Freedom is a Constant Struggle

I’d read and heard loads about One Battle After Another and invited a friend who came through the long Sixties to see it with me. She has studied the kind of white nationalism that fuels Trump and that fueled Charlie Kirk and his followers. I figured two pairs of eyes and two heads were better than one and I was right.

My movie companion heard some of the same complaints that I heard: that the movie directed by Paul Thomas Anderson was trash and one best avoid it. That was not her stance. She was gratified by the portrayal of the white male nationalists who are obsessed with racial purity as though it really exists and who hire assassins to carry out their dirty work. She thought that Leonardo DiCaprio deserved an Oscar for his performance. Yes!

In an email, one friend urged me to boycott the film as though that would send a message to the director and to Warner Brothers who distributes it. But tell me not to see a movie and I am sure to see it. As a boy my dad would not allow me to see The Desert Fox about the famed WWII German general. His argument: the film glorified a Nazi. I did not leave the theater in awe of Rommel or eager to wear a swastika.

I can understand why some Sixties friends are queasy about One Battle After Another. The violence comes on fast and furious and from all sides. Some scenes seem to glorify gratuitous violence. One of the major characters, a Black woman known as Perfidia Beverly Hills, becomes “a rat” and betrays her comrades.

I can hear friends say, why couldn’t the film feature a character like the real life Assata Shakur, a member of the Black Liberation Army who escaped jail and with help from white comrades escaped to and lived in Cuba, protected by the Cuba government until she died on September 25, 2025.  Viva Assata.

In  his defense, I’d say that Anderson wasn’t making a documentary; he seems to be saying that even icons of the revolution can be corrupted and collaborate with the state. But that’s not the end of the story he tells. Right before the credits roll, Perfidia’s daughter Chase goes to Oakland to join the revolution. The battle goes on. It’s a never-ending story.

The scenes in which Chase is hunted down go on far too long and Anderson milks the suspense for all its worth and more. But to urge movie goers not to see his tour de force seems self-defeating. Tell people not to do something and they’re likely to do it if only because they’re motivated by spite if nothing else.

Anderson’s film is about a group of failed American revolutionaries who belong to a group called the French 75. I don’t imagine anyone who sees the movie would want to get guns, learn to use them and emulate the characters in the film, played by Leonardo DICaprio, Benicio del Toro, Chase Infinity and others. The acting is superb, especially DiCaprio’s depiction of a radical turned pothead and paranoid schizophrenic.

When I first heard the name of Anderson’s revolutionary group, French 75, I thought of Rachel Kushner’s 2024 novel of ideas, Creation Lake, about a group of modern day French revolutionaries and the American secret agent who infiltrates their ranks and aims to destroy their organization.

According to the publicity for One Battle, the film was inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, which is about Sixties hippies and lefties marooned in the 1980s. To tie Anderson’s movie to Pynchon’s novel is a stretch. Of course, no writer or filmmaker can own the Sixties, or copyright radicals, hippies and the kinds of rightwing extremists in the film who pull the strings of their puppets.

There are more clichés in One Battle than I could count, but put them together and you have an original work of art that melds the personal and the political and that cuts across racial and generational lines. My movie goer friend describes it as a testament to the zeitgeist.

The title of Anderson’s film put me in mind of the Sixties battle cry, “Freedom is a Constant Struggle.” If there’s a message here, that might be it. But why, one might ask, didn’t Anderson make a movie about pacifists and liberal peace-loving reformers in the ruling class. Nice people, not crazies? After all, they exist. But a movie with those kinds of characters would preclude the scenes with gunplay, firefights, blood and guts; the visuals that viewers expect from an action-packed Hollywood picture.

After all, this is a Hollywood film. Isn’t that what Anderson is saying when he named the radical turned rat, Perfidia Beverly Hills. She’s a Beverly Hills revolutionary. For a time, they thrived in Hollywood. Perfidia, in case you were wondering, means treachery and betrayal. The road to revolution is littered with the bodies of rats and informers. But also with fathers like Bob who is played by DiCaprio and daughters like Willa who is played by Chase Infiniti and who remain true to one another and to the cause they serve.

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