All journalism—whether reporting, reviewing, or analysis—boils down to one essential craft: pattern recognition. “Dog bites man” fits the pattern, so it is not news. “Man bites dog” breaks the pattern, so it becomes news.
Most journalists rarely pause to ask themselves why the pattern exists in the first place. They are trained to look for disruptions—sometimes to even invent them, and christen them as ‘trends’—so that they can package them into stories, publish and move on. Limit journalism to deviation-spotting, and you reduce it to a series of clever party tricks, a kind of performance art designed to keep the audience entertained. Perhaps that is the point.
But what if a journalist resists this grand distraction project? What if she dares to probe the deeper questions: Why does a dog bite a man? Why a dog? Why a man? Why the violence at all?
Paul Thomas Anderson—the most celebrated writer-director of his generation, and a kind of gonzo-style visual journalist himself—dares to ask those questions in his latest film, One Battle After Another. The film follows Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), a washed-up far-left revolutionary, as he tries to rescue his mixed-race daughter from a corrupt, white supremacist military officer. Even the title suggests Anderson’s interest in pattern over plot—the cyclical and unresolved nature of America’s racial tensions and political violence.
Bob was once an explosives expert for a radical anarchist group called the French 75, led in part by his lover Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor)—a ferocious, charismatic figure hopelessly addicted to revolution and sex. In one early scene, she forces right-wing officer Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn, in a performance that could win him his third Oscar) to masturbate at gunpoint before imprisoning him in the very detention centre he is guarding, before liberating the inmates.
Lockjaw’s humiliation becomes his sexual awakening. Like certain slave-owning Founding Fathers, he discovers that domination has given him an appetite for those he subjugates. He begins to lust after Perfidia, hunts her down, and extorts her into a torrid affair. “I can give you the embrace of the federal government,” he whispers. Their power relations warp into a hall of mirrors: she dominates him in bed; he dominates her everywhere else.
Perfidia eventually bears a child—it is left unclear whether the child is Bob’s or Lockjaw’s—and her marriage collapses. She is consumed by her love for violence, which she justifies as her devotion to permanent revolution. As Perfidia deserts him and the federal crackdown on the French 75 escalates, Bob spirits their daughter away to Baktan Cross, a sanctuary city in the American West that resists federal immigration enforcement. For Bob, the revolution is over.
Years later, we find him outside a martial arts class, waiting to pick up Willa (Chase Infiniti), now a rebellious teenager. He is broken, dishevelled, and stoned—puffing away while a Steely Dan song plays: “I am a fool to do your dirty work, oh yeah/ I don’t want to do your dirty work, no more.” Anderson’s ear for music remains as precise as ever.
Bob is a wreck—his only acquisition of some personal value over the years being a horseshoe moustache, useful for scaring off Willa’s boyfriends. But his cultivated bravado does not fool his daughter, who worries aloud that her father is the sort of man who might “wrap his car around telephone poles”. Anderson’s ear for dialogue is as sharp as ever.
Bob’s routine recalls Zoyd Wheeler, the ex-hippie protagonist of Thomas’s Vineland, who is disciplined enough to jump through a window once a year to keep his mental disability cheques coming. When Lockjaw resurfaces to finish his vendetta against the remnants of the French 75, Bob receives a call from a sleeper cell promising safe passage for him and Willa—provided he can recall and utter the pass code that will trigger the operation. But Bob is too stoned to remember. He is like a washed-up Ethan Hunt trapped in a nightmarish parody of Mission: Impossible—too inept to even get his hands on the mission brief.
Jolted into action while dressed like the Dude in The Big Lebowski, Bob is forced onto the road. He must rediscover his inner fire to save himself and his daughter. Willa, for her part, makes her own unsettling discoveries: she learns that her mother may have been the informant who forced the French 75 to disband, and worse, she may be Lockjaw’s child. A living specimen of America’s original sin—the product of a marriage of slavery and white supremacy. As the plot thickens, Anderson’s thesis about patterns becomes clear—history does not resolve, it repeats. Bob and Willa must do exactly what the title promises: fight one battle after another.
This is Anderson’s tenth feature, and his most expensive to date—its sprawling production design and kinetic set-pieces dwarfing anything he has attempted before. A loose adaptation of Vineland, a story of generational regrets about unfinished revolutions in America, One Battle After Another is the kind of thematically rich spectacle that not only treats the senses well, but also ignites the imagination. A standout sequence is a car chase through rolling countryside that ends in a satisfying conclusion without any pyrotechnics. Marvel’s tireless team of theme-park artisans could take notes.
One Battle After Another reportedly cost $130 million to produce—nearly twice the lifetime gross of Anderson’s most successful film, 2007’s Oscar-winning There Will Be Blood. By Hollywood arithmetic, a film must earn nearly three times its production budget to turn a profit, which means Anderson’s latest would need to clear roughly $450 million to be considered a commercial success. The combined gross of Anderson’s previous nine films—all of them beloved for their artistic sensibilities, none of them mainstream hits—falls considerably short of that figure.
And then there is the question of subject matter. In the Donald Trump era—when even late-night comedians risk cancellation for the wrong joke—an action thriller doubling as a political allegory about race and immigration would seem too incendiary for a production of this size, let alone one with Anderson’s name attached.
Still, Anderson got the backing of Warner Bros, one of Hollywood’s most storied studios, for this risky bet. Its wide release raises three questions. Why did this film get made at all? Why did Anderson, known for arthouse gems like Boogie Nights and Licorice Pizza, decide to make what is being marketed as an action epic? And has he, in doing so, delivered an intellectually uncompromising work, or sold himself out to the very forces he seems to critique?
An Indian critic may have anticipated these questions years before Anderson began working on the idea. “The intimate relationship between America’s internal and external wars, established by its original sin, has long been clear,” Pankaj Mishra wrote in 2017. “The question was always how long mainstream intellectuals could continue to offer fig-leaf euphemisms for shock-and-awe racism, and suppress an entwined history of white supremacism and militarisation, with fables about American exceptionalism, liberalism’s long battle with totalitarianism, and that sort of thing.”
Mishra has long been an anatomist of America’s structural weaknesses—patterns are very much his sort of thing. One would love to know what he makes of Anderson’s “instant classic”. For now, though, it is worth returning to the source of that quote: Mishra’s review of We Were Eight Years in Power, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s meditation on the legacy of the Obama presidency, published soon after Trump took office.
Coates, born in 1975 in Baltimore—the city that would later inspire The Wire—grew up in the shadow of America’s war on drugs. Anderson, born five years earlier in California’s San Fernando Valley, came of age in the West Coast liberal culture.
Coates’s childhood was marked by struggle. His father, a Vietnam War veteran who joined a radical movement, ran a community press and library during the crack epidemic to support his family of four wives and seven children. Anderson’s father joined the Navy during World War II—but as Anderson once quipped, he “didn’t do much fighting”. He later became a well-known radio and television host, and had three wives and nine children. He moved his family to the vast, Pacific-facing California, the state that Franklin Roosevelt transformed into a strategic, industrial, and atomic hub during World War II.
Anderson and his siblings grew up in a community of scientists, engineers, and skilled workers that benefited from the robust infrastructure and prosperity left behind by World War II. California was also by then the centre of the American film industry, which, as one author observed, “played an outsize part in establishing the yearnings, fears, role models and self-understandings of Americans”. Anderson attended private schools and made his first film at age eight, using a camera his father had bought to encourage his early filmmaking ambitions.
Coates moved to New York after a university friend was murdered by the police. He worked as a deliveryman as protests broke out against America’s wars in the Middle East in 2003. By then, Anderson had already become Hollywood royalty—a “rock star” among cinephiles, celebrated for drawing unexpected, career-defining performances from actors as different as Tom Cruise (Magnolia) and Adam Sandler (Punch-Drunk Love). In 2007, the year Coates was commissioned by The Atlantic to blog about Obama’s presidential run—a breakthrough that would propel him to national prominence—Anderson was recognised by the American Film Institute as “one of American film's modern masters”.
The rise of Coates as the most significant intellectual of the Obama years is well-documented, as is Anderson’s evolution from the chronicler of the golden age of porn in Boogie Nights to the master dissector of intimacy in Phantom Thread. It is fitting, then, that Mishra’s review of Coates’s Obama-era anthology—published the same year Phantom Thread premiered—contains a line that now doubles as a commentary on Anderson’s latest work: “For a self-aware and independent-minded writer like Coates,” Mishra wrote, “the danger is not so much seduction by power as a distortion of perspective caused by proximity to it.”
This is one danger that Anderson struggles to escape in One Battle After Another. Just as Coates’s meditations on race enthralled the Obama-era elite—arguably slowing his intellectual progress—the adulations that Anderson will rightfully receive for this film could cause distortions. With One Battle After Another, he is not very far from the place that Coates may have found himself in 2017, after the publication of We Were Eight Years in Power.
“For all his searing corroboration of racial stigma in America, he has yet to make a connection as vital and powerful as the one Martin Luther King detected in his disillusioned last days between the American devastation of Vietnam and the ‘evils rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society’,” Mishra wrote.
Coates, after years of silence following the end of the Obama era, returned to nonfiction last year with The Message, a book-length address to his students. He recounts his travels, made since he last saw them, to Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine. The section on Palestine—half the book—details the history of Israel-South Africa ties during apartheid, an alliance that helped inspire the current South African government’s efforts to prosecute Israeli leadership for war crimes at the International Court of Justice.
Between 1948 and 1994, Israel and South Africa built a deep military partnership—arms trading, nuclear collaboration, joint training programmes—as both nations faced international isolation and a shared a sense of “minority survivalism” against perceived threats from surrounding majorities. Israel supplied weapons to South Africa despite a 1977 UN embargo, eventually becoming its primary arms supplier. The South African army chief, Coates wrote in The Message, openly admired the efficiency of the Israeli checkpoints in the occupied territories.
“South African officials hosted their Israeli counterparts in safaris, enjoyed Israeli support for their dubious ‘Bantustan’ policy, and kept an open dialogue on the best practices by which one might divorce a people from its various freedoms,” he wrote.
With The Message, Coates finally made the connection that Mishra once argued was essential—the intertwining patterns created by America’s internal racial tensions and its involvement in global systems of subjugation. One Battle After Another suggests that Anderson, too, is on to such patterns. But then, even as its politics remain sharp, it is also disappointingly partial. The film nods towards Hollywood’s internal battles: the corporate mergers and politically motivated cancellations, the fault lines that the Gaza war has opened within the industry, and the increasing fusion of Republican agenda—steeped in white supremacy—with corporate power.
But it stops well short of tracing them to their deeper roots. Why do streams of migrants head for America’s borders? Why does America continue to allow capital’s relentless hunger for cheap labour to tear its social fabric? Why should the dream of a just society be confined within America’s borders? One Battle After Another raises these questions, but hesitates to answer them. Anderson, it seems, would rather mount a grand spectacle than follow the logic of his own critique to a conclusion. Elements in the film’s ending—Bob gets his first iPhone—suggest that Anderson’s radicalisation is more measured and cautious.
Still, this is both a triumph and a turning point—the work of someone approaching a new phase of clarity in recognising the recurring patterns of American violence.
Surely, Anderson’s next film should not be missed.
Film: One Battle After Another
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti
Rating: 4/5