…and it’s been staring us right in the face since Paul Thomas Anderson’s anti-rural-white-America epic opened four weeks ago on 9.26.
And here it is:
Even the ugliest, most deranged, most demonically boozy or druggy dad would have serious qualms about killing his own daughter, especially if the bad dad is a hardcore rightie, given traditional conservative beliefs (Charlie Kirk, etc.) in the sanctified rituals of parenting and fatherhood.
And yet Sean Penn’s Colonel Lockjaw is such an impossibly racist fucktard that he somehow determines that his mixed-race daughter, Chase Infiniti’s Willa, has to be iced so as to eliminate biological proof that he once had sex with Willa’s African-American mother (Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills)…a paternity situation that would totally kill his chances of being accepted into a secret rightwing racist fraternity called the Christmas Adventurers Club.
This is what’s fundamentally and humanly wrong with One Battle After Another. There’s just no believing that this kind of psychopathic ugliness could prevail within the heart of even a fanatical rightwing hard-ass like Lockjaw….even the sickest, most racially diseased dad in the world wouldn’t clip his own daughter over a social-political motive.
Even if Lockjaw was so insanely devoted to racist ideology that he tried to nullify his own heart and shut off his own soul spigot in order to commit filicide, even the sickest bad dad would be so inwardly torn about the prospect of murdering his own that he probably couldn’t go there. Because deep down, even the worst dads are human.
And yet PTA has dramatically invested in this kind of venality. He believes that Lockjaw, being a racist pig and all, could be a daughter-killer. He bases the bulk of the film, in fact, upon this premise. (Not the 40-minute prologue set in 2008 or thereabouts, but the present-tense part.)
The problem isn’t just that silent Godly guidance and the better angels of human nature forbid such a diseased mindset at the end of the day, but that we, the ticket-buying, popcorn-inhaling, non-lefty extremists in the audience…we can’t and won’t believe this shit. It simply doesn’t add up in human terms. Filicide is simply a bridge too far in this context, and it just doesn’t wash.
Left progressives (who of course include many film-industry types and many if not most film critics) are buying it, of course, because they see hardcore, immigrant-arresting, ICE-resembling righties in starched military fatigues as inherently evil…to them a belief in Lockjaw’s inhuman scheme is a no-brainer and a no-sweater.
Even I, a sensible centrist, had half-accepted Lockjaw’s sick decision to slay his own daughter. I sat there in my movie-theatre seat and went along with PTA’s dramatic suggestion until, yesterday around noon, a friend flipped a moral switch by mentioning what I’ve written here. A lightbulb went on and I went “wow…yeah, of course…that’s a good one.”