One Battle After Another Ending Explained

This post contains full spoilers for One Battle After Another.

At the climax of One Battle After Another, Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) has finally found his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). Before this moment, Bob spent most of the film searching for his only child, trying to keep up with and outrun Sean Penn’s Col. Steve Lockjaw and a militarized police force which was raining hell down on members of the revolutionary group the French 75. In the process, the film careened from hilarious to terrifying, sometimes in the same scene.

But after Lockjaw, bounty hunters, and even an assassin from the Illuminati-like secret society of powerful white supremacists, the Christmas Adventurers Club, have been dispatched, Willa is still breathing. And scared. Hence when Bob tries to embrace her, his daughter raises her pistol and declares, “Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction.” She’s demanding that Bob respond with the next line from the 1971 Gil Scott-Herron spoken word piece, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” thus completing the password and confirming Bob’s identity.

It’s an unexpected moment, one that painfully, and tellingly, delays the emotional reunion that we viewers have wanted. But the delay also underscores the theme running throughout One Battle After Another, leading to the film’s final denouement of revolution and the legacy of the sins of hte past.

The Battles Continue

Shortly after the reunion of Bob and Willa, we check back in on Lockjaw, who has incredulously survived the ordeal, albeit now badly disfigured. The leaders of the Christmas Adventurers Club know that Lockjaw is Willa’s biological daughter, the result of his coupling with Perfida Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), a French 75 revolutionary, Bob’s girlfriend, and—most worrisomely for the racists who make up the club—a Black woman. Despite being uncomfortably open about his fetishization of Black women earlier in the film, Lockjaw now insists that he was (in his phrasing) “reverse raped” by Perfida and the French 75.

Much to his shock, the club leaders seem to buy the explanation and induct him into the organization. Lockjaw allows himself to revel in his victory as a Christmas Adventurer shows him around and brings him into his office. Yet no sooner does the door shut on Lockjaw’s office than the room fills with gas, killing the man at his highest point. We then watch as henchmen take out Lockjaw’s body and cremate it.

For some, Lockjaw’s death provides a type of catharsis, showing the utter degradation of an older body that was clearly fashioned to a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. level of musculature. However, the scene also makes a larger point about the nature of the white supremacy embraced by the club and instiutional power. A secret society built around arcane rituals riffing on pop cultural kitsch, the Christmas Adventurers Club is the clearest sign of One Battle After Another‘s debt to the work of Thomas Pynchon, whose 1991 novel Vineland inspired Paul Thomas Anderson‘s film.

While the movie retains some of the postmodern playfulness found in Pynchon, Anderson takes a more sober approach to the threat of white supremacy, particularly in its shockingly realistic depiction of militarized police. That seriousness makes the final scenes featuring the Christmas Adventurers Club not a relief that Lockjaw is dead, but rather a reminder that the club remains in power, full of hate and with endless resources. It reminds the viewer that the battles continue. And the enemy is not only entrenched, but also capable of eating their own without mercy, accountability… or anything approaching a sense of humanity and true kinship.

An American Girl

But let’s compare Lockjaw’s fate with that of his intended prey. As shocking as it is when she pulls a gun on her father and demands that he complete the code phrase, Willa’s actions are consistent with her character arc. She began the movie simply wanting to be the American ideal of a normal teenager. She wants to just go to a high school dance with her friends, to admire her mother (whom she thinks died a hero), and to not have to worry about her father’s reckless behavior and his antiquated rules of passcodes and subversive politics. And yet, all that falls apart when Lockjaw sends a squad of police officers in fatigues and carrying assault weapons into her high school.

By the end of the film, we’ve seen her train with weapons, outsmart Lockjaw and other cops, and escape from bounty hunters. Through a trial by fire she’s quickly grown into an adept revolutionary, especially in contrast to the man who raised her. For every demonstration of competence on Willa’s part, we find an example of Bob mucking things up, most notably his inability to remember any of the password phrases.

Thus Anderson juxtaposes the scene of the Christmas Adventurer’s Club cleaning up their mess with one of Willa going out the door, ready for action. When Bob tells her lovingly, “Be careful,” Willa responds, “I won’t.”

Infiniti delivers the line without a trace of fear and a smile that goes beyond the usually know-it-all cockiness that every teenager possesses. Moreover, Anderson matches the scene with “American Girl” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (a very different use of the song than in Silence of the Lambs by Jonathan Demme, whose son Brooklyn TrueHeart Demme appears in One Battle After Another). In a different film, Willa’s smile and the ebullient Heartbreakers track would feel like foolish optimism.

But the movie has shown that Willa has shorn away any naiveté about revolution that she may have inherited from Bob. Like her parents, Willa is a radical. She didn’t want their legacy, full of hypocrisy and disappointment. Yet the reality of this world forced previous generations’ hang-ups, animosities, and even racism onto her. She had no choice but to adapt and hopefully do it better—all with the ability to appreciate the messiness and failures of her mother, who betrayed the French 75 to save herself, and her father. Unlike the Christmas Adventures Club, she ends the story with family and friends, as opposed to murder and mayhem by holding humans to impossible, self-destructive standards.

Willa has a clearer understanding of both the threat she faces and the techniques needed to fight it. And she goes out into an America in which those in power have the resources and desire to destroy her, and she’s willing to resist.

Love Letters

If Willa’s smile at the end signals that she’s become a competent revolutionary, then she’s following in the footsteps of her mother Perfida. Although sometimes reckless and ultimately a rat who turned state’s evidence against her comrades before escaping to Mexico, Perfida was an extremely effective resistance fighter. When Willa fights back against her captures, she reflects her mother, not Bob.

Yet, there’s a genuine warmth in Willa’s final smile at Bob, something that was missing in Perfida, at least until the very end. Before Willa goes back out into the world, Anderson intercuts scenes between Willa and Bob spending quality time together and the Christmas Adventurers Club disposing of Lockjaw’s body. In voiceover, we hear a letter that Perfida sent to Willa from Mexico, one that Bob had been keeping until the right time.

Where Taylor played Perfida as an explosive and selfish warrior in the first half of the film, she now imbues her character with heartbreak and longing. This is a person who knows that she failed to be a parent, who has been so devoted to fighting for a better world that she forgot what she was fighting for, and she’s filled with regret. Through the letter, combined with images of Bob being a stereotypical doofus dad who can’t figure out how to take a cell phone picture, One Battle After Another avoids making the same mistake that Perfida made. The film pulls no punches in its depiction of the evils of the world, and remains insistent that it must be resisted.

But it never loses sight of the human beings caught within the struggle. In these final moments, we realize that One Battle After Another is ultimately about love: the love between a father and daughter, the lost love between a daughter and her absent mother, the love of community (best demonstrated by the “Latina Harriet Tubman situation” orchestrated by Benicio del Toro‘s Sensei Sergio St. Carlos), and a love of justice.

There’s a deep human longing within Anderson’s film, one that justifies the wackiness left over from the Pynchon novel that inspired the movie and one that grounds the movie’s revolutionary furor. In these final moments, as Willa reckons with her parents, One Battle After Another insists that if the fight will go one, then it must be ultimately fueled by love. And love conquers hate.

One Battle After Another is now playing in theaters.

The post One Battle After Another Ending Explained appeared first on Den of Geek.