In One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s relentless epic about a revolutionary burnout and his relationship with his daughter, politics is a playground, where men like PTA can put themselves front and centre in the ‘revolution’, playing out a fantasy where true revolutionaries mock pronouns and Native American lands, whilst gleefully taking part in the real revolutionary act: the fetishisation of black women.
One Battle After Another opens at a detention centre, where, as night falls, a revolutionary group are preparing to liberate the people inside. It’s nail bitingly tense, and the cinematography is undoubtedly stunning.
Here we are introduced to Bob, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character. If it weren’t for his A-list status, you’d never guess that he would become the film’s lead. As the film gears up, Perfidia Beverly Hills, played by Teyana Taylor, is the star.
It is during this liberation that one of the most uncomfortable scenes of the film unfolds, leaving behind a sour taste that the rest of One Battle After Another never manages to shake off.
In this scene, Perfidia comes across the film’s villain, Colonel Lockjaw, and, at gunpoint, demands he gives himself an erection. PTA doesn’t critique this sexualisation, he revels in it.
The character of Perfidia is never developed past this point. Entirely governed by her sexuality, she plays the trope of jezebel note for note. The jezebel characterises black women as hyper-sexual, valued only for their sexuality and their body through the lens of the white man’s sexual satisfaction. The trope emerged from chattel slavery, when black women’s bodies were governed by white men, valued only by their ability to produce more enslaved people, or to be sold into prostitution.
Perfidia is relentlessly viewed through this lens. For one all-too-long scene, we watch Perfidia through the eyes of Colonel Lockjaw. Not only is this the male gaze, it’s the gaze of the film’s villain, a white supremacist, whose entire career is the dehumanisation of others. Although the film’s (somewhat bumbling) villain, Lockjaw’s gaze isn’t challenged by its narrative. His perversity is rewarded by the film, and he goes on to have sex with Perfidia. In One Battle After Another, the revolutionary black woman conveniently asserts her dominance by sexually pleasing white men — specifically white men of the same age as the film’s director.
In Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, which One Battle After Another is very loosely based on, the character Perfidia resembles is a white woman, named Frenesi Gates, who betrays her comrades when she falls for federal agent Brock Vond (Lockjaw is PTA’s version of Vond). In the novel she is attracted to Vond, and enters into the relationship with him willingly. However, in PTA’s re-telling, the question of consent is a lot more murky. His flipping of the source material’s script results in a black revolutionary using her sexuality to evade her white oppressor, and ensure her safety.
Another issue is the way her motherhood is contrasted with Bob’s fatherhood. When Perfidia becomes pregnant, she is disapprovingly presented as a reluctant mother, yet when Bob is portrayed as a disengaged father, who spends his time yelling at Willa’s friends and smoking pot all day, he is endearing, and the film roots for him.
The level of blatant misogynior in One Battle After Another was shocking to see. Maybe I’m naïve, but in 2026 I thought a film would at least be more sneaky about it. In recent times, though, it does feel like hatred is coming out from behind closed doors. The elites are exposing themselves for what they are, because they realise there’s nothing we can do about it. I’m thinking about the live-streamed genocide in Palestine, the relentless onslaught of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails, and the regularly-proven fact that ‘cancel culture’ just isn’t real if you’re a famous man.
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© Zuki Yasmin
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