(Female) Enjoyment as a Political Factor in One Battle After Another

Still from Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another, 2025.

Every time a new Paul Thomas Anderson film comes out, the same thing seems to happen. It’s true, the director has a community of loyal fans, whose sociological traits are well known (as is the mid-nineties “midcult” aura that hovers around them), and who always promote his films and sing their praises. But each time, one has the impression that this critical enthusiasm, even though nearly unanimous, is rather tepid.

His latest film, One Battle After Another—an adaptation, more in spirit than letter, of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland—is no exception. It’s not that it has been poorly received, or that it is performing badly at the box office. Quite the opposite. And yet many critics, especially on the left, have noted with disappointment that although the film presents a politically charged surface—it opens with an image of a detention center for migrants, and its villains are white supremacists—it doesn’t take this group of revolutionaries seriously enough for us to truly believe in their cause. And even as a family story—the film portrays the relationship between a weak father and an adolescent daughter—the dramatic tones are too feeble to truly engage the viewer’s emotions. (Unlike in Bruce Willis films, when the father in One Battle After Another arrives to save his daughter at the end, everything is already over.) Nor does it work as an action movie: it lacks the plasticity of Michael Bay’s chase sequences. Anderson’s final chase scene, which everyone is talking about, is more conceptual than genuinely action driven, involving as it does a labyrinthine, almost Borgesian choreography between three or four cars that have lost track of where the others are.

In short, One Battle After Another hasn’t displeased anyone, and yet it hasn’t really convinced anyone either. Few have had the courage to consider it a masterpiece, or even one of the most important films in Anderson’s filmography. This feeling of mild dissatisfaction seems to me something that must be interrogated.

The Young and Old Anderson

If we think about Anderson’s filmography of recent years, it’s hard to imagine contemporary film critics considering any of his latest works as truly periodizing for this moment in cinema history. This has become increasingly true since Anderson’s career took a decisive turn with The Master. Although his career has always displayed the unmistakable traits of an auteur—and in film criticism, the term “auteur” is always tied to an impression of continuity and consistency—in the last fifteen years something discontinuous has occurred in his work.

The early Anderson was a director deeply indebted to Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese—that is, to what still remains the benchmark by which we measure, whether consciously or not, most American cinema: the New Hollywood. From Altman, Anderson inherited a taste for ensemble storytelling and overlapping dialogue (Boogie Nights and Magnolia), while a more Scorsesean tone is found in his intertwining of a rich historical backdrop with the rise-and-fall epic of a single character (There Will Be Blood). It is telling that these three films, which have always been considered his most important works, are the ones most indebted to his masters and to the aesthetics of New Hollywood.

In the second part of his career, Anderson began making films that were far less grandiloquent, with narrative structures lacking major emotional or dramatic peaks. But perhaps for that very reason, Anderson managed to develop a more original poetics and style in these films. If in his early films Anderson was a disciple of a tradition nearly thirty years old, it is only from The Master onward that he truly found a cinematic language of his own.

I cite The Master as Anderson’s turning-point film because it is emblematic of this shift: it is one of those films that seems to promise a vast psychological epic, preparing viewers for a story of manipulation and the loss of individuality (losing oneself being one of the great phantasms of Hollywood cinema). It features two of the greatest dramatic actors of the last few decades. Yet it’s a film we never quite manage to enter into, with characters we never fully come to understand. Roberto Manassero wrote that

just as Vincente Minnelli used the widescreen format for his family melodramas, turning 1950s bourgeois homes into prairies of solitude, Anderson decides to exploit the large format not to expand outward but to go deeper, to dig into his characters’ minds and discover that beyond a certain threshold … neither religion nor, for that matter, cinema itself can go.1

In a certain sense, the cinema of the later Anderson has retained only the shell of the grand collective narrative, while emptying it out from within. It is a cinema that has exposed the crisis of New Hollywood cinema, even as it continues its legacy.

My impression is that the mild dissatisfaction many of us feel when watching Paul Thomas Anderson’s films from the past fifteen years says more about us than his films. Perhaps we should take the opportunity to analyze not only the images we see, but also the questions we pose to them. Why do we keep implicitly asking Anderson to give us another There Will Be Blood, another Boogie Nights, or another Magnolia, only to end up inevitably disappointed? Why are our standards still Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Casino, Raging Bull, The Godfather, The French Connection, The Long Goodbye, Nashville? What does this “midcult” attachment to New Hollywood say about us? And what does it reveal about our passionate attachment to a certain idea of America?

A Pynchonian Cinema

There is a reason why, at a certain point in his career, Anderson tried to move in another direction. Perhaps it is no coincidence that one of the authors he turned to is Pynchon: not only one of the best-known figures of a certain literary postmodernism, but also one of the most difficult and least adaptable novelists for the big screen (perhaps because he is, in a sense, already cinematic in his own right). A director who has drawn on Pynchon for two of his last four films clearly finds in him something that resonates deeply with his own way of telling stories and creating images. But what exactly?

When in 2011, at the dawn of one of the most severe economic crises of recent decades, Joshua Clover asked whether financial capitalism could still be thought of narratively, one of the authors he turned to was Pynchon. His underlying idea was that the financialization of the economy has progressively replaced time with space (the main example being the process of “presentifying” a portion of value produced in the future, in the form of subprime derivatives). In the contemporary world, the sequentiality of narrative, which necessarily requires temporal progression, is continually denied by the simultaneity of global capitalist flows, which instead flatten social relations onto a single synchronic plane.

According to Clover, Pynchon’s Against the Day is both a parody and a formalization of the impossibility of narrativizing contemporary financial capitalism. The novel implicitly tells us that any narrativization of capitalist totality can only take the temporal form of a tangled mesh of flows that stretch from the present back to the late nineteenth century (to the dawn of capitalism, where the story is set), and the spatial form of the obviously absurd image of a dirigible gazing from above at the totality of capitalist social relations. It is precisely through the failure of a Jamesonian “cognitive mapping” that Pynchon allows to us to see the impossibility of the question itself. Clover asks, “How far back, and to what imagined height, must we travel for such knowledge to be conceivable?”2

Benjamin Noys, in discussing Clover’s thesis, raises the same problem. Following Fredric Jameson, he suggests that an economic crisis does not simply produce new stories but alters aesthetic form: narrative structure, the relationship between appearance and totality, time and space. In this sense, he proposes using the looser category of “contemporary narrative” rather than “postmodernism” in order to capture “this sense of permeable currents between realism, modernism, and what was called the postmodern, as well as the impact of genre fiction in our current moment (thinking of the genre of fantasy fiction, in particular).”3 In this framework, contemporary narrative becomes differential, disjointed, and fragmented, like capital itself.

Here Pynchon occupies a central place. Noys examines his production from Vineland to Bleeding Edge, passing through Mason & Dixon and Against the Day, emphasizing how each novel performs a kind of cognitive mapping across different historical epochs (the eighteenth century, the Belle Époque, the 1960s, the beginning of the new millennium). Yet this retrospective strategy of returning to the moment of capitalism’s birth reveals a sort of nostalgia for origins, an attention to the past that cannot fully “translate” the complexity of contemporary financial capitalism. It also denaturalizes capitalist domination through a reactivation of past struggles, and hints at the possibility, however tenuous, of another totality. It is as if contemporary narrative finds itself compelled to register the failure of representation: the impossibility of articulating temporally that which, in financial capitalism, is given as simultaneity. In this sense, Pynchon is the symptomatic novelist of late-financial capitalism: his expansive, centrifugal prose is not so much a diagnosis of the system as its embodiment—an art of crisis that shares, to the fullest extent, its aporias.

I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that Anderson set out to tackle, through Pynchon, the problem of the impossible representability of today’s capitalist totality. Yet perhaps, if there is something political in his cinema of recent years, it should be grasped at the level of his cinematic form rather than at the level of the content of his stories (which, unavoidably, are steeped in the ideology of his own world). Anderson, even if not fully understanding it, has registered the fact that the fragmentation of contemporary narratives produced by the paradoxical synchronicity of financial capitalism has rendered the narrative models of New Hollywood impossible to pursue.

Indeed, his cinema continues to preserve the outer shell of New Hollywood cinema, while no longer fully believing in it. Anderson’s alternations of tone—from comic to grotesque to dramatic—produce not only an effect of juxtaposition between different, sometimes incompatible registers, but also an effect of distancing for the spectator. One could say, half-jokingly, that whereas Tarantino (a director to whom Anderson is often compared) took the tradition of B movie cinema and grafted it onto the narrative structures of New Hollywood (Tarantino’s alleged postmodernism, after all, is a great misunderstanding), Anderson has instead grafted onto that same popular cinematic tradition the narrative structures of the postmodern novel, creating a rhythm that feels almost jazzy, dissonant, uneven, with quasi-modernist inflections.

The Absent Center of a Political Narrative

The novelty of One Battle After Another is that the impossible totality—which no longer seems to have a dominant register and instead disperses into a thousand fragments, digressions, comic intermissions, and dramatic closures—has never revolved so insistently around an absent center. A center that perhaps constitutes both the allegory and the singular embodiment of the impossibility of totality. That absent center consists of the character who, in Vineland, was Frenesi, and who here goes by the name of Perfidia Beverly Hills, played by Teyana Taylor.

This is apparent from the very beginning of the film: Perfidia represents a form of total and uncontainable female freedom, around which all the other characters revolve–from the two “castrated” men (one literally, the other symbolically), to the group The French 75, which will have to deal with the consequences of her betrayal, to her daughter Willa/Charlene, who will be abandoned by her mother and forced, for the rest of her life, to confront the mythic narrative of her, in its positive and negative forms. This uncontainable freedom also immediately takes the shape of a boundless sexuality.

In the very first scenes of the film, Perfidia eroticizes the attacks that the group is carrying out by insisting on stopping to fuck Bob/Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) under the power pylons they are blowing up. Later, during the assault on the immigrant detention center, she forces Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) to get an erection in front of her at gunpoint; shortly afterwards, in a hotel room, she penetrates him from behind, as if to make explicit her own phallic position.

But her uncontainable jouissance is also on display in the now-famous training-ground scene, when she wildly fires a machine gun while eight or nine months pregnant (“It’s like she doesn’t even realize she’s pregnant,” says Bob/Pat while looking on). Soon after, she will also repudiate her role as a mother, abandoning both her family and her child, and effectively vanishing from the movie altogether.

Perfidia explicitly affirms her radical freedom to both of the men who try to conquer her, and who will ultimately lose her: to Bob/Pat (“You realize I put myself first, right? And that’s what you’re scared of”) and to Steven (“This pussy don’t pop for you”). But all of them lose her, including the film itself, in which she never reappears except in the form of a letter.

I think Perfidia’s role should not be interpreted primarily at the level of content, but rather structurally. All the narrative events set in motion throughout the film depend on the consequences of her actions, but equally on her absence (and in this respect, the film quite clearly distances itself from the book). Every character is thus forced to orbit around the void she creates—with the odd result that the true protagonist of the film appears on screen for no more than twenty minutes, at the beginning.

It is not insignificant that a director of such “masculine” stories as Anderson, at the very moment he builds a film around an incomplete totality, should do so via a radical act of female freedom—a freedom that traumatizes all the characters within Perfidia’s orbit, even years later. This freedom, by the end of the film, get embodied by the only genuinely universal character—that is, the only one who embodies the totality otherwise absent from the film. And that is Perfidia’s daughter, Willa, who walks out of her house and goes to join a protest in Oakland, bearing witness to her fidelity to that event of freedom enacted by a mother she never knew, and whom we as spectators have only glimpsed, fleetingly, in a flashback at the beginning of the film.