an excuse to talk about revolution.

One Battle After Another isn't radical, but it is really *good*

Dear friends,

This is just a note to say that, this week, there’s no paywall to the Reading/Watching/Listening roundup. I wrote about One Battle After Another, and I’m just too buzzed on the discourse to keep it closed off. If you are a movie nerd, please, let’s nerd out. (I talk about movies or TV shows every week below the cut, so if you’re into it, maybe hit that upgrade subscribe for next time?<3)

love & solidarity,

raechel

Reading.

This review of the re-issues of two Andrea Dworkin books spiked my cortisol in a mostly-generative way. Critic and academic Kathleen Hurlock engages thoughtfully with both Dworkin and Moira Donnegan’s 2024 forewords to the texts, but like most Dworkin-defenses, fails to convince me that Dworkin is urgently important to revive. Still, I appreciated Hurlock’s weaving of past and present feminist thought, even if its conclusion was that the only alternative to de-fanged liberal feminism is the Dworkin kind (simply untrue!).

Writers, ICYMI: Tajja Isen’s in-depth and sobering look at the current state of book publishing.

And because that will probably make you feel bummed, read this much more feel-good piece from Maris Krietzman on being a good literary citizen.

Here’s a good little overview of possibilities for a “solidarity economy,” which we’ll need (already need/many are already doing), for certain, for survival.

No one will fund Charlie Kauffman (the creator of Eternal Sunshine) because his movies are too weird, which is very bleak. He blames Hollywood formulaism for AI and he’s not wrong to make that link (though it breaks my heart). He says: “The most valuable thing to me in terms of my mental health is to read a poem or see a painting or listen to music which speaks to me, which breaks me open for a moment, and where I feel an experience honestly and delicately portrayed. That’s another reason AI can never create anything artistically. It can trick us into thinking it has, but it doesn’t have the experience of being alive. It doesn’t know loss and joy and love and what it feels like to face mortality. I’m very worried about the future in so many ways, and if we don’t allow ourselves to connect with other humans who have the experiences that we have, then I think we’re lost.”

A highlight from class: Johanna Hedva’s classic “Sick Woman Theory.” It’s a great text to return to again and again.

Watching.

Toni Cade Bambara is often quoted as saying, “The role of the artist is to make revolution irresistible.”¹ I used to feel really moved by that sentiment, thought all (independent) artists ought to aspire to it, and that it was perhaps a thing we should regularly critique Hollywood for failing at. More recently, as an artist and a fan, I’m not so sure that’s my motivation beyond the very cheesy-but-legitimate case for human stories being a pathway to empathy. It’s more subtle to change hearts and minds through a creative rendering of the complex interiority of fictional characters, but I wonder if it’s not just as effective as more explicit propaganda. It’s not a binary, of course, and really we should have all sorts of art to engage, but I begin here to say, I went into One Battle After Another with a lot of skepticism. As someone who’s been involved with radical movements for twenty years, seeing little nods in the trailer to a version of “my people” had me majorly on edge, especially when it stars Leo-just-invested-in-an-Israeli-hotel-DiCaprio. On my first viewing, I was having trouble relaxing into the possibility that I might enjoy it, and it gave me plenty of fodder for critique: the hyper-sexualization of Perfidia, at first glance, is just another example of racist exploitative tropes; the annoying caricature of the empty, Leftist talk around the fire; the nods to Black Power without any real discussion of what that means to a multi-racial organization (beyond “Ghetto Pat’s” line about being there because he “loves Black girls”). Problematic!! I was able to proclaim. But I was also feeling incredibly moved, near tears, almost completely immersed, and totally blown away by the filmmaking.

To be clear, I do not think Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another makes revolution irresistible. In fact, if I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, it is because he is so hyper-aware of his absolute futility as a Hollywood director to be a driver of radical social change, that he includes Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” as a central reference-point for the characters. And it is once I leaned into my own advice to not expect nor look for revolutionary guidance from Hollywood that I was able to take the movie for what it was: an absolutely phenomenal film featuring extremely shallow engagement with radical movements and ideas that allows for a moment of cultural discourse to center around questions related to liberation struggles. And I, for one, am fucking here for that.

Many excellent reviews and thinkpieces have already been written, so I’d like to use this space to shout-out those, and also include some links to things that are perfect companion texts to the film. I’m also including the absurdly long TikTok videos I made for my silly little #FilmTok page. I am so bad at short-form video content, y’all. Good thing I am starting a podcast again, because really I just want to talk a lot (and even better to talk with other people, which is what the pod will be!). Please share other thoughts/links/observations/etc! I haven’t felt this hype about collective cinema discourse since Barbie!

***

JAKE MIKE BOY

says, “Debating whether a Hollywood production is radical, revolutionary, counter-revolutionary or just woke nonsense sounds exhausting. And critiquing movies for what they don’t do has always seemed disingenuous and disengaged to me. So does looking to art for ideology.” And also quotes

sam bodrojan

’s excellent piece on the film: “Cinephilia is about loving a rotten thing and it is worth being really honest about your own complicity in this instead of jumping through hoops to justify your affection.” (yessss.)

Absolutely necessary and important to read the perspective of Black women critics on the character of Perfidia. As always, “Black women critics” are not a monolith, so they aren’t all in agreement, but these pieces are all really thoughtful. Brooke Orbe writes: “Her mother appears briefly to lecture Pat about being wrong for her daughter, who comes from ‘a whole line of revolutionaries.’ What does that legacy mean to Perfidia? How does she reconcile that ancestral tradition with her own fetishizing of whiteness? Why is she trying to “feel like [fictional white male drug lord] Tony Montana” if she’s got a revolutionary lineage to draw from?! When all of her fucking leads to pregnancy, she chooses to have the baby at the height of her activism, why?” (Such a clear example of little tweaks in the script that would have made her character significantly fuller.)

For The Guardian, Ellen E. Jones correctly asserts: “There’s a scene in which Lockjaw sidles up to Bob (DiCaprio) and whispers: ‘Do you like Black girls? I love them.’ This is intended to demonstrate the character’s repellence, but would be much more effective as such, if we hadn’t just seen lovable Bob describe his attraction to Perfidia in pretty much the same terms, moments earlier.” In a really gorgeous essay-review that weaves in reflections on the recent death of Assata Shakur, Zeba Blay notes: “...for all the complexity Taylor is able to pour into her truncated screen time, her role in this movie is defined chiefly by her absence.” But @FantasticFrankey has a different take: “Perfidia is one of the most well-written Black women characters in cinema history….And the way that we interpret her character based on our own internal biases says more about our state of mind than who she really is.”

***

For further reading:

Perfidia’s family is depicted as having been involved with Black liberation movements of the 1960s. Those groups were also not monolithic, and it’s worth digging into the history of The Black Panthers and The Black Liberation Army, (I’d specifically recommend books by women in these movements, including Assata Shakur, Elaine Brown, and Angela Davis). Also take a look at some Black radicals who get a bit less attention, like Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin.

OBAA is loosely based on the Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland, which I can’t vouch for, but others I respect say it’s solid (with better politics than the film has). PTA and Leo also both looked to history about The Weather Underground, which feels very clear in the French 75 dynamics; you can read the book, the Wikipedia, and/or give the podcast Mother Country Radicals a try (I enjoyed it). I’d also recommend learning about the George Jackson Brigade, a group of mostly queer militants from the same era.

As I mention in the video below, the police hunting down the members of the French 75 after Perfidia snitches was a harrowing scene. The death of Laredo (an unaging Wood Harris, aka Avon Barksdale!) reminded me so much of footage from the MOVE bombing in 1985, when the Philadelphia police dropped bombs on the residential home of Black activists. For another recent-ish example of cops hunting activists/radicals, I recommend the haunting film Better This World about the FBI infiltrator Brandon Darby who entrapped two young men at the RNC in 2008.

As for all the film critics who say “there’s nothing like the French 75 in the 2010s or 2020s, that was a 60s/70s thing” I would say, sure, it may not show up the same way, but militant radical action has never gone away. As long as there is oppression, there is always resistance to it (and also terrorizing police retaliation). Many of these things don’t have an internet trail, but some slightly less underground but impactful actions to learn more about include: Stop Cop City, the flotillas to Gaza, the ZAD, literally every top story on Crimethinc right now is some version of militant rebellion, obviously the George Floyd Rebellion, and so on. And of course, this includes anti-ICE work, much of it that looks like Sensei’s Latino immigrant network, some that looks a bit more like the French 75’s tactics. (Don’t let the mainstream media trick you into thinking we don’t have power.)

***

Okay here’s my ramble!

@raecheljolie @raecheljolie ♬ original sound - Raechel

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

@raecheljolie @raecheljolie ♬ original sound - Raechel

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

*a thing I forgot to mention is how much I hate the “Mexican, hairless” line. also hate how a bunch of dude-bro film critics are high-fiving over that line. 🙄

*another thing I forgot to mention is how much I loved that Howard, the French 75er on the radio, was in such deep community with his neighbors that the two kids on the street who saw him get kidnapped knew exactly what to do. Making community with your neighbors is a radical act!!! 🖤

Listening.

Yes, okay, I listened, I am but a human adult girl! I haven’t spent much time on the thinkpieces, but I did like that Candace Wuehle used this as an opportunity to re-amplify Showgirls (1995) and The Last Showgirl (2024), both of which feature stories about actual working showgirls, not billionaires.

But also, are you sleeping on the new-ish Wednesday? Don’t.

Joy & Attention.

all the flower gifts from friends, filling and warming our sweet home.⇼ our cats and how they are perfect.⇼ the yossy arefi food blog (newsletter) is really hitting my pleasure sensors in a very 2010 way and i’m indulging it. ⇼some social media lols really got me this week: this dance vid (trust me) and this, i simply could not stop laughing (but also content note, it’s the president). ⇼also, all the jane goodall tributes (weeping). ⇼cooking with almost entirely local food (the farmers market in Ohio in early autumn is popping). ⇼fungi, getting extra spooky for October.⇼

⇼alone time. ⇼but also, friends. ⇼being really proud of P. <3 ⇼autumnal shifts. ⇼some generative conversations with my students.⇼ also the two workshops i’m running right now (an absolutely lovely memoir container with the best crew & a nonfiction workshop at the library). ⇼and, the workshop/container i’m participating in (another Binyamina space, of course). ⇼overcast days.⇼ & all of you, thank you so much for being here. <3

1. She actually said, “As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people it is my job to make the revolution irresistible,” which I think is even more interesting to consider.