One Battle After Another: PTA and the Death of Revolutionary Cinema

Summary

Most directors become disillusioned by politics later in their lives. Especially the Italians. Just take Bertolucci or Pasolini, both committed Marxists and Catholics, who made radical films up until the 1970s. Then they pivoted, became more critical of both the left and the right. For Bertolucci, “he fell out of love with politics.” But for Pasolini, it was more personal, arguing that consumer capitalism destroyed class consciousness. Pasolini’s bleakest and most nihilistic political film was also his most infamous: Salò. It became well-known for its depravity, moreso than its political critique. And yet, two years before its release, Pasolini admitted in an interview with Le Monde:“I can no longer believe in revolution, but I can’t help being on the side of the young people who are fighting for it.”It’s a line that captures the core contradiction of so many post-revolutionary artists: the loss of belief, but not of allegiance.Which is what makes Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest One Battle After Another both an exception to the rule and a reflection of it. He never made overtly political films like Bertolucci or Pasolini did. Maybe because he belonged to a generation shaped not by the fire of revolution but by the ashes of its failure. By the time Anderson was discovering cinema, the era of militant auteurs had already receded into history.This generational distance explains, partly, why the Gen-X wave of filmmakers were considerably more skeptical, allergic to dogma. PTA's contemporaries, Tarantino and Nolan, didn't inherit the revolutionary fervor of their European predecessors; they inherited its collapse. It also might explain why both auteurs represent a return to the apolitical craftsmanship of studio-era Hollywood, closer to Howard Hawks or William Wyler than to Godard. Their politics, if present at all, were sublimated into style and genre. The message was no longer the manifesto. It was the medium.Which makes Anderson's choice for his revolutionaries' name, t...