How a 54-Year-Old Steely Dan Song Explains One of the Best Acting…

Perfidia Beverly Hills exits One Battle After Another after owning the first 30 minutes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s impending awards-season juggernaut about American revolutionaries, the revolutionary impulse in America, fathers and daughters, domesticity, freedom and control, Black women and the white male gaze, and our fascist, racist police state, to name just a few of the ideas it toys with (too casually, some persuasively argue). We see the consequences of Perfidia’s escape as her baby’s “daddy,” Bob “Ghetto Pat” Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), drives off with trepidation into a future as the newly single father of an infant. There’s a time jump. Sixteen years have passed, and we are reintroduced to that child, Willa (Chase Infiniti), who stares out, beatific, self-possessed, with her hair tied back in a thick pony, draped in a pristine gi cinched with a purple belt. And then Anderson drops the needle on… Steely Dan.

One Battle After Another is a slippery film, but there isn’t much ambiguity in the sledgehammer songs PTA intersperses throughout when he isn’t relying on composer Johnny Greenwood's propulsive, moving orchestral score. He employs the Shirelles’ “Soldier Boy” for a sexually charged scene between Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) and Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), and Tom Petty’s “American Girl” at the end, as Willa drives off to her next protest. But Steely Dan’s pop classic about being dick on the side to a woman in a committed relationship is his most inspired call. Leonardo DiCaprio has said it was his anthem when they were shooting; he saw it as his character’s mantra, reading the song as Bob being pissed off after Perfidia betrayed him and left him with their daughter. I’d argue the song is a critique of Bob and the anthem for another character, who enters the film at the same moment, bowing to Willa as the horns swell and he reminds his pupil to breathe.

Benicio del Toro’s work as Sensei Sergio in One Battle is gathering steam as a performance that could net the actor a second Best Supporting Actor Oscar, and it should. It is a role that by all accounts he redefined for Paul Thomas Anderson, finding a brief window to play the character immediately after filming his other great performance of the year as the protagonist of Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme. He has a total of 13 minutes of screen time, good for just over eight percent of the film (according to this X account I found that does the lord’s work of clocking this shit). This would amount to one of the briefest Oscar-winning performances ever. But Del Toro’s main scene is a showstopping set piece that changes everything, tracking Bob and Sergio through what turns out to be an entire compound of undocumented adults and children Sergio is helping. The scene comes an hour in and elevates OBAA from a merely good film to a great one, giving depth and meaning and a face to its ideas, and speaking directly to a moment in America in a way Anderson never has before.

OBAA was inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. The film is PTA’s second time picking up the work of the postmodern seditionist, though far less directly than he did with his near-beat-for-beat adaptation of Inherent Vice. It is, rather, Anderson paying homage, flexing with his vision of some of the master’s style and devices, perhaps none more than the original invention of the Sensei character. Sensei Sergio is both the owner of a strip mall dojo and the operator of an underground railroad for an entire undocumented community that must quickly mobilize when Lockjaw brings the fist of the state down on it: raids that quote the horror ICE has unleashed on this country by fiat of our president. It is a perfectly Pynchonian idea, introducing this mild-mannered children’s karate teacher as yet another member of a magical cartoon network of conspirators on one side or the other of an ancient global conspiracy.

“The scene comes an hour in and elevates ‘One Battle After Another’ from a merely good film to a great one.”

“Dirty Work” was a standout on Walter Becker and Donald Fagen’s 1972 debut as Steely Dan, Can’t Buy a Thrill. The illicit confessional contains the hallmarks of their work, a rich composition packed with clever turns of phrase, but is sweetly sung by David Palmer and sunnier than much of Steely Dan’s later catalog, which makes its use in an action film about revolutionaries curious. Prior to OBAA, it most famously appeared in The Sopranos’ season-three premier, “Mr. Ruggerio’s Neighborhood.” Tony sings along to the song while the feds track his personal and professional families’ every move. It’s a joke at the expense of Tony’s obliviousness and his thick Jersey accent.

In OBAA, “Dirty Work” is obviously metaphorical and can be read as an expression of the labor Bob has abandoned: that of raising his daughter, something Sensei Sergio is doing. When del Toro first appears onscreen, he’s instructing Willa gently, his disposition affectionate and paternal. Bob needs to get baked and have a vape handy just to function in a parent-teacher conference; Sensei, meanwhile, has been teaching his daughter discipline. It is perhaps why Sergio knows Willa has a phone and Bob doesn’t, too busy drunkenly harassing her dates for a school dance to notice that his daughter is disobeying him.

Sergio has also picked up the struggle of the French 75, the revolutionary outfit we meet at the start of the film, springing some 300 detainees from a facility on the Mexican border. A decade and a half later, the group has splintered, and Bob has forgotten his mission (and passwords). He’s abandoned the revolution for a sedentary life, numbing himself with substances and burning sage as he mutters about the slave owners who punctuate his daughter’s high school curriculum.

“Sensei Sergio is compassionate and selfless, calm in the face of chaos, working as a handler in his community for no money.”

Del Toro’s presence throughout the film, by comparison, is defined by the warm, swelling sax that introduces him. He is compassionate and selfless, calm in the face of chaos, working as a handler in his community for no money. He introduces the children he’s fighting for to Bob one by one, even as they are all under the threat of arrest and/or death. Sergio’s stakes are immediate and material, less romantic and more tangible than the French 75’s anti-government rhetoric and dramatic operations. At one point during the raid scene, Bob apologizes for bringing heat down on Sergio’s community in Baktan Cross. “Tranquillo,” Sergio says, explaining that this is a generational war of attrition. “We’ve been laid siege for hundreds of years. You did nothing wrong.” Inspired by this patient resistance and total commitment, Bob screams “Viva la Revolucion!” before they briefly part ways.

Perhaps motivated by Sergio, by the end of One Battle After Another, Bob is still on the couch, a clueless dad trying to master the selfie, but he’s opened up and is trying to connect to his daughter, concerned for her but not attempting to stop her from picking up his cause. Sergio’s final beat in the film is the line reading of the year, easy to play for memes and laughs, but it’s yet another act of sacrifice, made through a serene grin. He’s distracting the cops from their pursuit of Bob, and incurring a DUI or much worse in the process, before he dances out of the movie. The dirty work of revolution goes on.

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