Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, One Battle After Another, is tailor-made for this moment of our culture war. As far-left protesters and agitators clash with federal troops and law enforcement in cities across the country, some of its scenes even seem ripped from nightly news segments. And to be clear, the movie’s politics are decidedly leftist—Anderson certainly believes in the romance of revolution.
And yet despite this streak of “radical chic,” the film is something more than the “ode to radical terrorism” some right-wing critics assert it to be. Loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, it follows one ex-revolutionary, Pat Calhoun/Bob Ferguson (brilliantly played by Leonardo DiCaprio), as he races to rescue his daughter from an old enemy from his radical youth. His mission reveals that the passionate abstraction of revolution, and the terrible violence it breeds, cannot fulfill the deepest longings of the human soul.
The film begins with a sequence depicting Pat’s salad days of revolutionary action. He is a member of a terrorist collective called the “French 75,” a group of Marxists and Black Power radicals committed to the violent overthrow of the United States. Pat, going by the nom de guerre “Rocket Man,” rigs explosives for his militant comrades. He is seduced by the erotic zeal of the uprising, and becomes lovers with one of its leaders, Perfidia Beverly Hills (played by Teyana Taylor).
Pat’s idealism at the outset of the revolution reminded me of Whittaker Chambers’s description of his turn to communism in his memoir Witness. “The Communist Party represents itself as the one organization of the will to survive in the crisis of civilization where that will is elsewhere divided, wavering, or absent,” he wrote. “It is in the name of that will to survive the crisis, which is not theoretical but closes in from all sides, that the Communist first justifies the use of terror and tyranny, which are repugnant to most men.” Like Chambers in the 1920s and ‘30s, Pat sees revolutionary action as the path to a new birth—and Perfidia’s intense radicalism is the emblem of this strength he admires the most.
But Pat is not Perfidia’s only lover. Through an admittedly ridiculous series of events, she becomes entangled with Steve Lockjaw (played with surprising humor by Sean Penn), an agent of the fascist regime she is supposedly resisting. Later in the movie, Lockjaw explains that, despite the gulf between their politics, he, too, admired Perfidia for her strength. In his own sickening way, he loved her because she was a “righteous warrior for freedom” even if he disagreed with her definition of it.
In his confused and drug-addled way, One Battle After Another’s protagonist seeks to preserve the flawed reality that is his family.
Although the film is far more explicit about the villainy of its fascist antagonists, beneath the surface Anderson draws subtle parallels between them and their left-wing terrorist enemies. Both sides are pilloried for the ridiculous ideological shibboleths they use to justify shocking violence, from “Black Power” to “racial purity.” In the end, a discerning viewer will no doubt see that Perfidia and Lockjaw really are not that different from one another. Extremists, no matter the political valence of their ideologies, are all just seeking power, with no regard for who gets hurt in the pursuit.
Eventually, Perfidia becomes pregnant by Lockjaw, but Pat assumes the child is his. After the baby is born, Pat begs Perfidia to stand back from the frontlines of revolution for their daughter’s sake. “We’re a family now,” he implores as Perfidia marches off to commit further acts of terror. She does not heed him, and in a bank heist gone wrong, brutally shoots and kills a black security guard—a member of the very working class she is supposedly trying to liberate. In the fallout, she is captured and persuaded by Lockjaw to inform on her comrades, forcing the French 75 underground.
Pat flees with his daughter, given new identities as “Bob and Willa Ferguson.” He raises her in a remote Northern California forest, slipping into an alcohol- and drug-fueled paranoia. Willa (played by Chase Infiniti) feels constrained by the extreme measures Bob implements to keep them hidden from the ghosts of his past. They live more or less off the grid, until Lockjaw raids their town searching for them. He wants to join a white nationalist secret society, the absurdly-named “Christmas Adventurers’ Club,” and therefore must cover up the existence of his mixed-race daughter. Bob and Willa get separated, and the rest of the movie essentially is a long and exceptionally well-filmed chase sequence as he tries to rescue her from a succession of perils.
As part of his mission, Bob has to reenter the revolutionary underground he abandoned. Much of the film’s brilliant humor comes from his generational clash with the young revolutionaries who took up the French 75’s cause. At one point, he calls the rebellion’s headquarters and cannot remember the passwords he needs to get through to its leadership. The operator derides him for insufficiently studying the “texts of the revolution,” and when Bob argues back accuses him of “violating my safe space.” Bob’s older style of revolutionary action is out of joint with the pronoun declarations and land acknowledgments of the new radical vanguard because their emphasis on identity and theoretical purity hinder his pursuit of practical goods.
But at a deeper level, the tensions between Bob and the resistance go beyond competing styles of radical politics. In the sixteen years he spent in hiding, Bob’s priorities have simply changed. No longer is his highest goal revolution. However much he may still affirm his comrades’ ideology, at the end of the day, he just wants to make sure his daughter is safe. Opposing fascism or ending oppression are merely abstractions; in his confused and drug-addled way, Bob is now instead seeking to preserve the flawed reality that is his family.
Whittaker Chambers went through a similar experience in his days serving the communist underground, although it wrought a far more profound change in his own soul. In the introduction to Witness, he describes a quiet domestic moment simply watching his infant daughter eating in a highchair:
My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear—those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: “No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.” The thought was involuntary and unwanted. I crowded it out of my mind. But I never wholly forgot it or the occasion. I had to crowd it out of my mind. If I had completed it, I should have had to say: Design presupposes God. I did not then know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.
For Chambers, that epiphany led him out of communism and into conservatism. As he put it later on in the memoir, every ex-communist’s “break is the political expression of the perpetual need of the soul whose first faint stirring he has felt within him, years, months or days before he breaks … because he must choose at last between irreconcilable opposites—God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism.” Radicalism and revolution promise strength to overcome oppression and crisis, but, in the end, they just foster a cycle of violence that can redeem no one.
Bob never gets as far as Chambers did, of course. Even in the closing scenes of the movie, he encourages his daughter’s own turn to radical activism. But his journey nonetheless shows that revolution is ultimately empty. The humanitarian glory ideologues seek manning the barricades pales in comparison to the permanent things, such as family, to which the human soul aspires. Radicalism does not lift Bob up from the stupor of his life—his love for Willa does.
Paul Thomas Anderson certainly did not set out to make an anti-revolutionary movie, and it would be ridiculous to say that One Battle After Another is a classic of conservative cinema. But in satirizing the follies of radicalism and affirming the things which make life most worth living, perhaps it does indicate an essential truth Americans need to learn if we are to avoid the dystopian future the film envisions.