battlefields
by Douglas Messerli
It was fascinating to me that in March of 2026, at
the very moment the US President had almost single-handedly taken a nation to
war—with the help, of course, of the Israeli militarists who have long been
seeking to find a major world power to help them wipe out one of their most
potent enemies without any stated reason except for his personal dislike of the
Iranian government, and, most importantly, having received not a single
congressional vote or any evidence of major support from the citizens—that four
of the titles I first saw were all about doing large-scale battle on national
landscapes.
For Ryan Coogler’s
Sinners the war involved an uprising of Mississippi Delta blacks simply
seeking out their private enjoyment after their long days of working the cotton
fields, interrupted by Irish vampires, serving as a threat of assimilation and destruction
to their culture, and ending in an outright rebellion of the last survivor
against the Ku Klux Klan, emblem of the white bigotry that had destroyed so
many black lives for centuries. If it was a valiant fight, it was alas, as
history has shown, a losing battle.
So too
did blacks and whites lead a rebellion this time against the political right
and wealthy industrialists in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After
Another. Here a Weatherman-like radical group, the fictional French 75, worked,
often successful, to free immigrants detained by ICE (Immigration and Customs
Enforcement), blew up corporation headquarters, and robbed banks to sustain
their activities. The military right of the US came down upon them with full
force,
almost totally silencing them. Yet their worst enemy
was simply time, as the first generation of radicals grew into middle age, and
drugged and drank themselves into oblivion. Yet even hidden away in a small
California town, the “hero” and his daughter still came under siege, in this
case because of a personal vendetta by one of the military rightists who having
fathered a black child and who was seeking entry to one of the most elite
racist organizations that made even the Klan look like a small town operation.
If “Rocketman” Paul Calhoun / now renamed Bob Ferguson is not precisely an
innocent, his daughter Charlene/Willa (the offspring actually of the mad
military racist Lockjaw) is guilty of nothing but existing; and the new battles
that all must suffer this time round are simply those of protecting the future
from the brutal hate Lockjaw and the American industrial complex represent.
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent focuses
in on another national landscape, that of Brazil under the 1970s military dictatorship,
filled with corrupt police forces and spiteful industrial chieftains who,
almost in reverse of One Struggle After Another, turn innocent researchers,
outspoken women, immigrants, gay people and others into rumored political dissidents
so they might have recourse to murder them. Unlike the former political activists
hiding out with new identities in a safe town in California, the stragglers who
have made it to the underground safe house in Recife have done nothing but
attempt to live good everyday lives, only to find themselves described as
Communists, queers, and other kinds of outsiders who must be destroyed to save
the fascist government. The battles they must undergo are daily struggles just
to survive, and, in the end, that survival also entails the next generation,
since they will surely lose out in the complex plots against their living.
Finally,
in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, the young hero of the work seems to be
battling the entire nation, his working-class Jewish family and neighbors, bigoted
Southern whites, a mafioso figure, and the affluent elites—as well as the worldwide
Table Tennis Association—just to get his chance at the American dream of
becoming the world ping-pong champion. One by one he wards them off only to
also get caught up with a man who describes himself as a vampire. And like the
others I describe above, Marty realizes that despite all of his desperate
battles, his dream also represents a lost cause, having finally been defeated
by the powerful forces which control his world.
All of
these works, every one of them representing moral individuals who attempt to defeat
the evil forces of self-interest, greed, and hate, lose most of their battles,
recognizing that in the worlds that they inhabit they will always be outsiders.
And, accordingly, all four of these works contain, as James R Dubro has
described them, “queerish” figures. Vampires, by their very definition,
represent in their attraction to all sexes for a source of blood, serve as
stand-ins for bisexual or queer individuals, desiring to consume and take over
the bodies of both males and females with whom they come in contact. The number
of male on male bodies in Sinners alone suggests a bloody orgy more than
zombies feasting on the living. And in Marty Supreme the vampire pen
manufacturer is more interested in actually paddling the behind of the young
Marty that in getting behind him in support of his table tennis career.
Some of the first for whom militarists and
fascists come when pretending to crack down on “so-called” moral turpitude
(usually a cover for their own truly immoral behaviors) are members of the LGBTQ
community, actions which in The Secret Service are satirized by the
press by describing them as attacks of the hairy leg now on the loose after
having been found hanging from the jaws of a tiger shark.
In One
Battle After Another the younger generation for which the central figure
fights, Charlene/Willa may have found a way to escape the sexual and gender-related
predatoriness that dominates the older generation by refusing to define
themselves and their friends in those terms, arguing for their own non-binary
categories.
The sad
thing that keep haunting me, however, while watching all four of these films
was that we come out of the theater facing no more of a morally defined world
than when we entered. In one of their cases, no matter how many battle these
heroes won, they lost the war, being outnumbered and outmaneuvered by the
forces of evil.
Leaving
the theater I still had to return home to the news of Trump and his numerous
minions in government and across my nation who were ready to whip up a chaos of
divisiveness and hatred instead of seeking to serve a united people with empathy,
care, and hope.
There was
a reason, I believe, behind the selection of his year’s best film by the
American Film Academy being One Battle After Another and the Cannes Film
Festival chose Mendonça Filho as best director. These films revealed the
battles that most of us were engaged in now almost every day of our lives.
Los Angeles, March 16, 2026
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (March 2026).
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