We live in an age that prides itself on vigilance. We are told—often correctly—that history never ends, that reaction never sleeps, that injustice returns in new guises the moment we look away. The lesson appears sober, even responsible: there will always be another battle. And so we prepare ourselves for endurance rather than transformation. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (2025) stages this lesson with admirable seriousness. It offers no triumphalism, no illusion of final victory. Fascism, authoritarianism, reaction—call it what you will—returns again and again. The struggle is permanent.

But permanence is not neutrality. To insist that struggle never ends is already to take a position about what kind of politics is possible—and what kind is not. When we place One Battle After Another alongside two of the most influential contemporary political philosophers, Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou, something sharper comes into view. What looks like realism begins to resemble consolation. This article argues that both Žižek and Badiou help us see why the mantra of endless struggle, however militant it sounds, may function as a subtle form of reassurance—one that protects us from the far more unsettling question of whether a different political horizon is possible at all.

We usually think of consolation as gentle or sentimental: holiday movies, narratives of personal redemption, assurances that things will work out. But consolation can be severe. It can come clothed in realism, cynicism, even militancy. To be told “there will always be another battle” can feel bracing, adult, unsparing. It denies false hope. It rejects naïve optimism. Yet it also does something else: it normalizes repetition. It teaches us to expect recurrence rather than rupture, management rather than transformation. This is the deeper target of my critique: not hope, but endurance elevated into virtue. Consolation today no longer says “everything will be fine.” Instead it says, “Nothing will ever be fine—but that’s just the way things are.”

A Žižekian reading of One Battle After Another begins from suspicion. Žižek’s central claim, repeated across decades, is that ideology today rarely takes the form of deception. We often know very well how bad things are. Ideology works instead by shaping what we take to be inevitable. From this perspective, the film’s insistence on endless struggle is not merely descriptive; it is ideological. It teaches us to experience repetition as realism. The enemy’s perpetual return becomes proof that no fundamental change is possible—only........

© Blitz