In the fever dream of today’s Left, we live in a “fascist police state.” It is in this phantasmagoria that Paul Thomas Anderson has set his film One Battle After Another, which film critics are already splooging over to an absurd degree. They love it because it’s well-made, no doubt. PTA can’t make a bad movie. He is too talented. But the splooging is not over the movie itself. It is because the movie reflects the mass delusion they have all lived in for the last ten years – that they are under an occupation by a fascist, police state.
The film Civil War depicted this same mass delusion. The upcoming documentary on George Orwell, produced by Alex Gibney, will perpetuate it, much to my own personal horror. This is why someone shot Charlie Kirk for “spreading hate” – hey fascist, catch — and why Luigi Mangione shot Brian Thompson. It’s why you see them out there on the streets every single weekend protesting the “fascist,” the “dictator,” the “authoritarian.”
All because they could not win an election against a supervillain of their own making. It was depressing for me to watch the phantasmagoria spill over into art and become nothing more than propaganda for the Democrats and the social justice fundamentalism that has overtaken the party. Not even a political assassination can stop it. They are right back at it today. Why, because when you build a utopia online and you cast yourselves as the Puritans, the “good” people doing “good” things, you also need a named evil. You need the bad to define yourselves as good.
On the Left, the “bad” was racism. After the 2008 financial collapse and $700 billion bailout, two populist movements were born. Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. Both were smeared as “racist,” as were the two leaders that rose in the wake — Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. But the Tea Party got it worse.
That low-frequency hum that there were “racists, racists” everywhere sprang from how we defined our utopia — our beloved leader, Barack Obama, had been met with obstruction by the Right at every turn. That, we declared, was “racism.” The low-frequency hum got louder and louder, so by 2012, it was spread throughout schools and universities. Black Lives Matter has become the third major movement to emerge in the internet age.
By 2013 and 2014, came “Oscars So White,” and when Trump won in 2016, it set in motion the same thing that happened to Salem when adolescent girls began writhing and convulsing and accusing the townspeople of being witches.
20 people would lose their lives in Salem, even 71-year-old Rebecca Nurse, who was so devout she was named a visible saint. They tried to convince the Oyer in Terminer not to convict her, even though she refused to confess or live. A devout Puritan was excommunicated by the church before they hanged her in front of her friends and neighbors for one more battle fought against the Devil won.
“For these and many more foul and sinful transgressions, I do here, in the name of the whole church and in the name of Lord Jesus Christ and by the virtue of that power and authority which He hath given to His church, pronounce you to be a leprous and unclean person, and I do cast you out and cut you off from the enjoyment of all those blessed privileges and ordinances which God hath entrusted His church withal, which you have so long abused. . . . And I do exclude you not only from the fellowship of the church in all the public ordinances of the same, but also from all private fellowship and communion with any of the servants of God in this church, except only in those relations in your own family. . . . And for the greater terror and amazing of you, I do here, in the name of Christ Jesus and His Church, deliver you up to Satan and to his power and working, that you who would not be guided by the council of God may be terrified and hampered by the snares and power of Satan—for the destruction of your proud flesh [and] forthe humbling of your soul, that your spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus, if it be His blessed will. And so as an unclean beast and unfit for the society of God’s people, I do from this time forward pronounce you an excommunicated person from God and his people.” — A Salem Witch
If they can do that, if they can go that far, it’s easy to see how we arrived where we are now, with the ruling elite telling the working class that they are all racists for caring about crime, the border, etc.
One Battle After Another is a cartoon version of White Supremacists in America. If you share that view, like Paul Thomas Anderson and so many on the Left do, you will feel seen. You will feel this vindicates and validates your mass delusion: yes, all white men (except the one ineffectual flaccid stoner dad) are racists and all people of color are victims of an oppressive system.
The film opens with an ICE detention center of sorts, 16 years ago (when Bush was in power?), and we see a militant gang shooting up the bad guys and attempting to free the migrants. Teyana Taylor – one of the film’s best performances — gets pregnant and then splits, man, because THE REVOLUTION. This is met with some critical thinking by PTA because who would leave their own baby for THE REVOLUTION?
I mean, the TikToks write themselves. Every Women’s Studies major will be making cry-videos about how yes, this is finally it. This is all of it!
Leo is tasked with raising the baby — Baby Jesus-like — only Feminist Jesus — because she’s not really his child. She is the child of virulent white supremacist Sean Penn. For a reason not explained or explored, Penn — one of the most ridiculous characters ever put to screen — decides he wants to join those evil white supremacists who run everything in America. But to do that, he must get rid of the “evidence” that he “dirtied” his dick with a Black woman. For his part, Penn is portrayed as a guy who lusts after Black women secretly but has no problem killing them when they get in the way of his joining the elite white supremacists (who do not exist). Give me tattooed guys in a cabin in the woods in Idaho, and maybe I’ll believe it.
Penn’s character has no real person inside. We’re just supposed to assume WHITE GUY BAD. If he’s wearing a military uniform, all the better. Cops=bad. ICE agents=bad. Military=bad. Even when he is face-to-face with his biological daughter, no human being emerges. Sean Penn breaks one of the fundamental rules of acting — you have to see the human being in there to portray them. Not that it will matter because all that matters is that he meets the stereotype, and he does.
What is fascism? Cancel culture that we’ve seen in the last ten years. Shunning, banishing, exiling people for not complying. Shooting someone because you don’t like his opinions. Smearing me as a racist and refusing to advertise on this site. Fascism is: conform or else. That’s not the Right. That’s the Left.
One Battle After Another complies with the doctrine of the Left in every way imaginable. It doesn’t break any rules, but for the odd joke about the updated activists who are now too “woke” to function. But it doesn’t matter. He’s not really important in this tale. He is only there to ensure the survival of the “Feminist Jesus” for the REVOLUTION. Except that he doesn’t and can’t because he’s a white dude and no white dude is allowed to save a woman at all, let alone a woman of color, let alone “Feminist Jesus.”
The idea that America is a “fascist police state” is hilarious, considering no fascist would allow people to call him a fascist, for starters, but would also shoot all of the protesters who gather every week to call him Hitler. He threatens to go into Chicago, but he is not going into any state where the governor does not invite him. Instead, he’s going into Memphis, a red state, with the governor’s approval. But no one on the Left ever gets the truth about anything.
In 2016, we all called Trump a racist and a fascist for building the wall. The phantasmagoria and mass delusion would ultimately result in two impeachments, four indictments, a felony conviction, and two assassination attempts, and still, they imagine America is a police state. Trump came back and won the old-fashioned way by getting the votes. Why? Because when the Democrats did finally take the White House, and they were the dogs that caught the car, what did they do? They opened the border and millions of people crossed over.
The results of that were catastrophic, not that anyone on the Left and inside the bubble would ever hear of the rapes or child rapes or murders or gangs overtaking apartment buildings or terrorists who then try to murder Jews. None of those get a mention on the Left. It’s Paul Thomas Anderson’s depiction of mass deportations. And what a luxury that is for the people at the top.
But people at the top and on the Left don’t see people of color as actual people. They are symbols of virtue and thus, trapped in the cage of “goodness.” They could never see migrants as potentially criminal – that would be racist. No Black woman or person of color is allowed to really be a bad guy in a movie, without the quick fix of redemption by the end.
The Democrats lost for the same reason Hollywood is now collapsing or barely surviving. Because they don’t see America anymore. They only see utopia. They have never learned their lessons of 2016. They have spent ten years demonizing, dehumanizing, and blaming the Right for their failures. They had four years to prove to the country they were the better side, and they failed. That put Trump back in power, not because he rampaged into the White House — I saw a Tweet the other day comparing him to the “Fourth Reich” — but because the Democrats have done worse than fail the American people. They have demonized them and called them “racists.”
So is One Battle After Another a good movie? I guess. It’s well-made. But if you already know the rules of the game, you can already figure out the plot. You can tell by how it’s cast. There was nothing surprising about any of it. It is entertaining propaganda. Eddington was better because, at the very least, it offered some critical thinking about the real totalitarians. Not enough, but some.
The critics love it. They are the oppressed resistance, after all. The Academy might love it and will celebrate the wealthy white man calling the working-class voters who want a secure border racists. Those “good white men of the Left” need to be seen as the only good ones in a corrupt white supremacist empire.
In that way, One Battle suffers from the same problems as There Will Be Blood. It offers easy answers to complicated stories. It chooses the good guys and the bad guys with very little nuance. It appeals to simplistic thinkers who are dazzled by the dazzling filmmaking.
And yet, I’m not even sure people who write about movies even understand what art is anymore. I didn’t see much art in One Battle, even if it is entertaining to watch Leonardo DiCaprio and Teyana Tayler. I wish the movie had been about them, rather than yet another agonizing lecture that tells the working class what demons they are for caring about their own survival in a country and culture that has abandoned them.
The better movie is Sinners, which tells a true story, not one rooted in mass delusion. And it is art. It is a masterpiece with heart and soul. The performances are better. The writing is better. The directing is better. One Battle After Another might be brilliant filmmaking, but it’s hard to appreciate that because the dogma gets in the way. I can’t get excited for a movie that is self-congratulatory propaganda for those who already have everything.
