How theatre can can lead to constructive political conversations

After decades of work, Angeleno director P.T. Anderson has scored his highest-grossing film with his recent One Battle After Another. Having opened on the weekend of September 26, the film follows the fanatical, even surrealistic, journey of washed-up revolutionary Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), who lives in hiding with his teenage daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), some fifteen years after his militant group, French 75, went underground. When their nemesis Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) resurfaces, Bob and Wila again find themselves running from the law. When Wila goes AWOL, her karate teacher, Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), is enlisted to help Bob find his daughter. Although ambitious, edgy, and fun, the political message of the hit film is generally muddled. The immensely talented director did not make a film matching the Leftist rigor of, say, Battleship Potemkin. Nor can the film be grouped among a veritable cavalcade of fictional and non-fictional films produced during the last twenty years that deal with immigrant issues along the U.S.-Mexico Border. Sleep Dealer, El Norte, and Who is Dayani Cristal? are but a few of the stronger offerings of a genre of filmmaking that, for both good and bad, may constitute a true cinematic cottage industry.

Nevertheless, the film leans heavily into Latino culture in terms of themes, setting, and characters. Filmed largely in the U.S.’s Bordertown par excellence—El Paso, Texas—we meet the martial arts teacher Sergio, who describes his work helping migrants cross the border as a “Latino Harriet Tubman situation.” We learn that the fugitive revolutionary, Bob, is known by several aliases, including “The Gringo Coyote.” His savior, Sensei Sergio, explains to him outrightly that he’s “a bad hombre”—cheekily invoking the hurtful bon mots used by then-candidate Donald Trump in a 2016 debate with Hilary Clinton. The epithet is repeated later on in the film when Bob, under police surveillance in the hospital, is tipped off to an exit route by a member of the French 75 disguised as a nurse: “Are you diabetic? You’re a bad hombre, Bob. You know, if you’re a bad hombre, you make sure you take your insulin on a daily basis, right?” All this, plus the fact that the film’s denouement begins with a raid on a Mexican Restaurant in Northern California.