intentional revolutionaries
by Douglas Messerli
Paul Thomas Anderson (screenplay, based on Vineland
by Thomas Pynchon, and director) One Battle After
Another / 2025
As critic David Denby recently observed in The
New Yorker there are two kind of Paul Thomas Anderson movies, the “big
noisy” movies, ragged epic studies of human behavior such as Magnolia and
There Will Be Blood, and “smaller, quieter ones” such as Phantom
Thread and The Master, although it is difficult to think of the
later film as either small or quiet. I argue that there is also a third kind of
Anderson work, the highly political, comical, and linguistically disjunctive movies
such as Inherent Vice and now One Battle After Another, both
broadly based on works by Thomas Pynchon and which are neither truly quiet nor big,
noisy, and ragged epic works, and I would argue represent least flowed contributions
to cinematic art.
Both of
the films of the latter category, highly popular with critics, the most recent
work of last year (2025) actually becoming a box-office hit, have become almost
cult works given the fact that they present as semi-heroic characters, stereotypical
figures of politically radical behavior that one might argue are generally
unpopular with a great portion of the general public. Certainly, times have
changed. It would have been almost unimaginable to experience a film like One
Battle After Another in the early 1970s at the time when the Symbionese
Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst, who soon after joined them in their
bank robberies and other assaults. Since then, however, given several horrific presidential
administrations, so many of us have come to distrust authority for its racist, homophobic,
socially irresponsible, and financially greedy self-aggrandizement, let alone its
patriarchal obsession of the female body, that what once might have been seen
as political criminals to the vast majority of society are now so celebrated
that they are not only seen by a certain sliver of the US population of
improbable heroes but whose cinematic exploits are celebrated as a likely Best
Picture at the Academy Awards.
Welcome to a world where the villain of the
piece, Steven J. Lockjaw (a wonderful Sean Penn), a corrupt military officer
pursing the radical French 75 underground members, who is also so obsessed with
the sexual lure of black women and who later virulently denies unspoken
suggestions that he might be homosexual, is almost as much fun to watch as the
powerful radical leftist Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), Lady Champagne
(more commonly known later as Deandra) (Regina Hall), and the Perfidia’s rather
lost white boyfriend, the explosive device expert, “Ghetto” Paul Calhoun
nicknamed “Rocketman” (Leonardo DiCaprio), along with their interracial gang who
free entire immigrant detention camp detainees, rob banks, and blow up
strategic imperialist enterprises.
By the
time most of the French 75 group have been rounded up and killed off, and the
pregnant Perfidia has escaped the public “protection” of Lockjaw and returned
to Pat, what remains of the radical movement has gone so underground that it functions
almost entirely through codes and paranoia,* setting up the surviving couple,
Calhoun and Perfidia, in an underground safety house in Baktan Cross,
California—not so different from Dona Sebastiana’s safety house in Recife,
Brazil in Mendonça Filho’s film.
Here Perfidia bears a daughter and, just as
quickly, refuses to perform the feminine role of motherhood, abandoning Pat and
would-be family life for Mexico, Algiers, or some other exotic spot, leaving
behind what will soon become, now under the name of Bob Ferguson, a washed-up
revolutionary with a growing pot of a stomach and too much pot and cocaine in
his brain washed
down with wine and whisky. But one has to give him
credit, if nothing else, for raising a fiercely independent, beautiful daughter
Charlene, newly named Willa (Chase Infiniti) whose friends, in another US
cultural shift to which this film gives voice, all identify as non-binary,
suggesting that Willa herself does not see herself locked in a female-male
dichotomy against which her mother so struggled. Welcome Donald Trump to the
real world.
Yet out
there somewhere Lockjaw still lurks, and now, 16 years later, seeking entry into
the exclusive evil old men’s strictly secret segregationist Christmas
Adventurers Club. And suddenly remembering that there is a black girl out there
who probably is his baby, decides to declare war on Baktan Cross, calling in
the military to close down the local chicken processing plant where
Hearing
through the underground of the attack, the former Lady Champagne (now Deandra)
is deployed to whisk Willa away from a school dance and hurry her off to nearby
convent of pot-growing nuns.
Bob/Pat,
whose brain has shed almost all ties with the radical underground, cannot
remember the code word to be given the location of his daughter’s whereabouts. Escaping
through an underground tunnel, Bob rushes off to Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), the local karate sensei and community leader who also
houses many of the town’s immigrants—who he sends off through a hidden passage—and
his own students, who take flight with Bob across several rooftops, from where
he falls before being arrested by the local police. They interview him, insisting
he is a diabetic in need of insulin, and transfer him to a local hospital where
a nurse suggests he enter the next room to take the nearby fire escape to
safety.
Meanwhile, Christmas Adventurers Club
member, Tim Smith (John Hoogenakker) is called to the Club and told of Lockjaw’s
activities, including the closure of the chicken processing plant owned by one
of their own members. Miller is sent to do away with Lockjaw, Bob, and Willa.
Accordingly, we now have a trio of confused and desperate men on their
way to the convent.
Predictably, Lockjaw reaches the destination first, capturing Willa and,
in a truly painful comic moment, forcing her to undergo a DNA test to see if
she is truly his child. If the machines aligns with three straight markers, her
future will be death, otherwise she will be freed. He proves he is the
biological father and now must rid himself of his evidence, his own daughter.
Arriving
just in time to see his daughter taken away by Lockjaw, after his hired
murderer Avanti refuses to kill the girl
because of her young age. With Avanti at the wheel, he drives Willa to a
far-right militia who will do the job.
Yet, as
Avanti sees the men meet in preparation, he refuses to drive off but returns
with gun in hand, killing them all, as Willa escapes in his car.
Following
Lockjaw, whom Miller is chasing, Ben witnesses what appears to be Lockjaw’s
murder, finding the car and body in a small gully. But also remembering another
car speeding past him going in the other direction, turns back to find Willa
herself, after killing Miller, afraid even to meet up with her own father
without the proper code. He begs her to stand down, which she finally does, collapsing
into his arms in relief as they return home.
Lockjaw,
miraculously does survive, and is greeted at the Christmas Adventurer’s Club as
a new member. Shown into his new office, Lockjaw sits back in utter joy behind
the desk, as the doors as closed and gas becomes to fill the room for a ceiling
vent. Once he is dead, a person comes to carry him off for cremation—a series
of events that perhaps all too vividly call up the Nazi gas chambers and
cremation plants.
Before I
close, however, perhaps I need return to the missing link in all this, the “rat”
as Willa herself describes her mother when she discovers the truth, Perfidia
Beverly Hills, whose sexual relationship with Lockjaw is at the heart of later
father-daughter dilemma and near-murder. Some critics felt strongly that the
character was, as Wikipedia describes it, “was overly sexualized and a sex
criminal.” Yet describing Perfidia was herself being overly sexy, or as one
commentator put it, horny, entirely misses the point. Yes, she is fetishized by
Lockjaw, but she begins their relationship by putting a gun to his head and
demanding he get an erection that she refuses to put to rest. She uses him in
an almost sadist-masochistic manner to keep him from overtaking her, from
turning her into a black whore of a slave.
Throughout the early part of the film, this central character, prepared
at any moment to be raped by the men in power, attempts to convert their attempts
at over-powering her to regain her own empowerment until finally, faced with
complete defeat and years in prison, she once again is able to use her
sexuality as a device of escape.
Even
when she is freed, however, she must still face a heteronormative and patriarchal
demand, that she convert her political energy and activities to motherhood. Her
refusal to even play that role speaks to the integrity of her position, whether
or not one agrees with her choices. As the actress playing the role, Teyana
Taylor herself argues, her character weaponizes her sexuality against her
enemies, explaining that the decisions Perfidia makes through the film are done
out of her struggle to survive:
“It will never be a moment of judgment, because a
lot of her mistakes have come from her being in survival mode dealing with
postpartum depression and the title of being a strong woman—a strong Black
woman. We don't get the same amount of compassion as everybody else. We don't
get the same amount of grace as everybody else. Everybody just assumes we're
okay.”
By taking
gender out of the picture, her daughter Charlene/Willa opens up new
possibilities of a non-binary identification that might permit her to survive
not simply as a woman, but as a human being worthy of survival in the fact she
represents herself primarily not in terms of sex.
It is not
coincidental that the Trump Republicans began their attack on the LGBTQ world,
a world that lies generally outside of their patriarchal hierarchical constructs,
by attacking transgender figures, not only because they are a small,
underrepresented minority, but because their very transformation symbolizes the
collapse of their system, in which a fluctuating sense of sexuality no longer
permits them steadfast control. The fact that a woman can become a man, a man a
woman threatens their very notion of a permanent, inflexible reality. Who knows
who you might wake up to be?
Finally, I
believe we should perceive Perfidia as a remarkable escape artist, a Houdini of
sexual definition. A radical beyond all the political issues of this film.
And it is
little wonder that there have been attacks of Anderson’s film from right-wing
commentators that see it as a sympathetic portrayal of volent anti-fascist
revolutionaries. I joked at the beginning of this essay that the work was
ironic given the Democratic / Republican gap of our times. Yet the concerns of
this film are not all established as “left-wing” activities, even though members
not only of the political right but the left have seemed to support this
reading. The issues brought up in this film, however, just as in The Secret
Agent, are about battling authoritarianism, fascism itself, which should be
an American concern, not simply one a liberal political party. The entire
establishment of our country was based on these very principles, and we see in
the Brazilian film just what happens to individual liberties when they are
taken away. This satire seemingly exaggerates them to outright murder, but then
the histories of authoritarian and fascist governments have almost always taken
away life along with the hard-fought liberties.
As I wrote
of Mendonça Filho’s motion picture: “The film was written for our times.”
*Codes and coding are particularly important in this
film, the former becoming so impregnable that they keep out the very people the
codes were created to protect. Oddly enough, many years ago in 1993, without
having read Pynchon’s 1990 fiction, I wrote a prose poem titled “Existentialism”
about the French underground using just such an elaborate coding system that
they finally couldn’t communicate. I do not like to intrude with my own
creative writing on these essays, but I do think it quite relevant to this
work:
“There was a moment in which anything might have,
should, did occur to us as potentially an act that carried with it risk,
danger, and yes, we understood, destruction of all we had known, knew, and
would know as something to be cherished, loved. Yes, we were cautious, crossing
streets forward and back again, and darting into establishments which we had
never visited before, out a side door into an alleyway and over a wall or
through little lanes at back to those streets again where we might walk calmly
or furtively and quickly cross. Still we were certain to be seen, followed,
felt the eyes upon our back, turned entering another house of flats, and sat,
perhaps, on the little leather settee for a time before we tried a door at the
back and took to the streets once more. Then we might return home or stop by a
bar for Pernod, sitting all afternoon at an obvious table, or sometimes hidden,
racing out of the place and posing as prostitutes do by the loo on Rue St.
Germain or into a hotel where we would try to rent a room. Sometimes we saw
them pass, so we thought, and double back, and passing us once more, becoming
alarmed that we might recognize them, change women or men, so that the first
follower might fall away to be replaced ty the second who might be the clerk
who asked how long we intended to stay. So we said very little, were
non-committal, were so uncertain of our plans, even if we dared to be seen in
one another’s company, we could not make dates, could not declare, for certain,
if we would be at such and such a place on a particular week or day. So it, we,
the organization we had in courage and faith begun, began, had begun actually
before we felt each footstep was a cause for fear, a trace to be followed to
our houses, children, spouses, to fall apart. For if one of us found his or her
way into a place where another of us might have met her or him, he or she was
probably not around. If we did meet, it was by chance, an accident, as when I
met Paul on the pier, one afternoon, Pierre met my mother at the marketplace.
But even here, at the marketplace or pier we were so afraid to speak to one
another, to say anything others might overhear, that we concocted a code, quite
complex, of rhymes, numbers, and associations the might hide what we really
said. For example, if I met a man who was once one of us—for we could no longer
trust everyone who once joined was serving yet—I might say “Hello, Mr. Jello,”
which meant, “Are you trembling, in trouble, nervous, upset? If he said “Good
day Mr. Marshmallow,” I would quickly turn about and leave the place; while if
he reproved with a “Harsh fellow” I might speak a little lower, supposing we
were being watched. If, on the other hand, he addressed me as “Mr. Bellow,” I
might assume I could shout, and in a natural voice answer him, “Well, Sir, what
about the Bastille then?” If he responded, “It’s been liberated,” we might meet—by
accident again—in another blank—depending upon the number of letters in the
word—months, weeks, or days. If, on the other hand, he told me it was a prison,
I could presume that he or she was being tailed so continuously that he or she would
have to hole up for a period commensurate, I might never see her or him again.
So I might respond, “Adieu,” or “Auf Wiedersehen” or “So long, to indicate the
movements of the Americans, the Germans, or the French. And he or she might
respond, I do or don’t like lager, beer, wine, or whiskey, depending upon the
nationality with which she or he did or didn’t have contact.
Consequently,
we did little for the underground effort and against the government had no
effect.”
Los Angeles, March 13, 2026
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March
2026).
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