We didn't start the fire...
It was always burning... since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire...
- Billy Joel
It was fairly apparent that Anderson started this movie, scripting at least, much before the occurrance of the last Presidential election, and though the key beats were borrowed from a novel in the 80s, the actions of the administration in the movie vis-a-vis curbing the illegal immigration, matches, beat for beat, the current administration policy of rounding up of the illegals by masked immigration agents, hauling them to detention centers in unmarked vans and then forcibly deporting them to, sometimes, their native countries, and other times, to other sanctuary countries that would accept America's contraband for some undisclosed favors. (Ironic it is, when America illegally emigrates foreign nationals to an unrelated third country as part of addressing its own issues with illegal aliens) Prescient or Predictable? As in, it could only go this way, as long as America treats illegal immigration as a law and order issue and throws more (enforecement agencies') bodies at it, as though it wasn't decades of its selfish foreign policies, particularly towards the Latin American nations, supporting dictators, fomenting trouble, meddling with their elections, and helping install friendly regimes favorable towards American businesses, which eventually destabilized their societies and created this morass of mass migration. And now to appear tough in front of its electorate, the adminstration (not just the current one, but the ones before this too, irrespective of their true colors) tries to put the genie back in bottle by building walls across its borders, round up all able bodied men in various enforecement agencies and assign them the lone task of rounding up the sheep on the city roads and herding them back to their pens beyond its borders. Someone once said, America views every problem as a war, because of its history, even naming the heads of the agencies tasked with dealing the issue as "Czars". Does this sound familiar - The nation, troubled by the contraband into its borders, affecting the neighborhoods, upsetting the social fabric, springs into action and creates an agency with its own Czar, arms it to its teeth and mandates it to go after the nations south of its border to try stemming the flow of the product at the source level. Decades after Ronald Reagan's public declaration of war on drugs, again treating the issue as more a law and order one, instead of a demand and supply economic issue or from a public health addiction angle, close to 50 years later, the agencies of DEA, CIA, FBI and now Homeland security are still at it, battling the hundred headed Hydra with limited success. When a character in the movie talks to a History teacher in a classroom adorned with pictures of Founding Fathers and asks, whether the school is indeed teaching the real history of country, and not the "white"washed one written by the slave owners, the resonance sounds deep.
As much America had been an expansionist power right since its inception, there existed a strata of the society that perennially opposed to its money-grubbing policies quite militantly, like the Indians in the 1700s, the blacks during the 1800s, and during the 1900s toolmakers, tradesmen, suffragettes, seamstresses, unions, environmentalists, ant-war activists, civil liberty group and many such. Until the moment the night broke for the dawn, the nation vehemently opposed all these organizations with the brutal might of its machinery, never acknowledging the merit of their argument and tried to squelch the voices with a vice grip of its law, and when the moment finally arrived, a point at which the activism could no longer be ignored, legislations, affirmative actions, civil liberties, regulations, anti-discriminatory rules, occupational safeties et al were enshrined in law, not through the largesse of the heart of the adminstration, but through a consistent effort of collective hands, proving that America is what it is today, not because of its Founding Fathers alone, but also because of its organized, involved, and warring subjects, who forced the hands of the law men to really mean the words "We, the people" they so condescendingly opened their Constitution with. It is not without a bit of irony, when the current President signs an order decreeing the organization "Antifa" (short for, anti-fascist), a terrorist organization, opening a new front, a new chapter and a new page in its haloed book, writing yet another preamble of another struggle of the proletariat against the adminsitration's authoritarian tendencies.
"One battle after another" is a heady mix of politics, social commentary, explosive history, family strife and gut-busting comedy, if that combination even makes any sense, all this without naming names, without taking sides and without any heavy-handedness. Whether Anderson wanted to site an explosive family situation with a chaotic militant backdrop against a heart-wrenching migrant scenario in that order like in a nesting doll situation and make it a family drama, like ordinary people caught in extraorindary circumstances scenario, or move the order around with regards to the macro and the micro making it a political statement about the current times, to each his own. Sean Penn's character of a bottled up military man, played brilliantly by the actor, the secret cabal of the Christmas Adventurer's Club, a secret administrative agency aimed at ensuring the monochromatic hues, more white than dark, of upper echelons and a mad cap, fried family man with a militant past, trying to keep his daugher and his act together, all caught up in the dragnet of illegal immigration, is a serious tip of the hat to "Dr. Strangelove", another heady comedy about Cold War Paranoia.
The technical team firing on all cylinders, the actors on top of their marks, the director on top of his game, all in the service of a feature that will certainly go down as the Strangelove of its generation, "One battle after another" is as relentless in serving up themes, memes and extremes as its title. An absolute masterpiece!
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