Rarely has American cinema so explosively mirrored unfolding political realities. With each passing day, freshly announced news bulletins — “Trump Calls for Using U.S. Cities as a Training Ground for Military,” “ICE Agents Shoot Pastor in the Head With Pepper Ball,” “Expert on Antifa Flees to Spain Amidst Death Threats” — make Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest blockbuster, “One Battle After Another,” feel even more nightmarishly relevant than when it first opened in late September.
Anderson’s thrillingly shot neo-Western replaces the cowboys and Indians trope with a sympathetic portrayal of armed leftist militants fighting white supremacist state fascism. Despite being loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel “Vineland,” which explored the afterlives of failed 1960s revolutionaries during the Reaganite 1980s, the film’s settings and language unmistakably evoke the turmoil of the Trump era. In the film’s opening act, a “revolutionary” insurgent group frees caged and mylar-blanketed immigrants from the spitting image of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility. In its second act, paramilitarized American troops invade the fictional sanctuary city of Baktan Cross in northern California, allegedly to catch drug runners and illegal immigrants. The film’s language of “sanctuary cities,” its leftist antiheroes’ habit of affectionately calling one another “bad hombres” (a term that Donald Trump popularized during his debates with Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race) and its use of completely contemporary cars, clothing and other props combine to resituate radical 1960s resistance in the present.
It was an inspired choice. Just two weeks before “One Battle After Another” opened in theaters, the United States experienced its highest-profile political assassination since Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was shot in June 1968. On a sunny day in early September, the young conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk was gruesomely gunned down on live video while speaking to a large gathering of students at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. The alleged lone shooter had texted his trans partner that Kirk’s views — likely referencing Kirk’s intolerance toward trans people — were “irredeemably hateful.” Suddenly, the political violence and left-wing radicalism of the ’60s seemed to take center stage in Trump’s America. Into this maelstrom, Anderson’s film dropped, linking vintage-lensed nostalgia for 1960s “revolutionary” leftism with depictions of a repressive and racist regime whose texture and tactics smack of Trumpism. The Trump administration’s decisions in the wake of Kirk’s assassination — ramping up ICE operations and National Guard deployments in “sanctuary cities” like Portland and Chicago and defining liberal pro-democracy organizations that explicitly oppose political violence, like George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, as colluders with left-wing terrorists — made the film feel more terrifyingly prescient with each passing day.
“One Battle After Another” is an instantly iconic artifact of our combustible political moment. Its characters, wrought with Dickensian memorability, and its cinematography, jam-packed with ingenious car chases and epically angled camera shots, make the film’s three hours whir by in what feels like a mere 30 minutes. But discussion of the film’s astounding artistry should not obscure analysis of its darker ruminations. The America that Anderson has realized on screen reflects a growing strain in American filmmaking that should ring alarm bells for us all.
Anderson’s epic is the latest and most unabashedly leftist film in a spate of recent Hollywood productions that envision a United States embroiled in political violence. In the last two years alone, four major motion pictures with A-list protagonists — “Civil War” (2024), starring Kirsten Dunst; “The Order” (2024), starring Jude Law; “Eddington” (2025), starring Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal; and “One Battle After Another” (2025), starring Leonardo DiCaprio — have explored this terrain.
Director Justin Kurzel’s film, “The Order,” feels like a haunting prequel to our current problems of political violence. In it, Law plays a detective who uncovers a violent white supremacist secessionist plot that actually happened in the American West in the 1980s. The other three films, by contrast, seem set in our present or near future. In “Eddington,” written and directed by Ari Aster, social media echo chambers and the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns drive the 2,500 residents of the eponymous, fictional New Mexico town into an orgy of real, and possibly hallucinated, political violence. Meanwhile, Alex Garland’s “Civil War” features depictions of a burned-out northeastern United States that has morphed into a disaster zone reminiscent of Syria, Libya or eastern Ukraine. Through the eyes of war correspondents, it reimagines the classic American road trip as a dystopian odyssey through a country where a vaguely defined rebel insurgency manages to topple, via enormous bloodshed, the federal government controlled by a dictatorial president.
These Hollywood productions show that American films are increasingly portraying the United States as a polity where anti-politics has replaced politics, violence has displaced democracy and the sane center seems nowhere to be found. This trend matters. American cinema, like other mass-market art forms, often functions as a weathervane for broader cultural and political dynamics. Filmmakers are increasingly registering and, in turn, reflecting back at us from the silver screen fears that America’s future could be defined by vigilantism, insurgencies and state violence.
They are far from alone in sharing these fears. In 2019, The Washington Post ran a chilling headline: “In America, Talk Turns to Something Not Spoken of for 150 Years: Civil War.” That same year, a Rasmussen poll found that 31% of probable U.S. voters said they thought that “the United States will experience a second civil war sometime in the next five years.”
In the five years since — spurred by factors including the divisive spectacle of the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riots (whose perpetrators Trump has exonerated, rather than held accountable), polarized responses to the way states and the federal government handled the COVID-19 pandemic, and social media algorithms that reward emotive, polarizing and even radicalizing content — that number has only risen. A 2024 Marist poll found that 57% of Americans now foresee a civil war as likely during their lifetime. Younger generations are three times as likely as the Silent Generation, and nearly twice as likely as Boomers, to agree. These findings show that the U.S. is increasingly offering fertile soil for fears and fantasies of political violence to thrive.
In one sense, “One Battle After Another” fuels those fears and fantasies. Anderson’s film terrifies because its heroes and monsters are drawn from the edges of our shared present. But far from telling a “both sides” story, Anderson places his sympathy firmly on the side of its self-proclaimed leftist “revolutionaries,” despite the fact that the film’s first act shows them blowing up courthouses to protest abortion rulings and killing cops who interfere with their bank robberies.
DiCaprio plays the film’s chief protagonist, Bob Ferguson, a middle-aged lapsed member of the French 75. Named for a cocktail served at Rick’s Bar in the anti-fascist classic “Casablanca,” the French 75 are a fictional left-wing insurgent group led by Black feminist revolutionaries. When the government cracks down on the group, Ferguson — then known as “Ghetto Pat” aka “the Rocketman” — follows the French 75’s orders to go underground. He abandons a youth spent building bombs for the group, blowing up right-wing government targets and giddily copulating with one of its leaders, a Black female radical unforgettably named Perfidia Beverly Hills. When she abandons him to continue fighting for the “new consciousness” by sticking up banks and shooting police officers, he dutifully focuses on fathering their daughter, Willa.
Anderson depicts DiCaprio’s Bob as a dopily lovable druggie whose fatherly devotion to Willa triumphs over his dedication to left-wing radicalism. Viewers see him as a rumpled antihero who spends more time shuffling around Baktan Cross in a desperate effort to charge his phone than building bombs.
But DiCaprio’s character never questions, let alone regrets, his romanticized youthful violence. Rather, we see him nostalgically smoking joints and presumably reliving old escapades by watching “The Battle of Algiers,” a 1960s ode to Algeria’s anticolonial resistance, in which militant attacks on civilians played a role in ending French colonialism. It’s a simultaneously comical, endearing and yet deeply discomfiting image. Defanged and aging, DiCaprio’s soft, bumbling father figure becomes an affectionate, beanie-clad vehicle through which support for idealistic but nevertheless bloody left-wing violence is arguably maintained.
DiCaprio’s Bob is one of a diverse collection of sympathetically drawn leftist heroes and antiheroes, all of whom seem prone to over-romanticizing violence in the name of liberation. Anderson pits these flawed but endearing protagonists against a cartoonishly racist and repressive state. But ironically, in the course of doing so, he has created a film that some Black feminists have criticized for hypersexualizing its Black main character, Perfidia, in a manner that invokes racist stereotypes of Black women as uncontrollably libidinal Jezebels. Anderson unwittingly delivers some flattened portrayals of Black women. Like his rose-tinted portrayal of the film’s leftist militants more generally, his handling of these characters is more textured than his portrayal of the right but far flatter than it could have been.
“One Battle After Another” is, at its core, an epic war for the soul of America. It pits a humanized and variegated leftist “resistance,” of which the French 75 is part, against a smaller, monolithically portrayed cabal of fascist racists who seem the very embodiment of evil. This shadowy group, called the Christmas Adventurers, seems to control whatever is left of the United States government. Its members are love-to-hate-‘em wealthy white supremacists clad in Patagonia vests who seem to monstrously embody everything one might hate about stereotypical Connecticut finance guys and the Ku Klux Klan simultaneously.
The central conflict of the film involves Sean Penn’s character, a military colonel evocatively named Steven J. Lockjaw, racing against the fatherly love of DiCaprio’s Bob in an effort to find and kill Willa. Lockjaw’s motive is his aspiration to join the Christmas Adventurers. The group performs a “double white Yankee” background check on all would-be members to ensure that they are the product of white American gentiles, and have not engaged in interracial intercourse. The possibility that Willa is the mixed-race product of a sexual assignation between Lockjaw and the Black militant Perfidia Beverly Hills would obliterate his chances of joining the powerful white supremacist cabal. He therefore goes on the almost cartoonishly evil mission of finding and killing Willa.
Against the beanie-clad lovability of DiCaprio’s bumbling Bob, Penn’s Lockjaw represents a toxic form of alternative paternity. A coiled-up caricature of aggressively insecure masculinity, Lockjaw comports himself like a petrified Popeye, made of leathery, hardened anger. His character’s irredeemable wickedness seems confirmed when he captures the fiery 16-year-old Willa (played by perhaps the most Dickensian-named of them all, newcomer Chase Infiniti), calls her a “fucking mutt” and pays a bounty hunter to kill her minutes after learning that she is, indeed, his daughter. Penn plays Lockjaw to repulsive perfection, styling his hair with spittle to impress the white supremacists and making grotesque saliva sounds when he subjects himself and Willa to a paternity test.
Unlike Garland’s “Civil War,” which shows viewers the effects of democracy’s devolution into political violence through the eyes of mostly dispassionate journalists (one of whom is the film’s protagonist, a seasoned war photographer played by Dunst), Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” features no characters who oppose political violence. The way Anderson tells the story — a nonstop rollercoaster of incredible cinematography scored by Jonny Greenwood’s heart-stopping staccatos — additionally gives the viewer no impetus to pull back and critically analyze its action. By contrast, “Civil War” breaks up devastating scenes, like a burned-out helicopter crashed in front of a JCPenney department store in the suburban mid-Atlantic, with shutter sounds and still images from the war photographers’ cameras.
These directorial decisions make “Civil War” a far more sobering account of a U.S. wracked by political violence than Anderson’s epic neo-Western, which enmeshes us so deeply into its action — and seemingly celebrates its left-wing heroes and antiheroes so uncritically against a backdrop of monsterized villains — that judging the French 75’s “revolutionary” violence with critical distance becomes nearly impossible. These plot and storytelling devices made it practically inevitable that many viewers would reduce “One Battle After Another” to their own partisan projections.
In the weeks since its release, “One Battle After Another” has predictably attracted polarized responses from professional film critics and everyday commentators alike. These sort into two main buckets. Mainstream MAGA viewers agree with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro that the film is “an apologia for radical left-wing terrorism” with “the subtlety of a brick.” On his podcast, Shapiro lambasted DiCaprio’s character, Bob, as a “loser who smokes weed all day” and encourages Willa and her “gender nonbinary blue-haired friends” to be “into violence.” Many will interpret the film’s ending as Bob giving Willa what Shapiro calls a “thumbs up to do [violent] ‘revolutionary’ activity” like her mother did in the French 75.
At Fox News, the West Virginia-based conservative commentator David Marcus went further. “For this movie to make any sense at all,” he wrote, “one has to believe that the United States, right now, is a fascist dictatorship. That is not only a dangerous fallacy, but, as we have found out recently, a deadly one,” a reference to Kirk’s murder. Anderson, Marcus opined, “won’t be committing any ‘brave’ acts of murder to right the supposed wrongs of our nation. He’ll just make movies encouraging others to do so while he basks in the fruits of capitalism.”
On X and other social media platforms, conservatives like Marcus are rejoicing that Trump is cracking down on Antifa (shorthand for “anti-fascists”), a loose collection of leftist activists who oppose fascists and neo-Nazis, some but not all of whom have espoused violence, and only a small percentage of whom have committed it. “Maybe this will be a fun movie for them to watch in jail,” Marcus wrote.
Meanwhile, at the leftist outlet Jacobin, Eileen Jones began her review of “One Battle After Another” with an almost spiritual jubilation. “Glory be,” she exclaimed in her review’s first words. Hailing Anderson’s film as “the complete package of filmgoing delights,” she called it “everything movies made in the United States should be right now.” Rather than striking her as a flattened or exaggerated stereotype of all-too-real and all-too-resurgent right-wing forces of racist and even fascistic white supremacy, Lockjaw and the Christmas Adventurers cult were, for Jones, a “pointed” portrayal of “the power elite in this country, not just as self-serving capitalists routinely screwing the citizenry but also as aging monsters addled by long-held racist fixations that are all tangled up with deep sexual psychosis.” Reviews in center-left outlets like The Guardian and The New Yorker similarly lauded the film unreservedly, with the former applauding Penn’s “monstrous” portrayal of America’s right-wing threats.
In an increasingly partisan and echo-chambered world, where we too often prefer art and analysis that reinforces our prejudices over that which challenges us to think beyond our stereotypes, Anderson’s film is becoming a memorable cultural touchstone for both the left and the right: the left, because the film appears to celebrate it and affectionately portrays its violence as the ideologically defensible work of idealists whose opposition to fascism is laudable; the right, because the film appears to reproduce their stereotypes of leftists as drugged-out, feminized lay-abouts whose embrace of political violence to combat cartoonishly demonized right-wingers seems to be celebrated, rather than excoriated, by a disconnected left-wing Hollywood that conservatives have always loved to hate.
Of all these films, the most sensitive exploration of how political polarization happens is undoubtedly “Eddington.” Its director, Aster, spent the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in his hometown in New Mexico. The forces of polarization that he observed there, playing out through Americans’ social media feeds, disturbed him deeply, as he has said in several interviews. Rather than having a clear protagonist on the right, left or center, the film has two main characters. Phoenix plays Sheriff Joe Cross, whose journey from center-right to far-right sees him transform from a kindly family man to a villainous menace who kills a homeless person, the Democratic mayor and the mayor’s son all in the space of three minutes. Pascal, meanwhile, plays Ted Garcia, the Democratic mayor of Eddington whose obnoxious elitism leads him to slap Phoenix’s Cross across the face at his socially distanced house party, where Katy Perry’s music is predictably blaring — a moment that becomes the last straw in Cross’ journey toward monsterized right-wing radicalization.
Though Aster’s film, despite his best efforts, arguably portrays Cross in a cartoonishly diabolical light from the moment his over-the-top mayoral campaign car trundles down the hill, it goes incomparably farther than “One Battle After Another” in humanizing Cross and, by extension, the U.S. right. Cross doesn’t start out as a crazed murderer. Rather, he begins as an asthmatic aspiring father, whose wife Louise, played by Emma Stone, distances herself from him both emotionally and sexually. Cross makes repeated, pity-inducing attempts to connect with Louise but then, in a misguided attempt to avenge sexual abuse he believes she experienced at the hands of Garcia, he makes a public announcement that alienates her from him completely. Louise’s mother, who moved in with them when COVID-19 began, pulls both Louise and, through her, Cross to the right by falling victim to intense online disinformation along the lines of QAnon conspiracists. Meanwhile, white male teenagers in the town try to gain the affections of social justice-minded young women by participating in increasingly closed-minded Black Lives Matter protests that shame the Black police officer, Michael, for even being a cop.
Many of the same film reviewers who gave “One Battle After Another” glowing reviews panned “Eddington.” A common point of criticism from reviewers presumably on the political left was that Eddington — despite featuring a right-wing character, Cross, who devolves into a murderous radical — was overly “both sides-ist.” The fact that the film satirically skewered left-wing political discourse, and that it leaves the causes of the carnival of political violence that erupts at the film’s end open to interpretation, rubbed many reviewers at outlets from The Guardian to The New Yorker the wrong way.
We are, it seems, in an era of hyperpartisanship, where political differences are widening into canyon-like divides. The courageous spirit of “Eddington,” in which Aster takes us on a journey of radicalization into violent extremism that humanizes — while it also satirizes — characters on both the left and the right is, in this climate, too much for many critics and audience members alike to process, let alone appreciate. But it is important work.
Garland’s film, “Civil War,” reminds us why. In it, Dunst’s character, a war photographer who has seen the sickening effects of political violence across multiple countries, confides in a sharp-minded old friend and colleague about the horrors of war. “Every time I survived a war zone, and got the photo,” she says, “I thought I was sending a warning home. Don’t do this. But here we are.”
Political scientists who have done comparative studies of the forces of polarization, democratic backsliding and rising political violence that now plague the United States would likely share Dunst’s desire to warn others. Despite misrepresenting war journalists as people who photograph the action of conflict more than its aftermath and impact, “Civil War” shows a great deal of the impact, too, setting scenes that American viewers would likely associate with conflicts that have ravaged places like Syria and Eastern Europe in the lusciously lit, verdant lawns of American suburbia.
Those scenes could transpire in the United States if too many people on both the left and the right dismiss works of art, like “Eddington,” that invite us to think critically about how extreme polarization happened in the U.S. and instead uncritically applaud partisan forms of political violence. American filmgoers should recognize, though, that modern civil wars look less like battles between regimented and uniformed armies of secessionist states versus the federal government, and more like motley groups of insurgents with wildly ranging political views — some of whom truly do support forms of political violence that would meet many definitions of terrorism — battling repressive and/or weak central governments.
More chilling than the political violence that any of these films depict is the reality that the United States, like many states around the world, is retreating from democracy according to all of the bodies that most reliably score such things (including Polity, V-Dem and Freedom House) and closer toward a form of “hybrid regime” or competitive authoritarianism in which multiparty elections mask a reality that elections are neither free nor fair. Countries that fall into this in-between state — neither full democracies nor fully authoritarian regimes — are where civil wars are most likely to erupt.
Because democracy is a very new form of government, globally speaking, scholars have mostly tracked civil conflicts erupting in countries as they transition from authoritarianism toward democracy. But scholars involved in the Political Instability Task Force, based in Sweden, have also tracked political violence that erupts as once-stable democracies or pseudo-democracies fall deeper into the murky middle of hybrid regime status. Like positive transitions toward democracy, negative transitions away from it create new categories of winners and losers, some of whom conclude that they must act with violence now, while they still have the chance, rather than accept being part of a permanently dominated underclass in the new order.
The best thing that could happen to prevent rising political violence and widening polarization in the United States from someday erupting into all-out civil war is that its leaders, first and foremost the Trump administration, reverse the trend of de-democratization and shore up our beleaguered democratic institutions. But since the Trump administration has, over the past decade, been the principal driver of this trend, that seems unlikely.
Instead, Americans across the political spectrum are left with the haunting choice that faces the young characters Jessie, an aspiring war photographer; Michael, a young Black cop; and Willa, a would-be leftist revolutionary in the films “Civil War,” “Eddington” and “One Battle After Another,” respectively. Will we, like them, embrace a future course of action that cynically gives up on the hard, coalition-building work of democratic politics? Or will we let pragmatic, democratic politics triumph over the nihilistic forces of violent anti-politics that each one of them has personally witnessed — to arguably traumatizing effect — in these films?
In American cinema, as in American life, the siren song of anti-politics is sounding. Our collective future hinges on whether we can listen to, evaluate and ultimately reject it with critical distance. Like the undulating rollercoaster of a Californian road that symbolizes the very notion of “one battle after another” in Anderson’s new epic, the work of democratic coalition-building is longer and arguably even more arduous than resorting to picking up arms like the French 75 or the Christmas Adventurers.
To continue along that road, rather than crashing into a ravine off it, we must recognize that the United States is at a critical political juncture — a crossroads at which losing our democracy is all too possible. How we answer the questions of anti-politics versus politics, purism versus pluralism and violence versus coalition building will shape where we arrive.
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