TODAY, YOU DO NEED A WEATHERMAN TO KNOW WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOWS

Now FREE to read - my piece on One Battle After Another

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Below, a text I published a few weeks ago, now free to read.

Weathermen, the best-known radical left “terrorist” group that operated in the US in the late 1960s and 1970s, took its name from Bob Dylan’s lyric “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” from his 1965 song “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025), which made a lot of fuss in the media, basically tells the story of Weathermen reimagined in our world, more than half a century after the events—here is the storyline shamelessly summarized from Wikipedia.¹

Pat Calhoun and Perfidia Beverly Hills are members of the far-left revolutionary group the French 75. While breaking detained immigrants out of a detention center in California, Perfidia humiliates the corrupt commanding officer, Steven J. Lockjaw, who develops a sexual fascination with her. Pat and Perfidia become lovers as the French 75 carry out attacks on politicians’ offices, banks, and the power grid. Steven catches Perfidia planting a bomb, but lets her go after she agrees to have sex with him at a motel. Perfidia gives birth to a baby girl, Charlene, but Pat is unable to persuade her to settle down and live as a family. She abandons them to continue her revolutionary activities. After Perfidia is captured at a botched bank robbery, Steven arranges for her to avoid prison in exchange for information about the French 75. She enters witness protection as Steven hunts down her comrades and shoots many of them on sight, forcing the others to go on the run. As Pat and Charlene are forced to live in hiding as Bob and Willa Ferguson, Perfidia escapes Steven’s custody and flees to Mexico.

Sixteen years later, living in the sanctuary city of Baktan Cross, Bob has become a paranoid drug addict who’s living off the grid. He is protective of Willa, who has grown into a self-reliant and spirited teenager. Through his vehement anti-immigration efforts, Steven has become a Colonel and a prominent figure in the US security agencies. He is invited to join the Christmas Adventurers Club, a secret society of far-right white supremacists. He hunts for Willa to cover up his interracial relationship, which the club forbids. He hires an indigenous bounty hunter, Avanti Q, who captures Bob’s comrade Howard Sommerville, triggering a distress signal to the remaining French 75.

Under the guise of an immigration and drug enforcement operation, Steven dispatches his troops to Baktan Cross to find Bob and Willa. Deandra, a trusted member of the French 75, rescues Willa before her school dance is raided. Steven’s men attack Bob’s home while he is high. He escapes through a tunnel and calls the French 75 for help, but is unable to remember the password. He seeks out Willa’s karate teacher and community leader Sergio St. Carlos, who evacuates a stream of immigrants through a hidden tunnel. Deandra brings Willa to a convent of revolutionary nuns, where she learns the truth about her mother’s betrayal.

The Christmas Adventurers uncover evidence of Steven’s relationship with Perfidia and send a member, Tim Smith, to eliminate him and Willa. Raiding the convent, Steven forcibly tests Willa’s DNA, confirming he is her biological father and thus making his membership in the Christmas Adventurers Club impossible, and leading him to decide to kill her instead of freeing her. Sergio arranges for Bob to escape custody and drives him to the convent, throwing him from the car before being pulled over by police. Hot-wiring another car, Bob reaches the convent but fails to kill Steven with Sergio’s rifle. The colonel hires Avanti, an indigenous professional killer, to take Willa to a far-right militia, who will kill her. Tim tracks Steven down and shoots him in the face with a shotgun, causing him to crash his car, and leaves him for dead. Avanti delivers Willa to the militia, but after a change of heart, frees her and dies gunning them down. Willa takes Avanti’s car and pistol and is chased by Tim until she lures him into a crash by exploiting a blind summit. She shoots him dead when he does not know the revolutionary countersign. Bob finds her on the highway, but she points her gun at him, demanding the countersign, to which he exhaustingly does. The two tearfully reunite and drive away. A badly scarred Steven is seemingly welcomed into the Christmas Adventurers after lying that he was “reverse raped” by Perfidia, but is gassed to death and cremated shortly after his initiation. Returning home with Willa, Bob gives her a letter of hope from Perfidia, where she apologizes for her actions and vows to reunite with her family in the future, and his blessing as she sets off to join a protest hours away in Oakland.

Many reviewers search for a movie which served as a model for One Battle After Another; however, as far as I know, they all ignore what is for me the obvious choice, Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep (2012), a film which also deals with leftist ex-radicals confronting their past. Simplified to the utmost, the story centers on a recent widower and single father, Jim Grant, a former Weather Underground anti-Vietnam War militant wanted for a bank robbery and murder, who hid from the FBI for over thirty years posing as an attorney in Albany, New York. He becomes a fugitive when his true identity is exposed, and he must find his ex-lover, Mimi, the one person who can clear his name, before the FBI catches him—otherwise, he will lose everything, including his 11-year-old daughter Isabel. His search for Mimi takes him across the US where he contacts many of his Weatherman ex-colleagues; finally, Jim and Mimi meet in a secluded lake cabin close to the Canadian border. She is still passionate about the goals of the Weathermen and unapologetic about her actions thirty years earlier, but Jim tartly replies: “I didn’t get tired. I grew up.” Even if he still believes in the cause, he has now become a responsible family man. Jim asks Mimi to turn herself in and alibi him for the sake of his daughter, Isabel: he doesn’t want to leave Isabel behind and repeat the mistake that he and Mimi made thirty years earlier by giving up their own daughter. The next morning, Mimi flees the cabin to sail to Canada, but she turns her boat around and returns to the US to give herself up; the next day, Jim is freed from jail and reunites with Isabel.

It is true that, as a reviewer put it with an acerbic wit, The Company You Keep exudes nostalgia for the time when terrorists were still people who looked and were dressed like us and bore recognizable Anglo-Saxon names. The film nonetheless has an authentic touch in how it renders in almost unbearably painful way the disappearance of the radical left from our political and ideological reality: the survivors of the old radical left are like sympathetic living dead, remnants of another era, strangers drifting in a strange world—no wonder Redford was attacked by conservatives for sympathy and complicity with terrorists. The film’s (and also Neil Gordon’s novel, on which the film is based) authentic touch transpires not only in generally sympathetic portrayal of ex-Weathermen, but even more in wonderful narrative details like the long detailed descriptions of underground life (how to check if one is trailed and shake off possible pursuers; how to create a new identity; etc.).

Where the film fails is in how it confronts the aspect of Weathermen activity which is today for us most problematic: their decision to take the path of violent action. While the film obviously sympathizes with the radical leftist cause, its predominant tone is to reject the path of violence in the terms of maturation, of the passage from youthful enthusiasm (which can easily turn into violent fanaticism) to mature awareness that there are things like family life and responsibility towards one’s children which no political cause should make us violate—or, as the hero says to his ex-lover: “We have a responsibility beyond the Cause. We have a baby.” Read in this way, The Company You Keep is, as someone wrote about Neil Gordon’s novel on which the film is based, le roman des illusions perdues.²

Is, however, such a reference to growing up, family responsibility, etc., a neutral apolitical wisdom which posits a limit to our political engagement, or is it a way for ideology to intervene, preventing us to analyze to the end the political deadlock we find ourselves in? What this second option amounts to is not a covert attempt to justify violent terror, but an obligation to analyze and judge it on its own terms. Let us imagine that Jim were to have no daughter—the problem of Weathermen strategy would remain. Without this type of radical self-examination, we end up in endorsing the existing legal and political order as the frame which guarantees the stability of our private family lives—no wonder that, in legal terms, The Company You Keep is about the hero’s legal rehabilitation, about his effort to become a normal citizen with no dark past haunting him, and at a kind of what one cannot but call a happy ending (the main figures go public, are soon liberated and find a place in our society).

In One Battle After Another, however, as the title of the film clearly indicates, the battle goes on: Willa takes the torch and continues the underground struggle betrayed by her mother. There is another change: in The Company You Keep Weathermen fight against the imperialist system itself, while in One Battle After Another they focus on helping the illegal Latino American immigrants to avoid expulsion and find a place in the US, in other words, they are not working against the system as such, they work to enable immigrants to integrate into the system. And since the system is not the enemy, the enemies of the revolutionaries are not just grey bureaucratic enforcers of the law displaying the banality of evil, i.e., what we perceive as “normal” structure of power—they are ridiculous figures caught in obscene enjoyment, living caricatures. Steven (Sean Penn) combines excessive masculinity and sexual desire with nervous gestures signaling that he is all the time close to a psychic breakdown; Christmas Adventurers Club is a fantasized caricature of an elitist racist group which has no place in today’s global society where black and Asian men and women can also occupy top positions of power (Rishi Sunak, Kemi Badenoch). When the CAC top leaders condemn Steven for not controlling his penis and inseminating Perfidia, they act against the spirit of white masculine racism which totally condones white men raping black women as a normal way to have fun.

Here we touch the crucial feature of the film: no wonder Steven is totally obsessed by Perfidia since Perfidia is ultimately the leftist revolutionary version of the same type of subjectivity as Steven: without Steven’s inner obstacles and nervous tics, she impersonates what in the French 1968 was called jouir sans entraves, enjoying without obstacles. There is no gap for her between her violent political activity and intense promiscuous—she fully enjoys reckless sex in the midst of a “terrorist” act, following the same stance also in how she talks, seamlessly combining brutal acts with dirty speech. Her shifting identity leaves no space for a permanent partner, and no wonder that she betrays even her revolutionary Cause—not because of her daughter (she abandons her for the revolution) but for her survival. After the betrayal, she is given by the government a new identity and sanctuary, but she disappears even from there, so that nobody knows where she is… As such, Perfidia also embodies the form of the film, or, as noted by Pietro Bianchi,

“Perfidia’s role should not be interpreted primarily at the level of content, but rather structurally. All the narrative events set in motion throughout the film depend on the consequences of her actions, but equally on her absence. Every character is thus forced to orbit around the void she creates—with the odd result that the true protagonist of the film appears on screen for no more than twenty minutes, at the beginning.”³

From my standpoint, therein resides the falsity of the film: the “absent center” (Bianchi) of the film, Perfidia as the figure of full feminine enjoyment, is a masculine fantasy constructed to cover up what Lacan called the feminine non-all, the hysterical fragility of the feminine subjectivity. Perfidia is precisely the dream of a Woman as all, of a woman who is phallus. It is crucial to note that, if we take away from the story its “absent center,” the spectacular plurality of its excessive inconsistent actions falls apart. The gap that separates the two films is most palpable at the level of form: while The Company You Keep remains firmly within the constraints of the standard psychological realism, One Battle After Another is, as Peter Bradshaw noticed,

“at once serious and unserious, exciting and baffling, a tonal fusion sending that crazy fizz across the VistaVision screen—an acquired taste, yes, but addictive. The title itself hints at an unending culture war presented as a crazily extreme action movie with superbly managed car chases and a final, dreamlike and hypnotic succession of three cars through the undulating hills.”⁴

The film is full of crazy brilliant moments—not just the hypnotic car chasing but also the convent of revolutionary nuns who practice how to use machine guns. It really introduces a new way of telling the story which unfolds in an inconsistent plural space where brutal obscenity can coexist with pathetic humanist engagement embodied in karate teacher and Deirdre—Perfidia embodies this form at its purest. But here the excess of the form is not the truth of its content, it does not bring out its repressed aspect. The excess of form is rather here to dazzle and fascinate us so that we ignore the ambiguity of the film’s ethico-political stance. It is easy to propose, in a Jamesonian way, that the inconsistent dispersed plurality of the film bears witness to the fact that today’s global financial capitalism can no longer be narratively presented as a totality, so that the film’s failure to properly represent the society it depicts is in itself an indicator of the truth of this society itself, an indicator of the fact that today what Jameson called “cognitive mapping” of our situation is structurally impossible. However, Perfidia as the film’s “absent center” mystifies this impossibility—Perfidia acts as a universal mediator of the film’s dispersed content, she impersonates the excessive and destructive logic of today’s capitalism at its purest. Compared with her, the “bad” figures like Steven and members of the Christian Adventurers Club are pale shadows of this logic. It is difficult to imagine a more antifeminist film than One Battle After Another.

At the very end, Bob gives Willa a letter of hope from Perfidia, where she apologizes for her actions and vows to reunite with her family in the future—is this a letter which arrives at its destination, as Lacan would have put it, a letter which announces a pacifying denouement, or just another irrelevant promise? What if Perfidia really returns to Steven and Willa? Will they be a happy family where the daughter will just disappear on her job from time to time? I presume that the film on purpose leaves this open, that it is irrelevant to its logic. Like The Company You Keep, One Battle After Another ends in a tension between revolutionary spirit and parental moral responsibility, but while The Company You Keep implicitly proposes a formula (yes to revolutionary engagement, but an engagement which should not violate parental responsibility), One Battle After Another just juxtaposes multiple stances and playfully stages their interaction.

So what about love between revolutionaries? From what we know about love among the Bolshevik revolutionaries, something unique took place there, a new form of love couple emerged: a couple living in a permanent emergency state, totally dedicated to the revolutionary Cause, ready to sacrifice all personal sexual fulfillment to it, even ready to abandon and betray each other if Revolution demanded it, but simultaneously totally dedicated to each other, enjoying rare moments together with extreme intensity. The lovers’ passion was tolerated, even silently respected, but ignored in the public discourse as something of no concern to others. There are traces of this even in what we know of Lenin’s affair with Inessa Armand.

The title of Freud’s short text from 1914 “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through”⁵ provides the best formula for the way we should relate to a past traumatic experience. In our case, the traumatic memory is that of Weathermen, and while Redford’s film engages in nostalgic remembering but fails to resolve the key dilemma, One Battle After Another tries to fill in this gap by way of directly repeating the traumatic memory—the film imagines how Weathermen would look today, in a radically different historical situation, and also ends in a failure. What is needed is the working-through of the trauma: an analysis of what was wrong in the Weathermen experience itself. Here we should proceed in a ruthless way that will hurt many leftist sensibilities: the real Weathermen were focused on anti-imperialist resistance, especially in Vietnam, but today, with the exploding crises in formerly colonized countries, we can see that anti-colonial struggles also had deep limitations, which is why they often ended in authoritarian and corrupted new regimes. As for One Battle After Another, to focus on the violent help to illegal immigrants is also problematic: it helps big capital (providing cheap labor and lowering the wages of American workers) and simultaneously raises support for Trumpian populists. Not even to mention the topic of direct (not just defensive) violence: while I am fully aware that violence is often needed and fully justified, I suspect that in today’s US direct small-scale single acts of violence like those practiced by Weathermen have no chance against the Trumpian state and just serve its brutal oppressive measures—such acts work like a call: “Please send National Guard to our town!” The focus should be now on sabotaging the corporate digital control over our lives.

In short, there is nothing revolutionary in One Battle After Another. Today, we need weathermen to learn which way the wind blows. One Battle After Another depicts a group that has no weatherman giving them orientation. With its helter-skelter form it celebrates disorientation itself as radical freedom.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Battle_After_Another.

2. It is impossible to miss a nice detail in the film’s plot: it is the two ex-Weatherwomen (played by Susan Sarandon and Julie Christie) who remain faithful to their old commitment, while all ex-Weathermen made a compromise on behalf of family responsibilities – contrary to the standard myth that women are more attached to families while men are ready to risk all for a Cause. Exactly the same happens in One Battle After Another (with the exception of the traitor Perfidia).

3. https://www.e-flux.com/notes/6783407/female-enjoyment-as-a-political-factor-in-one-battle-after-another.

4. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/sep/17/one-battle-after-another-review-paul-thomas-andersons-thrillingly-helter-skelter-counter-culture-caper.

5. Available online at https://marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/classes/201/articles/1914FreudRemembering.pdf.