Football Was Never Neutral

In my previous post, I suggested that what I missed in football were the moments when the game seemed to escape its institutional frame, those brief openings through which collective life, political commitment, or historical memory entered the sport from the outside.

I am no longer sure that this is the right way to describe the present World Cup. Against my expectations, and, indeed, against the argument I had just made, politics has not merely intruded upon contemporary football but has structured this tournament from the very onset.

It began with FIFA itself, that strangely untouchable organization whose public language of neutrality increasingly resembles that of a mafia demanding obedience. Haiti was prevented from using its beautiful jersey commemorating the Battle of Vertières (1803), one of the decisive anti-colonial victories of the Atlantic world, on the grounds that it violated FIFA’s policy of “no politics”. The irony is difficult to miss: the revolutionary call to arms of La Marseillaise may still be played before every French match without objection, despite the anthem’s radical message and deeply political history. (It is worth recalling that it was adopted by Russian revolutionaries in 1905, by the Parisian Communards in 1871, and, incidentally, sung by the Black revolutionaries in Haiti itself as they faced the French colonial army during the siege of Crête-à-Pierrot in 1802.) 

Then came the foul treatment of the Iranian national team, where the rhetoric of neutrality seemed once again to operate unevenly, with the players entering the pitch already marked by geopolitical prejudice.

The tournament became even harder to read as mere sport when reports emerged that Donald Trump had attempted to influence the handling of a red-card controversy involving the United States. Whether or not such pressure had any real effect, the perception alone was enough to produce a remarkable spectacle: much of the footballing world appeared to unite behind Belgium in the subsequent match. After securing victory, the Belgian players celebrated by imitating Trump’s ridiculous dance, turning a football result into a moment of international mockery.

Now Spain reaches the final at precisely the moment when Trump is threatening severe economic retaliation against Pedro Sánchez’s government over its refusal to align with Washington’s preferred policy on Iran and over immigration policies that remain, by contemporary standards, unusually resistant to the punitive consensus dominating much of the West. Here, once more, the historical echo is hard to ignore: Thomas Jefferson himself suspended trade with Haiti after its independence, fearing that a successful slave revolution might inspire rebellion from below in the United States itself. The times are different, but the instinct of punishing political disobedience and containing dangerous examples feels uncomfortably familiar.

And then there was Argentina’s victory over England, followed by the banner declaring that Las Malvinas son argentinas. In a single gesture, the Falklands dispute returned to the World Cup stage, reopening a wound that football has never entirely managed to close since 1986. The reaction was telling: many celebrated the banner, many condemned it, and Milei’s own right-wing government reportedly found itself irritated by it. Politics had not invaded the tournament; it had merely become impossible to conceal.

So perhaps my earlier formulation needs revision. The striking thing about this World Cup is not that football occasionally escapes into politics. It is that FIFA tries to police political expression while political reality keeps walking onto the pitch through every door left open: anti-colonial memory, sanctions, war, immigration, diplomatic threats, disputed territories, and the simple fact that players and supporters continue to inhabit the world rather than the sterile universe imagined by sports administrators.

The case of Norway is perhaps the strongest illustration. While its team exceeded every expectation on the pitch, its football federation quietly pursued another campaign off it, pressing FIFA and UEFA to suspend Israel by invoking the organization's own statutes on discrimination and human rights. Not through boycotts or symbolic gestures, but through institutional pressure.

The old fiction that politics contaminates football from the outside no longer holds. FIFA still invokes neutrality whenever inconvenient memories, revolutions, or occupations appear on a shirt, a banner, or in a celebration. Yet its own governing structures have become another arena in which geopolitical conflicts are fought. Neutrality increasingly resembles not the absence of politics, but a way of deciding which politics may appear and which must disappear.

As for the final tomorrow, I still resist the language of national destiny. My support for Spain has nothing to do with ancestry, despite the presence of a Spanish great-grandfather somewhere in the family archive. Yet I admit that I would take a certain pleasure in seeing Spain win under these circumstances, on American soil and in the middle of a public confrontation with the Trump administration. And if I am permitted one wholly unrealistic wish, it is this: that Lamine Yamal, whether Spain wins or loses, walks onto the podium waving a Palestinian flag, reminding us that football has never been as separate from the world as its administrators would like us to believe, and that players and supporters alike may still find, beyond the whole commodified spectacle, forms of collective life worth defending.

The World Cup and the Things That Escaped It

The World Cup is approaching, and I notice my son developing a relation with football (or soccer, depending on which meridian one inhabits) that feels familiar in its very indeterminacy: neither indifference nor devotion, but a minor enthusiasm mixed with a diffuse awareness that something enormously consequential is unfolding around him.

As a Brazilian, this already borders on a minor confession. Football is supposed to arrive early, as fate rather than preference. It did not quite work that way for me. I followed the World Cups from 1986 to 2002 with fluctuating attention, never quite becoming what might properly be called a believer. What remained was not the continuity of competition, but a scattered archive of images, as if the sport had offered itself only intermittently, through sudden breaches in the ordinary flow.

I remember Sócrates in 1986, somehow out of register with the occasion itself: bearded and thoughtful, wearing a headband in solidarity with the victims of the Mexico earthquake. I remember Maradona charging through defenders like a comet, and the mythology of the Hand of God (later framed by him as a kind of symbolic revenge for the Falklands defeat four years earlier). I remember Roger Milla in 1990 (still one of my favorite players) dribbling René Higuita, scoring, and dancing by the corner flag as Cameroon captivated the world, making me a passionate supporter of them throughout that tournament. I remember Bebeto and Romário as a magical duo in 1994, while Roberto Baggio remains suspended in a single, overdetermined gesture. I remember Brazil’s bitter defeat to France in 1998, and then the uneasy relief of 2002, after the tension of the match against Belgium.

What binds these fragments is precisely their resistance to becoming mere football. They survive less as sporting memories than as condensed emblems of something larger: joy, failure, collective enchantment, political commitment, national disappointment or solace. They seem, even now, to exceed the game that produced them.

Contemporary football, by contrast, leaves me oddly untouched. Not because the technical level has declined. Quite the opposite. The game is faster, more physically exacting (but also way more violent), and more statistically refined. The difference lies in the slow reorganization of its surroundings: between a world of partial attachments and the fully globalized ecology of platforms and continuous circulation.

Within the limits of my memory and ignorance, somewhere between the era of Sócrates and that of Neymar, a whole configuration of the sport’s life seems to have grown stale, and the overbearing world of commercial spectacle can never, in my eyes, rejuvenate it. Sócrates, who famously never celebrated his own goals, embodied a vision of football grounded in collective ideals. A committed opponent of Brazil’s military dictatorship and deeply associated with the democratic movements of his time, he seemed to understand the game as inseparable from civic life and shared experience. By contrast, despite his undeniable talent, Neymar is the consummate athlete of a spiritually impoverished age. His Oscar-deserving dives, together with his long-standing alignment with despicable political figures on the Brazilian far right, sit squarely within the contemporary grammar of ultra-individualism: a culture absorbed by celebrity, marketing, and relentless self-branding.

One is of course tempted to dismiss this contrast as nostalgia, and not without reason. Some may say I am being unfair to 100%-Jesus, tax-dodger millionaire Neymar and turning Dr. Sócrates into a saint of the beautiful game. Perhaps. And yet I cannot shake the impression that they sit at opposite ends of a transformation. Not because football has lost an original authenticity (it was already a business in the 1980s), but because it has become perfectly adapted to a world in which authenticity is no longer required.

My own position in this is slightly displaced. I was never absorbed enough to become disillusioned. And yet I remain attached, in a secondary way, to what football once intermittently offered: not devotion, but brief openings onto something like collective life; moments when the sport seemed to exceed its institutional frame. The joy of Milla and his teammates, Higuita’s eccentricity, Sócrates’ politically charged presence, Maradona as a force of nature. These figures felt larger than the sport without feeling manufactured by it. Whether that perception is accurate or not, those openings now feel rarer, or more quickly absorbed by the machinery that surrounds them.

Football persists, more global than ever before. What feels harder to locate is not the game itself, but the occasional escape from it. So I find myself watching my son approach it with the same suspended hesitation I once knew, still unable to explain why I will not, once again, be supporting Brazil.

Ranking Under Duress

The Guardian recently put out a poll asking readers to nominate the greatest novels of all time: what would occupy the top of your list, the sacred top three, the books you’d take to a desert island or rescue if your house were on fire?

I admit I love this kind of thing. Maybe because after enough exposure to the daily weather system of horrible news, each headline arriving with the by-now familiar atmosphere of low-grade apocalypse, it feels good to remember that life extends beyond the narrow bandwidth of the present tense; that the new order of things, however infernal it insists on becoming, has not yet annexed everything.

So here goes: my top ten novels of all time (three simply wouldn’t do), an almost impossible task – not only choosing but ranking them – liable to change with weather, mood, planetary alignment, and whatever obscure sentence happens to ambush me next time around, but worthwhile all the same. (It was only after writing it down, and with some embarrassment, that I realized I had forgotten one major novel. Since removing any of the others now felt both impossible and faintly disloyal, the list has become an ungainly top eleven instead of a top ten. Statistical purity, it seems, was never really an option.)

11. In Search of Lost Time – I know. I know. I know. By all accepted protocols this should probably occupy the top position, glaring reproachfully downward at everything beneath it. But since I still have not, to this day and age, found the time (yes, yes, the irony remains available to all) to read it in full, it seemed dishonest to place it any higher. Yet even in fragments, and despite prolonged intervals between volumes, it feels impossible to leave out – as if it already carries the rumeur des distances traversées, even when only half-read.

10. The Magic Mountain – Much as I liked Death in Venice (read during a trip to antebellum Syria) and the Doctor Faustus, this was the one that lingered. A novel that somehow converts suspension into movement, where people speak, fall in love, eat (prodigiously!), speculate, fall ill and die, and time itself – stretched into waiting, and waiting into a form of life – becomes the main event.

9. Light in August – During Covid I went through a Faulknerian campaign, reading all of the major novels in succession. Another could have occupied the spot, but this was the one that remained: for its heat, its violence, its tenderness, and because few novels convey so well that people are simultaneously condemned to history, haunted by the impossibility of fully knowing themselves, and yet absurdly free within it.

8. The Scarlet Letter – Amid all the spiritual darkness, surveillance, punishment, and public choreography of guilt, there appears that brief opening in the forest: one of those small utopian clearings literature occasionally grants us before withdrawing the offer. The fact that it doesn’t last only makes it more compelling.

7. The Ambassadors – “I remember the palace...” (burned to ashes by the Communards) and, of course, “Live all you can.” I’ve always liked reading those two lines together, perhaps because they seem to pull in opposite directions and somehow arrive at the same destination: memory and experience, possibility and deferment, the life examined and the life squandered. A socialist’s compromise with luxury.

6. Lord Jim – While Heart of Darkness (though more novella than novel) is without doubt Conrad’s greatest achievement, and while Victory may have given me more immediate pleasure, Lord Jim stayed, particularly the sequence around Stein, the butterflies, and “the destructive element”. Less comfortably, it made me aware of certain Bovarystic tendencies of my own, to the point that, if forced into the old cliché of naming a book that changed my life, this would most definitely be the one.

5. The Charterhouse of Parma – The breathtaking pages describing the coulisses of Waterloo alone would justify its place here, but everything afterward is just pure delight. Like James, Proust, and Mann, Stendhal here deploys a temporality in which duration resists the imperatives of plot, making room for delay, digression, detour, experiential excess – a life not yet fully disciplined into (narrative) efficiency.

4. Under the Volcano – Intoxication, failure, history approaching from a distance (the Spanish Civil War and the spread of fascism looming behind the action and between the lines), revolution raging “in the tierra caliente of each human soul”, and then all at once private ruin and collective catastrophe becoming indistinguishable. Few novels make consciousness feel so crowded, so simultaneously lucid and doomed. And then there is Lowry’s language: incantatory, allusive, endlessly digressive, yet somehow always under exact control. On a trip to Mexico last year, many years after reading it, the Consul – alongside Eisenstein, Rulfo, and Arturo Belano – was constantly with me, as if the book had spilled beyond its covers and carried its feverish logic into the textures of the journey itself.

3. Ulysses – I read it the year my son was born, eleven years ago. What began as another title from the long civilizational checklist of “books one must read before dying”, became unexpectedly one of the great reading pleasures of my life. Every morning before dawn I would advance slowly through a dozen pages: coffee beside me, baby and cat distributed across my body in no particular hierarchy. And somehow Joyce, despite all the noise about difficulty and genius, turned out to be astonishingly companionable. For a while afterward, it became difficult to imagine wanting to read anything else.

2. Huckleberry Finn – First read at twenty, in college, then returned to a few times over the years, most recently aloud to my son. And each time I let myself be seduced by the same passages: the egalitarian raft-community of Jim and Huck, adventurously drifting through the night; smoking, chatting, drinking coffee by day – temporarily exempt from the laws of “sivilization”. One of my favorite images of “utopia amid overall disgrace” in all literature.

1. Don Quixote – Not only for affective reasons (my father used to read parts of it to me when I was a child) but because I increasingly suspect it really is the greatest in almost every register available to the novel: funniest, freest, strangest, most generous, most hospitable to contradiction. Contestatory without dogma, melancholic without resignation, utopian without innocence. Every great novel after it feels, at least occasionally, as though it knows it is arriving late to something already accomplished in the early seventeenth century.

P.S.– No, Dostoyevsky won’t be making an appearance in my top eleven. I realize this may sound like heresy to some, but, for all his greatness, he has never quite been my cup of tea (I’m still to read The Idiot, though). I also remain, somewhat shamefully, outside the orbit of War and Peace and The Man Without Qualities, both of which I intend to enter sooner or later, pending whatever improbable alignment of time, discipline, and planetary indifference makes such entries possible. And yet, once one begins to think in terms of lists, exclusions, and accidental hierarchies, the borders start to loosen. A top eleven is already a kind of compromise with overflow; a top 101 would, of course, dissolve into something closer to a map of compulsions than a canon. In that expanded, and frankly uncontrollable, version, Kafka and Machado de Assis would appear immediately (how did they fail to make the cut at all?) alongside The Savage Detectives (remembered less as a book than as a kind of call to life), Vineland, The Lost Steps, Hopscotch, The Time of the Hero, Father Goriot (read in two days, as if in a fever), The Waves, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (once upon a time my absolute favourite), Journey to the End of the Night (which accompanied me somewhere around my thirtieth year like a kind of diagnostic instrument), The Thief’s Journal (same around my twenty-fifth), Moby Dick, The Grapes of Wrath, For Whom the Bell Tolls (not Hemingway’s finest, perhaps, but the Spanish Civil War always exerts its own gravitational pull upon me)… and so many others that any attempt at closure begins to feel arbitrary rather than descriptive.

I gatti di Roma

For Bruno and Camila

They fled the Colosseum, where once
they could nap undisturbed
and where now, every hour
three thousand selfie-absorbed
absent-minded ant-men pour
from its ribs.
 
They deserted the Roman Forum
where columns stand like broken teeth
in the jaw of an empire still chewing.
And they slipped from the piazze and fontane
when coins began to fall like metallic rain
into Neptune’s indifferent beard.
 
O cats of Rome, green-eyed anarchists
striped with the dusk of seven hills
you have no patience for the ant-men
stacked like empty pizza boxes
at the mouth of the ages
gnawing the Urbs Aeterna to a souvenir
an Instagram post.
 
You remember when sand tasted of blood
when across the Via Appia Antica
six thousand slave-rebels flowered in agony
their bodies a forest of warning.
The breeze had carried a different scent then.
 
There, under the Mausoleum of Cecilia Metella
which Byron loved
in grass that grows like whispered Latin
you lick your paws as empires pass.
 
Some sleep near the unadvertised
tomb of Seneca the Younger
where stoic bricks instruct the wind
in the grammar of endurance.
 
Others curl in the forsaken Protestant ground
where a young poet whose name was writ in water
dreams beneath a tilted stone
and another
advocate of non-violence and free love
shipwrecked in the Gulf of La Spezia
rests with salt still singing in his hair.
 
There too lie le ceneri
of a giant
ashes arguing softly
with the roots of cypress.
 
And in the now-peaceful borgate
along the old aqueduct on the via del Mandrione
in the neighborhood of Accattone
where dust once tasted of hunger
and prophecy
near the memory of Ferdinando Persiani
whose rebel flame, perhaps
burns still under the pavement
you stretch across Vespas and lemon trees
like commas of an unfinished manifesto.
 
O cats of Rome, furred question marks
curled against the rhetoric of ruins
you leap the low walls of history
and drink from broken sarcophagi
where rainwater gathers like unwritten poems.
 
And then lay on a slab of travertine
holding the last heat of day.
 
                                  ⁂

Para Bruno e Camila

Eles debandaram do Coliseu, onde antes
podiam tirar uma soneca sossegados
e onde agora, a cada hora
três mil selficentrados homens-formiga irrompem
de suas costelas.
 
Desertaram o Fórum Romano
onde as colunas se erguem como dentes quebrados
na mandíbula de um império que ainda mastiga.
Também sumiram das piazze e fontane
quando as moedas começaram a cair como chuva metálica
na barba indiferente de Netuno.
 
Ó gatos de Roma, anarquistas de olhos verdes
listrados com o entardecer das sete colinas
vocês não têm paciência para os homens-formiga
empilhados como caixas de pizza vazias
na boca dos tempos
roendo a Urbs Aeterna até reduzi-la a uma lembrancinha
uma postagem no Instagram.
 
Vocês se lembram quando a areia sabia a sangue
quando na Via Appia Antica
seis mil escravos rebeldes floresceram em agonia
seus corpos uma floresta de advertência.
A brisa então exalara um aroma diferente.
 
Lá, sob o Mausoléu de Cecília Metella
que Byron tanto amava
na relva que cresce como sussurros em latim
vocês lambem as patas conforme os impérios passam.
 
Alguns dormem perto do túmulo sem alarde
de Sêneca, o Jovem
onde tijolos estoicos ensinam ao vento
a gramática da persistência.
 
Outros se enrolam no esquecido solo protestante
onde um jovem poeta cujo nome foi escrito n’água
sonha sob uma pedra inclinada
e outro
defensor da não-violência e do amor livre
naufragado no Golfo de La Spezia
descansa com o sal ainda cantando em seus cabelos.
 
Lá também repousam le ceneri
de um gigante
cinzas que discutem mansamente
com as raízes dos ciprestes.
 
E nas agora pacíficas borgate
ao longo do antigo aqueduto na via del Mandrione
no bairro de Accattone
onde a poeira outrora tinha gosto de fome
e profecia
perto da memória de Ferdinando Persiani
cuja chama rebelde, talvez
ainda arda sob o pavimento
vocês se espreguiçam por entre Vespas e limoeiros
como vírgulas de um manifesto inacabado.
 
Ó gatos de Roma, interrogações eriçadas
enroscadas contra a retórica das ruínas
vocês saltam os muros baixos da história
e bebem de sarcófagos quebrados
onde a água da chuva se acumula como poemas não escritos.
 
E em seguida se estendem sobre uma laje de travertino
guardando o último calor do dia.
 
[poem originally written in Portuguese; English translation by the author]

Paranoia and Dis-Memory

Two Cinematic Allegories 

Comparing societies through similar or contemporaneous works has long been a particularly fertile critical strategy. For many of us, the classic case remains Antonio Candido’s essay that contrasts North American puritanism with Brazilian malandragem through a crossed reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Manuel Antônio de Almeida.

I recently read a review that set Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent alongside One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s film released shortly beforehand and presented by the reviewer as a kind of American counterpart to the Brazilian work. In the contrast he proposes, the critic ultimately comes down in favor of the Brazilian film, precisely because it is less optimistic: there is no resolution, nothing neatly comes together, whereas the American film, for all its darkness, still closes on a note of hope. This difference, the reviewer suggests, would reflect a society (the Brazilian one) that is more “realistic” – that is, less naïve – than the American.

Starting from our earlier conversation, I would take hold of the thread from the opposite end. The two films do in fact share several important structural features. In both, the “double-agent” protagonists – Armando/Marcelo (Wagner Moura) and “Ghetto” Pat/Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) – are single fathers on the run. Yet the motives for flight already point to a difference of some consequence: the American is a former guerrilla hounded by his political past; the Brazilian, a former public-sector employee locked in a collision with a São Paulo bigwig, in a conflict that is essentially personal. From that point on, the two characters only diverge further.

Bob Ferguson is an internally conflicted figure, and it is precisely this tension that gives him density. At once progressive and conservative, he is torn between disciplining his daughter and encouraging her rebelliousness; between protecting and passing on; between immediate survival and fidelity to a memory of struggle. His paranoia, the product of a concrete historical conjuncture, does not immobilize him. When the net tightens, he activates every resource at his disposal to save his kid, even if this means reawakening bonds, narratives, and gestures drawn from a defeated past.

Armando, by contrast, is a smoother figure, perhaps precisely because he lacks more fully articulated convictions. His linearity is less a strength than a symptom. Confronted with danger, knowing that a price has been put on his head, he responds with a kind of tropical stoicism: he throws himself into Carnival, appears to accept his fate as if violence were an atmospheric condition rather than a historical conflict. More than that, he becomes fixated on uncovering his mother’s identity, even when doing so places his own life at risk. The son who initially motivates his return to Recife quickly recedes into the background.

Memory, a central concern in both films, may be the point at which the comparison acquires its greatest historical thickness. In Anderson’s film (itself adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland) the intergenerational transmission of oppositional values, under conditions of political regression, occupies the center of the frame. This is a memory that is besieged, fragmentary, and paranoid, yet still capable of being transmitted. In The Secret Agent, by contrast, the dominant motif, as we have been unpacking, is not memory but dis-memory, or, more precisely, a systematic indifference: the traces of the past do not settle, do not generate learning, do not lead anywhere.

From a Brechtian standpoint, the characters ultimately matter less than the historical dialectic they embody. In Anderson’s film, they give shape to the paranoia of a nation in which the Other figures permanently as a threat, but also to the virtual possibility of a formation against the grain, grounded in the persistence of a minimal core of resistance and historical memory that traverses generations. Nothing quite analogous seems to exist in Brazil. Armando, an apparently uncontradictory character, is at once indifferent and obstinate; his search for his mother’s identity operates as an allegory of a country intent on knowing “what it is”, when the decisive question should instead be “how it works”. The old question of national identity thus returns as a false solution to a real problem.

In short, even in the United States something still appears capable of taking form, however much amid ruins, surveillance, and paranoia. In Brazil, by contrast, everything ends in samba: interminable carnivals in which death is ever-present. The only thing that truly accumulates is bodies, dissolved into the festive repetition of a present without ballast.

[This is a fragment of a conversation on Mendonça Filho’s film, to appear, in Portuguese, in the upcoming issue of Sinal de Menos.]

To My Father, at 70

There was a time
when time itself hardly counted
we rolling down grassy slopes
or laying upon sun-warmed stones
watching swallows, hawks and vultures
score their lines across the sky
at the vesper hour

Then came another – remember?
when we were allowed
to expect a different future
to trust that the road ahead might widen
if only enough people gathered
and pushed everything forward

But that time too passed
and another rose in its stead
asking merely that we wait
in quiet rooms and shuttered days
while the world held
its breath
and revealed how the ordinary
rests on fragile ground

The times that run now
demand in turn
that we keep on walking
with neither parade nor promise
yet also
without yielding to bitterness
or illusion.

Out of all this a life is molded
that will not be dimmed
by easy certainties
and perhaps that is
the greatest lesson
I learned from you

So all I can wish is that
in these convulsed days
the chapters yet to come reach you
under gentler weather
and that companions walk beside you
with the same fidelity
with which you
walked beside me

⁂

PARA O MEU PAI, AOS 70

Houve um tempo
em que o tempo nem contava
rolávamos na grama
ou deitávamos na pedra quente
vendo andorinhas, gaviões e urubus
riscarem o céu
no crepúsculo vespertino

Depois sobreveio um outro – lembra?
em que nos foi permitido
esperar um futuro diferente
acreditar que a estrada adiante pudesse se alargar
se somente gente suficiente se ajuntasse
e empurrasse tudo pra frente

Mas também aquele tempo passou
e outro tomou seu lugar
pedindo apenas que esperássemos
em quartos quietos e dias fechados
enquanto o mundo prendia
a respiração
revelando como o comum
pode ser frágil

Os tempos que correm
exigem por seu turno
que continuemos caminhando
sem desfile nem promessa
mas também
sem ceder ao amargor
ou à ilusão

De tudo isso se molda uma vida
que não se deixa ofuscar
por certezas fáceis
e talvez essa seja
a maior lição
que aprendi com você

E assim só posso desejar que
nesses dias convulsionados
os próximos capítulos lhe cheguem
com um clima mais brando
e que companheiros caminhem ao seu lado
com a mesma fidelidade com que você
caminhou ao meu

[poem originally written in Portuguese; English translation by the author]

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]