One Battle After Another

...the middle-aged woman edition

In the opening scenes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, we see Leo DiCaprio’s character running late to a work meeting. It’s not your average work meeting with your boss going over where we’re at with the capital campaign. No, it’s a meeting of revolutionary types. They’re standing outside, at the U.S./Mexico border. Dress code is revolutionary casual. Leo’s character is tugging a little wagon behind him. He’s there for a few seconds when a woman, who we’ll learn is named (amazingly) Perfidia Beverly Hills, approaches him. She wants to know what he’s got in his wagon. Leo’s character is like, “Thank you for asking. I got a lot of good stuff in there!”

Apologies for these photos of our TV hanging on a wall. I’m sure a young person would’ve known how to do this better.

The only problem, reports Leo (I believe his character’s name is Pat here), is that he doesn’t quite know what to do with his stuff.

Leo/ Pat is unclear how to proceed w his mortars

“Don’t be unclear!” -Perfidia Beverly Hills as well as a persistent, impatient voice inside my head

But Perfidia, and this is the total beauty of Perfidia, knows exactly what to do. Her confidence is intoxicating. I wanted to be near her, with her, close to her whenever she was onscreen. If you need some “direction”, like Leo/Pat does, she has more than enough for the whole class.

She gives Pat his orders in no uncertain terms. The stuff in his wagon is going to serve a very key function:

Don’t worry, I’m not going to take you scene by scene through this entire movie via photos of our TV screen. If you haven’t seen One Battle After Another, however, I do highly recommend it. I found it stunning and beautiful. A fun, borderline-joyous film about revolutionaries and white supremacists! I could’ve done without the very last scenes, but that’s for another essay and one I don’t want to write, at least not today.

What I want to write about is the tyranny of the desire to make progress. The ostensible instinct to keep moving forward, to resist stagnation (not to mention going backwards!) at all cost. I want to write about the related notion, introduced to me by the writer Oliver Burkeman, of the “insecure overachiever”: the kind of person like myself whose feelings of insecurity and inadequacy are kept at bay as long as they are achieving things, accomplishing things.

Back in November, when I read Burkeman’s description, part of me already knew this about myself, that I’m a goal-oriented person. I’m competitive. I honestly like to lift weights. I like to struggle.