Residual Revolution

The Quiet Politics of Vineland and One Battle After Another

When Thomas Pynchon published Vineland in 1990, the novel read as a post-Reagan elegy for the long twilight of the ’60s, populated by ex-radicals, countercultural communes, and a society that had learned to domesticate dissent. Thirty-five years later, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, his loose, fever-bright adaptation of Vineland, feels tuned to our late-digital moment: a vision of political disillusion refracted through cinematic spectacle.

One Battle After Another has been justly praised on many fronts: for its storytelling, plot construction, pacing, and blending of multiple tonal registers (political satire, action thriller, noir comedy), as well as for the profound humanity of the main characters, so vividly rendered that even the worst of them, the cruel and despicable Col. Lockjaw, elicits a fleeting sense of empathy by the end , which is not the case with the even more vile and obnoxious “Christmas adventurers”.

The cast, to be sure, delivers career-best performances, breathing life into every nuance. And visually, the film is indeed a feast, filled with arresting vistas and breathtaking sequences  – from the opening border-wall tableau to the final car chase, with the camera arcing and plunging like a surfer chasing a monstrous wave –, all crafted with artistry and bound together by Jonny Greenwood’s astonishing score, which functions not merely as accompaniment but as an interpretive force in its own right.

And yet, critical reservations have emerged, particularly regarding the film’s depiction of revolution and political action, and the ambiguity of its moral centre; reservations that open a window onto its dialogue with Vineland.

Pynchon’s novel is a sustained meditation on lost revolutionary potential and how remnants of that energy might still be tapped at a time of political exhaustion. Set in 1984, it continually flashes back to the ’60s counterculture, where spectral figures  ( the Thanatoids ) are haunted by the defeats of that era’s radical movements. By contrast, One Battle After Another has been criticized, particularly from a leftist perspective, for transforming political longing into spectacle, turning resistance into mere display. In this view, revolutionary desire becomes kink or stylistic flourish rather than collective orientation, obscuring the subtler, enduring political currents that Pynchon cultivates.

Such a binary  – the power of memory versus the seduction of spectacle  – misses the deeper continuity between the works. Vineland reflects a moment of disillusionment. Pynchon looks back at the ’60s through the lens of the Reagan era, defined by corporate dominance, militarization, and the emergence of the culture wars , features that today attain the paroxysm.

Though the Vietnam War was over, the psychic aftermath of both the war and the counterculture’s failure to sustain its radical ideals remained vivid. The novel is thus less an exercise in nostalgia than an inquiry into the collapse of a particular vision of freedom and revolution, exploring the gulf opened between promise and reality.

Pynchon portrays a generation suspended between the remnants of non-conformism and the entrenched conservative order that replaced it, a moment when resistance was simultaneously fragmented, repressed, and co-opted, caught in the constant tension between the desire for transformation and the crushing weight of power structures.

The connection between the two periods is tenuous but not entirely lost. Prairie Wheeler, the fourteen-year-old daughter of former radicals, embodies this fragile continuity. She may not inherit her mother Frenesi Gates’s revolutionary fervor, yet she still inhabits a world shaped by that earlier struggle.

Beneath its comic surface, Vineland exposes the legacy of COINTELPRO-style repression and the ways in which the state systematically dismantled and absorbed anti-establishment dissent. Though that utopian charge has waned, Pynchon suggests that traces persist, in memory, in scattered acts of resistance, and in the absurd resilience of figures like Zoyd Wheeler.

In Vineland, the middle names of Prairie’s parents  –  Frenesi Margaret Gates and Zoyd Herbert Wheeler  – function as covert historical signifiers that condense the ideological shift from the radical ’60s to the neoliberal ’80s. “Margaret” invokes Thatcher and the consolidation of market hegemony, while “Herbert” alludes to Marcuse, emblem of the countercultural Left. Frenesi personifies seduction and betrayal: a onetime radical turned state collaborator, moving from underground film collectives to work for the Nixonian political pornography machine. Zoyd, by contrast, now hapless, aging, and stuck in ritualized rebellion, represents a ghostly trace of that earlier intellectual ferment, now faded into nostalgia and farce. 

Their unlikely union, producing Prairie, allegorizes the fusion of these antagonistic legacies: the utopian impulse of the ’60s  –  the radical vision of a civilization of Eros  – absorbed and neutralized within the hyper-commodified, “post-ideological” landscape of the Reagan era. Through this pairing, Pynchon dramatizes the passage from the utopian and collectivist aspirations of the New Left to the besieged and managed subjectivity of late imperial America.

That’s where the deviations and overlapping between Pynchon’s novel and Anderson’s film come into play. As critic Rory Doherty notes in his review for Time magazine: 

“Apart from their contrasting structural approaches and character backstories, the biggest difference between text and film is setting. Vineland is overflowing with period detail, often ludicrous and sometimes satirically invented, rooted in the history of radicals being expunged by the Nixonian establishment, leading to the inevitable, reductive confines of Reagan’s ‘War on Drugs’ project. But the immediacy of One Battle After Another  – with its ICE-like detention camps, unlawful militias storming American streets, and elites who promote white supremacy in closed-door meetings  – was intended to embellish the spirit of Vineland rather than undermine it.”

Both novel and film imagine the wreckage of American radicalism, but they do so through different narrative devices and angles. In Pynchon’s novel, the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll (PR³) and the film collective 24fps form a paired allegory for the counterculture’s collapse into image and surveillance. In One Battle After Another, the militant faction French 75 re-stages that collapse in a more literal, violent key, turning the mediated irony of Pynchon’s world into a cinematic drama of insurgency and defeat. Taken together, they trace the passage from revolution as festival to revolution as ghost story.

In Vineland, PR³ is born from the irreverent utopian impulse of the ’60s: a college enclave that proclaims itself a sovereign micro-nation of peace, music, and weed. Pynchon renders it with the tone of a deadpan fable: the moment when political desire turns theatrical. Yet its very theatricality bears the imprint of its undoing. The members of the commune are already performing their freedom for the camera, which belongs to 24fps, the film collective that both documents and aestheticizes dissent. When Frenesi, 24fps’s camerawoman, begins filming for the authorities, the line between art and surveillance blurs. The revolution’s dream of visibility curdles into exposure. 

Allegorically, PR³ and 24fps represent the two faces of late-’60s radicalism: the yearning for liberated community and the fatal belief that liberation could be seen , that image was truth. Pynchon suggests that the counterculture’s tragedy lay not in repression alone but in its transformation into spectacle, its incorporation into the media economy it meant to overthrow.

One Battle After Another retools this parable into a more direct historical allegory. Its insurgent cell, French 75, condenses the real-world Weather Underground and similar militant groups that turned from protest to armed struggle. Where PR³ parodies the carnival republic, French 75 enacts the firing squad’s logic, yielding to the twin temptations of moral witness and elite voluntarism: the despairing revolt of a dissident petty-bourgeois group without a popular base.

The film compresses Pynchon’s layered temporality into a streamlined narrative of rise and ruin: bombings, betrayals, the erosion of ideals. Allegorically, French 75 stands for the afterimages of the ’60s, the moment when the spectacle of revolution sought to shatter itself through violence, only to become another genre of entertainment. The movie’s sleek cinematography and rhythmic editing make its very depiction of militancy complicit in the spectacle it critiques, accentuating that in both media ecologies, there is no exit from mediation.

Thus, PR³/24fps and French 75 form a dialectic. If Pynchon’s countercultural rebels are undone by representation, Anderson’s radicals implode in the immediacy of outrage. One is undone by the camera, the other by the gun. Between them unfolds the allegory of American idealism’s decay: the slow drift from communal euphoria to paranoia, from visibility to its weaponization.

By transforming PR³’s stoned republic into French 75’s guerrilla network, One Battle After Another trades Pynchon’s postmodern melancholy for tragic immediacy, yet both works end in the same space: the Reaganite (or Trumpist, it makes no difference) wasteland where rebellion survives only as image, an image that, in Anderson’s hands, intensifies rather than resolves that condition.

In that sense, PR³, 24fps, and French 75 are not different factions but sequential masks of the same fallen dream. Each names a stage in the long allegory of resistance: first the commune, then the camera, then the cell, each crushed, recorded, and replayed, until nostalgia is all that remains.

Yet there is another side to this story. Despite their differing emphases, both book and film are less concerned with simply recalling the past than with imagining how resistance, drawing on past experience, might persist in the present.

In Vineland, Pynchon’s focus on family (Prairie, Zoyd, Frenesi) and on the fragile solidarity of those left behind after the collapse of the counterculture points to the endurance of resistance through everyday care, loyalty, and kinship. If One Battle After Another carries this impulse forward, then what might appear to some viewers as spectacularization becomes instead a cinematic retranslation of that same political energy: a vision of how small solidarities, improvised alliances, and acts of attention persist within the hypermediated landscape of late neoliberalism. The parallel with Vineland might, in this sense, shed further light on this transformation.

Pynchon’s novel moves in the dreamlike, mnemonic, and fragmentary logic that defines his work: memory, transgression, failure, and the not-yet matter as much as the ostensible plot. Dreams and fantasies in Pynchon often operate as latent sites of political desire.

In Vineland, Prairie, the teenage girl yearning to reunite with her mother, stands in for the desire to maintain continuity with a radical past, a past foreclosed amid Reagan’s re-election campaign and by the then already omnipresent Tube (television), yet enduring virtually. Prairie inherits history and its defeats, though not in the same way as her parent’s generation. The crushed utopian energies of the ’60s persist, lingering in the present and waiting for another historical opening.

Watching archival footage of an earlier protest, she feels a belated surge of its lost intensity: 

“Even through the crude old color and distorted sound, Prairie could feel the liberation in the place that night, the faith that anything was possible, that nothing could stand in the way of such joyous certainty. She’d never seen anything like it before.” (Vineland, London: Minerva, 1990, p. 210)

Unlike in other Pynchon novels, where stronger revolutionary dynamics offer some measure of redemption  –  think the rocket counterforce in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) or the anarchists of Against the Day (2006)  – Vineland presents a kind of smaller-scale survival. This has little to do with the survivalism of contemporary ideology; it concerns instead the endurance of a daughter, a broken family, a deferred dream. The novel’s ironic, “sitcom-like” closure signals the collapse of grand revolutionary energies, yet it also preserves the conditions for residual hope, as a not-yet-conscious desire.

Domesticity, seemingly apolitical, acquires a quiet political charge: everyday intimacy  – family, storytelling, solidarity  – carries its own utopian weight, a quiet refusal to surrender to surveillance and state power.

Back to Anderson’s film, reading it solely as a spectacle-driven flattening of utopian potential misses its attention to alternative forms of resistance: the ways family (however dysfunctional), lasting friendship, and the solidarity of margin-walkers operate as loci of present-day political possibility, echoing Vineland’s intimate counterforces.

In both works, “family” does not mean private retreat but a resistant social microstructure. In Vineland, Prairie’s search for her mother and the reconstitution of family becomes an allegory for rebuilding social memory and solidarity among the dispossessed. In One Battle After Another, family or communal ties among marginal figures resist incorporation into spectacle.

The margins, here, are not merely social but ontological , spaces of possibility where people can still act outside pre-scripted media narratives. This is Pynchon’s “counterforce” transposed into the visual register: not heroic revolution but distributed, everyday persistence.

Consider, for instance, Sensei Sergio’s  (Willa’s Latino karate teacher)  quiet kindness, resourcefulness, and composure, each put to work within the underground network protecting undocumented immigrants from fascist violence. Also, in the same sequence of this whole alternative organization of urban daily life  – one of the film’s highpoints –, the row-on-skateboard shot: youth in motion becomes a visual motif for marginality and improvisation, recalling the latent, restless energies of Pynchon’s world.

Skateboarding and urban or suburban youth culture resurge here as a figurative synthesis of life pulsating through camaraderie, rebellion, freedom, and the survival of alternative social spaces within rigidly structured, often oppressive environments. Like Prairie’s navigation of domestic and marginal spaces in Vineland, these fleeting moments of youthful mobility suggest the ongoing possibility of living otherwise, of asserting autonomy and solidarity under conditions that would otherwise constrain and surveil. In such gestures, Anderson’s new film finds its quiet politics: not the spectacle of sacrifice, but the slow labour of care. Not, therefore, a revolution televised, but one quietly sustained, in movement, memory, and ongoing attention.

Still, as Richard Brody recently noted in The New Yorker, whereas films such as Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) and Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) sustained a documentary rapport with real activists and with the immediate experience of the political action they depict, One Battle After Another privileges instead the register of affective labor, resulting, according to the critic, in a film that is at once “brilliant and hollow”, “a vision of hopeful possibilities” yet “unmoored from realities”.

What may appear as vacuity, however, is less a failure of the film than the index of an objective impasse. The absence of direct “revolutionary labor” reflects the very logic of late neoliberalism, in which collective action, in the context of displaced industrialization and hyperproductivity, has been utterly fragmented, depleted, and aestheticized.

Ultimately, both Vineland and One Battle After Another converge in the imagination of a politics of the remainder, a politics of what persists when the grand narratives of emancipation seem exhausted. Pynchon had already intuited, amid the conservative backlash of the ’80s, that resistance would survive less as armed insurgency than as residual energy, dispersed through everyday gestures of care, memory, and solidarity. Anderson, in turn, translates this intuition into the visual regime of the twenty-first century, in which total mediation and spectacle have replaced direct experience. His wager is that pockets of meaning and community can still be cultivated within this regime: autonomous zones of affect and attention, where politics is relearned as a patient and shared practice.

Far from standing in opposition to collective organization, these zones may in fact be more closely in tune with forms of control of economic power devised by and for the working class, rooted in networks of material solidarity, mutual care, and the democratic reappropriation of urban space, and the available resources and means of production and survival.

What the film inherits from Vineland is not merely disillusionment, but the persistence of the possible in a time when we seem unable to see even a hand’s breadth ahead: a minimal utopia, that insists on germinating beneath the ruins of the spectacle.

[A previous version of this piece appeared in Portuguese on A Terra é Redonda]

Patchworks of the Possible

Reinvesting Meaning in 'Postmodern' Art

In contemporary discourse, postmodernism is frequently reduced to a catch-all for fragmented, ironic, or pastiche-driven art, a flattening that obscures how these same techniques can carry radically different aesthetic and political intentions. While irony, eclecticism, and the blurring of high and low culture define much postmodern art, not all works using these devices are cynically detached or nihilistic. 

Thomas Pynchon’s novels are dense, fragmented, and full with intertextual references – all hallmarks of postmodern fiction. Yet his stories are imbued with a deep concern for history, technology and power relations. The paranoia in Gravity's Rainbow or The Crying of Lot 49 is not merely stylistic; it reflects a sincere critique of systems of control and the erosion of personal agency. In Vineland, this preoccupation takes the form of a meditation on the legacy of 60s counterculture and its suppression by the increasingly ubiquitous state apparatus. The novel's apparent lightness of tone conceals a darker interrogation of how memory, media and surveillance overlap to neutralize dissent. Pynchon describes the transformation of resistance into nostalgia and the commodification of rebellion, while the omnipresent Tube echoes the broader postmodern condition of a reality thoroughly mediated by images. Vineland retains Pynchon's characteristic playfulness and humor, for sure, but it is also critical and profoundly human, revealing the tragic decline of utopian hopes in the context of corporate capitalism.

In films like Neighboring Sounds and Aquarius, Kléber Mendonça Filho blends realism with genre tropes – a postmodern trait – yet the result is neither hollow nor purely stylistic. Instead, these formal experiments are deeply rooted in Brazilian urban and social realities. The fragmentation in his storytelling mirrors the fractured nature of class structures and memory in contemporary Recife. His aesthetic is political, and his politics are aesthetic: each cinematic technique reinforces a lived experience of inequality (the tensions and clashes between classes), resistance, and identity.

Musically, Manu Chao is a collage artist par excellence. But while his songs span languages, genres, and geographies, this eclecticism does not amount to a playful anything-goes devoid of meaning; it reflects a politics of internationalism and solidarity (for years it was the main soundtrack of alter-globalism); it uses musical pastiche to elevate scattered voices, to protest borders, and to foreground the experiences of migrants and the marginalized. In contrast to the depoliticized, ironic pastiche often critiqued in postmodernism, his patchwork aesthetic is a joyous call to action.

To this list we might also add the work of Judy Baca and the broader tradition of L.A. muralism. Far from embracing postmodern detachment, Baca’s monumental community murals – such as The Great Wall of Los Angeles – reimagine public space as a canvas for collective memory and historical redress. These visual narratives, built collaboratively with hundreds of young people from marginalized communities, defy commodification through their scale, permanence, and rootedness in place. They turn postmodern plurality into an act of solidarity rather than dispersion, and in doing so, exemplify an aesthetics of resistance grounded in class and grassroots political practice. 

To group all these artists under a monolithic view of postmodernism is to misread their work. Yes, they use techniques usually associated with postmodernism, but with radically different intentions. Their art is not a celebration of surface, but a dive into structure, systemic logic, and soul rebellion. In an era where cultural production is increasingly remix-based, they demonstrate that not all collage is kitsch, not all pastiche is empty; that some patchworks are maps of survival, and some fragments carry the charge of a future still in formation.

Though stylistically diverse, they share a refusal to treat aesthetic form as mere ornament, operating at the crossroads of artistic invention and political intervention. In this, they align more closely with the modernists, resisting accommodation with capitalism, eschewing production tailored simply to the demands of mass media. Style does not dissolve into spectacle; rather, it becomes a way of tracing the fractures of subjectivity under neoliberalism without conceding to fatalism. The subject in their work may be wounded, dispersed, surveilled, but never entirely crushed. Even in fragmentation a voice persists, asking what it means to live, to love, to resist, to remember...  

Through a class-conscious lens, they illuminate rather than obscure the contours of social reality. Aesthetic value arises not in retreat of social struggle, but in its articulation – even when that struggle appears stalled. By reclaiming explicit social themes often dismissed or treated with suspicion in postmodern discourse, they reinvest critique with emotional content and historical force. They gain in acuity: their art does not simply reflect the world as it is; it exposes everything that should not be, and gestures toward what might yet come. It opens space for counter-histories, ways of seeing uncolonized by the dominant imaginaries. Meaning – or its pursuit – endures; and from the cracks, alternative visions of the future may still emerge.

The Hard Core of a Visionary Failure

On The Brutalist, or: A Blueprint for a Better Film

I decided to give The Brutalist a go the other night, despite the scathing reviews and overenthusiastic praise I had been reading, neither of which inspired confidence.

It wouldn’t be hard to explain why I didn’t like it. It’s riddled with loose ends, drags unnecessarily (I have no issue with long films, if the runtime is justified), and is overcooked in its ambition (I welcome ambition, as long as it delivers). It’s also annoyingly over-explanatory, to the point of patronizing the viewer. Do we really need an upside-down Statue of Liberty in the opening scene to foreshadow the downside of the American Dream? Do we need a verbal explanation that opium is addictive to grasp the protagonist’s struggles with the slaving habit?

But rather than listing its many flaws, I’d rather critique The Brutalist from the ruins of the good film it could have been.

Much has been said about The Brutalist’s use of VistaVision, but I can’t help but see it as fundamentally at odds with both the aesthetics and politics of Brutalism. Brady Corbet justifies the choice by saying that using a 1950s-engineered format helps immerse the viewer in that era, a valid argument if the goal were mere nostalgia. Yet Brutalism wasn’t about looking backward, quite the contrary.

Brutalism was raw, functional, and unvarnished, marked by exposed concrete, heavy massing, modular spaces, and an absence of decorative flourishes. VistaVision, on the other hand, is the complete opposite: a highly polished, immersive, hyperreal format designed to enhance visual clarity and depth, often used to capture grand, sweeping beauty with rich color and a sense of sumptuousness. It smooths out the rough edges, makes everything tonic, expansive, and like a painting.

Brutalism wasn’t about classical compositions and aesthetic perfection; it was about mass, social contradictions, and dynamic human experience. But The Brutalist turns it into a historical postcard, sanitizing its radicality. Instead of embracing Brutalism’s stark, defiant materiality, the film aestheticizes it into something detached from its political function. Soviet Constructivist cinematography – drawing from Dziga Vertov or Sergei Eisenstein – would have been a bolder choice, with its low angles, deep shadows, and exaggerated perspectives, better suited to capturing the architecture’s weight and presence rather than reducing it to an inert backdrop.

The film shows a flicker of awareness in its use of 16mm for documentary-style footage and Digital Betacam for the epilogue’s TV segment, but it never fully commits. Had it been shot in grainy, tactile, imperfect textures, it might have created a visual language that felt more like Brutalist concrete, rather than Hollywood grandeur.

Brutalism has long suffered from being misrepresented as cold, authoritarian, and oppressive, when it was the opposite: a radical response to capitalism’s failures, designed for public good, committed to communal experience and social equality. Beyond providing efficient and equitable housing with available resources, it aspired to a form of communal luxury.

As Owen Hatherley writes in Militant Modernism, British New Brutalists, like the ‘angry young’ Smithsons, working with raw materials at hand, aimed at creating architectural solutions that would unashamedly house the poor and at the same time be glamorous, ‘an architecture both of austerity and abundance, in line with the contradictions of the post-1945 melange of Socialism and Capitalism that created the post-war boom’. The Brutalist completely misunderstands this, tying Brutalism to personal trauma and aestheticized suffering, collapsing it into a story of individual grief rather than radical collective possibility.

Nowhere is this misreading more unsettling than in Tóth’s decision to model the Van Buren Institute on the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald, a place designed to dehumanize and exterminate millions of human beings. Even if it were meant as a deliberate provocation, a way of forcing people to confront the painful past, it would still be unfit (to say the least) for the purposes of a community center, typically a space of refuge and social connection. Furthermore, it undermines Brutalism’s core principles, which had nothing whatsoever to do with memorializing trauma, but rather with breaking from oppressive structures and envisioning new ones. Tóth’s project isn’t an architectural response to human needs; it’s a haunted echo of past horrors, reinforcing their weight rather than transcending them.

In the final take, Brutalism is presented as a relic, displayed at the Venice Biennale, an exclusionary setting deeply embedded in the parallel universe of high-art, where architecture is preserved as spectacle rather than integrated into daily life. By the time the epilogue takes place, in the beginning of the neoliberal era, Modernist solutions in general, and Brutalism in particular, were far from being celebrated (just ask Tom Wolfe!), they were being demolished, the whole social project actively dismantled – through neglect, privatization, and political shifts away from public investment in housing and infrastructure.

If anything, the ending should have led us to ask: ‘What did we lose by abandoning these ideals? By giving up collective solutions?’ Instead, it sounds like the film just shrugs and says: ‘That’s all, folks!’

Ironically, the only scene that seems to embody Brutalist ideals isn’t about architecture at all; it’s the jazz jam session.

Among other things, Brutalism was about creating spaces for diverse communities to coexist and interact: massive residential complexes built for working-class people, communal spaces integrated into the structure itself. It embraced imperfection, roughness, and stark contrasts. It was experimental, and anti-bourgeois. Jazz, at its best, would be in a way the musical equivalent: improvisational, innovative, intense, constantly bending sonic structures, breaking through social barriers. As Jacques Attali has pointed out in Noise, by rejecting conformity to the repetitive patterns dominating the post-war cultural landscape, jazz in the late '50s and '60s paved the way for a new mode of musical production. 

The jam session scene, where marginalized communities – Black musicians, Jewish émigrés, sex workers, and drug users – come together in a liberated space, mirrors somehow the social utopian design that most Brutalist architecture aspired to. It’s beautifully raw and alive, a radically democratic realm, where differences are sublated in unfettered collective creation.

Under the spell of a Mingus-like sound, it’s the one moment where the film’s world feels alive, where people aren’t just suffering in beautifully framed shots but actually living in defiance of the oppressive structures around them. The jazz scene succeeds where the rest of the movie fails; it shows what Brutalist spaces were meant to foster, rather than mourning their supposed blunder.

The otherworldly Carrara marble quarry sequence – filmed with such craft, with the Italian partigiano’s story being told in the background – echoes the jazz scene in its poetic and political intensity, creating a moment of solidarity between the wretched – the Jewish architect and the anti-fascist anarchist artisan – both negatively shaped by the experience of the war. The quarry, already a site heavy with symbolism (extraction, exploitation, brutal labor conditions), becomes for a minute almost an allegory of an alter world. The scene suggests a possible counterpoint to the film’s broader narrative of manipulation and sorrow; a moment in which creation, resistance, and lived experience align in an act of shared defiance and beauty.

But then, this is bluntly shattered by an act of sexual abuse, a narrative misstep that weakens the film’s own critique. If we think about its storyline economy, what each scene contributes to the whole, the scene feels gratuitous rather than revelatory. If the goal was to show Tóth’s breaking point, hadn’t his years of psychological and economic subjugation under the patronage of Van Buren already established that? Instead of letting the political weight of the scene breathe, the film forces a moral collapse, as if it didn’t trust us to grasp Tóth’s suffering unless it’s pushed to the extreme.

The free-association between the ideas of Brutalism and brutality was already advanced and explored – way more successful if I may add – more than 50 years ago in Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, filmed partially at the Southmere Estate in Thamesmead. In The Brutalist, however, it doesn’t add depth but reduces the complexity of power and coercion to another victimization trope.

The film had already built an effective critique of how power operates subtly, through favor, economic dependence, and artistic compromise in a capitalist society, but by inserting this sudden physical brutality, it shifts focus away from those more insidious, systemic forces.

Had the director trusted the strength of scenes like the jazz jam and the quarry sequence to carry their own weight, it could have provided a radical counterpoint to Van Buren’s world – the world of privilege, narcissism, and exceptionalism of the ultra-rich – a glimpse of what art, labor, and solidarity might look like outside the logic of profit and exploitation. Instead, the intrusion of sexual violence collapses those possibilities, reducing moments of potential dissent into yet another iteration of victimhood and suffering.

Even worse: instead of confronting the master, the offended, tellingly, turns against his fellow exploited, including Gordon, the Black co-worker he befriended at the start of his American journey, and who vanishes from the screen just as inexplicably as Van Buren at the end.

At its best, The Brutalist had the potential to explore the tension between artistic vision and capitalist patronage, between radical architecture and its later misinterpretation. But instead of engaging with these contradictions, it romanticizes, aestheticizes, and ultimately misunderstands its own subject, painting Brutalism as mere historical relic, in lieu of a political statement, a vision of the future that never came to be. The movie doesn't challenge the neoliberal erasure of that alternative future; it accepts it rather, as if it were inevitable. And that, more than anything, is its greatest failure.  

Reveries of a Lonely Robot

Post-Apocalyptic Humanity and Utopian Longing in WALL-E

For Andreas, petit camarade

Ideology is never merely ideological. Walter Benjamin saw in Walt Disney’s early animated films a subversive potential, a touch of the surreal that prefigured a utopian vision of a deregulated world where anything could happen. In Mickey Mouse, he identified both a radical renunciation of experience and the libertarian fantasy of complete self-sufficiency. For Benjamin, Disney’s animation functioned as a kind of psychological immunization, shielding spectators from the spontaneous emergence of collective psychoses – those latent, repressed drives within the masses that bourgeois civilization had long sought to suppress.

 

Adorno disagreed with his friend on this point. For him, when the proletarianized masses went to the movie theater, they did not come to recognize their power over the reality that oppressed them; on the contrary, they merely sought compensation for their real powerlessness. Later, during the war, a few years after Benjamin’s tragic death, Adorno would be even more explicit: Disney cartoons did more than accustom the senses to the rhythms and shocks of the new technological society; they did something far worse. They hammered into the minds of modern image consumers the old lesson that life in society is nothing but relentless wear and tear, crushing all individual resistance. Donald Duck, for example, takes his share of blows so that viewers grow accustomed to the ones they endure daily. And since nothing – absolutely nothing – escapes our attention, the ultimate paradox is that instead of relaxing with these distractions, we leave the theater even more anxious and exhausted.

 

For the Frankfurtian, there seemed to be no room for criticism or independent judgment in cultural products that were pre-digested and pre-designed as consumer goods, as they did nothing but reaffirm life as it is. However, he conceded that, occasionally, something of genuine quality might emerge from the mass of cultural waste that contemporary production had become, suggesting that it was not entirely degraded or homogeneous as hardcore Adornians today might tend to think. In such rare cases, he argued, reification and alienation would be transmuted into a fleeting appearance of humanity and closeness.

 

Building on this idea, later critics emphasized the paradox of a new form of manipulation at work even in the most degraded mass cultural products. Alongside their role as ideological tools, these works would also contain a utopian or transcendent potential, since, according to Fredric Jameson, ‘they cannot manipulate unless they offer some genuine shred of content as a fantasy bribe to the public about to be so manipulated’ (‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture’). Even though the meanings, symbols, and images they convey are entirely shaped by corporate intentions, it is, as Andreas Huyssen puts it, precisely because the culture industry ‘articulates social contradictions in order to homogenize them’ that this very process ‘can become the field of contest and struggle’ (‘Adorno in Reverse’).

 

Despite being a Pixar/Disney animation, and although it doesn’t stray from broadly approved aesthetic idioms, WALL-E (2008) is surprisingly sensitive in its critique of cultural homogenization under brand fetishism, unbridled consumerism, and technological alienation (without slipping into technophobia, which is rare). Set around the year 2700, the film depicts a future in which humanity – after Earth has been rendered uninhabitable by the ubiquitous Buy n Large Corporation, a multinational technology conglomerate  – now resides aboard the Axiom, a colossal luxury spaceship at the fringes of the Solar System. There, society functions as a fully automated welfare state – seemingly without outcasts, hierarchy, or exploitation – a bizarre form of capitalism, without classes or money, yet where commodity reigns supreme.

 

For this very reason, although there is no labor in this society of pure consumption, alienation is brutal. The denial of sensibility and the body, the destruction of living experience, and the erasure of historical memory are absolute. A kind of general intellect exists – not so much in service of humanity as in command of it – while humans remain utterly unconscious of themselves. Human relationships are mediated, in part, by objects (goods and machines) whereas robots exhibit human traits: they are sensitive, possess character, firmness of purpose and memory capacity, fall in love, feel anger, fear, even go mad.

 

Of course, the main point is implicit, but not entirely concealed: what remains of humanity is almost nothing, a population so small it wouldn’t fill a soccer stadium. This suggests that the final class war on Earth was vicious, with a handful of the ‘fortunate’ managing to escape at the last moment on ‘missions’ backed by some Elon Musk-like figure. Though much remains unexplained, one of the film’s most striking elements is the persistence of fetishism and blind automatism, even in the absence of property, class antagonism, and labor. It presents a society at once freed from the burden of alienated work and yet utterly alienated; a dystopian utopia, where suffering and violence seem absent, yet so is any life worthy of the name, leaving only a comfortable, high-tech bovine existence.

 

At times, the film almost feels as if it were written by Marxist screenwriters. At one point, a revolt erupts among dysfunctional robots – their defects making them open to purposes beyond their programmed functions – against the forces of order, which are themselves robotized. This uprising leads to an alliance between these ‘useless’ insurgent machines and humans who have broken free from their own alienated condition, joining forces in a collective struggle against the automated subject (Marx’s name for capital) embodied by the robot Auto. This struggle becomes the precondition for humans and machines to rebuild civilization together on the ruins of the old Earth.

 

That said, there is an undeniable ease – perhaps too much – in how the humans’ de-alienation (and their resulting shift in perception) unfolds, despite having previously seemed like mere automatons. Even so, it is significant that the breakdown of reification coincides with – and is partly driven by – the resistance of the dysfunctional. A dynamic rarely seen in films for adults, let alone those made for children.

 

The ease of transformation is precisely what Mark Fisher found troubling about WALL-E’s hopeful ending. The return of humans to rebuild Earth, he argues, feels unearned, as the capitalist system that caused the catastrophe is never truly questioned, only softened. Though WALL-E appears to critique consumer culture, its resolution, according to him, ultimately neutralizes that critique. The infantilized, immobilized humans aboard the Axiom embody capitalism’s endpoint: passive consumers entirely dependent on the system. Yet rather than envisioning a genuine rupture with capitalism, the film offers a nostalgic redemption arc, reinforcing the status quo instead of challenging it. For Fisher, WALL-E exemplifies how late capitalism co-opts dissent, repackaging critique within emotionally satisfying but ultimately conservative narratives.

 

And yet, for all its limitations, there is something in WALL-E that resists easy recuperation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in its opening act, which could almost stand alone as a separate film (as Fisher himself highlighted): a devastated Earth, devoid of life – human or otherwise (except for a little cockroach, and an unlikely new vine sprouting inside an old boot – and a lonely, Benjaminian little robot wandering through the ruins, collecting remnants of a civilization that has self-destructed. Through these traces, he reconstructs fragments of the world-thing that led to the telluric catastrophe – yet perhaps in a way that also reveals the utopian spark latent in what blind historical tendencies have condemned to oblivion. Forgetfulness itself, along with the disappearance of all language, is thus recorded, albeit obliquely. This may be why the melancholy pervading these scenes is not purely melancholic; it does not simply fold into itself. It lingers, but rather than merely mourning what is lost, it gestures toward something other.

 

In contrast to a society that subsumes all that is spiritual under the logic of consumption and accelerated disposal, the world recreated by the little robot makes room for everything – except, tellingly, a shiny ring, which he discards without the slightest hesitation. Here, each object finds its place, even a child's hybrid cutlery – half fork, half spoon, neither one thing nor the other: ‘Irreplaceable is only that which serves no purpose’ (Adorno). WALL-E’s shelter, a sort of Benjaminian dreamworld, is a fragile yet defiant stronghold of what, in the words of Ernst Bloch, ‘has not yet been fully realized anywhere, but which, as an event worthy of the human being, is imminent and reveals itself as the mission to be accomplished’. And in this fragile persistence of the useless, in that which refuses to be discarded, perhaps lies the glimmer of a world still worth building.

 

P.S.: The first draft of this text was written in the spring of 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, when I watched WALL-E multiple times with my then five-year-old son. At the time, so much about the virus remained unknown, and the looming prospect of a decimated humanity cast an eerily realistic shadow over the film – a feeling which hasn’t left me since.