One Battle After Another

Satire is where politics go to die. After all, once the dust has settled, what’s changed? Satire is like a good laugh that, regardless of its humour, leaves a sour aftertaste—is the punchline that funny when the joke is your life? Satire comments on the present and does so with the hubris of a politically-minded smart-ass. In other, more sincere times, the parody might inspire answers to the present’s vicissitudes, but in poor times like ours, where cynicism is rampant and selling out the path to glory, the most it inspires is a chuckle before you tune out and fall back in bed depressed. Leonardo di Caprio is the lead of Paul Thomas Anderson’s potent One Battle After Another, but it’s another recent DiCaprio film that comes to my mind when reflecting on it: Don’t Look Up (2021). An end of times satire that could actually work, weren’t our collective prospects so grim. What worth is pointing at an asteroid about to blast all of us out of existence when the world is already on its knees?

Looking at the current media landscape, it looks like satire is the last resource, the limit and the grave of North-American cinema and television, in and outside of Hollywood. Where it once inspired—who could guess we’d one day feel nostalgic for the 1990s disaster movie cul-de-sac—now American media rarely, truly moves the world. We’re living in an era when most of us are exhausted of the United States, and of the world centring on it, all while its cultural imperialism, through the arts but also technology, academic discourse, and political rhetoric continues to shape international debates and tastes. Late last fall I found myself at a talk by a US visual artist, apparently among its top one hundred most influential, that rambled on, fascinated and eloquent as only Americans can, about AI, cheap psychology, and identity speech and I couldn’t help but yawn. I couldn’t even bother to be infuriated anymore.

One Battle After Another could be, but is not, this predictable. Paul Thomas Anderson is one of, if not the most ingenious yet sincere North-American contemporary film directors. If not for his genuine artistry, the film could, it too, easily reproduce the same impotent—the right word to use for a fallen empire—satirical cynicism. Sure enough, the first half-hour focusing on Perfidia Beverly Hills’ mischief, its middle stretch with DiCaprio’s Bob following Benicio del Toro’s wise Sensei across a seized Baktan Cross, and the Vertigo-induced final car chase in the desert, all of which to the rhythm of Jonny Greenwood’s unstoppable score, might just be some of the most edge of your seat cinematic experiences of late. Throughout: the political messaging, which neither takes itself too seriously nor, screwball humour notwithstanding, ever indulges on facile commentary. One Battle After Another is a utopian film—quite unlike Anderson’s previous insidious character studies of There Will be Blood (2008) or The Master (2012). It is a film about legacies and the passing of the will to change, a belief that only we can build the future and that there is still a future to be built: from Perfidia’s long line of revolutionary mothers down to her and from her to her estranged daughter Willa, this last family step by way of the caring yet aloof hands of stoner Marxist-Leninist groupie Bob.

One battle after another indeed. Yet the same battles can’t be repeated endlessly. Why do I say this? Because no matter how contemporary, the film’s topics would also fit seamlessly in the American 1990s multicultural debates or its 1970s post-revolutionary malaise. This atemporality is actually in the film itself, Anderson acknowledges it; an undefined present populated by fanfictional guerrillas fighting for liberation and secret society conspiracists zeroing-in their racist agendas equally on Nixon, Reagan or Trump. In this regard, the film is a perfect portrayal of America’s paranoid, parochial, nationalist-indulged amnesia. A country spinning on its wheels, its greatest hits on repeat, greedily turned into IP. As Karl Marx once said, “The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

The challenge for a film like One Battle After Another is mirroring its tumultuous times yet, in doing so, risk replicating it further. After all, a mirror can only mirror, never show new horizons. For many, upon its premiere One Battle After Another was the best film of the decade—heck, the best film ever! How sad the desperation, how low does an empire fall. America, pass on your torch of liberty.