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. Her contradictions nudge her into failure unbecoming of a heroine but it is a mistake to perceive those errors as so egregious that they can only be meaningfully corrected by a more positive representation of her. The messiness of her contradictions are not the problem.

Considering the context of black women’s persistent efforts to electorally save America from its most white supremacist impulses, any one of Perfidia’s contradictions is interesting when considered in isolation. It is interesting, for instance, to witness the inner machinations of a black woman erring in a revolutionary praxes that requires equal parts foolhardiness and discipline.

The problem with Perfidia is how the sheer volume of contradictions collide to flatten her into a singular dimension.

If we charitably assume the filmmaker intends for these contradictions to imbue Perfidia with a multi-facetedness—their end result achieves the opposite. We are instead presented with a character whose chaotic self-indulgence makes her seem less complex, narrowing her to the point of being a conspicuous MacGuffin.

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 atop her pregnant belly, to pass an epistolatory “go get ‘em, tiger” so Willa can further the radical lineage of her family.

Naturally, those most attuned to this kind of narrative exploitation are the black (female) audience—particularly when interracial fetishisation is etched in the film’s skeleton. Perfidia’s slap-dash sense of autonomy presents a perfect example of how anti-racist over-correction can so easily horseshoe into racial insensitivity. She is jezebelesque but her adrenaline kink offers plausible deniability. Abandoning her white lover(s) and daughter ensures she is certainly not a mammy. Perfidia’s cocktail of contradictions insulate her from the accusation of being a traditional racist trope. But you can never shake the feeling that her character is occupying the same figurative locale of a stereotype, as if she’s only getting off on a technicality.

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, 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 cursed with the knowledge that they mark the ass-end of an era. The dry-husked 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 chooses to focus on bestows its own kind of kindness. To follow Ghetto Pat, Sheriff Joe Cross, or even Colonel Lockjaw's gaze leering on Perfidia’s ass for an uncomfortable length of time, is not an outright promotion of their characters, however it does reinforce the idea that their internal machinations are worth following. The filmmaker is naturally seasoned at making characters who look like him cohesive, so the collective screen-time of these men compounds into 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 squandered character like Perfidia Beverly Hills is, I think, to see this recent uptick of “white failure films” for what they don’t know they are:

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

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