PTA’s “One Battle”: Cartoon Leftists Amid Real-World Fascists
Why Paul Thomas Anderson's "One Battle After Another" doesn't work in this political moment.
Despite its critical acclaim, One Battle After Another is a dangerously mistimed movie for the left. Its first thirty minutes read like a MAGA fantasy, or nightmare, about the “antifa” left: In rapid succession, we see violence, bombings, and a deadly bank robbery carried out by a shadowy activist group calling itself the French 75—Thomas Pynchon’s parallel-universe version of the real-world, early-1970s Weathermen. Parts of the French 75’s activism is about breaking migrants out of camps, but other parts seem anarchic and aimless—as if Paul Thomas Anderson set out to provide cinematic validation for Trump’s confabulations about “radical left lunatics.” The collision between real-world MAGA talking points, on the one hand, and the film’s portrayal of violence is disconcerting, Leonardo DiCaprio’s whooping “Viva la revolución” while his band of fellow merry pranksters, led by the berserk Perfidia Beverly Hills, assassinate a security guard. The film’s essential cartoonishness doesn’t keep One Battle from handing the MAGA movement a broad brush to tar the left as amoral worshippers of lawlessness and disorder.
Why would Hollywood lean into a fetishistic, aestheticizing portrayal of far-leftist activism at a time when progressives’ sobriety, humanity, and peaceful resourcefulness should be foregrounded? The fact that liberal critics and audiences seem to have largely embraced One Battle only makes matters worse. Of course, $130 million movies take a long time to produce, and One Battle was likely set in motion when Trump was still in the wilderness, seemingly destined to remain a one-term president. One Battle would have played better against a second-term Biden or Harris presidency.
But regardless of circumstances, Anderson seems particularly unsuited to making a politically charged semi-blockbuster in this moment: He appears blissfully unaware of the film’s political context or its possible extra-cinematic effects beyond movie theaters. Fox News could run clips of One Battle’s first half-hour for the next six months and deepen Trump’s base; in fact, its opinion columnists are already hard at work, opining about the film’s “anti-America” qualities. There’s little more dangerous in the world of culture than an essentially ironic filmmaker—harmlessly entertaining in quieter times—working with dated material who ventures into hotter political waters without recognizing how the times are changing. Lopping off the first act, at least, would have been a smart move.
Still, there are genuinely entertaining moments as well. In the film, the Christmas Adventurers Club, a hybrid Skull and Bones–Church of Scientology-style fraternity, plays an outsize role: Members greet each other with a “Merry Christmas” in the middle of summer, not to mention comical salutes of “All hail Saint Nick.” The lodge wields enormous power and, chillingly, doesn’t hesitate to engage in murderous, white-supremacist “cleansing” operations. But while the primary antagonist of the movie, Steven J. Lockjaw, harkens back to the cigar-chomping colonels of Vietnam War movies, his caricatural persona verges on self-parody. Loading his person with the dominant politics of the movie universe also makes for a contrived plot resolution: Spoiler alert, with Lockjaw out of the picture, our fugitive hero is, for some inexplicable reason, free to return home.
Meanwhile, the portrayal of the underground railroad-man and martial-arts instructor Sergio St. Carlos, played to great effect by Benicio Del Toro, is surprisingly moving: His practical activism, providing shelter and comfort to hundreds of undocumented migrants, seems endlessly more valuable than the aimless revolutionism of the French 75—a point the movie doesn’t stop to ponder: St. Carlos’s role is to move things along and help “Ghetto Pat” (a symptomatically dated, offensive moniker), played by Leonardo DiCaprio, escape the authorities’ fascist machinations. DiCaprio/Pat, now nearly twenty years after the violence of the film’s opening sequences, plays a disheveled, lovable, yet frustrating, Dude-like character willing to risk it all to save his daughter.
The core problem with One Battle After Another is that it’s a fish out of water: a postmodern caper dropped into the brutal return of modernist politics, including fascism authoritarianism; a story emerging from the Pax Americana of the early ‘90s and (therefore) disconnected from the seething nativist nationalism of the 2020s. An exceptionally dangerous historical conjuncture is not the best time for picaresque postmodernism. Even esteemed film directors need to know what it is they are doing in the world as it currently is.
Of course, art shouldn’t be made to conform to the antipathies of fascists. That would be handing the Bannons and Millers of the world too big a cultural stick. But the left is in the midst of a uniquely intense strategic cultural–political battle with the right—and the far right is largely winning. While Hollywood might think it is doing the left a favor by making films like One Battle, if anything, the opposite seems true. This doesn’t mean that we should joylessly demand that art conform to ideology or to the strategic imperatives of the moment. But it does mean looking beyond the cultural industry’s immediate horizon—and weighing the possible cultural–political effects of the commodities the industry puts to market. Even as Hollywood congratulates itself, it hands the right a stick to be beaten with.
What I’m reading this week
A selection of assorted links, books, and podcasts about the state of the world.
Zohran Mamdani, the Power Breaker. Examining why the liberal establishment got Mamdani wrong.
Youth crime rates in sharp decline. Contrary to some right-wing populists’ views, there’s been a global youth crime drop in recent years.
Richmond Council U-turn on £150 fine for coffee poured in drain. How excessively vigilant policing can create crime out of thin air.
Sanders praises Trump, slams Biden on border: ‘You’ve got to have borders, period’. A disappointing turn to rebordering rhetoric by Bernie Sanders.
Plush Power. Labubu dolls as China’s first contemporary instance of a truly successful global cultural export?
‘Bitcoin is not an asset class’: UK’s biggest investment platform has a stark warning for investors. A major UK investment platform says crypto isn’t a legitimate asset class.
Pete Hegseth’s Crypto History. Assessing Pete Hegseth’s involvement in the crypto trade.
Inside the mind of MAGA: a conversation with Steve Bannon | The Economist Insider. Bannon says nothing he hasn’t been saying for at least a decade but seems convinced, contra the U.S. Constitution, that Trump will secure a third term.
Review – Underground Empire. A review of Farrell and Newman’s Underground Empire (2023): “How America came to rule the world, not just through military might or soft power but through the pipes, wires, and code that power the global economy.”
"There’s little more dangerous in the world of culture than an essentially ironic filmmaker—harmlessly entertaining in quieter times—working with dated material who ventures into hotter political waters without recognizing how the times are changing. Lopping off the first act, at least, would have been a smart move." Had that been done, I think the best (least scripted, most alive) line in the movie would still have been "Why are your shorts so tight?" and Lockjaw's answer would still have been "dated" (e.g., "Do you think I'm gay?"). But Lockjaw himself is precisely dated. He is a composite of two characters invented by Peter George, Stanley Kubrick, and Terry Southern: Generals Buck Turgidson and Jack D. Ripper. But Anderson had no idea what to do with Lockjaw's executioners, who get off scot-free in the incoherent end. Maybe Paul Thomas Anderson is just another "harmlessly entertaining" movie-maker (e.g., the cars driving on the desert highway). But has irony ever not drowned in hot political waters?