One Battle After Another as Biden Era Centrism

Paul Thomas Anderson's newest film is a paean to moderate leftism

One Battle After Another follows Pat Calhoun, his seductive companion Perfidia Beverly Hills, and the leftist revolutionary group of which they are a part. Pat, Perfidia, and the rest of the French 75 fill the opening of the movie with their exploits of political terrorism, followed by breathless sexual celebration. They blow up campaign headquarters, plant bombs in courthouses, and organize raids on deportation camps.

In one of these raids, Perfidia meets and pleasurably humiliates the comically evil and stiff-lipped villain of the film: Colonel Steven Lockjaw. Lockjaw’s sexual fascination with Perfidia, and the politically inconvenient child it creates, become the central conflict of the movie.

The French 75’s exploits eventually catch up to them and a botched bank robbery leads to Perfidia’s arrest and sends Pat and his (unknowingly cuckholded) daughter Willa into hiding. The rest of the film follows Lockjaw’s attempts to hunt down Pat and Willa to erase the evidence of his racial infidelity.

Perfidia and Lockjaw

Biden Centrism

Colonel Lockjaw and the military-industrial immigration enforcement agency under him are the unambiguous villains of the film. Lockjaw delivers extrajudicial executions and becomes a boyishly enthusiastic member of the Christmas Adventurers, an ultra-racist secret society that is simultaneously sinister and absurd.

In this way, the leftist radicals of the French 75 are the heroes. They are fighting the bad guys, their ideals are better than the comic cruelty of Lockjaw and his goons, and the immigrants they are ostensibly trying to protect are hardworking and faultless.

But Anderson’s film is not a hagiography for The Weather Underground. Despite the positive contrast with Lockjaw, his depiction of the French 75 is not sympathetic. Pat becomes a deadbeat drug addict, Perfidia abandons her child and rats out her friends, and other French 75 members are depicted as annoying, ineffectual woke scolds.

I read Anderson as talking to the wannabe leftist revolutionaries in his social circles as a coastal-elite Hollywood director. Anderson is conceding to this group that the anti-immigrant right is obviously evil and cruel, but he sees their revolutionary posturing as a fetishistic, Freudian fantasy that will ultimately end in failure and death. Even if you had the advanced and sexy revolutionary organization you dream of, he says, you would still fail.

Anderson’s alternative vision is captured in the final scene of the film. After defeating Lockjaw, Pat and Willa begin their new Biden-centrist life. After years of anti-authoritarian paranoia that kept them off-grid, Pat and Willa buy iPhones and learn to take selfies. Willa gets a message about a protest and she drives off to go hold a picket sign. The sins of Pat's past are absolved after he accepts incremental civic engagement as the true vehicle of change.

One Battle After Another caricatures both the military-industrial right and the wannabe-revolutionary left, leaving moderate liberal activism as the only battle worth fighting.