One Battle After Another, the latest film by Paul Thomas Anderson, is a critical darling, picking up numerous award nominations — and, on Sunday, four big wins at the Golden Globes. Loosely adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, it follows the crumbs of a revolution and the fallout of an activist squad known as the French 75, after member Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) gets arrested and rats out other members to avoid prison time. Her husband, formally known as “Ghetto” Pat and now disguised as Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), and their child Willa (Chase Infiniti), must hightail it to California to avoid the government strongarm of Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn).
Bucking the consensus, film critic Jason England was not convinced by the film’s political and emotional content. In his discerning review for Defector, England argues that One Battle After Another lacks the heart and soul required of texts seemingly devoted to political revolt, a spectacle synonymous with many left-leaning signposts that rely on performances of politics, rather than action.
His piece received substantial attention, most disputing England’s argument, but it was not the discourse that spurred my conversation with England. At the tail end of his review, England brings up Iowa City.
There’s a 60-foot mural on the side of a parking garage in Iowa City — a place dear to my heart — that encourages: “WEAPONIZE YOUR PRIVILEGE TO SAVE BLACK BODIES.” This past September, four years after the mural went up, ICE walked into a popular downtown market blocks away and removed a Colombian immigrant from his job with relative ease.
Struck by the mention of the murals, as well as the ICE kidnapping of Jorge Gonzalez Ochoa from Bread Garden, I spoke with England to explore what it means to keep the places you once lived with you, to invoke them in your writing, and to demand more from them, and more from art.
What brought you to Iowa City?
I came to Iowa City in 2006 to attend the Writers’ Workshop, then I taught as an assistant professor, and then got a fellowship to teach in 2009. I left to do a fellowship in Wisconsin, and I came back to Iowa City because it was a place where I had a genuine community and a lot of people I loved, and I got a job offer to teach in the rhetoric department. I left Iowa City in 2017 for another job offer at Carnegie Mellon, but it was difficult to leave behind the community and the people I love, so I visit frequently.
Walk me through the process of writing this piece. At what point did you make that connection to Iowa City and why did you feel that the piece should end with that mention?
Activism is something that I’ve seen up close and participated in, and I know how difficult and complicated it is. We need people to focus their energy on social justice and civil rights, so watching this shift towards symbolism, I found it to be initially curious and worrying, and then devastating. I saw this increase in signs, windows, and T-shirts, in the idea that the revolution would be merchandised. I find that these statements are often incredibly clumsy. If it were underpinned by action, then you wouldn’t need a sign in your window.
There’s this incredible energy in Iowa City. What drew me to stay, and what I appreciated on a daily basis, is that there is truly an energy of palpable decency in Iowa City, but it needs focusing. That’s where vision and bold political imagination come in. I’m not criticizing an artist who did a mural, but what I’m saying is we have enough murals and T-shirts. You gotta take another step here because you can have a mural, and you can still have ICE agents come right in the Bread Garden, where I was a month before, and grab a man out with little resistance, little pushback. That’s a very human, depressing thing. I ended it with that because it wasn’t a criticism of our city; it was an acknowledgement of this tragedy. That we can have, in name and in word, a certain politic, but in practice, we’re still losing.
Your review mentions that we struggle to imagine what collective resistance and communal support can really look like, but it does not mention Benicio del Toro’s character in the film, Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, and his community activism in caring for undocumented families. Most people who had an issue with your review were frustrated by that kind of omission.
I thought it was quaint and trite, honestly. It’s not a new idea for underserved and marginalized communities to band together and take care of each other. The gravity of what we’re up against renders a movie like this, for me, passé. I thought it was a small part of the film, and I didn’t purposely omit it; I just thought it didn’t redeem what I found to be extremely goofy about the movie. People who make these movies are a bit detached from what’s happening in the world. Does it suggest a do-it-yourself system for migrants? I think we need more than that. That’s existed forever, that’s how these communities sustain themselves, right? That can’t be a strategy because once again, it lets most of us off the hook.
Many people who loved the film but disagreed with your argument felt the need to mention how well-written your piece was. What does that mean to you?
There’s a complexity of afterthought that good art engenders in you; it stays with you for days. It doesn’t mean that your film fails totally if there are things that someone thinks are wrong with it. I actually find those films sometimes to be more interesting.
The writer’s duty is to distill insights from the world generally, and when you’re writing about film, it’s to distill these larger universal truths from the film and contribute to this larger human conversation. If you can do that, if you can get people talking and thinking differently, more deeply, I think that you’ve achieved your goal. My only goal is furthering the conversation, deepening the conversation.
Do you see any silver linings or hopeful possibilities within Iowa regarding this political imagination?
There has to be some revisiting of whether or not what we’ve been doing is effective. We want to be optimistic, but you take a view of the last 12 years, it’s not a bright picture, right? But the reason I stayed there is because meaning exists in the small tragedies and small victories that make up a person’s life. I have met more interesting people, for better and worse, in Iowa City than anywhere I’ve lived. I try to remember that, although there are plenty of people who are dismissive of a place like Iowa City, the human condition lives in Iowa City in an amplified state. I met some of the most courageous and fascinating and devastating people there. The idea that big meaning exists in seemingly small narratives is something that Iowa City drove home as a place.
