In other words, the movie is perfectly timed for people who want to latch on to the revolutionary politics it portrays for their own reasons. Along with being an excellent movie, then, it’s a sort of Rorschach test, a psychic prompt at which agitated people can cast their political feelings. Some of these feelings have been pretty raw, directly connected to thoughts of real political power. For example, David Marcus of Fox News let on that the movie made him “angry” at leftists in a way that reminded him gratefully of the “cracking down” the Trump administration is doing against Antifa, and his anger at those Antifa radicals allowed him imagine how One Battle After Another would be “a fun movie for them to watch once they are all in jail”. I liked the movie a lot, but even I didn’t find it that evocative.

The film is a sort of love triangle: between revolutionary comrades Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), and the main antagonist Federal Immigration honcho Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) who gets hotter for Perfidia than even Bob is. But, since the film is (loosely) based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, it’s a Pynchonian love triangle — wild, improbable, so pervy it’s virtually supernatural. One Battle After Another is delirious fun, one of the most delightful movies I’ve seen in years. It touches daringly but not heedlessly on themes of political violence. Finally, though, and despite the shrill warnings of its conservatives detractors, and despite the dreamy swooning of its progressive admirers, it’s not politics. It’s just a movie, and thank God for that.

Anderson’s greatness has always consisted in his ability to make coherent art out of close and often lurid and somehow also epic psychological studies that are punctuated by juddering action and intimate violence. Thanks to these heavy counterpoints, an Anderson film can often leave you feeling kind of battered and wrung out when it’s done. One Battle After Another reverses this balance, in a way that makes it both more fun and less draining than, say, There Will Be Blood or Magnolia. That is, it has a setup of chaotic adventure on a large scale and settles only occasionally into close observation of the crazed G-Men and vain utopians who make up its cast. Indeed, despite its apparent political commitments, it’s one of Anderson’s least serious movies. The only Anderson film more larkish, finally, than One Battle After Another is Inherent Vice, which also draws from a Thomas Pynchon novel.

The Pynchon connection is key. Anderson’s Inherent Vice is closer to its Pynchonian sourcematerial than is One Battle After Another. But the new film is more Pynchonian in tone and spirit.  As the movie goes on, jumping 15 years when we meet lovely Willa (Chase Infiniti) as the adolescent daughter of fugitive Bob, its story grows more larkish, indeed slightly magical. Events transpire not according to some cold causal logic but from a sort of cosmic horniness familiar to Pynchon readers, the Fates really wanting in their loins for things to come together in a certain way, which makes the playing out of the assorted mortal destinies basically comic, basically funny. This places all the radical political action in an almost mocking light that makes both the progressive swooning and the conservative frothing about One Battle After Another seem like different forms of wish-projection.

This is not to say that the politics are insincere. Pynchon surely hates Nixon and Reagan and other buzz-killing Republican finks he sneers at in passing. But he’s too much of a postmodern jokester to make such dour hating a tonal feature of his fiction. Even the political bad guys get taken up into the machinery of Pynchonian play, and become funny. And Anderson surely hates the apparatus of immigration detention he portrays in One Battle After Another. But he’s too “inspired by” Thomas Pynchon not to show the avatars of this apparatus as clownish functionaries rather than slavering demons. The film’s enforcer supreme, made into an unforgettable grotesque by Sean Penn, has that great Pynchonian name, Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw, and he is consistently hilarious, literally never for a single instant a figure of seriousness. There’s an evil secret society in the film that seems to function as a shadow government, or some kind of white-supremacist Avengers, which conservatives are railing against as a slanderous outrage against the honor of America’s virtuous regime. Its name is the Christmas Adventurers Club. Its slogan or secret password is “All hail St. Nick”. How a pundit, even a Right-wing pundit, can mistake the planet where all this happens as our Earth rather than Near Pynchonia is a mystery. But then debilitating literalness is a job hazard, or perhaps a job requirement, of the Constantly Angry Commentator.

In other words, One Battle After Another is sincere about its politics, but it is not, as an aesthetic matter, serious about them. And this unseriousness is a good and saving feature of the film, because its politics really are pretty silly. The first time I saw it I thought to myself as the credits came up, “Wow. I have never loved a movie so much that had such dumb politics.” It’s the violent methods of the film’s revolutionaries that conservative critics and progressive admirers have found terrifying and inspiring, respectively, but more telling are the political ends that animate these radicals. The film seems to be about a bunch of Leftists planning revolutionary change for fascist America, but the revolution they’re trying to stage is on behalf of the utterly conventional moral quibbles and lifestyle priorities of bourgeois liberals. (I’m not saying these humdrum ends are dumb in themselves, necessarily. I’m saying that, if you’re pursuing these things that we most already have through the dramatic methods of armed revolution, the mismatch, the overkill, is very dumb indeed.)

The eye-catching opening sequence, and the extended action set-piece in which Bob joins up with his daughter’s relaxed and resourceful karate teacher (Benicio del Toro, being excellent), involve frightened migrants and the immigration forces trying to detain and deport them. As such, these scenes express the humane and totally understandable desire of liberals to distance themselves from the cruel realities of immigration enforcement. I struggle with this stuff myself, but maximizing the free movement of families across the US-Mexican border so that American businesses can have a larger supply of low-paid labor is not exactly a traditional goal of the radical Left or the working class. It is, rather, a policy fixation of educated progressives who, queasy about the human reality of immigration enforcement, also derive substantial lifestyle benefits from having all those migrants around to pick their vegetables and process their industrial meats and take care of their kids and make them tasty burritos.

Indeed the film says nothing about economic class. I’ve seen the movie twice now, and I have no memory of any character mentioning poor people. Affluent viewers anxious that a real-life French 75 would appropriate their things for communist redistribution can rest easy. The militants in One Battle After Another aren’t thinking about your property. The word “capitalism” is said once that I recall, but the person who says it is speaking vaguely, and he seems to be working in an anti-tech vein, inveighing against “surveillance capitalism”. In other words, he’s saying something any old centrist grumpy about the internet might say. Instead of poverty or class, the movie’s militants are militating for “freedom”, and this freedom seems much more “negative” and Lockean than “positive” and Marxist. When Colonel Lockjaw asks her what she and her movement are after, Perfidia, the film’s most outwardly radical character, snarls something about “free lives” and “free bodies” and “free borders”. When she brags about bombing a senator’s house, she says it’s because he supported “that anti-abortion bill”. With the possible exception of the internet stuff, then, and with the obvious exception of their chosen methods, the revolutionaries in One Battle After Another have no evident policy disagreements with the editorial team at Reason magazine.

Conservative critics might counter that this proves their point, that Paul Thomas Anderson really is encouraging progressives to take up revolutionary violence simply to pursue their current agenda of open borders and perpetual sexual liberation. That would be a fair point, if One Battle After Another actually encouraged anyone to take up revolutionary violence. The film portrays violent methods in a few scenes, and it presents them as part of a thrilling adventure in the moment, and it shows the supposed radicals committing and enjoying these militant acts to be nice people with good intentions, for the most part. But it also shows the whole enterprise to be kind of a mess, kind of a disaster. Even on the film’s terms the ends don’t justify the means, because the means, being haphazardly deployed by semi-competent people with their own particular agendas, don’t bring the world an inch closer to those ends.

The film is actually profound on this point, how projects of supposedly universal justice or general legitimacy require regular idiosyncratic people to carry them out, and so these general projects are readily hijacked by the specific quirks of these all-too-human humans. In embodying this dilemma, Perfidia represents the folly of revolution itself. She is the most charismatic member of French 75, but this owes in part to the very particular fire that burns inside her, which is one-part preternatural anger and about seven parts feral sexuality. In very Pynchonian fashion, then, her revolution is a matter of desire, of libido. Her specific chemical mix makes her an eager player of dangerous revolutionary games, but it also makes her unreliable as a revolutionary comrade and completely ludicrous, indeed terrifying, as a self-appointed agent of universal justice.

More from this author

The wild heart of David Lynch

By Matt Feeney

More provocatively, for wary conservative viewers especially, the film applies this model to every urge to rule, within nominally elected governments and ostensibly revolutionary cadres alike. As Perfidia represents the mercurial and fairly stupid eros that revolutions end up taking their bearings from, Colonel Lockjaw embodies the priapic, libidinal essence of official violence. Revolutionaries pursue revolution in part because it’s fun and arousing, and some men sign up to be government enforcers, the tip of the sovereign spear, because they have a powerful desire to stab something. The thought of being the final thrust of the sovereign body is the sort of turn-on a man like Lockjaw can make a career out of. Lockjaw himself draws this link between official enforcement and erotic desire almost explicitly when, in a scene of deep comical strangeness, he refers to his erect penis as his “power”.

If Perfidia represents the arbitrary human desire that lurks in revolutionary plans for universal justice, DiCaprio’s Bob represents the steep human costs that the heady plunge into revolutionary action imposes on a life over the long run. Ben Shapiro really got himself going on this point during a recent podcast. A core “suggestion” of the film, Shapiro said, is that it’s “better…  to be a complete loser who wastes your life bombing things randomly in order to free illegal immigrants to run willy-nilly across the border than to be a productive citizen”. Shapiro gets the sequence wrong here, which is kind of important for what the film’s actual “suggestion” is regarding what kind of person it’s “better” to be. Bob doesn’t become a loser and then bomb things randomly so some Mexicans could get all willy-nilly. He bombs things and then he becomes a loser. He becomes and lives as a loser because he bombed things 15 years earlier.

In other words, thanks to his revolutionary hijinks, Bob’s been in hiding for those 15 years, living as a paranoid hermit with his frustrated daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). He’s a stoned and lonely bachelor who rarely washes his hair and is always wearing an old bathrobe. I imagine there are one or two viewers out there who will receive the “suggestion” that it’s better to live like Bob than to be a productive citizen, but they’re probably starting out as even bigger losers than Ben Shapiro accurately says Bob is. But it’s hard to imagine this is a lesson the film itself wishes to suggest, especially as the revolution, which sputters along without him, is achieving precisely nothing that would make Bob’s existential bargain seem a wise one.

That’s Bob’s existential bargain — and the deep sacrifice he’s imposed on poor Willa — are either probably or obviously not worth it, depending on how much of a loser you already are, is something Pynchon himself says in Vineland. After his long years of hiding out with his daughter Prairie (Vineland’s inspiration for Willa), the old legal jeopardy has once again found Zoyd (Vineland’s inspiration for Bob), which leaves Zoyd regretting the whole damn thing. “Damn fool Zoyd,” Pynchon writes. “Sent so gaga by those mythical days of high drama that he’d forgotten he and Prairie might actually have to go on living years beyond them.” Maybe I’m naive, gullibly inclined to interpret films I really enjoyed as bearing reasonable rather than idiotic ideas, but I thought that sound sentiment was the suggestion I was supposed to get from smelly Bob. But this aside by Pynchon also shows that progressive critics are getting carried away in their giddy claims that One Battle After Another is — to quote the New York Times’s Manohla Dargis — “dead serious”, at least about revolution. A cadre of young people “sent… gaga” by their “mythical days of high drama” does not sound even coma serious, let alone dead serious. To put it another way, if you’re identifying with these violent dilettantes, you’re not serious either.

Suggested reading

Why did Hollywood ignore a Turkish delight?

By Geoff Dyer

I want to point out for special recognition a fretful review of One Battle After Another in the conservative outlet The Blaze. According to the writer Peter Gietl, the film’s “celebration of vitriol and murder is clarifying” — that is, it reveals the lethal intent of Paul Thomas Anderson. “When the perpetually sweaty DiCaprio shouts ‘¡Viva la revolución!’ while detonating bombs, you’re meant to cheer. And if you’re not cheering, well, those bombs are meant for you.”

Couple things. First, the film’s take on murder is far from celebratory. The one murder it shows, black Perfidia killing a black security guard during a bank robbery, comes out of nowhere, from no operational logic or shared political motives, but merely from Perfidia’s uncontainable impulses, and so it appalls the other revolutionaries and ends up being their fall from grace, the end of their revolutionary innocence, the moment when all the fun comes apart and everyone is sent on the run, or to prison, or worse.

Second, Bob actually says “¡Viva la revolución!” twice, and neither time is the audience supposed to cheer. The first time he says it you’re supposed to chuckle, because it’s said as an afterthought, the blurting of a revolutionary cliché, and because it’s Bob, and Bob just isn’t a serious person. The second time he says it there’s more of a setup, more comic timing built behind it, and 15 years of hiding and getting high have made Bob even less serious than he was the first time he said it, and so you’re supposed to laugh. And that’s what the audience did both times I saw it — in Oakland, California, perhaps the most politically radical city in America. They didn’t cheer — it would have been dopey as hell if they did. They laughed, because it was funny, because it was Bob.

Finally, the melodramatic kicker in Gietl’s hysterical riff — “and if you’re not cheering, those bombs are meant for you” — is far more politically inflammatory than anything in One Battle After Another. Its interpretation of Paul Thomas Anderson’s motives is so flagrantly wrong, so totally unsupported by the text of his fun new film, that the reader would be justified in making a sort of Pynchonian turn as he seeks its actual meaning. This turn might take the reader into his memories of Pynchon’s masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow, whose hero has a cosmic erotic connection with the rockets of war. These memories might inspire our reader to wonder what kind of cosmic wanting lurks in that ostensible worry about Paul Thomas Anderson’s bombs, and, perhaps, what is the hidden connection in this wanting to the explosive power of the vengeful sovereign.

In the film, former revolutionary Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) has long tried to escape his militant past with the radical cell known as the “French 75.” But when his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) is endangered, he gets pulled back into the underground. Bob’s earlier partner and fellow activist Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), Willa’s mother, embodied the French 75’s Leftist creed, and Bob tagged along until the movement fractured, including a high‑profile operation at an immigration detention center that ignited a familiar Trump-style crackdown.

Years later, the group’s nemesis Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) resurfaces, now aligned with a clandestine, far‑Right, racist “Christmas Adventurers Club” and determined to root out the French 75 and their progeny, especially Bob’s daughter Willa. The confrontation between the two forces feels ripped from the headlines, driving the Right to vituperate against the film and the Left to vaguely take up its protagonists’ cause.

Many reviewers have been searching for a movie that might have served as a model or predecessor for One Battle After Another; as far as I know, they’ve all ignored the obvious choice, Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep, from 2012. That film also deals with Leftist ex-radicals confronting their past. Simplified, the story centers on recent widower and single father, Jim Grant, a former Weather Underground anti-Vietnam militant wanted for a bank robbery and murder, who hid from the FBI for more than 30 years posing as an attorney in Albany, NY.

Jim becomes a fugitive when his true identity is exposed, and he must find and enlist the help of with his ex-lover, Mimi, the one person who can clear his name. Mimi is still passionate about the goals of the Weathermen and unapologetic about her actions 30 years earlier, but Jim has become a responsible family man.

Jim asks Mimi to give herself up in order to save him and his 11-year-old daughter, Isabel. He doesn’t want to leave Isabel behind and repeat the mistake that he and Mimi made 30 years earlier by giving up their own daughter. When Mimi confronts Jim about selling out, he tartly replies: “I didn’t get tired. I grew up.” In the film’s final scenes, Mimi flees the cabin she is sharing with Jim to sail to Canada, but she turns her boat around and returns to the United States to give herself up; the next day, Jim is freed from jail and reunites with Isabel.

It’s true that, as one reviewer put it with acerbic wit, The Company You Keep exudes nostalgia for the time when terrorists were still people who looked and were dressed like “us” and bore recognizable Anglo-Saxon names. The film nonetheless has an authentic touch in its wistful, painful rendering of the disappearance of the radical Left from our political and ideological reality: these militant survivors are like sympathetic living dead, remnants of another era, strangers drifting in a strange world. No wonder Redford was attacked by conservatives for glamorizing terrorists. The film’s authenticity is evident not only in the generally sympathetic portrayal of ex-Weathermen, but even more in wonderful narrative details like the meticulous descriptions of underground life (how to check if one is trailed and shake off possible pursuers; how to create a new identity; and so on).

More from this author

The squashed birds of progress

By Slavoj Žižek

The film fails, however, to confront the most problematic aspect of Weathermen activity: the group’s decision to take up violent action. While the film obviously sympathizes with the radical Leftist cause, its predominant tone is a rejection of violence, framed in terms of maturation, of the passage from youthful enthusiasm (which can easily turn into violent fanaticism) to mature awareness that there are things like family life and responsibility towards one’s children that no political cause should make us violate. Or as the hero says to his ex-lover: “We have a responsibility beyond the Cause. We have a baby.”

Read in this way, The Company You Keep is, as someone wrote about Neil Gordon’s novel upon which the film is based, le roman des illusions perdues, a novel of lost illusions.

But is the injunction to grow up, embrace family responsibility, etc., really a neutral apolitical wisdom that posits a limit to our political engagement? Or is it, rather, a way for ideology to intervene, preventing us from analyzing to the end the morality of violent resistance?

An honest analysis would not covertly attempt to justify violent terror by hiding behind family-values virtue-signaling, but has an obligation to analyze and judge it on its own terms. Let us imagine that Jim were to have no daughter — the problem of Weathermen strategy would remain. Without this type of radical self-examination, we end up endorsing the existing legal and political order as the frame that guarantees the stability of our private family lives. It’s telling that The Company You Keep is about the hero’s legal rehabilitation, about his effort to become a normal citizen with no dark past haunting him. He’s grasping for a happy ending, and the film supplies one in Hollywood style: the main figures go public, are soon liberated, and find a place in society.

In One Battle After Another, however, as the title of the film clearly indicates, the battle goes on: Willa takes the torch and continues the underground struggle. There is another change: in The Company You Keep, Weathermen fight against the imperialist system itself, while in One Battle After Another, the contemporary descendants focus on helping the illegal Latino immigrants to avoid expulsion and find a place in the US homeland. In other words, they are not working against the system as such, they work to enable immigrants to integrate into the system. And since the system is not the enemy, the enemies of the revolutionaries are not just gray bureaucratic enforcers of the law displaying the banality of evil, i.e., what we perceive as the “normal” structure of power. Rather, they are ridiculous figures caught in obscene enjoyment, living caricatures.

Penn’s Steven Lockjaw combines excessive masculinity and sexual desire with nervous gestures signaling that he is all the time close to a psychic breakdown; the Christmas Adventurers Club is a fantasized caricature of an elite racist group that has no place in today’s global society where black and Asian men and women can also occupy top positions of power (Rishi Sunak, Kemi Badenoch, Usha Vance).

Steven’s sexual attraction to Perfidia — he at one point forces her to have sex with him — is particularly revealing. Steven is totally obsessed by Perfidia since she embodies a Leftist revolutionary version of his own wild subjectivity. Only, she lacks his inner obstacles and nervous tics, and thus freely enacts what during the 1968 eruptions in France was called jouir sans entraves, “enjoying without obstacles.” There is no gap for her between her violent political activity and intense promiscuousness — she fully enjoys reckless sex in the midst of a “terrorist” act, following the same stance also in how she talks, seamlessly combining brutal acts with dirty speech. Her shifting identity leaves no space for a permanent partner, and no wonder that she betrays even her revolutionary Cause. After the betrayal, she is given by the government a new identity and sanctuary, but she disappears even from there, so that nobody knows where she is….

As such, Perfidia also embodies the form of the film — or, as the critic Pietro Bianchi says, “Perfidia’s role should not be interpreted primarily at the level of content, but rather structurally. All the narrative events set in motion throughout the film depend on the consequences of her actions, but equally on her absence. Every character is thus forced to orbit around the void she creates — with the odd result that the true protagonist of the film appears on screen for no more than twenty minutes, at the beginning.”

Therein resides the falsity of the film: as its “absent center” (as Bianchi puts it), Perfidia is a masculine fantasy constructed to cover up what Lacan called the feminine non-all, the hysterical fragility of the feminine subjectivity. Perfidia is precisely the dream of a Woman as all, of a woman who is phallus. It is crucial to note that, if we take away from the story its “absent center,” the spectacular plurality of its excessive inconsistent actions falls apart. The gap that separates the two films is most palpable at the level of form: while The Company of Men remains firmly within the constraints of the standard psychological realism, One Battle After Another is, as Peter Bradshaw noticed, “at once serious and unserious, exciting and baffling, a tonal fusion sending that crazy fizz across the VistaVision screen — an acquired taste, yes, but addictive.”

The film is full of crazy brilliant moments — not just the hypnotic car chases, but also the convent of revolutionary nuns who practice how to use machine guns. It really introduces a new way of telling a story, as it unfolds in an inconsistent plural space where brutal obscenity can coexist with pathetic humanist engagement.

Yet this formal excess aims at dazzling and fascinating us, so that we ignore the ambiguity of the film’s ethico-political stance. It is easy to propose, in the manner of the late Frederic Jameson, that the inconsistent dispersed plurality of the film bears witness to the fact that today’s global financial capitalism can no longer be narratively presented as a totality, so that the film’s failure to properly represent the society it depicts is in itself an indicator of the truth of this society: an indicator of the fact that today what Jameson called “cognitive mapping” of our situation is structurally impossible.

However, Perfidia as the film’s “absent center” mystifies this impossibility — Perfidia acts as a universal mediator of the film’s dispersed content; she impersonates the excessive and destructive logic of today’s capitalism at its purest. Compared with her, the “bad” figures like Steven Lockjaw and members of the Christmas Adventurers Club are pale shadows of this logic. It is difficult to imagine a more antifeminist film than One Battle After Another.

At the very end, Bob gives Willa a letter of hope from Perfidia, in which she apologizes for her actions and vows to reunite with her family in the future. Is this a letter which arrives at its destination, as Lacan would have put it, a letter which announces a pacifying denouement, or just another irrelevant promise? What will happen if Perfidia really returns to Steven and Willa? Will they be a happy family where the daughter will just disappear from her job, from time to time? I presume that the film on purpose leaves this open, that it is irrelevant to its logic. One Battle After Another, like The Company Of Men, ends in a tension between revolutionary spirit and parental moral responsibility, but while The Company Of Men implicitly proposes a formula (yes to revolutionary engagement, but an engagement which should not violate parental responsibility), One Battle After Another merely juxtaposes multiple stances and playfully stages their interaction.

Suggested reading

Stop weaponizing suicide

By Matt Feeney

So what about love between revolutionaries? From what we know about love among the Bolshevik revolutionaries, something unique took place there, a new form of love-couple emerged: a couple living in a permanent emergency state, totally dedicated to the revolutionary Cause, ready to sacrifice all personal sexual fulfillment to it, even ready to abandon and betray each other if Revolution demanded it — but simultaneously, totally dedicated to each other, enjoying rare moments together with extreme intensity. The lovers’ passion was tolerated, even silently respected, but ignored in the public discourse as something of no concern to others. There are traces of this even in what we know of Lenin’s affair with Inessa Armand.

The title of Freud’s short text from 1914 “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through” provides the best formula for how we might navigate these disjunctures. In our case, the trauma to be worked through is that of Weathermen. Redford’s earlier film engages in nostalgic remembrance but fails to resolve the key dilemma. One Battle After Another tries to fill in this gap by directly repeating the traumatic memory: the movie imagines how Weathermen would look today, in a radically different historical situation, and also ends in a failure.

What is needed is an actual grappling with the trauma: an analysis of what was wrong in the Weathermen experience itself. Here, we should proceed in a ruthless way that will hurt many Leftist sensibilities: the real Weathermen were focused on anti-imperialist resistance, especially in Vietnam, but today, with the exploding crises in decolonized Third World countries, we can see that anti-colonial struggle also had deep limitations, which is why it often ended in authoritarian and corrupted new regimes.

Violent help to illegal immigrants is also problematic: it helps big capital (providing cheap labor and lowering the wages of American workers through arbitrage) and simultaneously gins up support for Trumpian populists. While I am fully aware that often violence is often needed and fully justified, I suspect that in today’s United States, direct small-scale single acts of violence like those practiced by the Weathermen have no chance against the Trumpian state and would only serve to intensify its brutal logic and oppressive measures. They amount to a public request to the White House: “Please send the National Guard to our town!” The focus, instead, should be on sabotaging the corporate digital control over our lives.

In short, there is nothing revolutionary in One Battle After Another. Today, we need weathermen to learn which way the wind blows. One Battle After Another depicts a group with no weatherman giving them orientation. With its helter-skelter form it celebrates disorientation itself as radical freedom.

Someone recently described to me, vividly, the anhedonia of severe depression: of finding himself in sublime mountains, in champagne-service clubs, with gorgeous women who loved him, feeling nothing. And I guess somewhere on the depressed-neurotic axis there’s an overlap between “I don’t enjoy things anymore” and just wishing you were the type of person who likes Marvel movies and Ed Sheeran and doesn’t feel a bored yet self-satisfied despair as you attempt to chat with the median individual on a dating app.

There’s something bovine about cinema, which is also what is spectacular about both popular art and art in public: the confirmation that the individual spirit is also the shared spirit, that what is vulnerable and personal and redeemable about us, is in all of us. Art makes us feel realer and deeper, and to share that with others makes us feel less alone. But for the same reason, bad art can also seem like an insult to the human race itself: that’s all we are?

To play on David Foster Wallace: Licorice Pizza is a supposedly good movie I will never see again. Los Angeles, especially, is plastered with ads for the film; so is my demographically overcoded web browser. I am supposed to like the new Paul Thomas Anderson film, having seen quite a few of them already; yeah, I’ve listed “film” on the interests line of my résumé. And, seriously, how many art films are there today besides low-budget films intended for an audience of 100 individuals residing mostly in Bushwick, Israeli-Austrian dramas about the Holocaust, and slow cinema about outsider farmhands from low-GDP EU member states?

More from this author

Mary Gaitskill teaches us to embrace complexity

By Esther Manov

Nonetheless, I was left asking myself: what were all those moviegoers so excited about? Why are critics so impressed? How was this moving?

Much as the film’s alleged anti-Asian racism is more shockingly unfunny than it is shocking, the romance in Licorice Pizza is neither revolting nor remarkable. Anderson can make touching films about characters struggling toward misguided intimacy. But Licorice Pizza isn’t even a cloying teen romance: Gary and Alana neither consummate their mutual attraction nor even mourn it, and instead simply bounce around for over two hours: cute, charming, and completely inconsequential.

The moment Gary asks out Alana, she cheerfully declines with, “That’s illegal!”, but it’s not like he tries that hard, anyway. At their first dinner, they tell each other they’re not going to forget each other, but they seem pretty happy to goof around with his more prepubescent-looking friends in zany, period-piece pursuits (waterbeds, pinballs, slightly unsavoury politics). There’s little narrative momentum, little impediment, and little sense of “the stakes”. The leads are affable, and Haim is astonishing; but these characters are as thin as the candy on an M&M.

Previous Anderson fare arguably went a little overboard on the downbeats: all that really degrading stuff at the end of Boogie Nights, all those dying men in Magnolia, all the violence in Punch Drunk Love. But at least that mattered. Here, the downbeats are basically that two people who’ve agreed not to date get a little bit jealous when the other one flirts with someone else. The tensest scene involves Alana driving an out-of-gas truck in reverse down the Hollywood Hills. To no one’s surprise, it works.

More from this author

The Velvet Underground had to die

By Esther Manov

But the scene after that, I think, holds the key to the movie. They’ve gotten the truck down the hill and collected some jerrycans from the gas station. The sun is rising, painting the quiet road in almost psychedelic purples and oranges. The younger boys are ecstatic silhouettes on the horizon, laughing and leaping and pretending to hump each other with the gas tanks. Meanwhile, Alana is crouched on the sidewalk, near trash and glass, head hunched over her knees — something good has happened, something fun is going on, but she can’t enjoy it.

I don’t know why Anderson made a film that was clearly going to be accused of paedophilia — he told Variety that while walking by his local middle school, he saw a teenager flirting with a girl taking school pictures, and instantly thought the premise was “ripe for humour”. And anyway, he says: “It’s not romantic in any consummation of things. That would be inappropriate.”

Regardless of whatever PTA was thinking, we live in the era of the “Mommy Girlfriend”. Infinitely affirming and infinitely caring, the Mommy GF is the ideal mate for a generation of men that commonly self-identifies as autistic or anxious, and who have no idea how (or whether) to be masculine or mature. With the Mommy GF, you can stay a kid. As an iconic 2013 4chan post went: “that face when you’ll never have a cute slightly older Mommy GF who cleans up after your loveable-fuckup-self, helps you do your taxes, brown-bags a lunch for you to take to work, wakes you up on time, and cuddles you to sleep.”

That’s not exactly the deal here; I doubt the phrase “Mommy GF” was thrown around Licorice Pizza brainstorms, and Gary, anyway, seems like a perfectly confident and competent young man. But for better or worse, the Mommy GF has graduated into end-of-year lists — and maybe even real life. A number of millennial girls in my circle have started dating Zoomer boys, and I’ve been wondering about these relationships.

They’re all around 30. They’re all, more or less, ambitious. It’s tried-and-true for the clout-chasing young woman, to date an older man. But why date a younger one? As Mariah Kreutter has pointed out, it’s hard to see why Alana’s “borderline incoherent character” has any interest whatsoever in dating a 15-year-old. What, after all, does the Mommy GF want?

Maybe this: to enjoy things, one last time. Very young people, especially boys, enjoy things with an unbridled, carefree insouciance that evaporates the second one becomes concerned with becoming an “adult”. And perhaps on the fringes of show business and in the afterglow of the Sixties — or in the youth-obsessed inertia of millennial life, screwed by 2008, scared of settling, mired in therapy-brained exploration of the unconstrained yet unfulfilled self — one can soak in that sweet, warm limbo for just a little longer.

Suggested reading

How we destroyed The Matrix

By Dorian Lynskey

But sooner or later, it has to end. As a young woman told me recently, for the educated millennial woman, it’s a bit odd to marry in your twenties; but once you hit 30, you’re suddenly “an unmarried 30-year-old woman”. Essentially, you’ve got one year. The clock starts ticking, and all time becomes time lost. Every joy contains its future loss. And for the archetypical millennial woman — with no savings, no house, and no children – ageing reaps no accomplishment and no satisfying narrative. It’s purely something that makes you look worse in photos.

If you date the younger guy, you can zip around the Valley plotting hare-brained schemes, or at least understand TikTok. But you’ll still feel old, even older than you are. Just 25, Alana is, as Gary calls her, the “old woman”. It’s unclear what her main worry is — material success, glory, being single — but she’s going to be worried for the rest of her life. And Gary doesn’t care about any of that, not really. He’s just having a good time. And seeing that good time — a band of boys, playing as the sun comes up — she wants to cry. Tellingly, from the next scene, she commits herself (rather unconvincingly) to “politics”.

But this breezy, sugar-dust cloud of a film doesn’t dwell in despair. At the end of it, Alana and Gary just run toward each other, with a condescending intercut of identical earlier sequences (they really could be walking, but I suppose running looks nice in trailers). They kiss. Music plays. Did you notice that this was shot on 35mm and the colours were very warm? Did you see that the characters had cool clothes, which included many prints? Yay! You’ve seen an art film. Nice.

Perhaps that’s what the Mommy GF wants: to be able to just enjoy a film like this. Maybe I’m just growing out of it.