"One Battle After Another”: Notes on Paul Thomas Anderson’s Film, a Personal Memory, and the Notion of Uprisings

"One Battle After Another”: Notes on Paul Thomas Anderson’s Film, a Personal Memory, and the Notion of Uprisings

1- A Film

It is an understatement to say that this new work by the prodigiously gifted Paul Thomas Anderson is divisive. Less for its aesthetic qualities—universally praised—than for its political scope.

Some criticize its caricatural depiction of the two forms of radicalism clashing in Trump’s America—ultra-left movements on one side and White supremacists on the other—while others reproach it for being ultimately harmless, due to PTA’s choice to privilege entertainment over a deeper political exploration.

And indeed, it is far removed from the incendiary political force of "The Battle of Algiers" by Gillo Pontecorvo—a film directly referenced by PTA through a clip watched by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Yet despite this, one cannot deny that the film—telling the story of a former left-wing activist forced to track down his daughter kidnapped by a neo-Nazi militia—resonates deeply with current events. The recent images of the deployment of the U.S. National Guard in cities like Portland or Chicago seem almost lifted straight from the film.

Beyond this resonance with the present, the film remains politically compelling because it accurately touches on several key ideas.

The first concerns the emphasis on transmission—the passing of the revolutionary flame from Generation X, shaped by the struggles of the 1990s and 2000s, to the now-famous Gen Z. Anyone following current events knows that recent uprisings in countries like Nepal or Morocco have been largely driven by this younger generation.

The second lies in PTA’s decision to foreground the notion of time through the film’s title—“One Battle After Another”—whereas the novel it is loosely adapted from, Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, privileged the notion of space.

Finally, the third idea relates to the failure of the struggle against the system. This is embodied in DiCaprio’s character, who, a few years after his revolutionary exploits, has become a shadow of his former self—preferring to spend his days procrastinating rather than revisiting the classics of anti-system thought.

2 – A Personal Memory

If these ideas strike me as particularly relevant when it comes to revolts and uprisings, it is first and foremost because, since October 7 and its consequences—the devastation in Gaza and the global protests in support of Palestinians—I have found myself constantly thinking back to similar events I witnessed or filmed twenty years ago, in the early 2000s.

At that time, the world was living in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and bore a striking resemblance to today: people were already demonstrating across the globe in support of the Palestinian people, then in the midst of the Second Intifada; the West was just as arrogant as it is today, with the invasion of Iraq; and across Europe, as now, the rise of the far right was a growing concern.

My friends and I were students in Paris, drifting from one demonstration to another, carried by the fervor of marches for Palestine, against the war in Iraq, or opposing the presence of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election.

Even if these protest movements did not change the world—the Rassemblement National now stands at the gates of power—revisiting the footage of a film I shot at the time, I realized that the gestures captured during those demonstrations are the very same ones we see in protests today.

3- The Exhibition “Uprisings”

And these gestures that repeat themselves, despite defeat, lie at the very heart of "Peuples en larmes, peuples en armes," an essay by the philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman, written in the wake of the exhibition "Soulèvements" that he curated in 2016 at the Jeu de Paume.

An exhibition I had the pleasure of visiting, and which curiously came back to mind after watching the film by Paul Thomas Anderson—perhaps because, in both cases, the notions of uprisings and revolts are approached through the prism of time.

But unlike the film’s narrative, where time is linear—“One battle AFTER another”—the non-chronological arrangement of the exhibition reflected a conception of time as the resurgence of fragments of the past within the present.

Thus, throughout the exhibition, images of lamentation, raised fists, and barricades—drawn from Renaissance painting, as well as from 19th-century engravings and photographs—were juxtaposed with equivalent images from contemporary uprisings: from the Arab Spring to the conflict in Northern Ireland, and including revolts in Latin America.

For anyone familiar with Didi-Huberman’s work, this visual montage, linking different eras, echoes the research of the art historian Aby Warburg and his concept of the “afterlife” (survivance) of images.

A concept that seeks to show how images never fully disappear: they survive, reactivate, and reappear in new contexts.

And when one considers that the history of uprisings is also the history of the defeated, it becomes easy to see how, through this notion of “afterlife,” the hope born of these struggles is never entirely buried. Hence this line by Didi-Huberman in the exhibition catalogue: “An uprising reveals the power of powerlessness.”

It is precisely this “power of powerlessness” that lies at the core of "Peuples en larmes, peuples en armes". The guiding thread of the essay is to show how pathos—that is, suffering—can give rise to praxis—that is, power and action. As if weeping and rebelling were two inseparable responses to injustice.

Returning to “One Battle After Another,” if some have found the film’s political argument lacking in depth, it may be because there are no tears. This absence can indeed give the impression that the struggle led by the film’s far-left group has no justification other than a love of revolution itself.

But in Paul Thomas Anderson’s defense, it is worth recalling that what primarily interests him, in the portrait of America he has been building from film to film, is the depiction of the American “being” as an “entrepreneurial being”—a defining trait of a country where one exists only by undertaking.

After exploring, among other things, the “enterprise” of pornography, oil, religion, and fashion, he now portrays the revolutionary enterprise as a kind of “family business,” passed down from one generation to the next—one battle after another.

As for today’s uprisings—whether those in support of Palestine or those unfolding across the world—it is still too early to know whether they will change the world.

The only thing that can be noted is that, alongside uprisings against the existing system, recent demonstrations in London against immigration show that other kinds of uprisings are also taking place today.

This, incidentally, was one of the criticisms directed at Didi-Huberman’s exhibition: that it failed to acknowledge that events such as the March on Rome, and others of a similar nature, were also forms of uprising.

But to conclude on a note of hope, I would rather evoke the title of the exhibition’s final section—“Desires (indestructible)”—as a reminder that even if today’s uprisings were to end in defeat, the utopias they carry would not die with them.