One Battle After Another – The imperial boomerang circles home

#films

About halfway through One Battle After Another, soldiers wearing combat fatigues and brandishing guns break into a convenience store, looking for Willa Ferguson, the movie’s fugitive protagonist, as well as for evidence of illegal immigrants. This is a scene we are all familiar with: the armed entry of infantry into an enemy building. The military hand gestures and codes. The careful scouting of rooms for hostiles. Except, this isn’t Black Hawk Down or the Hurt Locker. We are not in Iraq or Afghanistan. And these soldiers have ‘police’ stitched to their uniform.

We are in ‘Baktan Cross’, USA. The war has come home.

One Battle After Another is a magnificent movie in many ways, most of which are much better expressed by professional critics. The excellent pacing means that despite coming in at 2:40hrs the movie doesn’t feel long. The story is gripping. The characters flawed but interesting, with Leonardo diCaprio, Chase Infiniti, Benicio del Toro and in particular Sean Penn all putting in stellar performances. The cinematography is beautiful, from vertiginous car chases to the carefully curated details in a family home. The minor garnish of magical realism provides for effective symbolism without ever really stretching the bounds of plausibility. The soundtrack is frenetic and of a kind with the movie’s feverish momentum. Watching One Battle After Another is like stepping onto a frantic and relentless rollercoaster. When you finally grind to a halt, you feel exhilarated, confused about what just happened, and wondering if you have to go on the ride again to fully appreciate it.

There is no shortage of excellent scenes in One Battle After Another, but one that stood out most starkly for me is the ‘police’ arriving in the fictional town of Baktan Cross for their womanhunt for Willa Ferguson (Infiniti). In its reminiscence of countless war movies, it shows us a country at war with itself, its military an occupying force on its own soil. This is a movie about the imperial boomerang having fully circled back.

One Battle After Another follows Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio) as he desperately tries to save his daughter Willa from being disappeared by Colonel Lockjaw (Penn). For Lockjaw, Willa is a potentially fatal embarrassment that could prevent his inclusion in the ranks of the ‘Christmas Adventurers Club’ – a Ku Klux Klan for posh people – because she may be his mixed-race daughter born of an intense but brief reciprocal sexual obsession with Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), the de facto leader of the ‘French 75’, an American insurrectionary group along the lines of the Weather Underground or the Baader-Meinhof Group. The activities of the French 75 form the start of the movie, but are cut short after a botched bank robbery leads to Perfidia’s capture and her partner and newborn daughter going into hiding as Willa and Bob Ferguson, until the latter are tracked down by Lockjaw sixteen years later.

Bob is however singularly ineffectual at rescuing his daughter. Even in the heyday of the French 75, he was more of a hanger-on than a disciplined revolutionary, and sixteen years of smoking weed and watching The Battle of Algiers on repeat haven’t exactly improved things. For the protagonist of a putative action movie, Bob is neither very capable nor very central to the unfolding story. Instead, his incidentality to events helps One Battle After Another to foreground what Bob is caught up in: a world of detention centres and disappearances. Of militarized policing, razzias and summary executions. This foregrounding is most effective for the part of the movie where Bob pairs up with Willa’s karatedo teacher sensei Sergio (del Toro), who is a highly capable agent, providing an excellent contrast with the hapless Bob. For me, this was definitely the strongest part of the movie.

There is a lot going on in One Battle After Another, but the one thing it brilliantly demonstrates is the merciless logic of the imperial boomerang: how techniques used by an imperial power against enemies without ultimately rebound on the nation itself, to be used against the enemies within. Originating with anti-colonial writers Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon during the Algerian War of Independence, it was first used to describe how European fascism and Nazism were the logical return home of tools of oppression and extermination that imperial powers had refined in their colonies abroad. It was the Spanish, British, and Americans who invented concentration camps for their colonial ventures after all. These days we see it in police departments being trained in counter-insurgency techniques and stockpiling armoured personnel carriers. A state apparatus that becomes habituated to the regular use of violence against foreign populations it deems less human, will inevitably discover that such violence can be equally useful on its own soil. All it needs to justify this is to define some groups of people as undeserving of rights and protections. One Battle After Another reminds us of this again through the contrast of Bob and sensei Sergio. Bob may have opted into the struggle through moral conviction, or his love for Perfidia (or both). But Sergio and his community never had a choice. The struggle was brought to bear on them, by a state that decided that people like them did not have the right to exist.

Yet as Carl Schmitt realised all the way back in the 1940s, once you set this logic in motion it gains a momentum all of its own. Once you start rounding up immigrants, it is a small step to also round up the protestors against your immigration raids. Then you realise that it is even more effective to restrict the right to protest further and further, while making it easier and easier to exact harsh penalties on those you have detained. Once the aim of the state becomes the preservation of a ‘pure’ people and the unrestrained expression of its will, any opposition to that aim will be illegitimate and any means to remove that opposition will be justified. It doesn’t even require all the participants to be actively racist, though that does help. We see in One Battle After Another that for a lot of the soldiers and police, this is just work, and once they have started on immigrants, they will readily extend their oppressive violence to white teenagers. They are simply following the orders of a system that dehumanizes their victims for them, turning them into an occupying force against their own population.

In our world of increasing authoritarianism, state violence and repression, One Battle After Another reminds us that when it comes down to it, there are just two main flavours in politics: Either we start from the position that all humans deserve the same rights to dignity and humanity and that we should work towards a world where we can live in harmony. Or we start from the position that there is a boundary between one group of humans who are deserving and another group who are undeserving, downstream of which is the entire apparatus of dehunanization to legitimise ever increasing levels of violence against the undeserving group. And once that boundary is drawn, you are locked into a trajectory where there is always a pressure for the deserving group to be made smaller, and smaller and smaller, as the definition of who is racially pure, or a contributing member of society, or has the correct politics, or isn’t a ‘public nuisance’, is going to get narrower and narrower.

The only recourse for those of us who believe that every human deserves life and dignity, that nobody is illegal, is to push the other way. To expand the circle until all of us are inside it, and who knows, maybe even large parts of the non-human natural world as well. There is no space for a ‘Third Way’, prevaricating, ‘moderate’, centrism that insists that much can be said on both sides, that there are ‘legitimate concerns’ and that we should trust the law to dispense justice. Viz. Wilhoit’s Law, by the time people are being thrown out of helicopters, the law will not protect you. There is, after all, a famous poem about this:

First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me

It certainly seems daunting now. But as Tony Benn told us “every generation has to fight the same battles again and again and again. There is no final victory. And there is no final defeat.” We see this towards the end of the movie, as Willa takes up the mantle of her parents to go off and protest against immigration raids. Willa, Bob, Perfidia, and all the others, all links in the intergenerational chain for justice. As Ursula K. le Guin taught us in The Dispossessed, even after the Revolution the work will not be done. For all of us, it will forever be one battle after another.

Notes & Suggestions

______________________________

If you enjoyed this blog, you can subscribe

You can also Discuss... this on Remark.As if you have a Write.As account.

And you can follow me on Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@thecasualcritic