If there was ever a nadir of the arts, a year in which artistic freedom and independent media nearly met their demise, it would have been 2025.
The War for Representation
Acquiesce, for a moment, to a reading of last year’s tempestuous politics as a climactic battle for the arts, a conservative D-Day in America’s unending culture war, and a valiant effort by artists to resist. In this culture war — a term first coined and defined by American sociologist James Davison as “a struggle to define the actual and ideal character and direction of the country” — you may deftly identify the two warring parties in the typical dichotomous binary of conflict. On one side are the conservatives in American government, corporate leadership, and social mediaspheres, and on the other, the progressives of America’s artistic bodies and institutions, as well as in the government’s pitiful minority.
These two factions, having long partaken in academic and political disputes, are certainly no strangers to heated disagreement. However, the gradual creeping of the political sphere onto artistry culminated last year. Debates over the race-swapping of Disney characters, the Bechdel test in a patriarchal film industry, and the inclusion or lack thereof of LGBTQ+ performers on Broadway escalated into the relentless application of federal power against the arts by way of funding cuts, legislative rollbacks, and the undoing of civil liberties. In a way that has never before occurred in the United States, the conservative wing appropriated the power of the government in the pursuit of hegemony over the arts, and of dominance for once and for all over American screens and stages.
It goes without saying that the politicization of the arts is not without precedent, after all, artists themselves have never been exactly apolitical. Francisco Goya’s paintings fiercely criticized the Spanish wars, Michelangelo sought for his “David” sculpture to exemplify the anti-Medicean ideal, and Stanley Kubrick’s films frequently satirized American politics.
In a vacuum, then, politics in the arts shouldn’t be cause for concern, and may even be an essential element of artistic expression. Policy in the arts, however, has a much more worrying history. Mao Zedong, for one, famously posited that “literature and art are subordinate to politics,” a bit over 20 years before his disastrous Cultural Revolution. Art, as described by Joseph Goebbels, is “no mere peacetime amusement, but a sharp spiritual weapon for war.” As for who stated that art should “reflect the awesome splendor of our country’s timeless exceptionalism,” that would be none other than President Donald Trump. It does not appear commendable to be in the selective camp of those statesmen who seek to strong-arm the arts into some grotesque association with a vague national identity.
This, along with Trump’s strategy of using every available legal avenue to get what he wants, is a supreme cause for concern when considering an independent media. Last year saw the leveraging of the Federal Communications Commission’s exclusive regulatory prerogative to secure favors and obedience from the nation’s media giants, politicizing and bastardizing the relationship between non-partisan government organs and artistic institutions. In order for Paramount to secure federal approval for its acquisition by Skydance Media, it paid tribute to the nation’s feudal lord, in the form of $16 million sent to Trump. Determined to preserve its seat at the president’s gold leafed table, the entertainment conglomerate even went so far as to oust Trump’s longtime critics Elise Preston, Nancy Chen, Janet Shamlian, Nikki Battiste, Debora Patta Dana Jacobson, Michelle Miller, and Stephen Colbert, cancelling “The Late Show” after a 33-year-long run and fulfilling its promise to the Trump administration to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion policies from the company. Weary of the consequences of disobeying a vindictive presidential administration, ABC and its corporate parent, The Walt Disney Company, pulled talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel from the air after FCC chairman Brendan Carr threatened to retaliate against the network, outraged by Kimmel’s critical comments on Donald Trump’s, Stephen Miller’s, and Pam Bondi’s reactions to the death of Charlie Kirk.
We see in these concessions — but a few instances of a year’s worth of Trump’s interventions in the arts — an unprecedented, almost corporatist relationship between the presidency and the media. Behold, for yourself, the depths of the peril of the arts. Institutions such as the Kennedy Center and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting sat helpless against federal fury. Creatives across the industry found themselves deprived of artistic independence and free expression. It should not be objectionable, then, to raise that last year, it truly seemed as if resistance was futile, as if the culture war was on a trajectory towards victory for the conservatives. It seemed as if the arts had untheatrically fallen.
(Not So) Small Resistance on the Big Screen
You must not think it’s miraculous that today, a free and independent media still stands. The media and the arts are alive because people fought for them. Freedom fighters put forth their blood, their sweat, and their tears in a truly treacherous bout for artistic liberty — though in this war, battles are not fought with rifles and tanks, but with scripts and boom mics.
At the helm of this liberation front was one Paul Thomas Anderson.
Paul Thomas Anderson has, for nearly as long as he’s been alive, been a filmmaker. The lifetime Angeleno made his first film when he was 8 years old, and from that point on, would direct psychological and period dramas that now fill the canon of American film. Whether you quantify it in his 14 Oscar nominations, his life of luxury in the San Fernando Valley, or his general status as a preeminent white director at Hollywood’s forefront, Anderson is the epitome of privilege. His voice has been plenty heard, his life and legacy depicted across millions of feet of film. Yet, with his endowment etched into the persevering stone of “There Will Be Blood” and “Licorice Pizza”, Anderson chose to emerge last year as an opponent of political tyranny, as a lone anterior voice of resistance. In the war for representation, the most impressive weapon was Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another.”
A film about leftist revolutionaries, “One Battle After Another” is an anomaly in that it is an incredibly timely piece that feels thoroughly anachronistic. The film was released in a world where the Trump administration looms like an ever inert storm cloud, and as such, it feels transgressive to even approach the insolence of “One Battle After Another.” In 2025, it told the narrative of Black radicals engaging in militant resistance, revolutionary nuns harboring fugitives in a convent, and a karate sensei running an underground sanctuary network for undocumented immigrants. This alone assures me that “One Battle After Another” will go down in history as a remarkable display of artistic resistance.
Most insolent of all, “One Battle After Another” is so recalcitrant as to portray the everyday man. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as character Bob Ferguson, a painfully ordinary layman who — having long fled from a life dedicated to militance and activism — is unwillingly followed once more by the forces of fascism because tyrants don’t care if you care about politics. Ferguson eventually returns to his old ways of resistance, not because of his nonexistent revolutionary zeal, but because of the imperative to resist when you and your loved ones become victims of vassalage.
“One Battle After Another” would be an extraordinary work in any time and context, and Paul Thomas Anderson is an unparalleled creative, whether the film was released in 2025 or the 1960s. However, it is in the particular context of the first of four years under the second Trump administration, and of the insurmountable wave of pressure from the federal government against any meddlesome project last year, that “One Battle After Another” finds a distinctive importance. It directly defies the Trump administration’s documented efforts to delegate the arts. It, as a concept and a project, was not supposed to exist. In a year where the largest corporations and studios kissed Washington’s ring, “One Battle After Another” was distributed by Warner Bros. Discovery. In a year where Hollywood sought to be as politically inoffensive as possible, Paul Thomas Anderson depicted a family of revolutionaries incessantly tailed by a sexually frustrated, chauvinistic, xenophobic, white-supremacist agent of the military. “One Battle After Another” is Anderson’s “King Lear,” and truly a work of insurgency.
Though it will go down in history with the likes of political films Iincluding “The Battle of Algiers,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and “City of Men,” “One Battle After Another” is not like these films or any other. For only “One Battle After Another” fought directly against Donald Trump in the culture war for representation.
Does It Really Matter?
In the past three decades of recent memory, these petty battles frankly did not matter. For the average American, principally concerned with putting food on the table and supporting family, the culture war has been as distant as America’s “special military operations” in the Middle East. At its peaks, in regards to issues such as abortion, religion, and LGBTQ+ rights, it has sometimes become the subject of national concern. However, when it comes to minority representation in movies, the inclusion of plus-sized models, and other issues of this nature, the layman tends to consider the culture war trivial. Can you blame them? Are they wrong? What is so important about the arts, about diversity in media?
It is representation and the inimitable power of the images we see and internalize.
Representation stood at the center of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, of Isabella’s “Inquisición” or Spanish Inquisition, and of the Third Reich’s “Kulturkampf.” Political regimes with ambitious aims for the fate of their nation gravitate towards an obsession with representation. In the 1930s, a group of German intellectuals called the Frankfurt School recognized this historical trend, and in their work, we find the importance of the arts and the root of the culture war.
Beginning from a method of anti-positivist analysis called critical theory, the philosophers of the Frankfurt School sought to explain how Nazi Germany, in particular, had come to power and how the machine of propaganda, anti-semitic imagery, and nationalist aesthetics had convinced otherwise moral German people to sit by and allow their government to commit genocide. In their search for an answer, they found that the arts and the media had become a “culture industry,” a factory that pumped out images and messages carefully curated by Nazi leaders to shape how Germans viewed Jewish people, Europe, and the rest of the world. What was depicted and represented determined what Germans believed to be true.
The parallels between the aims of the Trump administration and the strategies of these varlets of history are doubtlessly unsettling, though admittedly distant. The Frankfurt School’s theories, however, would soon hit much closer to home.
In 1973, the Jamaican-born British philosopher and Open University professor Stuart Hall pioneered a theory within cultural studies which asserted that representation in the media is not a reflection of a pre-existing reality, but the productive cultural force that gives meaning to the world. Influenced by a combination of Hegelian analysis, Marxist dialectic, and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, his representation theory is what can be most directly identified as the center of the war of representation. In formulating it, Hall engaged in a political Manhattan Project, for representation theory would go on to become a weapon of mass destruction in our present cold war of culture.
The recognition of the power of representation quickly caught on with academics, and once the idea was propelled beyond the borders of the United Kingdom and to the United States, American ideologues became cognizant of the secret sauce to hegemony. It was not long after this that James Davudsin Hunter worried that “a struggle to define the actual and ideal character and direction of the country” was impending in the nation. Indeed, such a struggle was imminently in the works. The 1990s saw the development of modern and controversial conceptual frameworks of representation known as critical race theory, intersectionality, and identity politics. It saw agents on each side of the American political aisle realize that if Hall’s representation theory was right, he who controls what Americans see would determine what Americans believe in. So ensued the arms race that brings us to today: to the aftermath of an election in which the conservative wing of the students of Stuart Hall emerged as the victors, and to a time where the depiction of political dissidents, racial minorities, and the marginalized among us is not some paltry point of concern for social justice warriors, but the surest weapon in the fight for equity and representation.
The Resuscitation of the Arts
Last year’s dogfight for representation could have held a grisly fate in store for the arts. It could have ended in corporate and industry leaders conceding to the man who could best fill their pockets. It could have ended in the Republicans, vested with the combined power of the majority in Congress and the President of the United States, thrusting the might of the government against the arts without any meaningful resistance, without any remonstrance from a sincere opposition. Frankly, last year could have marked the end of the free media in America as we know it.
But last year, Paul Thomas Anderson stood, as did the countless dissentient creatives whose efforts won’t make it to the newsrooms or historical records. “One Battle After Another” showcased to millions of people in theaters worldwide the value of diversity and representation in the images we consume, in the media we enjoy. It is this kind of art that stands as the last bulwark defending the independence of media and the sanctity of the arts. That independence and the freedom of expression will only prevail insofar as audacious artists of Anderson’s mold continue this insubordinate habit. In the face of the belligerent intervention of an unfettered majority in government, Anderson’s defiance can only be understood as a good fight for the arts.
Featured Image Source: Fandom Wire