One Battle After Another

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised... and you can't buy a ticket, either.

Ahhh, what to say what to say. Picked a couple of yuppies (is that still a term?) in my Uber yesterday evening — they had a couple of Subarus just like ours but lived up in the hills of South Eugene: extremely nice house with a view (literally fawns and turkeys walking around the neighborhood). They noticed my, in their words, “Pro Labor” bumper sticker and took a picture of it. Anyway that got us talking and then one of them asked me if I’d seen the Wuethering Heights trailer because they had just seen it last night. Of course I said I had (locked and loaded to talk about Jacob Elordi not being a “Moor-ish” if need be) but I led with “Yes, I saw that before One Battle After Another.” I think it’s interesting that I needed to bring up OBAA, that somehow the music in the trailer of the new Margot Robbie vehicle are more appropriate for casual banter than you know, the film of the year we all saw. Anyway that’s my oblique way into the question: what does OBAA mean, if anything? Someone who clocked my “pro labor” signage didn’t bring it up but kind of did a knowing glance toward our shared experience of seeing OBAA… what’s up with that? (And I dropped them off at a queer bar for a “labor fundraiser” … their words).

So I guess this is a film no one knows how to talk about. I’m sick and tired of the 2018ish critique of everything centering “white bros.” I refuse to link (I do link later, read for yourself) to the people making this critique of Paul Thomas Anderson, that he uses black women as a “prop” into the “hero’s journey” of a protagonist like Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Bob.” Bob aka “Ghetto Pat” brings people into the story of the struggle. The struggle is not the “story.” But this movie wouldn’t have everyone talking without the white, alcoholic man at the center of it.

Look, this is the movie of the year—so let’s get that out of the way. Then hold in tension what the film itself tells you: The Revolution Will Not be Televised. One Battle After Another (OBAA) is cinematic catharsis that begins with blistering scenes which will probably stress you out given their verisimilitude relative to our world. Then we meet a team of superheroes: The French ‘75. These super-powered protagonists, led by super like Perfidity Beverly Hills, Junglepussy, and Rocket Man liberate immigrants from detention facilities and sabotage the fascist federal government and have a great time doing it — they use their powers for revolution and god damn they look good doing it. They are even more powerful than the World War 1 field gun they take their name from. But then you find out how mortal they are, but not before they conjure a supervillain for themselves: people have oft said Batman creates the supervillains of Gotham given that a costumed hero also elevates the ambitions of villains to become flamboyant themselves.

OBAA isn’t a superhero film, I can drop the act. But its “trick,” (though it’s unfair to call it that) is a bit of a genre sleight of hand. Leonardo DiCaprio plays revolutionary hero Rocket Man a.k.a. “Bob,” an assumed identity he must take up as his band of super-powered revolutionaries is “disbanded” (to say the least… poor Alana Haim) and who becomes a “drug and alcohol lover” who must raise a daughter on his own while managing his legitimate paranoia that his past will come back to ha/unt him (sorry for my little Derridian back-slash of indeterminacy. “Bob” is flamboyant and so am I). Bob smokes weed, drinks red wine on the couch, and watches the all time leftist cinematic classic The Battle of Algiers. That film in particular is relevant to this film’s “trick”: The Battle of Algiers splices historical news reels into footage shot like newsreels and uses mostly non-professional actors to depict the overthrowing of French colonial rule in Algeria. It is this “splicing” technique that absolutely must be kept in mind while watching OBAA: Paul Thomas Anderson does such a brilliant job of opening the film with depictions of ICE facilities and immigrant detention that it seems as if he is doing a Battle of Algiers but OBAA is all fiction and all professionals, even if it looks as true to life as the news reel footage in Battle of Algiers. Genre bleed.

Bob

But I implore you to go watch Battle of Algiers if you haven’t seen it because it’s plot/historicization of the Algerian Revolution is the plot of OBAA: you lose the battle but you win the war of public opinion. Many people are brutally put to death but the crowd overwhelms the powers that be. But one vital difference remains: battle of Algiers had news reels of real revolutionaries doing historical revolutionary acts, while OBAA is a total simulation.

OBAA is a family drama. It fools you a little bit (not a criticism) by depicting circumstances so timely they seem like news reels but…they are’t. OBAA is a masterpiece from a master but it’s in line with other masterpieces like There Will Be Blood (2007) and The Master (2012) in that these films take place within brutal capitalist expansion, or cultic revelry, but they are not direct critiques of either of those things: they are human stories with those historical circumstances as backdrops. And that’s why OBAA is also brilliant: it has the backdrop of “Trump Fascism” but look — it’s about a family.”

OBAA personalizes a universal struggle. The film’s plot directly brings you into an intense struggle, zooms out, then makes you consider so quickly what that struggle was thought a particular, narrow lens: The Family.

Hey, if you don’t like emotional and ideological manipulation you don’t like the movies!

And hence the predominant critique going around is how “exploitative” this film is with black women. I think it touches a third rail of how uncomfortable we are with mixed marriages, biracial children, etc. We almost imagine that biological union between imagined “races” will fix things if only… as we live in this time of extreme polarization and again frankly, white fascism.

Some critiques of the film focus on Assata Shakur and thinking through how “radical” black women are compared to how they appear through the lens of Paul Thomas Anderson: selfish, impulsive, thoughtless. Liberals feel “uncomfortable” rooting for the kinds of people they patronize. They don’t think people “like that” should have to face difficult decisions, they don’t want to see those kinds of people behaving in contradictory behavior, they don’t want those people to get to actually be people: for the liberal, a black radical is someone who stands up to the powers that preserve the white liberals’ way of life.

The “black radical” is who the white liberal thinks they are and what they believe in. But the white liberal doesn’t share the beliefs of any radical, they simply believe that the form of blackness speaks for itself. They do not care about content, or meaning that fills up the “form.” Perfidia is supposed to be a saint, it’s almost like the white and black perspective depends on not treating black women as people, only symbols. Again, the critiques are about how “real” black revolutionaries are “truly revolutionary (yet we still live in hell where their actions meant nothing and all that matters is depicting them in purely unambiguous moral terms).

Every white leftist loves Assata Shakur because we want to project a fantasy. But that fantasy itself is even a failure. The time of moral victories is over. We need to fantasize about more than failure, and stop pretending that any kind of person isn’t human, without guile and impulse. No one wants to talk about that. Superheroes don’t exist. And liberals will create them again and again and again: the “pro labor” rich people up in the hills will always find comfort in the figure of the black radical while at the same time feeling morally superior to them. OBAA gives everyone what they want (except you know, serious white supremacists… who, like in the film, never really lose despite any liberal fantasies). No one wants to talk about anything directly. It takes a Wuethering Heights trailer or a MOVIE to talk, obliquely, about politics. Like the Battle of Algiers, liberals love splicing their “revolutionary” beliefs into media, into movies. Because you know, movies aren’t real life. If they think movies are going to turn the political tide, or “black radicals” are going to save us, we are more fucked than I ever imagined.

All the heroism in this film is off-screen. The Revolution Will Not…

There is something special with Regina Hall at the 21’ mark here. Things “fail and don’t fail” at the same time.