Infrastructures of Escape

I saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another for the second time on the night of October 9, 2025, at the legendary Music Box Theatre, on Chicago’s North Side. A few blocks up the road, in my neighborhood, word on the street all afternoon was that ICE agents—some milling about with bovine aimlessness in bulbous “tactical” gear, some lurking in unmarked vans—had been spotted around Senn High School. This wasn’t hard to credit. A few days before, down in the Humboldt Park neighborhood, an agent had lobbed a smoke bomb, ostensibly at a grocery-store parking lot but, in fact, adjacent to a grade school. Later that same afternoon, from up in my office on the twentieth floor, I watched one and then another military helicopter swing in a low curving arc around the campus of the big public university where I teach. Meantime, on the night of the screening and just around the corner from the Music Box, the Cubs were taking a must-win game in a playoff series they would go on to lose.It’s strange living in a city under hostile occupation. It’s strange because in its rhythms and rituals the place is just ordinarily itself until, abruptly and terribly, it is not, and it’s strange because nothing at all—not the crowds, the Cubs, the trees on your street, the buses you take—dissipates the total atmosphere of stupefied horror, itself a dense compound of incredulity, thwarted rage, and seized adrenal fear. I will speak of each of these in turn, but this is chiefly to say that I am grateful, in an outsized way, to the one hundred–plus Chicagoans who made it to the theater that night, whose rapt and voluble collective immersion in scenes of police malevolence, state terror, comic turnabout, and sustained refusal made for as joyful an in-theater experience as I’ve had maybe since I was a kid.A confession: I am about the least objective observer of One Battle you could ask for, and not for the reasons described above. A few years ago I wrote a book about Thomas Pynchon in which I argued that there had been something unhappy and critically misbegotten in spending so many glum years speaking of him as a pure-form “postmodernist,” all gamesmanship and involution and polymath obscurity. With the anarchic and incendiary Vineland (1990) as my proof text, I tried to make the claim that such criticism had misappraised perhaps the two most crucial things about Pynchon and his novels. These are: a prankish and greatly humane comic graciousness, and, running along in sync with it, an unflagging, farsighted antifascism. These, in combination—or rather, the calibrated merging of the two, typically inside a prolonged derangement of the inherited forms of realist fiction—are what it means, or what it should mean, when one calls something “Pynchonian” or “Pynchonesque.”One Battle is not, as Anderson’s Inherent Vice (2014) rather successfully was, an “adaptation” of Pynchon. It is, I think, something looser, and weirder, and altogether better: an extended riff, that is also an extended reading, that is also—and here the heart swells—something like a fan’s notes, a loving tribute executed in the idiom of film. There are plenty of things to say about its formal accomplishments and deficits—about the textured 70 mm photography, the pivot from Vineland’s 1960s/1980s setting to the calamitous present tense, the badly fumbled ending, its casting, its plotting, the astounding kinetic vivacity of a film that’s engrossing over the whole course of its nearly three-hour run.1 But most of what I mean to say is that I fucking loved it. Whatever else Anderson may do in his reading, I think he gets impeccably and upliftingly correct that Pynchon is at heart a comic humanist and a vitriolic antifascist. And then, with a grace and ingenuity all his own, Anderson translates that signature novelistic disposition—the delirious sentences, off-kilter plots, lunatic counterfacutals—into a rollicking big-screen entertainment. I don’t know that it’s the easiest thing, just now, to make a credibly antifascist piece of mass culture. Anderson has done that, and Pynchon helped him do it. I’d like to give an account of what this means.Like Vineland, One Battle is, in broad strokes, a story about the turbulent afterlives of insurrectionary politics. We begin alongside a militant group calling itself the French 75 as they raid an internment camp at the border, liberating the imprisoned, zip-tying the military personnel in charge, and effectively kicking off the plot. It is there that perhaps the most wildly dynamic of the revolutionaries, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), makes the acquaintance of the film’s chief antagonist, one Steve Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a priapic military man with an Oliver North haircut and a twitching desire to possess, or perhaps be possessed by, the Black radical he is meant, professionally, to revile. Several things about this opening sequence are remarkable, only one of which is that, inside the temporal logic of the film, the raid takes place sometime around 2008 or 2009—a nice bit of timing that lays artfully across the Bush–Obama divide. Vineland is mapped along different coordinates, and consequentially so. Published in 1990 and set in 1984, with the most concussive drama unspooling between 1967 and 1970, Pynchon’s novel is among other things a great garrulous rebuke to those gauzy, PBS-ish metabolizations of the 1960s that, after Reagan, had become the solidified norm. These would tend to describe that bygone era as a time of essentially cultural upheaval—generation gaps, “nonconformity,” a great youth-coded lurching in the direction of music, justice, sex, and so forth—rather than a period of acute political crisis, distinguished by a host of antistate rebellions, armed and unarmed, around whose devastation there would grow in turn a colossal apparatus of repression that, by 1990, had been absorbed all but totally into the operating grammars of the everyday American Real. That, in short, is the counterhistorical thrust of Vineland. Anderson, for his part, is not much concerned with the 1960s or their neutering misappraisal. But, like Pynchon, he is surpassingly interested in the ascent of that huge apparatus of carceral power, as well as in the human forces that oppose it.Which takes us back to that opening raid, initiated by the volcanically charismatic Teyana Taylor as Perfidia, striding with imperturbable defiance across a twilit landscape of overpasses, glowing desert mountain ranges, and improvised internment camps. What begins so arrestingly here, and then protractedly does not cease, is a sustained immersion in a perspective—identified less with any one figure than a total world—that is, to put it with undue brevity, opposed to the amassed powers of the police. I’m not sure I can state this forcefully enough. I don’t know, that is, that I can suitably convey how jolting it is, how frazzling to the whole sensorium, to find yourself in the presence of a piece of mass culture that so fully inhabits a perspective in which the various forces of policing are, directly and unambiguously, malign. This is of course a perspective familiar by now to so many of us, so thickly2 theorized3 and historicized4 and so amply5 substantiated6 in histories7 recent8 and long-lived,9 but also, at present, as near to prohibited, officially and actually, as it has perhaps ever been. Precisely this destabilizing collision of the intuitively known and the functionally verboten—the bringing-to-the-surface of a kind of widely shared, increasingly unspeakable common sense—explains at least some of the palpable exhilaration that greeted the film upon its release.But One Battle is not just an ACAB chant in cinematic form. Like Vineland, it asks us to think hard about what policing serves, and means, and is—and, with this, to consider what Alberto Toscano, glossing Karl Polyani, calls the “longue durée of fascist potentials” inside capitalist modernity.10 Here, I think immediately of a resonant line from Vineland I’ve been quoting for years. It comes as a collegiate mathematician named Weed Altman wanders into a gang of police breaking up a campus demonstration at his otherwise serene place of employment, the College of the Surf. Amid the cartoonish comedy, the stoner riffing, the jokes about Nixon, we find this scene, shorn entirely of Pynchon’s habitual prolixity and distended syntax:His thoughts were interrupted by a scuffle nearby. Three policemen, falling upon one unarmed student, were beating him with their riot sticks. Nobody was stopping them. The sound was clear and terrible. “What the hell,” said Weed Atman, as a throb of fear went right up his asshole. It was a moment of light, in which the true nature of police was being revealed to him.11In a novel that features the Wobblies, Hollywood blacklisting, the dispossession of the Yurok, generations of union busting, and the shadow of imperial misadventure in Southeast Asia, this—the true nature of police—is no offhand quip. Writing on the cusp of the Clintonian 1990s, Pynchon presciently identifies the coming order not solely with financialization, “third-way” centrism, neoliberal technocracy, all the those other aspects of the so-called End of History. He identifies it, too, with the almost total compression of the mechanisms of governance into a suite of militarized, overwhelmingly carceral responses to anything that looks like even mild disruption to the orders of elite accumulation and imperial capital. Feeding the hungry, housing the unhoused, treating the ill, and preserving the land all are left behind in the assembly of the state on the model of what its architects will cheerfully describe to you as a kind of perpetual counterinsurgency. This was to be a forever war against civilians, populations internal to the nation who have been marked out, by one or another unadjudicated executive fiat, as mortal threats to the health and security of what, for a while now, officialdom has unironically called the Homeland.12For Pynchon, the War on Drugs offered an ideal post-Vietnam pretext. To its credit, One Battle turns a keener eye on the on the feverish and brutal styles of racialization proper to regimes of so-called security, and so the film is thinking most directly about immigration and the frantic criminalization of entire worlds of Black and brown struggle and survival. Joined across the seam of their works are refractions of several strong, dynamic accounts of fascism, from Frankfurt School heavy hitters like Adorno and Horkheimer and Bloch and out into the stupendous archive of anticolonial thought, where writers like Aimé Césaire and Walter Rodney remind us that the phenomena of “fascism” can perhaps best be grasped as a set of distinctively imperial strategies of population management and disposal, refined in the colonial periphery, that have been brought back in all their counterinsurgent violence to the metropole. As Rodney concisely put it in 1972, “Fascism came as the end-product of centuries of capitalist bestiality, exploitation, domination, and racism—mainly exercised outside of Europe”—though one might think as readily of Langston Hughes, who spoke of “our native fascism.”13 Vibrating to exactly that historical frequency, One Battle places race purity and white supremacism at the center of its plotting and, more crucially still, shows us a series of counterfascist worlds that are anchored, one after another, in the labor, expertise, and bravery of people (particularly women) of color, from Perfidia and French 75 member Deandra (Regina Hall) through to Sergio (“Sensei”) St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro) and the convent of revolutionary nuns who provide momentary shelter for the film’s central figure, Willa Ferguson (Chase Infiniti), as she flees the cadre of soldiers, police, and bounty hunters Steve Lockjaw has employed to find and, if necessary, dispose of her. In each and all of these scenes of affiliation, we are asked to register the present tense of state terror as, among other things, an inward-turning extension of long-standing practices of explicitly racist dispossession—“something as simple,” as critic Joshua Clover wrote in 2022, “as the colonial management of capitalist collapse.”14This conceptualization of the fascist present—of our moment as fascist—is so vibrantly alive in the contexts and contours of the film that anything else one might say can seem a good deal downstream of it. Two illuminating through lines help turn the point all the same. One has to do with the film’s management of a basic affordance of the grammar of cinema. I mean the interplay of fast-sprung sequences of frantic action (raids, assaults, collisions, and in an altogether extended and Ferguson as their near the with of to most the human as Vineland in a of of the film’s engrossing we find the of a in across several speak of my French 75 member as she a what will to be the raid, then my we of this cinematic are One the one these sequences turn the in the film’s of the orders of It is chiefly in and that the film an register for the cartoonish that more or less moment of Vineland, the on its of just a or two from and something more in the film, police are so your go The scenes of of the resonant in which a of by military helicopter to upon a for all the like it was an in land with the of and one another here, and their the film with its these of the police have an and we find it in of and chief a with by It is here, across sequences in which the his and down an assembly of that the film us to as directly as else the to the human proper to the forces of when to the even than in our with the the of white at the heart of the film, these scenes and our upon the and by an another of and don’t have to in a city under for these to but it is by no the only that One Battle shows One of the of prolonged in the film, I would is not only the of carceral power, but also what it the film’s on of the of fear and the of management that it. Whatever his other as comic a or an revolutionary in most as in One for at as an acute for in several The shows of the French 75 and of and by But he is not and in a kind of across his and in the of his makes out in his from his and of his in some in its also, by the something to Battle is in this of of which is perhaps the least He by state and in the back of the film several behind Willa and by in from who become a member of the if of his with that may or may not be be But consider his French 75 whose in the of revolutionary action is to to scenes are by of and, as it the more think of the moment in which from his by a and in of the looks out at his and with and to you to I’m not think of to us in up on the as she with grace through a A and it’s an entirely since the film across scenes of and a of a of is, in armed and more than through a of and of not the to the of all that, the film also takes to and and almost not so much in of but in the of for that is she from when the film there at the Sergio St. as known to his with and by del agent of what he calls for and of After for a second Sergio him a of It’s two he and it is a that in corner of the film. It’s clear that mean an of it a of action in the of it. These in their under might be offered as to the film’s of whose violence the orders of more than it does the of there is a drama to this film been calling it a action then, one it chiefly in this of the film’s each one itself through the strange of mortal entirely the of do these to some a in one at their in or because of any What their fear is something else and it’s here that the film comes into what I to be its the agent of and and then is nothing other than collective of and in which people in the of those are in and The French for are imperial nothing But are a of on out, or with to a night of police in order to and of too, the most of these sequences a of that don’t on most any of the of you might have to scenes in are so and, in the of the film’s sustained and so that I my stopping in my all one by In is from the where he does his a sequence by of two on the the might to be a kind of that, the moment the is out of they to the the and out the that the to has been and and then, offered up a at the of a city there to with the most of to him in not by his but as and, him in then with a of and to him in how to from into the of a that while ostensibly for a to the and, in him how he is, right now, to the which who but Sergio with a a and some I watched this the second time with and and an almost of may be as the with all But that hard make any of these less I were to on one from One it would be just this cinematic to give and and to the people in to what, at this we have no not to is, of one readily figure for these after upon the of But it’s that the idiom of in does not near to the and and of these of and film in out of its to remind us how may not be but he is most To this is to a great it is to how the film at us in the a of scenes and and into by nothing so much as the and of everyday In the Pynchon days after One these are to as of and I would like to think Anderson when he into One Battle is not a and ending, for which Willa a left by is and the film back into a it has a lot of time us to But that is by the Anderson is a who years ago a book about state terror, the nature of police, and the humane of counterfascist and, over of the of Pynchon’s Vineland into the of a a that to think and hard about the of an American I like its its derangement of and action I its and management of But most of all I its loving from Pynchon to all that might like in the worlds we to the the the Black and brown the the everyday least of that of the of a and apparatus of state terror into something less and less in a of One this as more and more and much less of who some or other might itself into the I the film a that it of Vineland, and, that, one in a not at present, down and it on the big in