VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN
Notes on ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER
very good and fun! …. but i think the hype was if anything counterproductive. i really liked it, but people LOVE this movie. getting the kind of effusive critical/letterboxd praise that i haven’t seen since idk when
that sounds overly harsh, if i’m more down on this than public consensus, it’s only bc public consensus is calling this movie the best one of the 2020s thus far. totally possible to have an opinion that’s sky high but not quite out of orbit
second watch improved it lot for me. still can’t cosign the breathless hyperbole but appreciated it a lot more watching it for its own thing and not thinking about vineland
anchored by some truly great performances. whole cast firing on all cylinders here.
leo is phenomenal, shaggy likeable fuckup stoner with real love for his daughter, in over his head but really trying and with just enough skill and knowhow to have a hint of a fighting chance
so so funny: the vaping, the phone breakdowns, the physical humor when he’s on the run, the frenzied panic contrasted w benicio del toro’s serene benevolence
sean penn is doing a lot as a fascist troop leading the counter-domestic terrorism group, and imo it works. snarled twisting face, trey gowdy haircut, trt muscles and flushed red skin, walking like there’s a stick up his ass (on second viewing gets way more pronounced over course of the movie). a true and honest depiction of a species found all over the usa nowadays, in too many positions of power to name. rfk probably the most famous, but go look at your local police department or car dealership or gym— there he is, stepping out of his lifted truck, taking off his oakleys, changing and manipulating time to his will
teyana taylor great, appreciated her performance more the second time around. carries the first half as assuredly as leo carries the second, a fully-constructed character fighting her battles alone. you have to buy her as a triumphant and then tragic figure for the movie to work, and it does. was hoping she’d return at the end but her disappearance all the more effective at establishing how much she matters.
benicio del toro so self-assured he bends the energy of the film around him like a black hole. chill benevolent radical sensei, a character possibly a bit too cool, feels transported from a different movie, but so feel-good and fitting w the vibe that i can’t hate it. the stretch where he’s in the move (leo meeting him at the dojo to his dui arrest) the strongest stretch for me
little wonder people keep holding him up as the exemplar of correct activism. rule of cool
the military interrogator scary on a level well beyond any of the military or white supremacist guys in part because there is nothing cartoonish about him. if sensei comes from a lighter film, he comes from a far bleaker one. deeply unsettling to look him up and learn that he’s a former homeland security interrogator, not a professional actor. they just put him in front of the camera and told him to do his thing, r lee ermey style
PTA obv a great director. action a highlight (rooftop chase scenes, final road scene), some great blocking, great writing (dialogue a plus), moves incredibly well for a 3 hr film. think the final act is weak, tho, and i feel like his own changes are mostly for the worse. book ending was better and i’m not sure the secret racial purity society worked.
hard to separate my thoughts and feelings on this movie from my thoughts and feelings on vineland. i love vineland, think it’s a great softer more sentimental pynchon, but i think that going into the movie knowing that it’s a vineland adaptation was probably a negative. i was working a little too hard for most of the movie to try to map the themes and characters of the book onto the movie, and i think it negatively affected my enjoyment of the movie first time around
there’s so much to say about the points of departure but for now: i get why pta wanted to change the names to make it clear OBAA is his own thing, but the names are all worse unfortunately lol. this point about knockoff pynchon being more dickensian is 100% correct
funny enough there are some quality pynchonian names here, they’re just in the cast. dijon duenas? starletta dupois?? chase infiniti???
tonally in line w the book but not thematically, if that makes sense. the humor and sentimentality is all there but pointed in very different directions, especially in the final act.
other big points of departure from the book i’m still thinking about
racialized sex: pynchon doesn’t do race really, which on the one hand i’ve always respected knowing your limitations but on the other hand it’s maybe the biggest missing link from his attempts at sketching out american history through his project. (no coincidence the 19th century the only time period he hasn’t covered in a novel, right?) i’ve seen takes that the racialized stuff here is PTA working through his own anxieties, but i think that’s too simple; racializing the leftist/fascist conflict is prob PTA’s most effective choice in that it offers a new axis along which to interpret the central conflict, but i think he the christmas adventurers stuff kinda undercuts that in a sense.
the last act: weakest part of the movie for me, i think book ending is better and more thematically appropriate. just don’t think willa being rescued by the native cop was that effective. there’s a optimism there (racial solidarity/individal moral codes overcoming structural violence?) that imo feels unearned and at odds with wider themes of the movie
eliminating the tv-watching thanatoids: was clearly a resonant point for pynchon in the 80s, but have we just moved past that? idea that “tv is harmful” feels incredibly outdated now but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong; maybe we’ve just accepted we lost that battle and now focus on phones (and now ai) as the current iteration of this trend towards passive apathetic comfort. saw some ppl suggest that phones play similar role in this movie in that they bring about willa’s downfall, but idk if that tracks unless you’re willing to interpret final scene as being harsher on bob than i think it’s trying to be
moving action from california to the border: i actually like this, made a lot of sense for internment camps to be ones audience would recognize as their own. i guess we lost something about CA history and radical histories specifically, but eh
some of the discourse around this movie makes me feel totally lost
oversexualization of black women: even ignoring the people who obviously didn’t know who junglepussy was and didn’t know about the pynchonian source material, really don’t get this critique. lockjaw is the leering obsessive who sees perfidia as a sexual being; her comrades see her as a hero and a mother, in that order. suspect some of this was people projecting their own discomfort with teyana taylor’s body, either their reactions to it or the ways she used it to get what she wanted. perfidia a great character, can’t understand people who are mad she’s not explicitly quoting assata or whatever
torture: yeah no shit everybody rats out their comrades. there’s a scene where bob sits down to watch the battle of algiers lol, PTA’s basically shoving it in your face. one of the greatest leftist movies features multiple examples of algerian revolutionaries breaking under french torture, climaxing in the film’s heroic lead being cornered in a secret room after an algerian, barely able to stand after his interrogation, is forced to leads the french to his hiding place. the french blow the building up and ali la pointe dies. the algerian revolution still wins in the end.
cracking under interrogation is not meant to show the individual failings of those who speak, it’s simply what happens. the revolutionaries know this as gillo pontecorvo knew this, that’s the reason for the codes and passwords.
“the right kinds of activism” or whatever: the french 75 aren’t failures, they get defeated! there’s a difference! sensei has the utmost respect for them, the members still active are depicted as competent and principled, and because of this they’re able to save willa in baktan cross. bob’s a useless fuckup because he’s not involved with them anymore!
also the historical referent here isn’t the weather underground like i keep seeing, it’s the black liberation army! big difference!
big fuzzy thematic thoughts: going back through vineland notes i was struck by the resonance of the past, the payment owed for past sins (even beyond the grave: deathless wraiths walk among us) …. pynchon’s position that there is a history that weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the men and women who try to resist ever-encroaching systems of control, knowing that they are fighting a losing battle against an enemy that has time and money on their side, an enemy that offers a power seductive enough that even some among their number cannot resist it… but there is still a future. there is love and parenthood and a child in the woods with a dog who knows he’s home.
in contrast by centering the revolutionary violence, by using that as the starting point i think pta ends up doing a reverse thing. end theme ends up being that maybe the revolutionary violence of the 1960s has something to offer? while pynchon lived through it, saw the government load up and blast it all away with a full armada and oceans of chain link fence, knows that violence alone cannot be the answer… i think that’s what people are reacting so positively to when they call it a revolutionary film, a movie that takes leftist violence seriously as a starting point feels fresh when it fact it’s dated; it’s taking 80s source material (the book itself looking back to the 60s)
quick hits
banana pancakes reference, bob/pat’s role within the french 47 being the webb traverse-esque explosives expert… pynchon bros up one million
even the dirty work needledrop… there’s a ref to the same song in against the day (p. 397: “Well we are their proletariat, ain’t we,” snarled Darby, “the fools that do their ‘dirty work’ for next to nothing?” )
anybody link one battle after another and james crumley’s mexican tree duck yet? both end with a bad guy who represents fascist corporate order getting assassinated in an office on the top floor of an el paso skyscraper at the very moment he believes he’s obtained a major prize and defeated a ragtag team of washed-up former soldiers. can’t be a coincidence, right? someone ask PTA about this
the movie’s weirdly geographically disorienting if you know el paso. was super confused how bob/sensei drove from norcal to el paso overnight until i realized that only the opening scene is supposed to be in el paso proper, downtown ep was standing in for fictional baktan cross in northern california
praying that chase infiniti has good taste in roles going forward. incredible first performance, can’t wait to see what she does next