one battle after another review
film by Paul Thomas Anderson (2025)
Had Paul Thomas Anderson read Assata Shakur’s autobiography, would he have directed a better film? I don’t mean to presume the man’s an illiterate; his devotion to Pynchon’s Vineland, which he adapts with a rollicking deftness and attention to the man’s obsessions (the fascist self-hate of Never Perfect Enough Male Physiology, finding humor in the absurdist acronym-inity of postwar bureaucratic structures, or simply inventing names too comic to be real) is nothing if not admirable.
Review by: James Carneiro | Filed Under: Film Reviews
October 14, 2025
But whereas Pynchon was content to let the postmodern shenanigans hang in the air, allow us to ruminate on the insider POV of a privileged stratum of professors and middle management types and nat-sec technician-perverts (courtesans for Amerikan Empire’s inner whirrings all!) before resuming our (presumed) equally ephemeral and comfortable cubicle droning, PTA confides in us with the subtlety of a V-2 rocket: black women are the coolest fucking thing since Wonderbread. In a world of unabashed fandom, perhaps oversharing really is authenticity. (For the uninitiated, PTA is ethnically Mayflower.)
PTA’s wavelength usually beguiles me. Broadly speaking, I admire his premises but flounder upon his emotional constipation. I watch his films like a museum security guard eyes the artwork; with bored remove. One Battle After Another was no anomaly for me—I found his character sketches unconvincing—but it did disappoint me in ways I’ve never experienced with his work before.
Take the direction. PTA abandons all pretensions to formalism and goes absolute bugnuts with the camera. It feels akin to scrabbling for purchase on a sea-going vessel in a squall; lilting angles, perpetually askew, the queasy decoupling from any sense of permanency. I fucking loved it. At last, the constipated formalist finds joy in the filmmaking process! Our boy is evolving.
Temporally, we’re traversing new frontiers as well. One Battle After Another operates on ellipses. It’s subtle—done so well you hardly notice—but Anderson’s skill at denying us easy catharsis or obvious Money Shots had me rethinking my remove from the man; was I becoming a convert? I found myself falling in love with how space-time itself was folded at will, propped up in corners, commented upon in dry Pynchonian.
Violence is upsetting and unknowable and tactile. It’s anticlimactic in its stupid random unfairness. Violence is structural and violence is personal, but we really only have agency over how we bargain with it; the inevitability (much like the cruelty) is the fucking point. In so many ways, the film feels like Python or Perl or HTML or any multitude of programming languages originally cooked up to chauffeur missile silos for DARPA.
Imagine a recursive storytelling which mutates minutely, not necessarily “learning” but self-editing in furtherance of self-preservation; the storyteller as malignant tumor, metastasizing toward what it believes to be “teleologic” or sacred or holy but in actuality so self-interested the result can only be thus: destruction of the host body. The smartest thing about OBAA is Anderson knows the body fascism of the men who compose CHUD Amerika—cops, soldiers, ICE, so chiseled in their steroidal Punisher form-fitting freakishness—are killing themselves. (Which is funny.)
The film’s insights into CHUD pathology are probably its greatest thematic asset. (And arguably Pynchon’s as well.) Whether the “kinetic composure” rictus of Colonel Lockjaw and his operator ilk or the fuddy-duddy ritual of the Safari Club/Bohemian Grove clique, Anderson’s jesting is largely the same; fascist men are deeply pathetic. The social configurations which produce them, the lingua francas they use to identify each other, they are the film’s best mined humor and, I think, the extent of a very frightened liberal’s conception of What Gets (Ostensibly) Hard Men Harder. (Apologies to Leo, you may be an extraordinarily gifted comedic actor, but mugging recursively has diminishing returns.)
Alas, we can no longer ignore Paul Thomas Anderson’s soggy thesis; black women are the coolest fucking thing since Wonderbread and they exist for my pleasure/development as a man. PTA’s conception of black women is so rooted in reheated Blaxploitation staples—and only that, he can literally only conceive of them as cartoons of cartoons, all Epic Mic Drops shorn of interiority or political theorizing—that the object of his fixation passes beyond “this is off-color but harmless” and into “this is leering and pornographic and deeply sad.” Again, would a reading of Assata have forced him to actually interrogate the reality of being a black woman communist? I genuinely don’t know. I’m unsure how much caricature-residue must be dislodged, scraped out, set aflame.
Ghetto Pat, as the avatar for Anderson’s white liberal fetishism, inevitably requires a foil in Colonel Lockjaw’s (ostensibly more debased) fascist lechery. Two fetishes, one wholesome and loving and sentimental, the other metallic and perverse and unfeeling. But really, how different are they? The only qualitative difference is shame. Lockjaw marinates in it while Pat attends to “his” women with a sort of libidinal charity; The Great White Father bestowing his affections, his cock, his needling insistence that no one else would so selflessly (shamelessly) love his cartoon women.
Note how both men relate to their interchangeable charges—a wounded petulance, non-learning, never growing, two little boys forever upset the Saturday Morning Wish Fulfillment isn’t conforming precisely to their lazy projections. And the film isn’t self-critical in any regard, it warps and weaves and bobs and ducks to keep Deandra-Perfidia-Willa aligned with the masturbatory contours of Pat-Lockjaw’s twin fantasy, course correcting like a racist GPS to keep us on the safest route possible. At no point in this film did I seriously entertain the question, “Will any of these women make a wrenching decision or argue a political point or perform a militant action which exists outside the cranium of a honky malefactor-benefactor?”
It’s fucking obscene and made all the worse that PTA is wreathed with roses for it.
There’s an irritating strain of internet hermit—with a reductive Fischer Price conception of Italy in the 70’s—who insist on telling us we’re living through the American Years of Lead. I fear Paul Thomas Anderson has been reading their posts.
It’s an understanding of the “strategy of tension” as filtered through bourgeois historiography; shadowy cabals and buffoonish groupuscules sweating in the dark, spinning schemes, all the while Calf-Like Apolitical Masses Just Wanna Grill, Man. There’s no class struggle, no collective mobilization, no tales of conscientization taking place on tenement flights, beside improvised shantytown cistern, astride minimum wage drudgery of so many maddening humiliation-flavors you feel your brain is sloughing off neurons to the gentle lapping of the River Po.
We aren’t at that point yet. So much preparatory work must be done. Your task, however ephemeral it may seem this night, could be framed as “Will I read Assata or will I numb myself on PTA’s latest?”
I’m sorry, Miss Shakur; I afforded this man more allowances than you could ever stomach.
Required Reading: libcom.org/article/assata-autobiography-assata-shakur
Required Listening: www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/rn4u4-264383/Years-of-Lead-Pod-Podcast
Author
Reviewed by James Carneiro. Initially caught the film bug while cruising for used copies of Bergman flicks/bootleg concert footage at Disc Replay. These days, he’ll review quite anything, though he is partial to Italian neorealism, American underground film, and whoever is using cinema as a method of interrogating power structures. You can follow him on Letterboxd and Twitter.
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