America’s Cinematic Salvation

Coiled at the center of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a shadowy club committed to the “racial purification” of the American populace. Meeting in luxury hotel suites and bland office towers, these lumpy, balding men — generals, politicians, titans of industry — want to rebalance the composition of their country, and possibly the world. They call themselves the Christmas Adventurers, and they profess a creed of strict racial hygiene, inducting only “white Americans by Gentile-born,” in the hope of segregating white Americans away from the refuse of the worldwide underclass. “You want to save the planet,” says head Adventurer Virgil Throckmorton (Tony Goldwyn), “you start with immigration.”