One Battle After Another’s dire diagnosis of American politics
Cinema doesn’t just function as a prism through which we are able to scrutinise the current moment; it actively urges us to do so. And now more than ever, the current moment is begging to be scrutinised. Things seem to be getting more and more desperate, and in a lot of ways the “safety” of the big screen is the easiest and most low-stakes place to have the most incisive and pointed discussions.
I am of course in part gesturing towards the fractured state of American political discourse surrounding the country’s ideological mainstream teetering ever closer and closer into what philosopher Slavoj Žižek refers to as “liberal fascism”. More and more unavoidably, the biggest (?), most powerful (??) and most democratic (???) western nation’s political landscape is positioning itself as the centre of big conversations about our collective future. The future of democracy, the future of the world economy, the future of world peace, the future of the planet itself. Perhaps this is one reason these conversations so swiftly become heated; we are in fact discussing something that has a substantive effect on our individual and collective futures. The conversation is no longer simply a political one – it has become an existential one, too.
One Battle After Another, the new film from writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson, enters into this conversation with a surprising amount of genuine-hearted humour and farce to go with the rage, grief and eventual optimism. Loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, Anderson initially began writing the script for what would eventually become One Battle After Another twenty years ago. It is pretty remarkable just how present and current the film feels despite this – or perhaps it is actually because of this that the film is so accurate in its political resonances. In giving the screenplay that amount of time to incubate and breathe in the political compost heap, its focus lands on the things that are evergreen. The truths and complexities of
American culture and society that do not come and go with the changing of administrations, the passing of time; they simply take on a different face and name.
One of the film’s most notable targets is something that is far closer to a mainstream ideology than most would be comfortable to admit. Whether you prefer to couch it in the language of a certain branch of white Christian nationalism, or you’re comfortable simply labelling it as white supremist ideology, there is a vein of racially motivated and politically justified racism that runs deep through the graves and charnel pits of American history. And as Jordan Peele’s now-seminal horror text Get Out deftly points out, it is not something that can be cleaned or excused by a single black president, no matter how many white people tell you they would have voted for a third Obama term if they were able to. From the very inception of America’s political identity, it was influenced internally by racial segregation and supremacy.
What One Battle After Another has the balls to do is to depict this reality in its contemporary form in a way that reduces it to farce. It never once flinches in depicting white supremist ideology accurately and powerfully, but while doing so it never pretends that these characters are anything other than a complete joke. I think this is an inspired decision made in the script, because in allowing the audience to literally laugh at the lunacy and absurdity inherent in white supremacy it lets you then also encounter the terrifying hatred with a radical and often uncomfortable amount of humanity.
Because racial hatred isn’t something external that exists in a vacuum that we can examine at arms length – it is a terrifyingly human trait, an extreme version of something that we can all recognise within ourselves. It doesn’t always look like a monolithic, archetypal image like Adolf Hitler or a Ku Klux Klan hood; it can also look like an insecure, pathetic middle-aged man who just wants to be included and to feel special.
The film also seems to make a number of pretty explicit parallels with current affairs, using very specific imagery that certainly will resonate with audience members as
startlingly reflective. One particular narrative turn sees Sean Penn’s Col. Steven J. Lockjaw weaponise the military force he commands for the sake of individual pursuits. What follows is a long sequence that seems to directly reference the ICE raids that are becoming more and more common and shockingly acceptable in the US. Again, PTA chooses to pair the troubling reality of this with a healthy dose of farce – while human rights are being stripped and laws are being transgressed by the lawkeepers, DiCaprio is doing his best impression of Jeff Bridges’ The Dude while frantically trying to find a phone charge. Some of the funniest moments in the film, including an extended bit involving DiCaprio’s drug and alcohol addled brain attempting to remember the answer to decades-old security questions over the phone, cohabit the screen with shocking reflections of real life horror and abhorrency.
Inherent to the narrative of One Battle After Another is an exploration of the racial divide at the heart of American culture. When we first meet our characters in the first act of the film, they are embarking on a revolutionary quest to free black and Latino immigrants from detention centres at the hands of the American military. By the time the film has jumped sixteen years into the future, it seems like not all that much has changed despite their “successful” raiding of the detention centre. Lockjaw and his counterparts are warned that the sanctuary city’s local population of mostly Latino immigrants are dangerous, and will be “sympathetic to the enemy’s cause”. The images that the narrative evokes on screen are strikingly similar to those on the news and our social media feeds.
The sting in the tail of One Battle After Another, the thing that will propel you skipping and jumping out of the theatre, is a celebration of generational progress; a passing of the baton to those more energised, passionate and mobile than the revolutionaries and the world-changers who came before them. Despite the fact that these things seem to be exactly the same as they were a generation earlier, the film honours the achievements of those who have gone before us and champions those who have the ability to act now.
This positioning is crystalised in the pairing of veteran Leonardo DiCaprio with
newcomer Chase Infiniti – their on-screen father/daughter relationship perfectly embodies this symbolic handing over of the flame from one generation to another. These systemic issues, many of which are inherent in the very foundations of the American identity, will not simply be solved within a generation; it will only ever continue to be one battle after another. And yet there is hope in our ability to keep the flame burning generation to generation, in our ability to pass down a righteous anger and unquenchable desire to see the systems and infrastructures that oppress and marginalise get violently torn down. In our ability to look racism and white supremacy in the eye and laugh at it (not with it, as some seem to have catastrophically misinterpreted from the film). In our ability to advocate for the dignity and safety that every human being has a right to, especially when those in power seem happy to compromise on behalf of others for the sake of their own personal or ideological gain.
Films like One Battle After Another are important not despite the fact that they are also entertaining, but because they are entertaining. One Battle After Another uses the vehicle of a funny, star-studded and action-packed political thriller to trojan horse a conversation about dangerous, revolutionary ideas into the popular conversation. It should spark the sort of conversation that would draw the ire of the current US administration, and it should reignite a passion for radical and countercultural empathy in the face of empire and discriminatory policy. While we are being entertained by the car chases and gags, we are being quietly but persistently reminded by PTA that the revolution rolls on, like ocean waves.
“The revolution will not be televised… The revolution will be live.” – Gil Scott-Heron (1971)
“What does the billboard say? ‘Come and play, come and play, Forget about the movement.’” – Rage Against the Machine (1992)
Jonty writes about film, narrative and culture on his Substack, “Postcards from the Abyss”.
