Our Day Will Come
Sean T. Collins on One Battle After Another and Kneecap
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Sean T. Collins previously wrote for Hell World on The Hunting Wives, Sinners, Fargo, The Curse and the 2024 election; Sexy Beast, vampires and class warfare; Godzilla Minus One and the trauma of war; and the surveillance cinema of The Curse, The Zone of Interest and Skinamarink.
You may also appreciate this piece on the series Say Nothing and the history of hunger strikes.
Luke O’Neil
Our Day Will Come
by Sean T. Collins
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is not just the title of a movie — it’s a promise, a warning, a threat, and an advertisement. It leaves little doubt about what you are going to see when the lights go dim; people who watch this movie want, or at least think they want, to watch someone with a chain saw massacre people in Texas, and will spend the entire time until that first revving sound anticipating and dreading it. It’s like naming your band Alien Sex Fiend: You’ve ensured that your people, and perhaps only your people, will find you.
One Battle After Another takes a similar approach. Adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s somewhat less adventurously titled novel Vineland by Paul Thomas Anderson, the rechristened story does what it says on the tin, as the fella says. You go into the theater expecting an action film from one of America’s finest directors in which some guy is forced to spend the whole time fighting, and that’s what you get.
OBAA stars Leonardo DiCaprio as “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun, aka “Rocketman,” an explosives expert with a militant group that works to set immigrants free from federal concentration camps. When his long-time love interest Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) gets caught and rats everyone out to save her own ass, Pat goes into forced retirement. He adopts the name Bob Ferguson, raises his and Perfidia’s daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti, who has the most Pynchonesque name in the cast), and smokes a ton of weed. He becomes the Dude, is what happens.
Then he gets drawn back into the country’s years-long battle against its own rabidly racist and anti-immigrant authorities thanks to their living embodiment, Sean Penn’s Col. Steven J. Lockjaw. (I tend to hold up three things as the pinnacle of funny names — the work of Tim & Eric, the East/West Bowl sketches from Key & Peele, and the Space Mutiny episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, but Pynchon’s work is way up there.)