The battle over Paul Thomas Anderson His revolution should not be politicised

Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film One Battle After Another, about a group of American revolutionaries called French 75, and the government officials who pursue them, has been denounced as “ill timed” and “irresponsible” — and worse — in conservative outlets. At the same time, progressive critics have taken its portrayal of revolutionary action as vague inspiration — not because these professional film reviewers want to fight a violent revolution themselves, in most cases, but because seeing such a revolution in a movie reminds them, in their current political weakness, how much harder they’d like to see their leaders fight.

In other words, the movie is perfectly timed for people who want to latch on to the revolutionary politics it portrays for their own reasons. Along with being an excellent movie, then, it’s a sort of Rorschach test, a psychic prompt at which agitated people can cast their political feelings. Some of these feelings have been pretty raw, directly connected to thoughts of real political power. For example, David Marcus of Fox News let on that the movie made him “angry” at Leftists in a way that reminded him gratefully of the “cracking down” the Trump administration is doing against Antifa, and his anger at those Antifa radicals allowed him imagine how One Battle After Another would be “a fun movie for them to watch once they are all in jail”. I liked the movie a lot, but even I didn’t find it that evocative.

The film is a sort of love triangle: between revolutionary comrades Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), and the main antagonist Federal Immigration honcho Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) who gets hotter for Perfidia than even Bob is. But, since the film is (loosely) based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, it’s a Pynchonian love triangle — wild, improbable, so pervy it’s virtually supernatural. One Battle After Another is delirious fun, one of the most delightful movies I’ve seen in years. It touches daringly but not heedlessly on themes of political violence. Finally, though, and despite the shrill warnings of its conservative detractors, and despite the dreamy swooning of its progressive admirers, it’s not politics. It’s just a movie, and thank God for that.

Anderson’s greatness has always consisted in his ability to make coherent art out of close and often lurid and somehow also epic psychological studies that are punctuated by juddering action and intimate violence. Thanks to these heavy counterpoints, an Anderson film can often leave you feeling kind of battered and wrung out when it’s done. One Battle After Another reverses this balance, in a way that makes it both more fun and less draining than, say, There Will Be Blood or Magnolia. That is, it has a setup of chaotic adventure on a large scale and settles only occasionally into close observation of the crazed G-Men and vain utopians who make up its cast. Indeed, despite its apparent political commitments, it’s one of Anderson’s least serious movies. The only Anderson film more larkish, finally, than One Battle After Another is Inherent Vice, which also draws from a Thomas Pynchon novel.

The Pynchon connection is key. Anderson’s Inherent Vice is closer to its Pynchonian source material than is One Battle After Another. But the new film is more Pynchonian in tone and spirit.  As the movie goes on, jumping 15 years when we meet lovely Willa (Chase Infiniti) as the adolescent daughter of fugitive Bob, its story grows more larkish, indeed slightly magical. Events transpire not according to some cold causal logic but from a sort of cosmic horniness familiar to Pynchon readers, the Fates really wanting in their loins for things to come together in a certain way, which makes the playing out of the assorted mortal destinies basically comic, basically funny. This places all the radical political action in an almost mocking light that makes both the progressive swooning and the conservative frothing about One Battle After Another seem like different forms of wish-projection.

This is not to say that the politics are insincere. Pynchon surely hates Nixon and Reagan and other buzz-killing Republican finks he sneers at in passing. But he’s too much of a postmodern jokester to make such dour hating a tonal feature of his fiction. Even the political bad guys get taken up into the machinery of Pynchonian play, and become funny. And Anderson surely hates the apparatus of immigration detention he portrays in One Battle After Another. But he’s too “inspired by” Thomas Pynchon not to show the avatars of this apparatus as clownish functionaries rather than slavering demons. The film’s enforcer supreme, made into an unforgettable grotesque by Sean Penn, has that great Pynchonian name, Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw, and he is consistently hilarious, literally never for a single instant a figure of seriousness. There’s an evil secret society in the film that seems to function as a shadow government, or some kind of white-supremacist Avengers, which conservatives are railing against as a slanderous outrage against the honour of America’s virtuous regime. Its name is the Christmas Adventurers Club. Its slogan or secret password is “All hail St. Nick”. How a pundit, even a Right-wing pundit, can mistake the planet where all this happens as our Earth rather than Near Pynchonia is a mystery. But then debilitating literalness is a job hazard, or perhaps a job requirement, of the Constantly Angry Commentator.

In other words, One Battle After Another is sincere about its politics, but it is not, as an aesthetic matter, serious about them. Anderson is too committed an artist to let crude politicking trump formal integrity in his film. In granting supremacy to the formal requirements of a larkish Pynchonian adventure movie, he can’t help subverting and diluting and confusing any programmatic sentiments the movie might also harbour, which is something true militant art can’t allow. The film’s dramatic, emotional centrepiece is a man’s desperate search for his daughter, not some bloody pursuit of revolutionary victory. This favouring of family over politics is not only not revolutionary. It’s counter-revolutionary, as Perfidia understands. But it’s Bob’s orientation from the moment his daughter is born, and Bob is the movie’s hero. The conventional pathos and thrillingly unrealistic presentation of this storyline make for a much more coherent and enjoyable work of art, given the goofy Pynchonian atmosphere in which it happens, than would some grim “realist” agitprop that said political struggle is more important than bourgeois distractions like familial love. And, as I said, Anderson is so serious about that other bourgeois distraction, aesthetic form, that he’s obliged to present all political dogmas, even those he might sympathise with himself, as fundamentally unserious.

And this unseriousness is a good and saving feature of the film, because its politics really are pretty silly. The first time I saw it I thought to myself as the credits came up, “Wow. I have never loved a movie so much that had such dumb politics.” It’s the violent methods of the film’s revolutionaries that conservative critics and progressive admirers have found terrifying and inspiring, respectively, but more telling are the political ends that animate these radicals. The film seems to be about a bunch of Leftists planning revolutionary change for fascist America, but the revolution they’re trying to stage is on behalf of the utterly conventional moral quibbles and lifestyle priorities of affluent liberals. I’m not saying these humdrum ends are dumb in themselves, necessarily. I’m saying that, if you’re pursuing these things that we most already have through the dramatic methods of armed revolution, the mismatch, the overkill, is very dumb indeed.

The eye-catching opening sequence, and the extended action set-piece in which Bob joins up with his daughter’s relaxed and resourceful karate teacher (Benicio del Toro, being excellent), involve frightened migrants and the immigration forces trying to detain and deport them. As such, these scenes express the humane and totally understandable desire of liberals to distance themselves from the cruel realities of immigration enforcement. I struggle with this stuff myself, but maximising the free movement of families across the US-Mexican border so that American businesses can have a larger supply of low-paid labour is not exactly a traditional goal of the radical Left or the working-class. It is, rather, a policy fixation of educated progressives who, queasy about the human reality of immigration enforcement, also derive substantial lifestyle benefits from having all those migrants around to pick their vegetables and process their industrial meats and take care of their kids and make them tasty burritos.

Indeed the film says nothing about economic class. I’ve seen the movie twice now, and I have no memory of any character mentioning poor people. Affluent viewers anxious that a real-life French 75 would appropriate their things for communist redistribution can rest easy. The militants in One Battle After Another aren’t thinking about your property. The word “capitalism” is said once that I recall, but the person who says it is speaking vaguely, and he seems to be working in an anti-tech vein, inveighing against “surveillance capitalism”. In other words, he’s saying something any old centrist grumpy about the internet might say. Instead of poverty or class, the movie’s militants are militating for “freedom”, and this freedom seems much more “negative” and Lockean than “positive” and Marxist. When Colonel Lockjaw asks her what she and her movement are after, Perfidia, the film’s most outwardly radical character, snarls something about “free lives” and “free bodies” and “free borders”. When she brags about bombing a senator’s house, she says it’s because he supported “that anti-abortion bill”. With the possible exception of the internet stuff, then, and with the obvious exception of their chosen methods, the revolutionaries in One Battle After Another have no evident policy disagreements with the editorial team at Reason magazine. (Where the film comes down on the matter of political action I can’t reveal in any detail without saying too much about how it ends, but I will say that it’s not exactly Bolshevism.)

Conservative critics might counter that this proves their point, that Paul Thomas Anderson really is encouraging progressives to take up revolutionary violence simply to pursue their current agenda of open borders and perpetual sexual liberation. That would be a fair point, if One Battle After Another actually encouraged anyone to take up revolutionary violence. The film portrays violent methods in a few scenes, and it presents them as part of a thrilling adventure in the moment, and it shows the supposed radicals committing and enjoying these militant acts to be nice people with good intentions, for the most part. But it also shows the whole enterprise to be kind of a mess, kind of a disaster. Even on the film’s terms the ends don’t justify the means, because the means, being haphazardly deployed by semi-competent people with their own particular agendas, don’t bring the world an inch closer to those ends.

The film is actually profound on this point, how projects of supposedly universal justice or general legitimacy require regular idiosyncratic people to carry them out, and so these general projects are readily hijacked by the specific quirks of these all-too-human humans. In embodying this dilemma, Perfidia represents the folly of revolution itself. She is the most charismatic member of French 75, but this owes in part to the very particular fire that burns inside her, which is one-part preternatural anger and about seven parts feral sexuality. In very Pynchonian fashion, then, her revolution is a matter of desire, of libido. Her specific chemical mix makes her an eager player of dangerous revolutionary games, but it also makes her unreliable as a revolutionary comrade and completely ludicrous, indeed terrifying, as a self-appointed agent of universal justice.

More provocatively, for wary conservative viewers especially, the film applies this model to every urge to rule, within nominally elected governments and ostensibly revolutionary cadres alike. As Perfidia represents the mercurial and fairly stupid eros that revolutions end up taking their bearings from, Colonel Lockjaw embodies the priapic, libidinal essence of official violence. Revolutionaries pursue revolution in part because it’s fun and arousing, and some men sign up to be government enforcers, the tip of the sovereign spear, because they have a powerful desire to stab something. The thought of being the final thrust of the sovereign body is the sort of turn-on a man like Lockjaw can make a career out of. Lockjaw himself draws this link between official enforcement and erotic desire almost explicitly when, in a scene of deep comical strangeness, he refers to his erect penis as his “power”.

If Perfidia represents the arbitrary human desire that lurks in revolutionary plans for universal justice, DiCaprio’s Bob represents the steep human costs that the heady plunge into revolutionary action imposes on a life over the long run. Ben Shapiro really got himself going on this point during a recent podcast. A core “suggestion” of the film, Shapiro said, is that it’s “better…  to be a complete loser who wastes your life bombing things randomly in order to free illegal immigrants to run willy-nilly across the border than to be a productive citizen”. Shapiro gets the sequence wrong here, which is kind of important for what the film’s actual “suggestion” is regarding what kind of person it’s “better” to be. Bob doesn’t become a loser and then bomb things randomly so some Mexicans could get all willy-nilly. He bombs things and then he becomes a loser. He becomes and lives as a loser because he bombed things 15 years earlier.

In other words, thanks to his revolutionary hijinks, Bob’s been in hiding for those 15 years, living as a paranoid hermit with his frustrated daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). He’s a stoned and lonely bachelor in a ratty house who rarely washes his hair and is always wearing an old bathrobe. I imagine there are one or two viewers out there who will receive the “suggestion” that it’s better to live like Bob than to be a productive citizen, but they’re probably starting out as even bigger losers than Ben Shapiro accurately says Bob is. But it’s hard to imagine this is a lesson the film itself wishes to suggest, especially as the revolution, which sputters along without him, is achieving precisely nothing that would make Bob’s existential bargain seem a wise one.

That’s Bob’s existential bargain — and the deep sacrifice he’s imposed on poor Willa — are either probably or obviously not worth it, depending on how much of a loser you already are, is something Pynchon himself says in Vineland. After his long years of hiding out with his daughter Prairie (Vineland’s inspiration for Willa), the old legal jeopardy has once again found Zoyd (Vineland’s inspiration for Bob), which leaves Zoyd regretting the whole damn thing. “Damn fool Zoyd,” Pynchon writes. “Sent so gaga by those mythical days of high drama that he’d forgotten he and Prairie might actually have to go on living years beyond them.” Maybe I’m naive, gullibly inclined to interpret films I really enjoyed as bearing reasonable rather than idiotic ideas, but I thought that sound sentiment was the suggestion I was supposed to get from smelly Bob. But this aside by Pynchon also shows that progressive critics are getting carried away in their giddy claims that One Battle After Another is — to quote the New York Times’s Manohla Dargis — “dead serious”, at least about revolution. A cadre of young people “sent… gaga” by their “mythical days of high drama” does not sound even coma serious, let alone dead serious. To put it another way, if you’re identifying with these violent dilettantes, you’re not serious either.

I want to point out for special recognition a fretful review of One Battle After Another in the conservative outlet The Blaze. According to the writer Peter Gietl, the film’s “celebration of vitriol and murder is clarifying” — that is, it reveals the lethal intent of Paul Thomas Anderson. “When the perpetually sweaty DiCaprio shouts ‘¡Viva la revolución!’ while detonating bombs, you’re meant to cheer. And if you’re not cheering, well, those bombs are meant for you.”

Couple things. First, the film’s take on murder is far from celebratory. The one murder it shows, black Perfidia killing a black security guard during a bank robbery, comes out of nowhere, from no operational logic or shared political motives, but merely from Perfidia’s uncontainable impulses, and so it appalls the other revolutionaries and ends up being their fall from grace, the end of their revolutionary innocence, the moment when all the fun comes apart and everyone is sent on the run, or to prison, or worse.

Second, Bob actually says “¡Viva la revolución!” twice, and neither time is the audience supposed to cheer. The first time he says it you’re supposed to chuckle, because it’s said as an afterthought, the blurting of a revolutionary cliché, and because it’s Bob, and Bob just isn’t a serious person. The second time he says it there’s more of a setup, more comic timing built behind it, and 15 years of hiding and getting high have made Bob even less serious than he was the first time he said it, and so you’re supposed to laugh. And that’s what the audience did both times I saw it — in Oakland, California, perhaps the most politically radical city in America. They didn’t cheer — it would have been dopey as hell if they did. They laughed, because it was funny, because it was Bob.

Finally, the melodramatic kicker in Gietl’s hysterical riff — “and if you’re not cheering, those bombs are meant for you” — is far more politically inflammatory than anything in One Battle After Another. Its interpretation of Paul Thomas Anderson’s motives is so flagrantly wrong, so totally unsupported by the text of his fun new film, that the reader would be justified in making a sort of Pynchonian turn as he seeks its actual meaning. This turn might take the reader into his memories of Pynchon’s masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow, whose hero has a cosmic erotic connection with the rockets of war. These memories might inspire our reader to wonder what kind of cosmic wanting lurks in that ostensible worry about Paul Thomas Anderson’s bombs, and, perhaps, what is the hidden connection in this wanting to the explosive power of the vengeful sovereign.

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