ONE DISCOURSE AFTER ANOTHER

At its start, 

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another teases a propulsive story replete with surprise. When I saw it in the theater a man next to me exclaimed, what? six minutes in, at the sight of a sudden onscreen erection. With a two-and-half hour runtime, the film doesn't drag towards its conclusion and nor is it laden with overwrought dialogue in the tradition of “new literalism” as characterized by Namwali Serpell. Anderson also never reveals a coherent politic of the French 75, the revolution-minded group central to the film. On this point, one could understand it as his refusal to tell viewers what to think. One Battle After Another is, to be fair, a blockbuster not an academic dissertation. Acquiescing to the unknown frenzy is part of the thrill in watching.

What do we know? The French 75 are an armed resistance. Their weapons are a necessity as they set off to liberate a detention center on the U.S. – Mexico border at the start of the film. “Free borders, free bodies, free choices, and free from fucking fear,” member Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) declares in her first-face off with Captain Steven J. Lockjaw, a fittingly grotesque Sean Penn, who she holds at gunpoint. Perfidia and her comrades revel in the confrontation with a military state, proclaiming their individual and collective’s name. Most importantly, they like to blow shit up.

From another vantage point, one may instead see the ambiguity of the French 75's radical position as convenient, shallow even. The film does not detail what the movement is and what they’re revolting against. What do the would-be revolutionaries want (or claim to want)? Where do their interests for themselves and desires for a better world collide? The incongruities innate to a violent political project could add helpful substance to the film’s worldview but are lost. These contradictions are conveyed most through the unpredictable Perfidia, whom Taylor inhabits with a ferocity that lights the too few scenes she occupies. As much as she fights for revolution, she also lusts for it, ascending to highs at the explosions set off by her partner and co-conspirator, Ghetto Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio).

After their first encounter, Perfidia is stalked by a sexually obsessed Lockjaw. After following her during another bomb plot staged by the French 75, Lockjaw corners Perfidia and in an inverse of their initial meeting holds her hostage at gunpoint. He proposes that she spend an evening with him in exchange for a limited freedom that allows the French 75 to continue their discretions. But when a botched bank robbery leads to Perfidia’s capture by the police, she snitches on her comrades, goes into witness protection under the surveillance of Lockjaw, before escaping once more, all within the film’s first thirty minutes. 

By the time I saw One Battle After Another at the end of 2025, I was inundated with discussions on its leftist politics (or lack thereof) and its portrayals of Black women. Alongside Taylor, the cast includes Regina Hall, Shayna “Junglepussy” McHayle, Chase Infiniti, Starletta DuPois, and April Grace in a minor but magnetic performance. With the exception of Infiniti, who is present for most of the film, the consensus among some viewers and critics seemed to be that the Black women did much with the little the screen time they had. Take Taylor’s Perfidia who births baby girl, Charlene, after her dalliance with Lockjaw. Restless and unfulfilled, Perfidia is reluctant to motherhood, to leave the French 75’s operations, and to the constrictions of a traditional family life with Pat who is unaware that Charlene may not be his biological daughter. As critic Angelica Jade Bastién deftly wrote in her review, "Taylor brings to life a kind of flawed rendering of Black womanhood that I have longed to see in cinema. Not aspirational, but something more meaningful.” 

“I just wanna be seen and loved,” Perfidia laments before asking, “am I weird for being jealous of my baby?” Her desperate voice calls out from behind a closed door as Pat hovers outside. But we never see or hear in who Perfidia is confiding or know for certain if she is speaking to anyone at all. Her postpartum distress is mostly explained in voiceover, spoken over scenes that chug along to the conclusion of this first act. Just as the movie begins to contend with the matter of Perfidia’s expressed priority of self-preservation, she permanently exits. 

Absent from much of the discourse I encountered before seeing One Battle After Another, is its depictions of a Latine community and migrant peoples. Anderson couldn’t have known that his film would be released into our current state of an unnecessary yet over-funded ICE, emboldened to murder with impunity. ICE is a continuation and symptom of American imperialism (furthered by both Republican and Democrat administrations). The US military and government destabilize nations and then punish people seeking refuge, caging them in detention centers and bureaucratic traps.

In the film, like too often in real life, these vulnerable people are made nameless and voiceless. It’s chillingly effective and a reminder of the people that are pushed to social fringes, even as their harrowing experiences occur in the epicenter of American cities. The migrants are barely glimpsed as they lay alongside the fences of a detention center or when they line up in the hallway outside of safe homes, waiting to be ferried to the next shelter. Sensei Sergio (Benicio del Toro) is a leader in these efforts. He is also the karate teacher of Perfidia’s now teen daughter going by the name Willa (Infiniti) and raised alone by slacker degenerate Bob, formerly Ghetto Pat. When Lockjaw and his army descend upon the town the father and daughter have been living in secret for sixteen years, Bob seeks Sergio for assistance. 

Del Toro’s Sergio is measured and calm, remaining in good spirits under menacing threat. He stands in stark contrast to the bumbling Bob who has all but lost his revolutionary wiles. The organized camaraderie amongst Sergio and his community are a foil against the chaotic and now fractured French 75. But like Perfidia and her former crew, Sergio appears in a moment of crisis to push Bob to the next chapter before quickly disappearing. The sudden vanishment of characters to close each act is permissible if viewing the film as a sort of Alice in Wonderland descent through a bizarre political terrain. As a cat-and-mouse chase story One Battle After Another excels, rife with suspense and action captured by Michael Bauman.

Sergio calls his network a “little Latino Harriet Tubman situation.” It is one of several moments in the film that gestures towards a black radical tradition, while never landing firmly within it—does this matter? In his Oscar acceptance speech for Best Adapted Screenplay, Anderson said that he wrote the movie for his kids as an apology for the current mess of our world but with the hope they will be part of the generation "that brings us some common sense and decency." This sentiment is echoed in the movie’sfinal moments as Willa reads a letter that espouses the failures of her parents’ ambitions while  encouraging her to keep fighting. But what exactly did they fail to achieve? Since we never understood the French 75's initial desires that led them to battle, it’s difficult to understand the world Willa is inheriting, what she must salvage, or create anew.

Anderson may be less interested in the machinations that give rise to a guerrilla group than he is in what becomes of the imperfect people who pledge unfaltering loyalty to a cause. Yet often characters seem more like etchings rather than fully realized people who wield complexity. While this affect is not limited to nonwhite characters, it’s most glaring with the film's Black women, particularly Perfidia, who’s racial sexualization has been contested enough that Anderson was asked about the “backlash” after his recent slew of Oscar wins. Some of the negative reactions to Taylor’s performance reflect a discomfort with watching Black women (and mothers) who are flawed and not just sexual but horny in a culture that is increasingly prudish. Taylor, for her part has also discussed responses to Perfidia, telling Complex after her Golden Globe win for Best Supporting Actress, “I want discussion. I want to hear different perspectives. We don’t do that enough anymore. It felt powerful to see this movie and Perfidia shake the table.”

Currently film and television, like much of popular arts culture, is aggressively powered by nostalgia and existing IP. Though Anderson’s script is adapted from the Thomas Pynchon novel, Vineland, I’d posit that the book doesn’t have the same recognizable cache as say, Barbie and Mattel that is desirable to Hollywood executives. It is refreshing to see original films like One Battle After Another and Ryan Coogler’s historic Sinners gripping audiences beyond critics and cinephiles. With corporate mergers leading to the consolidation of major media studios—the impending takeover of WarnerBros by Paramount is preceded by the Discovery – WarnerMedia and Paramount - Skydance Media mergers of recent years—that are helmed by executives who are comfortable if not eager to curb the creative freedom of media published under their tenure. It is reasonable to assume such a state could further curtail the dwindling number of inventive filmmakers with institutional support, especially when considering both Coogler’s and Anderson’s films were distributed by WarnerBros.

Because of the hostile reality in which artists create, there is a defensiveness on behalf of filmmakers like Anderson and their oeuvre. Admirers of Anderson and One Battle After Another may insist that the politics of characters in a movie are not necessarily a reflection of a director’s own beliefs; that it is not the responsibility of a filmmaker or any artist to speak on politics, much less pledge fidelity to a doctrine; that the writing of the Black women in the film has been celebrated by the performers who enacted the roles. This may all be true and rational.

Responses to criticism of Anderson’s handling of Black women I’ve seen—admittedly, much of which has been online and on the platform formerly known as Twitter—suggest that disapproving viewers, many of whom are Black, failed to understand the aims of the film. Yet critical readings of Perfidia and the movie, are rooted in the racist history of American film which has often characterized Black people and women as vagrant and hyper-sexual. Given this record, I’m sympathetic even to the more puritanical reactions that reflect an unease with possible racist depictions. To frame all criticisms levied by black viewers as “backlash” eschews the context of why audiences may be skeptical and undermines the work of critics like Ellen E Jones and Bastién, who offer perspective anchored in their film knowledge. It may not be Anderson’s responsibility (or within his capability) to perfectly articulate Black women and radicals but nor is it audiences duty to accept the rendering at face-value or to extol the attempt. That’s what the awards are for, after all.

Instead of chastising

viewers who found One Battle After Another lacking, one could instead point them to the breadth of films that give space to Black women. One such film is A.V. Rockwell’s 2023 debut and stirring New York family drama, A Thousand and One. The story centers on Inez (also played by Teyana Taylor) who is released from Riker's Island after serving time for boosting. Inez returns home—Brooklyn in 1994—but is not welcomed back at the salon where she previously worked. The confrontation with her former employer is the first of several instances showing the systemic ills Inez will combat as she struggles to cement a nourishing life. She finds work doing hair in the less formal industry of house calls. Sitting on the stoop of a friend and customer, Inez sees her son Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola) who has been in foster care since her incarceration. Though he's only six, Terry is brooding, distant, and initially reluctant to Inez's attempts to reconnect. "Why do you keep leaving me?" he asks Inez, a question that also stands as an accusation and a plea. 

When Inez learns of a violent encounter with his foster parent that lands Terry in the hospital, she decides to take him and leave Brooklyn. They go to Harlem, where she grew up, but their escape is not without turbulence as Inez struggles to find a place for them to stay. Their instability sharpens the stakes of their situation. Beyond the threat of homelessness that casts over them is the fact that if discovered, Inez will return to prison. Eventually, through cunning and the kindness of an older woman, Inez secures consistent work and eventually, her own Harlem apartment. She gets falsified papers for Terry to attend school and welcomes her on-and-off partner, Lucky (William Catlett) into their home to forge a new family unit.

It may be apt to say that Inez kidnaps Terry as it is certainly how it would be legally recognized. But child welfare services in the United States is a fraught system and one that is often too quick to terminate parental rights of black parents. This racial disparity may encourage one to pause before using language like “kidnapping,” that criminalizes black mothers for a desire, that for other women, is seen as a maternal instinct. The friction between legality and Inez’s own sense of maternal righteousness is part of what A Thousand and One asks viewers to contend with. Inez is not a perfect figure or sanguinely self-sacrificing as I’m accustomed to seeing black mothers depicted. She is often, as Lucky describes, hard on Terry, pushing him to excel academically and transfer to the renowned Brooklyn Tech though he is hesitant. Inez’s hopes for a traditional family, one absent from her youth spent in foster care, propels her in a selfish bid for domesticity.

The bulk of the film centralizes on their home and the surrounding Harlem blocks, spanning from the early to mid-2000s. Through the course of this time, Terry grows into a pensive young teen and a burgeoning adult in delicate, nuanced performances from Aven Courtney and Josiah Cross, respectively. In a culture that has been stuck in so-called Y2K nostalgia for years, too often the trends of the 1990s and 2000s are haphazardly mashed into looks that never actually existed. The costumes of Rockwell’s film captures the actual style of those times. The bright, crisp oversized white T-shirts worn by Terry in 2004, for example, queued the song “White T” by Dem Franchize Boyz in my mind.

But the escape from Brooklyn in 1994 was, in the view of the law, also an abduction and a decision made by Inez even as she insists that Terry, then a child, holds equal stake in the choice. A specter of the past creeps quietly within their household, underpinning arguments while mostly remaining unspoken. The threat of reveal intensifies as Terry begins to consider his future post-high school. Frequently the camera (with cinematography by Eric K. Yue) closes in on the face of Inez, Terry, or Lucky in rumination or in conversation, reflecting the self-isolation that jeopardizes their family alongside systemic factors. 

In one scene, a depressed Inez retires to her bedroom after a volatile argument with Lucky. An offscreen TV set lights her face as she listens to a Ricki Lake guest discuss how her erratic behavior has cost her friendships. “I find that sometimes having a friend in yourself is better than worrying about having people as your friends, ‘cause no one’s going to look out for you but you,” the woman says as Inez’s pained chuckles quickly dissolve into crying. In her loneliness and in Rockwell’s hands, I see more explicitly the “meaningful” though not “aspirational” exploration of Black women Bastién intimated in Taylor’s Perfidia. A Thousand and One, is not a panoptic representation of blackness but a penetrating look at this Black woman, mother, and family.

While the film is accomplished in its singularity, it also offers a meditation on a changing New York City, specifically (though not exclusive to) Harlem. Panoramic views of the city’s skyline feature prominently throughout. The choice may have appeared contrived in a lesser film, but with a soulful score from Gary Gunn that moves from rhythmic to dreamy, the footage serves the time lapses from one era to the next. Over the score there are also news clips: Rudy Giuliani vowing to ramp up policing for minor offenses, coverage of brutality enacted by the NYPD, the introduction of “stop-and-frisk,” the announcement of new zoning laws. The increase in state violence tracks alongside images of longstanding Harlem buildings destroyed, replaced by corporate businesses and luxury apartments. When Inez’s new too-chummy landlord arrives at the apartment door, dread begins to mount as the background tensions collide with the family’s secret.

Rockwell makes clear that it is the same capitalist and anti-black forces under both Republican and Democrat administrations (Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg) that embolden landlords to deceive tenants. Race is not the only component of gentrification and it may be under-discussed how wealthy Black folk and other people of color profit from and help pulverize working-class black neighborhoods. But it is disingenuous to claim that the results of what is marketed as neighborhood revitalization doesn’t frequently come at the expense of black communities. “A white man was going to help us with the house and then he stole the deed or something,” a young character says with a shrug as she explains why she’s leaving the city. The banality of her delivery underscores the cruelty of her displacement. Rockwell uses the realities of gentrification—issues present in real-life Harlem today—to illustrate the deteriorating foundation of the home life, Inez has worked hard to keep intact for Terry and herself.

2023 was an underwhelming year for Oscar swings.

Nominees (who were honored in 2024) included the marketing campaign Barbie, the disappointingly cautious Oppenheimer, the two-dimensional American Fiction, the vacant Poor Things, and the saccharine The Holdovers (though not too much on Da’Vine Joy Randolph who seemed to exist in a different, potentially better film—if only!) Teyana Taylor and her costars offered riveting performances that, along with A Thousand and One’s cinematography, script, and direction, were deserving of nomination. Though the film received acclaim and picked up the coveted Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, it received no recognition by the Academy. Nor did All Dirt Road’s Taste of Salt, Raven Jackson’s stunning 2023 feature debut about the life of a Black Mississippi woman. While I enjoyed several of this past year’s Oscar nominees far more than many previous candidates, I was still struck by the absence of the inventive On Becoming a Guinea Fowl from Rungano Nyoni.

Oscar snubs and shutouts are common. Oscar campaigning—the marketing and advertisements used to help raise a film’s profile and cultural relevance—are necessary to be considered for nomination. Also common, is the feeling that it’s sometimes the best campaign that leads to major wins rather than the accomplishments of the film itself. It can be enough to make someone huff and tsk, it’s all rigged, and denounce the ceremony’s importance. Yet the dropped jaws of surprise and teary-eyed speeches from Oscar recipients indicate that such wins remain meaningful to many, particularly artists whose races, ethnicities, nationalities, and genders have continuously been underrepresented at the Academy Awards.

Some of the negative responses to One Battle After Another and Perfidia are underpinned by a frustration that it is blackness as written by white imaginations that is most often rewarded; a frequent argument since Hattie McDaniel’s win for Gone With the Wind. The Academy’s fraught history of honoring nonwhite people is undeniable. Since it’s inception in 1929, no Black woman has ever been nominated for Best Director, for example. But a narrow focus on a perceived lack of diversity, noble representation, and awards buzz overlooks an abundance of existent films depicting the expansiveness and messiness of living while Black as well as work from black performers who are not categorized within the murky confines of black film and art. And as seen with the 2025 awards cycle for Teyana Taylor, provocative reactions maybe be good for The Root headlines but can undermine the agency of black actors and place unfair pressure with the old decree to be a credit‍ ‍to the race.

More crucially, this can cast a deficiency in critically dissecting the same work from black artists many claim to thirst for. In her essay for Triple Canopy, Rachel Hunter Himes examines how the mainstream art world’s delayed recognition of black artists—who “...living and dead, from the nineteenth century to the present, arrived in the art world all at once” has led to shallow interrogation of their work. As Himes notes, written criticism of black artists is often laudatory, situated around biographical details rather than the medium and craft they work within. In an arts culture that has been (and in many ways remains) segregated, the desire to praise black art and Black people can be understood as a(n) (over)correction. It’s a tendency I must question as it’s evident even in this essay. I’m more inclined to discuss the film, music, and books by Black people whose works I find little fault. The impulse to emphatically praise can lead to a dearth in criticism that is skeptical and probing—I’ve wondered for instance, if the women of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners are any more layered than those in One Battle After Another—and it risks obscuring works that are deemed inscrutable or less easy to categorize.

I doubt that the Academy Awards will suddenly be appreciative of great movies in general, let alone ones not helmed by white auteurs. This is not to say that this isn’t cause for anger and disapproval but a hope that the critiques can be more distensible in their concerns. We can wonder why the studio behind the recent Timothée Chalamet fatigue can successfully campaign for the promising but ultimately drivel that is Everything Everywhere All At Once, but pour a fraction of that effort into films like  All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt and On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. We should be dismayed by the seeming cultural acceptance that art and marketing are inextricably linked. We can question our defenses, consider the conditions and requisites for our praises or condemnations especially as they relate to Black women. We should want more for black art, and art more generally, than mere hype and discourse.

With edits from Bayley Blaisdell