'One Battle After Another' and Rethinking Good Movies

¡Viva la revolución!

Before I get into this, I want you to know that if this piece seems to be going in a certain direction, I promise you it is absolutely not going in that direction. As such, reading this all the way through is very much encouraged; more than is usually implied by the fact that I wrote something in the first place.

Anyhow:

A spontaneous trip to a neighbouring town about a week and a half ago meant I was able to see One Battle After Another at the same time as everyone else. Here’s what I dialled from it:

• Long takes — most notably in and around Sergio’s evacuation sequence — frontload the “happening as we speak” sentiment; a less-extreme version of what Netflix’s Adolescence does.

• Robust portrait of white supremacist psychology, mostly via Sean Penn. His pronounced musculature gives his body the impression of a suit that he doesn’t fit into comfortably, and subsequently suggests a discomfort with the life he’s inhabiting. He — as white supremacists do — alleviates this discomfort by targeting expressions of life that aren’t white men; his way of being can’t be wrong if his is the only one that’s visible. The thinness of his skin — mostly exemplified in interactions with Willa — further highlights this.

  • He’s also so incapable of dreaming beyond subordination that he still beseeches membership in the Christmas Adventurers Club even after they blatantly try to assassinate him. On top of that, the disturbingly joyless co-opting of St. Nicholas (Santa Claus, a figure defined by joy¹) by the CAC alludes to the reductive nihilism inherent to white supremacy and whiteness in general, which are defined by erasure of the human and submission to empire, skin colour — contrary to popular belief — notwithstanding.

  • Most all of this is pretty par for the course for any film examining fascists or fascist-adjacents.

• Bob is a hapless, bumbling white guy whose bumbling haplessness conceivably stems from revolution not being the most pressing arena for white guys. His success hinges on the help of Sergio — who can coordinate a mass shielding/hiding of immigrants as casually as one would make a ham sandwich — and other non-white revolutionaries/sympathizers. The white man’s chaos is the Latino’s Tuesday.

  • Bob becomes frustrated when the rules of the underground apply to him (he doesn’t know “what time it is” and is therefore denied information), and he only bypasses the rules courtesy of his former comrade — a Black man — vouching for him. The former detail touches on the nature of taken-for-granted white privilege, while the latter speaks to the more intimate richness of true allyship.

  • In other words, by way of being a revolutionary against a system that usually caters to people like him, Bob commits to a world where the rules more evenly/honestly apply to him, and where he’ll subsequently have to deal with the annoying parts of having your privilege downgraded. Meanwhile, the Black man who vouched for Bob did so upon a foundation of friendship, trust, and a recognition of humanity; things that Bob himself demonstrated by literally fighting for justice all these years, and things that the system — even one partial to Bob’s whiteness — can never and would never give him.

    • Great details, but hardly piercing or multitudinous enough to propel a film to “best of the decade” sentiment, I would think.

Put another way, I cannot for the life of me figure out why One Battle After Another is being touted as an awards season frontrunner. I see no novel thematic insights — sans that third point above — or narrative framing, and technical prowess can only do so much without the backing of a lucid, innovative perspective.

But I’m not here to insist upon this lack, because if I see nothing worth talking about in One Battle After Another, and then choose to talk about it, then I would be talking about how it’s not worth talking about, which is a complete waste of time.

And at the end of the day, it seems all but destined to enter the cultural pantheon as a good movie anyway, even if its goodness is largely rendered with poetic platitudes that unwittingly echo the emptiness of my own response.

This raises an interesting question; how — in the parameters of the New Film Criticism — do we know if something is good?

My answer: Using film criticism to ask “What is good” misunderstands the nature of film itself. The New Film Criticism asks a different question in its place, and that’s the question I want to explore with One Battle After Another here.

Said different question is “How can we make this good?” Except, it’s not that different at all, because this question has actually been at the center of film criticism since the get-go.

I’ll say it again: Film criticism has never been about figuring out what is good; it has always been about making films good and deciding what a good film is.

If film criticism was about recognizing what is good, then critical reassessment would be completely unheard of. Alien, for example, went from being regarded as a tepid sci-fi joint to a touchstone of the medium.

But nothing about Alien ever changed; we did.

Think about it like this: Is art valuable because we adhere to the purported greatness of it, or because of how it helps us grow as people via the emotions and ideas that the art introduces us to and/or riffs on?

Well if it’s the former, then we’re coding the value of art with an erasure of the human and a submission to empire; the exact root philosophy that Lockjaw and the Christmas Adventurers Club predicate their lives and actions upon.

The latter, meanwhile, codes the value of art with the opportunity it gives us to expand our perspectives; an opportunity that then falls on us to take.

Thus, out with “What is good,” and in with “Can we understand this as good, and if so, how?”

The former question assumes that a film is already good, even though the value of art can’t precede our experiencing of it. The latter question understands that we create the value (i.e. an expanded perspective), and empowers us to do so.

A film cannot be good prior to it being watched, because the goodness of film lies in what we create out of — and/or who we become from — watching it.²

Therefore, asserting that a film is good on its own does not reflect the reality of what film is. What we ought to do instead is recognize that we — the viewers, the critics, whomever — make movies good, and we do that by unpacking the shareable perspective that our experience is built upon, rather than assert the unmoored, buzzword-heavy experience on its own.

This is the responsibility of the viewer, who serves as the bookend of the filmmaking process wherein the fruits of said process take on a proper life of their own (per the perspective gained by the viewer).

If someone tells you a film is “amazing,” you can’t bring that with you to the film if you don’t already think it’s amazing.

But if someone tells you a film is amazing because of how a piece of dialogue creates a framing device that recontextualizes the film’s themes and ideas, you can bring that perspective with you and recognize how they got that value out of that dialogue, even if you don’t like the film.

You can interact with a perspective. You cannot interact with an emotion.

I’m seeing a lot of asserting with One Battle After Another — its prestige and depth is being insisted upon, but without much sharing of any perspective with which to see all of that purported value.³

When we do this, we falsely suggest to the world that a film’s goodness precedes our perspective, but — again — the reality is that a film’s goodness comes from the perspective that it gives us/that we carry forward.

And if we don’t prioritize the perspective — the intelligible one, that describes rather than prescribes — when talking about the film, we reduce the film’s value to nothing more than a satisfactory theatrical outing and however much cultural relevancy we can farm from it.

I did manage to find a review of One Battle After Another that prioritizes the writer’s perspective. It was written by Matt Goldberg of Commentary Track, where he observes the following:

“…the aesthetics of conquest and revolution are comically meager next to the importance of family and community. His [PTA’s] satire eviscerates notions of honor and glory, reducing them to ridiculous play-acting in service of fragile egos. However, rather than a shrug of “lol, nothing matters,” the movie thrives because, through all of its silliness, there’s a big, beating heart of the lengths a parent will go to for their child, as flawed and weary as that parent may be. One Battle After Another never acts above the fray, but instead questions what purpose the fray has if its primary interest is in prolonging the fight. For Anderson, there is no revolution stronger than the love we have for each other, and no amount of code words and clandestine missions can bring down fascism that thrives on violent conflict.”

“Anderson’s observations are as trenchant as those expressed by Jean-Pierre Melville over half a century ago in Army of Shadows, where fighting fascism is a given, but problems emerge as revolutionary movements devolve into recriminations, duplicity, and meager bonds that struggle to topple authoritarianism when authoritarians still frame the rules of engagement. Fascists want war because they’re always going to thrive on its violence, aggression, and inhuman means. It’s not that the fascists are “better,” but rather they will drag you down to their level of absurdity and prey on the remnants of your empathy.”

“…the revolutionaries rely on the performative aspects of their aesthetic rather than the pragmatic ones. In their attempts to outmaneuver the fascists, they’ve only made their lives more difficult, isolated, and futile. Meanwhile, Sergio St. Carlos has an iPhone and is far more successful in helping Bob because Carlos relies on strong interpersonal ties to his community.”

Through Matt, I — and you, assuming you dialled as little from the film as I did — can now retroactively observe One Battle After Another as a suggestion to reevaluate what our (civilian) countermeasures ought to look like against a socially-oppressive-to-downright-fascist government.

More specifically, it’s a suggestion that structural terrorism and spectacle is precisely what the fascists want, and that we’re better off uniting as a people and supporting one another the way Sergio’s community does.

I can grapple with this perspective in a way that I fundamentally can’t with things like “Masterful,” “Deftly orchestrated,” or “Magical tapestry of America.”

The same would be conceivably true if Matt’s sentiment had been negative, but most negative sentiments exist to argue a lack of value, which has the same effect as meaningless praise — nothingness is frontloaded, therefore the point of engaging with art (i.e. expanding our perspectives) is missed.

The exception is constructive negative sentiments. If the film is offering an idea, and then does something that seems to mistakenly contradict it, we can use the contradiction of that mistake to more clearly recognize the film’s ideas, which can then feed into the perspective (value) we gain from the film. I did this in my Thunderbolts* review by talking about the handling of Taskmaster.

The way I would grapple with Matt’s perspective, however, is by pointing out how flawed of a sentiment this is.

The Stonewall riots, for instance, were marked by tooth-and-nail combat with police and evocative demonstration, including — by certain accounts — kicklines, singing, public displays of queer love, and serial graffiti, all in the name of mocking and neutralizing the police while viscerally asserting the undeniability of queer people.

In other words, queer rights owe quite a bit to direct action and aggressive confrontation of the oppressor; not only does it damage the structural/systemic frameworks through which oppression is carried out (police apparatus, etc.), but it also creates a cultural/psychological paradigm where resistance is visible, communal, active, physical, and consequential.

Stonewall-level results don’t happen by invisible means, and the performative aspect of revolutions like it are inseparable from those results.

The Sergio-coded efforts by that era’s queer community played a crucial role too, of course, but it’s naive to think that it was the best defense against the police raids, doubly so to think it was the only effective one.

Sergio himself teases an affinity for the performative dimension of revolution, per the antagonizing little dance he does in the middle of his arrest.

But then we look at something like One Battle After Another, where the majority of the ground gained by the white supremacists/military is due to the treachery of:

• Black women…

  • Perfidia ratting out the French 75.

  • Willa bringing a cell phone when Deandra (Regina Hall) told her not to.

• …and queer people.

  • Willa’s non-binary friend — the lone visibly queer person in the film — giving up Willa’s phone number to Lockjaw for reasons I’m blanking on.

Now, I’m sorry, but if a film is insisting upon unity of and love for other people as the answer to oppressive government (per the perspective Matt has given here), and then displays queer people and Black women as the faulty cogs in the grandfather clock of civilian solidarity, then you’re making a drastic and dangerous misfire in rendering the cultural landscape here.

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But then, what if that’s the litmus test? What if One Battle After Another is daring the (majority) white male portion of its audience to quantify all Black women and queer people with the vices of individual human beings who happen to belong to those demographics?

What if the film is furthermore challenging such audiences to reject a blanket lens with which to render queer people and Black women and instead look up to someone like Bob — a white guy who:

• Owns his anxiety and insecurity as his own instead of allowing it to come out as prejudice.

• Wants to be supportive of Willa’s queer friend and their gender expression.

• Rejects the comforts that come with being a white, male colonial beneficiary so as to stand with the revolutionary efforts of a group made up primarily of Black women, and…

• Puts his unyielding faith in the hands/wisdom of his non-white neighbours like Sergio, whose intimacy with the struggles of true justice come from his roots in the struggle, as opposed to Bob’s choice to commit to it; the gap of that intimacy with the struggle is considerable, and Bob knows it.

Huh, you know what? Forget what I said about no novel framing devi-

And on top of that, Avanti Q is a Native American bounty hunter whose capture of former French 75er Howard Sommerville triggers the hunt for Bob, and yet it’s also Avanti who serves as the catalyst of Willa’s escape by engaging in a shootout with her would-be captors.

In what way, then, do we quantify Avanti Q? By the manner in which he sides — and is implied to have sided — with colonizers like Lockjaw, or the way he violently engages the mercenaries so as to free Willa from the fate that Lockjaw paid for her to have?

Indeed, is the decision to love each other — to unite in spite of each other’s worst deeds (whether Perfidia’s, Avanti Q’s, or Willa’s queer friend) — itself not one battle of several? Is making peace with the fact that salvation probably won’t be peaceful — per the many violent engagments that lead to the film’s narrative win-state — another such battle? What about the necessity of compromising one’s white comfort in the name of standing against corruption — a thoroughly uncomfortable process, as exemplified by Bob’s neuroticism?

What if the treachery committed by the film’s Black women and queer people is not actually treachery, but a parable for their vulnerability in this system? The system wants to turn the lives of the vulnerable into isolated battles; the film gives us the opportunity to not take this bait.

Wait a minute, did I just flip myself on One Battle After Another?

See what I mean, folks? With my experience as a microcosm of the viewer experience, One Battle After Another wasn’t good until I made it good, and the reason I was able to make it good is because Matt Goldberg gave me a perspective that was rooted in tangible observation rather than abstract lionization. I took issue with Matt’s perspective, yes, but taking issue with it was what led me to talking myself into recognizing — that is, making actionable/accessible — tangible value in One Battle After Another in the form of this perspective I now have on it.

Martin Scorsese calling One Battle After Another a “fascinating and extraordinarily made film“ is functionally no different from me saying that it was void of perspective. Neither statement offers anything with which to well and truly interact with the film.

Scorsese’s comments obviously have more weight because he’s Scorsese, but Scorsese’s prestige as a filmmaker also exists because it was created by others — critics, audiences, you name it.

That’s not a knock on Scorsese; it’s just fact that his prestige did not and could not predate the culture that decided/agreed he was good. The same is true of art.

And come to think of it, isn’t One Battle After Another also a supremely helpful lens for understanding what I’m saying about film criticism here?

Because here I am railing against vague, self-affirming insistences of prestige masquerading as film criticism, all while One Battle After Another fucking dares us — dares us — to be complicit in the colonial gaze’s self-affirming attempts to flatten queer people and Black women into vague vessels of treachery and otherness.

Our own revolutionary maturity and lucidity is being tested with ideological brake-pumping and prejudice traps; an improvement upon the playbook of Crash.

Meanwhile, the New Film Criticism challenges us to understand our response to a film rather than just align with it via prescriptive, emotive language.

Both want us to slow down and really consider/intellectualize what we’re seeing and what we believe in.

This, while the film exhibits a fondness for direct and disruptive action — observable substance like the New Film Criticism or Stonewall — per Avanti Q’s violent 180 on the bounty hunters, the French 75 springing captive immigrants, or Bob trying to slime Lockjaw and his ICE agent-coded goons with a sniper rifle.

And just as Willa’s final-scene departure to Oakland signals another battle after this one, so too are we reminded that a film doesn’t end when the final cut plays in theatres. No, it ends when we take stock — really take stock — of the perspectives we gain after seeing it; perspectives that can evolve even more as we encounter new contexts, the perspectives of others, new pieces of art, and even revisits of the initial piece of art.

In other words, the value of film is as endless as the humanity that said value serves.

So enough with flattening the value of film into a contrived criteria so as to pre-empt and predetermine “good art,” enough with rendering film with vague satisfaction that detractors “just don’t get,” and enough with putting the hallucinated prestige of the art before its real-life, humanist utility — the decolonization of film criticism is but one step in the decolonization of our minds, and it begins by rejecting the question “What is good?

Viva la revolución, indeed.

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1. Also the patron saint of sailors, merchants, archers, remorseful thieves, children, brewers, pawnbrokers, toymakers, unmarried people, and students.

2. That’s not to say, of course, that we can’t understand the value of film when we’re not watching one, but without the context of a single film that brought about ontological evolution in us, we can’t actually intellectualize the value of film beyond blanket, idealistic abstracts about the medium. And regardless of what truths those abstracts may be speaking to, it remains that film only reaches its full power when we watch one and evolve from it.

3. This is as of last Wednesday, and for the sake of maintaining the purpose, flow, and trajectory of this review, I haven’t updated it with any additional tangible criticism I may have stumbled upon since then, which I have.