*This is completely spoiler free. I am talking about vibes around the happenings, not the happenings themselves.
This weekend I turned in the book to copy edits and filed a proposal for “The Non-Fiction Autism Project,” and with the sudden surfeit of spare time but zero executive function or brainspace to navigate logistics, I went to the movies.
I, along with everybody in the world, went to see the new PTA. I’m not going to get into his entire oeuvre or whether or not Phantom Thread is any good (it’s great; shut up) but knowing there was no way I would get through the week without absorbing some of The Discourse (I loathe spoilers) and knowing there was no way in hell I could troop through almost three-hours of runtime without physically being trapped, I headed to the theater.
Specifically, I went to the 70mm showing at Angelika East where most of the audience were dudes exactly my age +/- five years with a variety of esoteric tote bags and iykyk-type T-shirts.
In any case, when I watch a movie, the things I look out for most are tone and tail.
Tone, is tone. The absolute toughest, slipperiest factor to nail. It’s also why Hollywood and publishing mandates, like, “only hard comedies with an ensemble cast are going,” or else, “books of essays aren’t selling,” are so annoying and ultimately full of shit because whenever a singular voice comes barreling in like a dynamo everybody shuts the fuck up, pretends to have fucked with the vision the whole time, lauds them for how much of a paradigm-shattering iconoclast they are and then turns around to manufacture exactly the same thing except as a derivative, algo-mutant facsimile that barely scratches the itch as if that shit will work again.
Then there’s tail. Tail is how long the movie stays with me which, interestingly, has less to do with how much I enjoyed the movie at the time. It’s how long the film takes up residence in my mind and haunts my thoughts and the way I look at the world.
Both are signs of true mastery in my book.
For my inaugural movie review on this stack, please know I have no particularly subversive take of this movie. It’s fucking incredible. Ramming it into my brain felt wonderful.
Please also know that this will all be spoiler free. I don’t know when movie reviews became recaps but that shit is annoying and I wish it would stop.
The first time I saw the preview for One Battle After Another, I was annoyed. There was something about all the explosions and the guns and Teyana Taylor’s pregnant stomach and Leo doing what looked like his best “The Dude,” that gave me the preemptive exhaustion of all those auteur films that came out right after Covid.
But now I can see how impossible it would have been to cut a trailer of this film to indicate just how fucking awesome it is.
One Battle After Another was exactly what I had a hankering for. What so many of us had a hankering for. Why everyone who went and saw it opening weekend had so few words to say beyond: Yes.
It’s like eating crunchy snacks to the power of a billion or using dynamite to crack your knuckles. It was cathartic as shit and we are all of us pent up as hell.
As you know, the fascists are winning and they are everywhere. And just the other night I was saying to my partner right in front of our snitch-opp phones that I just wished that the Left were more effective at demoralizing the Right. Or that the only arrow in our quiver—which is exactly how a soft-ass lib would put it—wasn’t an incredibly high-minded, bloviating screed, just rippling with academic rigor about the white/cis/het/basic takeover of literature, dance music, art, Dimes Square, the West Village, with nothing particularly material to do beyond condemnation and complaint.
It calls to mind as so many occasion do, that Toni Morrison quote: The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.
This PTA movie is doing work. It’s also not not problematic. It isn’t not racist. But it is racist in exactly the way Hollywood is racist. And Hollywood for all its fuckshit was deployed effectively for its utmost synergistic good here. Especially this casting where we are never entirely compelled to forget we are watching Leonardo DiCaprio, Teyana Taylor and Benicio del Toro.
They do not disappear into their roles. In fact, they are just turned all the way up to StarPower 11. And this is fascinating to me for its deliberateness and efficacy.
We all suspect that, spiritually, Leonardo DiCaprio is one bong rip away from calling everyone homie or ése. In the same way that it feels emotionally plausible that Benicio del Toro would love to be called Sensei. Also that Teyana Taylor is a superhuman caliber of unequivocal baddie who is so mesmerizing onscreen that not weaponizing her appeal would be tantamount to Chekov’s gun going unfired.
There is a discourse to be had about the conscription of Blackness for this particular movie’s ends. There is certainly a Tarantino-adjacent overfamiliarity and a glee to it. There is also a Coen Brothers nod to the idiosyncratic euphony of the character names. And admittedly if an Asian woman had been cast in the film I would be girding my loins and hyper vigilant about how that shit was going to play out with very little faith that it would fare well but admittedly I would also be pumped for that actor because fuck it, it’s PTA, but also because I do believe there is a greater good at stake here. (Instead we have no Asian representation which at least feels super America.).
What this movie absolutely crushes is that it made the Left look cool.
This.
Fucking finally.
The Left is so obsessed with being smarter than them but more vitally we are cooler than them. This is what we keep forgetting. This is what they distract us from.
We already know that they don’t care about being dumb, they care about looking dumb. And time and time again they’ve made us look like inert, stroppy, pearl-clutching blowhards who cannot believe that they Just. Keep. Breaking. The. Rules.
The ongoing fascist agenda of unfettered genocidal profiteering, stripping civil liberties and looting infrastructure, dehumanizing everyone who isn’t a white, rich, lunatic are large-scale humanitarian crises but it also doesn’t negate the other problem which is that we are forcibly exposed to a level of irredeemable swaglessness that is the fucking Right.
There is so much that is foundationally unforgivable about them. But Jesus fucking christ it is absolutely unconscionable that we are somehow also losing an optics war against these dipshits.
