When is "One Battle After Another"?
By taking only loose inspiration from Pynchon's "Vineland," Paul Thomas Anderson's new film is politically ahistorical, but it packs an emotional punch as a contemporary reverie.
For those looking for a review, the TL;DR here is: Go see One Battle After Another, preferably big and loud while it is still in theaters. I have seen it twice (for reasons elaborated upon below) and I plan to see it at least one more time in the theaters. It works on a grand scale as an action-filled entertainment. It also works on a small scale, with moments that play out as vividly as imagist poetry. It is funny when it holds a mirror up to the “interesting times” we live in, and it is alarming when it reminds us what we might lose in these interesting times, if we have not lost it already. Okay, that should be sufficient for the review part. Go see it.
I’m not going to follow up quite yet on my remarks about film formats and their impact on marketing and fan culture. I’ll come back to that topic in the near future. Instead I want to contemplate the question I asked myself repeatedly while watching the One Battle After Another: Exactly when is this film taking place?
Does One Battle After Another (henceforth, One Battle) start in the present, at a makeshift militarized immigration detention center, which certainly seems to be right from today’s headlines, and then suggest a near future 16 years from now? Or does it start in the past, meaning that Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) receives his invitation to join the Christmas Adventurers Club sometime around 2024? The 16 year gap in the plot, in any case, is the time it takes for Charlene/Willa (Chase Infinity) to grow up and become the McGuffin of the second half of the film.
This question is relevant because the answer(s) help address a frequent negative take on writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson’s representation of American leftist politics. The film is “inspired by” Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel, Vineland, which addresses (among many things) what happened to 1960s radicalism by the time of the Reagan-era 1980s. Anderson rejects specific political interpretations after changing the plot of One Battle, to contemporary times. In response to criticism after the Charlie Kirk assassination, Anderson has called the film “an action-comedy very far from reality.”
I don’t think PTA wanted to make One Battle because of Vineland’s politics. I think PTA was more interested in Pynchon’s general world-view and sensibility than he was in Vineland’s politics. So he took pieces of plot and Pynchon’s sensibility and shifted main events to roughly current day.
That does not, however, remove politics from the discussion. (Nothing ever does.) The central character Pat/Bob is still a former revolutionary. For the contemporary plot to work, Pat/Bob needs to have revolted against something 16 years before the second half of the film. So, if the main action takes place in, say, 2024, the revolutionary period (and Charlene/Willa’s birth) would be around 2008.
That would place the first half of the film around the Great Recession leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, and the transition from Bush to Obama. When you think about One Battle in these terms, the revolutionary sequences in the film, as many of the film’s critics point out, seem to be the pure fantasy of a privileged white guy. Historical fiction is fiction, of course, but unless the film is suggesting a parallel universe, one would think there should be some degree of verisimilitude. Left-wing populist activism circa 2008 evolved into Occupy Wall Street, not a sequence of armed confrontations and bombings. The less likely (but arguable) interpretation is that the revolutionary period in One Battle is now, and the main action takes place in 16 years or the near future. But setting aside Trump’s recent and delusional description of Portland as a war zone, it would be hard to argue that the current American left is as violent as the French 75, the militant activist organization in One Battle.
For those who are pulling their hair out thinking that I’m being purely pedantic here, hold on. I actually think that this ambiguity is one of the strengths of One Battle. The timey-wimey quality of the film helps explain the often reported emotional response to the film’s “nowness.” Regardless of PTA’s intentions (and I think his intentions are somewhat narrow and focused on film storytelling craft and entertainment), many images in One Battle carry significant emotional weight because of the interesting times we live in. I, for one, cannot seem to shake some of my responses to the film, which led me to watch it again to try to understand my response and look for more temporal clues.
The film also has an impact in these interesting times because, borrowing the subtitle from Kathryn Shultz’s New Yorker review of Pynchon’s new novel, Shadow Ticket, One Battle “lands in a moment when reality seems to have caught up with [Pynchon’s] fictions.” The crazy conspiratorial stuff seems alarmingly plausible, now that we have been collectively numbed (or shell-shocked) by QAnon, J6, DOGE, and RFK Jr.
I should take a moment and state the obvious: the emotional impact the images have on me, a liberal (broadly speaking), are very likely different than they are for those with different politics, especially conservatives, but even those further to the left than I am. But my point is still the same: It is very hard not to have an emotional response to the film regardless of your politics (even if that emotional response is anger or outrage).
Who, what, where, when?
I read Vineland back in the 1990s, and I’m only now revisiting it via audiobook, so I’m in no position to present a nuanced comparison between book and film. To be honest, all I remembered from reading it was that one of the radical groups in the book is a militant film collective called 24fps (akin to Newsreel in real life, but presented in broad satirical terms).
Unlike Anderson’s One Battle, Pynchon’s Vineland starts in a very specific year, 1984, for very specific reasons. When we learn that Zoyd Wheeler’s daughter Prairie is 14-years-old, we understand that she was born in or around 1970 (or “the end of the 1960s”). There are consequences to this specificity. The basic juxtaposition between Zoyd’s past and his present parallels the more general juxtaposition between the radical left in the 1960s and Reagan-era America in the 1980s. Keeping in mind the nostalgia kick for the 1960s that emerged throughout the 1980s (The Big Chill 1983, and so forth) this juxtaposition already carried some weight in popular culture by the time Pynchon published Vineland in 1990. In fact, some people felt nostalgic about Pynchon himself in 1990, because of the 17 year gap between Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Vineland.
This specificity provides a storytelling shorthand in Vineland that is not available to Anderson in One Battle. Anderson uses shorthand anyway, drawing from contemporary iconography and imagery. But the 16 year gap in the plot still remains. Using contemporary imagery on both sides of that gap, for me, creates a kind of cognitive dissonance that parallels the cognitive dissonance and anxiety I feel anytime I watch or read the news. This is my best guess as to why the film has affected me the way that it has, and why I was compelled to watch it again to pay more attention to cues about time in the dialogue and mise-en-scene.
Let’s revisit the two temporal hypotheses I proposed at the beginning, with the understanding that there is no correct answer to the question in the title of this post.
The revolutionary period is now, and the second half of the film is 16 years in America’s near future.
I think most viewers assume that when they’re watching a film it is set roughly in the present day unless given cues to the contrary (like period costumes or vintage cars). As I mentioned earlier, the immigration detention camp, and the military presence within it, seems to parallel what we see in today’s news. Perhaps more importantly, when Pat/Bob approaches the camp during the French 75 operation, he approaches what appears to be a Trump-era border wall. That wall design now has iconic status, and is associated with a specific era. And images of Trump’s wall are not politically neutral, as proven by the fact that I can call it Trump’s wall and you’ll probably have the correct image in your head.
There are details that contradict this reading. Howard Summervile (Paul Grimstad) instructs Pat/Bob to get a 1G cel phone to make its use harder to trace. 1G cel phones transmitted audio as analog radio signals. Most 1G networks were phased out in the early 2000’s but some were still operational through the 2010s. So it would not make sense for Howard to give Pat/Bob this instruction in the present day.
The revolutionary period is 16 years ago, and the second half of the film is roughly in current day America.
The narrative moment that most strongly suggests this time frame is Pat/Bob’s discussion with Charlene/Willa about her friend’s pronouns. It seems to be a very current discussion of something that we’re working out in the culture, and something Pat/Bob is open to understanding. Whatever happens to that larger cultural discussion, I think we’ll be well past this preliminary stage 16 years from now. Also, during the protests in Baktan Cross, the military calls in “Eddie Van Halen,” a fake protester wearing a mask and a Van Halen t-shirt, to throw a molotov cocktail so that they can move in on the protesters. That seems to me to be a very current reference to conspiracy theories about antifa; there was a similar joke/reference to this in Eddington earlier this year.
However, there are details which seem to contradict this reading, too. There are several large flat screen televisions in the mis-en-cene in the first half (like above Colonel Lockjaw when he receives his citation for his work against French 75) that seem too big for the period, or they would be too expensive at that size to be used in those contexts. If I knew car makes and model years, I’d probably have more to say about this. Colonel Lockjaw’s FX4 truck, which he drives up to Perfida’s witness protection house, seems much too contemporary. (Note: I could be very wrong about the truck, please let me know in the comments.)
All that said, I think the latter reading is more plausible, with the important exception of the Trump border wall at the beginning of the film. Ultimately, this ambiguity is one of the reasons I’ve been thinking about the film as much as I have even after two viewings.
To Clown Like the Very Devil
By borrowing the sensibility of Vineland, rather than its political commentary on the legacy of 1960s radicalism, Anderson borrows Pynchon’s common themes of absurdity and paranoia (and the relationship between the two).
As I mentioned, I’m not too far into the Vineland audiobook, but its opening chapters provide sufficient examples of both. Zoyd Wheeler must do something that seems crazy at least once a year for his disability checks from the government to continue. So there’s a tradition in his town that around the same time every year, people expect him to jump through a storefront window. Zoyd even makes sure local press is aware of when and where it will take place. But this year, someone intervened and told the press it would take place at a different location than Zoyd himself had planned. And when he finally does jump through a pane of glass, someone has replaced the glass with stunt glass used in movies. Who intervened and called the press? (Conspiracy?) Why was the glass replaced without Zoyd’s knowledge? (Same or different conspiracy?)
A New York Times review quoted on the cover my copy of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow states, “Pynchon writes like an angel and clowns like the very devil.” Pynchon is perfectly comfortable going beyond the line of plausibility, like with Zoyd’s annual defenestration, and so is Anderson in One Battle. The clearest example of this in One Battle is the freedom Anderson gives Sean Penn in his performance as Colonel Lockjaw. In any other film, Penn’s excesses would be dismissed as “too much.” But the way Penn walks as Colonel Lockjaw is like how Pynchon’s prose sounds when it is read aloud.
The black wig that French 75 member Mae West (Alana Haim) wears when she attempts to escape a convenience store as authorities close in on her is completely absurd, even ludicrous. But what happens to that wig at the end of the scene is bluntly brutal. This push-pull between absurdity and brutality keeps the viewer on edge throughout the film.
But it is the role that conspiratorial paranoia plays in the One Battle that gets us back to its “nowness.” Conspiracy is the lingua franca of its universe, not something on the fringes.
Returning to the New Yorker review of Shadow Ticket, “Reading the New Pynchon Novel in a Pynchonesque America,” critic Kathryn Schulz explains:
Talking dogs, strange vehicles, conspiracy theories, stupid acronyms: life imitates cult fiction, apparently, and somewhere along the line our reality started to resemble, with uncanny specificity, the collected works of Thomas Pynchon. This is not a welcome development, as even his greatest fans would affirm.
By my count, there are four distinct conspiratorial groups in One Battle. The big two are the extended network of the revolutionary French 75, who sent Pat/Bob and Charlene/Willa into hiding after Perfidia turned states witness 16 years ago, and the Illuminati-like Christmas Adventurers Club, who has now invited Colonel Lockjaw to join their ranks. But Lockjaw has his own separate network, including Avanti the bounty hunter, through which Lockjaw pursues his own interests outside of his military authority. And finally there’s Sergio/Sensei’s (Benicio Del Toro) network of support for the undocumented community in Baktan Cross.
There are very few characters with speaking parts in One Battle who are not associated with one or more of these groups.
You could even add Charlene/Willa’s friends who refuse to provide information to Colonel Danvers after Willa’s escape from the high school dance. They are living in this world and they know the stakes, even if they’re not formally a member of an organization. They seem a lot like us, as we’re trying to figure out how to navigate our world. How are we going to respond when Colonel Danvers interrogates us?
The group that provides the most hope is Sergio’s network of support for the undocumented community in Baktan Cross. Pat/Bob can’t get help from the French 75 because he cannot remember a password. But Sergio’s network is able to assist Bob because colleagues are literally everywhere (the police station booking secretary who sends Bob to the hospital, the nurse who uncuffs him and sends him out the back door). Sergio seems to be at least a few steps ahead of everyone, including Bob. And Sergio’s network is rooted in a sense of community. It appears to have the most limited financial resources, compared to the other groups I’ve identified, yet it transcends those limitations. But despite this hopefulness, Sergio’s group is still embedded in a world in which conspiratorial organizing is necessary.
A Reverie of Nowness
People are thinking a lot about this film. And people are writing a lot about this film, even if it takes the form of a social media post like the one above. One Substack post that I’ve appreciated with a valuable take that I contemplated integrating into an additional section of this post is “One Fetish After Another: PTA Exploits Black Women and Averts Revolution,” by Brooke Obie. One Battle is not without its problematic aspects, and Obie vividly addresses several of them. And locally, you can find a spirited response in Tone Madison by Lance Li.
Perhaps the richest potential for scholarly work on One Battle After Another will be in reception studies, because of the range of passionate responses, left, right, and center. Anderson could not have intended this range of responses, any more than Rorschach anticipated any specific responses to an ink blot.
But I want to wrap up with another reason I’ll probably see One Battle at least one more time in the theaters. There are several moments that are simply hypnotic. They’re not exactly escapist, because some of them hammer home the threats that we face or may face in the future. As Lance Li suggests in his piece, “Paul Thomas Anderson works best in the moment.” I have mentioned some of my favorite moments above, but here are some more.
During our introduction to 16-year-old Charlene/Willa, Sergio/Sensei leans in to tell her to breath when she repeats her martial arts routine. We hear her breaths as she repeats the routine with sharp, distinct movements, and we hear Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work” (non-diegetic). The song works perfectly despite being anachronistic, the way Leonard Cohen songs work perfectly in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, or Dark Side of the Moon plays back perfectly with the Wizard of Oz.
What appears to be a cutaway shot to the girls’ bathroom at the high school dance ends up being one of the most important moments in the film. As Willa washes her hands and the other girls exit, Willa’s tracking device activates. She looks up and looks off screen, and we see Deandra (Regina Hall) appear in the mirror behind her. The single shot continues, and the camera tracks in slowly, as Willa’s life completely changes in a matter of moments.
Escaping Colonel Lockjaw’s raid of his home, Bob emerges from the smoke filled tunnel under his house and wanders into a park. We hear composer Jonny Greenwood’s discordant piano follow him as he stumbles his way to a restroom, to find water to wash out his eyes and an electrical outlet to charge his vintage cel phone. Bob puts one foot in front of the other, but he seems to be floating in a bad dream.
Skateboarder/parkour kids lead Bob up and over the rooftops above the protest riot in the streets of Baktan Cross. This time it is the kids who seem to float, silhouetted against the the business signs across the street, while Bob breathlessly lumbers his way behind them. This sequence made me feel particularly old.
And, of course, the final chase is completely mesmerizing. Telling you what happens would not be that much of a spoiler. But describing the style of the sequence would be a spoiler.
I have been lost in these sequences on both viewings. And I look forward to losing myself in them again. But I also need to remember, when I leave the theater, my other responses that the film has provoked. One Battle After Another is a daydream where we keep asking ourselves what is going on. At some point, we need to look around ourselves and ask the same question.