¡Viva la Generación! - One Battle After Another

The following contains full spoilers for One Battle After Another…

The iPhone came out in late 2007. Soon after that, a number of high profile 20th Century film directors (like Spielberg, Scorsese, Bigelow, Tarantino…) stopped making films set in contemporary times. A lot of this, supposedly, is the way technology has made it difficult to tell compelling stories. With instantaneous bridging of communication across space and time, drama and urgency can vanish in an instant.

More contemporary directors haven’t feared it so much. Rian Johnson’s Benoit Blanc films are contemporary, with Glass Onion taking place in the heart of 2020. While that movie came out two years after its moment, it directly engages with the world as it exists, tackling relevant issues (COVID, tech bro billionaires) without being didactic. There’s a charge to that movie that feels rare nowadays. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie also feels like it speaks within the cultural zeitgeist, though the heightened reality of Barbie’s World does dull the “this is real” effect somewhat.

It’s strange to think those aforementioned filmmakers have spent the last decade reflecting the world through subtext or oblique reference. Spielberg’s The Post is a naked defense of the power of the fourth estate. Killers of the Flower Moon portrays white nationalism as a terroristic enterprise slowly ethnically cleansing (and replacing) an indigenous population. Mickey 17 tackles the idea of a moronic proto-fascist political leader shepherding his zealous followers to some promised land out in the stars. Trump’s cultural center of gravity for the last decade has affected this, surely, but there was a vacuum in the medium even before his rise.

This year, though, Paul Thomas Anderson has convinced Warner Bros. into forking over a budget bigger than the global box office of his biggest hit so he could make a deeply political film about the present. That film, One Battle After Another, is a stunning masterpiece about revolution and the fight against fascism and oppression. It tackles white Christian nationalism by treating it as both absurd and terrifying. It explores revolution against oppression. It examines generational differences and the effects of aging in these struggles. And it shows what happens when a society lets its initiatives metastatize like a cancer. For all this, it might seem cynical, but it’s rather pragmatic and PTA infuses it with a wild hopefulness.

And it’s my vote for movie of the year.

A militarized Fuzz

For my entire adult life, I (and my generation) have witnessed police departments in cities grow more and more militarized. It’s not unusual to see supposed peacekeepers deploying tanks and assault rifles during legal protests. They might have standard riot shields and helmets, but to have weapons of war present in the name of pacifying a city has always made me feel uncomfortable and unsafe.

If the government gives a police department a tank, there’s incentive for the police department to use it. If their mandate is to engage the citizenry…

One Battle After Another tackles this imagery directly. Steven J. Lockjaw is in charge of a Homeland Security task force responsible for immigration enforcement. The language he uses during deployment is all shorthand vernacular, easily understandable but also reflecting the regularity with which they roll into a city to crackdown on whatever they want. Lockjaw himself has no real intelligence about migrants or whatever in Baktan Cross. The only reason he’s there is because his bounty hunter of choice managed to locate and apprehend Howard Sommerville in the name of tracking down Willa Ferguson so he can quash any threat that might keep him out of the Christmas Adventurer’s club.

Empowered as he is, he uses the tools at his disposal to get what he wants. And that means bringing the full force of the U.S. military down on an American populace.

Warning against an expanding military industrial complex is exactly what President Eisenhower warned the country about in his farewell address in 1961. And yet 60 years later we live in a world where there’s so much extraneous artillery lying around that the military will just give it away to police stations. To help the cosplay, the police have no issues dressing in fatigues, as though Baktan Cross is a city for them to pacify. Like this is Kandahar. The police clear buildings like they contain IEDs and interrogate civilian as if they’re all potential collaborators. It’s not an accident that the raid on Baktan Cross’s municipal center is the best sequence in the film, and keeping the film within the POV of the civilian population (rather than embedded in the military) helps to other this invading force.

Mostly, though, the thing that’s most quietly chilling is seeing all of the various individuals in this show of force decked out in full camo, body armor, and dressed for war… but all of them identify as “POLICE” across their chests.

Because this is what we as a society have allowed the Police to become.

A “good” offense

On the other side of this is the French 75. As a domestic terrorist cell, the French 75 fancy themselves the front lines in the war against government encroachments. They speak in grand terms of freedom and revolution, plant bombs in government buildings, and liberate makeshift camps full of migrants.

For all the talk, though, they’re hardly perfect. Junglepussy might be unafraid to show her face to the bystanders in the bank robbery, but when Perfidia Beverly Hills shoots the security guard, it shakes her to the point of silence. After Perfidia’s betrayal, Lockjaw hunts them all down and systematically eradicates the entire cell.

And so the French 75 fails. It’s unlikely that they would have succeeded at all. Hell, it’s not even clear what difference the French 75 made during their period of operation1. But seeing the military occupation of Baktan Cross conveys a world much worse than the one that they were trying to build.

The best defense

Meanwhile, Sergio and his “Harriet Tubman” cosplay is remarkably effective in what it sets out to do. The Sanctuary City’ infrastructure is not actively trying to foment change in the world like the French 75. It is instead trying to afford survival to the most vulnerable in the population. It’s not just the tunnels and the people who work in Sergio’s store. It’s the woman who processes Bob through the holding facility and the nurse who sets him free. Their existence might be awful, but it is an equilibrium by which life can operate. Sergio’s ending might seem sad (he’ll get at least a DUI), but what’s a loss of driving privileges when he can still walk free and operate his little Underground Railroad.

Sergio keeps families together and potential military targets alive. When faced with a fascist regime (especially one that has declared and operates like it has achieved a total victory), this resistance is impossibly important.

On the flip side of that are the Christmas Adventurers. Like Sergio’s Harriet Tubman cosplay, these white nationalists operate out of their own domiciles, connected to their secret operations by a series of tunnels. The group is utterly ridiculous, dressing like they’re members of a country club and greeting each other with “Hail Saint Nick”, but what makes white supremacy so dangerous is the underlying conviction of the ideology. It begets relentless methods and all-consuming pursuit in the name of the cause. Their proximity to power means they have the ability to continue to shape the world in their image. This small minority wields far more material power than the civilians in Baktan Cross.

Still, it’s not like they’re using the military to their aims. They order Tim Smith (he of the Patagonia vest) to run around with his blue sports car and commit extrajudicial actions to ensure their own survival. They, like Sergio, operate in the shadows.

Looking out for #1

All of this talk of organizations, groups, and infrastructures misses the most powerful aspect of PTA’s thesis. For all that these various characters fight for something larger than themselves, there still prioritize their own self-interest above over everything else. Bob might believe in the revolution, but the only thing he works towards is getting to Willa and bringing her to safety. Lockjaw orders the raid on Baktan Cross, but all of that is because he really really wants to be a Christmas Adventurer. Sergio can run this entire underground railroad, but he still has a large family and makes sure they’re all okay before he heads out to the larger mission. Even someone like Avanti (the bounty hunter Lockjaw uses to track down Sommerville and then later to deliver Willa to a group of white supremacist military dudes who will execute her) has a change of heart when he realizes he’s performed an act he cannot live with2. Lucky for him, he will not have to.

None of this, though, matches the deep complexity of Perfidia Beverly Hills. She makes grand proclamations about the revolution, throwing it in Lockjaw’s face when she first encounters him. She notes her lineage as coming from a long line of revolutionaries (something her family backs up). And yet, when Lockjaw tracks her down and threatens her, she immediately succumbs to his blackmail and begins an affair with him. It’s not without her own pleasure. She dominates him and makes sure she thinks she’s in control. The truth, though, is obvious.

As Sergio says later in the film, freedom means “no fear”. After her supplication, she’s a giant bundle of fear. Was a time she wanted to fuck Bob in the two minutes before one of his bombs destroyed a powerline. Now she can’t even stand to be in the same room as him or their daughter.

Lockjaw has also compromised himself. He is perfectly content to have this clandestine affair with Perfidia rather than break up the French 75. Based on the film’s timeline (and Willa’s ultimate parentage), this affair would have gone on for at least a year. Still, he doesn’t make an effort to stop them. All he wants is her.

But for Perfidia, this is hell. She must at least suspect the truth of Willa’s parentage and it explains (partially) why she’s so reluctant to throw herself into the parenting life. It’s down to Bob to raise their child. He pleads with her that they must take into consideration their responsibilities and that the revolution cannot be more important than their new family. When the cops arrest her (and seemingly only her), self-preservation becomes her priority. She turns on the French 75 almost immediately, and then bails on what shred of life she might be able to have in the name of living free elsewhere.

So much for the long line of revolutionaries.

If there’s anything cynical in the movie, it’s that PTA understands human nature’s propensity for self-interest above anything. And this self-interest can become utterly all-encompassing.

In the end, even Willa’s trials take such a toll she needs to use codewords to verify the identity of her own father. Almost like she doesn’t recognize him. That tense thirty seconds is the most shocking of the entire film, utterly heartbreaking to see how quickly this reality of “life in the struggle” has so quickly overtaken her own life.

And yet, the ending where Willa leaves to go to a protest in Oakland (three and a half hours away) is powerful, showcasing her continuing the traditions of her mother, but in a way that feels more organized, productive, and even self-serving. Tom Petty’s “American Girl” connects Willa with the idea of patriotism and the promise of what she could be. Maybe Willa won’t make the most difference, but the fight is a thing that will continue on and on as we fight for a better, more just society. Every little bit helps, and there’s nothing wrong with being smart and judicious about how anyone conducts their lives. Better to be a slow, ever-growing inferno than a quick billow of gasoline’s flame.