As Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master“ ends, Lancaster Dodd, a charlatan of cosmic promises, sings a love song. He hopes to win back the affection of Freddie Quell, a wandering post-war brute of deadly but delicious alcoholic potions, and commands that they must either be companions or enemies for all of time. It has been said all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies are dysfunctional love stories, and “One Battle After Another,“ a gauntlet of Americana psychosexual paranoia and revolutionary fervor, is another one: a lopsided love triangle between an explosives expert, a fascist, and the woman who wants to set the world on fire. It’s also a more personal love story for Anderson, one in which he allegorizes the struggles of violent resistance as a love letter to his kids to save a world he and his generation were unable to fix. And within that, he had made one of the most relatable movies in years about what it means to grow up.
Now a dad of four kids and having reached middle age, Anderson’s nearly three-hour action-comedy about revolutionary failure works as a psyop on the struggles of aging, parenthood, and compromise. In the real world, that can mean taking a morally iffy job to pay bills, the betrayal of a dear friend or life partner, or, as many recently have, staying silent online over an important issue in case someone tries to get you fired. These choices detonate when you have children, when every questionable decision creates collateral damage to their lives. Like the intricate math behind the V2 Rocket in Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow,“ life + time + experience become the variables for testing your failures. “One Battle After Another“ converts these everyday problems into the armed milieu of rebellion. It’s about the nature of revolution in the same way “The Master“ was about religion and cult, which is to say that Anderson suffuses his carefully considered ideas into character byplay rather than raw didacticism (just watch for whose method of resistance is most effective; he’s had a few beers).
These patterns of compromise and defeat are ingrained in the very structure of “One Battle After Another,“ which transitions from a tense 40-minute prologue to a 16-year time jump. We begin with armed raids on immigration detention centers and coordinated heist-bombings by the resistance group the French 75, led by Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) and Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), before leaping to a future where not much has changed. Perfidia is gone, a washed-up Bob is blazed out, and their child, Willa (Chase Infinity), rolls her eyes at her paranoiaic dad. Their old nemesis, Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), is back on the prowl. Soon, their values ossify and harden, or are thrown out at the first sign of trouble. As Bob says to the wisened Sensei Sergio (Benicio Del Toro), “I don’t get angry at anything anymore.”
Despite the shock and awe of the French 75’s radical rhetoric and attacks on banks and courthouses, one by one, many of the original members give up their fight. After Perfidia kills a guard during a bank heist, she sells out her comrades for a shot at freedom. During a later interrogation, Howard Sommerville, another original member, surrenders the secret location of Bob and Willa’s whereabouts to save his sister, aware it could mean their deaths. Finally, Deandra (Regina Hall), the most steadfast of the crew, eventually narcs just like the rest.
Anderson refuses to lionize his revolutionaries, whose motivations are never reducible to a monolithic politic of idealized resistance. Perfidia doesn’t just get off on the thrill of violent revolt; she gets off on it. Bob describing bomb wiring counts as foreplay, while exploding enough electrical wires to blackout a city gets her hot. That psychosexual blur is a classic Paul Thomas Anderson move, whose characters often entangle taboo desires with attachment and belonging. When she fucks Colonel Lockjaw, it’s in the intimate language of domination and power, delivering unto him his humiliation kink, where this violent beacon of race war policing becomes her bitch.
Once she became a mother, it was a little too young (as universal a fear of aging as it gets), and her self-esteem plummets. Experiencing postpartum, she’s jealous of her child and doesn’t feel like a woman. Her nipples hurt. Who is she without her revolution? She’s not ready for those answers yet, and I feel for her. She eventually sends a letter to Charlene, Willa’s birth name. Someone on Reddit scouted its source from a 1970s anti-war protest documentary, with Anderson reappropriating it as a deliverance from Perfidia to her child, part apology, part call to action. She has made her reckoning, and she hopes Charlene will make it hers.
With or without revolutions, who doesn’t start to slow down when they hit their ’30s and have kids? I’m 34, and I have to plan weeks in advance to schedule a hang. It’s hard. I’m still not used to it. There’s a loneliness to it, an adjustment, a need to rely on yourself more than others, a slightly smaller circle of social support. You don’t leave the house as much, tied down by responsibility. Perfidia ran from that conventional adult path, using the guise of revolution as her cloak. “Do the revolution, baby,“ Bob says. You can immediately infer that Anderson has been there. He has lived it. He had his party days. If you don’t believe Fiona Apple, just watch old interviews. By all accounts, he’s a loving father and husband, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a hard change.
Anderson made his career out of young innocents stumbling into the dangerous world of adult life, but there has been a perspective shift in his dad years. Compare “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood“ to “Licorice Pizza,“ both nostalgic memory pieces of the late 1960s and early 1970s. “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood“ is a fairy tale saturated with period authenticity but unfolds as an elegy from friendly ghosts. The darkness of the period, embodied by the Manson family, is eradicated by a flamethrower and a very good dog. Rick, Cliff, and Sharon all live happily ever after. “Licorice Pizza,“ in contrast, is a coming-of-age story that contrasts the naivety of Gary and Alana with the teethed edges of the adult world on the periphery. Alana only runs back to Gary when she fails as a grown-up, repeatedly encountering a world of racist and lecherous men who sexualize or use her.
It’s there that the adventures of Gary and Alana preface “One Battle After Another,” with Paul Thomas Anderson widening the scope of danger to fascist, race-hating evils. It’s now a dad’s job to protect his mixed-race child from the world and what’s in it. Bob might be hiding in Baktan Cross as an aging revolutionary, but when isn’t it a good idea to have your daughter learn how to defend herself? When isn’t it a dad’s prerogative to hassle your kid to remember to keep their phone charged and check for updates in case of an emergency?
It’s easy to see a lot of Anderson’s tender, grouchy feelings about hitting his 50s projected into Bob. Through the animus of Lockjaw and his fleet, there’s certainly his own fears about his partner and children, who, like Willa, are of mixed race. However, there are also the more domestic squabbles. There’s the desire to chuck your kid’s cell phone out of a moving car, or forget the lingo from your old crowd. When Bob can’t remember the password to the revolutionary answering service, it’s a sign of his political obsolescence just as much as time’s thievery of memory. It could just as easily have been forgetting a secret handshake between friends, or an inside joke with old pals.
I’ve read again and again how clever it is that Bob doesn’t “do anything“ in that climactic chase sequence, that it’s on Willa’s shoulders to emancipate herself from her pursuers. But that’s not quite right–– it’s the lifetime of Bob’s preparation that empowered the teenage Willa to fight back. She’s strong, and Chase Infiniti’s star-making performance commands a power beyond her years. But at the end of “One Battle After Another,“ Willa reaches a breaking point. Her world has been shattered. She needed her dad, and he was there. Anderson mourns the powerlessness of parents to always be present for their kids, yet Bob will stop at nothing to protect his daughter. He’s the dad who trained her, the dad who brought her home, the dad who helped his child remember herself when she needed it most. Too many have glossed over the detail that it’s Bob’s ordering of Willa to bring the trust device with her to the dance, the dad-daughter equivalent of reminding her to check her phone and keep it charged, which is what saves her life. As if to Paul Thomas Anderson just wanted to say, “see, maybe listen to your old man once in a while.“
Enter the fascist Lockjaw, the other dad. He is, we eventually learn, Willa’s biological father. Despite his military rank, Lockjaw is a pathetic emblem of “performative masculinity,“ all tight black tees and platformed shoes. Pulled from the pages of Pynchon’s “Vineland“ and more broadly Pynchon as a whole (think how Lee Chang-Dong reworked key ideas from Haruki Murakami’s bibliography into his haunting masterwork “Burning“), in Lockjaw Paul Thomas Anderson draws his most Pynchonian character yet, a white supremacist military lifer who dreams of entering the Christmas Adventurers Club, a secret society of terrifying racist dweebs. Lockjaw moves with a mechanical gait, as though he’s a toy soldier wound up with an oversized key, full of puckering ticks and cogged affectations. These signs of performed artifice recall a key idea from Pynchon’s debut novel “V,“ where the mechanization of modernity threatens the very flesh of our bodies. The more you lose yourself, the more inanimate and inhuman you become.
Lockjaw is one of the saddest characters Anderson has ever written. He’s another of his horrible fathers, unable to accept himself or the fatherly love that might be hidden within. If Bob’s regressive struggles as a parent show the importance of boundless love for your child despite your own limitations, then Lockjaw’s confused paternity, drawn from Ethan Edwards’ internalized racism and hate in “The Searchers,“ shows the opposite. Lockjaw’s confused, obsessive anger, and his need for inclusion and validation by the Christmas Adventurers Club, are endemic of the troubled men who find solace in red-pilled hate groups today. He loves Black women; he hates Black women. He loves his biological daughter; he hates his biological daughter. He loves himself; he hates himself. When he finally has alone time with Willa, he immediately inhabits the role of a domineering father, protesting “don’t talk that way about your mother!“ while denouncing Willa’s bad manners. Lockjaw is what happens when love and hate intermix, where the inability to self-accept destroys your ability to live.
Talking to the LA Times, Anderson admitted “that’s the mistake, isn’t it, to think that anything has changed.” Lockjaw’s mission, and the Christmas Adventures as a whole, reinforce that exact point. The screenplay began to form 20 years ago, which means Paul Thomas Anderson put pen to paper during the hysteria of post-9/11 America, when this country spoke with unnerving celebration about violence overseas, exposing an often racially motivated bloodlust. But then things seemed better for a while, those initially radiant Obama years, before the disillusionment that followed. If we swore to Eli Sunday we wouldn’t backslide, it would’ve been a broken promise. Now, in Chicago, ICE agents fist-bump as they arrest families and children. For many of us, we choose between helplessness, apathy, or maybe rage, letting them slip in and fester. Anderson made a movie about that experience, revealing the creep of despair in turning on the news and seeing the same old shit.
To a parent, I imagine it must feel like your child who will save the world. That notion is at the quantum center of Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar,“ and although James Cameron didn’t have kids when he wrote “The Terminator“ and “Terminator 2,” it’s the core idea there too: we must protect John Connor, son of Sarah Connor, leader of the resistance. Here, just as Sommerville sold out Bob and Willa to Lockjaw, it’s two teens who watched on standby that sent out the warning. If they hadn’t, our heroes would most likely have been killed. “One Battle After Another“ is Anderson’s “T2“ in more ways than one, following warrior parents who blew up buildings and got caught, whose kids are the children of the future. In both cases, the children push their parents into renewed relevance and moral reawakening, Anderson’s prayer that each new generation will rescue the old.
Willa becomes that hope. In the film’s most spectacular sequence, a car chase of woozy telephoto immersion, she speeds up and down steep swells of Californian blacktop without the safety of ever seeing the horizon ahead or behind. It’s an elegant metaphor for her coming of age. You won’t always see what’s coming for you, but you have to keep going. If “One Battle After Another“ is another of Anderson’s dysfunctional love stories, it’s as much about the relationship between father and daughter as it is about the generational divide, with the cycle of empowered youth pulling us towards a future that will be forever uncertain.
Have you seen “One Battle After Another” yet? If so, what do you think? Please let us know in the comments section below and on Next Best Picture’s X account and check out the team’s latest Oscar predictions here.
