Critic John Demetry called out the “sleeper cells” of film reviewers who joined the media mob praising One Battle After Another, and his ire could have gone further. The politicization of Hollywood can no longer be denied after P. T. Anderson’s openly seditious One Battle After Another invaded movie theaters. This politicization includes the Hollywood press: Critics and editors exceeded their usual embarrassment as shills; One Battle has exposed the political bias in the trade press’s routine. These reviewers broadcast their political preference by extolling a movie that is indifferent to life.
Describing how “film critics are already splooging over [One Battle] to an absurd degree,” gadfly blogger Sasha Stone on Awards Daily writes that “in the fever dream of today’s Left, we live in ‘a fascist police state.’” That’s been the mindset of mainstream journalism ever since Dean Baquet, former executive editor of the New York Times, overturned journalistic standards following President Trump’s 2016 election, and almost every other news organization followed his lead. The media’s hysterical praise of One Battle sneaks pronouncements about the national condition into what should simply be art criticism or narrative recaps.
The façade of critical impartiality has dropped. One Battle and the obvious activist intentions of its celebrants are what Obama likes to call “an inflection point.” Adopting the “threat to democracy” cliché threatens film culture. It’s especially harmful that Anderson’s spectacle of cartoon political violence arrives immediately after Charlie Kirk’s assassination and during the first crackdown on Antifa terrorism.
Movie-lovers, liberal or conservative, can be slow to catch on to the political motive behind widely hyped releases, but after the barely hidden propaganda in reviews of One Battle, it should be impossible for filmgoers to pretend that movies are not political but just entertainment. This should especially alarm conservatives whose low voices barely combat mainstream dread, ugliness, and dissension. One Battle has given leftists the ballast they need to continue their insane battle against the right. Anderson’s deluded, romantic idea of liberal Sixties and Seventies militancy versus racist establishment tradition pits audiences against each other. That conflict is spurred by Times and New Yorker raves that continue the partisan editorial policies of those publications.
Anderson’s cheerleaders aren’t heralding great filmmaking; they’re inflating their leftist bubble. This also happens with less serious movies such as Barbie, Dune, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Superman, and it passes without remark because hegemony demands that it not be recognized or divulged; naïve readers think the movies are just an innocent good time.
Only a political idiot would mistake One Battle for escapism. Note Richard Lawson’s Hollywood Reporter review that sees in the movie “a chilling resemblance to real men operating in our world today.” He adds, “It is certainly a refreshing jolt to see a big picture like this analyze the squalid motivations of the people currently dispatching the National Guard to major cities and empowering ICE to spread far and wide in its cruel project.”
Variety also raved stupidly (“a vision of a society in captivity,” burped Owen Gleiberman), but Lawson couldn’t resist confessing his allegiance to open-borders NGOs: He gushes about One Battle scenes in which Benicio Del Toro’s character “secretly works to ferry targeted immigrants to safety” in a process that’s “a clever and orderly network of seemingly anonymous people performing clandestine miracles.” Lawson says that this aspect of the movie is “inspiring in its testament to mutual aid while sorrowful that such things have to exist at all.” Continuing in editorial mode, Lawson reveals what he admires in the plot but disdains about the current administration: “a communal bond which no repressive government can truly understand or tear asunder.” And, as a kicker, he concludes, “The title of the film could be read as an exhausted lament. It could be a rallying cry, too.” This isn’t art appreciation; it’s sleeper-cell advocacy, paving the way for the next anti-government thrill ride or assassination.
A skeptic on social media gave the movie a new nickname: not OBAA, but “OOBAA, or One Obama Battle After Another,” for the way it seems to justify fashionable anti-Americanism by virtue of its $150 million budget and the imprimatur of major media company Warner Bros. Discovery, whose properties include CNN, HBO, and DC Comics. The money spent suggests that hipster-nihilist Anderson and his followers must be on the right side of history. Rather than examining that position, reviewers urge that we buy into it.
Sasha Stone’s diatribe against the industry dissects the problem:
Entertainment media fail when reviewers cannot analyze Hollywood’s current distortions. Ideology itself now determines the industry’s aesthetics.
Casual filmgoers should realize that the politics in One Battle After Another are facetious and dishonest — that DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Del Toro, and P. T. Anderson are just playing out their liberal Hollywood death wish (to America). One NRO reader perceived in One Battle a “seething disdain for middle America and conservatism,” yet it appears whenever mainstream scribes flaunt their arrogance.
Read Anderson’s film, and its praise, the right way: as an enemies-within “comedy.” Activist-critics who know nothing about politics prove they also know nothing about movies.
Armond White
