One Fetish After Another: PTA Exploits Black Women and Averts Revolution

Paul Thomas Anderson's action flick leaves much to be desired.

*Spoilers for the plot of One Battle After Another*

I was already annoyed after sitting through One Battle After Another for nearly three hours. I’m not in the “tight 90” brigade; I don’t mind a long movie that flows, but Paul Thomas Anderson’s empty foray into white leftist revolutionary ideology and iconography hypersexualized Black women, left much to be desired in both ideology and revolution and simply refused to end.

But then Assata Shakur died as I mulled over my review of the film and the insidiousness of using a Black woman revolutionary as a plot device for white male heroics in the film became even more glaring.

One Battle After Another centers on Pat, the aforementioned white leftist revolutionary, aptly played by the real-life poster boy for performative activism and greenwashing, Leonardo DiCaprio. Now washed-up, heavily stoned and in hiding, Pat has been living as Bob, a single dad of a biracial teenager named Willa (Chase Infiniti) that he must protect from an evil Army colonel who’s out to kill them both.

The Colonel has done such good work rounding up immigrants that he’s caught the attention of a white supremacist secret society called the Christmas Adventurers led by Tony Goldwyn (why is he so good at playing a generationally wealthy white supremacist?!). The only possible obstacle to Lockjaw’s ascension is evidence that he had been in a sexual relationship with a Black woman in the past: Willa.

You guessed it: Willa is biracial to satisfy the need for a “who’s the pappy?” plotline and set off the hero’s journey. Not for Willa, mind you. Don’t be confused. This is a movie about Pat.

Pat was a skilled bomb maker in a revolutionary group called the French 75, a group that closely resembles the real-life white marxist American guerilla group of the 1960s and ‘70s, Weather Underground/The Weathermen, an offshot of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Like the Weathermen, the French 75 bombs the outposts of their political enemies. Unlike the Weathermen, the French 75 is led by and made up of Black women. But despite a powerhouse cast of Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall and Chase Infiniti, Black women are little more than props and plot devices, and Infiniti is a MacGuffin with a gun in this story of a white male revolutionary.

Taylor appears too briefly in the role of Perfidia Beverly Hills, Willa’s mother and the leader of the French 75. Rounding out her crew is Deandra (Hall) Laredo (Wood Harris) and the rapper Junglepussy—whose character goes by the same name (everything about her character is more offensive if you don’t already know that). The film opens with the French 75 liberating migrants from a U.S. concentration camp at the Mexico border. As her batallion handcuffs the border patrol agents and hustles migrants into an awaiting getaway truck, presumably to freedom, Perfidia keeps the commander of the camp, Lockjaw (the creepiest Sean Penn has ever been, and that’s saying something) disarmed and engaged by demanding at gunpoint that he get and keep an erection. This starts the psycho-sexual fetishizing of Black women that drives the plot of the film.

But Anderson isn’t commenting on the white male fetishization of Black women, he’s directly participating in it. His camera leers at Taylor’s body just as Lockjaw does because the audience only sees her through the lens of the white men who fetishize her.

Celebrating their successful liberation of the camp, Perfidia makes out with Pat in the backseat of the getaway car. She breaks away from the kiss only to ask Junglepussy and Deandra, “Do you think he likes Black girls?” They laugh as he yells, “Of course I like Black girls! This is why I’m here!”

One can assume his attraction to Black girls is what earns him the moniker “Ghetto Pat.” A white man wrote this movie.

Like the most insufferable swirl couples you know, the French 75 insists that interracial relationships with white people are the revolution. Race is imperative to the lust all of the characters portrayed in sexual relationships feel for each other. Reminding us how bad Anderson is at differentiating satire about racists from perpetuating racism, he casts Licorice Pizza star Alaina Haim in a minor role as a 75-er and the “white girl” Laredo makes out with right before another action. Laredo calls her his “white girl” braggadociously. It’s not a descriptor of Haim’s character, it’s a prize for Laredo. In another scene, a jealous Lockjaw confronts an unaware Pat at the grocery store, decrying how much more Lockjaw looooooooves Black women than Pat does. It’s played for laughs. But what is the joke, Paul? I did not consent to this race play.

Perfidia seems to feel the same about whiteness, naming herself after a city famous for all the promise that white Americanness can hold: fame, wealth, power. But mutually lusting across racial lines doesn’t make Perfidia and her fetishizers equal. There is a huge power imbalance along racial and gender lines that Perfidia seems to ignore because Anderson ignores it in the writing of the script, let alone the character.

All of the direct actions and bombings the French 75 complete incite an insatiable horniness in Perfidia, who must kiss or have sex immediately afterward. As she and Pat separate to plant a bomb in the bathroom of a federal building, she’s confronted in a stall by Lockjaw who demands that she meet him at a hotel for sex unless she wants to be arrested for a CVS receipt’s length of terrorism charges. She doesn’t tell Pat; she doesn’t belong to him or need his permission to do what she apparently wants. She swaps one fetishizer for another and meets Lockjaw in secret in his hotel.

“Let’s fuck while the bomb goes off!” She demands of Pat who has just set a timer to detonate a radio tower in two minutes. Plenty of time for them to get in and get out. Why are they bombing the tower? If they state it, I have absolutely no recollection of it and would not put myself through this movie a second time to be sure. Like the migrants shuffled down hallways or into trucks, away from the main character’s lens, the revolution is aesthetic— little more than a series of establishing shots to prove that Pat is bout that life and Perfidia is a loose canon. What does she want besides sex? Why does she want it?

Teyana Taylor as Perfidia Beverly Hills

Her mother appears briefly to lecture Pat about being wrong for her daughter, who comes from “a whole line of revolutionaries.” What does that legacy mean to Perfidia? How does she reconcile that ancestral tradition with her own fetishizing of whiteness? Why is she trying to “feel like [fictional white male drug lord] Tony Montana” if she’s got a revolutionary lineage to draw from?! When all of her fucking leads to pregnancy, she chooses to have the baby at the height of her activism, why? Just like the fates of the migrants liberated from the camp or smuggled out during a raid on a convenience store, we’ll never know. Because Anderson isn’t interested in Perfidia as a character, but Black women revolutionaries as caricature. But his Black motherhood plotline is the most offensive of all.

After a bout of (presumably) postpartum depression, Perfidia abandons both her newborn and Pat. I’m guessing that Anderson received a note to explain that choice and added a reason via voiceover in post, where Perfidia wonders in frustration if Pat loves the baby more than her. We don’t know enough about Perfidia as a character to know if this is out-of-character. But Anderson devotes plenty of time to Pat complaining about Perfidia’s motherhood—or lack thereof.

As she fires off a machine gun with an engorged belly, Pat complains to other 75-ers that Perfidia acts like she’s not even pregnant. When Lockjaw confronts Pat about who loves Black women more, Pat is shopping for baby formula for the newborn—not to show Pat being a present father, but to highlight Perfidia’s absence and lack of nurturing.

Soon she lives up to her name—Perfidia, “faithlessness, treachery or betrayal” in Spanish. She gets arrested, rats out the other members of the 75, and promises herself to Lockjaw only to abandon him with a Post-It on the door like Berger to Carrie in Sex and the City (“This pussy don’t pop for you!”). It’s wholly unsurprising that she’d slip away into Mexico without her infant daughter, never to be seen again.

But it’s this lack of nurturing that underscores what Paul Thomas Anderson doesn’t get about Black women or Black revolutionaries.

Anderson invites a surface-level comparison of Perfidia to the legendary revolutionary Assata Shakur, a Black Liberation Army leader who was convicted of killing a cop, gave birth in prison and escaped to Cuba, leaving her newborn daughter behind. But Perfidia is nothing like Assata. Juxtaposed, the comparison is, again, insidious.

In the middle of a bank heist to fund their revolution, Perfidia kills a Black security guard who refuses to follow her orders. But Assata was wrongfully convicted of killing a cop. Perfidia ratted out her comrades to escape prison and wound up getting most of her closest comrades killed, including Junglepussy, Laredo and Haim’s character who was graphically shot in the head while trying to escape police capture. But Assata never told who or how her Black Liberation Army comrades spirited her away from a U.S. prison cell into the safety of Cuba for the past 46 years until her death at 78 last week. Perfidia abandoned her daughter before she was even arrested. But while the police state did everything in their power to make her miscarry, Assata actively chose motherhood in prison.

In Assata: An Autobiography, she wrote about why she made that choice:

“‘I am about life,’ I said to myself. ‘I’m gonna live as hard as I can and as full as I can until I die. And I’m not letting these parasites, these oppressors, these greedy racist swine make me kill my children in my mind, before they are even born. I’m going to live and I’m going to love Kamau, and, if a child comes from that union, I’m going to rejoice. Because our children are our futures and I believe in the future and in the strength and rightness of our struggle.”

Assata named her child Kakuya Amaya Olugbala Shakur, which means “hope for the future.”

She birthed into a hateful world a baby that came from love—of Black people, of liberation, of Kamau, and of herself. Che Guevara once said “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” There is no love in Perfidia Beverly Hills. There is sex. There is power. There is chaos. But there is no love. A loveless revolutionary is just a terrorist.

I don’t use Assata’s history to say that Anderson should’ve written Perfidia more like Assata; I use Assata to show how far from the mark Anderson’s writing of Perfidia is. It’s lazy and provocative only for the sake of provocativeness, evidence of questions he never bothered to ask about the character, let alone answer. She could be an insatiably horny revolutionary whose downfall is her cowardice and selfishness—all of that is the skeleton of a fascinating character! But Perfidia has no meat, no blood, no sinew in those bones.

When there’s an embarrassment of riches like Assata’s autobiography to give context on why Black women choose to be in revolutionary struggle, and even why some fell short in their efforts to live up to their ideals, it’s revealing that Anderson simply insisted on failing an open-book test.

Chase Infiniti is a MacGuffin with a gun as Willa in One Battle After Another

Instead, he takes a white Marxist group’s actions and puts a Black woman’s face on it with no further study. Bafflingly, in a surveillance state, the only one who ever seemed to wear a mask during their actions is Pat. During the bank heist, Junglepussy, another hypersexualized Black character, proudly proclaims she’s not hiding and wants everyone to know who she is. Perfidia also never masks and apparently lives with her mother, with no regard for bringing the feds to her mother’s doorstep. The sloppiness of the heist and the fall of the French 75 under her leadership resembles the end of the Weathermen in 1981, where members were captured after a botched Brinks’ truck robbery where two policemen and the truck driver were murdered.

But Black revolutionaries like Fred Hampton specifically spoke out against these kinds of reckless tactics. In an interview with ABC News, Hampton explained why the Black Panther Party would have nothing to do with white leftists movements the Weathermen and the SDS, which he characterized as masquerading as revolutionaries:

“We stand way back from the SDS and the Weathermen. We think it is anarchistic, opportunistic, individualistic, it’s chauvinistic, it’s custeristic—and that’s the bad part about it. It’s custeristic in that its leaders take people into situations where the people can be massacred and they call it revolution and it’s nothing but child’s play. It’s folly and it’s criminal because people can be hurt. We say that they’re doing exactly what the pigs want them to do. When they take people down and just do nothing, play around, and the pigs are prepared for this and they wipe all of those young people out. We think these people may be sincere but they’re misguided, they’re muddle-heads and they’re scatterbrains. The only way we can show them is to criticize them like we’re doing right now and then leave from here and then go to the federal building and have a demonstration that’s to educate, a demonstration that is disciplined and organized and let them see the examples.”

In this light, I must say a third time, it’s insidious for Anderson to use a movement of men and white leftists that was heavily criticized in its time by other Black revolutionaries and make a Black woman the face of it for the plot alone—a plot in which she doesn’t even get to actively participate!

Because the plot is a showdown between two white men fighting to hold onto Black and biracial women for reasons that keep them in constant conflict with each other. There’s no choice then but for the film to feel incongruent and exploitative of those thinly written Black women characters.

I’ve spent the last 2,000 words writing about what happens in the first 40-ish minutes of the film. The plot demands that Perfidia exists only to fuck, blow shit up and disappear so the real movie could begin. So that Pat can be the hero, the good dad, the real principled revolutionary, the present parent who lionizes his deceitful rat of a former partner to their daughter who must learn the truth about both parents the hard way.

After a cinematic wonder of a car chase that almost excuses the 2 hour and 50 minute runtime, and two separate endings where Lockjaw gets his comeuppance by the white supremacist society that he’d hoped to join, One Fetish After Another finally ends on a good note—for Pat.

After 16 years of outrunning the law, Deandra goes down trying to save Willa and Bob—who, I assure you, will not be returning that favor or even mention her again. In contrast, Pat and Willa seem absurdly safe and unbothered by the end, back in their home that was just raided by the feds not too long ago. (I guess with Lockjaw out of the picture, no one’s following up on why their house, Willa’s high school, and their entire community were raided by police and everyone’s just back to normal.) Pat gives his daughter an expository letter from Perfidia, which Taylor performs again via voiceover, to somewhat humanize a character who has been nothing but a sexualized, objectified MacGuffin herself. Willa processes the letter and leaves to attend an action in Portland, more committed than ever. The formerly overprotective Pat lets her go, satisfied that she can take care of herself and that he’s done all he can—as a father and for the revolution.

Chase Infiniti is a wonder in her debut role, and Teyana Taylor does what she can to give heart and purpose where there is none on the page. Regina Hall always deserves more and outside of Honk For Jesus, Save Your Soul, she has yet to receive it. The revolutionaries in the background led by Benicio del Toro’s karate sensei Sergio are endlessly fascinating. But we don’t get to know them or any of the migrants used as props. We don’t get to see the process of how seamlessly Sergio runs his Underground Railroad in a sanctuary city beyond how it intersects with Pat and his mission.

Because Anderson is not interested in revolution. He’s not interested in vulnerable immigrants. Despite the many jokes about lusting for them, he’s not interested in Black women. He’s only interested in the interiority of white men. Whoever complained about the lack of people of color in his movies that sparked this story should’ve left him alone to write what he knows.

Stay watchin’,

Brooke

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