This wasn’t fully apparent to me on opening night. Although I already felt misgivings about how the picture represents the American left, I was too caught up in its storytelling momentum to produce a coherent critique.
Given what is happening in the United States right now, with what remains of the nation’s liberal institutions hanging by a thread, One Battle After Another’s depiction of the military going to war against the “enemy within” hit so hard that I was still shaking long after the credits rolled.
Although I am a big fan of Thomas Pynchon’s work and found Anderson’s 2014 adaptation of the novelist’s Inherent Vice mostly satisfying, I could understand why the director had decided not to give Vineland a similarly faithful treatment.
By taking a less literal approach, Anderson managed to create a film perfectly suited to the horrors of today, reminding us how bad things can get when the full weight of the state is directed at radicals.
The dark humour for which Pynchon is revered comes through loud and clear. It’s very difficult to toggle back and forth between silly names, Larry David-style madness, and sheer terror without losing narrative momentum. But One Battle After Another pulls off the feat with aplomb.
The A-list men in the cast–Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro–are at their best, and the women of colour who co-star–Teayana Taylor, Regina Hall, rapper Junglepussy, and newcomer Chase Infiniti–are more than a match for their artistry.
The longer I thought about One Battle After Another, however, the more it began to bother me. Even though Anderson’s political sympathies clearly trend left, he reproduces the conservative framing of radicalism without adequately interrogating it. This is particularly apparent in how he handles the legacy of the 1960s. Or, to be precise, decides not to handle it.
In this regard, Anderson is strangely similar to Donald Trump. Although both fixate on the legacy of that tumultuous decade, they seem reluctant to invoke it directly. The 1960s become a dark star for the stories they tell, an invisible centre that structures their narrative universe.
In Trump’s case, the reason is personal. The decade coincided with his teens and twenties, when he was struggling to come out from under his abusive father’s shadow. Unlike his older brother Fred Jr., Donald never formally broke with the family patriarch. But that conflict made a huge impression on him, as did Fred Jr.’s increasingly debilitating alcoholism.
Donald’s two years at the University of Pennsylvania, in a crime-ridden Philadelphia neighbourhood, and the half-decade after graduation, when he collected rent for his father in dangerous New York apartment complexes, seem to have convinced him that the anything-goes mindset of the counterculture and the media-savvy revolutionaries who emerged from it were leading the United States to ruin.
Current targets of Trump’s ire, such as liberal cities and universities, are not perceived as they actually are right now, but how he remembers them from over half a century ago. That’s why his rants seem so detached from reality.
Unfortunately, the president does not seem to realise that most of his information is wildly out of date. He rarely discusses the 1960s as a historical period. Perhaps this is because that was the last time he felt completely dependent, without individual achievements to brag about. Whatever the reason, Trump’s behaviour suggests that he continues to relive those years in the present.
Paul Thomas Anderson was born too late to have personal experience of the 1960s. But he grew up in a Hollywood family, at a time when the decade’s legacy was being endlessly debated. Like other members of Generation X, he learned about it indirectly, through a deluge of media artefacts.
This may explain why Anderson decided to make a film based on Vineland without retaining its historical perspective.
Instead of being set in 1984, with many flashbacks to the late 1960s, the film begins with a backstory that is hard to date precisely, but takes place over a number of years, culminating in a sequence that correlates with the era of early smartphones. The story then leaps forward sixteen years to a narrative present that feels viscerally now, even though production was finished before Donald Trump returned to the White House.
The scenes from One Battle After Another’s backstory in which law enforcement hunts down left-wing radicals may seem to be a commentary on what is happening today, in cities like Chicago and Portland, but were actually inspired by histories of the period, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when groups like the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, and the SLA were being relentlessly persecuted. The film’s focus on radical women of colour suggests that Göran Hugo Olsson’s 2011 documentary Black Power Mixtape, with its focus on Angela Davis, was a particularly influential source.
It’s unnerving, then, to have the concrete details of those battles erased from the historical record in One Battle After Another. Indeed, only someone who has consumed a great deal of material about that period would be able to discern that the film is drawing upon it.
While the brazen political rhetoric we hear early in the picture matches the sort used by those American radical groups and their European counterparts, such as the Red Army Faction and Red Brigades, it is frustratingly abstract, stripped of all specificity. The radicals may be fighting one battle after another, but have lost sight of the war that gave their struggle meaning.
By decontextualising left-wing radicalism in this manner, One Battle After Another risks playing into the hands of politicians like Donald Trump.
Trying to make the film’s story align with actual historical events reveals why its vagueness is a problem. If the backstory ends in the late 2000s, then the lawbreaking that precedes that jump cut—planting bombs, robbing banks—would have to have taken place earlier in that decade.
But in the post-9/11 world of George W. Bush’s presidency, after Congress almost unanimously passed the Patriot Act, the “radical” left in the United States largely confined itself to non-violent protests of government overreach in the War on Terror.
Some reviews of One Battle After Another suggest that the backstory is intended to take place in the 1990s, despite not aligning with the number of years that pass between its final scene and the narrative present in which the remainder of the story unfolds. Nor does this argument account for anachronisms, such as an indirect acknowledgement that 3G cellular phones exist or the sight of vehicles that were produced in the 2000s.
Even if those apparent mistakes were fixed, however, the film would still be subjecting audiences to a bait-and-switch, depicting left-wing radicalism in a period when extremists on the right were dominating the headlines, most notably in the 1995 terrorist attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people and injured hundreds more.
Anderson has a reputation for being a meticulous artist, someone who takes the time to get the details right. It therefore seems highly unlikely that he failed to notice the problems with the film’s timeline. If they remain in the finished product, that’s almost certainly because he wanted them there.
The question is why One Battle Another plays so fast and loose with history.
By presenting us with scenes clearly based on the activities of radical groups that emerged in the 1960s, but denying us the specific contextual references that defined their conflicts with the government—J. Edgar Hoover, COINTELPRO—One Battle After Another deprives us of the tools we need to make sense of the present conjuncture, in which Donald Trump and his allies are desperately trying to conjure the robust left-wing radicalism that would justify further escalation of their clampdown on all who oppose them.
Paul Thomas Anderson has made a film that works beautifully on an emotional level, facilitating intense identification with the beleaguered radicals in hiding depicted in its narrative present.
One Battle After Another also pulls off the rare feat of being simultaneously hilarious and terrifying, thereby doing justice to the peculiar affect that characterises Thomas Pynchon’s oeuvre.
It’s fitting that One Battle After Another arrived in theatres just before the publication of Pynchon’s new novel, Shadow Ticket, because Anderson clearly wished to bring renewed attention to the famously secretive author.
Yet for all Anderson’s cinematic verve, One Battle After Another ultimately fails to deliver the storytelling we need right now, when the positive outcomes of the 1960s are being systematically dismantled by shadowy forces that wish to turn back the clock to a time before the Civil Rights Movement, before Social Security, and even before women had the right to vote.
By erasing the 1960s on a narrative level, One Battle After Another undermines the historical specificity that makes Vineland so valuable and risks performing the reactionary “dirty work” it ostensibly means to critique.
Screenshot courtesy of The Critical Drinker. All rights reserved.
