A film that turns America’s ideological fever into satire— and dares us to see the joke’s on us.
I. The Critical Divide
Audiences are reading only half of the satire
Straight satire invites incomplete interpretations, and those tend to reflect the biases of the viewer. So it was with Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers in the late ’90s, when many critics of the time read the film as supportive of fascism. And so it has been with Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. Mainstream outlets like The Ringer or Screen Daily suggest that Paul Thomas Anderson has delivered a righteous anti-fascist blockbuster—his most “accessible,” “entertaining,” and “urgent” film, an art-house crusade with box-office swagger. Over on the Right, the same movie is being denounced by The Blaze as “an insidious piece of propaganda” and “luxury nihilism” and Bret Easton Ellis has labeled it a “liberal mustiness time capsule.” Each camp sees what it wants: a needful challenge to authority or a threatening piece of agitprop, confirmation or betrayal, masterpiece or muddled mess.
Anderson’s joke is on them, those drawing the battle lines and staking claim to camps. One Battle After Another isn’t waving a flag for either side—it’s holding up a mirror to the absurdity of extremes and performance politics. The focus has been on plot or character or theme, but they’re missing the tone.
One Battle After Another is a satire of political extremes, from start to finish.
II. A Parody of Purity and Performance
Where conviction becomes costume and ideology is rehearsal
One Battle After Another borrows more than a little of its DNA from Pynchon, especially Vineland—the tragicomedy of burned-out radicals who can’t tell whether they’re still fighting the system or just starring in its commercials. Anderson isn’t adapting Pynchon as he did with Inherent Vice, but he’s absorbing his diagnosis of America as performative and ripe for parody.
The satire operates across the political spectrum, taking aim at the extremists at either pole. And Anderson finds plenty in his cross-hairs to lampoon. Everywhere you look in One Battle After Another, satire abounds and genuine meaning performs itself to death — slogans become passwords, purity becomes choreography, ideology becomes branding. The focus falls on two key figures, which help to orient us: Colonel Lockjaw and Perfidia Beverly Hills.
Lockjaw is fascism rendered as a medical condition. He’s named after the colloquial term for tetanus, broadly summarizing his character: he’s the body politic contracted and stuck there, choking on its own rigidity. Anderson clinches the satirical lineage with direct allusion to Kubrick’s most famous satire, Dr. Strangelove. Lockjaw’s rant about a “semen demon” that wants to “rape you in reverse” because his assailant sensed the “power of his mind and body” is a direct echo of General Ripper’s obsession with preserving his “precious bodily fluids” and “deny[ing] [women] my essence.” Both sides recognize the caricature, even if one calls it righteous and the other insulting. Anderson’s true brilliance is pairing him with an equally broad mirror on the Left.
Perfidia is the mirror image of Lockjaw, the convulsion to his contraction, all activity and spasm. “Perfidy”, the basis of her name, literally means, “the quality or state of being faithless or disloyal: treachery” (Merriam-Webster). The on-the-nose name is just the first similarity. In fact, there’s another pair of direct Kubrick references, another satirical masterpiece being quoted. First, Anderson gives her an inversion of the Full Metal Jacket interplay between weaponry and sex. She says, “Nah, pussy ain’t for fun. This is the fun. The guns is the fucking fun.”—a perfect reversal of Kubrick’s “This is my rifle, this is my gun; this is for fighting, this is for fun.” barracks chant in Full Metal Jacket. The comparison of sex organ and weapon using the same rhyme scheme cannot be coincidence. Even more indicative: when Perfidia’s daughter is born, she’s given the name, “Charlene”, the same name Private Gomer Pile gives his rifle in Full Metal Jacket.
But Anderson doesn’t stop there. The disease of performative purity is contagious; what begins in individuals spreads to institutions. The surrounding groups, supporters, and even the actions of characters receive similar absurd treatment.
The Christmas Adventurers elicit actual chuckles in the theater. The white supremacy, stronghold in suburbia, and obsession with purity are as broad as possible. The same is true for Mankind United (MKU, the ICE stand-in): bureaucratically amoral and robotic in their pragmatism. On the other side, people bicker over whether the French 75 shares similarity with The Weather Underground or should be read as more of a loose-knit group like Antifa, leaving the satire by the wayside. But it’s still there. “French 75” is both a champagne cocktail and a piece of World War I artillery, echoing the earlier conflation of celebration and ordnance. Their code phrases, telegraphed bombings, and theatrical bank robberies are a performance circuit. When it’s revealed later that the absurdly performative “Jungle Pussy” had betrayed Perfidia in a scene played for farce, Anderson closes the loop: radical purity has become self-parody.
The groups of the Right—The Christmas Adventurers and MKU—perform as well. While the protest is still fulminating, Lockjaw shouts, “Let’s fight fire with fire. Call in Eddie Van Halen,” and a roadie emerges to lob a Molotov between factions and give the MKU the justification to escalate. Even the Christmas Adventurers stage their own finale, turning Lockjaw’s murder and disposal into ritual theater.
And the filmmaking confirms their equality.
The key is noticing how Anderson edits like a moral equalizer, his dissolves and match cuts collapsing these opposites into sameness, extremity being the commonality. The first hint comes just after Lockjaw is recruited by The Christmas Adventurers. Anderson dissolves from the engagement party to a border town as the audio track plays the underground radio of Billy Goat, key mouthpiece of the French 75. The cinematic technique flattens difference into absurd symmetry—the secret fascists fading into the clandestine radicals. The cut isn’t just tonal; it’s methodological. Both factions rehearse the same behaviors: operating in secrecy, speaking in passwords, policing loyalty, and mistaking discipline for virtue. Anderson’s dissolve catches them mid-gesture; tuxedo or fatigues, they’re identical in their choreography.
Poor Bob Ferguson is our main channel into this world, as we spend the majority of the action seeing through his eyes. He’s the pothead revolutionary who can’t escape from his bathrobe or find a charger for his 1G phone, tripping over everything and failing at every turn. Both the cuckold (a favorite slur of the Right) and the loving, determined father fighting for his daughter’s life. He can’t recall the slogans or the passwords, he bounces energetically from battle to battle and never wins one, with an obvious and crucial exception.
One final indication of the satire comes from a brilliant source: the soundtrack. There are very few pieces of popular music in the film, which makes the first needle-drop feel almost transcendent. Sixteen years pass in a single match cut as baby Charlene becomes grown Willa and suddenly Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work” floods the theater. For a moment, it feels like oxygen. Audiences love it, this sudden warmth and nostalgia after so much ideological chill. But Anderson turns it against us. Minutes later, Bob and Willa mention Steely Dan by name, puncturing the illusion. We thought the moment mattered because we borrowed meaning from the song and mistook that inheritance for insight. Anderson’s saying: you’re not feeling the movie, you’re recycling your associations. Even the soundtrack can’t be trusted; it’s as performative as the slogans, the passwords, the purity tests. Anderson knows we need that breath of recognition, that brief comfort. He just won’t let us keep it without realizing its counterfeit nature.
III. Escaping the Polemic
The daughter of extremes finds grace in what remains.
Anderson’s satirical world is so complete that it leaves precious little room for sincerity. But he does show us where to look: the next generation. Charlene is the literal child of extremity, born from two caricatures of conviction. To live, she’ll need a new name. Billy Goat forges the papers himself: “You are Bob and Willa Ferguson, a mother and son who died in childbirth last month.” The roles reverse: the daughter must mother the father. From here on, Willa is the adult in the room, Bob the child still learning how to take the world seriously.
For a while she plays by the rules of the satire. She swaps codes with strangers, answers “The revolution will not be televised” on cue, but lies about her phone to a comrade. Her capture by Lockjaw feels inevitable, a plot point recycled from every script about purity and punishment. Then the film cracks open.
The bounty-hunter scene hits like a bolt of lightning. He’s pure transaction in a leather duster, until he suddenly isn’t. “I don’t kill kids,” he mutters, eventually freeing Willa and dying for it. It makes no sense, and that’s the point. In a world where every moral act has been branded or staged, the only real grace looks absurd by comparison. Anderson films it flat and unscored, as if embarrassed by the sincerity leaking through his own satire. It’s the first time the movie lets something human happen without quotation marks.
The same logic carries through the next confrontation. When Willa kills the Christmas Adventurer for failing the passcode, she’s still using her mother’s tools to fight her father’s war. But moments later she turns that test on Bob. He fumbles it, offers half an answer, then pleads not with rhetoric but love. She lowers the gun. The code has lost its spell. The purity tests belong to the past. Between them, the satire finally breaks, and something human walks out—father and daughter driving together out of a desert of death searching for the new world they’ve earned.
For the old one is ending. Lockjaw’s death arrives not on the field of battle but in milquetoast Boomer heaven, a beige corner office with corporate particle board furniture, fluorescent lighting, and a gas chamber stunt that would impress a Nazi. Set against this is Bob’s voice-over, explaining the letter that Perfidia sent to Willa. Willa reads her mother’s letter, which is given no place in time, no immediacy, and no true effect, and the camera slowly zooms in on her until she’s in extreme close-up, the true focus isn’t the letter but its effect on Willa. Adjacent to Lockjaw’s death, this is Perfidia’s death as well—a philosophical death of her ideals and spirit. This letter is full of platitudes, self-negation, rationalization, and empty verbiage. For a revolutionary who values activity and action above all else, this is a paltry non-thing stacked with bromides like, “We failed. Maybe you will not. Maybe you will be the one who puts the world right.”
Willa’s answer is almost silent. She hugs her father and shows him how to use a smartphone, no longer a source of danger. Love replaces ideology; connection replaces code. When she drives off toward another protest, it’s not torch-passing or indoctrination—it’s curiosity. She’s entering a world that might finally mean what it says. She’s not synthesis; she’s remainder, the part that couldn’t be consumed by satire.
IV. The Problem of Credit
Interpretation is not intention
There’s a reasonable objection to all of this: perhaps I’m giving Anderson too much credit for crafting a satire so complete that everyone seems to be missing it. Maybe One Battle After Another really is a straight-faced political fable. But this is a director who’s spent twenty-five years perfecting tonal misdirection. You don’t build a career on Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, and The Master by suddenly deciding subtext is dispensable. If Perfidia Beverly Hills and Colonel Lockjaw aren’t a double-barreled blast—one shell for the Left, one for the Right—then Daniel Plainview wasn’t a materialist.
Anderson’s trick has always been to present excess so convincingly that audiences mistake it for endorsement. That’s what’s happening here: two sides so sure of their righteousness that they forget to breathe and think. Whether you call that politics or pathology doesn’t really matter. Either way, it’s the same diagnosis he’s been writing all along.
And if you miss the satire, in particular the satire of the extreme Left, you would expect exactly the interpretations we’ve seen: the critics on the Left champion the film as an anti-fascist masterpiece speaking truth to power and the critics on the Right see a polemic tinderbox glorifying left-wing violence because it’s targeted at fascist caricatures.
Maybe the miracle of One Battle After Another is that, in a moment when every conversation turns into a purity test, Anderson highlights the nonsense of such extremity. The Left and Right vilify each other over everything—policy, language, even the movies that hold a mirror up to them. The loudest voices shout “gotcha,” smiling in the glow of their own confirmation. But this film doesn’t belong to them.
It belongs to anyone still willing to discuss rather than declare; to the people in the muddied middle who haven’t given up on conversation. One Battle After Another isn’t campaigning for centrism in the pundit’s sense; it’s pleading for a center of gravity—a place where we can still recognize each other as human and chart a path forward.
Anderson has made a satire of extremism that doubles as an invitation to dialogue. Because once we see the poles in their full ridiculousness perched at opposite ends of the bleacher, we instinctively scoot away from the zealots.
And looking around, we notice something interesting.
We’ve been scooting toward each other the whole time.