Jay-Ger touches on neoliberalism, meaningless words, and embodiment with Paul Thomas Anderson’s takes on Pynchon.
So this one’s going to be among my more ‘thesis-like’ pieces, since the idea is to articulate why I like the movie One Battle After Another, largely in response to random discourse I’ve come across recently about the film, but which reminded me of many takes I heard shortly after its release and subsequent success at the Oscars. The specific interpretation I want to counterpoint is what I’d call ‘the South Park reading’; basically, the idea is that the work’s main purpose is to poke fun at both sides of America’s political divide, while disavowing its own stance behind the veil of ‘neutrality’. When it comes to South Park (and applying to Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s works more generally), I think this reading makes more sense; the libertarian-ness is treated as natural rather than emerging from history, meanwhile other ideologies – such as those we might call more socially liberal or right-wing populist, for example – are treated as ephemeral, absurd, and lampooned as such (it’s worth mentioning, by the way, that I generally find Parker and Stone’s works funny; mea culpa).
In terms of One Battle Another, the movie is said to frame both what we could call the anarchist left – represented by the likes of Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), Junglepussy, and Willa Ferguson (Chase Infiniti); and the ethno-nationalist right, represented by Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), ‘The Christmas Adventurers Club’ (a secret society Lockjaw seeks entry to), and elements of the state – as engaged in a kind of psychological folie a deux, which gives the film its absurd edge. This reading, it seems to me, doesn’t really explain why the movie was so successful at the Oscars, an institution which tends to be somewhat self-conscious about appearing ‘progressive’. However, it may well be that simply highlighting certain elements of the American state (if not the state itself) as ethno-nationalist and/or fascist is considered radical; or, even more sadly, that, in Oscars tradition, most of the voters didn’t even watch the movie and were impressed by the ‘radical’ aesthetics of its promotional material.
My sense, having a reasonable familiarity with Paul Thomas Anderson’s career so far (like Tom, I also adore Punch-Drunk Love), was always that the reparative drive behind making the film was to redeem Inherent Vice; PTA’s 2014 work usually considered his worst to date, set in the ‘hippy’ ’70s and based on Thomas Pynchon’s book of the same name. An interesting feature of Pynchon’s work generally is the highlighting of something I described in last time’s reflection on Fargo (Season Five); the introduction of ecologies of floating signifiers to everyday life. One Battle After Another is PTA’s only other work to be based on a Pynchon book, in this case Vineland (though more loosely), which has a broader historical scope compared to Inherent Vice; taking place from the ’60s to the ’80s. To use a framing device from the Oscar-winning movie, ‘Sixteen years later, very little had changed’: while One Battle After Another is set roughly (very roughly) today, it’s supposed to feel like a continuation of this historical period.
For those holding ‘the South Park reading’, this has led the film to be described as not only apolitical (or right-wing by default) but ahistorical. How key challenges for revolutionary subjectivity may have changed during and since those years is obscured by a flattening of time and historicity (to use a fancy word). I think, read intertextually alongside Pynchon’s postmodern themes, this isn’t true. What I liked about the film most after initially watching was the ‘Pynchonesque’ way in which Bob (in particular) repeatedly encounters this sense of meaningless words; functioning to prove one’s allegiance to a political ideology, often with an incredibly obscure technocratic bar of entry – such as having to memorise lines of a particular book. In contrast to a work more prone to reification, for me it’s by abstracting this historical continuity against a pseudo-concrete background (and exhibiting its intensification), which gives the movie its historicity, as well as artistic flair.
If we consider the three key times of action across Inherent Vice and One Battle After Another (the early ’70s, the early ’80s, and the current era), it’s possible to see how this aspect of postmodernism may have been experienced by everyday people over the years. In the early ’70s, the confusion over how to navigate these emerging ecologies is embodied in Doc (Joaquin Phoenix); but whether they were really ‘there’ during that time is made ambivalent by something else strongly associated with the era – the stoner ‘haze’ impacting memory. The question posed is: was the ‘inherent vice’ Doc encounters, keeping him from uncovering the truth he seeks, this emerging aspect of postmodernism, or the ’60s tripped-out state-of-mind? (if they are even separable).
In the early ’80s, I feel that Perfidia also encounters something of an inherent vice in a rather tragic way. While the earlier Black Power movement was indeed empowering insofar as cementing a new kind of revolutionary subjectivity, it also seems to me that the longer history of African-Americans encountering a much higher, if not absent, bar of entry into powerful ‘white’ roles, was far from totally erased. For Perfidia, there’s a sense that she has to be a ‘perfect’ revolutionary, meanwhile Bob (as a white man) can embrace more ‘counter-revolutionary’ and contradictory aspects of life; such as raising a child in a nuclear family structure. Indeed, it’s not clear to me whether this is mostly because of how Perfidia relates to her blackness, or the depicted pressure from her family (in psychodynamic style, I’d guess it’s both), but this sense of inherent vice exists in a way which isn’t the case for other characters, particularly white men. I’ve seen some folk describe Perfidia as weak or selfish, which I think is harsh, especially when considered in terms of historical and familial circumstance; for me, she’s quite straightforwardly imperfect and human, like all good characters.
In the present day, Perfidia and Bob’s kid Willa (not biologically but let’s say spiritually) is a teenager. With Bob having smoked away the last however-many years, he and Willa are thrown into a cat-and-mouse style conflict with a military team led by Lockjaw (Willa’s biological father) since they remain enemies of the state; while Lockjaw initially has the further incentive of determining if Willa is his daughter, something impermissible to the Christmas Adventurers Club. This is the context in which Bob discovers the intensification of floating signifiers in everyday life, provoking Pynchonesque ontological paranoia. In contrast to Inherent Vice, Bob’s stonerism doesn’t impact One Battle After Another’s form, which I think is a major decision by PTA. That is, instead of appearing as a kind of deconstructed ‘non-narrative’ piece, it stays within the formal conventions of an action film. I think this is not only a good directorial decision (at least in terms of chances for commercial success), but also makes sense historically; it seems to me that the advent of ‘neoliberalism’, associated with the election of Ronald Reagan in the US (and Margaret Thatcher in the UK), is partly another way of describing the historical intensification of floating signification. Of course, this can be overplayed; I’m not saying that they are the same thing, since neoliberalism is much broader, but it seems to me a feature of the last half-century or so which is worth highlighting.
Read phenomenologically from Bob’s withdrawn and slightly dazed perspective (inherited by Willa), it makes sense that the early ’80s are depicted in such a presentist, confused, way. It also makes sense to me that Bob is able to navigate this shocking new terrain, albeit with struggle, since his inability to mourn a time seemingly before neoliberalism (and, perhaps his relationship with Perfidia then) gives him a kind of melancholia which means a sense of there being a ‘lost object’ beyond the everyday technocracy and bureaucracy, even in revolutionary organisations; something he often finds embodied when reacquainting with old friends. What One Battle After Another seems to depict with unconditional positive regard are human relations, and perhaps even a sense of shared purpose within a community. It’s easy to be romantic about a time when these things had not been (arguably) broken by neoliberal policies and ideology. I’m trying not to be; but at the same time I think it’s a question worth asking: how did we (those who assumingly want to try and make the world a better place) get here? Perhaps, in a sense, from time-to-time we are all Bob; gazing down a hazy looking-glass, trying to piece together the good from a bed of maybe-illusory broken words and terms, on which we also rest.
I’ll start to wrap up with a bit of personal reflection. I wish I got to talk more about Willa, since I relate to her quite strongly – I’m not sure if this is as a fellow ‘third-culture kid’ or ‘golden child’ (as I was, for a time); by the way, I’m not opposed to saying there’s a little overlap there in the way we’re raised. I’d also like to have talked more about the quite strong and honestly valid ‘necrophilia’ critique, seeing the film’s depiction of Perfidia as problematic: although perhaps that’s also not really for me to expand on. I’ve felt a little withdrawn in my therapy training recently, so perhaps that’s related to this focus on empty speech: honestly, I’m not sure I’ve had much to say, but write I will. Hopefully, I’ll return to more vital topics later; I feel myself coming back to them.
Overall, I’d hesitate to say that One Battle After Another is a properly political film (in the sense of being capable of creating or even containing large-scale change) for much the same reasons as with Fargo (Season 5) – if this is even possible for any work of mass culture; or, even more depressingly, perhaps even art generally. I do, however, think the idea that it’s not a historical film misses the point (at least, the point I thought would be worth sharing among other interpretations). While I think it’s a bit silly to get personally invested in this kind of stuff, I’m fairly happy it won Best Picture at the Oscars, even though it wasn’t my favourite of the nominees; and neither is it my favourite PTA. I suspect that the win was (alongside recognition of artistic merit) actually largely a legacy-pick, kind of like DiCaprio winning for The Revenant; as if the voters felt a debt owed for not awarding PTA Best Picture before, particularly for the much-celebrated There Will Be Blood.
Still, personal artistic revolutions are, I think, worth celebrating; perhaps because they can be inspiring, and perhaps simply because of their reparative beauty. Looking back at Inherent Vice now, I appreciate the film much more, and I don’t see why others (silly people like me who ‘missed the point’ before) won’t too. I think, due to my own associations with the hippy-era, I was expecting something more full of wonder; instead, I got a cold, grounded, depiction of the ontological confusion arising with the (seeming) loss of a kind of meaning – a spiritually ’80s film about the ‘true story’ behind psychedelic glam. If I’m right to say PTA was, in part, consciously reworking that movie into a clearer message – stripping it back to bare-bones and then pulping it up, with the ‘historical’ justification of doing so, then One Battle After Another is likeable not just as a standalone film, but one which helps another, one which is more forgotten and easy to toss aside.
