“One Battle After Another,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, employs a postmodern American setting to explore the roles of revolutionaries and organized revolutionary groups under fascist regimes. The movie is also about being a parent and what it means to put trust in future generations.
After a screening of the film at the West Newton Cinema, John Plotz, host of literary podcast “Recall This Book,” moderated a discussion of the film between Peter Coviello, an English professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, and Ethan Warren of the Boston Society of Film Critics, which shed light on the literary origins of “One Battle,” as well as its place in Paul Thomas Anderson’s filmography.
“One Battle” is inspired by “Vineland” by Thomas Pynchon, a novel written during Ronald Reagan’s presidency about the “afterlife of ’68 hippies,” said Coviello. The film retains the bones of the novel, but shifts its focus from the 1960s and 1980s to the 2000s and 2020s, and modernizes its story accordingly. In a stunning sequence, Benicio Del Toro’s Sergio St. Carlos mobilizes his community to help a group of undocumented immigrants evade Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a white supremacist and xenophobe, the film’s central villain, in pursuit of Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Willa (Chase Infiniti) Ferguson. In another, Willa and Deandra (Regina Hall), a member of the revolutionary group the French 75, take shelter with a convent of marijuana-growing, revolutionary nuns.
Anderson fits the film to modern-day America by choosing to center issues like racism, abortion rights, and immigration, and uses this setting to examine the role of organized movements in combating a fascist state. He juxtaposes two groups, the militant French 75 and the community-centered network led by St. Carlos. It is a comparison that is by no means black and white, but one that takes a hard look at what leads to success and failure within revolutionary groups. For example, Anderson chooses to have the French 75 bear arms, in a departure from “Vineland.” As Coviello notes, in this film, “guns are not ‘disqualifying’…the opposition of fascism may or may not be violence, but it will be organizing.”
Despite the fact that Anderson has adapted a Pynchon novel before with 2014’s “Inherent Vice”, “One Battle After Another” marks a departure from his previous work. As Warren notes, it is his first movie set during the 21st century since 2002’s “Punch-Drunk Love,” and his first ever film to feature a primarily non-white cast, specifically underpinned by black women–Willa and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) in particular represent the humanity that both foils and sustains revolutionary movements. As Warren says, the film is Anderson’s attempt to “engage in the American moment.”
The result is a sprawling, electrifying portrait of an America that feels all too familiar. Anderson, a father of four, casts a light on not only generational dynamics and the magnitude of “passing the torch” to new generations, but also on the dangers of the world those generations are headed into.
