How Two of This Oscars Season’s Buzziest Films Failed Their Black Heroines
The last time we see DeAndre in One Battle After Another, tears are streaming down her face as an ICE agent questions her about the whereabouts of her comrade Bob. “I don’t know,” she says repeatedly through sobs — and she doesn’t. This does not satisfy the agent, who continues to grill her. Scene ends. It’s never clear what happens to her after that; the film finishes about forty-five minutes later without any of the characters even questioning her absence.
So little cinematic real estate is given to DeAndre in Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film. The story is primarily fascinated with Bob, a white former member of the left-leaning, anti-government group called the French 75. Bob has been living in semi exile for nearly two decades with his sixteen year old daughter, Willa, after he was forced to flee with her when she was just an infant, after his lover and Willa’s mother, Perfidia Beverly Hills, was captured by the state. Following Perfidia’s arrest and coerced confession, several members of the French 75 were assassinated. Along with Bob and Willa, the only other members who were able to make a run for it were DeAndre and a character named Sommerville.
It’s never mentioned where DeAndre ends up going. After Bob and Willa’s dramatic exit, we simply see her walk away into the night. It makes it all the more stunning when sixteen years after those events, she appears, like a radical fairy godmother, in Willa’s high school bathroom to rescue the teen after a distress signal had been put out following Sommerville’s arrest. “I know you have a lot of questions, and I’ll answer them later, but right now we have to roll,” DeAndre says to Willa.
“I thought the person coming through the door one day was going to be her mom… see her daughter, teach her girl stuff, she’d do her hair,” Bob at one point confesses to another character. “I can’t do her hair, man.” Along with the friction in their relationship caused by Bob’s admitted impotence as a parent, which includes him being high and sleeping on the couch all day, Willa is functionally parentless. “I don’t want to be your babysitter!” she tells Bob.
It is DeAndre who walks through the proverbial front door and into Willa’s life the way Bob imagined Perfidia might one day do, but the film spends little time trying to form the connection between the two. She never gets a chance to answer many of the questions Willa might have about her mother, or about being a young Black woman. DeAndre is the first Black woman – or Black person, period — we ever see Willa, a Black biracial, interact with. The film dances around Willa’s biraciality, with only Bob’s comment about not being able to do her hair being the only signifier of the racial disparity between the two.
Much like Bob’s confession about his inadequacy as a father, the film doesn’t use this epiphany to begin to see Willa as a fully actualized person, but rather it’s there for the audience to see Bob as a fully actualized person. It's no telling how much dimension Willa’s anger could’ve been given if the film didn’t treat her Blackness as a mere afterthought, as a task it couldn’t do.
“You got more fight in you than the rest of us, DeAndre,” Rochelle, a nun at an all Black convent that DeAndre takes Willa to hide out. “I got sick of this shit a long time ago.”
DeAndre is stoic in the face of so many insurmountable odds. When the French 75 free detainees from an ICE detention center, it is DeAndre that you can hear throughout the scene, speaking in both Spanish and English, directing people towards their exit. It was she who was there to help the night Bob and Willa left to live their new lives.
Sixteen years after several of her comrades were murdered or forced to live in exile, what compels a Black woman who is undoubtedly dealing with unspeakable grief, anger, and trauma to rescue her old friend’s daughter from danger with only a moment’s notice to do so? What lessons could she have given Willa, so early in processing the rage taking over her body, in what it means to still feel drawn to the struggle after so much heartache?
Once DeAndre is detained by ICE, Willa is alone to deal with an ICE agent named Steven Lockjaw, who, once upon a time, was engaged in a psychosexual relationship with her mother. Lockjaw has rained terror on the local community to find Willa to figure out if she’s his daughter or not. After the DNA test he forces her to take came back with the results that he is her biological father, he takes her to be killed by a hit man. Her existence threatens Lockjaw’s desired membership into an exclusive white supremacist organization called The Christmas Adventurers, which has questioned his loyalty to the white race after rumors have it that he had sex with a Black woman and fathered her child.
This all leads to one of the two times in One Battle After Another, where the film corners itself and is forced to use a contrivance in order to move the plot forward. (The first being when Bob is in the hospital after being arrested at a protest, and a nurse who happens to be friends with Willa’s Karate instructor turned Bob’s companion, Sensei Carlos, helps him escape.)
Here, it is when Willa is handed off by Lockjaw to the hit man that the latter remarks that he doesn’t kill kids. The hit man ends up transporting her to a new hit man who is guaranteed to do the job. Once at the new hit man’s house, the old hitman, for some unexplained reason, just sits in his car until suddenly he gets out and decides to get into a shoot out with the new hit man.
Willa is ultimately saved, not by DeAndre or even her father, but by the moral whims of a random hit man. These moments of filmic course correction would feel less clunky if it weren’t a reminder of who is worth the creative gymnastics it takes to keep a person free and who isn’t. If the film was willing to pull such stunts to get Bob and Willa, it makes even more glaring how little care was given to DeAndre.
“You know what freedom is? No fear,” Sensei tells Bob, borrowing those words from the late singer Nina Simone. One Battle After Another ends with Willa and Bob reconnecting and laughing over Bob using a smartphone for the first time, a device he previously rejected over fear of government surveillance. The last time we see DeAndre, she is still crying, trying to convince the ICE agent to let her go.
It shouldn’t have been surprising when Annie died in Sinners. In Ryan Coogler’s latest cinematic achievement, he uses the extravagance of vampire horror to explore the theme of the commodification of Black culture. Twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, return home to Mississippi to open a juke joint. While running errands before the opening, Smoke visits Annie, a hoodoo practitioner, and his lover. He scolds her when he sees that she doesn’t take money from her customers. “Only money gives you [power.]” He tells her.
Smoke, along with several other characters in the film, try to empower themselves through financial means. Annie rebukes these ideas. When the vampires show up at the opening of the juke joint, offering money, it is Annie who helps guide the characters on how to fight the vampires, deferring to her various spiritual practices. “Vampires is different. Soul gets stuck in the body. Can’t rejoin the ancestors. Cursed to live here with all this hate. Can’t even feel the warmth of a sunrise,” She tells them.
She makes Smoke promise her that if she is attacked by one of the vampires, she wants him to promise that he’ll “free me before I turn.” “I got someone on the other side waiting for me,” she says. “They waiting on you, too.”
Both Sinners and One Battle After Another have been unduly pitted against one another this award season by fans of the films, despite the fact that both films take a masculinist approach to their ideas around liberation. Fatherhood is ultimately the location in which Anderson and Coogler both put their beliefs in who gets to be seen as a liberator, at the cost of the Black women in their films. Bob and Smoke’s stories end with their reunification with their daughters after having to fight off white supremacy to reach them.
The filmmakers lean into the seductive imagery of men participating in gun violence as the source of how their male protagonists gain their freedom. In Sinners, Smoke effectively self-immolates at the end of the film by getting into a shootout with the Klan. As he drifts between the ancestral and physical realm, it is Annie, ethereal in all white, cradling their baby, that ushers him into the afterlife. He reaches for his baby when one of the surviving Klan members, begging for mercy, tells Smoke that he can give Smoke money. Smoke empties his clip on the man before fully embracing his child. “Papa’s here,” he tells her. It is Smoke’s hail of bullets, which invokes his military training, that ends white domination in Sinners and reunites him with his family.
One Battle After Another attempts to subvert this trope with the image of Perfidia firing off a machine gun while pregnant with Willa, and later with Willa firing off a machine gun in the same fashion. Bob’s aimless use of his gun never kills anyone the way that both Perfidia and Willa’s does. Perfidia and Willa are unable to free themselves with their guns. The film inserts a random male character to act as a surrogate for Bob, using his gun to liberate Willa from captivity.
The monotonous, laborious reality of community building and radical work that Black women like Annie and DeAndre live every day, isn’t tantalizing for the film’s lens to capture. There is so much grief under the surface of these two women that’s shielded by a quiet, understated strength. Their respective films never allow for that grief to fully curdle into any approximating anger or a fatigue that would break them. Instead, they funnel all their emotions into their commitment to their communities, even at the cost of their own lives.
