Media Review: One Battle after Another, The Past as a Safe House, and the Afterlives of Clandestine Organizing

In the United States, political violence circulates as a floating signifier invoked to harden policing, to delegitimize protest, and to sustain an anxious public dramaturgy.Many film critics have framed One Battle After Another, released worldwide in September 2025, as a political film that meets the moment head-on. Yet its most generative move lies elsewhere. Freely adapting Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (1990), the film treats revolution less as a program than as memory-work: clandestinity replayed like a beloved record, in the shelter of safe houses and code words, while the present stubbornly mutates its surveillance, its rhetorics, and its enemies. Read through an organizational lens, the film becomes less a manifesto than an inquiry into how underground collectives persist in the rear-view mirror: how secrecy is maintained, how partial organizations cohere, and how violence is organized, sensed, and survived. If the film feels timely, it is also because it insists on being out of sync: its politics is filtered through the afterlives of older struggles. The underground it depicts does not merely hide from the present; it shelters inside a past that keeps replaying itself.One Battle After Another compresses, at first, the story of a militant couple inside a farleft faction called the "French 75". Pat Calhoun (an anagrammatic wink to the director's initials "PTA") is played by Leonardo DiCaprio; his lover and comrade, Perfidia Beverly Hills, is played by Teyana Taylor.