A Review of One Battle After Another
It might be hard to recommend One Battle After Another to most friends: the introductory sequence focuses on the main antagonists practicing fetishistic sex with each other.
Sean Penn plays a roided out (and possibly autistic) white army officer known as Steven Lockjaw, who is obsessed with being sexually dominated by the black terrorist revolutionary, Perfidia Beverly Hills, whom, in theory, he is supposed to bring to justice. She blows up banks. He is a sexual pervert. She murders people. He longs to join a secret order of wealthy white Satanists seeking racial purification — and is willing to kill anyone to be accepted.
So, these characters are nasty, but that’s the point: this is a satire of race war in America. The overly topical nature of the film might hurt its chances of timelessness, but as of right now, it truly is Relevant. What makes it more palatable is that it is willing to show how awful leftist revolutionaries are. And it has some of the best cinematography you might have seen in years.
One Battle After Another is the latest film by Paul Thomas Anderson, one of Hollywood’s greatest working auteurs. He’s an artist who makes beautiful images out of an age of ugliness. He is a keen observer of humanity. He makes films not just out of novels, but films that feel like novels themselves, that have a unique depth of character development over long time spans, intricate threads of detail that penetrate through many layers of American social life and the human heart. One Battle After Another features his characteristic level of skill in crafting soulful characters who form precise satirical portraits of our current culture.
Leo DiCaprio plays the stupid cuckolded boyfriend who is in over his head. After Perfidia is captured, rats out her allies, and escapes custody never to be seen again, Leo raises their baby girl by himself, in disguise under the code names Bob and Willa Ferguson — presumably never realizing the girl is (spoilers) actually the daughter of the fascistic Steven Lockjaw. 16 years later: he has fried his brain on drugs and drifted away from leftist convictions, instead becoming a paranoid and rather controlling father who lives in the woods and acts the tough guy on his daughter’s nonbinary, multicultural school friends.
Eventually, Steven Lockjaw comes after them once again. He has to erase them so that his racial hygienist buddies known comically as the Christmas Adventurers (‘Hail Saint Nick’ they piously intone), do not destroy him for siring a secret mulatto daughter. Bob and Willa rely on marijuana growing nuns (actually ex-revolutionaries in hiding) and a Hispanic karate teacher running a migrant smuggling operation to avoid the long, corrupt arm of the law. Leo’s struggle to avoid capture in the city of refuge during a riot has beautiful comic timing and virtuosic layers of tension.
The movie only works emotionally when the concerns of the characters transcend the race war backdrop. The American audience’s self-conception is not of being an occult super-racist or a communist revolutionary. It’s about being an outlaw who is just trying to survive, with a big gun and a fast car. And that’s what this beautifully shot film provides in spades, with interlocking layers of piercing realism and zany exaggeration. There is more thoughtfulness put into the camerawork of individual scenes of this movie than other movies have from start to finish.
Sadly, the concluding scene of the film seems to undo all the character development earned up to that point. It feels tacked on to mollify censorious libs. Just when it seemed like Bob and his daughter were leaving all the dark leftist legacy of her revolutionary mother behind them, he shares a letter Perfidia sent them long ago about feeling guilty about abandoning them and how much she thinks about her baby girl and how maybe she can change the world someday. Inspired by her mother, Willa drives off to participate in an Oakland BLM riot. ‘She was an American girl,’ serenades Tom Petty as the credits arrive.
Ironically upbeat, one comes away with a grim sense of tragedy — that we’re headed inevitably toward the America portrayed in this film. An America with less peace than ever, only more cages, more police brutality, more ethnic conflict, more occult conspiracies, more riots, more extrajudicial military action on American soil.
There’s a lot here for Christians to think about. Conservatives have shied away from tackling issues of race and class and justice and identity head-on, labelling them all as wokeness. But as American soil grows less and less racially homogenous, we see it tested more and more by the different cultures and value systems and ethnic identities hosted within the ever-ravenous belly of The System.
Reactionary young white men might be expected to ironically champion the ultra-racists who are willing to do whatever it takes to defend America. But beyond lancing your average Nietzschean group chat, I actually see the Christmas Adventurers as a potential satire of the DNC – they have a near-senile character who seems to riff on Joe Biden and another sleek Patagonia-wearing council member who could be a riff on Gavin Newsom. They draw their power from the type of people who sell their souls for sterile corner offices. They portray themselves as shiny professionals, but actually, they worship Satan.
If that doesn’t actually describe our current ruling class, I think the kind of group chats trying to inherit American power likely will take on this kind of ethos for themselves — unless Christians can provide a form of Christendom that shows mercy to the weak while still defending the property of American citizens. Is it even possible?
Christians need to seriously think through where they stand on issues of anarchy, authoritarianism, and ethnic identity. I personally desire law and order and a secure border. I don’t want America to collapse, and I want my birthright secured. But in our struggle to secure liberty, what might end up being sacrificed? I don’t want the hammer to come down on me or other Christians someday. As all borders, boundaries, and identities in our country are broken down, how do we show mercy while defending our property?
The vision presented in this film is one of military operations being conducted on American soil, with revolutionary terrorists, illegal immigrants, and youthful citizens all being treated alike as potential targets by unaccountable special forces. While that type of military government may become seen as necessary to enforce borders and protect property in our time of extreme civilizational decay, we should lament how that might bring about more genuine injustice.
The peak of the potent symbolism in the film happens at The Sisters of the Brave Beavers. The leftist revolutionaries have taken over an old convent in the desert and use it to grow marijuana, disguised as nuns — true enough symbolism for what has happened to the Roman Catholic church in America in many places. Willa is taken captive and dragged into the old mission chapel to be confronted by her biological father, who sits on a throne. He forces her onto the throne with ziptied wrists, thrusts a swab into her mouth (Covid testing anyone?), a swab into his own, and sits on the floor while a DNA identification kit whirs out their shared destiny.
Consider the parallels to our present situation. In a vast nation whose politically dominant ethnos, the White Liberal, is rapidly vanishing, Roman Catholicism is one established institution that could make a claim at being able to govern and mediate between many ethnicities. But it, too, seems to have been hollowed out. Science, and the American military, seem to be such stronger authorities in telling us who we are and where we need to go — for now.
Most of the film is shrewdly aloof in its satirical political stance; by the end, it concludes with a very liberal posture: sure, the leftists are out of control, but white men are either stupid or satanic. We are expected to empathize only with the illegal immigrants caught in the middle, just wanting to survive. Consider, in contrast, Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood — another epic film urging California to stand up to the dirty hippies trying to destroy them. At least that film conveys some vision of virtue for white American masculinity. It’s needed more than ever.
