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“An Anti-Fascist Movie at a Fascist Moment.” That’s the headline of one review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, which has been greeted as a movie attuned to the America here and now.
Yet, as almost everyone has noted, the film is cagey about what moment it’s in. In one of his many terrific comic scenes, Leonardo DiCaprio, playing a former revolutionary turned stoner named Bob Ferguson, struggles to answer the question, “What time is it?” He can’t.
One Battle After Another begins in a recognizably near-contemporary America, but one that is already pursuing the mass detention of migrants. After this prologue, the film jumps ahead 16 years to what appears to be the present, but, as we’ll see, one crucially different from our own. In terms of its animating energies, though, One Battle After Another is a blast from the 1960s; specifically, the ‘60s of free love, personal liberation, and revolutionary violence.
The prologue belongs to Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), a black leader of the armed revolutionary French 75 cadre. For Perfidia, political violence has an unmistakably sexual charge. She wants to have sex with her partner in love and revolution, Bob Ferguson, while the explosives they’ve planted are bursting above them. The causes she’s fighting for are a bit unclear, but her commitment to freedom in all its forms is not.
Anderson borrows an episode from familiar 1960s headlines when the French 75 rob a bank to fund their cause. The robbery plays out, at least until shots are fired, as high-style, performative self-expression. The revolutionaries proudly decline any masks or disguises, and one of them (Shayna McHayle), standing atop the tellers’ counter in thigh-high boots, makes sure everyone knows who’s robbing them: “My name is Jungle Pussy!” The moment is vivid and funny, but the battle cry is not exactly “Viva la Revolucion!”
The terrific, defining image of Perfidia shows her joyfully standing in a field, taking target practice and firing bursts from an automatic weapon at her imagined ideological enemies, whoever they may be. She is also immensely pregnant, which will set the stage for the second part of One Battle After Another.
Before we get there, though, we encounter Perfidia’s nemesis, Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn). While the sexually liberated Perfidia lives to free herself and others, Lockjaw is on a mission to lock people up. His sexuality, which is center-stage from the beginning, is compulsively driven by themes of domination. The battle is joined: Perfidia’s project of political, personal, and sexual liberation versus the sexually repressed Lockjaw’s campaign of political oppression.
We’ve met Lockjaw before. He would fit seamlessly into that 1960s touchstone, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), with its sexually perverse generals and politicos presiding over nuclear Armageddon. Lockjaw is kin to General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), with his paranoia about “precious body fluids”, and Major “King” Kong (Slim Pickens), who puts a nuclear payload between his legs and rides it to mutually assured destruction.
We find the same equation between twisted sexuality and deadly authoritarianism in other fictions of the decade, like John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and the novels of Norman Mailer and William S. Burroughs. Indeed, some of the most influential social theorists of the ‘60s, like Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, and Norman O. Brown, argued that the roots of fascism lay in sexual repression.
Although Lockjaw stalks his way to the end of One Battle After Another, Perfidia disappears midway. She announces to Bob that raising their newborn daughter is incompatible with her project of self-realization and political action. She leaves, and with that, the sexual politics turn 180 degrees.
One Battle After Another is now centered on Bob and his daughter with Perfidia, Willa (Chase Infiniti). Now a fugitive, Bob has spent the past decade and a half lying low and getting stoned. He has no work and no partner; the only woman in his life is his daughter, and his only ambition is to keep her safe.
In a nice touch, Bob spends most of One Battle After Another, including its bang-up action scenes, in his bathrobe. He can’t quite get dressed or, for that matter, undressed. Willa, too, is on the sexual sidelines. In her first scene, she is practicing karate alone. Like her mother, she’s a fighter, but her fight is inner and ascetic. Her goal is self-mastery. As for the remnants of the French 75, they have become nuns, the Sisters of the Brave Beaver.
If we are looking for the present American moment in this part of the film, we won’t find it here either. This is an America that still has phone booths and landlines. Instead of burner phones, the revolutionaries of the day use shortwave radios. As an alternative to digital communication, they use a wonky home-grown device that is supposed to play a melody to signal when a comrade is nearby.
One of Willa’s pursuers wonders aloud if she’s the only American girl without a cell phone. DeCaprio’s character spends much of One Battle After Another trying to keep his cell phone charged, running comically from scene to scene with a charging cable trailing forlornly from what the film specifies is a “1G” phone. While we live in a world of instant communication, Bob spends much of this story struggling to make a call.
This is all rather schematic, and none of it is meant to diminish One Battle After Another‘s pleasures. However, if viewers are looking for a take on the political present, where does all this leave us?
One Battle After Another Takes Refuge
For one thing, the film suggests that while the liberationist politics of the 1960s made for a good show – and still do – they don’t have much to offer in terms of how society might better organize itself. Perfidia leaves her family, rats out her comrades, flees the country, and only reappears at the end of the film in a wistful letter to Willa. At the end of all the battles, the father has saved his daughter, and the absent mother yearns for home. We’re left with family, that refuge from the battle.
I doubt anyone regrets the demise of the kind of revolutionary politics depicted in One Battle After Another. The equation of personal and political liberation was glib and, at least from this distance, self-evidently unsuited for any genuine political program. If the film resurrects that brand to tell a story, it’s only to bury it again.
The association of fascism with sexual repression is also glib. Is there anyone who thinks that Donald Trump’s problem is sexual repression? After all, Donald Trump, like his shadow twin Jeffrey Epstein, is a child of the 1960s. They, like most of America, got the ’60s message of sexual liberation, purged of any political content. The great prophet and profiteer of ’60s sexual liberation was Hugh Hefner, and Trump in his youth was the Playboy bachelor nonpareil. Hefner stands at the beginning of the mass commodification of sex that daily demonstrates that the worst kind of domination can go hand in hand with a shallow “whatever gets you off” ethos of personal liberation.
The political violence of the 1960s radical left is dead, but political violence is not. The January 6th insurrection against the US Government may be the most consequential act of political violence in the history of the Republic, especially given the Trump administration’s endorsement of its goals and methods. Unlike comparable historical events such as the Haymarket Riot (1886), the Tulsa Race Massacre (1921), or Kent State (1970), the violence at the nation’s Capitol on January 6th, 2021, was viewed in real-time or on video by nearly every living American of voting age.
While that is unprecedented, the real revelation has come in the aftermath, with the recognition that there is no consensus understanding of what everyone has watched.
In contemporary America, the revolution will be televised and live-streamed. The real battle, however, will be an endless contest, fought on millions of screens, over the meaning of what we’ve seen.
If Paul Thomas Anderson is one beat behind, we all are.
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