ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER: The Biggest Battle is for Love

Sometimes you have to build a tough wall against vulnerability. That can make you “go dead” to love. That’s one of the battles in Paul Thomas Anderson’s unflinchingly honest film, One Battle After Another. When you have to be tough, it’s not easy to let love come first, or to let it in at all. That’s the story of “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun and Perfidia Beverly Hills. Love is especially hard for Perfidia. For her, love threatens freedom, makes her feel controlled, but is she really free at all?

Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) has her priorities. She passionately loves Ghetto (Leonardo DiCaprio) and is as hungry for him as Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) later is for her. But giving herself over to the power of her love for Ghetto (and later her baby) interferes with her single-minded mission to stop the cruelty and control over bodies and lives. “We warned you. You didn’t listen.”

Ghetto loses her. Perhaps he’s had other losses in his childhood. We don’t know. Each has their reasons, seated in early fears and oppression. Ghetto is vulnerable to loss. Perfidia to control. And, when you’re scared, you can’t let anything break you down or make you soft. You can’t be vulnerable. That makes love a problem.  That makes you go dead. Perfidia runs and hides, Ghetto shrouds his feelings with drugs. For both Perfidia and Ghetto, it's One Battle After Another.

 Battle Against Vulnerability

Love makes you vulnerable. Rejection. Hurt. Loss. You don’t always get what you want. You could lose your freedom. These fears can bleed over into the love you need, as it does for Perfidia, in One Battle After Another. Perfidia wields her gun: “This is the fun. The gun is the fucking fun.” It’s like she doesn’t even notice she’s pregnant. And, when their daughter is born, love is threatened in Perfidia’s eyes. All Ghetto sees is the baby. She’s jealous, but can’t know it. He tells her, “We’re family now. You don’t have to do this anymore.” “I put myself first, you realize that, don’t you? You want your power over me. You’ll never do the revolution like me.” Her mom thinks the same; she sees Ghetto as lost. But he’s not as lost when it comes to love as Perfidia is.

Ghetto doesn’t want control; he wants to be heard. He wants to give their baby, Charlene (Willa), what she needs. But someone else’s needs are a threat to Perfidia. She feels taken over, possessed, robbed of who she’s always been (a free spirit), sucked dry, and (really) terrified.

Lockjaw is the poster child for anti-vulnerability. Look at his jutted-out jaw. His strut. The violence that is supposed to pass for strength. He’s a study in going against his real feelings. Perfidia too. Yet, on the outside, her cause is for truth and fairness. His is for lies, superiority. But Perfidia lies about her feelings. Ghetto (Bob), later, does too, with drugs and alcohol. If you fight vulnerability, you can’t be open to love. Is it a battle against being controlled or a battle to control your feelings?

Battle Against Control

All around, there’s cruelty and attempts at control in One Battle After Another. “Free Borders. Free Bodies.” That’s the opening message. No one should dictate how you live. No one has the right to rob you of personal freedom and choice. It’s a political message, to be sure. But it’s also a personal one. And many people, like Perfidia, will not be constrained, even by love and need.

Being robbed of freedom leads to Anger. Revolt. But rebellion itself has its opposition. And, Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw is Perfidia’s main antagonist. For him, rebellion is power over his inclination to love the “wrong” woman, since “white is might.” He needs the approval of men like those in the Christmas Adventurers Club to assure his masculinity. But he can’t know that.

So, not only is he cruel to the immigrants he rounds up and imprisons, he’s equally cruel to Perfidia, whom he secretly desires and covets. He is certainly not acceptable to the Club if they find out he loves her. Or impregnated her. So, he apprehends Perfidia. Imprisons her. She abandons her family for freedom and ends up as Lockjaw’s captive, later disappearing. As hard as she fights for “Black Power” and her own, Lockjaw is equally determined. He’s also very angry.

Plus, Lockjaw has his male pride. As much as he desires her, Perfidia has humiliated him. Forced him to succumb to his taboo desire. So, Lockjaw, who is insecure and was probably shamed early in his life, is as bent on turning the tables as Perfidia is. They’re head-to-head for a long time. It’s vulnerability against anti-vulnerability. Both believe vulnerability leads to shame.

Battle Against Shame

When your mission is anti-vulnerability, you cannot allow defeat. Defeat means feeling things you don’t want to feel. If you do, you feel vulnerable. If you want love, like Perfidia, you feel shame.

Perfidia comes from generations of oppression. She knows danger. She’s sly, sometimes not so careful, mocking those who try to bring her down. So far, she’s managed to get away with it, until she comes “face-to-face with Colonel Steve J. Lockjaw in the bathroom. She’s got him for the moment: “Get it up ... Get on your fucking knees. Get it up. Keep that dick up.” Little does she know that black women turn Lockjaw on. Is it humiliation? Really, it’s a rebellion in One Battle After Another.

Later, Lockjaw finds her planting explosives in the bathroom. He’s been spying on her to track her down. Humiliation fights humiliation. Now he has her. His threat: “If you want to keep doing what you’re doing, meet me at the Primrose Path 2300 ... He wants her in more ways than one. She meets him with her gun. Soon, we see her with Ghetto, and she’s so pregnant she’s about to burst.

It’s not long before Perfidia abandons her family, seizes her freedom, and continues her revolution. Ghetto, devoted to their baby, gives up the old fight for love of his daughter. Too soon, Perfidia is captured by “Steven J. Lockjaw, bringing justice against the revolutionaries!” Thrown into jail, she pleads with Lockjaw: “You can save me.” She becomes his prisoner (a prisoner of her anti-vulnerability campaign). Ghetto and Charlene, targets now, are put into a protection program, becoming “Bob and Willa Ferguson.” Ghetto doesn’t know if Perfidia is alive or dead.

 All his losses send him into despair.

Battle Against Despair

Ghetto, now Bob, has lost everything except his daughter. His identity, name, life as he knew it, all his comrades, and Perfidia. He loves Willa (Chase Infiniti) and does his best to be a good dad. But his inability to tolerate his losses, his loneliness, his anger – well, any of his feelings - makes him a drug addict. That’s what happens when you want any form of escape you can get. Perfidia, forced to turn on her comrades, escapes Lockjaw to Mexico. “Bob,” paranoid, goes to the land of drugs and alcohol.

But you can’t escape your fears (or if you’re Perfidia, your guilt) as hard as you might try. Bob’s terrified of more loss – of something happening to Willa now that she’s a teenager and as strong-willed as any teenager (and her mom). So, Bob is in a battle against his despair, loneliness, having no purpose, and his paranoid terror of more loss. (He told the High School that Willa’s mom died when she was young. The teacher said, “Very hard on a girl to grow up without her mom.”)

Maybe even harder on her dad, in One Battle After Another. He’s battling against feeling how much he loved Perfidia. And how much he loves Willa now. Love is scary. You can lose the people you love the most. That’s harder than fighting any revolution. In fact, trying not to feel your losses is its own kind of revolt. And it makes Bob paranoid, plus not totally there. “Freedom’s a funny thing. When you’ve got it, you have it; when you don’t, you don’t.” He doesn’t realize how much more “freedom” he’s about to lose ... because Willa is suddenly gone.

His child in danger turns him stone-cold sober. 

The Biggest Battle is for Love

Bob loves Willa. He always has. He makes sure she has her tracking device so that he knows where she is at all times. He gets “agro” with her friends when he lets her go to a dance, out of fear that she won’t be safe. But to let himself feel the depth of his love is another story. He lost Perfidia. Feeling love can be scary. So, what do you do not to feel? You drink, do drugs, run away, “go dead.”

Neither is safe. Lockjaw wants Willa and Bob gone, terminated, with no evidence that he loves Black women – since that’s sacrilege to the Christmas Adventure Club. So, violence, even killing, is better than being rejected. There’s no love in Lockjaw. Just greed and self-interest.

Not Bob. He’ll face every risk in the world to save Willa. When Willa’s whisked off by one of the French 75s, she asks her rescuer, “What about my dad?” “He’ll know what to do. He trained for this.” But Bob, after years of drug addiction, can’t remember the password. He tells himself: “Don’t panic, Bob, don’t get fucking paranoid, do what you got to do.” And, so Bob does.

Love proves to be the biggest and most important battle in One Battle After Another. For love, there’s no slacking, no hiding in drug-induced hazes, no time for wallowing in your losses. Because Willa, his daughter, is finally more important than anything else, especially than himself.

He has to find her. Lockjaw, the tough, determined, anti-vulnerability macho-male, is in hot pursuit. Yes, Bob is vulnerable. Scared of loss. And, he finally lets himself feel it. He’s freaking out, panicking, paranoid. The sensei (Benicio del Toro), centered and calm, steadies him. “Courage, Bob, Courage.” Bob/Ghetto had all the courage in the world ... when it wasn’t about love.

 Coming Alive Is the Answer

In love, you can’t hide. You’re vulnerable. You’re terrified. But you feel it. And, Bob uses love to find his daughter: “It’s your dad, Willa, look at me” ... he’s reassuring his brave but terrified child.

The reality that he could lose Willa sobered Bob up. And, Willa doesn’t have to be so tough because she has her dad in a way that she hasn’t. Fully present. They cry, something Bob hasn’t done, didn’t do, when he lost Perfidia and his old identity. In saving Willa, he got himself back.

Bob’s an old revolutionary – but this time he fights a personal revolution. Bob changes inside himself. The biggest battle of all - for love – out of love – finally brings Bob to his feelings, to his anger at those who robbed him, to his grief, to his vulnerability (against his own toughness), fighting for what is most important – love. This fight is facing his truth: “Are you ok, are you ok?” He looks his daughter over to be sure. Being honest about feelings. That’s the real cause.

The power of Bob’s love wins the biggest battle of all - against all the forces against it: vulnerability, hate, fear of loss, grief, greed, possessiveness, cruelty, and control. Defeating, in the end, the anti-vulnerability, anti-life that Lockjaw represents.  And, it doesn’t hurt to have a steady, kind Sensei, who is there when you need him and knows a lot about family and love.

Bob gives Willa Perfidia’s letter: “I preferred my whole life to be strong, to be dead ... is it too late? I think about you every day. Maybe someday you’ll find me.” Perfidia found herself. When you’re scared of being vulnerable, the biggest battle is to come alive to your feelings and admit to love.