The real battle is “one battle after another”

A first viewing of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Battle After Battle” makes it even more enjoyable to see it again. The film, which is two hours and forty-one minutes long, is full of fast-paced, complex action and complex dialogue, and the editing quickly cuts between the crowded set of places, events and characters. The first time I saw the film, I found myself struggling to keep up with what was going on, but this feeling of being left behind was exacerbated by a lack of psychological understanding, a feeling that the characters were moved because the script demanded it rather than because of any dramatic logic or internal urgency. On the second viewing, I stopped worrying: when I knew what was going to happen, I enjoyed the details more. the road The movements of the story prove to be as exciting as the story itself, and the twists and turns in behavior are as exciting as those in the plot. The feeling of arbitrariness that had previously baffled and frustrated me has been drowned out by excitement and sheer aesthetic pleasure.

Anderson, who wrote and directed the film, suppresses psychological complexity, creating characters who are little more than abstractions. The result is a film that, for all its sobering events and visceral physicality, is a work of great symbolic design. The film is strangely and unusually dialectical in itself – made up of many layers that do not come together or connect to each other but rather reflect each other and generate tension. Through all these contradictions, absences, dissonances and contradictions, a comprehensive cohesion emerges.

Even if the topic is trite or trivial, the approach will provide nothing more than one pride after another. But this is a story with high political stakes. The film is set in an alternate version of the United States, involving leftist revolutionaries, the government’s largely successful efforts to overthrow them, and the long consequences—both intimate and societal—of rebellion. Occasionally, Anderson trivializes the righteous enthusiasm that turns into active, violent resistance, but there is nothing frivolous about his portrait of life, broken relationships, and an American society shaken to the core. Moreover, in depicting the titanic lurches of his imagined history, including our alternate present day, he looks deeply beyond the immediate terms of his imagination to arrive at powerful insights regarding the horrors of the moment. The film depicts the radical imbalances of power, and the kinds of enlightenment that might hold hope (No matter how sentimental this idea is), even if it is somewhere in the distance.

“Battle After Battle” begins with two revolutionaries – Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) and Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio), aka Ghetto Pat and Rocket Man – as they join members of their splinter group, the French 75, in an armed raid on an immigration detention center near the US-Mexico border. While the group has managed to release about half of the detainees, it is also making its presence and intentions known: this appears to be only the first in a series of attacks. French 75 bomb campaign office of a senator who voted to ban abortion; He blows up a bank. He blows up the transmission tower. (Anderson, with an impersonal sense of wonder, shows the lights going out throughout the city he serves.) Her outburst is also sexual, or erotic: when Perfidia storms the tent of the detention center’s commandant, Captain Stephen J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), ordered him to get erect, and pushed him outside, with that tent pole visible under his pajamas. In the car on the way back from the raid, Perfidia and Pat got out; As Pat teaches Perfidia the finer points of bomb making, she embraces him and begins having sex; As they rush away from the transmission tower where they planted the explosives, she wants them to have wild sex right before it explodes. She uses an automatic weapon for target practice, telling her companion: “Pussies aren’t for fun. This is fun. Guns are fucking fun.”

Sex is also racialized: early in the film, Perfidia, who is black, asks Pat, who is white, if he likes black women. When she asked Lockjaw, who is also white, to straighten up, he called her a “beautiful thang.” At a critical moment, Lockjaw captured Perfidia but promised to let her go if she met him in a hotel room. She succeeded, kept the attempt a secret from Pat, and became pregnant, not knowing which man was the father. She and Pat name the baby, a girl, Charlene, and end up raising her alone, after Perfidia is arrested, reported to the group, and goes into witness protection. Pat and Charlene are given false identities and escape. Sixteen years later, they live together in a sanctuary city called Paktan Cross; Charlene, now called Willa (and played by an extraordinary young actress named Chase Infinity), is in high school, and Pat, now called Bob, does nothing but drugs, drink, and hang out. Suddenly, Lockejo, now a colonel, is motivated to capture Willa and hunt down Bob, and the rest of the film involves the motivations for his pursuit, Bob and Willa’s efforts to avoid capture, their resulting separation, and their daring struggle to reunite.

One of the best aspects of classic films about radical events at the time they were actually happening — like Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Zabriskie Point” and Robert Kramer’s “Ice” — is the debate. What it takes, ideologically and practically, to organize a group that carries out violent acts is remarkable, because it cannot be separated from the basic energy that gives drama its emotional charge – the transformation of emotion into action. There is no such thing in “Battle after Battle”. Partisanship, dogma, ground rules, and justifications are, in Anderson’s film, irrelevant, meaning that the actions of French 75 take place in an intellectual vacuum. The revolution comes as a given and not as an achievement, closer to a club than an army. The political situation that Anderson illustrates, in the events preceding the film, is essentially one of feeling. However, the film’s sentiments are not entirely trivial, as they are painfully consistent with the current mood. Despite the lack of political detail, the comparisons are unambiguous: Anderson depicts the police and military combined to detain people of color in what are effectively concentration camps, the oppressive and normative power allowing the official to satisfy his network through abuse of power.

While watching the first part of Battle After Battle, I was reminded of a scene from another great film about left-wing extremists and their plans for revolutionary violence: Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise. There, a woman named Veronique (Anne Wiazemski), a member of a Paris-based cell, meets a philosophy professor (real-life philosopher Francis Jeanzon, who plays him). She told him about her group’s plans to shut down their university with bombs. He tells her that she and her group will be captured long before they can do so. She reminds him that during the Algerian War, he was pursued by the police – Janson actually worked with pro-Algerian activists in France – and managed to escape. Jenson explains: “Because there were many sympathizers among the French people. Because even those who did not support Algerian independence did not condemn us.” He continues: “Your work will lead nowhere if it is not taken up by society, by class.”