Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, his take on Trump-led America, extends his search for thinking cinema: it strikes a balance between realism and style, treating cinema as a form of thought
The pleasure of watching a film shouldn’t come from trying to decode it or keep pace with its cleverness. It should move at a rhythm that feels natural: steady, alive, and unforced. The cinematic medium carries within it a sense of healthy purpose: a force that is at once collective and deeply personal, offering a critical reflection of thought and experience in today’s society.
When we study the directorial methods of Paul Thomas Anderson, we begin to understand cinema in a way that does not separate technical craft from writing. Experiencing his films, the part of our mind that seeks to analyse the “how” of the magical interplay between image, sound, and movement is momentarily stilled by his approach, simple yet distinctly stylised, refined through years of technical finesse.
As Leonardo DiCaprio puts it, “Anderson creates these incredible worlds in his films where, as an audience member, you are enveloped into them.” We are often put into the front seat of a unique hive mind, unpredictable and quirky at times, when we engage with his films. One might have a million ideas in terms of the ‘treatment’ of a scene, but according to actors who have worked with Paul Thomas Anderson, he is both open to exploration and meticulously faithful to the script.
Keeping the main narrative centered on one character, Anderson likes to move through the protagonist’s journey like a surgeon performing open-heart surgery. Time is of the essence, but the exchange of blood is inevitable at different stages, and every instrument, every cut, every stitch has its own moment of necessity.
Peculiar craze of his characters
Many of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films carry the pulse of extended music videos, with a strong sense of timing in the editing. His latest film, One Battle After Another, loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, reflects the atmosphere of the Donald Trump-led America, where the immigration of so-called “alien workers” or “outsiders” is condemned in the pursuit of a purified capitalist ideal. Starring DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor and Chase Infiniti, it follows a group of revolutionaries known as the “French 75” as they navigate the challenges of resistance over time.
The film’s first 30 minutes mimic an elaborate music video, offering just the right amount of sensory and thematic cues: tropes of new-age dialogue terminology, and musical palette that sets the tone for the rest of the film. Editor Andy Jurgensen’s method of adhering to emotional continuity rather than extreme logic helps nurture a vibrant pace in the film, allowing it to have an unpredictable tempo.
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In its long, wordless pauses and musical montage sequences, Anderson creates sufficient space for thought and explorative wanderings, giving the viewer time to anticipate character arcs and imagine the world-building beyond the frame. His films often feel like compressing an accordion attached to a spring: at times bursting with sound and motion, then plunging into stillness during emotional descents, and meandering through plateaus of events, build-ups, tension and atmospheric construction.
A still from There Will Be Blood
Anderson’s characters are flawed and at the same time humane, which is what makes them relatable and worthy of a voluntary exploration. This brings us to the peculiar ‘craze’ he often threads into his characters, a fascination with acts, ideas, or ways of living that deviate, sometimes wildly, from the ordinary.
In The Master (2012), he examines the shared obsession between the charismatic cult leader Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his troubled disciple, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix). The film focuses on the intense, and ultimately destructive, dynamic of their relationship. Quell numbs himself with the moonshine, a potent alcoholic brew made from various available materials, including paint thinner, developing fluid, and fruit. Anderson’s long-standing collaboration with versatile composer Jonny Greenwood transforms this unsettling energy into haunting leitmotifs that begin as raw phrases and gradually build into overwhelming crescendos.
In There Will Be Blood (2007), a rigorous character study of oil tycoon Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), Anderson dissects greed as a consuming force that devours a vulnerable conscience viciously. Greenwood’s robustly dissonant score throws into sharp relief the psyche of the helpless but ruthless protagonist: the strings wail and convulse, tracing the protagonist’s turmoil by taking serpentine trails in slippery musical scales.
A form of ongoing consciousness
Making space for the audience’s listening intelligence opens the door to a richer engagement with the cinematic form. Paul Thomas Anderson’s sharply written, minimalist dialogue offers plenty, yet never clutters the mind with residues of uncertainty or excess. As he moves with precision between sound, music, dialogue, image, and action, our absorption becomes more visceral; it’s like entering a tactile portal. He allows the audience to learn the film’s aural and visual grammar through intuitively placed cues rather than explicit instruction.
His quest for narrative simplicity never comes at the expense of technical garnishes, pacing, or musical underlinings. Every line of dialogue, every sound, every tonal inflection is used deliberately to build an aural archetype that shapes our perception of character and mood. These non-verbal modes of communication often make stronger impressions than dialogue itself.
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In One Battle After Another (2025), the quick, jittery piano stabs and offbeat utensil percussion defying the metronome capture both the comic paranoia and the furtive playfulness of a society under surveillance. In Phantom Thread (2017), an exquisitely detailed, almost ASMR-like sound design immerses us in the life of a pedantic dressmaker: we can sense the textures of fabric, the pricks of needles, the pull of thread, and the soft breaths of the women being measured for their dresses.
Werner Herzog once said, “A good director must be a good reader.” Paul Thomas Anderson seems to take that idea seriously. His adaptations of writers like Thomas Pynchon and Upton Sinclair reveal not just literary curiosity but a precise understanding of how prose can make it to the cinematic sensorium. He treats text as material, not scripture, isolating what belongs to the screen and what should remain implied. As both a passionate reader and a technically adept filmmaker, his judgment lies in knowing when a passage needs technical emphasis and when performance alone can carry the true import of the text.
Anderson’s films expand through this balance: grounded in realism but constantly inventing their own language of style. His films display a quietly assured poetic sensibility that evolves with each work. Each new film feels like an evolution of thought rather than an iteration of form: a slow, confident redefinition of how literature can come alive on screen. Across decades and generations, his cinema has built its own conscience: restless, searching, and acutely aware of time passing.
Every new work carries traces of what came before, yet none are repetitions. They are extensions of a single, expanding vision that keeps asking what film can hold, and what it can leave unsaid. In that sense, Anderson’s body of work forms not a collection of stories, but a living essay on how cinema thinks, remembers, and transforms. With each film, Anderson seems less interested in mastery and more in discovery, turning the act of filmmaking itself into a form of ongoing consciousness, where the medium, like its maker, keeps learning how to see.
