One Battle After Another is a grand-scale, darkly funny film that skewers American hypocrisy. It’s satire at its sharpest—mocking one of the world’s most powerful yet absurd countries and its chaotic political system. And yet, for all the detestation it attracts (these days even from Indian far-right voices), the U.S. has also nurtured some of the best minds, writers, and filmmakers of our times.
As Malayalis, we’re often overfed with left-leaning literary recommendations to the point where we begin to believe Americans can’t write—especially not against their beloved capitalist system. This is absolutely untrue. The country has produced and welcomed plenty of writers who boldly critique its rottenness, and it even became a haven for great exiled thinkers when fascism swept their own nations—Marai being just one example.
The movie itself follows a group of activists in the 1960s, inspired by global communist movements, who dream of sparking revolution in the U.S.—only to fail spectacularly. Two decades later, we meet them again, pulled back together when one man tries to track down a girl he suspects is his daughter. That man, ironically, is a white supremacist hoping to join an elite-run extremist club. From there, a cat-and-mouse game unfolds, brimming with biting humor and relentless mockery of everything America claims to stand for.
Watching it on an IMAX screen was a feast for the eyes, and for me, one of the best cinematic experiences of the year.
It’s worth noting that the movie is inspired by the novel Vineland, written by one of the most enigmatic voices in American literature, Thomas Pynchon. It’s not a page-by-page adaptation, of course—PTA has only borrowed some of the novel’s core ideas and reimagined them on screen.
Interestingly, I’ve also been reading William Gass’s The Tunnel, another dense and often staggering work. Like Pynchon, Gass wields sarcasm masterfully, though his focus is the Nazi era.
I used to avoid writers like Rushdie and Naipaul simply because some random columnist had trashed them—a mistake I recognized sometime back. And I can’t help but laugh at the thought that history is repeating itself: critics still dismiss certain books, perhaps because these novels are enormous, demanding “chunksters” that require real effort to get through. Maybe that’s why our so-called genius critics avoided them like the plague back then(To be honest, they were mostly just trying to pose as wise, righteous leftists who claimed to hate imperialist America). Hilarious.
If nothing else, I hope this movie nudges more people toward serious American fiction—because there’s a whole world of it waiting beyond the usual recommendations.
Also, while reading The Suicide Museum, by Ariel Dorfman, I was struck by its references to Che’s failure to gain support from local communists, the impunity of Allende’s murderers who were never brought to proper trial, and the persecution of his supporters by the so-called democratic government that followed Pinochet’s fascist rule. What fascinates me is how often people cast these histories in a haze of purity, clinging to wishful notions of some supposedly ideal past—while overlooking the harder, more unsettling realities.
In the end, only deeper, more honest reading can free us from this comforting but dangerous illusion.