I enjoyed the latest Paul Thomas Anderson flick, One Battle After Another, as a piece of entertainment. But I found myself a bit skeptical of its political message, inasmuch as it even had a coherent politics. So I was glad to read this scathing review by Jason England in Defector. I don’t know if I agree with everything in it, but I love a good no-punch-pulled argument against anything suspiciously popular. A sample:
Because of the messiness of the racial politics, One Battle After Another functions as a hybrid of Rorschach test and rage bait, providing heavy-handed symbols of contemporary social and political ideologies, with nebulous insights underpinning them, while also providing ammunition for the insufferable intraracial gender wars.
It helps explain what I found missing.
