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On this Black Friday Weekender, Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman pour a post-Thanksgiving drink and dive headfirst into Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film One Battle After Another, a loose adaptation of Pynchon’s Vineland that somehow nails our political moment a little too well. The two break down the French 75 as a failed revolutionary underground, Sean Penn’s Lockjaw as a walking case study in self-loathing authoritarian masculinity, and the Christmas Adventurers Club as a country club for Nazis who also run everything. They get into how the movie stitches together 60s and 70s radicalism, modern fascism, secret societies, ICE raids, false flags, and Benicio del Toro’s quietly perfect sensei, then ask what it all says about living through America’s own near future right now. If you care about politics and movies, this one is basically a Muckrake text.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Mutt Craig Podcast.
I'm Jerry D.A. Sexton.
I'm here with my dear friend, Nick Houselman.
It is Black Friday, November 28th.
We're recording this late because of the Thanksgiving holiday.
How are you, bud?
How was your Thanksgiving?
My Thanksgiving was wonderful.
It was so nice to be around people and, you know, really just have good food and good wine.
And then I went to sleep early and woke up early.
Everything is going swimmingly.
You're living the dream.
Yeah, I mean, the weather here is beautiful.
Okay, we're back to normal Californian standards.
Yeah, I got to tell you.
I mean, you know, nothing like being outside early this morning and just enjoying the sunshine.
So I'm sorry that anyone else is having to struggle with some terrible weather, but, you know, come out here.
I'm cold as hell.
Is it that cold where you are?
It's cold.
Wow.
I'm cold.
And that's okay.
I like it cold.
I'm happy for the winters to be getting here.
I'll say that.
It's manly.
It's something.
It is certainly something.
Well, we are recording this again on Friday.
Apologies for the late posting, but hopefully you will forgive us because we have a really, really good movie to talk about.
And what we usually do is that we will pick a movie.
We'll watch it.
We'll talk about both the filmmaking aspects, the writing of it, but also the political themes of all of it.
And the movie that we're talking about today is this year's release from Paul Thomas Anderson called One Battle After Another.
We're going to be dissecting not just the movie as a whole, but there is so much to talk about here when it comes to revolutionary politics, far-right politics and philosophy, just secret societies, revolutionary violence, all kinds of things.
This is a ripe movie to discuss.
A reminder, if you haven't already, head over to patreon.com slash my craigpodcast to become a patron, to gain full access to this entire conversation every weekend or episode, as well as to support the show, gain access to our community, all of that good stuff.
Nick, One Battle After Another is Paul Thomas Anderson's latest movie.
It is a loose adaptation of the 1990 novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon.
This is his second adaptation of a Pynchon novel after Inherent Vice.
Inherent Vice was a much more true adaptation.
This goes in wild directions that we're going to have a discussion about.
But before we get into the themes and the discussions we need to have around this, including revolution and right-wing reactionary politics, how do you feel about this movie?
You know, I thought it's an incredible movie, incredible amount of filmmaking.
And I'm always aware of like the actual filmmaking of it as well and how successful that is.
And a lot of times it'll be a movie maybe I don't even really like, but because the filmmaking is done so well, it's probably why I don't like it because it's gotten me into some state that they wanted me to be in.
And it's impressive how they could sustain the intensity of this movie with a lot of different, you know, not tricks, but they're, you know, sort of using editing and music to develop that.
But the roller coaster ride that he puts you through is certainly not what you would expect from a typical PTA movie, but you still get some of the PTA goodness in there anyway with it.
It can't help itself to put it in there.
So overall, just a really fantastic movie that, again, is also as present as a movie has ever been in my mind.
And somehow it's able to call stuff that was happening.
You know, they probably filmed it a year and a half ago and they knew exactly what was going to be going on somehow.
And so again, just it's just multi-leveled impressiveness, if that's a phrase.
I'm a Paul Thomas Anderson guy.
He is my favorite filmmaker of this modern era and one of my favorite favorites of all time.
I was very excited about this movie.
You know, some of his movies are better than others, like any other filmmaker, how it works.
This is, there's so much of what you expect from Paul Thomas Anderson, but he also stretched himself in a way that he hasn't done in past movies.
There's action there.
It feels much more like what you would call like a blockbuster movie, something that would be more mainstream.
A lot of his movies are very auteurist, right?
There's a lot of that stuff going on.
But when it comes to, and for people who haven't seen it, we are going to talk about the movie as a whole.
So there are going to be spoilers in this, but I recommend you go watch it, not just because it is, and it's not a perfect movie.
There are a couple of gripes that I have with this thing.
One that stands out really, really large for me, but we'll get to that in a bit.
But I think it is one of the best movies to come out in a very, very long time.
And it is, for anybody who listens to this podcast, the stuff that this movie gets into, this is a muckrake podcast movie.
There is so much for us to get into.
Again, not just with like leftist revolutionary ideas, but the philosophy and psychology and operation of not just capitalism, but far-right figures.
And I thought in that way, it's Nick and is it fair that this is supposed to be said in the near future?
The timelines are a little bit weird, but it is within a fascist regime that is anti-immigrant, that has shut down the border, that is using secret police and the military in order to carry out capitalistic white supremacist plans.
And in that way, this is one of the most pertinent movies that I've ever seen.
Like, not just in any moment, but this moment especially.
I'm shocked.
I was shocked by how perfectly he nailed that.
If you care about politics and you care about America right now, I feel like this is a must-watch.
Right.
And they don't specify, and it covers a range of years, too.
It starts in the beginning in whatever present or time that is present, and then it goes 15 or 16 years in the future from there.
What's interesting to me, though, is we don't necessarily have revolutionary groups that are carrying out bombings of buildings, at least as far as I know.
And I think I pretty much pay attention.
Are you aware?
Like, because this is sort of the fever dream of Antifa.
If you were to ask Trump and those people, they would probably sort of describe what you see in this movie, which is the French 75, a group that is organized and does have plans, and they do these things in a really methodical way.
And that's what made it interesting in terms of what timeframe this is, because that's the one thing that doesn't quite fit with what we're doing now.
But we had that.
You know, we did have the Weathermen and the Underground, like, you know, back in the late 60s and the early 70s.
So it's kind of interesting if he's fudging that or not, or trying to kind of bridge a couple of different eras and then add his own sort of utopian vision of it, but it still felt extremely real.
There's an anachronistic quality to it.
And what you just brought up, I think, is exactly what's happening in this movie, which is the French 75, which is a revolutionary underground group, is attacking immigrant detainment centers and the military and secret police that are carrying out that type of fascistic oppression.
It took the weather underground and those types of revolutionary movements of the 60s and 70s and put it into the near past, right?
In order to kind of have that revolutionary fervor.
And then the meat of the movie takes place in a time that reflects basically what we've got now, maybe a little bit more advanced.
And it puts it in that time period in order to kind of play around with what happens when you have failed revolutionaries who are living in a time that has been birthed from their failure and what happens in terms of like your mindset, you as a person, what it is that you go moving forward.
So it is anachronistic and it really creates, I think, a very interesting portrait of politics that is living and vivid and also does what I think all great art does, which makes you consider you, your role, your preconceived notions, and everything that's going on in the world.
And I think in that way, it does more in terms of that kind of art than anything that I've seen in a very long time.
Yeah, very well said.
It's really when you start to merge the political environment we're in with the artistic sense of what you can do in a film.
Yeah, rarely do we have that kind of synthesis that we see here.
So yeah, I mean, it's hard to imagine.
And the French 75 was interesting because I looked up the significance of that.
I don't know if you know what this is.
It was one of the first machine guns ever invented.
And so, you know, if you're going to be in a revolutionary group, you're going to need a clever name, right?
Like they always have some interesting thing that has a backstory.
And so I found that fascinating, especially because one of the most arresting shots they have, and this is beautifully shot, by the way.
And most of the time, we're not even aware necessarily of the camera on what's going on, but there's always going to be PTA flourishes of handheld or city cam shots.
But the most arresting shot, I think, in the entire movie is of our main character who's completely pregnant, firing a machine gun in the middle of the field.
And it's an arresting image where you don't normally see somebody nine months pregnant, like ready to pop any moment, full-on machine gun.
The entire body is quivering in the middle of this field while they're practicing, you know, doing their drills for, you know, being revolutionaries.
Fascinating stuff.
Yeah.
So let's go ahead and start with the beginning of the movie.
You know, like most movies that work, this is divided up into three acts.
The beginning of it takes place in a recent past in which the French 75 are an active revolutionary group that are attacking military installations, bombing federal buildings, things of that nature.
We have three main characters at the start of this movie.
Pat Calhoun, who is Leonardo DiCaprio.
We have Perfidia Beverly Hills, who you just mentioned, who is a black female revolutionary.
And then we have Stephen Lockjaw, who is played by Sean Penn, who is an authoritarian military figure who is in charge of an immigrant detainee base that the French 75 attack at the beginning of the movie.
They bomb it.
They loose all of the people who have been detained.
It is a really, there's so much kinetic energy that's taking place in the beginning.
And you can tell it also gets sort of mixed up between violence and sex and power and sort of a shaping of roles.
But we have a beginning where Pat Calhoun, who is Leonardo DiCaprio, is setting these bombs in this liberation.
And Perfidia Beverly Hills gets the drop on Lockjaw, who is Sean Penn, and sexually humiliates him and takes him hostage.
They carry out multiple bombings, multiple liberations, things like that.
But over time, Lockjaw, Sean Penn, manages to find Perfidia Beverly Hills, catches her in the act of getting ready to bomb a federal building.
And then the two of them engage in a questionable affair.
There's a power dynamic that's taking place here.
Eventually she gets pregnant and she ends up leaving.
She, she takes off uh, you know, escapes away from things, takes a deal with Lockjaw uh, after a failed um bank robbery, takes a deal in order to betray the entirety of the French 75.
She disappears into witness protection and Pat Calhoun, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, becomes Bob Ferguson, which is where we'll get into the second act of this thing.
But the initial revolutionary violence, the dynamics of it, I think there's stuff to talk about here.
It is a very, you brought up her shooting a machine gun while pregnant.
This is a very, very pregnant first act in terms of things to talk about.
Yeah.
I mean, let's figure out where we want to start then.
There's so much to talk about.
I think one of the most genius parts of this of this film is that they'll set up extremely recognizable situations.
And we've seen this before in movies.
And then heighten, raise, alter change to the nth degree, which you would never, in a surprising, shocking even way, which just continues to make it more engrossing.
So for instance, she comes upon, and I thought, by the way, when they go to release these immigrants who are in detention, they're not releasing them.
They're actually going to take them somewhere.
They're picking them, putting them in a truck and driving them somewhere to save them.
I thought a couple of different things were interesting, which was it's sort of a treatise on how poorly prepared these ICE style military brigades are to actually do their jobs.
They waltz in there with art with no resistance at all.
And they don't really make a big deal of that necessarily, but it seems clear to me, like, Lockjaw is asleep, you know, in his little trailer.
You know, there's not no resistance.
And so the scene where she approaches Lockjaw is fascinating because it would have been a typical hands up, get over there, get your knees, put this zip tie on your legs.
And instead, yes, we don't have to get into the details, but she sexually humiliates the guy, which also then sets up another sort of interesting dynamic in terms of relationships, because you're going to have that relationship between Lockjaw and Perfidia, which is a white man and a black woman.
And then you're going to set up the relationship that's already existed before the movie starts between the Leonardo Caprio's character and Pat and Perfidia as well.
And it's the dichotomy between Lockjaw and Pat in terms of what they represent of the white person, white male in this country, I thought was interesting too to unpack in terms of the political station of that.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, it does.
And there's a lot here.
I think when it comes, I think one of the most glaring flaws in this movie for me is the portrayal of Perfidia Beverly Hills.
I do not think that there is enough time spent with her to understand her motivations.
There's like a very aggressive sexuality that is mixed with revolutionary fervor.
And that actually is an accurate portrayal of what happens in revolutionary movements.
There is an old saying, and I'm going to butcher it right now, but it's that fucking is the same as firing a gun, right?
And that there is so much in terms of like sexual politics, sexual liberation.
There is a really uncomfortable, inextricable relationship between violence and sex that sometimes our culture deals with, but they don't really.
Like we don't like to get near that.
So it makes sense that these things are taking place.
But what I think it also makes apparent are a couple of things.
One, the French 75, they don't have a plan.
Like at no point in the beginning of the movie, when we're talking about this revolutionary group, the French 75, their plans are to do things in the moment, but we never have an actual discussion about what their revolution would create.
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