# Media Review: One Battle after Another, The Past as a Safe House, and the Afterlives of Clandestine Organizing

Stanislas Kihm

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Stanislas Kihm. Media Review: One Battle after Another, The Past as a Safe House, and the Afterlives of Clandestine Organizing. Organization Studies, 2026, 10.1177/01708406261430579. hal-05532731

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Media Review: One Battle after Another, The Past as a Safe House, and the Afterlives of Clandestine Organizing

<table><tr><td>Journal:</td><td>Organization Studies</td></tr><tr><td>Manuscript ID</td><td>OS-26-0259</td></tr><tr><td>Manuscript Type:</td><td>Media Review</td></tr><tr><td>Keywords:</td><td>Discourse theory (metaphor, narratives, rhetoric etc.) &lt; Theoretical Perspectives, Ethics &lt; Theoretical Perspectives, Organizational control &lt; Topics, Partial organization &lt; Topics, Power, domination, resistance &lt; Topics</td></tr><tr><td>Abstract:</td><td></td></tr></table>
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**Media Review: *One Battle after Another*, The Past as a Safe House, and the Afterlives of
Clandestine Organizing**

Paul Thomas Anderson

*One Battle after Another*

United States of America: Warner Bros. Pictures

Early 2026: in the United States, political violence circulates as a floating signifier invoked to harden policing, to delegitimize protest, and to sustain an anxious public dramaturgy. Many film critics have framed *One Battle After Another*, released worldwide in September 2025, as a political film that meets the moment head-on. Yet its most generative move lies elsewhere. Freely adapting Thomas Pynchon's *Vineland* (1990), the film treats revolution less as a program than as memory-work: clandestinity replayed like a beloved record, in the shelter of safe houses and code words, while the present stubbornly mutates its surveillance, its rhetorics, and its enemies. Read through an organizational lens, the film becomes less a manifesto than an inquiry into how underground collectives persist in the rear-view mirror: how secrecy is maintained, how partial organizations cohere, and how violence is organized, sensed, and survived. If the film feels timely, it is also because it insists on being out of sync: its politics is filtered through the afterlives of older struggles. The underground it depicts does not merely hide from the present; it shelters inside a past that keeps replaying itself.

*One Battle After Another* compresses, at first, the story of a militant couple inside a far-left faction called the “French 75”. Pat Calhoun (an anagrammatic wink to the director’s initials “PTA”) is played by Leonardo DiCaprio; his lover and comrade, Perfidia Beverly Hills, is played by Teyana Taylor. Their early actions are cut with headlong speed: raids, sabotage, and a border detention-center breakout that ends with the commanding officer, Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), publicly humiliated and privately obsessed. What follows is a chain of compromises and betrayals that the film narrates almost breathlessly: Perfidia is caught after a
homicide during a burglary, then strikes a deal to denounce her comrades, and becomes both protected by the police and hunted by former activists. French 75 members are tracked down and executed; Pat is forced into a new identity and a life off the grid. A child is born (Charlene) and, as the movement collapses, names and lives are swapped: survival becomes paperwork, passwords, and disappearance.

After a sixteen-year ellipsis, the pace briefly relaxes, letting some scenes breathe and stretch. Pat is now Bob Ferguson, a paranoid stoner raising his daughter, now called Willa (Chase Infiniti), in the city of Baktan Cross, while replaying the past as if it were still usable: he watches The Battle of Algiers (1966) like a devotional loop, and clings to an inherited grammar of struggle. The threat returns through Lockjaw, now a colonel and a prominent figure in U.S. security agencies, eager to enter a white-supremacist secret society called the “Christmas Adventurers Club” and therefore determined to erase any trace of his interracial past. When troops descend on Baktan Cross under the cover of an immigration-and-drug operation, Willa is pulled to safety by a surviving French 75 member. At the same time, Pat is hunted, separated, and forced back into contact with an underground he can barely re-enter, most painfully when he cannot remember the group’s telephone countersign. His last resort is Willa’s karate instructor, Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), whose calmer, low-key support anchors a loose protection chain. From there, the pursuit does not let up. Pat and Willa remain on the run, and the film’s last hour largely follows their attempt to stay one step ahead of Lockjaw’s men and the broader security apparatus closing in around them.

The film speaks directly to organization studies on three intertwined planes. First, it foregrounds violence not as an external shock that occasionally interrupts organizing, but as a constitutive horizon that silently shapes what actors can coordinate, say, and endure (Costas & Grey, 2018). In the film, agency is exercised under the possibility of capture and disappearance. This matters because it shifts attention from motives and ideologies to the mundane logistics of
survival: routes, cover stories, and the distribution of risk across a network. Second, the film treats secrecy as a social process rather than an aesthetic of conspiracy (Costas & Grey, 2014). Secrecy is shown as something that must be continually maintained, performed, and repaired through small practices: a phone countersign, a safe house, a habit of speaking in codes, a deliberate reliance on lo-fi channels, a refusal to leave traces. When these practices falter – when a password is forgotten, when a link is compromised – secrecy does not merely “fail”; relationships are reclassified, and trust is recalibrated. Third, the film repeatedly depicts collectives that do not look like full-fledged organizations yet function as partial ones (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2011). The French 75, the Christmas Adventurers Club, and the shifting set of protectors around Pat operate through minimal but decisive organizational elements: membership (who is in), hierarchy (who decides), rules (what must be done), monitoring (who is watched), and sanctions (who is punished). Pynchon’s (1990) source novel already frames this world as an afterlife of countercultural struggle; the film turns that afterlife into a practical question of organizing. The film’s organizational payoff lies in moments staged as tests of belonging, trust, protection, and authorized force, amplified by pacing that alternately compresses action and lets the costs of clandestinity surface.

Lockjaw’s storyline might be read as a caricature, yet its scenes earn their analytical force precisely because they stage reactionary politics as a logic of admission and recognition. Summonsed to a lavish hotel where a wedding celebration provides cover, the Colonel is ushered away from the public festivity into a discreet interview with the Christmas Adventurers Club: an initiation disguised as small talk. Secrecy is organized through opacity and ritualized access (Parker, 2016), and “purity” is probed less through doctrine than through biography. The Club wants a “safe and pure” pedigree, yet Lockjaw’s past makes that demand impossible. Years earlier, he slept with the activist Perfidia, and Willa – his biological daughter with her – is precisely what he now tries to conceal to secure the Club’s recognition. What follows is not
simply villainy but a selection ritual: eligibility is performed under scrutiny, recognition is granted through signals and tests, and violence becomes legitimate by becoming sanctioned. This is where partial organization becomes more than a descriptive label. The Club does not need a visible bureaucracy to produce order: it can stabilize membership boundaries (who counts), install an implicit hierarchy (who judges), impose rules (what must be proven), monitor deviance (who is watched), and threaten sanctions (who is erased). In other words, what looks like a loose assemblage is organizationally potent – an efficient political machine that trades procedure for ritual and replaces transparency with initiation.

Pat's forgotten countersign is the film's most economical scene of organizational breakdown because it is staged as a mundane failure with structural consequences. On the run, Pat tries to re-open a line to the French 75 in the only way that still "counts" in their world: a telephone call governed by a shared countersign. The moment is played with a comic surface – hesitation, fumbling, a stoner's fog, the embarrassment of someone who once belonged – yet the form is telling: the camera lingers on the gap between urgency and recall, on the awkward silence where a single sentence should be. What collapses is not simply communication but membership. The scene lands as a sharp proposition about secrecy: secrecy is not a stock of hidden information but a set of social processes that must be continually performed, maintained, and repaired through small practices (Costas & Grey, 2014). The underground exists here at the level of micro-infrastructures (code words, secure habits, trusted intermediaries, the decision to stay lo-fi, and the discipline of leaving no traces). When Pat cannot produce the countersign, secrecy does not merely fail; the boundary is redrawn without him. He becomes an outsider not because he has switched sides, but because he cannot enact the practice that constitutes belonging. The film thereby reframes the memory of struggle in operational terms: the past is not only an ideological repertoire but also a working system that must be kept alive. Forgetting a password is, quite literally, forgetting the organization – an antidote to romantic accounts of
clandestinity in which secrecy protects without excluding, or solidarity persists without
procedural competence.

The safe-house relay extends the same argument from the other side by showing that secrecy is never purely individual because protection is always borrowed. Once Pat and Willa are pursued, survival becomes a series of handoffs: doors opened reluctantly, back rooms offered temporarily, rides arranged, cover stories improvised, silence purchased at the price of other people's exposure. Compared to the breakneck montage of the opening, these sequences are longer-breathed: scenes stretch, conversations linger, bodies tire, and the moral friction of "bringing danger to someone else's door" is allowed to accumulate. The hinge is a brief exchange that crystallizes the network's ethic. Pat apologizes: "I'm sorry. I brought all this shit to your door, man. I'm sorry about everything."; and Sensei answers: "We've been under siege for hundreds of years. You did nothing wrong. Don't get selfish." Sensei functions less as a mentor than as a quiet logistician, holding together a community infrastructure that makes flight possible while reframing guilt as a political temptation. "Don't get selfish" turns a personal emotion into an organizational problem: clandestine networks cannot survive if risk is individualized and shame becomes a private exit from collective obligation. Here, the film does not merely illustrate theory; it sharpens it. If violence is a constitutive horizon rather than an episodic interruption (Costas & Grey, 2018), then solidarity is not a feeling but a discipline – an ongoing redistribution of exposure across a network, sustained by reminders that keep collective time ("hundreds of years under siege") from collapsing into personal panic.

Taken on its own terms, *One Battle After Another* makes clandestinity legible as an organizational condition built from thresholds, tests, codes, relays, and redistributed risk. Its most valuable contribution for organization studies is formal: by aligning pace, montage, and comedy with the fragility of secrecy, it turns abstract mechanisms into visible practices—admission rituals, passwords, and the everyday work of keeping a network intact. Read
alongside work on organizational secrecy and partial organization (Costas & Grey, 2014; Ahrne & Brunsson, 2011), the film points to a research agenda on the afterlives of movements (Briscoe & Gupta, 2016): how belonging is policed when structures remain partial, how solidarity is sustained when protection is borrowed, and how identities are reassigned under pressure. It is slightly belated political imagination, rooted in the 1970s–80s, that is part of its value, forcing attention to what persists when the present has already shifted the conditions of secrecy and exposure. The film’s pleasure-momentum, comic errancy, and refusal of a neat diagnosis also function as a method. By turning political violence into a coherent fiction, it relieves the heaviness of the real just enough to make its organizational form thinkable. As a result, the film is worth revisiting less for a program of revolution than for the organizational afterlives it traces, where the past becomes a safe house that still organizes the present.

References

Ahrne, G., & Brunsson, N. (2011). Organization outside organizations: The significance of partial organization. *Organization, 18*(1), 83–104.

Briscoe, F., & Gupta, A. (2016). Social activism in and around organizations. *Academy of Management Annals, 10*(1), 671–727.

Costas, J., & Grey, C. (2014). Bringing secrecy into the open: Towards a theorization of the social processes of organizational secrecy. *Organization Studies, 35*(10), 1423–1447.

Costas, J., & Grey, C. (2018). Violence and organization studies. *Organization Studies, 40*(10), 1573–1586.

Parker, M. (2016). Secret societies: Intimations of organization. *Organization Studies, 37*(1), 99–113.

Pynchon, T. (1990). *Vineland*. Little, Brown and Company.