One Battle After Another: The Revolution Will Put You in the Driver's Seat

The immediacy of Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another is met only by its steadfast refusal to place itself on any specific timeline, instead existing in an anachronistic permanent space of modernity where very little has changed over the course of sixteen years. It is both reflective of an America trapped in stasis and of one where failure to act leaves us helpless, as the most hateful bad actors in our government slowly seize control over an already fragile system. For a filmmaker who hasn't made a contemporary set film in over twenty years, it's fitting to make one that has no interest in dating itself at all, instead choosing to address a deeply rooted sickness planted deep in the heart of our culture, one that has always existed, and one that will always require revolutionary action to reject. Loosely based on a book written in the '90s about characters living through the Reagan era and reflecting on the Nixon era, every part of the narrative is refracted through a lens of American corruption, militarism, and fascism.

The film's title is certainly indicative of its structure, an aggressively paced thrill ride that opens on the explosive liberation of a detention center and rarely takes a moment to breathe from that moment on, a relentless series of cascading actions swirling around domestic turmoil and the machinations of an administration steeped in far-right white supremacy and Christian nationalism. This, however, feels like Anderson's grand subversion, that this endless series of battles are less about the actions of DiCaprio's burned out former revolutionary Pat Calhoun and more about the revolution that must be fought at all times, generationally, to protect the oppressed from the likes of Steven Lockjaw.

Critically, Anderson recognizes all of the digressions and challenges of revolutionary activism, exercising the tangible exhaustion of radical action in the face of excessive force and militaristic escalation as a response to protest. Anderson's work has always been at its best when he leans into the ensemble, shining a light not on the individual but the collective; whether it's the sprawling, intertwining narrative threads of Magnolia coalescing into the resonance of the impossible or the dazzling heights and dizzying grime of Boogie Nights and the intersection of both through the throes of intimacy, the intoxicating pull of Paul Thomas Anderson is the tiny narratives spun in each and every corner of his frames.

Here it is not just the pull but the narrative drive – revolution is not just one man against a brutal, fascist Colonel in search of his daughter. Revolution is Sergio's underground railroad providing safe passage to undocumented immigrants as the facade of a military operation threatens the streets of Baktan Cross. Revolution is the Sisters of the Brave Beaver providing a haven to train and protect a resistance. Revolution is collective action, direct relief provided every day and on a regular basis by those who are empathetic enough to fight the good fight under the monotonous auspices of routine. Anderson goes out of his way to show that nothing here functions without the cooperation of everyday people, and that not everything needs to be a grand political statement to be effective. If anything, he proves the inverse – the French 75 as radical activists are not necessarily shown to be effective at moving a political needle outside of the very opening scene, which is a point of direct action. Freeing unjustly imprisoned immigrants with a statement of free borders and free bodies is meaningful action, but the increased violence of the French 75 beyond this is not shown as an effective tool, only one that generates a cycle of violence leading to the brutal deaths of many of its members.

The violence of the French 75 culminates in the bank robbery, with Perfidia shooting an armed guard as a means of self-defense, regret filling her lungs as she realizes she's enacted a spiral that she likely can't recover from. It's this sudden infusion of muddy morality that punctuates the first act, after leading with the platonic ideal of Anderson as a montage artist, capable of conveying the immense swaths of emotion that flow through the energetic and sexually charged furor of revolutionary action. A bit of cinematic larceny, this ability to wrap you up so feverishly in all of the chaos, to get you in on the high of the action only to pull the rug out and force you to reconcile with the consequences. It is crucial that this first act is so intoxicatingly infused with intimacy, drawing a necessary dichotomy that the revolution is fueled by love and that the opposition's rage is partially fueled by their desperate desire for something they don't possess the capacity for.

The necessity of this wake-up moment is in part to prove that Pat (Bob by the time he enters the second act, going into hiding deep in the California woods) is not necessarily the critical actor that his positioning as a protagonist might imply him to be. Bob's character arc is largely about him coming to grips with the fact that the revolution has passed him by, that he's become a washed-out paranoid stoner with nothing to show for the past 16 years of inaction. While he languished in the woods, spending his time getting high and watching movies about other revolutionaries getting things done, his former colleagues have kept fighting these battles despite the risks to their safety. Anderson draws comedy out of Bob's aloof frustration, painting him as a mostly inept loser who only realizes the criticality of the various countersigns, rules, passwords, and secrecy of the underground movement once the past comes back to break down his door.

This is what works about the ensemble approach, opening the film to allow for a complex network of perspectives and musings on how the exhausting work of rebellion and activism reverberates through different people, ultimately making the point that we can't shield the younger generation from the realities of our world, we can only equip them with the means to keep fighting back. Perfidia being at the center of it all as such a deeply enigmatic character makes it all tick, someone who harbors a passion for revolution so fiery that it ultimately clouds her judgement, self-serving in a way that forefronts her own perceived importance as a rejection of her place in the collective. It is a refusal to be forced into structure that takes precedence above all else – she will not be a prisoner, and witness protection is nothing more than a different kind of prison that subjects her to the whims of Lockjaw being in a position of power over her.

Lockjaw is the embodiment of alt-right power structures and insecurities, a lonely and profoundly pathetic man who can only view the world through a lens of control and ownership, poisoned by a toxic masculinity that offers no space for vulnerability. The complexity of such a plainly evil character is offered in the depth of Sean Penn's performance, as a stream of conflicting ideologies and desires constantly flicker across his face. The conflict is largely born out of his fetishization of Perfidia, creating a power dynamic that catalyzes the film's central violence. This relationship played off of the ones between those in the French 75 proves the inherent brokenness of conservative ideology, because to them, any kind of attraction that escapes the rigidity of white supremacist ideology and traditionalism creates an inescapable guilt, one that can only be responded to with violence. It's compounded by Perfidia's refusal to succumb to power – Lockjaw thinks that his position of authority and ability to wield the government as leverage against her will create the subservience he desires, while she knows that she can use his naivety against him.

The backdrop of the uniformly disgusting yet banal Christmas Adventurers Club offers further insight into the machinations of the right, how these power structures and perceived superiority feed the egos of fragile white men, and how those egos feed back into the systemic failures of our government. It's played up to an absurd degree in a way that sharply acknowledges the tacit absurdity of reality, that at its core all of this stuff is just deeply and resolutely weird. The ability to laugh at how monumentally stupid it is to hold the abstract concept of Saint Nick as a figurehead of fascism is its own effective method of resistance, as their ability to consolidate power is rooted in getting people to take them seriously. Just showing the completely disaffected evil that circles around their discussions is its own way to strip back the layers of it all, that their violence is all self-interest, detached narcissism percolating in the labyrinthine basement of a mansion isolated from the rest of the world.

Their isolation is key; meeting in vast, empty hotel halls or a clinically sanitized corporate office space that serves seemingly no purpose other than to be occupiable real estate. This contrasted against the constant claustrophobia of the real world makes for an effective vision of why it's so easy for these people to view the rest of the world as something to be wiped clean for their own benefit, a purely ideological violence that serves no purpose in reality but feeds an ability to feel greater than. It's a similar isolation that disconnects Bob from the revolution, a hermit too cooped up in his shack in the woods to remember the people he once fought for. It all circles back to the film's tactile sense of community, that every sequence where the frame is filled with people feels vibrant and alive, full of the verve of revolution.

To the right audience, much of One Battle After Another may be reflexively obvious, at least to the kind of people whose revolutionary ideals already understand the virulent depravity of modern conservatism – but this is also why it is exactly the kind of cinema we desperately need. The kind of cinema that is constructed out of empathy for everyone with the desire to resist, the kind of cinema that is built with the framework that not only do the people outnumber their oppressors, but that it's exactly what they're afraid of. Insecurities built on a fragile house that relies on keeping everyone fighting each other instead of them, because once people begin to believe in an ability to work together for a better future, the revolution can be ignited. The beauty of One Battle After Another is that it isn't about a father going through hell to rescue his daughter – it's about a father who reaches the end of a fevered, hellish journey only to realize that he didn't affect anything at all, and that his daughter was more than capable of fighting back against the reality of her world all the same. Viva la revolución.