Notes on One Battle After Another 

The internet is an interconnected garden of human flourishing, and yet we all end up writing about the same things. Yes, I too have seen that new movie. I think it’s pretty good! I love a movie where stuff go boom. 

And so but yes it’s true the movie has to do with revolution but it is not in itself a revolutionary movie, if we can table for a moment that I don’t know what a revolutionary movie with a $130 million budget would actually look like. Analyzed politically, the movie is quite conservative. It ends with the daughter driving off to Oakland to take part in a political demonstration, sure, but it also ends with the father and the daughter getting iPhones and snuggling into the warm couch of the techno-corporate-state surveillance apparatus, which they had previously avoided out of a justified fear of persecution. And the movie supports and ends with a reunification of the family as the comprehensible unit — as opposed to the man-made revolutionary tribe as the unit. So while revolution runs through the movie as a theme and plot device, the undercurrent is not revolutionary. Perhaps this is similar to why there aren’t any persuasive anti-war movies. There’s something fundamental to the nature of the medium: stuff blowing up looks cool, so even if the subject depicted is human brutality, and even if the characters eloquently rail against such brutality, it still looks badass when shit go boom, and that’s why even our staunchest anti-war films accidentally and inevitably make war seem kind of neat. I feel like this was an idea articulated in Tim O’Brien’s The Things they Carried. Yes, war is hell, but it’s also paradoxically the most exciting period in your life. There is no either/or, there is only both, always. 

There’s also criticism out there that Perfidia is the most interesting character and when she walks into Mexico at the end of act one, the movie loses much of its mojo, which seems plausible. But also, this criticism springs from the desire for Paul Thomas Anderson to have directed a different type of movie, rather than evaluating the movie he actually created, which is a type of state-power thriller. All that granting the artist his donnée stuff, per Uncle Hank’s timeless advice. The Amazing Adventures of Perfidia Beverly Hills would have been an interesting movie, but an entirely different one. 

That being said, I still thought Anderson did interesting things within the action thriller political drama he trapped himself inside. The chase scene at the end, in particular, was nauseous, by design. Lord knows I’ve seen enough car chases in movies to last eight lifetimes, but I’ve never had to look away because I thought I might hurl my recently scarfed peanut M&Ms. 

I don’t know nearly enough Pynchon to opine about how this movie relates to his novel Vineland, from which this movie is loosely adapted. I thought the plot was fascinating, though I’ve read enough of Pynchon to know that if I cop a paperback I’m probably going to be frustrated. (I’m firmly on Team DeLillo.) But I did find the tone of the movie interestingly non-standard. That is, it was more satirical and absurd than originally perceived. I tried to go into the movie with as little forefronting of knowledge and interpretation as possible. I saw the preview a couple of weeks ago and was provoked and so I went. I couldn’t help but learn some plot-related and source-related details beforehand. Such are the tentacles of the Hollywood promotional apparatus.

To those critics who argue that Anderson portrays antifa inaccurately, I want to say: this movie is obviously a type of satire. There’s a character named Virgil Throckmorton. The antagonist is named Lockjaw and he sports a rooster-ish, flaccid, grey Mohawk. His racism mingled with repressed interracial lust is, yes, a cliché. One thinks back to American Beauty’s Col. Frank Fitts with his murderously repressed homosexual desire/homophobia for an equivalent filmic character cliché (that still sort of works). It’s too on the nose, but also that’s the point. 

Despite all of this I found Sean Penn’s Lockjaw terrifying, still. Something about the veins in his neck and arms, those dilated highways of rage. There is a constipated regimental stiffness to how Lockjaw walks that is at once absurd, cartoonish, chilling, persuasive. When I watch actors I tend to sort them into persuasive or not. Can I go with them anywhere? Penn is a blunt presence, almost metallically abrasive and not someone I would ever have a beer with, but I believe in him. Also, I find Benicio del Toro utterly convincing in this role and every other role I’ve seen him in. I am able to recognize him — oh, it’s him again — while still utterly believing him as this character. This is opposed to someone like Tom Cruise, who is always so relentlessly Tom Cruise, international man of handsome.

The other satirical component I found ridiculous, but also convincing, was the bit about the Christmas Adventurers, the underground network of white collar white nationalists. The hit man they send out to dispatch the miscegenating Lockjaw is wearing a Lacoste sweater for chrissakes, a detail worthy of American Psycho. He even looks like Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman.

Some people view the film as a commentary on our current situation, but I think this diminishes the film, as well as Film in general. First, it costs too much money and there are too many people involved for a film, any film, to be an editorial or extremely timely political commentary. The film is a vision, not a commentary. We turn everything into takes now, as if art were primarily concerned with telling us how to live. The movie isn’t so didactic, not so clearly explanatory, thank goodness. Sure, it’s eerily timely. Just this week they sent federal troops into Memphis, a mere 200 miles from the Land of Progress. This gesture, like so many current gestures, feels like a troll, a type of real-life shitposting. Yes, the movie deals with current political angst, but the real test will be in perhaps 15 years when one can rewatch Battle and determine if it’s still worthwhile, if its vision is independent and not contingent on the day’s latest horrors.

Finally, I admit that I am sentimental about all the fatherhood stuff in the movie — the haphazard father searching desperately for his endangered daughter. I have no aesthetic distance when these topics come up. When the tracking devices are introduced and explained early in the movie — the separate devices emit a melody when brought into close proximity with one another — I knew that this detail would recur in perfectly appropriate narrative fashion later on, like Chekhov’s pistolero. But despite being thoroughly calloused, I still had to squelch a yelp of emotion by stuffing the remaining M&Ms into my mouth when the DiCaprio father stumbles along the street at the end, his rifle in one hand, his parent tracker in the other. It starts to sing right on time. At that moment the daughter is prone on a dune with pistol raised, demanding the code words. She’s just shot the Lacoste hit man, who could not produce the appropriate code words. Now she’s demanding them from her father, who she sees but no longer trusts without the two-factor authentication of the exchanged code words, taught to her long ago by this very same father and underlined in their importance by the last several days of running from people who want her dead. At this point I had to cover my eyes, terrified she was about to shoot the father. Appropriately he doesn’t say the code words. He just says it’s me your dad until she relents. Because the code words are the currency of the political network, the tribe. There is no currency in the parent-child network. It’s just a gift economy of mutual attention and affection. (These words mean the same thing.) The father-child bond is one of instant, feral recognition, the singing of the devices. The use of those singing trackers was utterly predictable and absolutely devastatingly effective to this humble viewer. Look, I’m only human. They don’t tell you when you become a father that when they hand over your child at the hospital, freshly wiped down from the viscera of entry, that they also implant a device within your abdomen, a tracking device, and that as you move about your world and life whenever you see your child again, the device will burst into song. It doesn’t matter the occasion. Sitting in an idling car, watching bored pre-teens stumble out of the middle school, you’ll be there scanning, thinking subconsciously not my kid, not my kid, not my kid, and then suddenly there they are, and before you can even form the thought tracking device it will start singing in recognition inside you, singing endlessly, everyday until there’s no more breath left to sing — every time they come out of a school, or stomp down the stairs, or throw themselves into the backseat with a grunt, or lurch zombie-like out of a friend’s house after a sleep over, or stand around with their sequined pals before the pre-dance photo-op like so many well-dressed deer, every time you see them the device inside you will sing mine!

Maybe the actual revolution is the day when the tribe doesn’t kill the family.