Coiled at the center of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a shadowy club committed to the “racial purification” of the American populace. Meeting in luxury hotel suites and bland office towers, these lumpy, balding men — generals, politicians, titans of industry — want to rebalance the composition of their country, and possibly the world. They call themselves the Christmas Adventurers, and they profess a creed of strict racial hygiene, inducting only “white Americans by Gentile-born,” in the hope of segregating white Americans away from the refuse of the worldwide underclass. “You want to save the planet,” says head Adventurer Virgil Throckmorton (Tony Goldwyn), “you start with immigration.”
Does that sound so farfetched to you? Based on a Thomas Pynchon novel published in 1990, first conceived around the turn of the 21st century, and filmed entirely before the 2024 general election, Anderson’s film arrived in theaters last fall at a time when immigration had become the battlefield on which all of America’s domestic conflicts are being fought. In the past year, the president has signed an executive order illegally ending birthright citizenship, and has openly yearned to denaturalize, deport, and even detain abroad U.S. citizens. “Homegrowns,” he said last year, “are next.”
These policies have been backed up and egged-on by a coterie of American white nationalists, among them Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller and Vice President J.D. Vance, who believe that America’s “cultural coherence,” established by early generations of white Anglo-Saxon immigrants, has been fatally compromised by nearly 150 years of immigration from places all across the globe. The only real Americans, they believe, are the descendants of those early settlers, a group now called “Heritage Americans.” Everyone else is, at best, a second-class citizen — though, given the pitch of their ethnonationalist rhetoric, invader would probably be the more accurate term. Miller apparently believes the country would be better off with about 100 million residents — a task that would involve removing more than 240 million people.
No wonder One Battle went off like a pipebomb upon its release last Fall. The film opens with a raid on a migrant detention camp by the French 75, a group of left-wing American radicals committed to “free borders, free bodies, free choice, and freedom from fucking fear,” as Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) tells the white supremacist Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). With his steamed-ham skin tone and fascist-dork comb-over, Lockjaw is a dead-ringer for the recently-demoted CBP commander-at-large Greg Bovino; ditto his beardy, neckless minions, who could easily stand-in for the federal thugs who murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti. These are not direct references, but in 2026, they resonate all the same.
Sixteen years and change after his encounter with Perfidia, Lockjaw is invited to join the Christmas Adventurers, who admire his skill in the “hand-to-hand combat” required to staunch the “threat of uncontrolled migration.” The trouble? Years before, Lockjaw blackmailed Perfidia into a one-night stand, a scene of mutual exploitation, provoked by the Colonel’s fetish to be dominated by his racial and ideological enemy. Nine months later, Perfidia had a child, a girl named Willa (Chase Infiniti), now living in hiding with her presumptive father Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), after the collapse of the French 75. Afraid that Willa will turn up in his background check, Lockjaw launches a military mission under the guise of an immigration raid on the fictional northern California town of Baktan Cross, to determine for good whether the teenager is his daughter, and to erase the last trace of his own compromised humanity.
Lockjaw is journeying into the racial wilderness, deploying up-to-date technology (satellite surveillance, portable DNA tests) to untangle that insolubly knotted and all-too-American question of belonging. For as Sharm notes, in order that some should belong, others must be excluded. Lockjaw and his Adventurer patrons are all too happy to exploit immigrant labor and indigenous expertise, but even when physically inside the country such people must always remain on the outside.
If you want to, you can see the history of American cinema as a battle between who stands at the center of the frame, and who gets pushed to the periphery. In the classic Hollywood western, the tension between native and settler is resolved firmly in the interests of the white homesteader, converting frontier into heartland, and eliding entirely the fate of the defeated. This is a story of national gain, yes, but also catastrophic loss — a void which most westerns pass over in silence, or with the barest nod to what came before.
John Ford’s The Searchers opens with a shot of one doorframe, and closes with the image of another. Both belong to Texas homesteads, and both frame Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), a former Confederate and current soldier-of-fortune, and his uneasy relationship to the American frontier. Edwards is forever approaching these remote outposts of polite humanity, and then shrinking away, always adjacent to their emergent community, but unable to join them. Like the rogue rancher he played in Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Wayne is of use to the order-abiding folk of these remote American territories, who would perish without the protection, and the violence, he offers them. But this violence, and the rage it brings, marks him as a man apart. He is of the country, but he does not quite belong to what it is becoming.
Of course, Edwards has his own opinions about who should and should not belong on the American frontier. When his niece (and possibly his daughter) Debbie is taken by a band of raiding Comanches, he launches a years-long quest to return her to white society — or to kill her, if she has assimilated to life among her captors. Ford’s film is essentially a parable of racial sorting, determining who belongs to the emergent United States — former Confederates, recently arrived Europeans, even southwest Tejanos — and who never will. Edwards knows enough about the Comanche to despise them, and even those like his part-Cherokee semi-nephew Martin, whose white skin and manners and name cannot make up for the miscegenation in his ancestry. Others believe Debbie’s state, with its constant threat of racial and cultural mixing, to be a fate worse than death.
The Searchers is America’s rancid mythology, written in technicolor, and told with just enough ambivalence to camouflage its insidious vision. In Ford’s view, the frontier might have been won through brutal violence, and indigenous genocide was the cost of the American state, but what can you do? That’s just the way of the world. It achieves this through a series of elisions and obfuscations, omitting acts of sexual violence and cutting away from Ethan’s worst deeds. If he is unable to rejoin society, we are told, it is because he has become too much like the Comanches, and in his worst transgressions — including the scalping of a Comanche chief — he is reduced to their essentially subhuman level. Having crossed the threshold to savagery, he can never really come back.
Ethan’s single-minded obsession with recovering and violently purifying his quasi-daughter rhymes with Lockjaw’s, and The Searchers is not the only work of American cinematic history which Anderson’s film recalls. It also rhymes with John Sayles’s 1996 Lone Star, with its portrait of the hopeless intermixing of the mundane and the mythic along the course of the Rio Grande. Sayles’ film is ostensibly a murder mystery, an investigation into how exactly the skeleton of a long-disappeared sheriff ended up in the dirt outside a Texas army base. But its real target is the fatal hold that a founding myth can have on the collective imagination. Sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper) has a few of these, all bound up in the figure of his domineering father, a legendary lawman who drove corruption from his small town, and pushed Deeds away from his young love Pilar (Elizabeth Peña), now a history teacher forced to deal with angry white parents and her own family’s denial of their Tejano ancestry.
Myths conjure a lost past but they operate on us in the present and can shape our futures. In order to survive, such myths must construct, constrain, and conceal reality, and Deeds’ investigation forces him to challenge all that has been buried within his own life, and in the community he has been elected to protect. In his film’s signature move, Sayles stages past and present scenes in the same spaces, emphasizing continuity by panning seamlessly from one temporality to the other and back again. By denying his viewer the safety of a clean cut, Sayles refuses to cleanly separate what has gone on from what now is, just as the legacies of past atrocities do not fade with time. He fills these spaces with figures tormented by the questions of their own lineages, the place in society they believe they have earned because of their ancestry, their race, their cultural patrimony. For these people, the past must remain a myth, a frontier story in which order triumphs over chaos, and good over evil; to acknowledge the reality would be too painful, and would falsify the worldview according to which their power and wealth were rightfully inherited and hoarded.
Yet, as Lone Star makes clear, such myths were crafted to deny what is already the plain reality for those who want to look and for those who do not have the luxury of living in a fairytale. No country’s or community’s or even individual’s history can be as clean and as pure as the ideologues want, and in order to live together, we must do as Pilar tells us at the close of the film: we must forget the Alamo, and return to the world.
Because life together in our actually-existing multi-cultural nations is messy, it challenges us — and it is worth it. One Battle After Another slyly contrasts the white-bread white supremacy of the Christmas Adventurers with life in the sanctuary city of Baktan Cross, a multi-cultural, multi-lingual haven of energy and humanity in the midst of a nation on the edge. As far as I can tell, Anderson’s film is the first major Hollywood production to depict an ICE detention center, or to present Latino life as of a piece with humdrum Americana — which it very plainly is, whatever myths the real-life Christmas Adventurers running our country have long been in the process spinning for us. That we are even arguing about such things — that it feels at all pointed to include is a testament to the warped vision of our own country that dominates our national discourse. We all live here — we all see America. We have to describe it accurately.
Is it comforting or horrifying to be reminded that America is not the only country currently mangling itself in this manner? The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendoça Filho’s movie-mad political thriller, takes place in 1977, in the last years of Brazil’s military dictatorship. A former professor named Armando (an Oscar-nominated Wagner Moura) returns by car to the northern city of Recife, where he takes refuge in a building full of other internal refugees, those living, like Armando, under the threat of death. As a researcher, Armando ran afoul of an industrial magnate by the name of Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), a powerful and corrupt man who has used his government and criminal connections to syphon public wealth into his private accounts. And during this “time of great mischief,” as the opening title card tells us, men like Ghirotti are a force to be feared.
Like Anderson’s white supremacists, the industrialist insists on his own racial purity. He refuses to Brazilize his own name, and he belittles the mixed heritage of the north. Filho places against this the city of Recife, a place of wild and sordid life, where ancestry and culture have become gleefully intermixed. He fills his film with chimeras and hybrids, deviants and divergences, and sets it during Carnevale, when the order of the world is upended, and hierarchy dissolves. This is the city of the filmmaker’s childhood, and it is filled with the stuff of his memories. Armando’s father-in-law is a bespectacled man called Sr. Alexandre (Carlo Francisco), who works as a film projectionist at the Cinema Sao Luiz. Yet he is based on a real man, and a real film projectionist, also named Sr. Alexandre, whom Filho knew in his youth. Even the film’s wildest interlude, a monster-movie-style passage where an amputated leg attacks a group of gay cruisers in a riverside park, comes direct from the history of Recife: the mythical “hairy leg” about whose exploits Filho read in the newspapers as a child.
In The Secret Agent, such stories are a byproduct of authoritarian life, sublimating a deeper vein of unspeakable violence into popular entertainment. They exist to document those disappearances and murders which leave no official record, because the government and its representatives have chosen to excise them. Filho, too, has made a record of these inexpressible gaps. His is a film about all the many generations of missing people, of dead parents and lost children, of lives deemed insignificant and inconvenient, and for whom no record is left. Armando spends his days in Recife searching for the identity card of his mother, a domestic servant, little better than a slave, who was raped by Armando’s father and then cast aside once the child was born. This twinning of epistemological and physical violence is endemic to a highly-stratified society in which some belong, and others do not, a structure of masters and servants which replicates itself even in the ostensibly egalitarian refuge where Armando is hiding, where lighter-skinned professionals boss their lower-class servants around.
Filho’s film is so vibrant, so life-giving and alive, that its perfectly-composed period setting comes almost to seem like a refuge of its own. But it is still the past, and the atrocities it documents are beyond anyone’s ability to deflect. The dead are dead, the lost forever lost. Such crimes can be recorded, remembered, memorialized, even dramatized, but they are beyond our power to avert.
Yet the truth gets out all the same, bubbling up from the collective unconscious via urban legends and comic strips and, especially, through the movies. At one point, Armando goes to visit his father-in-law at the Cinema Sao Luiz, and watches as audience members writhe and speak in tongues after a screening of The Omen. Though that film is foreign trash, and does not say a word about the military regime, it allows its viewers a release valve, a means of expressing viscerally what they would not dare to say in public — one crazed collective scream, rising up against the unspeakable.
At the end of The Secret Agent, Armando’s grown son Fernando (also played by Moura) tells a story about Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. As a child, says Armando, he wanted so much to watch Jaws that even looking at the poster gave him nightmares. At last, when he was old enough, his grandfather allowed him to see the film — and as soon as he did, the nightmares stopped.
This, then, is the power of cinema: to frighten us, yes, and to lie to us, and to tell us stories about who we supposedly are. But they also allow us the opportunity to speak the unspeakable — to banish our own authoritarian nightmares by depicting them in vivid color. Like Filho, Anderson is a disciple of cinema history, and their films take up and reposition a buffet of genres — the western, the monster movie, the psychedelic thriller—in service of political allegories that upend the existing canon of cinematic representation. One Battle essentially restages The Searchers, fashioning Lockjaw as a kind of HGH John Wayne. But where Edwards rides to cleanse the wild west, Lockjaw and the Christmas Adventurers mean to put their boot down over an entire hemisphere, building walls and staging assassinations to affirm the purity of the white race. His prejudice has become their holy ideology.
Drawing from Pynchon, One Battle takes these networks seriously, and it does not shy away from the violence inherent to their maintenance. But it also mocks them, fully and relentlessly, at a scale equivalent to their power. Their aesthetics, like their worldview, are pure, sterile, and bland — and who wants to be a part of that? Some have argued that this undercuts the film, but if you doubt that anyone would identify as a Christmas Adventurer, tell me: is that pining to join that boys club any more ridiculous than calling yourself a Heritage American?
So, yes, cinema can create and propagate spurious myths of purity and exclusion, and try to cap the discontent bubbling up from beneath everything clean and settled. Or it can express the inexpressible, speak the unspeakable — it can take our national stories by the arm and twist. Until we too live in a country without so much mischief, it might be the only option we’ve got.