(I don't know why the A in After is capitalized. I was taught that propositions aren't capitalized in titles. But my education was wrong about many things.)
No Spoilers for once.
***
In the year of our lord 2025, a famous auteur, the type who comes out with one brilliant masterpiece every few years, made a comedy movie satirizing the foibles of the modern political moment.
And then it happened again.
The first is Eddington, by Ari Aster of Hereditary and Midsummer. The second got wide release just yesterday. One Battle After Another (OBAA) by Paul Thomas Anderson, of There Will Be Blood and Boogie Nights. Maybe Robert Eggers will do the third one.
Eddington was... a disappointment. I actually kinda liked it, but that opinion is not universal and I can see why. It is "about" politics writ large and COVID times in particular. It shows the right-wing characters - a gun nut sheriff, youtube addled conspiracy theorists - and left wing protesters to moderate establishment politicians as bumbling buffoons at the mercy of corporate puppeteers. It's pretty funny and there's nothing to fault in the performances of Paul Pascal, Joaquin, and Emma Stone. You should have a fun time seeing it.
Reviewers claim that it "both sides" the national debate, given that it's a movie for progressive audiences but most of the lines from left-wingers are parodies of privilege, dilettantism, and virtue signalling. I did not feel the same way. The protesters in the street are kind of dumb, but nowhere near as criminal as the conservative sheriff, and in the end the "true villain" is implied to be a corporation that doesn't care which side is in charge so long as they get what they want. I feel this message is more leftist than not.
But I can understand why people would think the movie is apolitical. It is close enough.
This is NOT the deal with OBAA.
OBAA is an adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon psychedelic novel originally about the 60's, but updated for the omnipresent Now. (There's a 15 year gap between the backstory and the main action of the movie, but both of them feel ambiguously current.) The all-consuming issue is immigration, or rather the rounding up and imprisoning of immigrant populations who otherwise do all the work needed in factories.
The resistance left in this movie is fool of bumbling pot-heads who forget all the rules of spycraft, overly officious bureaucrats, and hyper-individualist traitors. They also without doubt are the heroes of the movie. They are actively trying to do good against the machine of the fascist state. There are also some competent good guys among them. Their enemies are storm troopers and rich Christians obsessed with racial mixing. (They think it is a deadly sin. Presumably they aren't fans of Thomas Jefferson.) And one roided out racial fetishist, played brilliantly by Sean Penn. That Supporting Actor Oscar is his.
I believe in the Left cause enough to be often frustrated at the actions of actual leftists, who sometimes seem to think being self-defeating is evidence of purity to the cause. I laughed at Eddington, and can even say it somewhat accurately reflected politics before 2025.
It's a lot harder to say that now. Now, one of those sides is running a regime that seeks to disenfranchise millions of citizens, rewrite the constitution, invade major American cities with the National Guard, fire comedians who make jokes they don't like, declare emergency powers at the drop of a hat, and to use the power of the government to force companies to bend the knee to them. Oh, and have turned ICE into a black-masked Gestapo who grab anyone who looks vaguely foreign off the streets and send them to prisons with names like "Alligator Alcatraz" and "the Hellhole No One Returns From."
In contrast, I guess the current left is... doofishly hostile to their own allies. It's annoying, but there's no longer any equivalency between the two.
Eddington is a holdover of the era of Trump's first term and Biden's term (and the end of Obama's.) Politics is a joke where both sides are behaving oafishly but nothing is really happening in government anyway. I can't blame Aster, as that is the environment when he was filming it.
OBAA (besides superior acting, writing, and that AMAZING score) is about the more recent current moment. Trump's second term really does seem a threat to free society. I don't know how to productively fight the state, but if you could do so it would be genuine freedom fighting. It fits our actual mood.
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