The Oscar-winning film One Battle after Another by Paul Thomas Anderson is imagined as an exciting film about “an unending culture war presented as a crazily extreme action movie”[2] and “the lonely heroism of not fitting in.”[3] As Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian put it: “It’s a riff on the now recognisable Anderson-Pynchonian idea of counterculture and counter-revolution, absorbing the paranoid style of American politics into a screwball farcical resistance, with a jolting, jangling, nerve-shredding score by Jonny Greenwood.”
Over the course of 162 minutes, the film demonstrates a failed attempt to articulate the meaning of political and ideological turmoil, the revival of democracy, and the significance of revolution and transformation, both through its screenplay and cinematic language. The Left and the Right move swiftly through tunnels, both metaphorical and literal, suggesting what may be the only enduring reality of the twentieth century that the film succeeds in rendering contemporaneous.
The Left proclaims “Viva” (revolution) belatedly approximately a century after a historical context in which the United States supported the suppression of similar “Viva” movements in South America and worldwide.[4] This renders the expression somewhat incongruous, even if it might appear relevant should Hollywood ever turn its attention to Cuba.
The Right is military, racist and white, as expected. The film’s depiction of the Right works both as a dark subversion and a disservice to It’s a Wonderful Life the film historically attentive to the struggles of the working class and the dangers of corruption. While Frank Capra’s use of the Christmas carol “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” [5] highlights the triumph of faith and the resilience of the so-called “ordinary American,” in this contemporary work the same musical motif ominously accompanies a gathering of white supremacists, inverting its original moral resonance. Despite widespread critical acclaim, the film ultimately leaves a disturbing impression, mixing an imaginary vision of America with the conventions of entertainment, political spectacle, and action – packed “revolutionary fairy tales.” This synthesis raises burning questions about the film’s essential meaning: whether it seeks to merely aestheticize the social and ideological fissures it depicts remains ambiguous, leaving the viewer indifferent rather than enlightened.
Sloppy writing, the absence of genuine dramaturgy, and an uninspired, inert approach to filmmaking all underscore the audacity of Hollywood, which nevertheless appears to be in need of a thorough “repackaging,” perhaps through the introduction of an anti-Oscar category. The actors and the music, however, should be exempt from this criticism, as they evidently gave their utmost to elevate the film’s overall quality. Sean Penn certainly deserved the Oscar for his outstanding performance, including the scene of his immolation in a chamber as a “Christian nationalist supremacist,” if one is naïve enough to accept the discourse of certain critics who reflect the broader cultural struggles shaping contemporary Hollywood.
The film reveals ‘Imaginary America’ that is fighting against itself, within itself, performing itself – mostly through Hollywood. Just as Maria Todorova, in her analysis of “Balkanism,” shows that the Balkans are discursively constructed as an internal cultural “Other,” Hollywood similarly relies on the production of simplistic, oppositional figures to stabilize its own ideological centre: films like Avatar and the Oscar-winning film One Battle After Another mobilize imagined “others” through reductive and contrasting depictions, thereby affirming the identity, moral authority, and civilizational self-image of a predominantly American and its own Western-coded perspective. However, instead of considering this problem and ‘imaginary America’ some critics took the film literally and contextualised it within ‘contemporary time’ seeing it as “a hidden cabal of Christian nationalists plan the future from a star chamber, and where a group of ragtag revolutionary guerrillas attempt to disrupt the regime through random bombings and bank robberies.”[6] This claim constitutes not only a factual error but a critical failure of contextualization: although ostensibly grounded in the novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon set against the socio-political landscape of the United States from the 1960s through the 1980s, the film ultimately remains an imaginative construct of contemporary Hollywood – an apparatus that simultaneously targets, stages, and adjudicates within its own closed representational “chamber.” In this framework, the binary of Left and Right dissolves into a more cynical and structurally entrenched dynamic between Republican Party and Democratic Party, whose mutual entanglement through compromising knowledge underscores the performative nature of political antagonism. The film’s reliance on false ideological divisions thus operates less as genuine critique than as a deflective strategy, obscuring deeper systemic pathologies – both within the cinematic text and the broader society – that it ultimately refuses to interrogate.
While the film may well prove entertaining to some audiences, it nevertheless constitutes a highly questionable reconfiguration of Vineland, emerging as a deeply unsettling, aesthetically and intellectually unfinished work. Thomas Pynchon deserved a more rigorous and conceptually faithful adaptation, just as cinema itself deserved a more coherent and formally accomplished film. The closing vision of an imagined America in which revolution collapses into futility ultimately reveals a profound error in reasoning: the suggestion that one form of destruction is merely supplanted by another reduces historical process to a sterile oscillation between thesis and antithesis – a limitation long ago recognized by Sergei Eisenstein.[7] Yet where Eisenstein finally sought to deconstruct dialectical ideological constructs, Hollywood appears unable, or unwilling, to move beyond them. What emerges instead is not a horizon of transformation but an endless choreography of conflict, in which “America” itself is exposed as a constructed fiction: a construct that Eisenstein dismantled, but that Hollywood, even now, continues to manipulate with the simplicity of Lego blocks rather than the rigor of critical form.
[1] Maria Todorova: Imagining the Balkans, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/sep/17/one-battle-after-another-review-paul-thomas-andersons-thrillingly-helter-skelter-counter-culture-caper
[3] Ibid.
[4] Michael Northcott: An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion and American Empire, London: Bloomsbury, 2004.
[5] Charles Wesley, 1739.
[6] https://variety.com/2025/film/reviews/one-battle-after-another-review-leonardo-dicaprio-sean-penn-1236520520/
[7] Naum Kleiman: Personal Interview, Paris, March 2026.
Photocredits: Title Image: AI-generated, Image Nr. 2: AI-generated, Image Nr. 3: (C) Wikimedia Commons
RaT-Blog Nr. 05/2026