“One Battle After Another” and the Prestige Capture of Anti-Fascism
« Créer, c’est résister. » / “To create is to resist.”
— L’Abécédaire / The ABC Primer, “R comme résistance.”
The official synopsis already gives away the operation. Bob is a “washed-up revolutionary,” living off-grid in “stoned paranoia” with his daughter Willa; an old nemesis resurfaces; the daughter goes missing; the father scrambles after her. And this was not merely a successful release. The Academy made it its central object, giving One Battle After Another Best Picture, Directing, Adapted Screenplay, Film Editing, and Casting, while Sean Penn took Supporting Actor. In his Oscar speech, Paul Thomas Anderson said he wrote the film for his children “to say sorry for the housekeeping mess” handed to them, and hoped their generation might restore “common sense and decency.” The entire ideological arrangement is already there: historical ruin translated into inheritance, politics translated into family, and anti-fascism translated into restoration rather than refoundation. (One Battle After Another)
Hollywood does not neutralize politics by deleting it. It neutralizes politics by rerouting it. The film names detention, white supremacy, raids, reaction, and domestic authoritarian drift. It does not hide them. But it translates the diffuse machinery of racial capitalism into a smaller, hotter, more consumable relay: the damaged father, the endangered daughter, the obscene officer, the elite cabal, the final chase. Deleuze is useful here not because he supplies a ready-made moral verdict, but because he lets us ask how does this machine function?
The first filter is the family. Bob, Willa, and Perfidia do not give us the truth of politics; they give us politics miniaturized into kinship. The revolutionary sequence can return only as damaged inheritance. Bob is not allowed to persist as a node of collective organization. He returns as residue: guilt, paranoia, passwords half-remembered, obligation without strategy. Bob’s competence has rotted into paternal persistence. Roger Ebert’s review makes the same point in more cinematic terms: Bob must seek out Sergio and the remnants of the old network, but he cannot even remember the passwords that would get him to the rendezvous point. Revolution survives as errand, not program.
Willa, then, is not simply the daughter-to-be-saved. She is the way the film makes history bearable. If the future arrived as organization, the film would have to think beyond prestige grief. If it arrived as a people, it would have to invent collective speech. Instead it arrives as filial relay. Willa inherits not a movement but its ruins: uncertain lineage, absent mother, compromised father, and the return of white-nationalist purification in the person of Lockjaw and his club. Willa becomes the target because Lockjaw’s relation to Perfidia and paternity threaten his advancement within the Christmas Adventurers Club; by the end she survives the desert pursuit and begins moving toward action on her own trajectory. The child is thus the film’s softened figure of futurity: not collective recomposition, but damaged succession.
Perfidia is the film’s absent center. She generates the political force of the story and then is displaced into betrayal, disappearance, rumor, letter, voice. This too is part of the capture. The major image can live with the daughter as inheritance; it cannot live as easily with the mother as unresolved militancy. That is why the film eroticizes Perfidia, diffuses her, and finally holds her at a distance. The uploaded report is especially sharp here: Perfidia is politically decisive, yet structurally sidelined, made to carry both revolutionary force and the burden of the film’s anxiety about Black female militancy. The result is not simply misrepresentation. It is containment.
The second filter is the face. Lockjaw is exactly this machine. He is not just a villain; he is the face onto which a whole field is projected. The uploaded Žižekian report calls him the “obscene underside of Law,” and that is correct as far as it goes. But a Deleuzian cut goes further: the face is political because it overcodes. Lockjaw condenses state violence, militarized masculinity, white panic, erotic humiliation, border command, and purification fantasy into one readable monster. He becomes the face the spectator can hate. That hatred is not nothing. It is also a relief. Once the system has a face, the harder labor of cartography begins to recede. Bureaucracy, donors, property, class interest, ordinary administration, respectable liberal complicities—all that can slip behind the glare of Lockjaw’s face and the freakish grotesquerie of the Christmas Adventurers Club. The uploaded report itself finally admits this when it notes that structural causation is privatized into the club and the antagonist. Exactly. Faciality reveals and conceals at once.
That is why Lockjaw is such a useful prestige antagonist. He lets the film show fascism as obscene enjoyment without forcing the film to show fascism as banality. He gives us a villain we can smell, so the institutions around him can remain comparatively deodorized.
This brings us to the film’s third operation: the deodorized war-image. The film is willing to show detention, raids, surveillance, exfiltration routes, manhunts, and the militarization of domestic space. Roger Ebert’s review and the ending explainers all confirm a structure of border action, underground escape, safe houses, phone tracing, bounty intermediaries, militias, and desert pursuit. But what the film cannot abide for long is the ordinary metabolism of administration: the paperwork, repetition, logistics, waiting, and infrastructural duration by which violence becomes a social atmosphere rather than an event. Violence appears in scenes. It does not stay long enough to become uninhabitable.
This is “censorship of the political dimension” becomes exact. The film does not lie about terror. It aestheticizes terror into something watchable. The image remains tied to pursuit, response, climax, and resolution. Even when it opens onto detention or reactionary administration, it quickly returns to momentum. Politics is permitted to appear, but only in doses the action-image can metabolize.
And yet the film is not a simple old-fashioned action-image. It knows that heroism is exhausted. Bob forgets the passwords. He lags behind the situation. He does not arrive in time with sovereign competence. Willa increasingly carries the line of action herself. Public accounts of the ending agree that the final desert sequence matters precisely because Willa survives by her own improvisation before Bob reaches her, and because the reunion comes through a code rather than a paternal rescue tableau. The old sensory-motor chain is damaged. Father-action no longer perfectly masters the field.
That is the film’s most interesting formal contradiction. It senses the crisis of the action-image, then rescues itself with action anyway. It allows history to jam the motor, then restarts the motor in the chase. This is why the climax is both politically interesting and politically conservative. Interesting, because it transfers agency away from the old male hero. Conservative, because it still grants kinetic resolution where the social antagonism has not been resolved at all. The chase does not solve the political problem. It converts the political problem into movement.
This is where the Oscar enters, not as decoration, but as function. Call it the prestige-Other: the institution that converts critique into moral self-perception. The Academy does not need to deny darkness. On the contrary, it needs darkness of a certain kind. Enough rot to prove seriousness. Enough tenderness to keep the room humane. Enough formal mastery to separate the product from crude propaganda. Enough political dread to flatter the conscience of the institution that rewards it. Officially, the Academy crowned a film about a “washed-up revolutionary” and his daughter. Formally, it rewarded a machine that transforms anti-fascist alarm into honorable feeling. Symbolically, it rewarded the industry’s image of itself as awake.
Anderson’s own phrase—“common sense and decency”—is decisive. That is not the language of recomposition. It is the language of moral restoration. The Academy could embrace this film because the film finally asks not for a new social arrangement but for an honorable endurance within breakdown. The uploaded Žižekian report is merciless and right on this point: Hollywood celebrates the terror of the present once terror has been processed through the safe prestige-form of father-daughter melodrama. The system does not block critique from entering the ceremony. It invites critique in, dresses it, seats it, applauds it, and thereby shows that it still has a conscience.
That is the inoculation. The Oscar is not the reward added to the film from outside. It is the completion of the film’s social function. The institution administers critique in a measured dose: enough anti-fascist dread to produce virtue, not enough to produce reorganization. Enough border terror to signal lucidity, not enough administrative smell to become unbearable. Enough damaged inheritance to evoke guilt, not enough collective force to make prestige tremble. Enough Willa to signify the future, not enough people to come to break the frame.
Its chiffre (components, dynamic signature) is familialize history. Facialize the state. Deodorize administration. Exhaust heroism, then rescue it with action. Replace organization with moral stamina. Convert all this into institutional courage at the point of consecration.
That is why “One Battle After Another” won Best Picture. Not because Hollywood failed to grasp its critique. Because Hollywood grasped exactly how much critique it could survive.
