One Battle After Another: A Dialogue

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another cemented itself as the Oscar frontrunner and extended Warner Bros.’s record-setting box-office run of #1 films when it debuted in theaters three weeks ago. But the director’s loose adaptation of Thoman Pynchon’s novel Vineland that finds Leonardo DiCaprio taking on the role of Bob, a burnt-out revolutionary protecting his daughter from Sean Penn’s rogue Col. Lockjaw, has drawn both the ire of a host of conservative criticism from Fox News personalities to Ben Shapiro and uninterrogated praise from left-leaning media outlets that willfully ignore the film’s complexities. 

As they did last year upon the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s divisive epic, Megalopolis, The Pamphleteer’s editor, Davis Hunt, and writer Jerod Ra’Del Hollyfield share their perspectives on one of the most dynamic and controversial films to hit the big screen in quite some time.

Davis Much of the reaction to One Battle After Another seems to hinge on the political atmosphere it depicts. Are the politics of the movie important?

Jerod Before we get into the politics, the most important aspect of this discussion is that, with the exception of Megalopolis and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, these director-driven ambitious sagas have been in short supply. The fact that this one broke out, opened #1, and may come close to recouping its $140 million budget sooner rather than later is a big win for the movies and art as a whole. That it has a near-perfect critical AND audience score shows that moviegoers weren’t turned off by its focus on politics. It’s poised to do solid business for the next few weeks and is destined to be the darling at all the end-of year-awards barring a Leo #MeToo. 

But to take up your question, One Battle has the same qualities of the best 70s films like Patton, Easy Rider, Nashville, or The Godfather. It’s what we all hoped Megalopolis would be. I was terrified PTA caught a case of TDS, but he got through the movie unscathed. 

Anderson has always excelled at finding the humanity in the most noxious of characters. Think Tom Cruise’s sex guru and Philip Baker Hall’s sexual abuser kids’ quiz show host in Magnolia or really anyone in Boogie Nights, Phantom Thread, and There Will Be Blood. 

As is usual for PTA, the film is about family. But, the way Anderson spins it is something new for him and rare in our current climate. One Battle After Another is a movie about radicalism—one that excoriates it as a playground for precocious teens that can be utterly debilitating in adulthood. That moment crystallizes early when DiCaprio finds out he is going to be a father and urges Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) to grow up, stop the revolutionary cosplay, and learn responsibility so they can provide for their family. 

Despite some pretty brutal satire—especially the radical customer service Karen moment that out Mark Fisher’s Mark Fisher—Anderson is an equal opportunity offender. The French 75,  The Christmas Adventurers, and the Sisters of the Brave Beaver all come off as ridiculously hypersurreal—Anderson’s Thomas Pynchon love shines through most clearly here.  

Beyond Bob and Sean Penn’s craggy Steven Lockjaw, the other characters are fairly one-dimensional. But that’s the movie’s entire point—radicals can’t be whole by definition. Even if Lockjaw didn’t have so much pathos, there’s no way to paint the movie as anti conservative. It’s a hilarious, sharp, and visionary ode to self-reliance and the responsibilities of family as the bedrock of a functioning society. 

Davis The plot of the movie is driven by Col. Lockjaw's desire to gain admission to the white supremacist Christmas Adventurer's Club. And to gain admittance, he upends the lives of dormant leftist revolutionaries because he wants to disappear his mixed race daughter to retain his claim to racial purity and secure his membership. When you type out the plot like that, it is hilarious. I thought the movie was hilarious. Have seen it twice. 

But the movie also isn't ambiguous about who is worthy of our sympathy and who isn't. The film opens with left-wing radicals raiding a migrant internment camp. The pretext for Lockjaw to set things in motion and shake the dust off these crusty radicals 16 years later is to round up more illegals as he pursues his suspected love child. 

A lot of attention has been heaped on how it's been maligned on the right for its politics, but a quick perusal of the New York Times or New Republic or any other outwardly left leaning media outlet will reveal a similar interpretation of the movie. "Paul Thomas Anderson’s 'One Battle After Another' is an exciting, goofy and deadly serious big-screen no — a no to complacency, to oppression, to tyranny," writes one NYT reviewer.

Yes, the French 75 suffers embarrassing defeat. But the failure of the revolution is cast in a heroic, oh-that-it-were light. The movie ends with Willa leaving to go to another protest in Oakland after reading a letter from her mother urging her to not give up hope despite their revolutionary failures. 

And the family dynamic that emerges by the end of the movie reminds you more of a commune than it does a family. One can only imagine Willa explaining to her caricatured Gen Z friends about her "weird" family dynamic after discovering that Bob is not her father. After the reveal that she is not Bob's child, the movie seems to elevate the revolution and its continuance above blood bonds. 

 What is most interesting to me is the environment into which it was released and how it's being absorbed by the public consciousness. Not all that different from the release of the writings of a school shooter, art tends to get instantly lumped into the category of left and right. We can nitpick about how things should be, but that's the way they are. A movie with a very clear political universe depicting good guys versus bad guys will suffer the same fate.

Jerod You hit on an aspect I didn’t initially mention. The movie is a comedy—easily the funniest work Paul Thomas Anderson has made—including his lighter films like Licorice Pizza. More than that, it’s a satire. And a very deft one. So deft, in fact, even the legacy critics aren’t in on the joke. 

Throughout the film, Anderson is able to tonally shift from moments of hilarity to resonant emotional beats that hit the family dynamic home. That is something to which all artists should aspire. Again, the movie is overwhelmingly beloved by audiences and critics, which is rare for a film that’s trying to say anything and rise above the algorithm. 

More importantly, Anderson undercuts every moment that could be construed as him taking sides. Just when the audience starts identifying with the detainment center’s liberators, he has Perfidia spout off a hilarious word salad of isms—very similar to the shooter manifestos and TikTok activists you mention. 

Half an hour later, this protector of minorities murders a black bank guard in cold blood even though she doesn’t have to. Her lust for power is what drives her. It’s as simple as that, and it tells us the truth about the clean-cut letter she leaves for her daughter about keeping up the good fight, which makes Anderson’s feelings clear about his faux rah rah ending.  

Speaking of lust, Perfidia’s rendezvous with Lockjaw is Anderson’s bawdy way of laying bare true intentions. She craves the attention of the fight—not the fight. 

The Christmas Adventurers are there for balance, a way to show Anderson’s distaste for radicalism on all sides and revel in the irony that these protectors of the family will sacrifice it the same way as Perfidia to grasp even the smallest modicum of power. They aren’t major political players. They are fringe egoists—influencers without any talent for manipulating the metrics.  

All of this makes DiCaprio’s Bob an even more tragic character. He is the real face of the failed radical—the one that doesn’t get a job as an Obama advisor or a Bill Ayers/Angela Davis style tenured professorship even though his working class skills with explosives are the only reason the French 75 has any success. He’s lost because his calling was hollow. The only thing that makes him whole is family. He finds his destiny and himself pursuing that role and engaging his paternal instincts. It’s not a movie about failed masculinity. It’s one that provides a real answer to Manosphere posturing. 

Even if the film sweeps the Oscars, its greatest success is that it forced Ben Shapiro to “destroy” a movie that doesn’t feature superheroes. At the same time, it has also brought to the surface what now seems like a foregone conclusion: that the right will fumble its cultural ascendancy way before next year’s midterms. 

Given all of the Fox and always-online pundit hot takes, it’s clear conservatives learned nothing from the aftermath of 9/11. In response to that crystal clear mandate, they spent their time enacting draconian measures like TSA regulations and going after Bill Maher—the last great late night host, who may have still been on ABC instead of Kimmel if not for the mob. It’s all happening again under the aegis of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. 

Rather than rooting out radicals in universities and focusing on gubernatorial and state legislative races like Virginia and New Jersey—conservative thought leaders are spilling ink and wasting soundbytes on a movie they didn’t even take the time to fully parse out. And they certainly aren’t trying to create an alternative because that type of art is antithetical to their MO. 

What we haven’t talked about is Anderson’s enviable grasp on aesthetics—the staging, the gorgeous images, and sprawling world building. The last conservative artist who could even rival that is John Milius. And I’m sure his equally complex movies would evoke the same conservative pearl clutching in this climate. 

To your last point, audience response should not diminish art. Taxi Driver isn’t any less a stone-cold masterwork because John Hinckley, Jr. misinterpreted it and tried to kill Reagan. Anderson has thankfully never lost his Gen X skepticism, and it’s borderline unethical the way his detractors on the Right are taking a cursory glance at the movie’s surface for the sake of clicks and reposts. 

With last summer’s Eddington and One Battle After Another, we’ve  seen two of American cinema’s greats interrogate both sides of our political divide in search of real truths. Neither of them end up with a pat stance like unity. They both see that the individual and the family transcend politics. They also see the attraction of political activism for those who hope to exploit duty and altruism for their own personal enrichment. 

We should be actually discussing such work, not finding reasons to dismiss and pigeonhole it.

One Battle After Another is now playing in theaters.