Logical Meme

NOTE: Spoilers ahead.

I. Overview

One Battle After Another opens with a prologue set 16 years prior to the current day, which sets up the decades-long chain of events that are to follow. We see a fictional, far-Left, militant, revolutionary group called the French 75 (based on a fusion of the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army) engaged in the violent ‘liberation’ of the equivalent of an ICE detention facility. The establishment shot to this first sequence is the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego (a real federal detention facility), which is denoted in a title card, and the film’s soundtrack provides the requisite swelling-strings stylization, the sort of conveyor-belt “feel sad here” cue we’re accustomed to in Hollywood’s endless production of Holocaust films featuring gaunt prisoners in concentration camps (except in the case of Mexican illegals, the body type is generally the opposite of gauntness).

In the wake of the violent January 2026 anti-ICE protests in Minnesota that further divided the nation, One Battle subsequently received a slew of Academy Award nominations, winning Best Picture, Best Director (Paul Thomas Anderson), Best Adapted Screenplay (Paul Thomas Anderson), and Best Supporting Actor (Sean Penn). These outcomes come as no real surprise, given Hollywood’s penchant for trendy political content and public virtue-signaling.

However, at its core One Battle is a White male liberal’s glorification of radical Black politics and, to an odd and striking degree, Black female hypersexuality. Anderson awkwardly enmeshes his film with a miscegenation fetish and a portrayal of militant Leftwing radicalism as having a racialized sexual dimension, of sexual ‘liberation’ being an essential component of revolutionary politics. Secondarily, the film elevates Mexican illegal immigrants to a near-sacred status. Collectively, these representations of non-White groups amount to a cringe-inducing romanticization of the Other, all of which is further amplified by a one-dimensional and mystifyingly juvenile caricature of the police and military as ‘fascist’ thugs wantonly committing summary executions and getting sexually aroused by Black women pressing loaded guns against them. It’s all so very strange.

Such characterizations are informative, however, in revealing the modern Left’s current morality play. Here lies a paranoid, conspiratorial mindset, and an emotional rendering of Black and Brown groups’ respective ‘persecutions’ in a ‘fascist’ America. In today’s Cultural Marxism, which might be more accurately called Identity Marxism, traditional Marxist conflict theory (of oppressor vs oppressed) is applied to identity groups rather than just economic classes. This post-1960s trend centers on identity politics — focusing on race, gender, and sexuality — to create a matrix of oppression, a blueprint from which one can restructure society.

Beyond its boilerplate agitprop qualities, One Battle is more interesting when looked at as just one more instance of Hollywood’s many liberal revenge fantasies against White America. One Battle does this in much the same way that films such as Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) or Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025) do.^[1]

Liberal film critic Richard Brody describes One Battle as “a work of grand symbolic design” and speaks for many progressive fans of the film when he interprets Anderson’s alternate history narrative in hyperbolic terms. Anderson, he writes, “looks profoundly beyond the immediate terms of his fiction to reach powerful insights regarding the horrors of the moment” (Brody, 2025). The film attempts to juxtapose absurdist political satire (primarily of conservatism, à la Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove) with earnest Leftist preaching and hand-wringing, but the stark contrasts in style — correlated with the respective political positions — only serves to highlight the film’s didacticism. In short, One Battle captures the contorted, paranoid psyche and moral framework of today’s Left and stands as the most influential liberal moral panic film of the past year.

II. Age of Anxiety & The Leftist Moral Panic

It is not exactly a new nor controversial thesis to say that our culture feels unmoored. Among the Western nations, the crisis of post-industrial late modernity is real and its causes multifold. We can divide these causes into internalized and externalized factors. The external factors are objectively external (e.g., atomization & social fragmentation; mass third world immigration; feminization of culture; digital information overload; A.I.) while the internalized factors are just that: attitudes and beliefs altered within individuals and, by extension, society as a whole. From a Voegelinian perspective^[2], we can see a loosely causative and almost circular relationship to these internal factors, some of which include: alienation => digital anxiety => narcissism => epistemic instability => conspiracy theorizing => gnosticism => radicalization (i.e., activist transformation of the world). The Left and the Right of course react to the external factors in vastly different ways, and so internalize their subsequent anxieties differently. With respect to how the Left reacts to these external factors – that is, how they internalize associated anxieties into their psyches (and their art) — One Battle serves as an archetypal example.

In The End of Ideology (1960), Daniel Bell argued that in prosperous democracies, the grand, transformative political ideologies of the 19th and early 20th centuries — the ideologies which aimed to radically reshape society (e.g., Marxism, Nazism) — no longer inspire mass commitment. Revolutionary appeals to the working class were effectively diffused by Keynesianism and an expanding welfare state. Bell and likeminded thinkers anticipated that, in the West, politics would shift toward pragmatic, incremental, piecemeal problem-solving — technical adjustments, expert-driven reforms, and pluralist negotiation — rather than sweeping ideological visions or eschatological promises of utopia. In the U.S., this has largely been true: the Leftist radical activism of the 1960s-1970s (e.g., Weather Underground, Black Panthers) faded into insignificance, eventually becoming little more than touchpoints of cultural nostalgia, much like the Hippies.

Unlike in the 1960s, among today’s influential Leftists there is no explicit call for revolution per se, at least none with any real traction, no political manifesto akin to Marx’s to rally behind and serve as a foundational organizational text. Leftist propaganda today is delivered in a more personalized and individualized form, commensurate with our social media age of curated information flows. If there is anything resembling a unifying ideology for today’s Left, it is Wokeness. This presents itself as a hazy and inexact form of moral indignation, one that collectively coalesces around Anti-Whiteness. Far more so than class, today’s Left is animated by identity politics surrounding race and gender.

In The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955), Raymond Aron argued that Leftist ideology functions like a secular religion, immune to evidence and hostile to dissent. Marxism became the “opium” of Western intellectuals, offering moral exaltation, historical certainty, and a sense of belonging while obscuring the layers and complexities of political reality. Aron argued that the Left had become a moral identity rather than a coherent political program: intellectuals equated “Left” with justice and “Right” with reactionism, fascism, racism, and the like. While Aron’s book is chiefly a dissection of French left-wing conformism and intellectual life in the 1940s–1950s, it has predictive value when evaluating the modern Left in the U.S., which has in many ways begun to parallel the trajectory of 1960s French Leftism, not so much in revolutionary ambitions (e.g., May 1968) but in the spiritual despair, nihilism and narcissism that underlies it.^[3] The influential conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, who witnessed the May ’68 riots while in Paris, has described them as “a kind of adolescent insouciance, a throwing away of all customs, institutions, and achievements, for the sake of a momentary exultation which could have no lasting sense save anarchy” (Scruton, 2003).

So, might we be in the early stages of a resurgent, 1960s-style, radical activism among the Left… a Version 2.0? The Far Left has made serious inroads toward control of the Democratic Party: younger generations adept at social media (AOC, Mamdani, etc.) are shaping the Party’s intrinsic national message, which in turn changes the Party’s platform, actualized policies, and lastly and sometimes reluctantly, the stated positions of the Party’s elders themselves. (As an example, one need only look at the radical leftward change in position on illegal immigration that figures such as Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Hilary Clinton have displayed from the mid-1990s to the present). Particularly among the young, there is also the Left’s increasing propensity and willingness to use violence to achieve political goals (Antifa rioting; the assassination of Charlie Kirk; two assassination attempts on Donald Trump; the Left’s lionization of Luigi Mangione, who murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson; numerous attempts to murder ICE agents; etc.), which comports with the political message of One Battle.^[4]

III. Weather Underground + Black Liberation Army = French 75

In One Battle, the fictional, far-Left, militant, revolutionary group called the French 75 is based on a fusion of the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army. The title One Battle After Another was itself taken from a Weather Underground missive written by Bernardine Dohrn in 1969. In a February 2026 interview^[5], the ever-unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist (and Obama mentor) Bill Ayers effusively praises Paul Thomas Anderson’s film One Battle After Another (2025) and asserts that Anderson “obviously read everything about the Weather Underground. He obviously listened to our son Zade Dohrn’s podcast Mother Country Radicals. He obviously researched Assata Shakur and the Black Liberation Army.” Ayers argues that Anderson, in taking the now-mythic iconography of 1960s radicalism and placing it in a contemporary timeframe, un-freezes this chapter of American history from cultural nostalgia and makes it relevant for our current times, almost as a call to action.

“The title One Battle After Another,” Ayers says in an eye-opening part of the interview, “is taken from a speech Bernardine [Dohrn] gave… The context of the speech was explaining how we can be defeated but we have to keep going”, i.e., we must fight one battle after another.^[6] What Ayers is referring to isn’t a traditional speech but a revolutionary statement written by Dohrn in the October 21, 1969 edition of FIRE!, the Weather Underground’s propaganda-style publication that became associated with the terrorist group after it literally went underground.^[7] The statement reads:

On Monday, October 6, a pig statue honoring the murderers of Chicago strikers was blown to bits. On Tuesday, October 7, the head of the Chicago Pig Sergeants Association said that “SDS has declared war on the Chicago Police — from here on in it’s kill or be killed.” On Wednesday, October 8 a white fighting force was born in the streets of pig city… We came to Chicago to join the other side — to stop talking and start fighting… to destroy the motherfucker from the inside.

There were only 500 of us, but we forced Pig Daley to call in the Guard… We did what we set out to do, and in the process turned a corner. FROM HERE ON IN IT’S ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER — WITH WHITE YOUTH JOINING IN THE FIGHT AND TAKING THE NECESSARY RISKS. PIG AMERIKA — BEWARE: THERE’S AN ARMY GROWING RIGHT IN YOUR GUTS, AND IT’S GOING TO HELP BRING YOU DOWN. DID THAT PIG SAY KILL OR BE KILLED?

What can we infer from this? Well, it would appear that Anderson either named his film One Battle After Another after encountering Dorhn’s rant himself or after someone in his circle of family/friends suggested the title after they had read Dohrn’s rant. In either case, it is implausible that Anderson did not know of Dohrn’s rant when deciding to name his movie. Given Anderson’s auteur status as a writer/director, and the absolute (and rare) creative control he has over his filmmaking process, it would be far too coincidental otherwise. Furthermore, any doubts can be laid to rest when we consider that Anderson’s script has the Perfidia character use a phrase from the above Dohrn rant: In her “declaration of war” to the guards of the migrant detention facility, she characterizes her violent activism as itself a natural reaction. “We’re here to right your wrongs, motherfucker. You got an army growing in your fucking guts, and you put it there.”

This, in turn, leads us to wonder if Anderson’s militant radicalism is far deeper than he publicly reveals. It’s either that or his turning a blind eye to the Weather Underground’s ideological justification for violence signals a stunning naivety. In any event, the film in no uncertain terms depicts domestic terrorism committed by militant Leftists in a sympathetic light.

It is important to remember the extent to which the Jewish-dominated Weather Underground leadership sanctioned genocidal levels of violence, when the time came. Larry Grathwohl, an FBI informant who infiltrated the highest ranks of the Weather Underground, reported how the group’s leadership estimated that, once the Revolution had succeeded in the United States, they would need to kill 25 million people. Grathwohl writes: “I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of whom have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well-known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people… And they were dead serious” (Kengor, 2013).

It is also important to remember how the Weather Underground’s leadership believed it to ultimately be their duty to step aside and allow Blacks and Browns to be the revolutionary vanguard. Some of this sentiment was driven by frustration with the reactionism of the Nixon-era White working class, but the stronger sentiment was that this willful dispossession of leadership was a moral imperative. “We believed that the revolution led by Black and brown people was imminent,” notes one former Weather Underground member, “and it was our job to convince working-class whites to act as foot soldiers” (Reeves, 2026). Lastly, it cannot be overemphasized just how pathologically anti-White the Weather Underground was in their ideology and rhetoric, which in many ways anticipated our own Woke era’s anti-Whiteness.

Of course, none of this is on display in One Battle, just milder, coded allusions within an overall irresponsible liberal revenge fantasy of a film. “This fantasy may coincide with contemporary turmoil,” writs Armond White, “but its mixture of political absurdity, comic bloodshed, and racial farce merely exploits Millennial confusion” (White, 2025). For example, among the coded references is how, throughout the film, saying “Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, Hooterville Junction!” serves as a passcode for French 75 members to identify one another. Within the film, that’s as far as the reference goes, but in the 1960s, these sitcoms (with “Hooterville Junction” being a substitute for “Petticoat Junction”) were set in rural White locales, antithetical to Black urban locales, and so became a target of rage by Black militants. This exact phrase (along with other cultural references to Whites) is used in Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 black liberation song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, which can be heard in One Battle and which, lyrically, drips with resentment against Whites:

Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction

Will no longer be so damn relevant

And women will not care if Dick finally got down with Jane

On Search for Tomorrow

Because black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day

The revolution will not be televised.

With various cultural references like this, Anderson doesn’t come right out and directly broadcast his radicalism, but rather provides the select viewer with a wink and a nod. The closest reveal of Anderson’s true political philosophy is via the minor character of Howard Sommerville (Paul Grimstad) who isn’t in the film very long and serves as an incongruous placeholder for Anderson to briefly articulate his own meta-level political ideology. We see Sommerville sitting alone in a café drafting the speech he’ll eventually deliver over guerrilla radio airwaves (that we hear in voiceover).

We also see Sommerville engaging in Will Stancil-styled barrio activism (handing out pamphlets to Mexicans at a bus station, etc.) during this voiceover. Howard’s diatribe is comprised of standard-issue Marxism, blank-slate race denialism, open borders ‘asylum’ rhetoric, and a call for what Voegelin delineates as the activist transformation of the world:

“… maybe starting to see how corrupt to the core this whole fucking charade is. This great noble experiment in self-government. Bought and sold by billionaires. The Davos crowd. Openly racist, fucking Bell Curve Nazis.

“It’s bedtime for democracy, comrades… good night. So, you’re feeling, like, maybe your mind is starting to erode? Good. This is happening on the ground, through coordinated effort and strategic lines of resistance. Every day, working through dedicated teamwork, to take it directly to the capitalist overlords, who are extracting value from your life this very second.

“Go ahead. What, you think this is Facebook? This is gonna happen on your Instagram? It’s gonna happen on a hashtag somewhere? I think not. And don’t forget, while you’re doing it, that this is a nation that gives asylum. Don’t think they’re separate. Don’t break them apart.”

IV. Influences & Pynchon’s Conspiratorial Mindset

Paul Thomas Anderson’s overall body of work contains an impressive array of films packed with immediacy, visual flair, and stylized mise-en-scène: Hard Eight (1996), Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), Punch-Drunk Love (2002), There Will Be Blood (2007), The Master (2012), Inherent Vice (2014), Phantom Thread (2017), Licorice Pizza (2021), and now One Battle After Another (2025).^[8] Anderson’s films are driven by intense and often damaged individuals whose inner longings collide with grand American mythologies (fame, family, capitalism), and his narratives often unfold in loosely episodic structures taking place within sprawling, operatic arcs. Among his immediate influences, Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese are most apparent. From Altman we get the ensemble storytelling, the overlapping dialogue, and the chaotic feel of fractured families, and from Scorsese we get the streetwise shot-compositions, kinetic camera movement (Anderson is also a fan of Max Ophüls in this regard), and the popular music needle drops that underscore a scene’s desired emotional effect.^[9] There is also the noticeable influence of Stanley Kubrick’s precision and emotional austerity in films such as There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread. With respect to One Battle, Anderson has cited the following as key influences in the making of the film^[10]:

• • Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (2015): Bryan Burrough’s seminal book details the radical underground in the 1970s, documenting a largely forgotten era of intense domestic terrorism in the U.S. He details how groups like the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, and the Symbionese Liberation Army conducted thousands of bombings and killings.^[11]

• • Les Misérables (1935): Anderson cites Richard Boleslawski’s 1935 film adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel, particularly its mad, cacophonous first act that serves as the backdrop and setup for the core human conflict in the story: Inspector Javert’s (Charles Laughton) obsession with capturing ex-convict Jean Valjean (Fredric March).

• • Vanishing Point (1971): Anderson cites Richard Sarafian’s underrated mythopoetic road movie, which I have previously written about here. In Vanishing Point, the protagonist is determined to drive from Denver to SF in record time, for an unspecified goal, and his urgency in the matter acts as a purpose-in-itself, where the ultimate telos of one’s ‘vanishing point’ – eyes fixed as far as one can see down the road — symbolizes the annihilation of being that comes with death.

• • Midnight Run (1988): Anderson absolutely loves this witty, buddy-action-comedy-road-movie starring Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin, made in the heyday of the 1980s buddy films craze (e.g., 48 Hrs. (1982), Beverly Hills Cop (1984), and Lethal Weapon (1987)). Anderson says it is both his personal favorite film and his family’s favorite film, which they watch at least twice per year.^[12]

Relative to Anderson’s earlier films, with One Battle we have a more frenetic pace that reflects the confused, paranoid, and desperate mindset of today’s Left, where ‘fascism’ is everywhere — in every institution of authority, and even hidden underneath the seemingly benign, trimmed lawns of the suburbs. It is here where Anderson’s literary influences come to the forefront. The majority of Anderson’s films are based upon his own original screenplays, but in the case of There Will Be Blood, Anderson adapted his screenplay from Upton Sinclair’s socialist novel Oil! (1927), and in One Battle After Another (as with Inherent Vice) we have Anderson adapting a screenplay loosely based on the novel Vineland (1990) written by his most significant and lasting literary influence: Thomas Pynchon^[13].

Pynchon is one of the founders (and giants) of postmodern fiction, a satirical genre that — through devices of irony, self-referentiality, and non-linear narrative — parodies modernist fiction just as modernist fiction parodies realist fiction. Pynchon’s oeuvre is replete with conspiracy theories, usually fanciful and ridiculous, and the conspiracies in his novels are typically layered and, despite remaining largely unseen and in the background, serve as the magnetic center of the novels’ events. Countercultural anti-hero protagonists, often burned-out pot-smoking 60s-era radicals, stumble through the novel’s plot and life in general, but then also stumble onto actual conspiracies they soon find themselves caught up in. The harrowing realities of the conspiracy, the upending of one’s conventional ways of understanding the world, take their toll on characters’ psyches, leading to an even-worsening paranoia. In many ways, Pynchon’s novels, characterized by hidden connections and multiple interpretive levels, provide interwoven, gnostic systems of meaning to the characters and to the reader. Contours of ‘The System’ are delimited. It is most interesting, then, when Harold Bloom characterizes Pynchon’s novels as Kabbalistic.^[14]

The conspiracy-theory-as-plot-device is itself greatly influenced by early American detective fiction (e.g., Hammett, Chandler), a genre that in a more straightforward literary manner involves mystery and unknown forces which the hero does not fully understand. Over the course of typically three acts, a slow and suspenseful unraveling of a conspiracy takes place. Of course, the conspiracy itself may be relatively low-level, and not necessarily part of a particular, more macro-level one, but a conspiracy nonetheless. As with the genre of classic film noir — which inherits all the essential tropes of detective fiction and was often helmed by liberal Jewish émigré directors — there is a darkened moral atmosphere to the world and a growing skepticism toward institutions. Gone is the clean moral universe of classic whodunits. Instead, justice is compromised, authority corrupted, truth rarely restores order, and the protagonist (often a grizzled and jaded private detective) uncovers guilt without being able to meaningfully correct it. The fatalism inherent in this worldview (and the arc of conspiracy theories in general) coincides with the explosive growth in the 20^th century, particularly since WW2, of both the federal government and large corporations, i.e., the prevailing dominance of the bureaucratic-administrative state and its nexus with corporate interests.^[15] The institutions that effectively control us have become ever more faceless, unaccountable, and remote from the average citizen, and in One Battle this type of dark and cloaked entity – as it is imagined by the Leftist’s conspiratorial mindset — is the fictional White supremacist secret society called the Christmas Adventurers Club.

V. Characters

Bob Ferguson

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Bob Ferguson (aka “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun aka “Rocketman”), a former 60s radical who was an explosives expert for the film’s fictional domestic terrorist group French 75.^[16] In the film’s aforementioned opening sequence, we see Bob in his earlier activist/terrorist years as he participates in ‘liberating’ a migrant detention facility. Whether intended by Anderson or not, we witness the pathetic spectacle of this out-of-place, White, ‘60s revolutionary surrounded by Black radicals and Mexican illegals, screaming insults to the DHS soldiers whom the French 75 has just placed inside the very ‘cages’ that minutes ago held illegal aliens:

“We are a political organization that is free from the eyes, the ears, and most importantly, the weapons of the imperialist state, and this fascist regime! You are a political prisoner of the French 75, motherfuckers! You’ve been captured by the French 75! Fuck the police! Viva La Revolución!”

In the 16 years since the film’s opening sequence timeline, Bob has changed his identity and fled to the fictional town of Baktan Cross in Northern California, but his identity and sense of self are still inextricably linked to his past revolutionary activities and political philosophy. However, he’s now a man-bun-sporting, paranoid burn-out dressed in Jeffrey Lebowski bathrobe attire, who spends his days smoking pot, vaping, and watching Battle of Algiers. His existence now is nothing more than as a vessel of nostalgia, save for him being the (cucked) “father” of his mixed-race daughter Willa. In fact, Bob has been cucked thrice-over. First, he doesn’t realize that he’s not the biological father of Willa (though Perfidia surely does). Second, he’s been cucked by the Revolution, as Perfidia abandons him and Willa to “do the revolution”. Third, he’s been cucked by his own feminism, reflected in his inability to be a stern and responsible father to his daughter.

DiCaprio has commented on his character’s old-school hippie/libertarian streak, of the type one finds in certain Northern CA towns such as Eureka:

“Bob is what I like to call a don’t tread on me, anti-establishment, hippie revolutionary who is paranoid about anything and everything. He doesn’t want to be taxed. He doesn’t want to be monitored. He’s incredibly skeptical of everyone and everything around him. He hides himself off in the middle of the woods and stays home, watches movies like The Battle of Algiers, smokes pot and drinks, but has one objective, and that’s to protect his daughter” (Bowie, 2025).

Through Bob, we see a previous generation Leftie feeling awkward around the new generation Lefties: namely Generation Pronoun & Generation Snowflake. When his daughter’s friends arrive at their home to take her to a school dance, there is this exchange:

Bob: Now, who’s the one with the lipstick? What’s that one’s name?

Willa: Bobo.

Bob: Bobo… Now, is that a he or a she or a they?

Willa: Dad, come on.

Bob: No, are they transitioning? I wanna know if…

Willa: They’re nonbinary.

Bob: Okay, I just wanna be polite…

Willa: It’s not that hard!… They/them.

Later in the film, when Bob is on the run, we see him on the phone with French 75 headquarters, trying to determine the arranged rendezvous point with his daughter. He’s talking to a whiny guy (“Comrade Josh”), but because he cannot remember the password code to the question “What time is it?”, Josh does not give him this information. Bob pleads with him to make an exception, but Josh repeatedly refuses. After Bob explodes in rage at Josh, cursing at him and threatening him, they have this exchange:

Josh: Okay, this doesn’t feel safe. You’re violating my space right now.

Bob: Violating your space?! Man, come on… What kind of revolutionary are you?! We’re not even in the same room here! We’re talking on the phone, like men!

Josh: Okay, there’s no need to shout. This is a violation of my safety. These are noise triggers.

At an important level, Bob belongs to the pantheon of the Hapless Male trope, namely the endless drumbeat of predictably inept men (almost always White) that Hollywood and Madison Ave churn out in movies, sitcoms, and TV commercials. Invariably, these bumbling and not-all-that-smart males serve as comic relief, but are eventually guided, rescued, or otherwise saved by either a Strong Woman (aka the Mary Sue trope), a non-White, or the intersection of both.^[17] Even the NYT, ever late to noticing cultural trends it did not itself create, has put One Battle into this context. In a piece entitled “Dramas Keep Showing Us Hapless Men – And Hypercompetent Women,” Diego Hadis discusses several recent movies, including One Battle, where the three male protagonists all “fit the archetype of the schlemiel: irredeemably inept, an accident of a person, the butt of some great cosmic joke” (Hadis, 2026). These clueless males are eventually teamed up with ‘hypercompetent women’:

The women they come across, on the other hand, seem ready for anything. They might see several chess moves ahead of both the protagonists and antagonists. They know how to affect the world of the movie, and they do so with ease — exactly what the actual “hero” of the story is completely unable to do…

They are ever-present — and they are usually so capable, so confidently efficacious, that if they were the story’s focus, the movie would be over in 15 minutes…(Hadis, 2026).

In the case of One Battle:

Perfidia is the film’s driving force, directing the group’s strategy and taking Bob as a lover; her actions push the story forward even after she leaves. All through the film, though, so many of the women Bob encounters have things together in ways that put him to shame — say, the nurse doing intake at a police station after Bob is arrested in a military raid, who hands him off to another nurse, at a hospital, who calmly, unflappably leads him to freedom. Even Bob’s teenage daughter, Willa, is the responsible one, a purple belt in karate who effectively parents her own father… (Hadis, 2026).

Rather than criticizing these tired girlboss tropes for being as formulaic as the Waif-Fu trope (i.e., action movies where a 100 lb. girl handily beats up 250 lb. men), Hadis not surprisingly adopts the NYT’s “it’s time for women to run the world” approach:

The fact that these figures are so often women may be a way of suggesting that men have had their run, and look where it has gotten us… We should not be surprised if the coming years bring more films like these — all dreaming that there is somebody out there with whom we might throw in our lot, somebody competent enough to tell us what to do to make the world right (Hadis, 2026).

This last sentiment is very much a feminist call-to-action-for-women in One Battle’s final scene.

Perfidia Beverly Hills

Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) is the Strong Black Woman trope par excellence and the leader of the French 75. And while one of the world’s most famous movie stars is in One Battle, it is Perfidia who Anderson deems the film’s main character. He notes:

“I had a feeling like, Perfidia needs to feel like she’s the protagonist, the hero of the movie. You know, Leo might be in it, Sean might be in it, all these well-known actors are in it, but you see Teyana and it’s like: That’s the star of the movie. I wanted audiences to feel like, this is really a movie about a Black revolutionary” (Fear, 2025).

In the film’s opening illegal-immigration-liberation scene, when she first encounters Lockjaw and has a gun pointed at him, she declares her aforementioned political mission, which Anderson has clumsily written to shoehorn in a pro-abortion sentiment:

“My name is Perfidia Beverly Hills, and this is a declaration of war. We’re here to right your wrongs, motherfucker… You didn’t count on me. You didn’t count on my fight. The message is clear: free borders, free bodies, free choices, and free from fuckin’ fear!”

The very name ‘Perfidia’ literally means betrayal, which is apropos in this case: Ultimately, she betrays Bob by being attracted to, and having sex with, Lockjaw. She betrays the French 75 in a plea deal with authorities that involves her ratting out their names and locations. And she betrays her daughter by abandoning her. (Naturally, despite all of this irresponsibility and dysfunction, her daughter Willa still ‘relates’ to her in the film’s ending). Her middle and last name of “Beverly Hills” should not be overlooked either: this is Anderson situating one front of the revolutionary vanguard (at least nominally) within the manicured lawns of Beverly Hills, and perhaps giving Hollywood liberals a jab for not being sufficiently committed to Leftist causes and the associated ‘direct action’.

Anderson writes Perfidia as experiencing post-partum depression, and she abnegates her maternal role to her newborn infant Willa as a result, with Bob carrying the load. When Bob scolds her, reminding her that they “are a family now,” Perfidia uses her revolutionary politics to justify her abandonment of the mother role: “This is a new consciousness. I’m not your udder buddy. I’m not your mother. You want your power over me, the same reason you want your power over the world. You and your crumbling male ego will never do this revolution like me.”

Anderson no doubt based Perfidia on Assata Shakur, who joined the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s before becoming involved with the Black Liberation Army. She gained notoriety after a 1973 shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that resulted in the death of a state trooper, was convicted of murder in 1977 and sentenced to life in prison, but in 1979 escaped with the help of supporters. She then lived in the underground until 1984 when she was granted asylum in Cuba, where she lived until her death in 2025 at age 78. As an example of the standard hagiography heaped on Shakur by the Left, Nikole Hannah-Jones (of the ‘1619 Project’ infamy) was granted a NYT op-ed slot to celebrate Shakur. The piece is full of gems, including this quote from Angela Davis, the more famously feted Black Female Revolutionary:

Angela Davis, the activist who was wrongly imprisoned during that same tumultuous period, told me women were the backbone of Black radical movements and “the government probably recognized more than even our own people did the power of Black women” (Hannah-Jones, 2025).

In One Battle, after a bank heist goes awry, and which involves Perfidia killing a bank guard, she is apprehended by the police. (Anderson cowardly casts a Black male to play the murdered bank guard, so as to deflect attention from the prevailing Black-on-White nature of violent crime in America). We then see an all-White gaggle of cops cheering and flipping her off while taking selfies.

Lockjaw, thoroughly smitten with her, arranges for her to get a witness protection plea deal, in exchange for beginning an illicit affair. She puts up with this for a certain duration before fleeing (ironically through an official border crossing into Mexico) for a destination that, we learn later in the film, is either Cuba or Algiers, both being locations that actual 1960s Black radicals fled to when U.S. authorities were on their tail.

Willa Ferguson

The progeny of Perfidia and (shockingly) Lockjaw, Willa (Chase Infiniti) is nonetheless raised by Bob alone, given that Perfidia abandoned the family when Willa was an infant. As the film fast-forwards sixteen years later, we see Willa now sixteen herself, receiving karate instruction from Sergio St. Carlos. Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work” is playing on the soundtrack, which lyrically signifies the degradation of Bob and Perfidia’s revolutionary romance into a domestic aftermath where Bob is the sole parent, having ‘cleaned up’ Perfidia’s mess. (Bob once imagined himself as part of History; now he’s an exhausted man left holding the child, the guilt, the secrets, and the consequences).

Willa is now a rather typical American teen female. She has a cell phone that she hides from Bob (who has forbidden them), They/Them friends, and Girl Power attitude. In terms of both cultural attitudes and Leftist political strategies, Willa represents the notable generation gap relative to Bob’s generation. She is described to Bob as a natural ‘leader’ by her high school history teacher, which leads Bob to cry tears of pride.

In terms of plot, Willa is the aforementioned hyper-competent female forced to deal with Bob’s rather inept ‘dumb White guy’ persona. (The father-daughter dynamic between Bob and Willa is a central aspect of One Battle, no doubt partly a function of Anderson’s own relationship with his three biracial daughters).

Signifying where her future will lead after the movie ends, and with Lockjaw and his men searching for her, Willa is offered protection by a group of young, Black, radical, pot-smoking, ghetto-speaking, machine-gun-toting nuns called the “Sisters of the Brave Beaver” (inspired by Sisters of the Valley, an actual hippie convent), the name of which is yet another of Anderson’s bizarre sexualization of radical politics. At this ‘convent’ Willa learns how to shoot. (It’s significant then that Anderson cast both Maya Rudolph and one of his daughters to play members of this Sisterhood).

After narrowly averting death at the hands of both Lockjaw and the Christmas Adventurer Club’s hitman, when Bob finally finds her on a remote CA desert highway, Willa (having recently learned who her biological father is) screams “Who are you?!” to Bob, who replies to her plaintively by saying “It’s your dad”, which reconciles the two of them. (There may be an undercurrent here of Anderson’s own biracial daughters possibly questioning aspects of their racial identity as well as their father’s). Of this sequence, Anderson has said: “Coming up with the situation for Willa, where she is finally able to take agency over a situation — to turn the tables, be the aggressor, take the high ground – this became very exciting for us” (Fear, 2025).

In One Battle’s final sequence, Bob and Willa are back home safe and sound. Bob decides to finally give Willa a letter that Perfidia had written to her years ago, but that Bob has kept hidden from her. “I wanted to protect you,” he tells Willa, “From all your mom’s shit, from all my shit. I suppose I wanted to be the one that you came to for help… The cool dad that you could say anything to, even though I know that’s impossible.” Bob gives her the letter and as Willa reads it in her bedroom, we hear the letter’s content being read in voiceover by Perfidia. The letter contains some verbatim lines from an actual letter a Weather Underground member wrote to their family, as shown in the 2002 documentary The Weather Underground. At the 1:16:19 marker of this documentary, we similarly hear one of these letters being read in voiceover: “Hello from the other side of the shadows. I don’t mean to shock you, but I have been contemplating writing you for a long time… Often I wake up and find it completely inexplicable how and why I am where I am today and disconnected from my family.”

Sergio St. Carlos

A secondary character to One Battle, Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro) – aka “Sensei” — acts as a calm balance to Bob’s frantic and paranoid nature. “Ocean waves,” he often says as a mantra during tense moments. Sergio is both a karate sensei and a ‘coyote’ of sorts for Mexican illegals in the fictional sanctuary city of Baktan Cross. “I’ve got a little Latino Harriet Tubman situation going on at my place,” he tells Bob.^[18] With Lockjaw in pursuit of both him and Willa, Bob has reached out to Sergio for help in rescuing Willa. Sergio agrees and, along the way, introduces Bob to his family as the “Gringo Zapata”.

In one rather creepy moment, as Sergio and Bob and driving through a downtown Baktan Cross that is a fiery battle between protesters, police, and Lockjaw’s forces, Sergio pauses next to a dozen or so Mexican kids on skateboards. “Bee Gee,” he says to one of them he recognizes, “what’s the word?”. With a gloating smile on his face, the kid tells Sergio “It’s fuckin’ World War III out there, yo!”

One Battle has several digs at contemporary cell phone culture, one of which is when Sergio – almost out of character — takes a selfie with Bob. In another scene, when Sergio has to rush the illegals temporarily hiding above a Mexican-operated corner store to a sanctuary church, he yells several times at a Mexican teen minding the store to get off his phone, after Sergio has told him to watch the front door. Soon after, in Sergio’s ramshackle apartment above the store, he tells one of his daughters to get off her phone. In yet another room, we see two more Mexican teen girls on a couch not talking to each other but both staring at their phones. In all these instances, there is a blank look upon each teen’s face as they are staring at their phone.

Del Toro’s most memorable line in the movie takes place after he’s distracted the police away from Bob. Both had been drinking beers earlier. When the police pull Sergio over, they ask him if he’s been drinking. “I’ve had a few,” he says. “A few what?” asks one of the cops. “Few small beers” Sergio replies.

Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn)

The film’s one-dimensional villain is Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). A military man who dutifully follows orders, Lockjaw is nonetheless a corrupt military officer without scruples. He stands as a cartoonish representation of White Christian society, White supremacism, and reactionary politics… all of it rolled into one. He is depicted as perpetually angry and violent. His surname is, of course, meant to convey a clenched jaw and Penn portrays Lockjaw with a stilted, tight-ass gait, as well as an undercut ‘fash’ hairstyle that – when he meets with the Christmas Adventurers Club, a White supremacist secret society – is combed to be Hitler-like. (There isn’t much in the way of subtleties with One Battle). Sean Penn’s rumored years on steroids serves the role’s physicality well, although he seems to overact here (but in his defense the script probably called for an over-the-top military racist).^[19]

Reflecting how the Left often sees all uniformed law enforcement entities as one monolithic army of ‘fascism,’ One Battle blurs the lines between police, traditional military, and paramilitary law enforcement roles. Lockjaw is the commanding officer of a fictional paramilitary group called the “MKU” (Mankind United). While his role involves overseeing an immigration detention center on the U.S.-Mexico border, MKU functions as a distinct, specialized government organization rather than a traditional branch of the military.^[20]

At one point in the film, we see what appears to be the FBI or some other element of the DOJ awarding Lockjaw with the ‘Bedford Forrest Medal of Honor’ for his work hunting down members of the French 75. (Forrest was a Confederate general during the American Civil War who later served as the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan).

Despite his White supremacism bona fides, Lockjaw secretly harbors a largely repressed sexual obsession with Black women, so a miscegenation element also becomes crucial to the motivations of the film’s villain. Early in the film, Lockjaw is sexually humiliated by Perfidia but depicted as enjoying it, as it leading to his sexual arousal and then his “reverse rape” (as he later describes it). This display of a conservative White alpha male enjoying sadomasochistic submission to an angry, armed Black woman (complete with a gun pointed at his crotch) serves as a caricature of Second Amendment gun rights advocates and, more importantly, as a humiliation ritual for White males. If there is one grand metanarrative to One Battle, it is as a liberal revenge fantasy against conservative White men. Lockjaw symbolizes this class, first through his depicted arrogance and coldness, then later through ritual humiliation, disfigurement, and death.

In the film’s only scene between him and Bob, we see Lockjaw use very few words to indirectly articulate his jealousy that Bob has Perfidia and not him. “You like Black girls?” he asks Bob. “I love ‘em… I LOVE ‘EM!” One X user has aptly memed this exchange as emblematic of how poorly drawn Lockjaw is from the standpoint of character depth:

In yet another tired trope of Leftist ‘explanations’ of conservatism, the film makes implications that Lockjaw is a closeted homosexual.^[21] In one exchange — after Lockjaw has abducted Willa and deploys a DNA test to prove (or disprove) that she is, in fact, his biological daughter – it’s implied that Lockjaw is a repressed homosexual:

Willa: Why is your shirt so tight?

Lockjaw: I’m not gay, if that’s what you’re saying.

Willa: I didn’t say that.

Lockjaw: I’m not a homosexual.

Willa: I did not say that… but I see the lifts in your shoes.

Such is the sort of dialogue that wins the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

In this same scene between Lockjaw and Willa, he says to her at one point, in an over-the-top display of White-against-Black racial hostility: “You shut up! JUST SHUT UP, YOU FUCKING MUTT!!”. In addition to being a racial insult, this dialogue also serves to express the Left’s absurd notion that Blacks are being held in silence by the ‘institutional racism’ of White society. One can only wonder if Anderson is conveying his own daughters’ real (or, more likely, imagined) experiences, his own fears about what his daughters may face in the future, or whether through the character of Lockjaw he’s clumsily articulating his own inner demons on his daughters’ mixed-race status.

Having determined through a DNA test which he’s administered to Willa that she is in fact his biological daughter, and hence a threat to his acceptance into the Christmas Adventurers Club, Lockjaw decides to kill her, but not before mocking and insulting her further:

“I am a Christmas Adventurer! Do you know what that is? I have a higher calling. It is a higher honor than having you. I loved her, in case you were wondering. Best goddamn-looking witch I ever saw. Yeah, she was possessed… She was insane. Like you. You have it in you. I smelled it from within her, and I can smell it from within you.”

Lockjaw binds Willa’s hands and drives her out to a remote canyon location where he meets Avanti (Eric Schweig), whom from their exchange we easily infer has done this sort of contract-killing work for Lockjaw numerous times in the past. “I don’t do kids,” Avanti says, even after Lockjaw offers to double his rate. Lockjaw then tells Avanti to instead take Willa to a remote private militia actually called…. drumroll… “1776,” fully confident that they will have no compunction in killing Willa. And, in case the didactic allegory here isn’t yet clear, we have Avanti the American Indian ultimately deciding to sacrifice himself by killing all the 1776 members and saving Willa, before dying himself in the gun exchange. (We know that Avanti is Indian not only from his physiognomy, but because one of the evil 1776 members derisively refers to him as “Wagon-burner”).

In a myriad of ways, and from absolutely every angle, Lockjaw is the bogeyman that a Jewish-dominated Hollywood fear most. Thus, despite Lockjaw being a comically one-dimensional character (and Sean Penn’s performance being almost camp), what Lockjaw represents resonates with Hollywood’s political imagination. It isn’t surprising then that One Battle wins a bunch of Oscars, including Sean Penn winning for Best Supporting Actor.

VI. Christmas Adventurers Club

The Christmas Adventurers Club is a fictional, far-right, Christian Nationalist secret society composed of elite, White supremacist business and political leaders. The club uses its wholesome-sounding name, and suburban “southwest headquarters” access point, to mask sinister and xenophobic goals while aiming to control American society. (There is no such group in Pynchon’s Vineland, so this dramatic concept is entirely Anderson’s). We have the loaded connotations of “Christ” inherent in the word “Christmas”.

Lockjaw is being considered for membership to the Christmas Adventurers Club and is interviewed by them in a fancy hotel suite. Being a White supremacist himself, Lockjaw is of course eager to be accepted as a member of this exclusive group. Club member Sandy Irvine (played by Norm Macdonald’s old writing partner and SNL veteran Jim Downey) says to Lockjaw:

“Steve, we have, in the past, offered membership to certain members of the military. We found their tactical battlefield expertise to be quite useful. Now, our aim and your aim is the same. To find dangerous lunatics, haters, and punk trash and stop them.”

Then another, higher-ranking society member with the absurdly WASP name of Virgil Throckmorton (Tony Goldwyn) says to Lockjaw:

“You’re doing great work… Each and every day is hand-to-hand combat in the spread of uncontrolled migration, isn’t it?…

“I don’t think I’m being immodest when I say that joining the Christmas Adventurers Club means that you are a superior man. No, not the best man, not the most intelligent, the most sophisticated, or the wisest. It just means that you are superior to other human beings, and you shall never want for riches or the greatest of friends.

“Now, we report to ourselves with a freedom to be creative and cut through layers of bureaucracy. We live by the Golden Rule, in a network of like-minded men and women dedicated to making the world safe and pure.

“What would you say to someone who believes that you have been soft in your duty to racial purification?”

Lockjaw answers: “I would say they are a liar who has no business in society. Or on the planet, for that matter.” This impresses the Club members.

As part of the Club’s uber-thorough “Double Yankee White Inquisitions Completum” background check on Lockjaw, they ask him a series of questions that, as only a White liberal screenwriter can conjure, serve to signify conservative White males’ assumed aversion to psychotherapy, as well as the secret society’s anti-Semitism and organizing principle of White Gentile racial purity:

Throckmorton: Have you ever consulted with a mental health professional?

Lockjaw: No, sir…

Throckmorton: Have you ever engaged in an interracial relationship?

Lockjaw: No, sir.

Throckmorton: And you are American-born by Gentile?

Lockjaw: Yes, sir.

Later in the film, as the leaders of the Christmas Adventurers Club discover that Lockjaw has fathered a mixed-race child, they decide to take drastic measures to clean up the mess. We see a proper-looking White male drive a blue Mustang to an upscale home in an exclusive neighborhood that is the southwest headquarters of the secret society. In Pynchon’s Vineland, which Pynchon set in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s Presidential election is an all-important backdrop to the events of the novel. As a nod to this, Anderson uses Reagan’s posh home in East Sacramento – which he occupied during his stint as CA governor from 1967 to 1975 – to represent the exteriors of the Christmas Adventurers Club’s southwest headquarters.

As the man is driving to this house, the soundtrack plays an excerpt of the 18^th century English Christmas carol “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” to further ridicule Christianity and associate it with White supremacism and murderousness:

Hark, the herald angels sing

Glory to the newborn King

Peace on earth and mercy mild

God and sinners reconciled

Joyful, all ye nations, rise…

 

Hail the Sun of Righteousness

Light and life to all he brings

Risen with healing in his wings

Mild he lays his glory by

Born that man no more may die

Born to raise the sons of earth

Born to give them second birth

Hark, the herald angels sing

Glory to the newborn King

The man knocks on the door and is instantly recognized and let in by a genteel elderly woman. She asks if he is hungry and offers to make him her “famous Alice banana pancakes.” The man politely declines, saying he’s about to be running late and that he “better get down there.” We then see the man enter the door to the basement which then leads to a vast, lighted, concrete corridor with numerous rooms off the corridor, finally arriving at the room to which he’s been summoned. Awaiting him are the elite leaders of the Christmas Adventurers Club. (In this setting, we have the tired liberal trope of wealthy WASP enclaves — and White suburbs in general — secretly harboring White supremacist viewpoints). The room is replete with hunting motifs (because to urban liberals, that’s what White racists in the suburbs do).

The man, despite his unassuming demeanor, is actually a hitman for the Christmas Adventurers Club. He is instructed to kill both Lockjaw and Willa. As the Club members adjourn, they say “All hail Saint Nick” in unison.

The attempt to kill Lockjaw and Willa fails. Due to his own effort to dispose of Willa having gone awry, as well as the Christmas Adventurers Club attempt to murder both Willa and Lockjaw having gone awry, Lockjaw’s face has become horribly disfigured (get it?). In the end, however, Lockjaw is lured back to meet with the Christmas Adventurers Club under false pretenses. They lead him to believe he’s been accepted as a member. “Congratulations, Steve, you’re a Christmas Adventurer.” Lockjaw is jubilant. “Oh, Mommy. Thank you, sir!” he says back.

Sandy Irvine leads Lockjaw to a corner office in an empty high-rise office building which offers an amazing view of the city, telling him:

“Lockjaw, we’re lucky to have you. Now, obviously, goes without saying, this is just one place where you can hang your hat, take meetings, stow a few personal items. We like our members to feel they have a home away from home, any time, day or night. Now, it’s empty right now, but we’ll let you personalize it. A man’s taste defines him, doesn’t it?”

Lockjaw asks if he can sit at the desk in the office, to which Sandy says “Absolutely.” As Lockjaw sits down, Sandy says “Damn it. I forgot your keys. Wait here, I’ll just grab ‘em from my office.” As he leaves (closing the door behind him), Lockjaw puts his feet up on the desk, basking in the glow of his personal moment of triumph. We then hear the sound of some sort of gas being pumped into the room from the ceiling air vent. In just moments, Lockjaw is dead – seemingly frozen into place — and two men in full hazmat suits arrive, carry his body out, and place it into an incinerator.

The Holocaust analogy here is so glaringly obvious and forced as to be embarrassing. Both the poison gas and the subsequent disposal of a body into a furnace is, of course, a twist on the Holocaust trope of telling Jews they’re just getting a shower (and not Zyklon B) and then their bodies being incinerated. Why this trope here? Because, according to the modern liberal mind, ‘White people’ are responsible for the Holocaust, an event which apparently began on June 6, 1944.

In the end, Lockjaw was sentenced to death for the sin of miscegenation, particularly the most egregious form of this sin: producing a child with someone who is Black.

VII. Racialized Sexuality as Revolutionary Political Activism

One Battle has been a pet project of Anderson’s since the early 1990s when he first read Pynchon’s Vineland and became obsessed with it, and he then worked on the eventual adapted screenplay for over 20 years. In a very significant way, the film can be seen as an extended therapy session for Anderson. He seems to be expressing his apparent fetishization of Black women in much the same way that Quentin Tarantino expresses his fetishization with women’s feet. Anderson also seems to be expunging a weird misplaced sense of guilt over his own Whiteness, maleness and heterosexuality in general, and addressing anxiety over the racial identity crises his miscegenated children have experienced, or will likely experience in their lives, to some degree. Anderson also seems to be trying to elevate his own domestic situation as itself some sort of revolutionary act, which if true is a perfect example of elite, armchair LARP-ing, the sort of “revolutionary action” that doesn’t require getting one’s hands dirty.

There is a conspicuous amount of interracialized sexuality (of the White-with-Black variety) on display in One Battle, and it’s worth considering the possible autobiographical reasons why Anderson placed so much of this element into his film. How else to explain the random, disparate, and otherwise pointless displays of miscegenated eroticism in One Battle?

For example, in the aforementioned opening sequence of the film we see Bob kissing passionately with his Perfidia while they are escaping from their successful operation to liberate illegal aliens from a migrant detention center. (It is she who irrationally and recklessly initiates this moment of passion, which briefly confuses Bob). Later in the film, after Bob has detonated various explosives against other domestic targets, we see the two kissing passionately again as they are fleeing (and with her also wanting to stop to have sex). Then later we see Alana Haim (her Jewish physiognomy unmistakable), in a role so minor as to be almost pointless, as French 75 member “Mae West” who kisses a Black male French 75 member just before both of them participate in an organized bank robbery. During this robbery, another loud Black female member of the French 75 named “Junglepussy”, with gun in hand, jumps on top of a desk and shouts to the bank employees: “I am what Black Power looks like!”

The script never provides a satisfactory and internally coherent reason as to why Perfidia, the radical Black leader of a revolutionary Leftwing terrorist group, would decide she wants to have sex with a White man as odious as Lockjaw, let alone settle down with Bob, another White man. In fact, this has been a subject of contention among some liberal reviewers of the film. Regarding the ways in which Perfidia is sexualized by two White men, one critic for The Guardian trots out Cultural Marxism’s notion of the “White male gaze” as well as the “lived experience” idiom, writing:

And while I understand the context and meaning behind the villain’s sexual obsession as a reflection of racist and rightwing viewpoints, it also reflects hyper-sexualization of Black women in cinema. Taking on the form of a thing in order to critique and satirize it requires careful and informed perspective. Intentions can result in the opposite of what’s intended, and that’s why our intentions with other people’s lived experiences need to be handled so carefully.

One Battle After Another portrays these themes and reflects these questions and issues in ways that mostly point it out and train all of its satire and disdain for the white men guilty of that gaze, attitude, and behavior. But in going so far into being the thing in order to mock it, sometimes the line gets awfully blurry, and it starts to feel like the film isn’t so much pointing at racist/sexist stereotypes and male gaze as becoming those things in order to provoke us to react. (Hughes, 2025).^[22]

The anger rises with Ellen E. Jones, a mixed-race Black female critic for The Guardian, who bemoans the film’s “fetishised depiction of interracial relationships” and Perfidia’s “hyper-sexualized” nature. “Dear revered PTA,” she writes, “what is up with you and Black women?”

… Anderson went for extreme horniness instead. This is a choice. Just like it was a choice to name another of his Black female revolutionary characters “Junglepussy” – inspired by the performer’s real stage name, a sexualised spin on the old racist slur “jungle bunny”. Or to have Perfidia express her principled defiance of the fascistic state with the phrase “this pussy don’t pop for you”. (Note to white male screenwriters: not every Black woman talks like Cardi B. And even Cardi B doesn’t sound like a Cardi B record all the time) (Jones, 2025).

Of the scene where Lockjaw says to Bob: “Do you like Black girls? I love ‘em!”, Jones writes:

This is intended to demonstrate the character’s repellence, but would be much more effective as such, if we hadn’t just seen lovable Bob describe his attraction to Perfidia in pretty much the same terms, moments earlier. Or Avon Barksdale from The Wire (aka actor Wood Harris) fondly describing his girlfriend Alana Haim as “an ordinary, working white girl”. In the OBAA worldview, all interracial relationships are apparently founded on a race kink… (Jones, 2025).

I would contend that the two White men on either side of Perfidia – Bob and Lockjaw – represent Anderson’s own conflicted psyche about the very idea of White men being with Black women and producing mixed-race children, and his own family life within that context. Bob is the ‘good’ well-intentioned side of this struggle, and Lockjaw is the malevolent and repressed Shadow figure of this struggle. When the Christmas Adventurers Club asks Lockjaw point blank if he knows who Perfidia Beverly Hills is and whether he’s had a romantic relationship with her, Lockjaw lies to them, and the choice of words in Anderson’s script is quite interesting:

“Gentlemen, I have engaged the enemy face-to-face in battle. And in the dark alleys and shadows of espionage, I was once raped in reverse. The enemy employed deception. I was drugged. And while unconscious… I believe [my power] was taken advantage of. I believe she was a sperm thief. They saw the power of my mind and body. They desired it.”

Teyana Taylor (who plays Perfidia), when asked about this mini-controversy being discussed within the Left’s media bubble, exudes the Harlem ghetto mindset she grew up in, telling an interviewer:

“Is that not what Black women go through? We are fetishized, especially by creepy motherfuckers. And we are, unfortunately, the least protected people. Showing what Black women go through, that’s a hard reality to accept” (O’Connell, 2025).

It never crosses Taylor’s mind that perhaps the creepy motherfucker doing the fetishizing might be Anderson himself. In fact, the awkward and incongruous placement of mixed-race sexualization in One Battle begins to make more sense if we see it as a reflection of Anderson’s personal proclivities and very odd conception of miscegenation as a revolutionary act.

Whichever way one cuts it, however, a consistent theme does emerge in One Battle: miscegenation is depicted by Anderson as a revolutionary act. The intertwining and association of sexual arousal with violent revolutionary action is most odd, and the intimate merging of an idealized Marxist political utopia with a racialized sexual utopia is something Frantz Fanon might have dreamt up. It’s important to note that in Pynchon’s Vineland, both the Bob character and the Perfidia-character are White, which therefore makes their daughter White. Thus, it is entirely Anderson who makes the Perfidia character Black, injecting the storyline with layers of miscegenation and a bizarre racialized-sexuality-cum-revolutionary-politics angle. In a kind of auteurist poetic gesture, sexual transgression is symbolically aligned with political rebellion. All of this seems to be towards Anderson’s goal of rendering interracialized sexuality as, at a minimum, a form of political activism, and possibly also a proper and useful ingredient for revolutionary politics. To better understand this, and why Anderson may have infused One Battle with so much of this theme, we need to briefly turn to his own domestic family life.

***

At the time of One Battle’s release, Anderson stands as a 55-year-old father to four mixed-race children, ranging from 12 to 19 — three of them daughters – whom he shares with Maya Rudolph, the former SNL cast member he’s been in an unmarried relationship with since 2001. Rudolph is herself mixed-race (her mother was Black and her father is Jewish). The theme of mixed-race individuals (particularly Black-White biracial) feeling like outsiders in both White and Black communities has been a topic discussed extensively in sociology, psychology, personal memoirs, literature, and online discourse. Never feeling fully at home or accepted in the White community nor in the Black community, mixed-race Blacks often have the biggest racial chip on their shoulders. There is a heightened racial resentment that is almost always targeted at the White aspect of their identity. Following the ‘one drop’ rule, such mixed-race individuals overcompensate by identifying as Black and implicitly or explicitly rejecting the White aspect of their identity. The anger from their conflicted psyches is channeled primarily through publicly avowed ideology rather than violence. They often lean into their ‘Blackness’ and espouse anti-White rhetoric as a way to prove their ‘authenticity’ to full-blooded Blacks. In essence, this public aspect, largely performative, functions as a virtue signal to prove and establish their ‘Blackness’. (Barack Obama is a prime example).^[23]

Many of Anderson’s films feature fractured and dysfunctional family arrangements, and it may be the case that Anderson imparts autobiographical elements from his own domestic life into his films, namely the more trying times of his rather unusual family dynamics. It is not much of a stretch to imagine that the life of a successful, critically-acclaimed, auteur writer/director such as Anderson is fraught with domestic problems and emotional sacrifices. As we often see with many of the greatest artists, writers, and poets over the ages, dedication to their craft is their life, and everything else – family included – is a distant second. For instance, in There Will Be Blood (2007), Daniel Plainview’s (Daniel Day Lewis) ego and blind ambition is temporarily brought to its knees when a paster cajoles him to confess his sins, leading him to cry out “I have abandoned my child!” Similarly, in One Battle, Perfidia the dedicated Black female revolutionary essentially abandons her child, not so much for the revolutionary cause but to save her ass from federal prosecution and likely prison time.

In One Battle, Perfidia’s mother is called “Gramma Minnie,” a reference to Maya Rudolph’s mother Minnie Riperton, a renowned soul singer who died of cancer at 31.^[24] In an essay about Maya Rudolph’s influence on One Battle, Desiree Bowie writes:

That sense of absence runs deep. Willa loses both grandmother and mother in infancy, and Perfidia parts from her own mom too soon. Each woman is marked by the loss of the one before her.

Teyana Taylor, who plays Perfidia, even said she immersed herself in Riperton’s discography to find the character’s pulse during the film’s long shoot (Bowie, 2025).

In terms of casting the role of Willa, and what led to his choice of Chase Infiniti for the role, Anderson told an interviewer “She reminded me of my daughters. She felt like a person who would be friends with my daughters, and I just connected to her as a human being” (Fear, 2025). In a sequence in the movie where Bob and Sergio are frantically trying to find Willa (whom Lockjaw has kidnapped), Bob laments to Sensei Sergio that after Perfidia left all those years ago, he still struggles with how to be a father to Willa, brushing up against World War Hair in the process:

“Just never thought this fucker would come back for us, you know? I got lazy, man. I wasn’t paying attention. I thought the person coming through that door one day was gonna be her mom, not this fucking asshole. See her daughter, you know? She’d teach her girl stuff. She’d do her hair, she’d… be a mom. I can’t do her hair, man. You know that? I don’t know how to do her hair right.”

Of this bit of screenplay dialogue, Anderson says in the same interview:

“[It’s] no secret that Maya [Rudolph, Paul’s partner] lost her mother [the singer Minnie Riperton] when she was very young. And Maya’s father really struggled, as a single dad, to do her hair. Because, you know, I can tell you: As a father of mixed-race girls, it’s nearly impossible for me to do their hair as a white man. That was something that struck me as a father, and that I really knew was a challenge for her and for him. That’s a very personal line for me” (Fear, 2025).

In many ways, one can see DiCaprio’s hapless Bob character as a surrogate for Anderson himself. With the racially complicated nature of Anderson’s family, one senses a latent White Savior Complex in One Battle, albeit one that Anderson is simultaneously aware of but conflicted about, and so tries to mitigate.^[25]

***

Through the repeated inter-racialized displays in One Battle, Anderson seems to be leaning heavily towards a Frankfurt School interpretation of sorts. The legacy of Freudian pseudoscience (and its inherent hostility to the prevailing Christian sexual norms of heritage America) looms large vis-à-vis the idea of sexual energy as a political force.^[26] One need not believe that any of the associated theories capture anything objectively true — most are patently absurd – but it is important to note how these theories inform the Leftist and animate his political art and activism. The theories operate less as working empirical models but more as instruction manuals for activism. The notion of sexual energy as a political force can, of course, be traced back to the profound influence of Sigmund Freud, the Jewish father of psychoanalysis, particularly his theoretical framework of Eros and Thanatos as discussed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). In revolutionary contexts, so the argument goes, Eros (the drive toward union, pleasure, life) and Thanatos (the drive toward destruction and death) collapse into each other. Destruction becomes pleasurable; killing and dying are eroticized as forms of fusion and transcendence. Revolutionary violence thus becomes a Thanatotic act experienced through Eros.

This ‘dual-drive’ theory of Freud’s underlies several other influential Freudian-Marxists. In The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), the Jewish psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich argued that sexual repression creates authoritarian character structures. Libido that cannot be discharged erotically is redirected into aggression, discipline, and ecstatic submission; mass political movements offer a quasi-erotic release through violence, spectacle, and collective action.

Similarly, the influential Jewish intellectual Herbert Marcuse explicitly links libidinal energy with political rebellion. He deploys a Freudian-Marxist concept of ‘liberation’ that promises a return of pleasure, intensity, and bodily freedom. In Eros and Civilization (1955), Marcuse argues that capitalist society represses Eros, and that when ‘sexual liberation’ is incomplete, revolutionary politics will absorb this repressed erotic longing. Later, in Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972), Marcuse suggests that radical politics often becomes aestheticized and eroticized, but that violence can function as a substitute gratification. It is why, he argues, some revolutionary movements become theatrical and performative, intoxicating even when futile.

It is also worth pointing out the undue influence that The Authoritarian Personality (1950) has had on Cultural Marxism. Theodor Adorno and his co-authors sought to frame traditional Christian norms — such as conventional moral values, respect for established religious authority, traditional gender roles, and adherence to conventional family and sexual ethics — as symptomatic of an underlying authoritarian personality syndrome. On the “F-scale” (fascism scale) personality test that the authors designed, high scorers were pathologized as psychologically rigid, prejudiced, and predisposed to ethnocentrism and fascism, effectively recasting ordinary Christian conservatism as a form of mental maladjustment rooted in repressed aggression and weak ego strength.

It is important also to note that the Weather Underground, who operated between 1969 and 1977, explicitly embraced sexual liberation as a revolutionary act and bought into the Neo-Freudian rhetoric of political violence (and even the outright murder of White civilians) as frenzied ecstatic transgression, all in service of the revolution. For instance, Bernardine Dohrn infamously praised the Manson murders as “wild.” Mark Rudd, the aforementioned Weather Underground leader, writes:

There were crazy discussions at Flint over whether killing white babies was inherently revolutionary, since all white people are the enemy. Out of this bizarre thinking came Bernardine’s infamous speech praising Charles Manson and his gang’s murder of actress Sharon Tate, her unborn child, and the LaBiancas. “Dig it!” she exclaimed. “First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!” We instantly adopted as Weather’s salute four fingers held up in the air, invoking the fork left in Sharon Tate’s belly (Rudd, 2009).

That Bernardine Dohrn was not instantly disqualified from a faculty position at Northwestern University’s Law School speaks volumes about the Left’s continued grip on academia. As with other militant 1960s radicals — Bill Ayers, Angela Davis, Kathy Boudin, Kathleen Cleaver, etc. — the disturbing pattern here is in how their terrorist activities were not socially punished but social rewarded: academic appointments and other comfortable sinecures bestowed where one might have expected lasting disgrace.

VIII. Conclusion

One Battle is a thoroughly Californian film. Its setting takes place entirely in California. It’s director and lead actor, both ardent progressives, have lived there for their entire lives. Thomas Pynchon spent formative decades living in California and his novel that One Battle is loosely based upon is set in California. “As California goes, so goes the nation” is an old political maxim that rings truer every day, and the madness that is California politics plays like satire itself. In a piece of trivia worthy of The Babylon Bee, prior to scenes being shot for One Battle in downtown Sacramento, authorities removed homeless tents — from ‘Cesar Chavez Park’ no less – presumably at the production’s request: ‘The Sacramento Homeless Union says tents were tagged with notices of filming Thursday and those living in the tents were forced to leave the area. “This permit should have never been given,” said Crystal Sanchez, President of the Sacramento Homeless Union’ (Trubey, 2024).

In the epilogue of One Battle, while Bob embraces a quiet life and is adapting to modern technology (Willa shows him how to take a selfie on his new iPhone), we hear a police scanner/radio announce that there is a new protest in Oakland. The radio acts as a link between the past French 75 era of Leftist political activism and the present, showing that the “battle” is never truly over but has passed on to a new generation. The present marks an era of female-dominated, Gen Z, Leftist activism. (Gen Z men are moving decisively towards conservatism). Willa immediately prepares to leave to join the rally, and Bob tries meekly to dissuade her. “You know, Oakland’s a three-and-a-half-hour drive from here,” he says to her, “It’s raining out.” We see unmistakably that this has absolutely no effect on Willa’s determination to go. “Be careful,” Bob says to her as she walks out the door. “I won’t” Willa replies, in the film’s last line of dialogue, before Tom Petty’s “American Girl” needle-drops onto the film’s closing credits, signaling Willa as a continuation of her mother’s activist legacy and the future of America.

One Battle is clearly a celebration of female leadership and an endorsement of the continued feminization of culture. The perceived “battles” that Anderson entertains as reality – the “eternal struggle” theme of the film’s title – comes from Anderson’s liberal White sensibility of what Black and Brown existence in America is comprised of. As one liberal reviewer of the film notes: “The terms of One Battle are not success and failure but action and inaction, and the belligerent, no-nonsense swagger Willa accrues as her own battles pile on suggests that the radical tradition of her parents’ generation will survive through her own” (Goi, 2025).

The more that one scrutinizes One Battle, the more apparent it becomes that Bob is Paul Thomas Anderson and that Willa is his daughters. “Like Bob,” one reviewer notes, “Anderson is an aging rebel reckoning with the nature of time” (LeBeau, 2025). Anderson himself, in an interview, frames the film’s message as one of persistence and stoicism:

“Whether you’re talking about big things, finding one battle after another for the state of our world, or you’re talking about daily battles, from getting up in the morning and just getting your coat and getting your kids to school and brushing your teeth and stubbing your toe. I mean, that’s the job. Yes, fight these daily battles. Be nice. Keep your head down. Get on to the next fight, but don’t give up” (Fear, 2025).

In a Rolling Stone interview with both Anderson and DiCaprio, the interviewer tees them up with a loaded (and leading) assertion posing as a question:

“So many people are asking, what can we do to fight back against this weird, fucked-up moment in American history. And One Battle After Another does kind of have an answer to that, which is: Look after your community and take care of your own.”

DiCaprio agrees and then Anderson adds:

“I think I what I’ve been noticing over the past two weeks since we’ve started showing the movie is, you know, maybe it’s not fashionable to make an optimistic movie right now. That was a risk. It’s fashionable to be cranky or something. But there’s a streak of optimism in the film. I hope there is, at least, I because I feel that way. I mean, I have four kids. I’d better be fucking optimistic” (Fear, 2025).

These sentiments aptly reflect where progressive culture is at the moment. Domestic politics is not seen as a slow and relatively boring, procedural endeavor with compromises being an often-necessary way station towards progress. Rather, it is a grand opera of mythic proportions, where each of us is either good or evil. (The moral absolutism inherent in this Manichaean worldview helps explain the performative aspect of Leftist activism today).

To this point, DiCaprio has compared One Battle to the film Star Wars (1977), something Anderson does not disagree with, noting that Willa can be seen as ‘the Chosen One’ (ala siblings Luke Skwalker and Princess Leia), Sergio/Sensei as Obi Wan Kenobi, Lockjaw as Darth Vader (relentlessly searching for Rebellion members, and secretly the father of the ‘Chosen One’), and the Christmas Adventurers Club hitman as bounty hunter Boba Fett. To this we can add Bob as comic relief ala R2D2/C3PO but with a father-daughter dynamic in play. In terms of making sense of the Left’s paranoid mindset today, of capturing the zeitgeist of their worldview, One Battle After Another in many ways is the Star Wars of today’s Left.^[27]

In a rare moment where he steps outside of his usual, milquetoast NYT-acceptable ‘conservatism’, Ross Douthat fittingly contextualizes One Battle as a failure of vision:

“In keeping with the current liberal mood, it feels trapped in a Boomer time warp, trying to speak to the Trump era but constantly pulled backward toward the America of 50 years ago… Again, all this anachronism works fine in a story about futility and repetition. But Anderson wants to nod to those forces while still offering some sort of call to arms. And the trumpet is too tinny, a thin sound echoing down a long corridor from the Boomer past. History will not stop for this.”

One can easily see a film like One Battle not aging well. In the unlikely chance that, in the decades to come, conservative common sense prevails in the culture wars, and race relations temper to a more rational level, it’s easy to imagine all sides retroactively deeming One Battle as itself borne of progressivism’s own ironic racist assumptions, that is, of White liberals continually perceiving the social reality of Blacks to be one of victimhood, and fostering this sensibility amongst themselves to a manic degree, of treating Blacks as near-sacred beings perpetually trapped in a system that is ‘against’ them, perpetually in need of assistance from Whites. In this way, and over time, One Battle After Another will stand as a cinematic manifestation of the heightened White Savior Complex that characterizes our current era.

REFERENCES

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1. With the 2026 Academy Awards, Sinners laughably received the most Oscar nominations of any film in history. Coogler, who is Black and is best known for the Black Panther movies which inspired the emergent Wakanda mythos, constructs Sinners with a Black-centric orientation and a didactic plot involving White vampires who prey upon Blacks, ‘turning’ these Black victims into vampires themselves. In a racialized variation of From Dusk till Dawn (1996), the social-justice messaging in Sinners is hilariously heavy-handed. ↑
2. Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (1952) provides a useful lens for understanding the political implications of widening conspiracy theories and totalizing ideologies. Voegelin views the ideological pathologies of modernity to be gnostic in structure. Such ideologies often claim access to special knowledge (gnōsis) which reveals the hidden truth of history, and promises that salvation can be achieved within the world rather than beyond it. ↑
3. We can see this despair and self-absorption in such films as the Maoist director Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) and being satirized by Wes Anderson in The French Dispatch (2021). ↑
4. For empirical data on the Left’s growing willingness to use violence, see Rufo (2025) and Dulberg & Horder (2025). ↑
5. Bill Ayers interview, AirGo podcast Episode 386 (“One Battle After Another, Fascism, and Activism During the 60s”), https://youtu.be/XbB40aRz8bg?si=cqUkawiHyESaQbE7, uploaded to YouTube on February 12, 2026 by Respair Production & Media. ↑
6. Bernardine Dohrn (born Bernardine Rae Ohrnstein) was a leader of the Weather Underground and is the wife of Bill Ayers. Her son Zayd Ayers Dohrn also asserts that the movie title One Battle After Another comes from his mother. See Dohrn (2026). ↑
7. See Varon (2004), pp. 107-108. Mark Rudd, a prominent SDS leader at Columbia in 1968 who went on to become one of the original leaders of the Weatherman / Weather Underground, and who is himself Jewish, has written about the significant overrepresentation of Jews in the New Left, particularly in leadership positions (Rudd, 2005). Lichter & Rothman (1981) estimate that Jews accounted for approximately 60% of the New Left in the mid-1960s. See also MacDonald (1998, Ch. 3 “Jews and the Left”) and Rudd (2009). ↑
8. Magnolia (1999) was already on the pulse of where our culture has been drifting for quite some time. The randomness and contingency of life is explored through a series of rather sad and lonely characters, almost all of them male, desperately seeking love and connection. One outlet for this state of affairs is the charismatic and cultish self-help guru Frank T.J. Mackey (Tom Cruise), who preaches a misogynous ethos (ala Andrew Tate) which teaches men how to “Seduce and Destroy” and whose manosphere seminar’s intro music is Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. ↑
9. As with Scorsese, music is central for Anderson. In One Battle, this is accomplished through existing songs such as Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work” and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “American Girl”, as well as through original sountrack compositions. Jon Brion’s anxious, percussive experimentation and Jonny Greenwood’s jarring modernist score (solo piano doing staccato drone patterns and then dissonant passages aurally representing a character’s paranoia) deepen a scene’s psychological tension. ↑
10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8Q35vXE9bI. ↑
11. For a brief summary of Burrough’s book, see Van de Camp (2020). ↑
12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8WW4jJ59d4. ↑
13. Development of a Vineland adaptation has been a pet project of Anderson’s since the early 90s when he first read and became obsessed with the novel. Anderson’s film Inherent Vice (2014) is a relatively faithful adaptation of Pynchon’s novel of the same name, and The Master (2012) contains elements based on Pynchon’s novel V (1963), such as the protagonist being a discharged sailor who connects with a cult-like group of individuals. (See Arblaster, 2022). ↑
14. Bloom shares Pynchon’s liberal paranoia that White Christian Fascists lurk behind every tree and every lawn ornament, aligning him with the pronounced history of Jewish antagonism to Christianity and Gentilism. “The not unimpressive polemic of Norman Mailer — that Fascism always lurks where plastic dominates — is in Pynchon not a polemic but a total vision” (Bloom, 2003, p. 2). Jews love Pynchon, not only because of his radical Leftwing idealism but also because of these Kabbalistic-style attempts to placate a lingering paranoia and persecution complex with elaborate gnostic conspiracy theories. See, for example, Mendelson, Edward (ed.). Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays (1978). Pynchon is not himself Jewish but was raised both Catholic and Episcopalian. ↑
15. See, for example, James Burnham on the managerial–bureaucratic class and the writings of Samuel Francis and Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug). ↑
16. DiCaprio notes that his own father was a 1960s counterculture radical and bombmaker who “hung out with Abbie Hoffman.” In preparation for his role, DiCaprio cites as influences the book Days of Rage, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), Al Pacino’s nervous Sonny Wortzik character in Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and Lumet’s Running on Empty (1988), about a couple who are continually on the move with assumed identities, after having committed terrorist acts as part of a Weather Underground-like group. (As noted in Tom Wolfe’s fascinating Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970), Lumet hosted a high-end party for the Black Panthers before Leonard Bernstein’s soiree for the Black terrorist group, the latter being the focus of Wolfe’s essay). See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_cV9ciktoQ. ↑
17. The ‘White Men Are Stupid In Commercials’ account on X (@StupidWhiteAds) catalogs some of the countless TV commercials that adopt this trope. ↑
18. It was Del Toro’s idea to have Sergio be a ‘protector’ of Mexican illegals. The scenes with Del Toro were shot almost entirely in El Paso, TX, a city that is today a de facto satellite of Mexico. Anderson “adores” this city and its people. “Being in El Paso, at the center of immigration,” Anderson says, “gave us so much material and local talent to work with. It became the centerpiece of the film and certainly the best time I’ve ever had going to work” (Abramovitch, 2026). Del Toro has said that he and Anderson visited a church in El Paso that serves as a sanctuary for illegals until they get their “paperwork processed”. ↑
19. Like many on the Left, Anderson seems to equate extreme physical fitness with Rightwing politics and, childishly, homoeroticism. In the film’s opening sequence, many of the soldiers under Lockjaw’s command are physically buff and shown with their shirts off. ↑
20. MKU is likely modeled after the Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC), an elite, highly trained special operations unit within the U.S. Border Patrol Special Operations Group. Established in 1984, BORTAC provides national/international response to high-risk incidents, including counter-narcotics, hostage rescue, and riot control. One Battle’s closing credits confirm that MKU stands for Mankind United. ↑
21. Other notable examples of this trope include the repressed homosexual Col. Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper) in American Beauty (1999) (who also collects Nazi memorabilia to boot) and Major Weldon Penderton (Marlon Brando) in the movie Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967). Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) has special relevance here as well. Bertolucci was a Marxist and the visually stunning ‘Fascist aesthetics’ of The Conformist frames the protagonist Marcello’s troubled psyche. However, the narrative assumes a facile Marxism-Freudianism: Marcello’s childhood trauma from sexual abuse and consequent sexual dysfunction serve as a Freudian ‘explanation’ of his political extremism and willingness to assassinate an ‘anti-Fascist’ professor on behalf of the state. Repeatedly, we see the Left’s simplistic depictions and explanations of Rightwing political sentiment as psycho-sexual drama within the bourgeoisie. ↑
22. There is a parallel here with the longstanding criticism by some Blacks of Quentin Tarantino’s use of the word “nigger” in his screenplays, a critique that is but another front in the “only we are allowed to say the magic word” culture war. Anderson and Tarantino, who both grew up in the L.A. area, are good friends. Amidst his praise for Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997), Anderson describes an intimate scene that brings him to tears between Pam Grier (who is Black) and Robert Forster (who is White) as being “so cool and so breezy… about middle-aged people that feel the clock ticking… I consider Tarantino a peer, but that is a watermark for how to shoot and film a scene with delicacy and compassion.” See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VSACkqh9a4. ↑
23. Regarding the psychological toll mixed-race adolescents experience, see Green (2025). Regarding Obama, see Steve Sailer’s America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story of Race and Inheritance” (2009). Autobiographical aspects of One Battle have been touched upon by liberal writers: with respect to One Battle, see LeBeau (2025), and for autobiographical aspects of Phantom Thread, see Anderson’s own words in Radish (2018). ↑
24. Minnie Riperton is best known for the hit single “Lovin’ You” (1974), where her overall vocal style and rare falsetto range sounds very ‘White’, to the extent that club owners who booked her after only hearing (and not seeing) her, would be shocked that she was Black. Emily J. Lordi’s book The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s (2020), which features Riperton on the front cover, places her in a broader Black musical-intellectual tradition related to the era’s ideas of Black resilience and, indirectly, the historical world around Black Power. Lordi writes: “Born in 1947 in the Bronzeville district of Chicago, Riperton was the youngest of eight children and the daughter of a homemaker and a Pullman porter. As I have noted, she studied opera for years. Although she knew well that opportunities for black classical singers were extremely limited, she did not, like Nina Simone, narrate her detour from concert music as a racial trauma. This might have been a matter of temperament or a strategic omission. Or it might have been due to the fact that Riperton had always had another place to land: she had grown up near Chess Records, the crucible of Chicago soul” (116-7). Of Riperton’s cover of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”, Lordi writes that Riperton “recast Franklin’s signature song as an eerie exploration of interracial love” in a “seductive interracial duet” with White bassist Mitch Aliotta (62). Lordi later adds that Riperton’s “falsetto marked a refusal to shout and an embrace of an expansive, often buoyant interior life for which Riperton sought both musical and social space. Her quest was especially resonant in an era of black feminist emergence… Through her falsetto, as well as her often self- composed lyrics, Riperton contributed to these feminist efforts to make more space for black women’s interiority, both its pleasures and demands” (116). ↑
25. An important footnote in this regard, and one that amplifies the penchant of both Anderson and DiCaprio to romanticize the Other (and in the process espouse anti-White sentiment), is the fact that both were involved in substantially changing the storyline of Martin Scorsese’s 2023 film Killers of the Flower Moon (Ruimy, 2025). DiCaprio was originally slated to play FBI agent Tom White (ultimately played by Jesse Plemons), a character that was to be the lead role of the film, but was concerned that Eric Roth’s original script was too much of a ‘great White hope story’. Upon critical feedback from members of Oklahoma’s Osage tribe about portraying White men as heroic saviors of the Osage, Scorsese and DiCaprio decided to change the movie’s focus from the FBI’s point of view (as they investigated the Osage murders) to a focus on the interracial marriage between the villainous Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio) and an Osage woman named Mollie (Lily Gladstone). One can see parallels between Ernest’s slow poisoning of his own wife with Lockjaw’s “poisoning” of Perfidia. ↑
26. An almost exclusively Jewish field, psychoanalysis was borne in a rigidly enforced, cult-like atmosphere, propagated by loyal sycophants to Freud. (Freud’s infamous break with Carl Jung, a Gentile, is instructive in this regard). Psychoanalysis has attempted to maintain a veneer of scientific respectability over the years but has since become thoroughly discredited, and can now be seen largely as a Jewish attempt to pathologize Christian European norms. See Cuddihy (1974) and MacDonald (1998). ↑
27. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8WW4jJ59d4. ↑

In this essay, I argue that the movie Weapons (2025) is a latent critique of radical transgender ideology, particularly its barbaric application to children and its associated violence (e.g., Trantifa, trans-related school shootings, etc.). Whether this critique is the subtle intention of the film’s writer/director Zach Cregger or is an unconscious byproduct of his art, Weapons channels our society’s collective anxiety over the trans issue.

NOTE: This essay contains spoilers.

Suburban Horror

Much has been written about the horror film genre being a coded and subversive critique of straight, White, “patriarchal” suburban America. This writing has come almost entirely from the cultural Left and is quite often of the Marxist or Freudian variety, or a fusion of both. (Postmodernist film analysis is among the most execrable writing one will find). Among this crowd, Robin Wood’s 1979 essay “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” is quite influential.^[1] Drawing on Freudian and Marxist ideas, Wood argues that American horror films dramatize the tensions and “repressions” underlying bourgeois capitalist society. He proposes that horror narratives revolve around the return of the “repressed Other” — figures or forces symbolizing what the dominant society “excludes” or suppresses (e.g., sexuality, female autonomy, racial differences, youth rebellion). In this reading, the monster or threat embodies these repressed elements, while the central conflicts in the plot reflect society’s attempts to contain or destroy these repressed elements. Wood interprets the horror genre as a cultural barometer: when purported social contradictions intensify, horror films become more subversive, revealing anxieties about the fragility of the family, authority, and the suburban ideal at the center of American life. In a widely-quoted line from Wood’s essay, he writes: “At this stage it is necessary to offer a simple and obvious basic formula for the horror film: normality is threatened by the monster.”

In what can be called suburban horror or suburban gothic, some films attempt to subvert the American suburban life ideal in particular or, more generally, middle-class life itself. Relevant motifs include the fear of the neighbor/stranger next door; isolated or emotionally distant characters; the uncanny in familiar domestic spaces; anxieties about reproduction and parenthood; and the aforementioned consequences of “sexual repression” beneath middle-class conformity. And so we have Leftist exegeses on such films as Psycho (1960), Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Exorcist (1973), It’s Alive (1974), Carrie (1976), Eraserhead (1977), Halloween (1978), The Brood (1979), Poltergeist (1982), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), The Babadook (2014), and Hereditary (2018).

But sometimes the interpretive tables can be turned. Wood and his ilk are correct that films can act as a cultural barometer, an intuiting of the zeitgeist. With respect to many of the culture war issues of our time, the Left currently has institutional hegemony (e.g., schools, government, media, etc.) despite lack of majority support from the public, and right now there is widespread public anxiety over the issue of minors sexually transitioning, particularly in how schools, the medical establishment, and the courts can collectively strip decisions over such matters away from parents.^[2]

The zeitgeist itself is the conscious self-image of an age — its collective attitudes and dominant symbols — plus the unconscious compensation for what that age represses. Carl Jung theorizes that each of our individual psyches contains an unconscious reservoir of motives, desires, fears, beliefs, and other characteristics that we have suppressed from our conscious mind. He furthermore believes that insofar as certain elements of one person’s unconsciousness are shared by others — that is, as part of a collective psyche — we then have the second-order dynamic of the collective unconsciousness, which Jung demarcates through his schema of archetypes. In the same way that an individual has a Shadow, an entire culture can likewise possess a collective Shadow. The path to psychological health, according to Jung, is the individuation process, and the first step of that process involves encountering one’s Shadow and attempting to integrate its components into the ego. This cycle of individuation then repeats itself continuously as a person matures through adulthood.

It is in this context that the symbolism found in works of art can be studied, interpreted, and appreciated. Works of art that — however indirectly or subconsciously — touch upon the individuation dynamic will resonate. Whether it is through movies, music, literature, or other artforms, Jung’s unconscious Shadow archetype expresses itself as the antithesis of whichever personality type is the dominant, actualized, conscious zeitgeist of the day. “Whatever the unconscious may be,” Jung writes, “it is a natural phenomenon producing symbols that prove to be meaningful” (Jung, 1964). Of the very nature of a symbol, he writes: “By this I do not mean an allegory that points to something all too familiar, but an expression that stands for something not clearly known and yet profoundly alive” (Jung, 1933). Elements of the Shadow are encountered in creativity and can act as a sublimated expression of this encounter. Oftentimes, the artist is not consciously aware that his work is accomplishing this. Great art that engages with this dynamic is able to resonate with a wide swathe of society, tapping into those elements of the collective unconscious most in need of resolution, broaching unresolved tensions of the conscious and unconscious minds, and ultimately providing a step towards psychic integration. With respect to a society’s well-being, Jung believes that the more primordial elements or visions an artist gives expression to can have a salutary effect upon the psychically unbalanced situations the society is experiencing.

Aunt Gladys

Writer/director Zach Cregger’s surprise hit film Weapons centers on the mass disappearance of 17 third-grade children from the same classroom in a small Pennsylvania town. All vanished at precisely 2:17 a.m. on the same night, in a synchronized exodus from their respective homes. Only one child from the classroom, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), remains behind.

Rather than moving events in a straight line, Cregger divides the film into character-driven chapters. The narrative unfolds by jumping back and forth in time through these chapters, rotating the perspectives of several key characters.^[3] Weapons contains several themes revolving around the trauma of inexplicable loss, forms of addiction, and scapegoating, but a closer symbolic reading reveals a latent critique of radical transgender ideology, its application to children, and its associated violence.

At the heart of this interpretation lies Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), the film’s ruthless antagonist. Gladys is a malevolent witch with ulterior motives who, presenting as Alex’s old and long-absent aunt, inserts herself into Alex’s home life after the disappearances. (Alex has never met her before).

She appears to be suffering from an incurable illness (or else is unnaturally old), and the film’s supernatural premise suggests that she uses witchcraft to restore her health and prolong her life. By obtaining a victim’s hair or another personal belonging, she can place them in a trance-like, near-catatonic state and bend them to her will. She then exploits these victims, especially the children, as a source of vitality, effectively feeding on their life force to rejuvenate herself. In addition, by stripping individuals of their agency, she turns them (whether children or adults) into obedient zombie-like “weapons” who attack on command.

Gladys is heavily queer-coded in appearance and demeanor: garish outfits with all the colors of a rainbow flag, camp theatricality, drag-queen aesthetics, and an exaggerated, almost performative femininity. Interestingly, she only talks with this performative cadence when in public. Privately, when she is back at Alex’s house, with her wig off, her voice is lower, measured, and more natural. Gladys’ overall presence and effect can be seen as an example of the uncanny, one of the horror genre’s most unsettling devices in both literature and film. The concept is most famously associated with Freud’s influential 1919 essay “The Uncanny” (one of Freud’s better moments), where he analyzes the psychological roots of the feeling, believing it can be traced to repressed fears and the blurring of boundaries between animate and inanimate, familiar and strange. The uncanny operates less through the alien or monstrous, and more through the distortion of the familiar: the home that no longer feels safe, the doll that almost looks alive, a smile that goes a little too wide. What makes it effective as a horror device, and what the better elevated horror filmmakers understand, is that it doesn’t ask the audience to fear something foreign, but asks them to fear something they already know and love, albeit something that is now slightly wrong. In other words, the horror isn’t located in the thing itself but in the gap between what it should be and what it has become, and that gap — that ‘wrongness’ — is often harder to make sense of than a straightforward monster. With the uncanny, the familiar world is thrown into disarray rather than being intruded upon from the outside. An aspect of the closely related unreliable narrator device often comes into play as well: one never really knows if the noise a character hears, or something he thinks he sees in a flash, is really there or whether it is part of his overexcited or paranoid imagination. The uncanny in Gladys’ unsettling appearance mirrors the uncanny in our own real-world encounters with many transgender individuals, where we are supposed to ‘perceive’ the biological male who decided he wants to be a woman… as an actual woman.

Given Gladys’ unambiguous malevolence (which includes murder), it is rather odd (or perhaps not) that her character has become something of a camp LGBTQ+ icon. In a NYT piece by Esther Zuckerman titled “Aunt Gladys From ‘Weapons’ Doesn’t Scare These Drag Artists,” several drag queen performers who have adopted the Gladys persona in their acts are interviewed:

Perla said that drag queens were drawn to Gladys because she is something of a drag queen herself. When she’s at home, Gladys is makeup-less, casting spells in a nightgown. “But when she’s interacting with people throughout the film and she’s fully done up in this caricature of herself, there is such a difference between her private persona vs. her public persona, and I think that resonates with a lot of drag artists,” Perla said.

From this same piece, another drag performer expresses kinship with Gladys:

Capulet explains that, despite Gladys’ evil actions, she resonates for queer viewers beyond just her fabulous looks. “She’s an outsider trying to fit in with this weird society, and society kind of accepts her but not really and that’s gay people,” she said.

Another volunteers the well-worn ‘girl power’ trope:

[DeJa Skye] added that drag queens were drawn to Gladys because “we love a strong female.” She continued, “For me, it was just the fact she was not afraid to wear the cosmetics, she was not afraid to be camp, to be outlandish, to be out there and just to be, well, I guess not herself, quote-unquote, but what she wanted to present to the world.”

Still another hopes that Gladys lives forever in the drag queen world:

In Gouda Judy’s act, she imagines that Gladys survives the gruesome end of “Weapons.”

“I like to live in a delusional world where I get to see her one more time onscreen,” Gouda Judy said. “So I’m letting her survive through me and I’m sure a bunch of other drag artists are the same where she will live forever now as a drag icon.”

Amy Madigan, whose performance as Gladys has received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, concurs:

“I love that the gay community has so taken to Gladys, and they realize she’s somebody that is an outsider, that’s tormented, that doesn’t fit in. And also her look. People just said, ‘Yeah!’ It’s just a surprise to me that the community, and I think people in the drag community too, kind of really related to [her]” (Chichizola, 2025).

In Weapons, Gladys is deceitful and manipulative and exerts a supernatural control over both children and adults. It’s important to note the striking visuals of the children running away from their suburban homes (i.e., the nuclear family) in the middle of the night (while their parents are asleep) and together racing to Gladys (i.e., trans ideology). With their minds controlled, the possessed children run in a synchronized, trance-like state — arms outstretched in a pointed, ritualistic form – as seen on the film’s promotional poster.

This running-in-unison serves as a metaphor for the associated brainwashing – the mind virus — that comes with woke indoctrination of children on the topic of transgenderism. Regarding these missing children, Gladys has effectively usurped parental authority, isolated the children from their families, and then proceeds to use them to pursue her agenda. Collectively, these sequences of the children running elicits a parallel with how transgender ideology and its proponents effectively lure or “steal” children away from their traditional family units.

Elsewhere in the film, a secondary character named James, who is a young homeless drug addict (and who will ultimately come under Gladys’ spell), steals a child’s backpack from an unlocked car and heads to the local pawn shop to unload its contents, all of which are in trans pink and blue.

At one point in the film, after she puts Alex’s mother and father into a catatonic state, Gladys sits at the head of the family’s dinner table, with the catatonic parents seated on each side of her, waiting for Alex to enter the room. The symbolism here is that Gladys (representing trans dogma) is in control, and not Alex’s parents. We can also perhaps see this dinner table scene symbolizing the mother/father divide on the issue of transitioning a child, the sociological phenomenon of fathers being more resistant to the idea than mothers.

Gladys then says to Alex: “Now, when I tell you that you are not to speak about me or your parents to anyone… you understand what can happen if you break your promise. I can make your parents hurt themselves. I can make them hurt each other. I can make them eat each other if I want to.” One can’t help but see a corollary here with teachers and school administrators hiding a student’s gender dysphoria from their parents, of indirectly encouraging the child to keep their transitioning a secret from their parents. (Many blue states have actually passed laws not requiring teachers or school officials to inform parents if a student identifies as a different gender at school).

Gladys has the missing children spellbound and holed-up in the basement of Alex’s suburban house, standing in unison as if in an alternative classroom, and she has placed newspapers over all of the house’s windows, furthering the theme of hiding the trans agenda from parents. Gladys has turned the children into her personal ‘weapons’ against those who threaten her plans. Should the need arise, she has the possessed children under her control to carry out whatever malevolent deeds she needs done. This motif of an adult figure indoctrinating, grooming, and coercing a group of impressionable youth into militant action against imagined enemies, in many ways echoes the ideological conformity mechanisms of transgender activists and the spate of violence in the past several years committed by transgender activist shooters, or in the case of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, a trans-adjacent shooter. This violence is very much the result of framing rational dissent against the transitioning of minors – against the “gender affirming care” that involves puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones — as being fascist ‘existential violence’ worthy of violent pushback.

AWFLs & Homosexuals

Of the affected third-grade classroom, the single holdout, Alex, becomes the pivot point: the child who resists or is spared the full ‘infection’, and who facilitates the truth surfacing. This echoes conservative critiques arguing that ‘gender-affirming care’, very much a social contagion phenomenon, pressures youth into irreversible steps (with unknown long-term effects on the still-developing brain) and also sidelines those with detransition narratives or who otherwise oppose the Trans-mania driven largely by AWFLs.

On this last point, a telling scene involves Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), a blue collar, conservative-coded, alpha male whose son is among the 17 missing children. Increasingly upset with the police department’s lack of progress in the missing children’s case, Archer takes it upon himself to research the overall case. He marks the locations of the homes from which the children have gone missing onto a map and, where he can, proceeds to review Ring camera footage from nearby houses for the night the children went missing. From this footage, he is able to see the direction the individual children run in, and using a triangulation method he posits the general area where the children’s rendezvous point might be converging at. At one of the homes of a missing child, however, Archer meets unexpected resistance from the child’s mother. She refused to allow Archer to review the family’s Ring footage. Not giving up, Archer waits in his car just down the street until the woman’s husband pulls into the driveway. Archer then approaches him and instantly agrees to let Archer review the Ring footage. As Archer is reviewing the footage with the husband, we see the wife lingering in the doorway, with arms crossed and a look of disapproval. Might this be alluding to how White mothers seem to be the most fanatical proponents of gender-transitioning their children, and White fathers the biggest detractors?^[4]

The scapegoating of teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) further layers this allegory. Justine is the dedicated teacher of the missing children (and Alex). She is young, White, unmarried, and lives alone. Although her heterosexual promiscuity is depicted in the film, at first glance she could easily pass as lesbian or, at a minimum, feminist or the stereotypical AWFL public school teacher. As one lesbian reviewer of the film notes:

She isn’t, as far as the text shows us, queer, but it sure is easy to map her experiences and position in the film onto what it’s like to be a queer or trans teacher today. As part of their multi-level attacks on public education, the religious right has demonized LGBTQ+ teachers (Upadhyaya, 2025).

Justine is blamed by the community for the disappearances — in the way that, in our current cultural climate, teachers would be logical suspects in how and why someone’s child “decides” to become trans — and at one point in the film we see Archer use red paint to emblazon her car with the word “Witch”. Despite no evidence that she knows something about the children’s disappearances, she is placed on leave by the school’s principal Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong). Now completely ostracized, Justine’s alcoholism spirals, accompanied by other self-destructive behavior.^[5]

Marcus is conspicuously depicted as homosexual, yet this seems to serve no ostensible purpose. (For instance, we see him and his effeminate husband Terry in the grocery store interacting as they pick out cereals and such). At Justine’s urging, Marcus visits Alex’s family home to inquire about young Alex. Gladys meets him at the door and successfully deflects him, but Marcus grows suspicious. Gladys picks up on this and decides he must die. She eventually visits the home of Marcus and Terry, invites herself in, and activates a spell on Marcus. In the following grotesque sequence, Marcus (under Gladys’ control) kills Terry, knocking him down to the kitchen floor, and then smashing Terry’s head repeatedly with his own forehead while spewing an ungodly stream of black bile onto Terry. Gladys then sends Marcus to kill Justine, who has been investigating Alex’s home life.

Insofar as we accept the notion that Gladys represents radical transgender ideology, her taking control of Marcus turns him into a symbolic agent of trans ideology itself. Gladys’ instructing Marcus to murder his husband Terry represents the escalating animosity that the thoroughly intolerant, radical trans community has towards ‘traditional’ homosexuals and feminists who believe in the biological gender binary, which is an issue dividing the LGBTQ coalition.^[6] The black bile that Marcus spews onto Terry is akin to the relentless stream of screeched moral indignation and demands from the trans community that is taking place within this coalition’s political environment. Furthermore, with Gladys also suspicious that Justine (representing feminism) is getting close to the truth, she instructs Marcus to find and kill her. In other words, radical trans activism, its institutional ascent (especially in schools), and its intolerance for dissent has led some gays, lesbians, and feminists to turn on each other. These dynamics are articulated by Andrew Sullivan in his NYT opinion piece from 2025 titled “How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized and Lost Its Way”. Sullivan is an influential culture critic and gay rights advocate whose politics could best be described as center-right-with-libertarian-leanings. Of the radical transgender agenda, he writes:

[It] was no longer primarily about gay, lesbian and transgender civil rights, because almost all had already been won. It was instead about a new and radical gender revolution. Focused on ending what activists saw as the oppression of the sex binary, which some critical gender and queer theorists associated with white supremacy, they aimed to dissolve natural distinctions between men and women in society, to replace biological sex with gender identity in the law and culture and to redefine homosexuality, in the process, not as a neutral fact of the human condition but as a liberating ideological queerness — which is then meant to subvert and queer language, culture and society in myriad ways.

The words ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ all but disappeared. L.G.B.T. became L.G.B.T.Q., then L.G.B.T.Q.+, and more letters and characters kept being added: L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ or 2S.L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ (to include intersex, asexual people and two-spirit Indigenous people). The plus sign referred to a seemingly infinite number of new niche identities and, by some counts, more than 70 new genders. The point was that this is all one revolutionary, intersectional community of gender-diverse people and intertwined with other left causes, from Black Lives Matter to Queers for Palestine…

But this new ideology, I believed, was different. Like many gays and lesbians — and a majority of everybody else — I simply didn’t buy it…

[A]bolishing the sex binary for the entire society? That’s a whole other thing entirely. And madness, I believe. What if I redefined what it is to be heterosexual and imposed it on straight people? Or changed what it means to be a man or a woman, for that matter? Then it ceases to be accommodation of a minority and becomes a society-wide revolution — an overreach that would soon lead to a potent and sane backlash, against not just trans people but gay men and lesbians as well” (Sullivan, 2025).

Sullivan notes how the ‘live and let live’ liberal equality goals of the gay rights movement suddenly began to clash with LGBTQ groups who, per their stated revolutionary goals, rapidly permeated the relevant institutions, including schools:

They demanded that the entire society change in a fundamental way so that the sex binary no longer counted. Elementary school children were taught that being a boy or a girl might not have anything to do with their bodies and that their parents had merely guessed whether they were a boy or a girl when they were born. In fact, sex was no longer to be recognized at birth — it was now merely assigned, penciled in…

Sullivan argues that in the gay rights movement, “there had always been an unspoken golden rule: Leave children out of it.” (To what extent this is true is certainly debatable). But for trans activists, targeting children has been a critical front in their culture war:

So what did the gender revolutionaries go and do? They focused almost entirely on children and minors. Partly because the adult issues had been resolved or close to it and partly because true cultural revolutions start with the young, it meant overhauling the education not only of children with gender dysphoria but of every other kid as well.

In a nightmare dream sequence that Justine has, she enters her classroom and sees all of her students sitting at their desks with their heads down. Alex, the one student who didn’t disappear, raises his head and gives a sinister smile with his face covered in creepy clown-like makeup, conjuring Gladys’ own garish appearance. This could be seen to symbolize the fear that certainly some teachers must have that a young boy in their classroom decides he is a girl.

Anxiety Over Trans Violence

Within another nightmare dream sequence that Archer has about his missing son, a giant AR-15 is seen floating in the sky over his house, with “2:17” (the time the children all simultaneously disappeared) illuminating from it. Cregger has stated that he intentionally left the moment ambiguous and doesn’t give a definitive meaning for it:

It’s a very important moment for me in this movie, and to be frank with you, I think what I love about it so much is that I don’t understand it. I have a few different ideas of what it might be there for, but I don’t have the right answer. I like the idea that everyone is probably going to have their own kind of interaction or their own relationship with that scene, whether they don’t give a shit about it and it’s boring, or whether they think it’s some sort of political statement, or whether they think it’s just cool. I don’t really care. It’s not up to me. I just like that it’s there (Earl, 2025).

That being said, when combined with the very title of the film and the premise involving young schoolchildren, one cannot help but read the image as representing parental fear of school violence.

Sanity Prevails

Bioleninism (“Biological Leninism”) is a useful shorthand formulation for the Dissident Right’s view on how society operates.^[7] It provides an encapsulating framework that centers upon, and synthesizes, various core perspectives within the Dissident Right: HBD realism; Steve Sailer’s “Coalition of the Fringes” notion; Moldbug/Yarvin-style historical revisionism (rejection of the progressive account of history) and accounts of hierarchy; memetics; and the critical role that status anxiety plays in radically remaking the centers of power in Western society. Because post-industrial affluence in the West has met the material needs of even the poorest and most low-status groups, class consciousness has failed to materialize as a Leftist rallying point. In its place is status, a prime motivator of human activity.^[8] In brief, Bioleninism is the ideologically driven elevation of low-status groups into positions of power in the ruling class. However, unlike Lenin’s unified and formal Communist party of the Soviet Union, today’s Bioleninism is distributed and informal. There is no single unifying political party, but rather Gramsci’s “Long March through the Institutions” in the form of HR departments, NGOs, media, academia, corporate DEI… and public schools. Each act as a conduit of propaganda and activism.

The progressive regime today is largely comprised of an identity-based coalition of groups, and this has become the central organizing principle for its nexus of power. As such, this regime elevates people who would be low-status in a purely meritocratic, traditional, or naturally ordered (biologically determined) society — basically anyone who would rank low on natural hierarchies of competence, attractiveness, health, and traditional family formation. Groups that get uplifted and granted institutional power include non-White ethnic groups (particularly Blacks and Browns); LGBTs and people with other deviant sexualities; those with various other psychological disorders (“neurodivergence”); etc.

Along the way, the gender dysphoria underlying transgenderism goes from being a mental disorder to being normalized, a point of pride, even something to aspire to. This leads to an elevated moral status, a heightened sense of moral self-righteousness. The progressive coalition members become fanatically loyal enforcers (“political commissars”) precisely because their elevated position depends entirely on the continuation of the progressive regime model itself. If merit, tradition, or natural status hierarchies were to return — if the progressive regime were to lose its ruling class status — these groups would lose their position and prestige.

The mania surrounding gender dysphoria in youth is very much a social contagion phenomenon, where misfit kids seek to reinvent themselves into something new and fashionable, to immediately gain a boost in social status, and to suddenly possess a strange level of social power over adults. In those instances where outright social contagion is not in play, there is still a high likelihood that even these gender-dysphoric children are simply gay or lesbian.

In his famous 1917 lecture “Science as a Vocation,” Max Weber argued that the spread of rationalization, bureaucratization, and scientific thinking had systematically drained the world of its sense of mystery, magic, and transcendent meaning. Secularization had made our world disenchanted. A parallel track to this has been the idea of social fragmentation, something that has long been on conservatism’s radar screen. The inertia of the free-market ethos leans toward dissolving traditional norms and institutions, and toward the ever-novel commodification of all things, actions, and relationships. When concatenated across society, an emergent value system of consumer capitalism takes shape and coalesces. The cultural contradictions of capitalism are such that a vast array of choices and options (oriented around increasingly unbounded and free-floating values of self-actualization) leads to a hyper-individualism devoid of familial and communal ties, to an atomized society, to a culture of narcissism (to quote Lasch). From every conceivable angle, one is told that one ought to have the choice to do this or that, to become this or that.

In many ways, Trans-mania is a logical consequence of this societal inertia. Why should the biological reality of your gender prevent you from being your ‘true self’? From this vantage point, gender dysphoria acts as a re-enchantment of one’s being in the world. The contradiction, however, is that when people are ‘liberated’ from unchosen obligations, they are not necessarily happier individuals with healthy, integrated psyches, but are all too often weighed down with anxiety, depression, uncertainty, and anomie.

***

In the third act of Weapons, Archer eventually comes to realize that his take on Justine has been all wrong, that she is just as anxious and determined to find out what’s happened to the missing children as he is. In Archer’s eyes, Justine goes from being the scapegoat to being a partner aimed at rescuing the children. Since we are in the general Jungian wheelhouse in this essay, there’s an added element that is part of Jung’s psychological theory. That the conservative-coded male Archer and the (presumably) feminist Justine (which can plausibly be inferred from her irresponsible drinking, promiscuity, and overall appearance) resolve their differences and join forces can be seen as the embodiment of a healthy, integrated psyche.

Part of Jung’s concept of psychological wholeness rests on the idea that every human psyche contains contrasexual elements that must be acknowledged and integrated rather than suppressed. In men, this inner feminine dimension is referred to as the anima — a living psychological force embodying feeling, intuition, relatedness, and the capacity for deep emotional life. In women, the corresponding inner masculine dimension is animus — associated with logos, rationality, assertion, and directed will. (In many ways, this aligns with sociobiology’s discussion of sex differences in temperament and social roles). Jung’s argument is that a man who represses his anima becomes rigid, emotionally distant, and vulnerable to moods he can’t consciously account for. Since the anima doesn’t disappear when denied, it instead goes underground and operates autonomously as a Shadow, prone to erupting in irrational behavior. The same dynamic applies to a woman whose animus remains unconscious: she becomes vulnerable to dogmatic thinking, compulsive opinionating, suicidal empathy, and neuroticism. True individuation — Jung’s term for the lifelong process of becoming a fully realized self — requires a conscious, ongoing, and balanced relationship between these inner figures, so that the ego can draw on the full resources of the psyche rather than just a part of it.

In the film’s finale, Justine and Archer enter Alex’s house. This provides a sufficient distraction to allow Alex to take control of the spell that possesses the children and redirect it towards Gladys herself. Alex aims these ‘weapons’ at Gladys and the children proceed to chase her out of the house and through the suburban neighborhood. As the children smash through doors and windows of houses to get to Gladys, we see her wearing another pink and blue outfit, the last set of clothes she’ll ever wear before her grisly death at the hands of the children who literally tear her apart from limb to limb.

The film ends with the spell being lifted from the children, and most of them returning to normal. A voiceover tells us: “All of the kids from [Alex’s] class got reunited with their parents. Some of them even started talking again this year.” Some will successfully detransition, while others are just too far gone. This finale of Weapons can be interpreted as society’s rejection of the sexual transitioning of minors and of the accompanying ‘liberation’ of children from the clutches of radical transgender ideology.

References

• Belmont, N., Cronin, T. J., & Pepping, C. A. (2024). “Affirmation-support, parental conflict, and mental health outcomes of transgender and gender diverse youth,” International Journal of Transgender Health, 25(1), 50–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/26895269.2023.2252418
• Chichizola, Corey. “Weapons’ Amy Madigan Reacts To Aunt Gladys Becoming A Gay Icon (And She Deserves It),” Cinemablend, November 28, 2025, https://www.cinemablend.com/movies/weapons-amy-madigan-reacts-aunt-gladys-becoming-a-gay-icon
• Earl, William. “‘Weapons’ Director Zach Cregger on David Fincher’s Advice, Sequel Plans and What His ‘Resident Evil’ Movie Will Look Like,” Variety, August 8, 2025, https://variety.com/2025/film/features/weapons-sequel-director-david-fincher-1236468200/.
• Freud, Sigmund (2008). The Uncanny. Penguin Books: New York.
• Garcia CC, Schwarz K, Costa AB, Bridi Filho CA and Lobato MIR (2021). “Perceived Parenting Styles of Individuals With Gender Dysphoria,” Frontiers in Psychology, 12:655407. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.655407
• Grant, Barry Keith (ed.) (2018). Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews. Wayne State University Press: Detroit.
• Johnson, S. L., & Benson, K. E. (2014). “It’s Always the Mother’s Fault”: Secondary Stigma of Mothering a Transgender Child. Journal of GLBT Family Studies, 10 (1–2), 124–144. https://doi.org/10.1080/1550428X.2014.857236.
• Jung, C. G. “Psychology and Literature”, in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, translated by W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933.
• Jung, C. G. “Approaching the Unconscious”, in Jung, C. G., and Marie-Luise Franz. Man and His Symbols. New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1964.
• Lowenstein, Adam (2002). Horror Film and Otherness. Columbia University Press: New York.
• Spandrell. “Biological Leninism,” November 13, 2017, https://spandrell.ch/2017/11/13/biological-leninism.
• Sullivan, Andrew. “How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized and Lost Its Way,” New York Times, June 26, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/gay-lesbian-trans-rights.html.
• Upadhyaya, Kayla Kumari. “‘Weapons’ and the Demonization of Teachers,” Autostraddle, August 15, 2025, https://www.autostraddle.com/weapons-film-review-queer/.
• Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited & translated by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. Oxford University Press, 1958.
• Wood, Robin (1979). “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” In The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, edited by Andrew Britton, Richard Lippe, Tony Williams, and Robin Wood. Toronto: Festival of Festivals, 1979. Reprinted in Grant (2018).

End Notes

1. See also Lowenstein (2002). ↑
2. We can see allegorical anxiety over trans-mania in other recent films such as Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid (2023) and the Alt-Right-adjacent film Bugonia (2025). In the latter film, which has been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, the working-class White antagonist Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) has been silo-ed into online conspiracy theories. He believes that some ‘humans’ walking among us are actually Andromedans, wily and capable of using sexual manipulation to achieve their goals. As a defense measure against this, Teddy has undergone chemical castration and convinces his autistic cousin and cohort Dan (Aidan Delbis) to begin doing the same. Dan reluctantly obliges and his subsequent suicide serves as a commentary on the suicide risks of transgender hormone treatments. Teddy and Dan’s pattern of kidnapping and murdering suspected Andromedans may also serve as an allegory about the propensity of transgendered individuals to commit murders in the U.S. ↑
3. Cregger has cited Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) as a big influence on him in the making of Weapons. However, Cregger’s use of this type of multi-perspective device doesn’t entirely succeed here: it feels somewhat forced and the secondary character development is oftentimes pointless to the plot. See Earl (2025). ↑
4. The gender divide between parents, which shows fathers least likely to support a child’s transition, is consistently documented. See Johnson & Benson (2014), Garcia et al (2021), and Belmont et al (2024). ↑
5. It is worth noting that some liberal reviewers of Weapons see Justine as representing a conservative moral panic, namely, the demonization of queer or trans teachers accused of grooming and indoctrinating students for “simply” discussing LGBTQ+ identity topics. See, for instance, Upadhyaya (2025). ↑
6. Various groups in the LGBTQ coalition hold incompatible assumptions about what sex and gender are. Trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), for example, hold a core position that biological sex is real and immutable. From this foundation, it follows that womanhood is defined by biology and not gender identity. A trans “woman” is biologically male and therefore not a woman in the full sense. In the end, the core conflict is a philosophical disagreement about whether gender is purely a social construct (the trans position) or whether biological sex is an immutable category. The confusing myriad of positions that different groups hold on this topic has led to a proliferation of different ‘pride’ flags. ↑
7. The concept originated in the neoreactionary (NRx) online scene circa 2017-2018 and was coined by the blogger Spandrell. ↑
8. The role of status anxiety has been central in the theories of various influential sociologists, including Weber, Veblen (conspicuous consumption), Goffman, Bourdieu, and Girard (mimetic rivalry). ↑

SCORE: 4/5

This 38 min avant-garde silent film by French-Russian director Dimitri Kirsanoff displays early modernist techniques far ahead of its time (e.g., superimpositions, dissolves, unexpected juxtapositions). There are no intertitles, the film relying (successfully) on pure visual narration and viewer engagement. The violent opening scene is likely influenced by the murder of Kirsanoff’s father by Bolsheviks in 1919.

There is an emotional sequence where the impoverished young woman played by the striking Nadia Sibirskaïa (with her out-of-wedlock-newborn in tow, the product of a cad’s manipulation of her) is in a torturous psychological state: rapid superimpositions convey her frenzied and turbulent mind. We cling to our chair as she, holding her newborn, considers suicide (via long gazes into the river).

There is a scene where she is sitting on a park bench, hungry and cold, while an old man sits down nearby to eat his lunch. She is too proud to beg. From a sidelong glance, the man can see she is homeless and hungry, and so pushes a piece of bread and some meat towards her on the bench. She doesn’t immediately take it, but instead begins to tear up. With just these facial expressions, we see the sudden depth of her painful realization of how dire her situation is, how her dreams are utterly shattered, her pride smashed. She eventually takes the food and nods to the man in thanks. It’s one of the most emotional scenes I’ve ever seen.

SCORE: 4/5

SPOILERS BELOW —

In the style of Charlie Kaufman’s screenplays (e.g., Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)), Norwegian writer/director Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario (his first English-language feature film) is a smart and stinging rebuke to the celebrity of influencer culture, consumer capitalism and, perhaps most provocatively, cancel culture. As such, there is a decidedly conservative streak to this satirical film with, at one point, overt references made to the ‘Alt-Right’ and IDW-aligned figures (e.g., Rogan, Peterson, Tucker). As an outsider’s critique of American culture, Dream Scenario follows in the steps of Borgli’s first film, the well-received black comedy Sick of Myself (2022), which skewers the social cult of inclusivity/diversity and its associated reward mechanisms for exaggerated claims of victimization. “Though there were good intentions,” Borgli has noted, “an economy formed around being a victim, being marginalized or looking differently. That’s what incentivized me to think that placed in the wrong hands, it could have a very fatalistic outcome” (Keogan, 2023). (Borgli wrote the scripts of both films shortly after moving from Norway to Los Angeles, a place he found far more narcissist than his home country).

In Dream Scenario, Nic Cage plays Paul Matthews, a meek and frumpy professor of evolutionary biology who lives with his wife and two teen daughters (both perpetually glued to their cell phones) in an upscale suburban neighborhood in Massachusetts. He is a drab and unremarkable figure, and somewhat emasculated: we learn, for example, that he “chose” to take his wife’s last name in a cringe-worthy, misplaced gesture of feminist solidarity; at home we see him continuously defer to the females of his household, and at the college where he teaches we see him generally ignored by his class of bored students. As the movie unfolds, one could argue that Paul’s arc becomes an allegory for the accumulated cultural repression of White males in modern American society and the potentially explosive, defensive reactions from said White males that might ensue if pushed to the breaking point. Borgli subtly frames the film’s events within the Darwinian contours of evolutionary biology and its sister field of memetics.

Influenced by Jung’s writings on the tension between the conscious and unconscious mind, as well as his internet dives into online discussions of astral projection (Kaplan, 2023), Borgli depicts a freak phenomenon of the collective unconsciousness manifesting itself in a strange new way: Paul begins to appear in other people’s dreams, the common feature of these dreams being Paul’s disinterest and inaction while the dreamer is being hunted or otherwise threatened. In these dream scenarios, Paul’s curbed role as a bystander partially serves as a representation of the aforementioned generalized White male anxiety, emasculation, and beta male passivity. In an interview about the film, Borgli notes:

We spend a lot of our lives dreaming in bed, but we also spend our waking life mostly in our heads too. I feel like we’re not participating in reality as much as we are thinking about our past or the imagined future at any moment. That is a big part of the experience of life. I thought of this movie as a possibility of going there and exploring that. There’s a discrepancy between reality and what you dream about, and I wanted to put those two in dialogue and explore that tension (Lee, 2023).

Despite his bystander passivity, and due largely to the novelty of the phenomenon, Paul becomes fleetingly famous, a viral sensation driven primarily by Gen Z types on social media. At the college where Paul teaches, a throng of students has experienced his appearance in their dreams. As Paul enters the lecture hall one day, instead of it being nearly empty (as is typical for his lectures) the room is crowded. The students in attendance give him a round of applause, and although he’s a bit embarrassed by the adulation, Paul soaks it in before talking to the students:

PAUL: Who’s really here for the lecture on kin selection? Show of hands… Okay, the rest of you, I’ll give you five minutes before I start the lecture, okay? Ask me anything… Yes, you?

STUDENT: How does it feel to go viral?

PAUL: Huh… Well, we can discuss that when we get to memetics later this year.

Paul hopes to leverage his newfound fame to find a publisher for his yet-to-be-written academic book on ants — itself an apt allusion to the collective, hive-mind, human behavior generated by social media and ubiquitous advertising. Borgli says of Paul:

He feels he is being robbed of academic success and has an image of himself that doesn’t match his image in the world. It’s interesting that while he has this midlife crisis, that’s when everyone starts dreaming about him. He’s so starved for attention that he conflates being seen in this way with success (Lee, 2023).

As he listlessly attempts to find a publisher, we see the awfulness of Madison Avenue types represented in Trent (Michael Cera), an unscrupulous upstart public relations agent and his sycophant assistant Mary, who essentially deliver to Paul one false promise after another in an effort to lock him down as an account. They’re eager for Paul to agree to do product-placement (Sprite) in other people’s dreams, a proposition that Paul is disgusted by. However, despite extolling such principles we see the lure of fame ensnare Paul: a young woman from the Madison Ave agency named Molly pursues him in the hopes of actualizing the sexually explicit dreams she’s had of him. He clumsily facilitates the setting for this scenario, but for Molly it doesn’t go down quite as expected, and for Paul it leads to a moment of humiliation that begins a subsequent unraveling of his life.

“So, I’m starting to think that maybe Nick Bostrom was right about the simulation theory,” Paul says at a dinner party that turns sour. “That would sure explain a lot about my situation.”

Whereas in Act 1 Paul was an odd but welcome feature in others’ dreams, Act 2 takes a darker turn as Paul becomes a Freddie Krueger-type nightmare character in these people’s dreams, engaging in all sorts of sadistic depravities there. It is within this context — where some of his college students become “traumatized” by Paul’s sudden appearance in their nightmares — that the film engages in an effective critique of cancel culture. When pushed into a corner by false and baseless allegations, and with nowhere else to turn, might the White male become the very thing society is accusing him of being?

At Paul’s college, we see a cognitive behavioral therapist working with a dozen or so students who feel “unsafe” around Paul. In several instances, the film mocks woke mantras of “lived experience” and how infantilized students being triggered is, on woke campuses, sufficient cause for a college to cancel someone, especially if the ‘offender’ is a straight White male. The bullying mob mentality of social media-fueled cancel culture is most pointedly depicted when a large group of students paint “Loser” on Paul’s car and in response he shouts insults at them (his rage captured on students’ cell phone cameras, of course). To the college’s Dean, Paul protests against the absurdity that he is somehow responsible for their dreams, but his protests are in vain. The handwriting is already on the wall. Despite tenure, his employment at the college is threatened. Fissures begin to appear in his marriage, leading to its ultimate dissolution.

Trent, the Madison Ave agent, explains to Paul that, given the dark turn people’s dreams of Paul have taken, Sprite has pulled out of consideration as an advertiser. The corporations are now scared and risk-averse, Trent and his team explain to Paul, however, they propose an “audience-pivot”:

TRENT: We’re talking about a complete 180. We have to think fresh. Corporate culture won’t touch this. It’s too risky.

MARY: Yeah, but we are getting positive signals from a different venue. The whole — I don’t want to say ‘alt-right’ — but the kind of anti-establishment space, you know, kind of the Jordan Peterson route.

TRENT: Yeah, we can maybe get you on Rogan or something. Share your experience of being cancelled and just, like, pivot…

PAUL: Guys, no. I hate that idea. I don’t want to be some culture war person. I… I… I don’t want to be controversial.

TRENT: There is a chance, we think, to get you on Tucker Carlson this week… So, that’s a big audience. Just think about that. Don’t answer right now.

MARY: And then also, there’s France, Paul. For some reason, they love you over there. Even with the nightmares, they love it.

TRENT: Yeah. You’re building a fanbase over there.

A striking sequence is when Paul dreams of being hunted with bow and arrow by a version of himself wearing hunter camouflage. The allegory here seems to be that while in a social media age where the operative dynamics of ‘natural selection’ appear to be shaped less by physical prowess (genetics) and more by the cunning manipulation of cultural tropes (memetics), especially with respect to wokeness and how it currently serves as a winning strategy in our current ‘evolutionary biological’ game/model, it is physical strength and power – however dormant it might be at the moment – that will prevail in the end.

Desperate to keep his job, Paul tries to get ahead of the cancel culture mob by releasing a self-pitying apology video, where he cries and asserts that he is the victim, which might provide him some leeway in a culture animated by the victimology cult of wokeness. This video humiliates his wife and leads to their imminent divorce.

In the final sequences of the film, set at some undetermined but near point in the future, we see how the discovery of a shared collective unconscious experience has led Silicon Valley to develop wearable tech allowing one to enter someone else’s dream… and promote corporate advertising or one’s personal projects. We see youth gravitate towards this tech commodification and praise it in the most superficial and conformist of ways. Of this sequence in the film, Borgli says:

I was thinking about taking a strange, abstract, and metaphysical concept from an H.P. Lovecraft story and placing it into our banal and real culture to see how they clash. I just followed what I thought would be the playbook of how that would all play out. I thought that if this were to really happen, at some point, the dream phenomenon would get co-opted and made into a product. It captured some of my fears—i.e. if we let everything be a race to the bottom of market decisions, we will have nothing sacred left. I’m scared of the American model winning over and then turning everything into products (Lee, 2023).

With respect to the uncertain future between Paul and his wife, the film ends on an ambiguous and bittersweet note, although that ambiguity is somewhat clarified by Borgli in an interview. “He loses perspective over his values,” notes Borgli, “and at the film’s conclusion you see a man who finally understands what is important, but at the cost of having lost everything” (Lee, 2023).

***

In its critique of American culture, Dream Scenario offers many prescient and interwoven layers. Being a Norwegian who is quite fluent in English, Borgli offers us an outsider’s perspective, and Dream Scenario is instructive satire, pressing various themes that the New Right has been pressing for quite a long time. Of the commodification of virtually everything, Borgli notes:

As a filmmaker from a country where they have a film institute that funds movies and who’s coming to work in America where there’s no such system, there’s only the business model. I’m always aware and fearful of how market incentives can corrupt anything good, original, or sacred. It’s something that I want to talk about because there are ways that we don’t even see that advertising and marketing are slowly paving the road to hell (Shaffer, 2023).

Of social media and influencer culture:

There [are] so many of these 24-hour viral sensations—unlikely celebrities—and some capitalize on it and even create a career around this accidental fame. Some, of course, get completely humiliated and shamed and wish they could delete themselves from the internet. It just feels like more of a scary time to engage with the public, because the public is the world now (Kaplan, 2023).

Through both the film and in interviews, Borgli hammers home the detrimental and dysfunctional aspects of this dominant cultural trend:

We’re more and more pressured into making ourselves personal brands. It’s hard to live up to that personal brand. I think the discrepancy between person and persona is extremely vital and vibrant in the culture right now because we’re curating and branding ourselves. Maybe in ways that we don’t know, it’s damaging our own identity and self-worth. It’s harder to change positions on things because you’ve made yourself a solid, one-idea brand. That’s sort of how we deal with people now. There’s less space for nuance in that way, and we’re contributing to that (Shaffer, 2023).

When asked if he believes the celebrity and fame dynamics of social media and influencer culture are redeemable in their current form, Borgli offers a trenchant reply that employs an Aristotelian definition of excellence:

We need to understand that some of the goals we pursue in the more conceptual and abstract parts of our modern life have an effect on our bodies. For example, we realized that fast food is not something we can run on. We can’t live a life on empty calories. Similarly, I think there’s a lot of empty calories in our culture right now. There’s a lot of noise and not a lot of signals. There’s something positive about status and recognition. It’s important that collectively, we can deem something as “good,” such as a good piece of art. While this mechanism for recognition is positive and a good cultural tool, it has been weaponized against us with all these different ways that we can self-promote and get what we think feels like status. But it’s this empty calorie version of status. We need to parse out what is healthy and unhealthy, and we need to stop chasing the byproduct of achievement and start chasing achievement itself (Lee, 2023).

Lastly, there is a metatextual element to Dream Scenario when one considers the memeification of Nic Cage himself, usually surrounding his often intense (and sometimes endearingly over-the-top) performances. In a highly informative interview to promote the film, Cage discusses all of this and places it within the context of his character Paul:

I think the movie works on many different levels. It’s a bit like peeling an onion, it has different layers. On my mind was more of my own memeification and how I was trying to process waking up in 2009 and foolishly Googling my name and seeing those ‘Cage Loses His Sh*t’ memes, and thinking, well, I signed up to be a film actor. I didn’t sign up to be an internet meme. I don’t know what this is. I had no reference point for it. I found it frustrating, but I also found it stimulating. I thought it was confusing, but I had nowhere to put it.

So, when Dream Scenario came along, I quickly thought I might have, in some strange little way, the life experience to play Paul’s dreamification, because what he’s going through is not really unlike that: People start dreaming about him overnight and then they start talking about their dreams and it goes viral. And I thought, I can make it real for myself and real within the performance because of my memeification. I don’t say this with any complaint anymore or with any ill will. I’ve made friends with it, subsequently, and I’ve decided that, if anything, it’s kept me in the conversation. And it’s also given people a kind of id release. I mean, when they see these meltdowns, I think there’s some vicarious enjoyment to be able to kind of play out those fantasies that we can’t really do, because we all want to behave in society, you know? (Wise, 2024)

References

Kaplan, Ilana. “‘Dream Scenario’ Director Kristoffer Borgli on How His Surreal A24 Film Is Inspired By ‘Shin Godzilla’,” Backstage, November 15, 2023, https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/dream-scenario-director-interview-kristoffer-borgli-76637/

Keogan, Natalia. ‘“I’m Very Comfortable With Repeating Ideas Until They Are Perfected”: Kristoffer Borgli on Sick of Myself ,’ Filmmaker, April 12, 2023, https://filmmakermagazine.com/120781-interview-kristoffer-borgli-sick-of-myself/.

Lee, Zachary. “Inside My Head: Kristoffer Borgli on Dream Scenario,” RogerEbert.com, November 06, 2023, https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/inside-my-head-kristoffer-borgli-on-dream-scenario.

Shaffer, Marshall. “Interview: Kristoffer Borgli on Satirizing Meme-ification and Cancellation in Dream Scenario,” Slant, November 10, 2023, https://www.slantmagazine.com/features/kristoffer-borgli-interview-dream-scenario/.

Wise, Damon. “Nicolas Cage On ‘Dream Scenario,’ Resurrecting Superman And Working In Television: “I Never Would’ve Considered It Five Years Ago.”,” Deadline, January 11, 2024, https://deadline.com/2024/01/dream-scenario-nicolas-cage-the-flash-interview-1235699131/.

SCORE: 4/5

A flop when it was first released, Peter Fonda’s directorial debut The Hired Hand (1971) is now widely considered a minor classic in the then-burgeoning anti-Western subgenre (otherwise known as ‘revisionist Westerns’ , e.g., Little Big Man, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Sam Peckinpah’s westerns), with splashes of experimental ‘Acid Western’ stylizations (e.g., The Shooting). It is a simple but extraordinarily powerful film.

After the huge success of Easy Rider (1969), Universal Studios helped launch the brief New Hollywood phase of the industry by giving Peter Fonda $1,000,000 to make a movie (it is Fonda’s directorial debut), granting him full artistic control, as they had similarly done with Dennis Hopper, who would make the acid-drenched The Last Movie in the same year.

Fonda and a superb Warren Oates (Fonda gave up part of his producing fee to bring Oates aboard) play world-weary drifter cowhands at something of an impasse in life. Seven years prior, Fonda had left his wife and child for the ‘freedom’ of the open terrain of the American Southwest; he now longs to return home, unsure of how his wife will receive him but nonetheless determined to try. Although Oates would rather continue westward to California and the Pacific Ocean, he is game for returning to Fonda’s old homestead. (In many ways, Oates’ balanced and nuanced performance is the centerpiece of the film, the gravity upon which all events revolve around).

Verna Bloom plays Fonda’s forlorn wife, a woman hardened by loneliness and abandonment, yet still vulnerable and emotionally fragile in the presence of her husband… and Oates. She doesn’t initially accept Fonda back into her life in the role of traditional husband, but allows both he and Oates to stay on as ‘hired hands’. While Fonda plays a sort of aimless Odysseus returning home, Bloom is an all-too-human Penelope who, in the seven year interim, has both succumbed to various suitors’ advances and made her own advances to various cowhands she’s employed.

The screenplay by Scottish novelist Alan Sharp has some extraordinary dialogue, subtle and existential in the best of Western traditions. There is one scene between Bloom and Oates that is one of the most moving scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie.

The terrific cinematography is by the now-legendary Vilmos Zsigmond (McCabe and Mrs. Miller; Deliverance; The Long Goodbye; Close Encounters of the Third Kind; The Deer Hunter; Heaven’s Gate), but it is Frank Mazzola’s editing of Zsigmond’s footage that gives The Hired Hand such a unique feel. Moving images stop in freeze-frame and then dissolve into another, similarly-shaped still which then proceeds into new moving imagery, providing a poetic element to the visuals. This further coalesces vis-à-vis the haunting and atmospheric soundtrack self-recorded by Greenwich Village folk scene fixture Bruce Langhorne. Minimalist instrumental pieces involving banjo, sitar, and fiddle perfectly matches the film’s mood. The movie’s heralded, opening montage sequence – which consists of slow-motion footage of Oates bathing in a river while Fonda fishes – is a mini-masterpiece: the soft light and deliberate sunlight-infused lens refraction, the slow dissolves, and Langhorne’s simple banjo-centered melody collectively create a powerful and emotional backstory… without a single word. It is bookended by the film’s silent and very moving ending.

There is a sense of foreboding throughout the film, with incarnations of death (as well as unmitigated evil in nature) all around: a boy crying out for his mother as he lays dying; the corpse of a young drowned girl slowly cascading down a river. Christ symbolism (a widely-used trope in hippie films of the era) is present, but not in an overbearing way. The film’s longevity, however, is assured through its overarching thematic elements: With age comes the abandonment of youthful dreams and idealism (represented here through the discussions of California), the yearning to return ‘home’, the pragmatic acceptance of one’s limited lot in life and love, and the resignation that comes with seeing these truths.

SCORE: 5/5

This movie is a f*cking revelation. A cult fave, I was expecting a more conventional muscle car movie, but this is so much more. Directed by the underrated Richard Sarafian, with stunning cinematography by John Alonzo. A mythopoetic road movie + existentialism + knockout performances from everyone, especially from the lead actor, the equally underrated Barry Newman who plays ‘Kowalski’, the guy the police are chasing and who challenges authority and all around him in his souped-up Dodge Challenger. He downs a supply of amphetamines to reach his Sisyphean goal of driving from Denver to SF in record time, for an unspecified goal. All the secondary actors are top-notch. Though countercultural ala Easy Rider, it is incredibly based and salient for the New Right of today, who are today’s counterculture.

SPOILERS BELOW:

The layers of symbolism and allegory here are many. Though he doesn’t show it, Kowalski is damaged goods. He served with distinction in Vietnam. He became a cop but left that role after acting against police corruption. He then became a race car driver, but saw some die in wrecks and nearly died himself. And he is haunted by memories of his lost surfer girlfriend. For the most part, he refrains from the temptations of pot, ‘free love’, and whatnot for a higher purpose… getting to SF in record time, but does succumb to a desert seduction by a young hitchhiker (Charlotte Rampling) who, in her downhearted musings about waiting and eternity, may represent death itself.

In getting the car he’s driving to SF, we never learn why it is so urgent to get it there in record time, and it seems that Kowalski’s urgency is a purpose-in-itself, where the ultimate telos of one’s ‘vanishing point’ – the eyes fixed as far as one can see down the road — is the annihilation of being which comes with death.

The fantastic era-specific soundtrack, with its evangelical rock tinge (which serves as meta-commentary on the film’s proceedings), accentuates the Christ allegory of the protagonist. In the third act, Kowalski is aided by a guardian angel of sorts, a blonde hippie biker dude named ‘Angel’, who lives in a trailer in the middle of the desert with his gorgeous blonde girlfriend (who herself rides around the house naked on a motorcycle).

The role of the desert is central throughout. The sequence where, in the middle of Death Valley, Kowalski (fixing a flat tire) is stumbled upon by an old man snake collector, is like something out of the Bible. While the movie leans to the left for the time, by today’s standards this is less apparent. For example, on a lone stretch of desert highway, Kowalski picks up two gay hitchhikers whose car had broken down (one is carrying a “just married” sign that was on the back of their car), but this humorous interlude soon turns dangerous when they pull a gun on Kowalski to rob him. He bests them in the end though.

George Miller must have been greatly influenced by this movie when making Mad Max. From the centrality of desert highway, to the highway chase sequences, to the similarity in names between Kowalski, Max Balchowsky (the ex race car driver who maintained the five 1970 Dodge Challenger R/Ts used during filming), and Max Rockatansky, the name of Mel Gibson’s character in Mad Max.

If you haven’t seen this movie, do check it out. It’s achieved cult status for very good reasons. The cinematography is sharp, wide, and spectacular. The car driving is top-notch. And the deeper allegorical levels of the film will pull you in.

SCORE: 4.5/5

This vastly underrated comedy directed by Billy Wilder stars Jack Lemmon, Juliet Mills, and the criminally underrated British actor Clive Revill, who is a comic revelation (his comic timing is absolutely perfect) as Italian hotel manager Carlo Carlucci. The supporting cast is terrific, especially Gianfranco Barra as Bruno, the valet who desperately wants to get to America, and Edward Andrews in a small but hilarious role as a swinging-dick, conservative State Dept official.

Based on a 1968 play by Samuel A. Taylor, and with a script co-written by Wilder and longtime script partner I.A.L. Diamond, dialogue was tailored to Jack Lemmon, who is at the height of his comedic powers in this movie, playing the son of a recently deceased corporate magnate who has traveled to Italy to claim his father’s body, and is rushing to get back in time for a high-profile funeral already scheduled in the U.S. He soon learns that his father did not die in his traffic accident alone, but a woman he’d been having a passionate, 10 year-long affair with died with him as his passenger. Juliet Mills plays wonderfully a carefree British woman of very modest means, who has similarly come to claim her mother’s body, her mother having been the mistress of Lemmon’s father. Through a series of farcical misfortunes, and the classic situational comedy that Wilder excels at, Lemmon & Mills are drawn together.

Wilder wanted to make a film “a little like Brief Encounter, which I always admired,” but the comedic element supersedes the romantic. Mills agreed to gain twenty-five pounds for her role, and a couple of scenes involving explicit nudity (breasts and buttocks, not the other bits), at first seem out-of-place, but ultimately resonate satisfactorily given the associated existential sub-theme of mortality and physical imperfection.

The movie has great poignancy today, with anti-Nixon, political jokes that — while being topical — still have relevancy today, as well as a subplot involving the theme of people desperately wanting to immigrate to America. The movie is chock full of hilarious Italian stereotypes and pokes fun at Italian inefficiency, bureaucracy, and the norm of 3-hour lunches during the work week.

After viewing a number of Italian films, Wilder selected Luigi Kuveiller as his cinematographer, which was a superb choice. Avanti! is beautifully shot on the islands of Ischia and Capri, and along the spectacular Amalfi Coast. Both exteriors and interiors pop with a vibrant color that are masterful in their composition.

Upon its release, the film’s stars were rightfully hailed (Lemmon, Mills, and Revill were all nominated for Golden Globes for their performances here), but reviews were mixed. Some critics felt Wilder was floundering here, trying to stay hip with post-60s, Euro-cinema nudity and sex, but the the script makes some veiled self-referentiality on this. Wilder himself expressed disappointment with the end product, having wished the comedy to be secondary to the romance. Some also found Avanti! to be 30 minutes too long (it stands at 140 minutes), and while I agree that some scenes could have been trimmed or excised altogether, the movie’s length is a minor critique for what is otherwise a hidden masterpiece.