I wanna be as clear as possible when I say I don't think Anderson's choices here are 'good', nor do I think they are 'bad'. I just want to be make people aware of what the deal is here since the vast majority of moviegoers are completely unaware of the source material
For those unaware One Battle After Another is a 2025 is based on the book Vineland (1990) by famed cult author Thomas Pynchon. The book is set in 1984 and is about what happens when 1960s radicals wake up in 1980s “greed is good” Material Girl world.
What is important here is that the book is commenting on actual real life radicals who really existed in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, I live in Madison WI. There was a famous bombing of sterling hall on UW Madison campus because the the anti war radicals believed that the technology being worked on at that location was being used by the US military.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_Hall_bombing
Interesting fact: I met and talked to one of the people involved in that bombing Karl Armstrong. He spent a short time in prison for it and then return to Madison to live a normal life. He opened up a restaurant called “radical rye” an obvious nod to his radical past
And of course there was also the Weather Underground. A radical organization that instigated riots, broke Timothy Leary out of prison, and conducted bombing campaigns as part of a radical leftist anti war effort
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground
I say all that because a lot of people are simply unaware that these organizations even existed. And furthermore pynchon's book, while highly fictionalized, it is still grounded in reality, and is very much specifically about these actual real life people and the culture that they lived. Pynchon was curious about what happened to them under Ronald Reagan and the glitzy 1980s where the culture had basically forgotten them and moved past them.
Meanwhile One Battle After Another is about imaginary, hypothetical radicals who lived somewhere around 2010. I mean I was alive in 2010. I remember it. There was no organized radical leftist bombing groups running around America bombing people because of abortion issues and Or immigration issues. This is not a thing that was happening.
PTA's radical leftists are entirely fictional. They never existed. It's just a Hollywood construct. This is why a lot of people were confused at the beginning of the movie because they didn't understand who these radicals were, they didn't realize it was just a figment of PTA's imagination.
Again I'm not saying that's a good thing, I'm not saying that's a bad thing,. But it absolutely is a thing. Thomas Pynchon book is a damning, insightful, tragic commentary on 1960s radicals who really lived. Meanwhile PTAs movie is a sort of commentary on imaginary, fictional people that never actually lived in the real world.
Now you might say that immigration activists have always been around. And that is true to a certain extent. However the reality is that most people coming across the border using a coyote, are not part of some radical revolutionary underground movement. It's purely transactional. And the coyotes are in it for the money, and will leave your sorry ass behind if they think you're dragging them down.
And furthermore quite a bit of illegal immigration these days is actually controlled by the cartels, who are some of the worst human beings on planet earth. Just do some research on this if you don't believe me. It's not hard to find this information . So this notion of a highly organized, highly ethical, underground immigration organization, is again pretty darn fictional
And again it's a movie. It doesn't have to be grounded in reality. And that's fine. I just want people to understand that the original source material was commenting on real radicals not make believe ones, and that's a big difference
by Bluest_waters