Forms of the Implausible

On Frédéric Lordon’s Misreading of One Battle After Another

In a recent piece, Frédéric Lordon approaches Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film with his conclusions already in hand, a kind of a priori certainty that betrays an aesthetic traditionalism and prevents him from recognizing, in the very absurdities he mocks (such as the neo-Nazi headquarters of the “Christmas Adventurers”, with its minimalist design and built-in gas chamber), a form of deliberate exaggeration.

For these moments are not lapses of taste but strategies of critical hyperbole, the means by which Anderson renders the truth-content of a specific historical configuration. To demand realism here is to miss the point: the excess is part of the diagnosis. What Lordon condemns as implausible is, in fact, the necessary form of a critique attuned to its own time. His socialist-realist framework cannot register this.

More broadly, Lordon conflates a fragment of the bourgeois reception of the film with its own aesthetic and political project. He treats the enthusiasm of a particular audience as if it revealed the film’s inner meaning.

Yet One Battle After Another is not about “the Revolution” in the abstract; it is historically grounded – despite its temporal shifts between the militant legacies of the 70s-80s and the post-2008 landscape. Far from romanticizing armed activism, Anderson’s film criticizes precisely those vanguardist petty-bourgeois formations – the Weather Underground, the RAF, the Brigate Rosse, the Action Directe in France, the CCC in Belgium, the JRA in Japan – that sought to carry on a socialist revolution without any popular base. To read the film as a mere celebration of such movements is to invert its meaning.

Even more revealing is Lordon’s silence on what is arguably the film’s most powerful dimension, both ethically and aesthetically: the clandestine network that protects undocumented immigrants (by several accounts, largely Benicio del Toro’s invention). This sequence embodies the very collective process he insists is missing: popular organization and mutual aid, but also the apprenticeship of revolution, the people in motion, mainly the youth, rendered with exquisite photographic care.

Ultimately, Lordon’s piece has little to do with One Battle After Another itself. His true object is its reception by a narrow cultural milieu – the bourgeois-bohème de gauche – which he mistakes for the film’s message. In doing so, he abandons aesthetic analysis in favor of sociological caricature, reducing a complex cinematic experience to the projection surface of his own polemical habits.