One Body After Another
in which Paul Thomas Anderson reads his Peter Sloterdijk
Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterpiece One Battle After Another isn’t going to win the Academy Award for best picture, though it should. The accolades from the guilds and organizations and associations are numerous, but on the plebeian level, the film has received quite a lot of vitriol from our nation’s right wing. Even a cursory scroll through online reviews places front and center several one-star ratings. These “reviews” are predictably dismissive, often only one sentence in length, if that. Many on the Right see the film, whether they’ve actually seen the film, as having an “agenda,” and story, dialogue, characterization, pacing, cinematography, acting, composition, execution, artistry and so forth be damned. Sad to say, a movie that divides the country this much is not going to win Oscar’s top honor.
I can see why One Battle After Another would be polarizing; it is, among many other things, about politics now. But neither the Right nor the Left comes off well, to Anderson’s credit. The knee-jerk reaction, of course, is that the film is hateful toward conservatives. One Battle After Another attacks conservatives, the belief goes. It glorifies the Left and their battles, their so-called revolutions. But if this is the case then what about the scene at the movie’s midway point in which Leonard DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson is on the phone with one of the members of the revolutionary group the French 75, codename Comrade Josh, and all poor Bob Ferguson wants is the whereabouts of his daughter, the rendezvous point, but Comrade Josh, a real piece of work, won’t give the location to him because Ferguson can’t remember the answer to the question “What time is it?”—and why should he? It’s been ages. Ferguson goes the verbal rounds with Comrade Josh, who won’t budge. “This is a key tenet of the rebellion text,” Comrade Josh chides. “I’m surprised you can’t name it. I don’t know if you are who you say you are.” Exasperated beyond his limits, Ferguson threatens Comrade Josh with extreme bodily harm resulting in death. “Okay, this doesn’t feel safe,” Comrade Josh reacts. “You’re violating my space right now.” “Violating your space?” Ferguson responds. “Man, come on, what kind of revolutionary are you, brother? We’re not even in the same room here. We’re talking on the phone, like men!” “Okay,” Comrade Josh continues, “there’s no need to shout. This is a violation of my safety. These are noise triggers.” When Ferguson demands to know Comrade Josh’s coordinates, Comrade Josh answers, “I’m in a secure location somewhere between the stolen land of the Wabanaki and the stolen land of the Chumash.”
When Ferguson then yells, “You’re a little nitpicking prick!” it’s as if all of conservative America is yelling alongside him. That scene should be catharsis for the Right, who have been lambasting the Left for so long now about safe spaces and “snowflakes” and trigger words. The scene between Bob Ferguson and Comrade Josh owns the libs. The Right should be thanking Anderson, who in that single scene lays bare the rigidness and inanity of the Left. The Left as ouroboros, the serpent that devours its own tail, eventually eating itself whole.
The Right eats its own as well, and this is the true horror to conservatives upset with Anderson’s film. Those who have actually seen it—meaning seen it all the way through—are, if they’re smart and aware, no doubt deeply unsettled by the scene at the end in which Sean Penn’s Steven J. Lockjaw meets his inevitable demise. Watching One Battle After Another the first time, I did think, No way they’re going to let him join. Not really. They see through his lie. Sure enough, when that slider closes behind Lockjaw, and he walks around his new office to sit at his desk and put his feet up, and he stares at the ceiling and we hear the faint hiss, I thought, Of course.
I think back to the scene in which Tony Goldwyn’s Virgil Throckmorton meets with the head honchos of the Christmas Adventurers Club in their bunker hidden well away. After some time, the conversation turns to the point of Throckmorton’s presence: he is to dispose of Lockjaw, who committed an ultimate offense and therefore must die. “Make it clean,” Roy, the elder statesman, commands.
“Clean?” Throckmorton inquires.
“We should all be able to eat off the floor.” Roy chuckles. “It’s that clean.”
Throckmorton does not make it clean, and the burden falls on the shoulders of the Christmas Adventurers. Their method is clean. I think of the empty corner office, Lockjaw’s pride and relief at having finally been granted membership, and how that office has been used for disposal before, and will be used for disposal again. Never a drop of blood in that room, you could eat off the floor. You really could.
Terrorism, writes the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk in Terror from the Air (2002), began in April 1915 when the Germans used chlorine gas to change the atmosphere their enemy relied on to exist. To change the environment, Sloterdijk argues, to alter the very atmosphere in such a way that your target can no longer live, is the purest form of terrorism. More than that, it is the future of terrorism. If we apply atmoterrorism to the truth of climate change, it is the final form of terrorism.
What makes atmoterrorism so hideous is that it attacks indiscriminately, insidiously yet slowly and subtly. It is relentless. All in a given environment are affected. One moment you could be feeling as if you’re on top of the world, believing you’ve made it, and the next…you’re dying.
Of course: Lockjaw’s body goes into the oven; it has to be clean. I think of that empty corner office, so spare, so deadly, all the bodies, the Dilberts, one after another, for all time. The subtext, the cultural and historical context surrounding Lockjaw’s method of execution and erasure from the environment; the grim efficiency inherent in the Christmas Adventurers Club, masters of their own private Holocaust.
In his greatest films, Anderson touches a nerve. He has touched many nerves with One Battle After Another. He has touched history, too. He has touched the present and the future, and if there is a Good Saint Nick out there, somewhere, he’ll be honored for it.