One Battle After Another

I haven’t seen every contender, but One Battle After Another is a strong candidate for best mainstream American picture of 2025. Released theatrically late in the year, it’s now available streaming on HBO Max, which is where I caught it.

Basic lineaments are these. Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, from the novel Vineland by – get this – Thomas Pynchon. (You might think, reasonably, that Pynchon was impossible to adapt, but no; Anderson already took a shot at it with Inherent Vice, ten or so years ago, and there was apparently a stage production of V., in Berlin, running a little under four hours, and which seems to me a hugely quixotic undertaking.) The proof, however, is in the pudding, and One Battle After Another, quirky though it may be, is a very satisfying thriller. I feel it has a couple of blind spots, and I’ll get to that, but it sets up fast, and doesn’t slow down, and pays off big.

Leo DiCaprio, for those of you who still think he’s too cute for school – even after Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – shows off some terrific chops, very understated. Sean Penn, anything but understated, goes even more batshit than you could possibly imagine, as the heavy, and yet manages to convince you the guy isn’t a cartoon. Benicio Del Toro brings some lucid and calming energy to the scene, as a sensei. And the two female leads don’t play it safe, Teyana Taylor, as the radical mom, and Regina Hall, as her bred-to-revolution daughter – both heart-breakers, in their own way, and not always sympathetic.

The plot takes some sudden turns, and I won’t spoil it, but the story is pretty straightforward. A left-wing domestic resistance group, working to spring illegals from custody and move them through an Underground Railroad to safety, is compromised. They break up and go off the radar. ICE, in the person of the aforementioned Sean Penn, tracks them down, over the years, going for kill or capture. Leo, in a state of hallucinatory bliss, imagines he and his daughter are safe, but the devil comes to their door. Much grievous mayhem ensues.

You’ll have to take my word for it, it’s nowhere near as formulaic as this may make it sound. It hits a lot of the tropes you’d expect, but pulls some real surprises. It’s consistently entertaining, and still remains thoughtful.

Here’s the thing I’m not quite sure about.

There are, historically, left-wing groups that have turned to terror, just as there are similar right-wing organizations. The people in the movie might remind you of Edward Abbey’s Monkey-Wrench Gang, in that their intentions are good, but they’ve embraced violence, and like so many others, Left or Right, they think their cause excuses that. There is, of course, no organized AntiFa, not even an umbrella. We might remember, though, that in those damned and debated 1960’s and 1970’s, some of the more radical terror groups did in fact make common cause, the IRA Provos and the Japanese Red Army, the Weather Underground and the Panthers. Not a fever dream of J. Edgar Hoover’s, an actual alliance. Maybe it came to nothing, in the end, out of mistrust, but it was in the collective unconscious.

Their opposite number is the Great Right-Wing Conspiracy.

It features in a lot of over-heated paranoia movies, but is it a real thing? We know they’ve always had a fear of the anarchist Left, going back to the Haymarket, or Sacco and Vanzetti, but in those cases, the power of the state was mobilized. We’re talking about private money, working in the shadows. Sure, they meet behind closed doors, and wield enormous influence, but do they use secret Masonic recognition signals and practice barbaric rituals? Well, the Ku Klux Klan did, but I don’t think these guys have to. The big-money tech oligarchs are right out in the open. They’re not shy about swinging their weight around. That’s the only convention One Battle After Another uses that I’m not convinced of. I don’t think the right wing has to work in secret, or show each other their Capt. Midnight decoder rings. They recognize each other on sight, known predators stalking in the tall grass.

So, a reservation.

I guess you could say it was dramatic convenience. For sure, Thomas Pynchon has long trafficked in weird, all-powerful secret societies – and they seem, unhappily, all too authentic. I think, too, they’ve always been around: think the Jesuits. In other words, it’s an understandable temptation, and neo-Nazis and Aryan Nation supremacists are very definitely crawling around, not even in the underbrush. I wouldn’t argue that these people aren’t wicked, and capable of terrible cruelties, and they probably sit around their clubs with brandy and cigars, and gloat. They just don’t hide it.

Feeding the Inner Wolf

I had an odd insight at the supermarket the other day, watching a guy use the motorized shopping cart. He was a double-wide, for sure, carrying enough extra weight for it to be an obvious handicap, with tree-stump calves and thick ankles that probably indicated diabetes - but all of this beside the point. It got me thinking. He never set out to be that fat guy, he didn't do it by choice. It almost certainly had more to do with genetics, environment, the luck of the draw. We have a tendency to look at people with physical problems, obesity, rotten teeth, or bad skin, and hold them responsible, as if it were a moral failure.

I began to wonder about the corollary. What about people with glowing skin and great smiles and a body by Botticelli who turn out to be misshapen, or damaged underneath, but without visible injury? Perhaps some crippling trauma, or maybe no explanation at all. Maybe they're just plain ugly at heart.

There's a scene in John Crowley's novel LITTLE, BIG, where you encounter a crazy old drunk on the subway - or at least he seems like a crazy old drunk - and he's staggering up and down the cars, talking to himself. "I met the woof the other night, out back the churchyard. He didn't look like no woof, look like a man, but I knew him for who he was. He were hairy on the inside." The werewolf of folklore is known as Turnskins, a shape-shifter, wearing human covering as a disguise.

So, begging the question, Are there monsters? Some of us would say no, that it's nurture, or the lack of. I'd lean toward yes, though, the argument that it's nature, that evil is somehow innate, and not learned behavior. In other words, we can simply be hardwired the wrong way.

Do we come to the Manichean view that Absolute Good and Absolute Evil exist, as opposites? "Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it," Mephistopheles says, meaning he lives in the absence of God. But why shouldn't evil exist, without respect to virtue? Why do we imagine salvation is our reward for avoiding sin, when sin might prove to be its own reward? Bad isn't necessarily good taking a dive.

There was a time - the early days of the Church, say - when the world was seen as the earthly battlefield between the forces of light and dark, a struggle manifest, the war for men's souls. The stake was literal, not a metaphor. You could burn, your fatty tissue popping in the fire, and given the cooking time, it must have felt like an eternity. Then we have the misreading of Freud, as if a plausible explanation serves us as an excuse, or a note from teacher. ("Did you like Mr. Clutter?" "Why, yes, I did - right up to the moment I cut his throat.") Just supposing, however, that we don't see the dark silhouetted against the light, that there isn't any contrast, that the dark doesn't cast a shadow. It isn't the absence of God, or moral weight, or empathy, or some other frame of reference. Evil sufficient to the day. It stands on its own.

We're the ones who need help. We invent a mechanism that tells us the good is thrown on the scales with the bad, and they counterbalance. The one is necessary for the other. Yes, for dramatic tension in a fiction, a narrative, which is a construct, using familiar conventions. Not so much, we begin to think, in life. What if what goes around don't come around no more?

We appear conditioned to this idea of opposition: action, reaction, synthesis. I read a book one time about what the author described as The Bicameral Mind. The short version is Right Brain/Left Brain, but there's more to it than that. There was a long period in our development when we heard voices - the voices of the gods, perhaps? - but for a far longer period than our present psychological state, the accepted diagnosis or perceived reality, which has probably only obtained for about the last three thousand years, sake of argument, where such Voices signal mental illness, or at least the gateway to a less rational or linear world.

Presupposing the unspoken or the unseen, is the notion of duality functional? It seems like an enabling device, a comforting alibi. Rooted, as may be, in the bicameral mind, our physiology, the left a mirror of the right. This doesn't mean any of it has objective reality.

We might say, then, that evil exists for its own purposes. Not the opposite of good, but a force with no counterweight or equivalency. Thomas Pynchon, in THE CRYING OF LOT 49, says of Rapunzel, waiting rescue, what if the tower is everywhere, and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic? During the Middle Ages, many people thought the Black Death was evidence of God's abandonment, Not, we remark, a visitation of His disapproval - rather, a sign God had simply given up on us. But the disease vector of plague is a bacillus answering to its own necessities, unconcerned with the host bodies. We flatter ourselves, if we imagine we're any higher on the food chain, or that there's malice aforethought. In this sense, evil bears us no ill will. It's not retribution, and perhaps that's what makes it harder to bear. Evil is indifferent.