Opinion: ‘One Battle After Another’ and the Burden Placed on Black Women Characters | News

Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” has already been praised as a sprawling, ambitious piece of satire that fuses politics, absurdism, and an uneasy mirror of our present moment. But tucked inside the spectacle of anarchic protests, betrayals, and backroom deals is something more telling: the way Black women are used as narrative catalysts.

On paper, the film appears to give them prominence. Perfidia Beverly Hills, played with electric ferocity by Teyana Taylor, is one of the leaders of French 75 — the militant group whose activism ignites the plot. She’s revolutionary, sharp-tongued, and unapologetic. Chase Infiniti’s Willa, the daughter she has with Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), becomes the story’s hinge point once she disappears, propelling the second half of the film. Regina Hall’s Deandra provides texture as part of the ensemble, anchoring scenes with a steady presence.

The problem isn’t that they’re invisible — it’s that their presence too often feels like scaffolding for someone else’s narrative arc. Perfidia’s ideological clarity and razor-sharp critiques of white activists are some of the film’s best lines, but she slips into absence — literally — as the story pivots away from her voice and toward Bob’s obsession. Willa, the biracial daughter whose very existence should spark questions of legacy, belonging, and generational trauma, becomes more of a plot device than a character with her own interiority. And Deandra, though embodied by a powerhouse actor, is given more background shading than spotlight.

This matters because “One Battle After Another” is explicitly about who gets to tell the story of revolution — and who becomes collateral in the process. Black women in real movements have historically been asked to carry both the weight of liberation and the invisibility of erasure: they lead, they sacrifice, they critique, but too often they are remembered as footnotes in narratives that celebrate their male counterparts. Anderson gestures toward that truth, but he doesn’t quite grant his Black female characters the narrative ownership their arcs demand.

And yet, the film’s tension is also its power. To watch Perfidia’s disgust at the coddling of white revolutionaries is to watch art collide with reality. To witness Willa’s disappearance as a generational metaphor is to feel the sharp edge of what happens when activism and family collide. These women embody the crossroads of race, gender, and revolution — the messy center where satire risks becoming something more biting, more honest.

As a movie-goer, I find myself torn: on one hand, it’s refreshing to see Black women placed at the heart of such a grand cinematic experiment; on the other, I’m frustrated that they don’t fully get to drive it. As a creator, I see an invitation: to demand that our stories not just position Black women as catalysts, but as narrators, decision-makers, and finishers of their own arcs.

“One Battle After Another” is a film that thrives in ambiguity — it doesn’t hand us easy answers. But when it comes to Black women, ambiguity has long been the excuse for their sidelining. That’s why the conversation shouldn’t stop at whether the film is “good” or “bad.” It should continue with the harder question: when will Black women get to be the architects of the revolution onscreen, not just the ones sacrificed for it?