One Battle After Another

Movie reviews are a dime a dozen; does the world really need another? Yet every once in a while Hollywood makes a movie so addlebrained that you feel like you have to say something, not to praise it or to condemn it, but to express wonder that the cultural artifact could come into existence. One Battle After Another is such a film.

For days I kept trying to review it, and failing. It had struck me as being possibly the most morally and historically confused film I’d ever seen, but at the same time, almost nostalgically so.

Oh, the irony! Knowing, winking, Postmodernism has now been out of fashion long enough that I couldn’t place it. It felt like the time I encountered lychee on a pizza. What the heck is that flavor? It’s so familiar? Of course it is familiar–the movie turns out to be based on a Thomas Pynchon novel (Vineland.)

There’s something poignant about it, like when you watch an old movie and see 1980’s artwork on the walls. Who imagined then that the very concept of Postmodernism would so quickly become obsolete, like the old dinosaurs’ way of talking about the new world of the weaselly little mammals we now call memes.

Don’t get me wrong–I enjoyed the film. Who wouldn’t get a kick out of seeing Sean Penn play the sexually obsessed septuagenarian Homeland Security Major Stephen Lockjaw, going full Javert on his hyper-sexualized Valjean, the Amazonian, Grace Jones-like, revolutionary freedom fighting Perfidia Beverly Hills (played to the nines by Teyana Taylor).

I’ve tried to compress a synopsis into a reasonable length, but it seems to be impossible to fully synopsize this wacky story in fewer lines than the script. Therefore, leaving out 90% of it, the story is as follows.

The film starts in 2010, when Pefidia catches Major Lockjaw asleep in his bunk as her revolutionary gang, the French-75 (modeled on the 1970’s Symbionese Liberation Army but named for the signature weapon of the WW1 era French army) attacks the ICE internment camp for illegal migrants that Lockjaw commands. The inciting moment comes when she holds him at gunpoint and it is immediately clear that being at her mercy arouses the otherwise phlegmatic major. They go back and forth a bit, Tracy/Hepburn style, about Lockjaw’s tentpole, until Perfidia ups the ante by sodomizing him with her handgun. Lockjaw sees her bet, and raises. Far from crushing the major’s spirit, her sexual antics inspire him to epic levels of stalking.

The action takes place some years before #MeToo but even in long ago 2010, sodomizing a bound prisoner with a pistol would have been frowned upon. Therefore it’s an odd quirk of the film that a 2025 audience is expected to accept it as mere revolutionary exuberance on the part of Perfidia. (At the risk of pointing out the obvious, lockjaw makes speech impossible, and perfidy means speaking treacherously, so both parties suffer from impairments of communication.)

The gang successfully gets away, but after that, things move swiftly with Lockjaw and Perfidia. He catches her planting a bomb, extorts her into a sexual relationship in which he wears the metaphorical pants, impregnates her then releases her. She gives birth, and then he regains control over her again when she is busted for a bank robbery. He spends about thirty seconds convincing Perfidia to betray her French 75 compatriots to his Delta Force death squad in exchange for entry into the Federal Witness Protection Program. Lockjaw finally loses her when she bolts for Mexico.

Perfidia’s dweeb boyfriend, a decrepit, white, stoner, bomb maker and revolutionary comrade named Pat “Ghetto” Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) flees with the biracial child he believes to be his daughter. They are among the few survivors of the massacre of The French 75. The movie never attempts to explain why a sexual buccaneer like Perfidia had been sleeping with a meek, inarticulate, ill-groomed and clinically depressed stoner in the first place. Miracles happen, I guess.

Sixteen years later, Pat has descended even further into dependency on alcohol and cannabis, but he has faithfully raised the baby Charlene into a beautiful, mature, and poised high school girl (played by Chase Infiniti, who clearly has a big career waiting for her.) They live in the quiet and idyllic sanctuary city of Baktan Cross, which has seceded from California and the USA. I suspect the name alludes to the town of “Kiltartan Cross”, from Yeats’ fatalistically serene poem, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” another WW1 reference. “

Also in the present day, the now-Colonel Lockjaw finds himself in line for entry into the inner circle of a super-secret, quasi-governmental, WASPy, Aryan-Nation-meets-Skull-and-Bones old boy’s club called The Christmas Adventurers. The lads are uncompromising in their demand for racial purity, so lest discovery of his long-ago dalliance with the Black-as-Black-can-be Perfidia scuttle his chance for membership, Lockjaw sets out with his band of Delta Force guys to invade Baktan Cross to terminate Pat and his own mixed-race love child with extreme prejudice.

Whew! Hold on, we’re getting there. The action acelerates.

After a series of misadventures that include hiding out in a convent of embittered ex-revolutionary pot-smoking African American nuns who go about their work day in full habit, the lovely Charlene is captured by a formidable Mexican bounty hunter hired by Lockjaw.

Meanwhile, Pat escapes capture by the Delta Force raiders with the help of the revered Baktan Cross townie, sensei Benicio del Torre and his skateboarding, karate-kicking, teenage minions.

A zip-tie manacled Charlene bravely faces Lockjaw in the convent’s chapel, where Lockjaw forcibly takes a DNA sample from her and compares it to his own, using a portable DNA matching machine. He tells her, if the test is negative, she’ll be free to go, and if not <ominous shrug>. Needless to say, the test confirms that she is the fruit of Lockjaw’s leathery loins.

Meanwhile, Pat, who we and Charlene, but not he, now know is not in fact her father, is roaming around the countryside in his bathrobe shooting at Delta Force guys as he tries to find his child.

Lockjaw attempts to turn Charlene over to the Mexican bounty hunter to be killed, but the rough old bounty hunter balks, saying he doesn’t do kids. Pressed for time, Lockjaw says something to the effect of, “Ok, maricón, just deliver her to my men and they will take it from there.” I will truly laugh is someone reading this objects to the use of a homophobic slur in the context of a murdering right-wing death squad guy turning a victim over to a professional killer, but this is 2025 so probably someone will.

The bounty hunter reluctantly drops Charlene off with the Delta Force guys, but as he’s about to leave, he takes a better look at the men he’s leaving her with and thinks better of it. It’s not clear why, because he did drop her off so that they could kill her, but with something to the effect of, “Aw fuck this shit,” going through his head, he returns from the parking area and shoots the Delta Force minions, who return the favor before they all die.

Meanwhile, The Christmas Adventurers have gotten wind of Stephen’s hijinks and sent one of their own to take him off the board. Adventurer Tim overtakes him on the road and unloads a shotgun in his face, sending him careening off the road into a dusty desert ravine.

Charlene takes advantage of the chaos to steal the dead bounty hunters’s keys and gun and flees in his car, still cuffed. Unfortunately, as bad luck would have it, she passes Adventurer Tim, who is on his way to ensure that she is disposed of. Clearly, things have not gone to plan, so he gives chase.

The subsequent Hitchcockian high speed chase up and down the steep rollercoaster-like hills is a beautiful piece of cinematography. It’s shot using telephoto, making it look as if the cars are climbing and descending almost vertical hills. Again and again you see an empty road touching the sky just before the nose of a car shoots up from behind the hill. Far in the distance, many hills away, you see Ghetto’s stolen turkey of a vehicle gamely laboring after them.

Realizing that her pursuer will inevitably catch up and shoot her, Charlene cleverly stops her car on the blind side of a hill, just a few feet past the point where it would be visible to her pursuer. She jumps out of the stopped car and hides by the roadside, pointing the bounty hunter’s pistol as Tim comes flying over the hill and rear-ends her parked car at high speed. She puts a bullet in the blood-soaked Adventurer as he stumbles from the wreckage, before Dad pulls up. There’s a tense moment where she almost shoots him too, before they get over it and drive away.

Lockjaw, surprisingly (but only in a formal sense) turns out not to be dead after all, and we next encounter him being inducted into the secret society, his face hideously scarred from his encounter with Adventurer Tim. There is a moment of awkwardness when he must explain that yes, he had a non-white child, but it was the product of rape, so it doesn’t count. His inquisitors are initially nonplussed, but then appear to buy his rather lame explanation, and congratulate him on being inducted into the inner circle if the Christmas Adventurers.

Lockjaw is shown to his beautiful new office, where stretches out in his expensive office chair while his guide excuses himself to fetch the keys for him. Unsurprisingly to anyone who has ever been to a movie, it’s a trick. The “office” turns out to be a gas chamber, and we last see of Lockjaw he is being fed into the building’s incinerator by yet more trusty Delta Force guys.

It’s a fantastic mishmash of every movie cliche from the last century, from the salt-of-the-earth peons of The Magnificent Seven, who were already being mocked in Mel Brooks 1974 Blazing Saddles,” to the implacable Dad of the “Missing” series who must rescue his virginal daughter from her captors. The rough old Mexican killer with the heart of gold; the villain, scarred and blinded in one eye; the plucky girl heroine, who does not know her own true origin, raised in a motherless household; the nuns. It’s endless. Even the Sensei’s skateboarding minions recall the hockey stick wielding demi-demons of Kevin Smith’s 1999 Dogma, and anyone who has spent ten minutes in a movie theater could see that Lockjaw would turn out to be the real father twenty minutes before Perfidia even got morning sickness.

But the post-Modernist symphony of cliches isn’t the most interesting thing, despite it being recursively a cliche itself, which might have been a clever touch twenty-five years ago.

The more interesting thing is the author’s use of those cliches as the icing on a layer cake of the Mandala effect.

If you’re forgotten, “the Mandela effect” is the name of the phenomenon of a counterfactual memory of an historical event being widely shared, often for no obvious reason. It is named for the recollection by most Americans of Nelson Mandala’s tragic death in prison. And tragic his death in prison would have been, had it happened. In fact, Mandala was released very much alive in 1990, and served as South Africa’s first post-apartheid chief executive from 1994 to 1999, during which time he became immensely famous throughout the world, but particularly in the US, because he entertained countless American celebrities while in office. Mandala died in his own bed, old and respected in 2013, almost a quarter century after his release.

It is similarly odd to remember the Symbionese Liberation Army as heroic. At the time they were almost universally regarded as buffoons and crackpots, even among their vicariously embarrassed Marxist co-revolutionary peers. They would be completely forgotten today, but for their signature crime, kidnapping and indoctrinating the teenage heiress Patty Hearst, who was the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, the mega-rich newspaper tycoon who is today best remembered today for being the subject of Orson Welles’s classic roman à clef, Citizen Kane.

More complexly Mandalean is the image of Battle’s latter-day SLA attacking a migrant internment camp. Such camps didn’t yet exist in the early days of the Obama administration. More importantly, most of us (both Left and Right) think of Donald Trump as the great deporter, but the term “Deporter in Chief” was in fact coined for Barak Obama, whose administration would soon begin to build exactly such camps. Only years later was the phrase applied to Donald Trump. Actually, Obama remains to this day the all-time heavyweight champion of deporting. The Mandala effect here is the memory that oppression of immigrants ever got serious negative attention from the Left in that era. Nope–the left never cared much because Obama was our guy.

In fact, so minor was public objection to the mistreatment of immigrants, and so strong was Obama’s record on deportation, that not even Donald Trump thought immigration could be a major issue in the 2016 election. That is, until The Donald spotted the chink in the Democratic armor.

Trump alone noticed that it wasn’t the presence of immigrants that riled up MAGA America, but something much more specific. You have to give the devil his due on this one–it was one of the most brilliant pieces of political judo in history.

The actual irritant that Trump identified and relentlessly poked at was the perceived unfairness of the illegals who slipped over the border being allowed to jump the line while others followed the rules. Only Trump saw that what drove the base crazy was that primitive fury we all feel at someone who jumps the line. He turned that universally shared feeling into a lethal political weapon, rendering the Democrats’ rather ferocious record of deportation moot. Ironically, it would have been easy enough to counter, but because it didn’t fit with the Democratic narrative of racism, nobody in charge noticed the distinction, and the Donald was able to ride the issue to victory.

Just as Zu-Zu says in Capra’s 1946 It’s a Wonderful Life, “Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings,” every time a Democrat said “path to citizenship” the Republicans got another few hundred thousand votes. It wasn’t a secret–a few people screamed it at the time, but the Dems didn’t listen.

Is it ancient history now? Not really. Our lack of a sense of history and our shared unexamined assumptions continue to smooth the right wing path to power today.

This is the bitter fruit of 21st C leftist thinking. Postmodernism is just a slightly moldy formalism around a more general dismissal of the reality of history that is even stronger today. It was the early aesthetic expression of a broader belief in the meaninglessness of human expression that is quintessentially leftist. The belief that history, news, what politicians and statesmen say, indeed what anyone says, has no meaning apart from who the speaker is. If you had to boil the entirety of contemporary American politics down to a single line it would be, “The right lies and the left denies the possibility of truth.”

On the left, our shared story is that MAGA is a grab bag of anti-immigrant, white supremacy, hatred of the welfare/nanny state, and misogyny. We’re so confident that we know who the MAGA people really are that we can dismiss everything that our brothers and sisters actually say.

Are the MAGA talking points stupid? Of course they are! Virtually all political positions on both sides are stupid because politics is a branch of marketing, not an exercise in logic. But under the chaos, each of the major MAGA issues boils down to the first sentence every baby learns to say: “No fair!” And they’re not wrong about that. We should listen better.