American Psychos

We’ve heard a lot about “political violence” over the past year. This is the new thing to worry about, the pretext for the Trump administration’s most fanatical imaginings. But there are two types of violence in American politics: the routine violence of government, and everything else.

Even as the Beltway and media elites have made themselves sick with anxiety over the so-called epidemic of political violence, the humdrum, everyday, acceptable violence of American life—the violence of transphobes, racists, and war criminals in power, of overincarceration, mass deportation, and victimization of the poor—has serenely powered on, untouched by stigma and untroubled by the law. This is because that violence is the law, the brutality on which government rests; it’s violence made legitimate, deemed appropriate and necessary for the administration of the nation. This was already the unvarying rule of American government before Trump’s reelection, but his return to office has pushed the state to new extremes of cruelty in its use of violence as a tool of social control. Next to the prime-time horrors inflicted on us daily by the state, the “political violence” that countless pundits and politicians periodically remind us to fret over as some uniquely evil threat to the social compact seems almost dilettantish in its slightness and stochasticity.     

What can cinema say about political violence in the age of Trump, when the greatest shocks to the collective conscience are the work of government? Earlier generations of filmmakers had the advantage of operating in a world where most violence was unpreviewed, unseen, and undocumented, which gave their on-screen evocation of the lives of assassins, tyrants, and spooks real descriptive power. But our time is different. The fog and paranoia that shrouded the great political films of the 1970s—to take the period in recent history that most closely parallels the present—no longer hold any currency for us: the old norms of shame and dignity that once constrained the establishment, compelling it to perform its villainy behind closed doors, have grown obsolete.

Today the violence is all out in the open, declared in advance and endorsed at the ballot box. Barbarism is a political virtue in 2020s America, and those responsible for the worst of it are the people who are supposed to keep us safe. The iconography of violence is now as ubiquitous as the violence itself. By instrumentalizing Big Tech’s cult of the image, the Trump administration has turned the performance of cruelty into an addictive spectacle, magnifying its impact and creating an ambient sense of permanent and unaccountable danger among the public—terrorism by another name. Our phones and feeds are thick with images of masked ICE goons snatching innocents off the streets, bulldozers crashing through the White House, white supremacists dining at the highest tables of state, and American-supplied bombs raining genocide on the people of Palestine. When the extremism is already on screen, what place is left for the cinematic representation of political terror?

In Eddington and One Battle After Another, two films that address the current political moment, the agents of “political violence” as it’s commonly understood are relegated to the sidelines. Activists, protesters, saboteurs, and assassins are all part of the worlds that these two films conjure, but their violence—even at its most cartoonishly explosive—remains decorative; these are action films in which direct action is a mere framing device. Instead, it’s representatives of the state—all of them men struggling to manage the disappointments of middle age, their own still-burning ambition (political, social, sexual), and the bewildering fluidity of modern life simultaneously—who are responsible for the most shocking eruptions of savagery.

Set in late spring of 2020, Eddington has been hailed as one of the first movies to tackle the cultural politics of lockdowns, mask mandates, and the protests touched off by the murder of George Floyd. In fact it’s mostly a study of male impotence, a kind of pietà for the fiftysomething incel. Slowly at first then with wildfire acceleration, the film stages the confrontation between Joe Cross, its fictional small town’s police chief, an anti-masker whose wife leaves him for a woo-woo motivational speaker, and Ted Garcia, the local mayor, a gormless liberal technocrat who wants to green-light the construction of a water-guzzling “hyperscale” data center on the town’s outskirts.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe as a slack-hipped incompetent, the kind of slapstick buffoon who forgets to change his handwriting when attempting to frame “antifa” at a murder scene and can’t quite get the angle right on his front-facing camera. Pedro Pascal’s Ted, dressed in the Silicon Valley uniform of puffer vest and comfortable shoes, advocates for the higher violence of centrist common sense while tightly policing the norms of Covid-era civility (mask wearing, social distancing): “There’s no wishing tech away,” he explains through a mask to his fellow council members early in the film. “Whether we jump on the boat now or get bulldozed, these guys, they’re bringing an actual infrastructure for a real future.”

Demonstrations against police brutality, the transformation of the phone camera into a cultural weapon, the bombing and looting of America’s towns in the name of justice: Eddington shows all of these but they are not where the core of the action lies. Even the tired satirization of Covid’s collective codes of conduct, tossed off with an ungenerous cynicism that makes no effort to engage with the mass psychology of the pandemic, is there mostly for ornamentation. Instead the film detonates around a much smaller drama: in the pivotal scene the mayor, standing before a circle of guests at a political fundraiser he’s hosting at his house, slaps the police chief in the face. Coming on top of his wife’s sudden desertion of his marriage, this sets Phoenix’s bumbling cop off on a murderous rampage that ends, around an hour later in screen time, with a knife driven into his skull.

It’s an uneven film, and it devolves in its final minutes into a sequence of clownish a-has: Joe gets a hunting blade in the head—but wait, he survives! He’s eventually elected mayor of Eddington by default, having assassinated the one other candidate in the previous act—but wait, he’s paralyzed! The new mayor and his mother-in-law now sleep in the same bed—but wait, she’s actually fucking her son-in-law’s nurse! Despite the clumsiness of its extended coda, Eddington still has something interesting to say about the fundamental smallness of the causes that animate violence today. This is not a story about how Covid fried our brains but a chronicle of the enduring power of male humiliation as a motivating political force. One of the film’s concluding frames shows the cop-turned-mayor in bed, paralyzed and unsexed while his mother-in-law canoodles with her lover on the same mattress next to him: even in his moment of triumph, his humiliation does not relent.

This is a profoundly moralistic ending—the bad guy, though superficially redeemed, ends up a wheelchair-bound spectator to others’ happiness—but in real life, we know that the arc of history does not bend quite so easily toward karmic justice. In the real world the villains usually get away with it. As proof, there’s no need to look further than the presidential career of Trump himself, a man who rose to prominence in right-wing circles for his prosecution of the birther cause, and with only a few minor setbacks (thirty-four felony counts and two impeachments) has not stopped rising since. For all the scholars’ correct and important discussion of underlying causes, history can and often does change for massively stupid reasons. It’s true, of course, that Trumpism has its roots in income inequality, America’s decaying quality of life, the alienation of political elites from the people, the death of institutional authority and shared notions of truth, the algorithmic distortion of our information ecosystem, and all the rest. But it’s also fair to say that without Barack Obama’s humiliation of Donald Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the Trumpian wrecking ball might never have even presented itself at the gates of power. At the time this routine was seen as a deliciously brutal beatdown of a hyperventilating racist beyond the pale of respectable politics; in retrospect it looks like a grave miscalculation.

All the violence of the past decade stems from the sting of that moment, and Trump’s desire to seek retribution. Most politicians are narcissists, but they do their best to package self-obsession as sacrifice. Trump has made the pursuit of vengeance for perceived slights into the explicit core of his political mission: from the generational destruction of Obama-perfected technocratic liberalism to the campaign against the universities, the tariffs unleashed on virtually every country that’s “wronged” America, and the prosecution of political enemies like James Comey and Letitia James, vendettas are the alpha and omega of the Trumpian agenda. If it were fiction, the last fifteen years of the president’s entanglement with America would offer the most gripping revenge saga since Hamlet. But it’s real life, so it mostly just sucks. The pettiness of this political moment cannot be overstated, which is why a film like Eddington makes for such topically dispiriting viewing. Are we now destined, as a society, to suffer endlessly under the tyranny of mature-age boys, frozen in pubescent rage and spiraling from the casual embarrassments of their younger years?

Fortunately the answer is no, since men today are not only angry—they are also horny, as One Battle After Another dramatizes quite spectacularly. Paul Thomas Anderson’s joyride through the desert sands of the American catastrophe begins with the alarming visual of Sean Penn’s erection pressing against his military fatigues, and from there the defining tension of its chief fascist’s personality—the desire to wear pants versus the itch to let it all out—is set. Penn plays Colonel Steven Lockjaw, a racist migrant camp commander with a fetish for black women that comes back to haunt him sixteen years later, once he seeks admission to the Christmas Adventurers Club, a secret society of wealthy, well-connected white supremacists who reject anyone with even the slightest suggestion of interracial love in their romantic history. The film’s action centers around the camp commander’s quest to find his forgotten half-black daughter, conceived via the sexual extortion of a now-disappeared leftist militant named Perfidia Beverly Hills, and eliminate her; Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson (née “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun), a stoned-to-the-eyeballs former activist who was in a relationship with Beverly Hills and has raised the daughter as his own, follows in chaotic pursuit.

Though the film is loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, it drags the action into the present day: with its migrant detention camps, militarized raids on sanctuary cities, and broken networks of resistance, the world it conjures is rich with the imagery of modern American authoritarianism. But One Battle also harkens back to a simpler, pre-Trumpian time, when white supremacists felt compelled to operate in secret and actions for those climbing the slurry pole still had consequences. Amid all the on-screen explosions, disfigurations, and ejaculations, the film is nostalgic, in a way, for a kinder fascism. Anderson is the ultimate American sentimentalist: so many of his films are about fighting against sentimentality then succumb to it in their final third. One Battle is no different. Penn’s antimigrant military commander ends up deformed then gassed to death in a bland corner office at the hands of the Christmas Adventurers Club, while Di Caprio’s washed-out dad is reunited with his daughter after an up-and-down, filmed-from-the-dashboard car chase that ends with her pursuer’s guts spread across the middle of a desert highway. As in Eddington, justice is served; we all go home happy. And yet, the happiness of this ending feels strangely empty.

An interesting point of comparison here is Running on Empty, Sidney Lumet’s 1988 story of what comes after the revolution. Running on Empty has none of the visual brio of One Battle; it’s played in a much quieter key, as a kitchen sink drama that looks at the intergenerational conflict between two former activists on the run from the FBI and their rapidly maturing kids. Despite this gulf in style, it’s Running on Empty that is the far more radical film; whereas One Battle never really engages with the substance of its protagonists’ activism and resolves into the treacly spectacle of a family remade, Running on Empty takes seriously the question of what it means to live a life of political principle in a world that is all about selling out. Unlike in One Battle, the family in this movie does come apart; Running on Empty is the story of one rupture (the 1960s counterculture) after another (the rupture of adolescence, first love, and saying goodbye to your parents). “All families break up,” the teenage protagonist’s girlfriend says at one point. “Why do you have to carry the burden of someone else’s life?” For all its panache and undeniable fun, Anderson’s film does not have the courage to ask a question this complicated.

One Battle After Another is as much a lullaby as an action movie, a fable of living on the edge and kicking fascist ass that sends us back into the daylight confirmed in our childish belief in the upward motion of history and the nourishing necessity of family love. The beautiful irresolution of a film like The French Connection, where the drug lord evades capture and dissolves into the mold of a country cracking up, is alien to this world, as is the unrelenting savagery that makes works like Il Boom, Vittorio De Sica’s 1963 satire of postwar consumerism, and Caché, Michael Haneke’s 2005 excavation of the legacy of European colonialism, such memorably dark reflections on the socialization of violence.

No film addressing contemporary politics has yet to contend with the utter bleakness of our era. Eddington and One Battle are stories of redemption in a time of damnation. The demise of Penn’s petty tyrant, even at the hands of a greater evil, offers a richly satisfying payoff, but it’s also a fantasy: in America today the bad guys are more likely to be rewarded than incinerated. The assholes keep assholing. All of political culture now is just a series of dunks and owns, and increasingly the pwnage is turning deadly. There’s no going back to Obamaworld, to the dusty old song book of aspirational rhetoric and rule by flattery. The future of politics is not reconciliation but revenge, not revolution but distraction, not a more perfect union but a slow motion collapse. The only way America might come together now is through gooning; perhaps that’s already the future of film.