One Battle After Another, or How a Movie Teaches the Right to See What It Wants
Matti Leprêtre
This text was originally published by Le Grand Continent and appears here in a slightly adapted version.
September 10, 2025: the far‑right activist Charlie Kirk is murdered, a bullet tearing through his throat. September 22: taking advantage of the national shock and of giddy celebrations among a sliver of the far left, Donald Trump signs an executive order designating the “Antifa movement” a terrorist organization. September 26: Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, One Battle After Another, opens nationwide. September 30: before an audience of eight hundred officers and generals, Trump announces the launch of a “war from within” against the nation’s enemies.
A film cannot be held responsible for the political climate into which it is released, nor for the uses others will make of it. And yet, by choosing to stage a band of “woke” revolutionaries who take up arms against the U.S. government, Anderson gives concrete public form to a left‑wing violence that—until Kirk’s assassination—had been largely exaggerated or outright imaginary. Unsurprisingly, the movie has provoked a wave of outrage among Trump supporters, who variously denounce it as the year’s most irresponsible cinematic stunt or as a gleeful endorsement of what is now officially labeled “antifascist terrorism.”[1] That reaction, widespread across right‑wing media and user reviews, sharply contrasts with the near‑ecstatic praise from most professional critics.
It would be easy to dismiss the MAGA uproar as more of the same: a reflex of Trumpism’s aggrieved extremism. I want, instead, to step back and use the film—and the storm around it—to think about a broader drift: a part of today’s far left has grown notably less squeamish about political violence. What risks does that normalization carry for the left as a whole, especially in a moment of hardening authoritarianism in the United States and beyond?
A Fractured America on Screen
First, the film. One Battle After Another is a loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, but Anderson moves the action from the 1960s–80s to the present. The government against which the revolutionary cell known as the French 75 rises up is never named, but the allusions are unmistakable: this is Trump’s America. Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), and their comrades storm Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers; they wire small‑town municipal buildings—whose leaders helped criminalize abortion—with explosives in the name of “all the sisters” who will suffer; they face down a militarized police apparatus riddled with white supremacy.
The French 75 are, visually and narratively, a counter‑image to the reactionary America they oppose. The core group is largely made up of people of color. As the story unfolds, they are joined by Willa (Chase Infiniti)—the teenage daughter of Perfidia and, as we will discover, not of Ferguson—and Willa’s friends, many of whom are queer. Willa trains at a karate dojo run by Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), himself Latino and the linchpin of a mutual‑aid network that shelters undocumented families in his apartment. After an ICE raid, Anderson stages delirious night chases through a sanctuary‑city protest—set pieces whose choreography is vintage PTA in its momentum and mischief.
The film mirrors the country’s split with a second lineup. Arrayed against the French 75 is an avowedly supremacist security state, embodied by Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who infiltrates the group and becomes infatuated with Perfidia. Early on, after catching Perfidia placing a bomb, Lockjaw coerces her into sex by threatening to expose her. Midway through, we learn that Willa is his daughter, not Ferguson’s. Later, desperate to gain admission to the Christmas Adventurers Club—a circle of high‑ranking white supremacists embedded in civil and military administration—Lockjaw must prove he’s never had an interracial relationship. The grotesque logic leads inexorably to a manhunt: Lockjaw unleashes the ICE units under his command to find and kill Willa.
The movie’s racial allegory is hardly subtle. Willa—mixed-race, conceived when a white officer raped her mother—is hunted by a phalanx of white-supremacist soldiers. She survives only because a hired assassin, himself of Comanche descent, refuses to kill a child and dies to save her. The parallel is hard to miss. As feminist and decolonial scholars have long shown, generations of mixed-race Americans trace their origins to the rape of enslaved Black women by white enslavers; today, segments of white America still imagine those descendants pushed to the margins, if not erased from civic belonging. Willa embodies that history. The target is not just Trump but the deeper fracture of race and power that runs through the republic. Anderson builds his story along that fault line: the French 75’s “woke” insurgency on one side, and a far-right security apparatus on the other.
Violence as Spectacle
It is no surprise, then, that the violence the French 75 deploy reads to many left‑leaning viewers as legitimate—indeed, exhilarating and cathartic. After decades, or rather centuries, of enduring the brutality of white domination, here is a cinematic counterstrike. The opening sets the tone: pistols drawn, the group cuts through the fencing of a detention center, frees the detainees, humiliates the guards, and vanishes under a blaze of flares meant to signal the revolution’s dawn.
For the first hour, the French 75 perform a carefully curated militancy: they bomb the infrastructure of reactionary policy but aim to avoid casualties. In one scene, Perfidia calls a conservative city hall to warn staff to evacuate before the detonation. And yet violence is there from the start. In the detention‑center raid, Perfidia forces Lockjaw to masturbate at gunpoint—sexual assault as reprisal. Later, during a bank heist, she shoots a disarmed cop in cold blood. From that moment, the gears lock: an escalating cycle of reprisal turns the film into an extended firefight between the revolutionaries and law enforcement, for whom the only goal becomes the summary execution of every French 75 member.
Formally, the second half becomes a softened remake of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. Ferguson even screens Pontecorvo’s film early on, and Anderson borrows its architecture of compartmentalized cells: each member knows only a few others, which forces the security services to break them psychologically, one by one, in order to climb the chain to Willa. But One Battle blunts the terror. This is an action‑comedy hybrid aimed at mass audiences, not a study in torture and state repression. There are extrajudicial killings, but they are mostly off camera; the closest we get to the brutality of Pontecorvo’s paratroopers is a goon threatening to kill a comrade’s sister unless he gives up Willa’s location. The result is a strangely abstracted depiction of violence.
The viewer is permitted a purely affective release. It is fun to see an ICE site drenched in tear gas launched, for once, by revolutionaries; fun to watch a reactionary town hall crumble into dust. Nothing really sticks to the protagonists. Given the comic register, revolution looks almost playful; peppering police and soldiers with shotgun blasts and semiautomatic fire looks, if not ethical, at least cool.
Anderson’s tonal gamble rhymes eerily with the absurd messages the killer of Charlie Kirk reportedly left etched on the shell casings: as if killing white supremacists were, at bottom, an aesthetic gesture—part rap video, part “Punching Nazis” meme. For a full 170 minutes, the film offers almost no built‑in distance from the violence it stages. Perfidia is complicated—perhaps even meant to register the excesses of revolutionary fury—but whatever critical space she might have opened is overwhelmed by the stereotypes she sometimes embodies: the hypersexualized, impulsive Black woman, the poster image of her mid‑scream, heavily pregnant and firing a machine gun, having already touched off more than one justified controversy. In the end, she is less a moral center than an unwieldy vortex, a character whose choices unfold in a dimension adjacent to the plot.
What remains, then, are the images: disorienting, high‑gloss, and morally indeterminate—“woke America” making revolution against white‑supremacist America with explosives, assault rifles, and a coked‑up Leonardo DiCaprio shouting Viva la Revolución! The spectacle is the message; the message is the spectacle.
When Fiction Feeds Reaction
Those are precisely the images the MAGA universe seized on. In a season of national fury at “the left” after Kirk’s murder, One Battle After Another delivered exactly what the reactionary imagination craved. Across right‑wing reviews and conservative talk shows the refrain was identical: Anderson has made a movie that glamorizes left‑wing violence—the very violence that killed Charlie Kirk. The film, they say, exemplifies the domestic terrorism Trump must now crush by any means necessary.
One Fox News editorial, bluntly titled “DiCaprio’s One Battle After Another Is an Ill‑Timed Apologia for Left‑Wing Violence,” ended on this note: the movie irked the writer, he admitted, but then he remembered that the Trump administration was finally moving to crack down on Antifa—“the very real ‘domestic terrorists’ of today”—and perhaps, he quipped, Anderson’s film would make for pleasant viewing once its fans were safely behind bars. The brute logic is hard to miss: if the left loves this movie, maybe it belongs in chains.
That rhetoric is not a sideshow. The next months will determine the scope of the repression to come. Because “the Antifa movement” is a diffuse, leaderless galaxy rather than a membership organization, some optimists have suggested the terrorism designation will prove legally unenforceable. But legality has rarely constrained this administration when the President’s appetite for vendetta is at stake. On October 8, flanked by Attorney General Pamela Bondi, Trump invoked his plan to wipe out Antifa “from top to bottom” as a pretext for sending the military to quell protests against his immigration policies in Democratic‑led cities. The dragnet that ensued swept up the left as a whole. The President promised to jail any Democratic officials who, in his telling, failed to stop protesters from “threatening” ICE agents—up to and including Chicago’s Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker. The message to wary Democrats was simple: resist my deployment of the military and I will lock you up, too.
What will ultimately matter is not doctrine but opinion. Is the country ready to treat the newly designated “internal enemies” as terrorists? If so, who counts as one? Self‑identified Antifa activists? Any student with an Antifa sticker on a laptop, and there are tens of thousands? Anyone who calls themselves antifascist? Anyone who attends a rally where Antifa is present? And what does “treat them like terrorists” entail? Does it mean only prison sentences? Or does it mean maximum lethality—the same doctrine unleashed on drug cartels once labeled as terrorists—of the kind the President evoked in his September 30 address to the generals?
All of this, ultimately, will be decided in the court of public opinion. In such a charged atmosphere, it was hardly surprising that the more moderate left rushed, in the days after Kirk’s murder, to refute the connection Trump and his supporters were eager to draw between progressives and violence. With the exception of a few fringe voices celebrating the assassination, most of the left did exactly what it should have: it downplayed the killer’s political motives, emphasized that this wave of violence cuts across the political spectrum—as the recent murder of several Democratic officials also attested—and reminded anyone willing to listen that, if we are counting bodies, it is the far right that has played the central role in the epidemic of gun violence ravaging the country in recent years[2].
Yet, against that backdrop of denial and damage control, One Battle After Another splashes across the screen a full-blown spectacle of left-wing violence—an image that, before Kirk’s death, existed mostly in Trumpist fantasy. The film hands the president all the ammunition he needs to justify a broad campaign of persecution against the progressive camp in the years ahead. Trump had already tried, back in 2019, to label Antifa a terrorist organization and failed. This time, he has done so effortlessly—and if Kirk’s assassination was the immediate trigger, the imaginary violence conjured by Anderson’s movie prepared the ground for the persecutions still to come.
A few sympathetic critics have rushed to defend the film, arguing that Anderson began writing it long before Trump’s return to power and that its release simply collided with history’s worst possible timing. Perhaps. Even so, the anti‑ICE street scenes that pin the story to the present have been emblems of anti‑Trump resistance since the first term. By making ICE the film’s central antagonist, Anderson delivered what was bound to read as a taunt to Trump’s voters. Even if Trump had not been re‑elected in 2025, the release would likely have stoked his supporters’ resentment all the same, strengthening MAGA down the line. That is less foresight than an appetite for provocation, and it would matter less if the bear being poked did not hold such leverage over the fate of democratic institutions.
Beyond Reception: The Left and the Trouble with Violence
The question is not merely how the right instrumentalizes the film, but what message the film transmits to the left at a time of intense political violence. Recent polling suggests that roughly a third of young Americans believe force can be an acceptable way to shut down speech—an untenable premise whose tragic consequences need no elaboration. One Battle After Another raises a parallel concern: when, if ever, is violence a permissible means to halt a policy one finds intolerable?
In Anderson’s story world, the protagonists choose guns. Yet the regime they oppose remains curiously undefined. Yes, it’s obviously a Trumpist government—but is it the Trumpism of today, as abhorrent as many of its policies are, elected by a large share of the country that wanted those policies? Or is it a system that has crossed into a qualitatively different realm—full‑blown fascism—in which democratic expression, organizing, and self‑defense are effectively outlawed? The film never says. It sustains a deliberate blur, and that blur mirrors a broader ambivalence on parts of today’s left about the role of violence, an ambivalence that came into sharp relief in the days after Kirk’s murder.
Some on the far left openly celebrated the killer, Tyler Robinson. A far more mainstream current, though, did not so much celebrate as relativize. A meme went viral: Gandalf solemnly declaring that “violence is never the answer” to Sauron—posted, of course, with heavy irony. The point was clear enough: against an enemy as nakedly evil as Sauron—or Kirk—violence can be the answer, even when that enemy speaks and acts within a democratic framework. One Battle After Another is animated by the same sentiment. We learn nothing precise about the nature of the regime; we only know the bad guys are very, very bad, and the heroes very, very angry. In that moral landscape, shooting becomes not only justified but strangely satisfying.
From that crusading mentality, all manner of rationalizations follow. The United States, we are told, is sliding toward fascism—some insist it is already proto‑fascist—so armed resistance is the only solution. The problem with the film’s refusal to define the regime, beyond a gestural shorthand of “white‑supremacist state,” is that the legitimacy of violence depends on that definition. In Nazi‑occupied Europe, or in certain anticolonial struggles, armed resistance was a tragic necessity, and those who waged it deserve honor. In a democracy under stress—harshly right‑wing, illiberal in many respects, yet still quite far from fascism—armed “resistance” tends to generate the opposite of liberation. From the Rote Armee Fraktion to Tyler Robinson, spectacular violence has always handed the Reaction the very pretext it needed to tighten its grip.
Because One Battle After Another withholds context, the French 75 fall, in my view, into that second category: revolutionaries of convenience, without ethic or strategy, useful idiots whose theatrics hasten the authoritarian turn. They endanger not only the movie’s America but the real one, in which the film will help normalize a mass persecution of the President’s political opponents. For the portion of the country that approves of Trump’s agenda, the message could not be clearer: there are people out there ready to use guns to stop them—people who, as the film and the Kirk murder together “prove,” want them dead.
Follow that logic and the next step writes itself: join Trump’s war against the nation’s “internal enemies,” complete the criminalization of Antifa as domestic terrorists, and accept the method that criminalization licenses. Follow it far enough and what was once history—camps, extrajudicial killings, disappearances—stops being history at all.
What the Film Leaves Out
There is something else the movie could have shown us, and fleetingly does: solidarity. The network around Sensei St. Carlos is one of the few original and resonant threads in the film. Del Toro plays the role with a laconic reserve that stands at a slight remove from the French 75’s theater of violence. He helps Ferguson not out of zeal but out of friendship. He shelters families because they need refuge, not because explosions thrill him. The relationship between the Sensei and Ferguson could double as a parable of the wider left’s view of the small minority who confuse spectacle with strategy. We tolerate them with a mix of indulgence and exhaustion, half‑convinced by the old catechism of “complementary tactics,” until the costs—for everyone—grow too steep.
Anderson, alas, gives this world only a few minutes of screen time. It cannot compete with the pyrotechnics that drive the plot. That imbalance is not just a storytelling choice; it is a political one. In the current climate, to amplify the images of left‑wing violence is to help fix in the public imagination the equation of “left” and “violence.” The movie does not invent that equation, but it reinscribes it at precisely the wrong time. It supports, however inadvertently, a self‑fulfilling prophecy: the more convinced the far left becomes that fascism is imminent, the more it performs the role that makes fascism likelier.
This is the paradox at the heart of One Battle After Another. By staging the “heroic resistance” of the French 75 against a fictional white‑supremacist state without clearly defining the stakes, the film makes the authoritarian turn in the real United States more plausible. It shores up the very narrative that our would‑be authoritarians need. It invites the public to accept that “the left” is at war with the country, and that a war needs warriors.
What the Moment Demands
The question is whether democratic institutions can weather this new turn—deprived of protection, and sometimes actively undermined, by a segment of the left that prefers to imagine itself an avant‑garde fighting an almost entirely imagined fascism rather than resign itself to unspectacular strategies: build the base; defend the vulnerable; organize the city council; protect the vote; wait for the midterms. These are not heroic strategies. They do not produce viral videos. But they have one crucial advantage: they make it harder to justify the irreparable—the actual advent of a fascist regime, with its police, its camps, its executions, its rapes, and its disappearances. Despite the left’s constant dramatization, we are not there yet. No one has the right to precipitate the arrival.
None of this lets the right off the hook for its own violence or excuses a President who prosecutes political enemies with relish. None of it denies the daily harm inflicted by policies that separate families, criminalize abortion, and empower racist institutions. None of it demands passivity in the face of injustice. It does demand clarity. If the regime is truly fascist, then say so, and act accordingly—accept the tragic burdens that such a conclusion entails, including a sober accounting of means and ends. If it is not—and ours is not—then the left’s task is different. It is to starve the authoritarian project of pretexts, expand the coalition capable of defeating it, and refuse the narcotic of righteous spectacle.
The cinema has always known how to romanticize violence. What One Battle After Another adds to the genre is a contemporary edge and a flamboyant cast. It is certainly possible to admire the craft—the saturated nightscapes, the breathless chase sequences, the performances—without endorsing the message. But message and form are harder to separate here than the film’s defenders claim. The movie doesn’t just depict violence; it turns violence into a joke we are meant to be in on, a meme shaped by the rhythms of blockbuster action. In doing so, it teaches the right to see what it wants to see and offers the left the fantasy it least needs.
The fantasy is seductive: history as a montage of righteous detonations, revolution as a heist, politics as a role you play. Its danger is equally simple. Spend enough time playing with the images of revolution and you may conjure the nightmare you meant to ward off.
Matti Leprêtre is a historian of Nazism and modern Germany, and a lecturer at the Centre for History at Sciences Po Paris. His research examines the entanglement of medicinal plants, environmental movements, and health policies with forms of authoritarianism and mass mobilization from the nineteenth century to the Third Reich. He has presented his work at Oxford and Harvard and published in the Journal of the History of Ideas, among other venues. He is currently co-editing several collective volumes and special issues, and preparing a monograph on the society of the spectacle in the age of social media and smartphones. A graduate of Columbia University in New York, he also writes on French and American politics.
[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/one-battle-after-another-conservative-reactions-1236394128/
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/10/opinion/charlie-kirk-mourning-political-violence.html.