Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another depicts the desperate soul-searching of aging revolutionaries: Should we abandon the Cause and lead a normal life? Should we raise our children to become radicals? Should we regret the violence of our youth? As such, it was always destined to grab the attention of Slovenian film critic-cum-psychoanalyst,
, an aging radical himself.Žižek’s review in UnHerd is interesting for its paternal approach: he’s clearly disappointed with the movie, but he pulls his punches. Like a patient father, he wants to correct but not discourage. But Žižek clearly believes One Battle After Another’s radicalism is a radicalism of means — the means being political violence — but not of ends. Instead, the ends championed by the movie’s radicals dovetail with those of standard-issue bourgeois liberalism. The radicals in One Battle After Another are not fighting to replace the system, nor even to blow it up. Instead, they want to make the system more fair. On this point, Žižek compares the film’s revolutionaries with those from a 2012 movie about aging radicals, The Company You Keep:
… in The Company You Keep, [radicals] fight against the imperialist system itself, while in One Battle After Another, the contemporary descendants focus on helping the illegal Latino immigrants to avoid expulsion and find a place in the US homeland. In other words, they are not working against the system as such, they work to enable immigrants to integrate into the system.
This harsh verdict is basically correct, but Žižek misses a couple of things. First, in depicting the harsh conditions that migrants endure inside border detention centers (the local vernacular for such places is “kennel” and “icebox”), Anderson himself, as director of the film, is in fact doing something radical. It’s true that there’s no shortage of videos on X documenting the excesses of ICE, that reports abound about the inhumane conditions at the border, and that South Park skewered Trump’s child separation policy back in 2019, in an episode partly set in a border detention center. Nevertheless, in displaying those cages in a mainstream film, Anderson does something in and of itself political and radical, and should get credit for it.
It would only have added to the pathos of the film had Anderson let the camera dwell a little longer on these cages and detention centers. But the camera doesn’t dwell on anything for very long in this three-hour movie: Anderson chose not to resist the TikTokification of cinema. His artistic radicalism is one of content, not form. Still, for all that, Anderson sees in the detainees a “Revolutionary Subject,” a people whose very presence is a testimony to injustice and a force for change. He seizes upon them to lend his film a moral seriousness that his leads -- those aging, hapless radicals, who half the time play comic relief -- fail to provide.
Which brings me to the second thing that Žižek misses: not another element of radicalism in the film, but traditionalism. For the Latinos that emerge in One Battle After Another do not only lend the film a modicum of seriousness by providing a link to real-world injustice. They also provide a conservative, religious, even paternal ballast for the film, against which the radical protagonists count for support.
This becomes most clear in the character played by Benicio del Toro: a sage named Sergio St. Carlos. Sergio spends a lot of time trying to outsmart the police: he hides migrants and leads a network of lookouts for ICE raids. He is certainly a radical, of a kind. Sergio’s day job -- a martial arts teacher for local youths -- suggests that he knows something about the disciplined use of power. “Discipline” is a good word for what he provides for his community, where he plays a paternal role. Sergio eventually becomes a father figure to Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, the washed up revolutionary “Rocketman” Pat Calhoun, himself a father, though not always a very good one.
A father-son relationship at the center of One Battle After Another is not something we should have seen coming. It’s a conservative trope in a movie about revolutionaries. Consider that the radicalism of the 1960s and 70s is often explained in Freudian terms, as a sort of society-wide rebellion against the father. As one of the central figures of that era, the German Marxist Herbert Marcuse, wrote, the radicals of the 1960s “have learned not to identify themselves with the false fathers who have built and tolerated and forgotten the Auschwitzs and Vietnams of history, the torture chambers of all the secular and ecclesiastical inquisitions and interrogations, the ghettos and the monumental temples of the corporations, and who have worshiped the higher culture of this reality.” By destroying their paternal bonds, these revolutionaries “will not have redeemed the crimes against humanity, but they will have become free to stop them and to prevent their recommencement.” If you give even a little bit of credence to Marcuse’s theory, then the appearance of a relatively wholesome father figure midway through a film based on the life of the Weather Underground should surprise you.
Then again, maybe not. That the human need for a father is ultimately ineradicable is not surprising. We should not expect politics to be able to replace it, even revolutionary politics. And we should not be surprised when the father figure pops up in a sweeping, epic film. Moreover, Marcuse himself seemed ambivalent about whether this rebellion against the father would truly create a better world. Other Leftist thinkers of the time were even more skeptical. But I am curious about why it’s the proverbial “wise Latinos” who provide the father figure, and the moral seriousness, to the burned-out American radicals.
It’s a kind of orientalism for the South (a friend suggests we call it estereotyping): Latin America is a sort of nature preserve, where the Developed World can find the family, the father, and religion (the migrants in Anderson’s movie are constantly praying in Spanish, and use a church as a hiding place). One Battle After Another depicts a world controlled by powerful cabals of mysterious men, coldhearted security forces, and money. The Hispanic migrants provide not only an example of life which defies these powers and principalities. They also provide a glimpse of cultural institutions that no longer exist in the world of the film. It sounds like something Žižek would come up with: an America that literally imports its revolutionary subjects as well as its little platoons.
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