ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE CULTURE WAR

by David Guglielmo

I was recently on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, where we discussed Best Picture winner ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER. We both found it politically convenient, though I argued that its perceived ideology didn’t diminish its cinematic pleasures, likening it in a spur-of-the-moment comparison to THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY. Having since rewatched Anderson’s film, I find it aging well, especially when separated from the awards chatter and political discourse surrounding it.

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY is set during the American Civil War, though I rarely hear it called a war movie, much less a political one. It’s a Western adventure about a bounty hunter (Blondie, aka “The Good,” played by Clint Eastwood) and a criminal (Tuco, aka “The Ugly,” played by Eli Wallach), who find they need each other while searching for buried gold, and a third criminal (Angel Eyes, aka “The Bad,” played by Lee Van Cleef), who is on their tail.

The movie, shot in Spain and Italy, gives its mock Southwestern landscape a surreal tone and exaggerated aesthetic, existing in its own movie world, closer to Looney Tunes than real life. Everything is bigger, even—especially—the faces, which are treated as landscapes of their own, filling the screen in extreme close-ups where every laugh line and bead of sweat becomes a brushstroke on a canvas. Then, in a single cut, these faces give way to tiny figures dwarfed by vast, scenic landscapes. The good guys aren’t very good, in the John Wayne or Gary Cooper sense, and while Tuco goofily lacks a moral compass, Angel Eyes (a joke, since his eyes are beady and frightening) is nihilistically bad. All, including Blondie, are opportunists.

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER uses the large-format VistaVision as its canvas. Like THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY, it has the appearance of a larger-than-life “movie movie.” It’s set “now,” with politics ripped from the current headlines, but it’s an unspecified, timeless now, with no mention of Trump or any real-life political figure or party. The first act is set sixteen years earlier, against the backdrop of an immigration detention center in California, which, if placed within a recognizable American political chronology, might well fall under the Obama administration. This lack of specificity is deliberate, creating an alternate reality: a world we are familiar with, but not quite like this. Rather than confining the film to MAGA politics, Anderson suggests something more enduring, a political landscape that transcends any one administration.

The good guys in ONE BATTLE aren’t passing any moral purity tests. They are sloppy and dangerously violent revolutionaries. Perfidia (as in perfidious, played by a scowling Teyana Taylor) kills an innocent Black security guard, cheats, lies, and abandons her family before ratting out her crew to save her own ass. Meanwhile, Bob, now a single father, lives his life in a haze, drives drunk, preaches his self-righteous politics to people who actually give back, like schoolteachers, and physically intimidates his daughter’s friends. It’s a credit to Leo’s star power that this character comes off as anything but annoying. One of the film’s most touching moments is when he confesses that he didn’t know how to do his daughter’s hair. He’s been floundering ever since Perfidia abandoned them.

The bad guy, Steven Lockjaw (played by Sean Penn with a locked jaw), is a cartoon. It has been said Penn’s mannerisms were based on Popeye, but he could just as easily be Elmer Fudd. He’s a colonel whom we first meet at the immigration detention center (with a boner scene that should have been left on the cutting room floor) and the biological father of Willa (played by Chase Infiniti), the only character who resembles a real person. He’s sexually obsessed, tortured by his fetish for being dominated by Black women, and desperate to join the Christmas Adventurers Club, an elite group of influential white supremacists who all look like country-club Republicans and meet in secret basement tunnels while their wives make pancakes upstairs. Can we point to these people and say, “That’s Mike Pence,” or “That’s JD Vance”? Not exactly, but the archetype is familiar, in a comic-book way.

While we recognize that Lockjaw is repugnant, he drew a good many laughs in my screening. There are layers of vulnerability—however pathetic—that flirt with the idea of likability. I’d go so far as to say that PTA is inviting us to enjoy his company more than Perfidia’s.

But it’s Bob, his daughter, and her karate sensei, Sergio (played by Benicio del Toro), whom we root for. Bob is the neurotic father, well-meaning but compromised by his fears and vices. Lockjaw is the repressed authoritarian, whose military rank and obsession with power conceal a desperate need for approval. Sergio, by contrast, is the benevolent patriarch. Grounded and principled, he commands authority without needing to assert it. While Bob panics and Lockjaw grasps for control, Sergio simply gets things done and, as he instructs his pupils, always remembers to breathe. His composure plays wonderfully against Bob’s stoned hysteria, creating a comic dynamic not unlike the mismatched personalities in Leone’s film.

The audience isn’t asked to root for Bob and Sergio because they are leftists, or expected to align with their activism. It’s because we want a father and daughter to reunite after she is kidnapped by Lockjaw, much as we become invested in Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) in his search for his niece in John Ford’s THE SEARCHERS (to throw another Western into the conversation), even as his vile racism makes us question whether he’s really her savior. In both films, our emotional investment in the adventure doesn’t require us to share the protagonist’s worldview.

Is Leone commenting on capitalist greed and the absurdity of war? Considering he identified as a socialist, I’d say it’s highly likely. But what keeps us watching THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY is the rat race to the gold, the people and obstacles they encounter along the way, and how they cleverly double-cross and one-up each other. Leone uses cinematography, editing, and the great Ennio Morricone’s music to make a meal out of every stoic expression, every gust of wind, stretching the anticipation until it erupts into explosive action.

In both films, the politics aren’t merely decorative, but they don’t dictate our experience of either story. In this modern era, which we might call a cold civil war, or culture war, it’s these contradictions and the ambivalence they might inspire in an audience that make ONE BATTLE even more interesting. While Lockjaw might seem ideologically motivated by his white supremacy, his deeper ambition is to be accepted into a family. In the process, he breaks one apart, only to be killed by the very people he longs to join. His deepest desire becomes his undoing, a tragicomic irony that PTA and Sean Penn explore to far more memorable effect than a flatly evil stereotype.

There’s an interlude in ONE BATTLE where Willa takes refuge in a makeshift convent where her mother’s fellow revolutionaries now hide out and grow weed. The Spanish mission-style buildings resemble the stucco structures from the beginning of THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY, just as Jonny Greenwood’s “Guitar for Willa” recalls Morricone’s “Il Tramonto.” The revolutionaries dressed as nuns evoke other Spaghetti Westerns, which frequently place Catholic imagery alongside bandits and revolutionaries. Willa thinks she’s entering a space where she might be embraced as family, but instead finds herself disappointed. Similarly, Tuco visits his brother, a priest, and leaves dejected. Both movies pause their action-adventure for a vulnerable moment gone awry.

The long car chase at the end of BATTLE and the Mexican standoff at the end of THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY are both elaborate sequences of suspense leading to a catharsis in which geography, timing, anticipation, and a sudden burst of violence exemplify a pleasure unique to cinema, as opposed to a novel or a play. Leone creates suspense by withholding action, stretching a few seconds into an eternity through close-ups, editing, and Morricone’s music. Anderson does almost the opposite, to similar effect, creating suspense through movement as cars rise and fall over rolling hills, disappearing from sight. The landscape itself controls what the audience—and ultimately, one of the characters—can see. Neither sequence is literally in slow motion, but time is elongated and stretched.

The ending of ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER has been, to me, the most ideologically ambiguous part of the movie, mainly due to the earnest direction and final needle-drop. At face value, Willa is touched by the note her mother writes to her and decides to carry the torch, becoming more politically active through organized protests and disruption. Bob, who has spent the last sixteen years living in paranoia, learns to surrender. “Be careful,” he haphazardly warns her. “I won’t,” she replies.

Consider the end of THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY: Do we believe Tuco is going to take his share of the money left for him by Blondie—who shoots through his noose and frees him in the middle of the desert, with no horse or water—and be happy with his fate, never attempting to usurp Blondie again? Or do we believe the ending essentially opens the movie up for a sequel (one that never happened) in which he seeks revenge?

Similarly, Willa is setting out to follow in her mother’s footsteps, which is what got her family into this mess in the first place. Of course, political protest isn’t the same as violent revolution, but there can be a fine line—or a slippery slope, whichever idiom you prefer—and the possibility of repeating her mother’s mistakes looms over her decision. As Perfidia laments in her voice-over at the end of the first act, “Sixteen years later, the world has changed very little.” The audience, rather than accepting this as a happy ending, might expect more of the same. After all, it’s called ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER.

David Guglielmo is a casting director, filmmaker, and lifelong student of film. He writes about films because he loves them.