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Still from the movie “One Battle After Another.” (courtesy of Warner Bros. Korea)

By Slavoj Žižek, Global Eminent Scholar at Kyung Hee University

The Weathermen, the best-known radical left “terrorist” group which operated in the US in the late 1960s and 1970s, took its name from Bob Dylan’s lyric “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” from his 1965 song “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” 

Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2025 film “One Battle After Another,” which has caused a lot of fuss in the media, basically tells the story of Weathermen reimagined in our world, more than half a century later.

For me, the obvious comparison is Robert Redford’s “The Company You Keep” (2012), a film that also deals with leftist ex-radicals confronting their past. 

Simplified to the utmost, the story centers on recent widower and single father, Jim Grant, a wanted former Weather Underground anti-Vietnam War militant, who hid from the FBI for over 30 years posing as an attorney in Albany, New York. He becomes a fugitive when his true identity is exposed, and he must find his ex-lover, Mimi, the one person who can clear his name, before the FBI catches him — otherwise, he will lose everything, including his 11-year-old daughter Isabel. 

His search for Mimi takes him across the US, where he contacts many of his Weatherman ex-colleagues; finally, Jim and Mimi meet in a secluded lake cabin close to the Canadian border. She is still passionate about the goals of the Weathermen and unapologetic about her actions 30 years earlier, but Jim tartly replies: “I didn’t get tired. I grew up.” Even if he still believes in the cause, he has now become a responsible family man. 

Jim asks Mimi to turn herself in and alibi him for the sake of his daughter, Isabel; he doesn’t want to leave Isabel behind and repeat the mistake that he and Mimi made 30 years earlier by giving up their own daughter. The next morning, Mimi flees the cabin to sail to Canada, but she turns her boat around and returns to the US to give herself up; the next day, Jim is freed from jail and reunites with Isabel.

While the film obviously sympathizes with the radical leftist cause, its predominant tone is to reject the path of violence in the terms of maturation, of the passage from youthful enthusiasm (which can easily turn into violent fanaticism) to mature awareness that there are things like family life and responsibility towards one’s children which no political cause should make us violate — or, as the hero says to his ex-lover: “We have a responsibility beyond the cause. We have a baby.”

In “One Battle After Another,” however, as the title of the film clearly indicates, the battle goes on: Willa takes the torch and continues the underground struggle betrayed by her mother. There is another change: in “The Company You Keep,” Weathermen fight against the imperialist system itself, while in “One Battle After Another,” they focus on helping the illegal Latino American immigrants to avoid expulsion and find a place in the US. 

In other words, they are not working against the system as such; they work to enable immigrants to integrate into the system. And since the system is not the enemy, the enemies of the revolutionaries are not just grey bureaucratic enforcers of the law displaying the banality of evil — i.e., what we perceive as the “normal” structure of power — they are ridiculous figures caught in obscene enjoyment, living caricatures. 

Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) combines excessive masculinity and sexual desire with nervous gestures signaling that he is always close to a psychic breakdown; the Christmas Adventurers Club is a fantasized caricature of an elitist racist group that has no place in today’s global society, where Black and Asian men and women can also occupy top positions of power. When the Christmas Adventurers Club’s top leaders condemn Lockjaw for not controlling his penis and inseminating Perfidia, they act against the spirit of white masculine racism which totally condones white men raping Black women as a normal way to have fun.

Here, we touch on the crucial feature of the film: no wonder Lockjaw is totally obsessed with Perfidia, since she is ultimately the leftist revolutionary version of the same type of subjectivity as himself. Without Lockjaw’s inner obstacles and nervous tics, she impersonates what in the French 1968 was called “jouir sans entraves” — enjoying without obstacles. There is no gap for her between her violent political activity and intense promiscuity — she fully enjoys reckless sex in the midst of a “terrorist” act, following the same stance also in how she talks, seamlessly combining brutal acts with dirty speech. 

Her shifting identity leaves no space for a permanent partner, and no wonder that she betrays even her revolutionary cause — not because of her daughter (she abandons her for the revolution) but for her survival. After the betrayal, she is given a new identity and sanctuary by the government, but she disappears even from there, so nobody knows where she is. 

As such, Perfidia also embodies the form of the film, or as noted by Pietro Bianchi, “Perfidia’s role should not be interpreted primarily at the level of content, but rather structurally. All the narrative events set in motion throughout the film depend on the consequences of her actions, but equally on her absence. Every character is thus forced to orbit around the void she creates — with the odd result that the true protagonist of the film appears on screen for no more than twenty minutes, at the beginning.” 

From my standpoint, therein resides the falsity of the film: the “absent center” of the film, Perfidia as the figure of full feminine enjoyment, is a masculine fantasy constructed to cover up what Lacan called the feminine “non-all,” the hysterical fragility of the feminine subjectivity. 

Perfidia is precisely the dream of a woman as all, of a woman who is phallus. It is crucial to note that, if we take away from the story its “absent center,” the spectacular plurality of its excessive, inconsistent actions falls apart. 

The film is full of crazy, brilliant moments — not just the hypnotic car chase but also the convent of revolutionary nuns who practice how to use machine guns. It really introduces a new way of telling the story, which unfolds in an inconsistent plural space where brutal obscenity can coexist with pathetic humanist engagement embodied in the karate teacher and Deirdre. Perfidia embodies this form at its purest. 

But here the excess of the form is not the truth of its content; it does not bring out its repressed aspect. The excess of form is rather here to dazzle and fascinate us so that we ignore the ambiguity of the film’s ethico-political stance. 

It is easy to propose that the inconsistent dispersed plurality of the film bears witness to the fact that today’s global financial capitalism can no longer be narratively presented as a totality, so that the film’s failure to properly represent the society it depicts is in itself an indicator of the truth of this society itself, an indicator of the fact that today what Jameson called “cognitive mapping” of our situation is structurally impossible. 

However, Perfidia, as the film’s “absent center,” mystifies this impossibility — Perfidia acts as a universal mediator of the film’s dispersed content; she impersonates the excessive and destructive logic of today’s capitalism at its purest. Compared with her, the “bad” figures like Lockjaw and members of the Christmas Adventurers Club are pale shadows of this logic. It is difficult to imagine a more antifeminist film than “One Battle After Another.”       

At the very end, Bob gives Willa a letter of hope from Perfidia, where she apologizes for her actions and vows to reunite with her family in the future — is this a letter which arrives at its destination, as Lacan would have put it, a letter which announces a pacifying denouement, or just another irrelevant promise? What will happen if Perfidia really returns to Bob and Willa? Will they be a happy family where the daughter will just disappear from her job from time to time? I presume that the film leaves this open on purpose, that it is irrelevant to its logic. 

Like Redford’s film, “One Battle After Another” ends in a tension between revolutionary spirit and parental moral responsibility, but while “The Company You Keep” implicitly proposes a formula (yes to revolutionary engagement, but an engagement which should not violate parental responsibility), “One Battle After Another” just juxtaposes multiple stances and playfully stages their interaction.

The title of Freud’s short text from 1914, “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through,” provides the best formula for the way we should relate to a past traumatic experience. In our case, the traumatic memory is that of Weathermen, and while Redford’s film engages in nostalgic remembering but fails to resolve the key dilemma, “One Battle After Another” tries to fill in this gap by way of directly repeating the traumatic memory — the movie imagines how the Weathermen would look today, in a radically different historical situation, and also ends in a failure. 

What is needed is the working-through of the trauma: an analysis of what was wrong in the Weathermen experience itself. Here we should proceed in a ruthless way that will hurt many leftist sensibilities: the real Weathermen were focused on anti-imperialist resistance, especially in Vietnam, but today, with the exploding crises in decolonized Third World countries, we can see that anti-colonial struggles also had deep limitations, which is why they often ended in authoritarian and corrupted new regimes. 

As for “One Battle After Another,” to focus on the violent help to illegal immigrants is also problematic: it helps big capital (providing cheap labor and lowering the wages of American workers) and simultaneously raises support for Trumpian populists, not to mention the topic of direct (not just defensive) violence. 

While I am fully aware that violence is often needed and fully justified, I suspect that in today’s US, direct small-scale, single acts of violence like those practiced by Weathermen have no chance against the Trumpian state and would only serve its brutal, oppressive measures. Such acts work like a call: “Please send the National Guard to our town!” The focus should now be on sabotaging the corporate digital control over our lives. 

In short, there is nothing revolutionary in “One Battle After Another.” Today, we need weathermen to learn which way the wind blows. “One Battle After Another” depicts a group with no weatherman giving them orientation. With its helter-skelter form, it celebrates disorientation itself as radical freedom. 

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]