The Character That Gives 'One Battle After Another' Its Urgency

"One of the most memorable images from One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson's film about the activities of a paramilitary vigilante group, comes early on, when we see a very pregnant woman standing in a field and taking target practice with an assault rifle. It is also, as the Warner Bros. marketing department no doubt understands, one of the most provocative. There's, of course, that rifle."

""Pussy ain't for fun. This is the fun. The guns is the fucking fun," she says to a female compatriot of the French 75, the armed leftist organization that they're members of, which is waging war against an authoritarian U.S. government and shadowy white-supremacist forces. She's deadly serious. Shortly after, we watch that same compatriot, the minidress-wearing "Junglepussy," as she stalks back and forth atop a counter in a bank that the French 75 is robbing to fund its efforts."

"A few seconds later, as if issuing a riposte to Stokely Carmichael's 1960s contention that the only position for women in the civil-rights movement is "prone," she makes the implicit explicit: "I am what Black power looks like!" The French 75, from what we can see, is made up primarily of Black women, which means that members such as Perfidia are the most visible avatars of the group's revolution;"

A very pregnant Black woman takes target practice with an assault rifle, creating a deliberately provocative image that fuses maternity and weaponry. The character Perfidia Beverly Hills mixes politics and pleasure while belonging to the French 75, an armed leftist group fighting an authoritarian U.S. government and white-supremacist forces. The group appears composed largely of Black women whose identities are inseparable from their militant capabilities and commitment. Scenes include bold proclamations about power and gender, a bank robbery to fund the cause, and gestures that reclaim and redefine Black female strength and agency.

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