The Emptiness of Revolution
Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, One Battle After Another, is tailor-made for this moment of our culture war. As far-left protesters and agitators clash with federal troops and law enforcement in cities across the country, some of its scenes even seem ripped from nightly news segments. And to be clear, the movie’s politics are decidedly leftist—Anderson certainly believes in the romance of revolution.
And yet despite this streak of “radical chic,” the film is something more than the “ode to radical terrorism” some right-wing critics assert it to be. Loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, it follows one ex-revolutionary, Pat Calhoun/Bob Ferguson (brilliantly played by Leonardo DiCaprio), as he races to rescue his daughter from an old enemy from his radical youth. His mission reveals that the passionate abstraction of revolution, and the terrible violence it breeds, cannot fulfill the deepest longings of the human soul.
The film begins with a sequence depicting Pat’s salad days of revolutionary action. He is a member of a terrorist collective called the “French 75,” a group of Marxists and Black Power radicals committed to the violent overthrow of the United States. Pat, going by the nom de guerre “Rocket Man,” rigs explosives for his militant comrades. He is seduced by the erotic zeal of the uprising, and becomes lovers with one of its leaders, Perfidia Beverly Hills (played by Teyana Taylor).
Pat’s idealism at the outset of the revolution reminded me of Whittaker Chambers’s description of his turn to communism in his memoir Witness. “The Communist Party represents itself as the one organization of the will to survive in the crisis of civilization where that will is elsewhere divided, wavering, or absent,” he wrote. “It is in the name of that will to survive the crisis, which is not theoretical but closes in from all sides, that the Communist first justifies the use of terror and tyranny, which are repugnant to most men.” Like Chambers in the 1920s and ‘30s, Pat sees revolutionary action as the path to a new birth—and Perfidia’s intense radicalism is the emblem of this strength he admires the most.
Read more in Law & Liberty.