On this episode of The Time of Monsters: David Klion on the historical resonance of Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie.
Fans cheer at an event for the movie One Battle After Another on September 18, 2025, in Naucalpan de Juarez, Mexico. (Eloisa Sanchez / Getty Images)
The Time of Monsters podcast features Nation national-affairs correspondent Jeet Heer’s signature blend of political culture and cultural politics. Each week, he’ll host in-depth conversations with urgent voices on the most pressing issues of our time.
Few movies have ever been as timely as Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film One Battle After
Another, which traces the battle between revolutionary resistance groups trying to protect
immigrants and an authoritarian government run by racists. There are scenes from the movie
that feel like they are being played out right now on the streets of Chicago, Los Angeles and
Portland. Although it presents a stylized version of reality, the film raises important questions
about different strategies of resistance. David Klion, a frequent guest, wrote about the movie
for The New Republic. David and I talked about the film, its roots in actual history but also
variance with that history as well as its relationship with the Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland.
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Few movies have ever been as timely as Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest, One Battle After Another, which traces the battle between revolutionary resistance groups trying to protect immigrants and an authoritarian government run by racists. There are scenes from the movie that feel like they are being played out right now on the streets of Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland. Although it presents a stylized version of reality, the film raises important questions about different strategies of resistance. David Klion, a frequent guest, wrote about the movie for The New Republic. David and I talked about the film, its roots in actual history but also variance with that history, as well as its relationship with the Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland.
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The Time of Monsters podcast features Nation national-affairs correspondent Jeet Heer’s signature blend of political culture and cultural politics. Each week, he’ll host in-depth conversations with urgent voices on the most pressing issues of our time.
Norman Podhoretz, one of the founding fathers of neoconservatism, died on December 16 at
age 95. His legacy is a complex one, since in recent decades neoconservatism has been
supplanted in many ways by American First conservatism. But many aspects of Podhoretz’s
influence still play a shaping role on right. I take up Podhoretz’s career with David Klion (who
wrote an obituary for the pundit for The Nation) and the historian Ronnie Grinberg, who had
discussed Podhoretz in her book Write Like a Man.
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Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.