the white failure complex

and the many contradictions of perfidia beverly hills

Spoilers for One Battle After Another and Eddington

As Willa’s hijacked Dodge Charger roars through the undulating country roads towards the end of One Battle After Another, my approval rating rose to a fever pitch in stark contrast to the very low pee-yews at the beginning of the film. The suspense of the chase glides across a sine wave—ending with a delicious comeuppance that made me yell out, “hell yeah!” in the dead of the wintry night. Taking inspiration from Peter Yates’ 1968 Bullitt, it’s the most edge-of-my-seat driving sequence I’ve seen since Mad Max: Fury Road.

The most enjoyable aspects of One Battle After Another are suspended in the film’s margins. This penultimate car chase. The weed-selling, gun-toting black nuns. The underground network of a Latin American Karate Sensei. This is a movie unafraid to put things that shouldn’t be in conversation into a locked room together. The puppet-mastering, high-society of white supremacists being branded after the Yuletide is one more example of the film’s penchant for juxtaposing absurd contradictions. It’s a that gambit works until it doesn’t. The most obvious failure is in the form of Perfidia Beverly Hills.

Perfidia is a profoundly individualistic freedom fighter. She’s a Black woman from “a long line of revolutionaries” who abandons her daughter. She’s an integral cog of a highly organised cell—efficient enough to infiltrate government compounds—but she follows no protocol when she’s compromised. She’s a radical who becomes a government informant . Considering the context of black women persistent efforts to electorally save America from its worst, white supremacist impulses, any one of Perfidia’s contradictions would be interesting to investigate. It is interesting to see, up close, the inner machinations of a black woman erring in a revolutionary praxes that requires equal parts foolhardiness and discipline.

It isn’t Perfidia’s individualism or moral failures that appear egregious to the point where yearning for a positive representation of her would be meaningfully corrective. There is no such thing as an accurate portrayal of an imagined character. The problem is the sheer volume of contradictions collide to flatten Perfidia into a singular dimension. If we charitably assume that her conflicting actions are an attempt to afford her multi-facetedness, their end result achieves the opposite. We are given a one-note character whose selfish motivations make her seem less intriguing or complex and more of an obvious MacGuffin.

Naturally, this pricks the ears of the black audience—particularly when interracial fetishisation is etched in the film’s skeleton. On a cinematic level: a hyper-sexual black woman aroused by danger entangles with white men (one with a highly questionable degree of consent). On a narrative level, her utility as plot device is too conspicuous. We clock it as soon as she asks her fellow Black comrades, “do you think he likes Black girls?” after Ghetto Pat sets off explosions. Perfidia is jezebelesque but her adrenaline kink offers plausible deniability. The abandonment of her white lover(s) and daughter ensures she is certainly not a mammy. The slap-dash sense of autonomy Perfidia is given presents a perfect example of how anti-racist over-correction so easily horseshoes into racial insensitivity. Perfidia’s contradictions allow her to eschew traditional, racist tropes yet you can never shake the sensation that her character occupies the same figurative locale.¹

You can feel she’s being used—to set the dominoes towards the inevitable climax, to offer bad-ass optics of rattling off a Degtyaryov RPD machine gun off her pregnant belly, to pass an epistolatory “go get ‘em, tiger” so Willa can further the radical lineage.

Great art is defined by the artist’s ability to conceal his flaws until they look like virtues. In the character of Perfidia Beverly Hills, the seams of the filmmaker’s intentions are frayed threads, exposed as a live wire, and too visible to ignore.

Whether these failures are scriptural (owed to Paul Thomas Anderson’s imaginative distance from the black radical feminine experience) or performative (Teyana Taylor, a musician by trade, is acting alongside a stacked cast of dramatic veterans with relatively low cuts to her teeth by comparison) or a nondescript concoction of both and other factors, they seem to be an inevitable consequence of a white male director trying to cinematically reckon with his own sociality in relation to the diverse experiences of others. In that respect, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is in discussion with Ari Aster’s Eddington.

Others have dived into these movies in far greater detail but I believe both films are best exemplified by how their white male protagonists end up.

DiCaprio’s Ghetto Pat is sedentary; smoking on the couch, fumbling to take a selfie, having proved himself utterly useless in the task of protecting his own daughter when push came to shove. Phoenix’s Joe Cross is rendered sedentary by force; paralysed after committing numerous crimes and acting out his macho conservative shoot-out fantasy to its logically violent end. They are men marking the ass-end of an era. The dry-husk myth of the white heroic ideal crumbles, revealing the bitter fruit of an incompetent loser beneath.

The camera is not a condonement machine but who it is chosen to focus on bestows its own kind of kindness. To follow Ghetto Pat, Sheriff Joe Cross, or Colonel Lockjaw's gaze leering on Perfidia’s ass for an uncomfortable length of time—reinforces the idea that their internal machinations are worth following. Their collective screen-time compounds to make an ode to the obsolete, re-establishing their obsoletion as something important to witness. Another contradiction. The best way to make peace with the more egregious contradictions of a character with squandered potential like Perfidia Beverly Hills is, I think, to see this recent uptick of “white failure films” for what they don’t know they are²:

Evolutions of a post-apocalyptic fantasy genre—attempting to make sense of an eroding superiority that never existed in the first place.

1. It is not a shortcoming that affects Sensei Carlos or any of the other film’s supporting characters.

2. Or, perhaps, don’t want to admit they are.