>Paul Thomas Anderson’s decision to avoid depicting the political turmoil of the past ten years but to romanticize Sixties political violence in his new film One Battle After Another is a cowardly artistic choice. Adapting Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland is merely an excuse for Anderson to revive his own hipster fetishes — pop music, outré sex-and-violence, plus half-comic secular moralizing. Anderson’s tomfoolery makes stealthy comment on the battle between liberals and conservatives that has now become lethal. What’s meant to be entertaining is actually callous, dishonest, and reprehensible. This fantasy may coincide with contemporary turmoil, but its mixture of political absurdity, comic bloodshed, and racial farce merely exploits Millennial confusion. Despite its source in Pynchon’s postmodern paranoia (the subject of Anderson’s earlier adaptation Inherent Vice), the film’s dystopic vision feels modern mostly because it follows the chic progressivism that Hollywood has embraced since the advent of Barack Obama. Anderson’s Bob-Perfidia-Lockjaw triangle (each name an overly literary pun) is a Pynchon-ization of the conflicts that resulted from Obama’s personal link with Weather Underground radical Bill Ayers and the racial ambiguity that underscored his effect on the American polity. One Battle After Another is not the first post-Obama movie (Harvey Weinstein once bragged about “the Obama Effect” on Hollywood), but its emphasis on political, racial, and sexual division operates on a new level. Anderson’s large-scale convoluted storyline of multiple characters, quarrels, vendettas, and hostilities actually reflect the Biden era, which provided liberal Hollywood an opportunity to indulge its screwiest fantasies about our national polarization.
>>216966682He is literally the most (only?) correct movie critic alive and the fact that he's a gay black man only makes it funnier. Genius writer, and the only person with a byline that takes media seriously anymore.
