Revolutions May Fade into Irrelevance, but Many Still See a Concrete Need for Them

When people envision a "revolution," they often conjure images of sudden bouts of violence and radical change. People coordinate large-scale gatherings where they clash with the police and military to voice their suffering and demand change. From the protests emerge charismatic leaders whose speeches move crowds and whose ideologies are projected into the public consciousness. When the authorities refuse to budge in the face of popular discontent, protests turn into mob violence, then organized armed opposition that overcomes the defenders of the regime. 

This image is informed by romantic historical portrayals and piecemeal media coverage of current events. Movies and drama series condense the events of the French and American Revolutions into bite-sized pieces, skipping over the lengthy periods of inactivity between major battles. The Gen Z protests happening from Nepal to Madagascar today, not to mention the Arab Spring of a decade ago, are shown as overnight overthrows of tone-deaf presidents, with long-simmering discontent bursting into sudden explosion and then coming to the inevitable conclusion in matters of days. 

But the recent movie One Battle After the Other reminds viewers that for all the successful revolutions that history remembers, the failed ones continue to live on as suppressed legacies, devoid of the romantic racialism that imbues the movements at the very inception. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a washed-up radical whose membership in a domestic terror organization produced a brief romance and a daughter. When his romantic partner saw the domesticity of raising a family as unfitting for a revolutionary, single fatherhood became a focus of identity more than changing the world.

As the protagonist sinks deeper into purposeless alcoholism and drug use inside a rebel sanctuary, the viewers become more aware of how the revolution's original anarchic ideal of saving immigrants and opening borders for all has been replaced by its own form of bureaucracy. When nemeses of the past try to hunt down the protagonist and his daughter, he finds himself dealing with frustrating customer service lines that now connect individual members of a sprawling revolutionary network. Rather than bringing down the system, the revolution created a parallel, similar system of its own.

The revolutionaries themselves, while still feintly holding on to their original ideals, no longer pursue violence to achieve them. The viewers meet operatives who escaped arrest and then mask their past identities by making ends meet through regular jobs. Others, like the protagonist, end up no better than an unemployed person surviving off social security checks, thanks to the financial pull of the nameless revolution still run by an aging group of devotees. That reality only makes the reignition of conflict 16 years after the original start of the revolution all the more absurd. 

The bureaucratization of revolution is encapsulated by the daughter reading out a letter from her mother at the end of the movie. In hiding and now aging, the mother laments how she failed to continue on as a revolutionary, even though the world remains unsafe. She spoke of how she now thinks of how much she loves her daughter, even though years earlier, continuing violence for change occupied all of her attention. And she beckons the daughter to continue fighting for change on the street, a task the daughter takes to heart as she departs to join pro-immigration protests.

While the ending strikes an optimistic tone by implying that the revolution's promise of freedom can still be achieved without anarchy, it is difficult not to also see it as a repudiation of the concept of revolution in itself. After all, if protests still take place, but are organized through layers of bureaucracy, then how is it any different from politics by more conventional means of the ballet box? And if the ballot box could push through the changes demanded by the revolutionaries in the first place, then why are some even driven to violence in the first place?

In a world where, unlike how the movie portrays, violent radicals are not just a tiny minority fading in relevance, this overly optimistic conclusion leaves the viewers uncomfortable in its sheer dismissiveness. Yes, it is very much a possibility that failed revolutionaries end up becoming what they fight for, but many do not have that luxury. The protagonist and his daughter live in a nice house in the woods with seemingly no issue buying groceries and paying bills. But what about others for whom revolution is the only chance at survival?