I always feel disappointment when thinking of (or occasionally even watching) Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda, an attempt to illustrate how the same story can be tragic and comic. The conceit’s brilliant, and the film should’ve been brilliant too. Instead, Allen made a tedious and amateurish tragedy alongside an almost entirely unfunny comedy. He tells the same basic story—a depressed, disturbed woman on the cusp of middle age arrives in the night after escaping a failed marriage and affair, and in doing so, causes grief and trouble for her friends. Her disintegration, and the consequences for her friends’ marriage form the tragedy; in the comedy version, the marriage deserves to be destroyed, and titular character Melinda winds up with the mistreated Hobie, her friend’s husband.
From the start, we see a problem: the story isn’t the same. Allen took a basic premise and then wrote a comedy for it—and then a separate tragedy. Events unfold differently. But the wisdom in the original conceit was that the exact same story is both tragic and comic at the same time. What changes to allow these two separate responses (tears or laughter) is the perspective, not the events.
Earlier in his career, Allen wrote and directed Crimes and Misdemeanors, arguably his masterpiece, which also told two stories, one comic and the other tragic. In this case, they weren’t the same story at all, but rather two interlocking plotlines that touched only because of characters in common. Still, within the film, a ridiculous character, largely the butt of the joke, a successful, smug TV producer named Lester, played by Alan Alda, hits on a genuine insight about the overlap of tragedy and comedy: “Think of Oedipus,” he says, looking pleased with himself, “Oedipus is funny! Oedipus—that’s the structure of funny, right there. ‘Who did this terrible thing to our city? Oh, my God, it was me.’ That’s funny!”
He explains that “the thing about comedy is that you have to get some distance from it.” In Lester’s telling, you have to wait before something becomes funny. Hence the formula he repeats ad nauseum: “Comedy is tragedy plus time.” But it might be more accurate to say that what’s needed is distance—whether in terms of time or understanding.
Lucian of Samosata, the great ancient satirist, has Charon and Hermes pile one mountain on top of another and climb to the top to get the proper perspective on the world. Charon has long been curious to learn “what the life of man is like,” and why, when ferrying the dead, he has yet to see a single one cross over “without weeping.” But after looking down from the heights, he confesses that what he sees doesn’t seem to justify the tears.
“I see various occupations and lives filled with turmoil. Their cities look like beehives, where everyone has his own sting and stings his neighbor, and a few like wasps ravage and plunder the weaker ones…”
It doesn’t take him long to give his verdict: “this is all very ridiculous, Hermes.”
And Hermes responds, “Indeed, Charon, you couldn’t find words adequate to express how absurd it is…”
Satire and tragedy grapple with this absurdity, each in their own way. Consider the impossibility of reading the great tragedies without seeing their absurd side—or the reverse. Would the last books of Gulliver be funny if they weren’t also painfully tragic? Recognition of the bestial within the human, and the extent to which it remains a fundamental part of our makeup—could this even be borne if we couldn’t find some way to laugh at it? Yet the way of most art—most bad art, like all political dogma—is to pretend that the absurdity is outside of ourselves, and therefore “bad,” while we—way over here, separate, aloof—are “good,” fighting against it and so on. Bad art hides from this absurdity, obfuscates, focuses attention on smaller issues—romance, adventure, etc. It leaves out of sight the more upsetting questions, which taken together shape the context within which adventure and romance would be better understood. It fulfills, in art, what repression and illusion fulfill in life. There’s no catharsis.
Which brings me to Paul Thomas Anderson.
The much-lauded One Battle After Another is one of the worst films you’ll ever watch. It’s above all a self-important fairy tale without even a toe dipped into the reality it hopes to describe. Neither tragedy nor farce, it lacks both ironic distance and anything approaching the immediacy of good drama. There’s almost no character development of any kind—the villains are one-dimensional, the heroes cartoons. If you have a brain in your head, you’ll laugh throughout the exhausting two-and-a-half-hour runtime—but you’ll be laughing at, rather than with the filmmaker.
The story is this: former revolutionary, bomb-maker (and bomber), now doting father, “Rocketman” Pat Calhoun, alias Bob Ferguson (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), finds himself hiding out in a small California town, helping to smuggle illegal aliens into the country and smoking large amounts of marijuana. His daughter, Charlene Calhoun, alias Willa Ferguson, has only a dim sense of her parents’ past activism. She’s been drilled in the codes and procedures of contact between members of the underground, but seems to take them only half-seriously. Willa’s mother, Perfidia Beverly Hills, who left her family for the revolution, proceeded to rob a bank, get caught, and immediately give up her comrades. She then escaped from witness protection and disappeared.
The narrative revolves around the plot to capture and kill Bob and Willa by their old enemy, Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (who, of course, might also be Willa’s real father), played woodenly by Sean Penn in one of his worst roles to date. There are plenty of peripheral characters, including several who belong to an apparently white supremacist cabal called The Christmas Adventurers Club. You’ve never seen white supremacists like these. Your friendly neighborhood Groyper seems like a freedom rider by comparison. To call them caricatures would be a kindness. Men like this exist only in the imaginations of undergraduate leftists with complicated pronouns.
Anderson’s a talented filmmaker, so the movie is, at least in terms of nuts and bolts, fairly well-made. The mis en scene is more than adequate; the cinematography, editing, and pacing are all satisfactory. There are a few moments of pure action competently put together, so that if you forget or ignore everything that came before and is likely to come after in terms of character and story, you can enjoy the immediate sequence. But that about exhausts the list of positives.
It’s not just the politics that ruin the film—it’s the entire approach to narrative. It’s the childishness of conception, the fact that in the end the film eschews any kind of adult analysis and simply cheerleads for a cause—and for a ridiculous one at that. One Battle is little more than propaganda for an antifa-like revolutionary movement. There are no shades of gray here, unless we count the very gentle satirical touches applied to Bob the pothead, as he struggles nobly against evil white supremacists and his own short-term memory loss. Willa, meanwhile, is merely the embodiment of goodness and purity, so much so that Lockjaw’s possible paternity can’t touch her.
It’s the kind of film that inept but well-meaning evangelicals might make about characters from the Bible. In fact, that’s not fair: however silly that kind of didactic and simplistic art might be, there would still be more nuance in the characterization than anything you’ll find here. Here, you’re either a racist or an anti-racist, as in the reductive and stupid books of infant con man Ibram X Kendi. Here, you’re either with the movement or with the pigs.
Nor is One Battle clever. For instance, when Perfidia meets Colonel Lockjaw in a motel for their first sexual encounter, the soundtrack plays “Soldier Boy” by The Shirelles. Is this supposed to be amusing? Ironic? It’s merely cheap and lazy.
Similarly, Lockjaw, who aspires to join the racist Christmas Adventurers Club, is simultaneously attracted to black flesh. One of the first things he does in the film is point his erection at Perfidia Beverly Hills while she holds a gun on him. From then on, he pursues her, and, being an imbecile (aren’t all “racists”), is easily manipulated by her. She uses sex to secure her freedom. Lockjaw’s motivations, lust, revenge, hate, the pop-psychology trifecta, lead him to attempt to extinguish his own daughter’s life. In case you missed it, this guy is evil.
All it comes to is this: the self-important “good guys” triumph (of course) over the evil white supremacists. Lockjaw dies, and apparently the Christmas Adventurers give up pursuing the Fergusons. Bob goes back to smuggling illegals into the country, when he isn’t getting drunk and/or high. Not a single lesson is learned by anyone: Perfidia Beverly Hills, the bank robber “revolutionary” terrorist, sends her daughter a letter encouraging her to make all the same mistakes she made, and the daughter complies, dashing out of the house in a jovial epilogue to catch a little light protest in Oakland, while her father smiles knowingly from the couch.
There’s no way to interpret this satirically. It’s all in earnest. The appalling stupidity of believing that you’re capable of “setting the world right” (Perfidia uses this phrase when encouraging Willa to repeat her mistakes) should be the object of satire. Instead, it’s embraced straightforwardly, with predictably juvenile results.
Back to my comments on Woody Allen’s attempt to write the same story as both tragedy and comedy, the premise of One Battle could’ve produced a great comedy. If Anderson and his collaborators had shown the “revolutionary” buffoons in the right light, it might’ve been a scream. Sub specie aeternitatis, human folly and pretension are always good for at least a chuckle.
It would’ve been easy to satirize the childish pretensions of the left-wing radical type—their illusions, delusions, and the absurd but often tragic ways the reality test crushes their attempts to remake the world. The filmmakers could’ve illustrated the distance between inane beliefs and the reality they think they’re describing—their complete misunderstanding of human nature, of human behavior on both the personal and aggregate levels.
The film is merely cartoonish: the masturbating villain, turned on by black flesh, the secret cabal of bumbling racists, the noble bomb thrower and his wise illegal alien sidekick. Lockjaw’s neither funny nor frightening, and the overall tone of the film is sanctimonious rather than amusing.
One Battle could also have been tragic if the filmmaker had even passing familiarity with human nature. (Having seen There Will Be Blood, it’s almost unbelievable to think that this is the same director. Either Anderson has forgotten everything he used to know, or I gave him too much credit in the first place.) If the story revolved around Perfidia’s hubris, her fall, and subsequent recognition of her mistakes, it might’ve made an excellent dissection of the ways in which youthful incomprehension of nature leads to wasted lives and violent if futile attempts to remake the world. But in order to do this, Anderson and co. would’ve had to get some distance from their subject matter. Instead, they played to the cheap seats in the post-George Floyd, “No Kings” moment, embracing uncritically every stupid dogma the kiddos treasure.
What we get instead of tragic insight is a refusal to own up to the pathetic failure of naive ideals—the destruction of lives, of genuine possibilities, and so on. The attempt to be noble in this case leads to unnecessary destruction. As Montaigne put it, “People try to get out of themselves and to escape from the man. This is folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels, they turn into beasts; instead of lifting, they degrade themselves.”
I wonder about my previous respect for Anderson. Could a man who ends One Battle like an advertisement for the most naïve vision of activism have had anything serious to say at any point in his career? I look back over his filmography: I’ve always had mixed feelings about Punch Drunk Love, which verges on the saccharine; in retrospect, while funny and entertaining, certain aspects of Boogie Nights now seem overly sentimental; I never much liked Inherent Vice, the other Pynchon adaptation. The only film I felt sure of, There Will Be Blood, now puzzles me. I thought I saw some signs of intelligent life. I imagined the cynicism to be a stab at insight, whereas now I assume it was merely meant as a moral tale.
One Battle After Another could’ve been good satire, decent tragedy, or possibly a great tragicomedy. Instead, it’s a cautionary tale with a high price tag, and further evidence of the disintegration of Hollywood. Whether the majority of reviewers have praised this turd out of a sense of commitment to its politics, or because they assume that an auteur of Anderson’s stature couldn’t have produced a flop, or maybe because decades of ideological thinking have destroyed whatever critical acumen any of them might once have had, I won’t guess. But it’s interesting that, apart from Bret Easton Ellis, a talented satirist, no one in the public eye has come within 100 miles of insight into the whats and whys of this disaster.