[COLUMN] In One Battle After Another, Everybody's In It Together | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for One Battle After Another, the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie which is in theatres this weekend. It’s great, it’s one of the best movies of the year. And this piece includes a number of very significant details from the final act. So, if you are going to watch it - and I recommend you do - please feel free to bookmark and come back. Because from here on in it’s one spoiler after another.

Early in One Battle After Another, as the revolutionary group known as the French ’75 collapses in the aftermath a bank robbery gone wrong, Howard Sommerville (Paul Grimstad) explains the concept of a “trust” device to panicking father Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio), who is about to go on the run with his infant daughter Charlene (Chase Infiniti), who have just been given the identities of Bob and Willa Ferguson.

The trust device plays a musical cue. However, it does not work in isolation. If the trust device plays that musical cue in proximity to another such device, the two will harmonize and produce a melody. In that way, in that moment, the two parties holding these devices will understand intuitively that they can trust one another. The only other people carrying such devices are fellow revolutionaries. It is a way for Bob and Willa to recognize allies that they might not know that they have.

The trust device is only used a couple of times within the movie, most notably in an early sequence where Bob’s old colleague Deandra (Regina Hall) rescues Willa from a high school dance moments before a military raid and at the climax when Bob and Willa are reunited on a desolate Californian highway. However, it serves as an extended metaphor for one of the core themes of One Battle After Another. As in a lot of Paul Thomas Anderson movies, music is important.

Throughout the film, the scattered and fragmented members of the French ’75 identify one another by quoting the lyrics of Gil Scott-Heron beat-poem anthem The Revolution Will Not Be Televised at one another. Deandra coaxes Willa through it before the rescue, and Bob struggles to remember the lyrics while on the phone to an operator (Jena Malone). In some ways, this is just a human version of the trust device, a way for the two characters to understand that they are part of a common cause.

Although One Battle After Another (extremely loosely) draws from Thomas Pyncheon’s Vineland, the film is very clearly set in contemporary America. The characters use cell phones and reference Tom Cruise. It opens with an action set piece at a migrant internment camp on the American-Mexican border. There are targeted government raids on “sanctuary cities.” There are military clampdowns that feel like occupations. There is a sense of watching a democratic nation slip into full-on fascism.

This is a world where the United States military can seemingly do anything that it wants. Members of the French ’75 like Howard and Deandra are dragged into a room with interrogator Danvers (James Raterman), who very calmly but very firmly makes it clear that it is entirely possible that they may not leave. The armed forces become a blunt instrument at the behest of Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who uses them as a battering ram for his own personal advancement.

Lockjaw has spent years enforcing a brutal anti-immigration policy. This has brought him to the attention of a covert white supremacist group operating in the United States government, the Christmas Adventurers’ Club. (“All hail St. Nick,” they declare at the start and the end of each meeting.) This organization includes a membership committee including high-profile figures like Virgil Throckmorton (Tony Goldwyn) and Sandy Irvine (James Downey).

As Throckmorton explains to Lockjaw, membership of the Christmas Adventurer’s Club is proof that one is “a superior man.” Among their criteria for admission is racial purity. They will not accept a member who has had interracial sexual relations. This is a problem for Lockjaw, because he had an affair with Willa’s mother, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), and he believes – ultimately correctly – that he might be Willa’s biological father.

This would undermine his bid for membership of the Christmas Adventurers’ Club, and the social advancement and validation that would come with it, so Lockjaw decides to erase any evidence of his perceived indiscretion. He brings the full force of the American military down on Baktan Cross, the small Californian hamlet where Bob and Willa have managed to craft a new life. In a few short hours, everything that Bob and Willa have built comes tumbling down.

Bob and Willa are separated early in the film, and most of One Battle After Another follows Bob as he attempts to reunite with his lost daughter. The film has the quality of a road movie, a sense of interconnected set pieces as the various characters all move towards a collision in the third act. Bob is very much an underdog here. Years of domesticity have diminished him, his brain clouded by years of alcohol and marijuana abuse. What chance does a man alone have against the American military?

Like so many Anderson movies, One Battle After Another is a western. It is a story about the end of the American Dream, that place known as California where the fantasy of manifest destiny crashes headlong into the unyielding Pacific. Anderson has explored that idea repeatedly through his filmography. In There Will Be Blood, when America ran out of west, it instead drilled down in the soil. In The Master, postwar California provided fertile soil for cults to grow. In Inherent Vice, the rotting corpse of the counterculture festered into some strange cocktail.

Like so many westerns, One Battle After Another is about what happens when “civilization” comes to the frontier, this time arriving in tanks and humvees rather than on railroad tracks. To hunt Howard Sommerville down and therefore begin his pursuit of Willa and Bob, Lockjaw enlists the services of bounty hunter Avanti Q (Eric Schweig). Avanti is a part-indigenous independent contractor who drives a white Dodge Charger instead of riding a pale horse, but he’s a very recognizable western archetype – the “Indian tracker.”

However, while most westerns are ruggedly individualist fables of American self-determination, one of the most striking aspects of One Battle After Another is the sense of community and collaboration. Throughout the film, Bob is forced to put his life in the hands of relative strangers, of people that he does not know that he can trust. In each and every case, those characters come through for Bob, helping him in large and small ways as he attempts to get to Willa.

The most obvious example of this is Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), the sensei of the dojo where Willa studies martial arts. In a panic, fleeing his home, Bob arrives at the dojo seeking shelter. He discovers that Sergio operates a halfway house for migrants moving through the area. Sergio helps rally and steady Bob, providing him with an escape plan, a gun and some guides. When Bob gets separated from his guides and tasered, Sergio picks him up from hospital to drive him to Willa.

Under Sergio’s direction, Bob receives assistance from a medic (Lynette M. Telles) and nurse (Pamela Limbaugh-Brouhard) to escape police custody. Towards the climax, as he chases Lockjaw and Willa across the highways of California, Bob loses them at a crossroads. He pulls in. In broken Spanish, he asks a roadside fruit vender (Emilio Carranza) if he saw a car go by. This stranger, an anonymous character who Bob never met before and never will again, points him in the right direction.

There is a real sense of solidarity in this. One Battle After Another is constructed so that the heroes must consistently rely on the kindness of strangers. It is, in this context, worth acknowledging that the film builds to the revelation that Bob is not Willa’s biological father. However, that doesn’t change anything. “It’s me,” he shouts at the climax, the trust device in his hand. “It’s your father.” They may not be united by blood, but they are a true family unit.

One Battle After Another contrasts this shared purpose and solidarity with the fracturing and fragmenting nature of fascism. One Battle After Another understands that part of the horror of white supremacy, but also its greatest weakness, is a complete lack of empathy or compassion. Bob risks everything to save Willa. In contrast, Lockjaw sees Willa as a liability. She is a burden to his hopes of political and social advancement. She is something holding him back. The Christmas Adventurers’ Club is “a greater honor than having [her].”

One Battle After Another understands that fascism is incapable of the solidarity mounted in opposition to it. Fascism extends no favors to those who serve. It doesn’t encourage loyalty or trust. Even as he praises Avanti’s skills as a tracker, assassin Tim Smith (John Hoogenakker) tells the Christmas Adventurer’s Club that they cannot trust the bounty hunter, simply because of his heritage. The people who work with and rely upon Avanti casually throw racial slurs at him. It’s no wonder that Avanti ultimately decides that he cannot let Willa be murdered - that he ultimately makes the choice to sacrifice his life to save Willa.

Even Lockjaw, a man willing to murder his own daughter to prove his allegiance to the ideology of this racist brotherhood, is ultimately not pure enough for the Christmas Adventurers’ Club. At the end of the film, in some fairly on-the-nose imagery, Lockjaw is lured into a sealed room and gassed. His body is then loaded into an incinerator. These monstrous belief systems come for everybody. It is hard for these people to be in something together while adhering to an ideology built on superiority.

One Battle After Another is a film of bridges and hills. The film opens with Perfidia on an overpass overlooking an internment camp, a shot juxtaposed with a later shot of Bill watching a raid from another overpass. The climax unfolds in Borrego Springs, where a relatively straight highway crosses a valley of rises and dips, the road unfolding like waves. Even in the film’s visual language, there is a sense in One Battle After Another that the path forward is never a straight line, but instead highs and lows, ups and downs, crests and dips.

Like Eddington, One Battle After Another feels like a film truly in tune with this cultural moment. It also resonates with Andor, which is not as much of a surprise as one might think, given that DiCaprio has identified “the themes of Star Wars” as resonating with this tale of generational revolution. It turns out that Bob has friends everywhere. One Battle After Another feels like a distillation of Nemik’s (Alex Lawther) manifesto, the belief that “the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere and even the smallest act of insurrection pushes [the] lines forward.” As Sergio points out, his community has been under siege for centuries.

There is a warm humanism to One Battle After Another, a film which understands the horror and the violence of the current political moment, but which holds firmly to the belief that maybe the forces aligned against fascism have one key advantage in this unending uphill battle. They’re never truly alone. Everybody’s singing the same tune.