One Battle After Another: The Rebel and the Revolutionary
Paul Thomas Anderson points at the unspoken pitfalls of revolutionary performance.
The revolutionary is part of the political world. His approach is through politics. His understanding is that changing the social structure is enough to change the man.
The rebel is a spiritual phenomenon. His approach is absolutely individual. His vision is that if we want to change the society, we have to change the individual. Society in itself does not exist; it is only a word, like ‘crowd’, but if you go to find it, you will not find it anywhere.
Wherever you will encounter someone, you will encounter an individual. (Osho, “Rebel”)
Perfidia Beverley Hills (played by Teyana Taylor), the main character for the first third of the movie, is barely attached to the French 75, the fictitious revolutionary group that begins with the raiding of an Immigration Control Enforcement (ICE) detention center and ends in a bank robbery.
During each operation, even though Perfidia spouts off her dislike of white patriarchy and conservative political positions, her actions make it seem like she’s taking care of personal vendettas rather than taking steps toward a brighter future.
After her child is born, instead of seeing it as the most tangible victory for changing the world, one person at a time, she is only resentful of its existence. After she walks away from her kid, we understand that her motivations are not for national or global change, but for power through violence and explosive action.
The political words she used kept her associated with social revolution while her actions were individualist chaos.
Jump forward 15 years and Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Bob Ferguson is looking for this kid after she was whisked away by the remains of the French 75 to protect her. He gets into contact with a revolutionary hotline, where he needs to speak in coded passwords to find his daughter’s location.
He forgets how to answer the last question: What time is it? The hotline hangs up on him.
Later, Bob is being aided by Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio Del Toro), who is actively helping dozens of immigrants hide from a town-wide ICE raid. Bob calls the hotline again and gets stuck on the same question: What time is it? Carlos, unaware of the real answer, mutters: 8:15.
Bob, forcing his way to a supervisor on the hotline, gets to someone that knows him and immediately receives the location of his daughter. Telling off the original hotline employee after getting the answer to what time is it, he yells, “You must not have a fucking kid!”
I’ve been thinking about this scene quite a bit because I think a good bit about how revolutions might fail, and one way that “One Batter After Another” considers failure is when the supposed revolutionaries mince over words and begin to gate-keep the authenticity of revolutionary action.
They fail when they become an institution of social hierarchy. You’re only real when you memorized the lingo and the systems of thought. Perfidia knew the lingo and the systems of thought, which is why she could sneak in her personal errands into the French 75.
But when honest, communal support can’t happen because a guy can’t remember all three of your club’s passwords, you know that you’ve become an institution that supports itself on image over action.
I think about a book by Murray Bookchin, “Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm” which minced words to dismiss a group of potential allies. He complained about the egoism of anarchists:
The ego — more precisely, its incarnation in various lifestyles — has become an idée fixe for many post-1960s anarchists, who are losing contact with the need for an organized, collectivistic, programmatic opposition to the existing social order. Invertebrate ‘protests,’ directionless escapades, self-assertions, and a very personal ‘recolonization’ of everyday life parallel the psychotherapeutic, New Age, self-oriented lifestyles of bored baby boomers and members of Generation X.
Here, Bookchin determines what “is” and “isn’t” revolutionary, and whether allies are even worth the effort to cultivate. Apparently if you don’t follow a collectivist structure of resistance, then you’re no better than the enemy.
What if we redirected the energy we put into dismissing adjacent philosophies toward organizing as a whole and working out the small differences while we head toward a brighter future? Instead, it is easier to mince around what it means to be “authentically X” rather than do the hard work of just doing the thing with the help of others.
So we go back to the above quote from Osho, that revolutionaries only think that change can happen at a political, structural level, while rebels choose to believe that it happens at the individual level. If honest-to-goodness allies can’t navigate these created structures when they need help or want to help and are actively dismissed, when do we actually “stand together”?
This is why I love Carlos’ answer to “what time is it?” It is the outsider’s answer, the answer of a guy who just does things without deep-diving into the “subreddits for revolution” and the anti-capitalist newsletters. As he organizes dozens of immigrants into a tunnel that will take them to a hopefully protected church, he hears a question and just answers the truth of the situation: It’s 8:15.
A person in action will always be more real than a person in thought. Think but act. And sometimes just act and think later. Act rebelliously, knowing that the world is changed with each changed action of the individual. Think rebelliously, knowing that you have the responsibility—and the ability—to do something a little different from the rest.
All the revolutionaries who have succeeded in capturing power have been corrupted by the power. They could not change the power and its institutions; the power changed them and their minds and corrupted them. Only names became different, but the society continued to remain the same.
A Gautam Buddha, a Zarathustra, a Jesus—these people are rebels. Their trust is in the individual. They have not succeeded either, but their failure is totally different than the failure of the revolutionary.
Revolutionaries have tried their methodology in many countries, in many ways, and have failed. But a Gautam Buddha has not succeeded because he has not been tried. A Jesus has not succeeded because Jews crucified him and Christians buried him. He has not been tried—he has not been given a chance.
The rebel is still an unexperimented dimension.
(Osho, “Rebel”)