Still from One Battle After Another.

I have to admit that I was prompted to go watch One Battle After Another by listening to the New York Times interview with Sean Penn. Unlike my friend and frequent collaborator Gregory Maskarinec, who swore off reading the NYT after its promotion of the Iraq weapons of mass destruction hoax, I am even wont to listen to Ezra Klein podcasts. In the David Marchese interview, Penn says that his performance was studied and intentional, unlike a number of his previous performances. I’m not familiar with his roles, and I tend to think of Penn as Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). His portrayal of Col. Steven J. Lockjaw is similarly a comic performance, a send-up of the white supremacist military man whose name is a manifestation of end-stage tetanus (which I have seen among newborns whose mothers were unvaccinated in Bolivia in the 1980s). With his shoulders back and his spine ramrod straight (Did Manohla Dargis suggest that it might be stuck up his backside? Full-on tetanus causes opisthotonos, which I have seen in the context of ciguatera poisoning, not tetanus.), he struts through his scenes with the confidence of a soldier who might find it necessary to canoe an occasional camel jockey.

Going to the local multiplex was at least a distraction from doomscrolling through conspiracy theories on X.com about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It does seem to me that there is already a Charlie Kirk assassination conspiracy theory industry as robust as that of JFK’s. And it is weird to see Candace Owens agreeing with Max Blumenthal, who gave us a glimpse into the August intervention, when Charlie Kirk was told what’s up and what’s not. Candace Owens, who used to be with TPUSA, laid down the path that Charlie Kirk was starting to follow (along with Tucker Carlson). I did not know about Charlie Kirk before he was murdered. But I do watch Tucker Carlson, one of the Christians who has decided to be America First, one of the speakers at the July TPUSA conference that the billionaire donors found so objectionable. (I mostly listen to Judging Freedom with Judge Andrew Napolitano. Regulars include Aaron Mate, Max Blumenthal, Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, Scott Ritter, Lawrence Wilkerson, Douglas Macgregor, and others.) But I also try to catch podcast appearances by Chris Hedges, Norman Finkelstein, Gabor Mate, Katie Halper, Briahna Joy Gray, Ilan Pappe, and others.

As for myself, I had studiously avoided going down the rabbit hole of the JFK assassination, largely because Noam Chomsky had said that there’s nothing there. (He also said that JFK and RFK were run-of-the-mill Cold Warriors, in contrast to what Oliver Stone says.) But without Noam (cognitively) around any more to completely shape my world view, I have come under the sway of Oliver Stone, David Talbot (The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, 2016), and Jefferson Morley (The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton, 2017) – such that I now believe that JFK was assassinated by the U.S. Deep State (meaning that these people are capable of anything).

Ensconced as I am in comfortable suburban life, I have not felt the immediacy of ICE raids.  One Battle After Another brings home to us what is happening in our urban centers, where the administration has deployed paramilitary ICE units, supported by the National Guard and the U.S. military. While the Ezra Kleins claim that Charlie Kirk conducted politics the “right way,” white supremacists use his assassination as a pretext to wage civil war against Blacks, Latinx, Arabs, Muslims, and anybody who opposes the genocide of, ethnic cleansing of, and apartheid against Palestinians.

One Battle After Another portrays the multi-racial revolutionaries who fight back against the detention of immigrants. Sergio St. Carlos, the karate sensei portrayed by Benicio Del Toro, calls the marijuana and alcohol-addled former insurgent Bob Ferguson, portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio, a “white Zapata.” The karate sensei shares with Bob that he has something of a Harriet Tubman-style Underground Railroad operating out of his home. For his part, Bob happens to be watching The Battle of Algiers when the Col. Lockjaw and his soldiers come for him. Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is the hold music for the hotline for wasted and washed-up revolutionaries.

It is not foreign agents or foreign ideology that is responsible for this revolution. Tom Petty’s “American Girl” plays as the credits come on.

So, when is this revolution taking place? This is not science fiction. The cars are contemporary. So, it’s now and it’s here. It’s not Children of Men (which is set in the future, as well as in the U.K.), or the original Mad Max (in which the vehicles are souped-up funny cars, set in Australia), but the car chases are pretty good. The credits say it’s based on Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. I don’t recall Vineland being so full of action like this. Perhaps it’s speculative fiction, as Margaret Atwood calls some of her works (though the Maddam trilogy seems like science fiction to me). I will never own the 1967 Ford Mustang Custom that I dreamt of driving as a kid in the Chicago suburbs, but I spotted an early-model Mustang.

One Battle After Another suggests that perhaps it’s time to cut the Ezra Klein accommodationist crap and fight back against white supremacist fascism. The personal cost will be steep. But as Zapata taught us, es mejor morir en pie que vivir de rodillas.

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