About a year ago, my Instagram algorithm graced me with a video of British comedian John Cleese describing the advantages of extremism. In true British style, Cleese explains that extremism makes us feel good: “It provides you with enemies. … A great thing about having enemies is that you can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in the enemies, and all the goodness in the whole world is in you. Attractive, isn’t it?”
This clip came to mind as I watched One Battle After Another, the new film written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. (Some spoilers ahead.) Inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, it bears many of the ridiculous, hilarious, paranoid elements characteristic of that novelist’s work.
It also contains its fair share of warnings for our time—though it never gets preachy. Instead, One Battle takes a “show, don’t tell” approach to the dangers of our political landscape. It reveals how the allure of belonging and efficiency makes extremism enticing, tempting us to abandon our closest relationships. Ironically, it’s those we claim to be fighting for who often end up suffering the most.
One Battle spends its first half hour establishing the cat-and-mouse dynamic between a violent revolutionary group (the French 75) and the federal government, as well as the fetishized power dynamic of the groups’ respective leaders, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) and Captain Sean J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). From the film’s earliest scenes, these two exist in a sexual dynamic somehow both exploitative and permissive.
“Ghetto” Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio)—a less-assuming member of the French 75—also finds himself in an explosive sexual relationship with Perfidia. Together they have a baby, for whom Pat takes on the burden of care. Unable to reconcile her identity as both revolutionary and mother, Perfidia walks out, soon fleeing the country after outing her fellow revolutionaries to Lockjaw.
Now compromised, the rest of the French 75 must take on new identities and go underground. Assuming the name Bob Ferguson, Pat flees with his daughter, Willa, to the Northern California woods, where he lays low as a paranoid father for the next 16 years.
From there, One Battle skips ahead to “Bob” and his now-teenage daughter (Chase Infiniti) living quiet lives. We get a brief glimpse of their strained but mutually loving relationship before learning the film’s new stakes.
Now a military colonel, Lockjaw is being considered for inclusion in an elite white supremacist group known—in true Pynchon-inspired wackiness—as the Christmas Adventurers Club (complete with “Hail St. Nick” salutes). To be included in this group, Lockjaw’s racism must be unadulterated. Putting his membership at risk are both his past sexual encounters with Perfidia (who is Black) and his suspicion that Willa is actually his daughter. Determined to erase his condemning past, Lockjaw sets out to locate and eliminate Bob and Willa.
This film runs for nearly three hours. It’s difficult to summarize, casting a complex narrative of intersecting storylines and characters. Still, undergirding it all is something consistent: the ever-elusive quest for purity.
Before abandoning her former lover, Perfidia tells Bob that “you and your crumbling male ego will never do this revolution like me.” In her view, Bob’s commitment to raising their daughter is a compromise. When Lockjaw seeks admittance into the Christmas Adventurers Club, its initiators tell him that they are “dedicated to making the world safe and pure.” The myth of purity is part of extremism’s allure. Yet it is also the source of its weakness, its fragility, its absurdity.
It’s the quiet revolution of sensei Sergio (Benicio Del Toro) that suggests another way. He may not be as exciting or effective as the French 75, but he’s certainly more loving and present. Rather than making use of pomp or violence, the sensei is present, peaceable, and resolute—though not passive—in the face of evil.
Sergio shows us an alternative to our impatient, results-driven politics, where things must change now and where any method—no matter how violent—is suitable to that end. He embodies what Jacques Ellul, the 20th-century French social theorist and resistor against Nazi occupation, describes as the true revolutionary spirit: “There is no need for us to try … to bring peace on earth. Instead, we ourselves must be peaceful. For where the peaceful are, there peace reigns.”
Where Sergio is composed and focused, Bob is frenzied and scattered. Nothing he does ultimately contributes toward his daughter’s rescue, and his drug-addled brain can’t even remember the French 75 passwords he needs to help track her down. When he finally arrives after a long chase, dust settled, he finds that Willa has already saved herself. When she demands that her father confirm his loyalty with yet another password, we see once again how extremism breaks down relationships and sows mistrust—even among family.
One Battle After Another is another great movie from the skilled hands of Anderson, and it delivers a relevant message for our own frenzied time. But it also lacks an eschatology of love. In the movie’s world of revolutions, where one battle follows endlessly after another, there is no in-breaking of hope. At best, there is a dream of a future generation who is able to achieve what this present generation could not.
Christians also acknowledge a certain hopelessness of ever making all things new before Jesus himself comes. Still, we embody an eschatological reality now, made manifest by loving not only our friends, family, and neighbors but also our enemies.
At no point in One Battle After Another does a character make a sacrifice for an enemy. There are great expressions of love for one’s own or for the innocent—but such limited concern will ensure that no progress is ever made in the pursuit of peace.
It is tempting, for example, to view Lockjaw as only a trope of white supremacy, beyond salvation and better off obliterated from the earth. Such perspectives reveal our own extremism. Lockjaw is insecure, neurotic, and desperate for acceptance. These are cracks in the farce, vulnerable places in the armor.
If we believe people like Lockjaw deserve only rejection and hatred, then we ensure that they will forever remain our enemies. If we would be people of peace, then we must do more than shoot at those who stand across from us. If we truly are to revolutionize the world, we must, like Jesus, be willing to die even for those who return love with hate.
Dane Rich holds an MATS in biblical languages from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. His writing has also appeared in Mockingbird and Ex Fonte, and he blogs regularly on his Substack.
