Interracial romance has been framed as a kind of cinematic shorthand for rebellion for decades, but few recent films lean into that idea as hard as Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. The movie wraps a cross-racial family in revolution, surveillance and state violence, then treats their bond as proof that love can survive even the ugliest politics. What that framing leaves out, critics argue, is the everyday machinery of racism that keeps shaping those relationships long after the credits roll.
By centering a white radical and the Black daughter he raises, One Battle After Another suggests that intimacy across the color line is inherently subversive, even healing. The story hints at how that bond might challenge authoritarian power, yet it mostly sidesteps the structural forces that make interracial families vulnerable in the first place. The result is a film that looks radical on the surface while quietly smoothing over the messier truths of race, gender and power.
The film that turns love into a battlefield
On its face, One Battle After Another is a sprawling political thriller, packed with raids, underground meetings and a government that looks ready to crush dissent at any moment. Viewers encounter it first as a buzzy awards-season juggernaut, the kind of movie that shows up in every search for prestige cinema. The story follows a washed up revolutionary who once believed he could topple the system and now mostly tries to stay one step ahead of it. Around him, Anderson builds a world of checkpoints and informants that feels like a “life under autocracy” riff on Talking Heads’ song Life During Wartime, a warning that everyday life can shrink under permanent emergency.
The plot is also, as library notes put it, Loosely adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s novel Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, with One Battle After Another tracking the misadventures of a former militant who once tried to flee a corrupt. Critics have described the film as a “political anarchy” story in which the chaos is not just background but the air the characters breathe, a point underscored in one conservative reading that notes it was shot when Joe Biden was president and argues that Joe Biden’s America haunts its vision of the future. Yet for all the explosions and speeches, the emotional center is smaller and quieter: the relationship between a white father and the Black girl he is trying, and often failing, to protect.
Bob, Willa and the fantasy of radical intimacy
In One Battle After Another, the bond between Bob and Willa is framed as the one thing the regime cannot fully crush. Bob is the white ex-radical who raises Willa after her mother, Perfidia, disappears into the machinery of the state, and the film treats his devotion as proof that interracial family can survive betrayal, exile and surveillance. The story lingers on their domestic rituals, the way he teaches her to navigate a world that wants to categorize and control her, and it invites audiences to see that care as a kind of resistance. For many viewers, that cross-racial parenting arc is what lands hardest, a reminder that love can grow in the ruins of failed movements.
Yet the same essay that celebrates that relationship also insists that interracial intimacy, by itself, is not automatically transformative. The writer notes that But love can become a vehicle for confronting how racism shapes even the closest bonds, if the story is willing to go there. In this film, the camera often treats Bob’s care as enough, without fully grappling with how Willa’s mixed identity leaves her, in the writer’s words, not quite fitting into either racial community. That gap between what the movie shows and what it glosses over is where the fantasy creeps in: the idea that a tender father-daughter relationship can, on its own, neutralize the structural forces that mark Willa as vulnerable long before she chooses whom to love.
Perfidia, fetish and the limits of white imagination
If Bob and Willa are the heart of the film, Perfidia is its wound, and the way she is written has become a flashpoint. One critic argues that With Perfidia, audiences are given almost no insight into why she makes the choices she does, beyond a vague instinct for self preservation. She is the Black woman whose disappearance sets the plot in motion, yet her inner life is mostly offscreen, reduced to a series of “terrible choices” that the viewer is asked to judge without context. That absence matters, the critic notes, because films like this help shape people’s views of radicals, mothers and Black women, and Perfidia’s thin characterization reinforces the idea that their motives are either selfish or inexplicable.
Other writers go further, accusing Anderson of turning Black women into visual motifs rather than full people. One essay bluntly calls the movie “One Fetish After Another,” arguing that sitting through One Battle After nearly three hours felt less like watching a character study and more like enduring a parade of stereotypes. The author jokes that they are not in the “tight 90” brigade, but even they felt the film simply refused to end, stretching out scenes of Black women’s suffering without offering them real agency. Another critic points out that PTA is married to a Black woman, comedic actress Maya Rudolph, and argues that he should know better than to write these Black characters as props in a white man’s redemption arc.
Radicals, aesthetics and who the movie is really for
Part of what makes the film so divisive is the way it borrows the look of revolution while dodging its politics. One columnist notes that the movie leans hard on the iconography of late 1960s and early 1970s “revolutionaries,” with leather jackets, grainy protest footage and clandestine meetings, but argues that this world and the film’s world could not be further apart. In that reading, the movie is not actually a left wing manifesto at all, despite the posters and slogans, a point summed up in the blunt verdict that Here the radical chic is mostly aesthetic. Another critic, writing from a libertarian angle, complains that One Battle After, despite some standout moments, is not among Anderson’s best precisely because it caters to the vanity of leftist radicals and lets them off the hook for the damage they cause.
Even among audiences who might be expected to embrace its politics, the response has been chilly. One writer notes that, Yet among underrepresented viewers like people of color and leftists, the film has been harshly criticized, especially when compared with the radical movements it tries to echo. On social media, one viewer summed it up by saying that OBAA is a movie a little bit (but not mainly) about revolution, militant organizing and resistance, even as it uses those themes to frame a story that is really about a white man’s guilt and a young Black woman’s trauma. Another commentator, in a video breakdown that went viral enough to be cited in a Jan television segment, admitted they had “zero familiarity” with the film until their team flagged it, then questioned whether its supposed radicalism was mostly marketing.
What the “radical” love story leaves out
For all the criticism, many viewers still find something moving in the way the film treats interracial family as a site of care in a collapsing democracy. One essayist writes that One Battle After, what resonated most was not the shootouts but the scenes of Bob braiding Willa’s hair, or teaching her how to read the coded language of state power. That writer still believes interracial intimacy is not inherently radical, but has come to see how love can be a space where people confront the racism that shapes their most intimate bonds. The problem, they argue, is that the film stops just short of that confrontation, preferring to suggest that affection alone can bridge the gap between a white father’s ideals and a Black daughter’s lived reality.
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