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Crackpots #48: What Time Is It?
🕑 Added 2025-09-30 20:52:28 +0000 UTCPosting some scattered thoughts on the latest Paul Thomas Anderson film ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER. I have some problems with it (not enough Regina Hall, for one), but thats not really what I'm getting into, not really a movie review either, not that I would know how to write one. More interested in (gesturing around) all the other stuff going on with the movie. Goes without saying (I think?) but this contains spoilers basically immediately so if you don't want details on the film, don't read ahead. xx L
In the final chase of ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, the film puts its argument on the road. The highway rolls in short rises and dips; each crest hides whatever waits beyond it. If you keep your foot down, you fly blind. If you lift too early, the car behind closes the gap. Willa reads that geometry and makes a counter-intuitive choice: she brakes at the crown, shuts the engine, steps to the shoulder, and lets the pursuer crest into a world he can't yet see. The scene is simple to follow—rise, occlusion, reveal—but it reorders the terms of the chase: speed stops helping, sight becomes strategy and agency comes from choosing when to pause.
What time is it? We don't know. The setting stays vaguely contemporary, the frame happy to show an iPhone lighting a face one moment and we're beside a payphone the next; in one city the film runs on a VistaVision print that looks like recovered mid-century, in another it's IMAX at stadium scale; sixteen years vanish in a single cut with no flashbacks to fence the past off. Even the texture wobbles the dial—Jonny Greenwood's nervous modernist jangle gives way to a Spotify-core dad-rock needle drop and back again—all while the plot moves like a domino field, hallways into tunnels into those rolling desert roads, events tipping sideways rather than lining up. Which calendar is running here? The film won't say. It refuses a date and still makes you answer on time.
What time is it? The question keeps circling—hinge, test of tempo, ritual more than password. Bob misses it because he's off-beat, caught in ordinary linear flow—adrenaline slicing through untold layers of regret, decades of booze and drugs laid over the places where memory should catch—and the reply, when it finally shows its face, arrives as a riddle that won't collapse into a clock: time doesn't exist, yet it controls us anyway. Apparently, the revolution's code lives in metaphysics.
In that spirit, let's go back in time. Picture a cell on a rock in the sea—Fort du Taureau, winter after the Commune—paper, quill, a man who won't concede the calendar. Louis-Auguste Blanqui writes Eternity by the Stars and builds a strange lifeline from two plain claims: matter is finite; space and time are effectively without end. From that comes a cosmology that feels like a pressure system rather than a map: arrangements recur, worlds double on another, sequences return wearing different faces; for every road taken there remains a neighboring road that still breathes. He imagines earths consubstantial with ours and people consubstantial with us—other selves, other streets, other barricades—and he imagines them not as fantasy but as a way to keep possibility present when defeat tries to close the door.
The tone of the book is austere and almost mathematical, but the use is emotional and political. Blanqui's recurrence is less a promise of repetition than a refusal of foreclosure: the missed act remains near, the silenced voice presses from the side, the life that slipped away continues to lean on the living. He even writes himself inside the loop—that which I am writing...I have written and shall write again—as if to show that the page can be a doorframe and not a wall. Under seige, he drafts a world where failure loses the right to be final. The feeling it leaves behind is complicated—hope braided into sadness, insistence threaded through exhaustion—because recurrence doesn't hand back what was lost; it lets the lost keep touching what comes next.
Keep that pressure in reach. In Blanqui's scheme, history isn't cleaned up and archived; it remains adjacent, crowded with unrealized versions of the same materials: the same hands, the same streets, the same tools and fears. Recurrence here isn't meant as comfort or solace. It is a demand to register how many ways a moment can still be arranged, and a reminder that the present is never alone in the room.
Now imagine a man moving between borders with a manuscript in his coat—1940, the fascists are closing the exits. Walter Benjamin writes his Theses on the Philosophy of History as a series of pressure points: short, hard sentences designed to interrupt a habit, to stop the hand that keeps turning the crank. His issue is with the picture of time that slides by as if it were air—what he calls homogenous, empty time, the neutral medium in which "progress" keeps its calendar—and his counter-move is to name a different kind of second: now-time, jetztzeit, the charged instant in which the flow can be arrested, the routine broken, the past allowed to press its claim on the present.
Two figures make this feel more like instruction rather than mood: first, the revolutionaries in July 1830, aiming at the Paris clocktowers—an image of people literally firing on the instrument that organizes their days; the second, the angel staring at history blown toward the future by storm, watching the wreckage pile up, longing to wake the dead and piece together what has been smashed. Neither image consoles but both insist on a discipline: it takes force to produce a pause; it takes attention to hear the demand inside the debris.
Benjamin's most shocking proposition is quiet and stubborn: the living bear a debt to the defeated. He calls it a "secret arrangement" between past generations and the present—"weak messianic power," the capacity, in ordinary hands, to redeem what failed by using the instant in which its image flashes up again. This is why he speaks of the "tradition of the oppressed" and of brushing history against the grain; why he insists that class struggle, at its most lucid, works not only for the children but for the ancestors; why he keeps returning to the idea of the monad—an image dense enough to hold a whole universe, a fragment charged until it can stand in for the totality it refuses to summarize.
Now-time isn't a mood of urgency or a rhetoric of speed; it is the opposite of drift. He describes it as a "cessation of happening," an arrest that breaks the continuum so that an act can count—shooting the clock, calling the strike, refusing the order, opening the door, stopping the car. This is not a theology disguised as politics or even a politics disguised as theology, but a technique of timing: see when the image appears; stop the machine; pay the debt you can pay in the second you have. The storm blows either way. The pile of wreckage grows. What changes is whether anyone seizes the hinge.
This produces a strange ethic of attention: watch for countersigns, listen for phrases that return like signals, learn the landscapes grammar or the places where a line can be cut. It also produces a different sense of victory and defeat. The point is not to certify an end, to declare a game won, to award a date. The point is to keep seconds open long enough for the dead to be honored and for the living to move with something other than inertia. Continuity performs power—maybe—but interruption makes space.
The film keeps returning the same materials in altered arrangements—detention centers and rustling blankets, raids and bank smoke, transformer sparks, scatterings of kids running from police—so that what failed never quite leaves the frame, it just presses from teh side and asks to maybe be handled differently this time. Perfidia is there and not there: the gun braced against her pregnant belly, the disappearance into witness protection, the voice that arrives years later repeating every single day like a prayer not to tidy the absence but to finally make it audible. Willa carries that pressure forward without accepting its script; the spark others name in her reads less like destiny than a familiar toolkit laid out on a new table—routes instead of detonators, training instead of spectacle, the same heat but refusing the same mistake. She learned it somewhere.
Timing becomes practice rather than motto. The hill insists on a charged instant—brake at the crown, engine off, shoulder step—so that motion can be turned against itself. Willa and Bob's reunion insists on a beat—finish the Gil Scott-Heron line, then you can embrace—so that love has to arrive in rhythm, not just on sentiment. Sergio's corridors insist on schedule: doors open because someone elsewhere has counted, because a hallway clears when a truck turns, because the map is a clock if you read it that way. The film keeps staging these stoppages as ordinary acts tuned to the second at hand; the flow is real, but a pause can be made inside it.
Inheritance is where these seconds gather their stakes. The Christmas Adventurers make it explicit: lineage is a calendar you can police. In carpeted basements they hail St. Nick, sit in high rises staging purity exams, nod in code and promise that all Christmases be White—blood is simply paperwork: who belongs, who continues, whose body is allowed to carry the future. Col. Lockjaw's desire short-circuits his ideology and the oldest reactionary fantasy—purity—enters through its opposite, contamination. He has to deny the rumor of his own desire, pass the test, secure the induction. It's continuity as governance—eternal December, no rupture—control the line and you control the time.
Willa answers by cutting the line and drawing a new one in the present tense. When the claim is put to her, she withholds the word that would certify a past event and names the father—Bob—not out of sentiment but as work recognized: days shown up, rhythms learned, a beat held when it counted. That choice denies Lockjaw outright and repositions inheritance: not pedigree sealed in a file, but a practice lived in the open, handed down through the choices we make and the affinities we sustain, the fragile art of living that endures only when someone keeps renewing it. And when Perfidia’s letter finally arrives it doesn’t authorize so much as echo the decision—Please send a kiss to your dad, my Ghetto Pat. What carries forward isn’t blood but a standard: kinship as a vow made public, enacted and maintained, renewed in the run of days against what ledgers certify and beyond what fascists demand to make a life legible.
Time doesn't exist, yet it controls us anyway. Perfidia's letter says all this plainly without saying it: I pretend my whole life, pretend to be strong, pretended to be dead...I think of you every single day. Every single day. Absence is turned into a rhythm that never resolves and in the same breath, a schedule that never arrived—someday, when it's right and safe—as if a second could be waited into existence. But as the film keeps showing us, seconds are taken not found: brake at the crown; finish the line before you embrace; name the father in the moment you are asked. The days repeat; hinges have to be made.
Revolution is defeated and still alive in fragments. We failed. Maybe you will not. Both conditions stand inside the same line: defeat acknowledged, possibility handed forward without guarantee. The film arranges those fragments as usable material—routes, habits, remembrances, timing—rather than doctrine: pieces not a program or, maybe, practices not prophecies.
Think about the futures sitting just off to the side—the ones our parents and their parents didn't reach, the version of this world that kept pressing but never broke through. The film treats those as near, layered in fact, woven in, not gone: Perfidia's every single day beating on the surface of an absence; the raids and prisons repeating in new light; the words you have to speak on beat before love can step forward; the hill that will keep erasing its horizon until someone decides when to stop. That's the shape of what we inherit now—seconds that were missed and seconds that can still be made—while the present keeps its pressure on: men with rifles raiding schools and workplaces, paperwork turning people into targets, a politics that performs eternity with rituals and uniforms and asks you to mistake that performance for law. The film answers with gestures you can actually see: choose the ones you love; time the door to the hallway clearing; read the road like a sentence and act where the next crest will blind.
The future, under these conditions, isn't a prize waiting at the end of a march; it's an opening you create and keep—an arrangement you hold long enough to matter while the rest of the machinery keeps insisting on the old order. Time won't give you its schedule, but still you have to meet it. Revolt keeps failing and keeps leaving pieces that can be picked up. The unrealized leans on us until we choose to answer. We carry forward shards of regrets that aren't ours but that we still have to hold. The future is forced by the world that bears down and chosen by the seconds you seize—seconds that do not end anything but let another arrangement breathe. No season is won. A moment is kept. And then another.
¡Viva la revolución!
Yours,
xxL
Comments
Onsen Dreamscapes
I think you might enjoy Pure Land, Real World: Modern Buddhism, Japanese Leftists, and the Utopian Imagination, especially the first 3 chapters
Rey Katula
Beautiful, thank you. I saw the film as a critique of the vanguardism of the the New Left armed struggle groups, which is contrasted with the migrant community resistance of Baktan Cross. I think the film tells us that Americans (white and black, fascist and revolutionary) don’t know how to live together any more, although they all have a deep longing for a community. It’s very interesting that you were reminded of Blanqui at Fort du Taureau. A friend of mine wrote a text a few years ago that evoked the same moment: “Imprisoned in the Fort du Taureau, Louis Auguste Blanqui takes solace in knowing that somewhere across the ocean, the air he exhales is breathed in turn by the trees of the Brazilian rainforest, by his comrades in exile in London, even by the officials who ordered his arrest, despite their vendetta against sharing. He reminds himself that the same water his captors ration to him in a cup nonetheless crashes in great waves against the walls of the fort—that across hundreds of millions of years, every single drop of that water has passed through countless living things, traveling through the sky and back into the earth again and again. The very language with which he formulates and records these comforting thoughts has been fashioned and refined by a hundred billion tongues in a collective endeavor stretching back to the dawn of humanity. Collectivity is inevitable, ineradicable. Eventually, it will triumph over the temporary error of avarice.”
