Try, Try Again

Welcome to the new Formerly Dangerous.

I’m not interested in a ton of preamble. If you’re new to my work, welcome. If you’ve been a reader for a while, thanks for your support. I figure the best way to kick things off over here is just to jump right in.

I saw One Battle After Another again on Thursday night. I am absolutely mesmerized by the movie. It pulls off so many things at the same time that I can’t really point at another movie like it. It’s fascinating (and not at all surprising) to see the right wing get so upset by the movie, although (again unsurprisingly) they don’t seem to actually understand the movie they’re upset by. If you think OBAA is a film where the heroic radical left cheerfully assassinates right-wing targets, you need a lesson in media literacy. This is a film about the failure of violent revolution. The French 75 pull off one successful job, and then immediately start to crumble under the weight of their own pretension. Perfida Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) may truly believe everything she says, but she’s also drunk on new-found power and she makes horrible choices. The moment she decides to humiliate Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), she sets both of them on the road to destruction. When she is eventually captured, she does whatever she has to do to save her own skin. She rats on her collaborators, and we watch them all die violently. This is not a successful revolution. The one person in the film who seems to be effectively resisting is Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio Del Toro), and that’s because he’s far more interested in helping people than in making a statement. The bank robbery scene spotlights how bad the French 75 are at their job, and how much they’ve bought into their image. By contrast, the Sensei does what he does quietly, organizing the invisible into an effective network that is able to disappear into the shadows when “the law” comes looking for them.