The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are “status quo” is the catastrophe.
Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History
It belongs to totalitarian thinking to conceive of a final conflict at all. There is no finality in history—the story told by it is a story with many beginnings but no end.
Hannah Arendt, The Ex-Communists
Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
History is the object of a construction whose place is formed not in homogenous and empty time, but in that which is fulfilled by the here-and-now. For Robespierre, Roman antiquity was a past charged with the here-and-now, which he exploded out of the continuum of history. The French revolution thought of itself as a latter day Rome. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a past costume.
Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History
No specific time-setting is marked out in the course of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2025 film, One Battle After Another (OBAA); no one ever exactly spells out when it is that the movie takes place. A plain and common sensical reading of the film might appear to situate its events in the “present”—in other words, in a chronological default that does not ordinarily require further specification. But in place of the usual invisibility of such presentness in narrative art, the problem of timeliness in OBAA is conspicuous. The style and gaze of the film brings attention to its historical entanglements. Its status as a movie “about our times” is decisive and unavoidable. Yet, the very content of “our times” twists that perspective back around on itself. We live amongst a sense of indeterminacy and flux that fills the political object of OBAA with a void, and that void in turn becomes a deeper inner object of apprehension. In basic terms, this is a film that is concerned with progress and revolution from the standpoint of their historical absence.
Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, which OBAA loosely adapts, was itself rooted in a moment of revolutionary absence. It captures a stagnation which suffused the remnants of New Left radicalism who were left behind by Reaganism and the conservative ascent of the 1980s. A curious feature of OBAA lies in the extent to which it retains the specificity of this atmosphere even as it moves its story forward to a contemporary political frame. The French 75—the left-wing revolutionaries of OBAA—carry on with the aesthetic trappings of the New Left and hippiedom in a manner that sometimes makes them feel lifted straight from Pynchon’s own exaggerated depiction. Such echoes also persist throughout the visual dimension of OBAA. The brazen use of the style of action films from the 1970s is, of course, very evocative on this point. As are its depictions of free love, recreational drugs, and glimpses of the distinctive fashion of the 1970s.
As far as literal chronology goes, and taking it as a given that the “present” of OBAA is somewhere around 2025, the originary past of the French 75 from at least sixteen-years earlier would seem to encompass a period in the realm of 2007 through 2009. That is, they exist amongst a historical milieu defined by the space between the 2000s anti-war left and the then-emergent Occupy left. And various flashes of this history certainly appear in the film. More exactly, as argued in a convincing and important essay by Eric Ross, OBAA concerns itself to a large degree with the disappointments of the Obama administration:
However, certain features of the film complicate the logic of this interpretation. The border wall that appears during the raid conducted by the French 75 in the opening scene of the film is not a medium-sized chainlink fence or concrete wall of the type that was typical on the US-Mexico border during the late 2000s, but rather the infamous 10-metre steel bollard fence design that was standardised by the Trump administration. The technological landscape of the film is also incongruent with the early Obama years: contemporary cars and current smartphones are both depicted throughout the opening act of the film without any regard to their anachronistic implications. The opening of the film is, in some ways, more as if the physical present managed to reach back and occupy the emotional standpoint of the Obama years.
The point of considering these historical entanglements is not to emphasise any epoch as singularly important for the film’s mythos. The attitude of OBAA towards the past is not simple enough to be reduced to either nostalgia for the New Left or regret in the aftermath of the Obama left. The film presents a world where history accumulates like sediment—where the dead ends of the past pile up layer-by-layer without ever “moving on” or being displaced by the foundation of a new future. This is the difference between “history” as the merely factual causal past as next to “history” as the ever-present space that delimits the coetaneous possibilities of action. Whenever history appears as the latter, it loses the sense of belonging to the past; the circumstances of history instead reappear as the constitutive material of the present. To “look backwards” while fixated on this form of history is to delve into the mines of memory with an eye towards reformulating the structure of current experience. The world of OBAA is made up of exactly this kind of material.
The left that appears in OBAA is not reducible to the left of any particular epoch—not even the contemporary left per se. Instead, the recurrent failures of the left congeal and twist together as a form of self-address. Through this device, the film becomes a story of generational burdens and legacies; Perfidia Beverly Hills comes from a “long line of revolutionaries” (a contradiction in terms if revolution is to be understood as the finale of history); Bob’s fight for Willa is a fight for the inherited right to fight again—to pass on the torch of past failures. The French 75 continues a long fight that was already passed down from generation to generation, going back beyond either the New Left or the conflicts that Bob ritually revisits through common leftist fixations such as The Battle of Algiers (1966).
Beyond the prologue section of the film, OBAA orients itself towards the future in the sense of the arrival of a new generation. The movement of successive generations through history implicates the conceptual core of revolutionary politics “because revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.”1 A revolution sets out to establish a new foundation upon which to rebuild the flow of history. The entry of a new generation into the revolutionary tradition is a rupture in time and therefore a momentous opportunity to begin something new. This is why, for Perfidia, “this pussy right here, what’s it for? War.” To reproduce is to add another layer atop the ruinous mountain of the left, in the hope that this next addition will be the one that finally explodes the dam of history and leads to a revolutionary break. The film’s peculiar sense of timelessness as well as its representation of generational tensions are both to be read in light of this accumulative movement. There is a kind of resentment and cynicism on the part of Bob’s generation at the fact that their legacy is one of stagnation. All that they have left for the future is the same old fights without victory, and their children are tired of even taking up that much.
In the gaze of OBAA, the lack of a revolution in the present is the material with which it fills up its sense of past and future. This stands in contrast to the usual left-liberal mythology of linear progress; “the concept of the progress of the human race in history is not to be separated from the concept of its progression through a homogenous and empty time.”2 Each generation adds new struggles and new “rights” to the sediment of historical “progress,” but the past haunts the film as a reminder of the overriding struggle that never resolves and never moves on. In this sense, progress is the one thing that is never reliably permanent in its history. Each new “victory” in the eyes of left-liberal progress is reimagined here as a succession of new struggles that are subsumed within the same old timeless struggle for an absent revolution. Without revolution, progress is a house of cards in a world filled with the potential for reactionary backlash:
Therefore learn how to see and not to gape.
Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
To act instead of talking all day long.
The world was almost won by such an ape!
The nations put him where his kind belong.
But don’t rejoice too soon at your escape –
The womb he crawled from still is going strong.
The salience of the film’s viewpoint in our current moment depends exactly on its ability to act as a corrective to this ideology of progress. A significant feature of politics in the 21st century thus far has been that even the most dramatic social and technological upheavals do not unseat the general atmosphere of being politically stuck in place. OBAA is a story that reimagines Pynchon’s own idea of leftist malaise in the 1980s as if it were timeless and ongoing. Whether intended or otherwise, this timeless timeliness precisely speaks to the sensation today that change itself—as in, mere historical movement—is insufficient. The past no longer has the power to seem like a series of ordered steps that we have climbed on the path towards the liberal end of history. The more common mood today is instead that politics cannot proceed until there is a fundamental rupture in this historical contiguity. The absent revolution therefore fills the past with a sense of permanence and immediacy, as if history were just one battle after another with no capacity to settle questions and begin something new. It feels as though the film embodies the misery of asking ourselves, are you really still fighting these same old fights?
Notes
- Hannah Arendt, On Revolution ↩︎
- Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History ↩︎
