Paranoia Has a New Name: One Battle After Another

 

Paul Thomas Anderson has just done what no one expected: taken Thomas Pynchon’s most unfilmable novel and turned it into the defining film of this decade. While Tarantino keeps proclaiming that he and Fincher are the kings of contemporary cinema, PTA shuts him up without saying a word. Three hours of vertigo that feel like thirty minutes. Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn face to face, with Jonny Greenwood shattering any notion of what a soundtrack should sound like. And if you need more reasons: Steely Dan’s Dirty Work is in the movie, and it closes with Tom Petty’s American Girl, the song the Strokes will never admit they stole.

My daughter’s question before the film started sums up the problem: what’s the movie about? Drama, action, black comedy, political satire, thriller, war movie, social critique. All at once. One Battle After Another isn’t a film; it’s a living organism that mutates every ten minutes, forcing you to rewire what you thought you knew about cinematic storytelling. PTA takes Vineland and translates it not as a reverential adaptation but as an updated prophecy. The paranoia Pynchon wrote about with Nixon in mind now breathes with the lungs of our era: sanctuary cities, white supremacists, the unapologetic far-right, fascism disguised as patriotism.

DiCaprio has spent decades systematically killing off the heartthrob from Titanic. The Beach, Gangs of New York, Catch Me If You Can, The Aviator, Shutter Island, Inception, Django Unchained, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Revenant, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Don’t Look Up. Show me a more brutal filmography, and I’ll admit I’m wrong. But here, pitted against Sean Penn, another titan of acting, DiCaprio reaches a dimension we haven’t seen before. Two gods of method acting trading blows in a film that doubles as an existential boxing ring.

The character names alone tell you you’ve entered Pynchon territory: “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun, Perfidia Beverly Hills, Steven Lockjaw, Sergio St. Carlos, Junglepussy, Virgil Throckmorton, 1776 James. Secret societies sprout like mushrooms: the French 75, The Christmas Adventurers Club, The Sisters of the Brave Beaver. Each name is a declaration of war against flat realism. PTA gets that paranoia isn’t a disease but clarity in an age where conspiracies have gone from theory to the operating manual of power. “Only the paranoid survive.”

This is PTA’s most political film, but also his most vulnerable narrative. Where Inherent Vice took refuge in the drugged-out nostalgia of the ’70s, One Battle After Another drags you through the guts of the present without anesthesia. Non linear storytelling that leaps across decades, genres collapsing into one another, character psychologies excavated to the bone. The tension never lets up. Not a single wasted frame in three hours that spiral obsessively toward a center that might not even exist.

Artistic audacity: a phrase that’s lost meaning from overuse. But it applies here. The same audacity of Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, The Master, Licorice Pizza. PTA is one of the few directors who still believe cinema can be art without apologizing for it. While others chase formulas for likes and box office, he builds narrative monsters that demand your full presence. You can’t blink. You can’t check your phone. You’re either in or you’re out.

One Battle After Another is a film you need to see multiple times, not out of intellectual pretension but out of basic survival instinct. There’s too much happening, too many layers stacked on top of each other, too many details you only catch on the second or third dive. It’s a movie that forces you to come back because it knows the first time you barely managed to breathe. And when you return, when you watch it again, you’ll realize what you thought you understood was just the prologue. The battle goes on. One after another. That’s how life works. That’s how real cinema works.