“You know what freedom is? No fear,” says Benicio Del Toro’s Sensei Sergio in One Battle After Another, inspiring Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson to face an authoritarian manhunt right on his family’s tail. While both Bob and Sergio are, in certain senses, doomsday preppers, they react quite differently to an impending threat. And how we react when we feel under threat makes a big difference, both to our own wellbeing and to the movements we care about.
In the film, Bob is an in-hiding former member of the far-left revolutionary group called the French 75. For the last 16 years, while raising his daughter Willa in the sanctuary city of Baktan Cross, he’s lived with an intense paranoia about her safety and the potential of his old life coming back to haunt them both.
So Bob is far from cool-headed when his former adversary Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) brings the full force of the military to Baktan Cross to conduct mass raids and arrests on the immigrant population there—all as a cover to hunt down Bob and Willa on personal vendetta. After narrowly escaping capture at home, he runs conspicuously through town sporting a man-bun, sunglasses, and a grubby bathrobe, eventually arriving at the strip-mall karate dojo of Del Toro’s Sensei.
Finally sheltered safely, Bob shouts, “I need a weapon, man! All you’ve got is godd--- nunchucks here! Do you know where I can get a gun?” But where Bob is manic about the cops on his tail, Sensei is calm and collected
In his home, Sensei and his wife are housing a large number of presumably undocumented immigrants—he dubs it a “little Latino Harriet Tubman situation, all legit from the heart, no cash.” As the feds locate the apartment and ramp up their invasion, Sensei and his wife promptly work with various members of the local community to usher all the asylum seekers under their roof into a secret tunnel to get them out of dodge. And yes, he still manages to find a weapon, transportation, and a phone charger for Bob. He even stops to utter a brief prayer over the rifle before bestowing it to him.
When Bob apologizes later for distracting his friend from his mission, Sensei responds, “We’ve been under siege for hundreds of years, you did nothing wrong. Don’t get selfish.” Watching the film in our current political moment, I couldn’t help but find myself moved by his example.
How do we respond to fascism at our front door? Are we shocked or surprised? Are we filled only with fury, bitterness, and fear? Do we look out only for ourselves, or do we widen our sphere of concern and become more interdependent with others?
All around us, people are reacting in different ways to a rising tide of authoritarianism. Some are still living in denial—either willfully, or through the thick fog of partisan media bubbles. Some, like the prominent conservatives who spoke up against the silencing of Jimmy Kimmel last month, might finally be starting to hear some distant alarm bells. Others, keenly aware of the darkness, are panicking loudly about how to stop things before it’s too late. This, I must admit, is the primary emotion that I feel when I am doomscrolling through social media reactions to the latest actions or rhetoric of the Trump administration. The threat feels all-consuming, rendering me powerless. My dual emotions of rage and grief express themselves as pure panic. But panic, as displayed by Bob early in One Battle After Another, cannot take you very far.
Rage can’t take you all the way, either. The revolutionary group the French 75 depicted in the prologue of One Battle focused on trying to create radical change by blowing up buildings, threatening politicians, and creating spectacular displays of resistance. But, as Bob’s ex and fellow retired revolutionary Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) muses in a voiceover after the film’s time-jump to the present-day, “16 years later, the world had changed very little.”
Indeed, when it comes to actually, tangibly thwarting authoritarian regimes and sabotaging their power, One Battle After Another does not offer easy solutions or fantasize about neat-and-tidy rebellions. Sometimes, whether it’s the tactics or the timing, even the most passionate and justified resistance isn’t enough to change everything. Even the most dramatic displays of defiance can sometimes carry less impact than the humbler acts of protection and preparation.
This may be why the image of Sensei calmly evacuating his at-risk community to safety, even as he protects and prepares Bob, is so powerful. Rather than turning to outrage or panic or self-preservation, Sensei’s response to fascism is composed, self-assured, unsurprised, and pragmatic. He does not ignore the threat, but he does not lose his cool in the face of it, either. This is pure interdependence and community action at its finest—a spiritually satisfying culmination that says, “We know exactly what to do, because this is the moment we have been preparing for.”
As I type that phrase, “the moment we have been preparing for,” I am reminded of a lecture by the same name that I recently listened to from LGBTQ+-inclusive Baptist pastor and ethicist David Gushee at a queer Christian conference. Amid the tide of an increasingly authoritarian regime targeting queer people (and other marginalized groups) with greater and greater ferocity, Gushee argued that the network of LGBTQ+-affirming churches and alliances have been cultivated to serve in this exact cultural moment. In biblical language, “for such a time as this.” Despite the grim reality, Gushee’s message was fundamentally hopeful: We should be eager and ready for this moment because our communities are resoundingly vital and necessary.
In One Battle After Another, religious communities play an important role in the fight—not always through overt opposition, but through what Sensei calls “playing defense.” Midway through the film, an unconventional weed-farming convent of mostly Black nuns harbor and safeguard Bob’s daughter, Willa, as she is being pursued by sinister forces. Likewise, Sensei directs his wife to take the immigrants under their roof to a nearby Latino Catholic church partnered with his mission.
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Churches have always been places of refuge amid violence and persecution, which is why recent attempts to strip them of their sanctuary status have felt so perverse. But regardless of what laws come and go, the people of God will always find ways to provide radically countercultural economies of support, safety, and care.
Perhaps I’d make a poor all-out revolutionary, but as a Christian, I am learning to make sense of the fact that humans have always lived under powerful regimes that came and went without their say or ability to prevent it. The church itself was founded under such a regime, and ever since, wherever similar empires have come to power, the church has always been there too, surviving and even prospering in the fight for human dignity.
Nonetheless, Christians have rarely managed to cleanly or quickly dismantle authoritarian regimes, and sometimes the darkness persists for a long time. Jesus himself was put to death by the state. I’m not saying that resistance is futile—but we don’t get to choose the timetable for when its fruit will yield. And while we wait for the harvest, we have to respond attentively to the reality around us. How, then, shall we live when the weight of such forces looms so large?
I was reminded of these questions last week when I listened to New York Times columnist Ezra Klein’s recent interview with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. During the conversation, it became clear that Klein and Coates have starkly different approaches to understanding how to make sense of the rising tide of right-wing power in the U.S. Klein, strategizing about how to win back public support for liberals in the wake of their waning popularity, tried to find a concrete answer for why they lost the 2024 election. Perhaps, he suggested, Democrats should settle for compromises on an issue like abortion rights in the future.
Coates’ response was simple and more self-assured: “We’re losing because there are always moments when we lose.” When Klein commented that this sentiment felt too “fatalistic,” Coates replied:
It doesn’t feel fatalistic to me, it feels like the truth … It’s not that you know what’s going to happen … it’s that you don’t underestimate what you are up against … [Hate is] a very, very, very strong force. And so I don’t think it requires you to feel that you will eventually lose, on the contrary, I think it requires you to feel that even if you do lose, you have this kind of steadfastness to keep going.
Earlier in the interview, Coates gave some of this context for thinking this way:
I am descended from people who, in their lifetime, fought with all their might for the destruction of chattel slavery in this country, and they never saw it [eradicated]. And in my personal belief system, they died in defeat and in darkness. And so, I guess the privilege that I draw out of this, and honor that I draw out of this, is not that things will necessarily be better in my lifetime, but that I will make the contribution that I am supposed to make.
Coates’ moral clarity and understanding of his own place within the ever-shifting sands of societal progress was eye-opening for me. It was reminiscent of the characteristics I’d found so compelling about Sensei in One Battle After Another: steadfast, unfazed, outward-oriented courage—grounded in a peace of knowing that history is long, and what’s happening is nothing new. Put simply: “You win some and you lose some, Bob.”
It’s not a spoiler to admit, I think, that One Battle ends with Bob (and Sensei) accomplishing very little that actually affects the greater forces at play in their world; if anything, the hope the film presents is that fascism may eventually eat its own tail. For Bob, however, it may be that simply searching for his daughter—attending to the vital task in front of him—is a precious pursuit enough, regardless of the outcome. Sensei rescued dozens of women and children from separation and detainment, and provided Bob with the tools he needed to continue his quest, and that was the contribution he was supposed to make.
So, how do we live within this dark time? One Battle After Another paints a compelling picture: Yes, we occasionally play offense, but far more often and much less glamorously, we play defense. We build networks and bonds of community, depending on others and allowing others to depend on us—moving toward people instead of away from them. We grow gardens, both literal and spiritual, not just to feed our nuclear family in an isolated bunker, but to feed others too.
I think often of the words in Jeremiah 29:7: “And work for the peace and prosperity of the city where I sent you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, for its welfare will determine your welfare.” To accept that we are living through such a time, to acknowledge its evil and recognize that I cannot do anything on my own to stop it, allows me to redirect my attention toward what I can control. I can invest in communal interdependence, prepare for the worst but hope and pray for the best, make others aware of my vulnerability and need, and become aware of theirs as well.
If we rise to meet these coming years, we must recognize that there is great evil upon us, and refuse to be shocked, panicked, or even merely enraged by it—but acknowledge that the proper response to such evil is to be even more prepared to love our neighbors as ourselves.
In the words of One Battle’s Sensei: “Courage, Bob, courage.”
How do we live within this dark time? One Battle After Another paints a compelling picture: Yes, we occasionally play offense, but far more often and much less glamorously, we play defense.
Georgia Coley is a documentary filmmaker and culture writer living in Nashville. She writes about the intersection of trans experience and theology at her Substack, Georgia In Her Mind.
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