Why politics is ruining how we watch movies

One Battle After Another is, perhaps, too on the nose. Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic depicts past and present revolutionaries fighting back against a heavily militarized, white-supremacist regime that seemed to mirror reality in the United States when the movie hit theaters in late 2025. Characters rescue immigrants from detention centers, bomb the office of an anti-abortion politician, and engage in explosive standoffs with the police. 

But according to its auteur, One Battle After Another is not a manifesto. Nor was the script, which he started working on two decades ago, intended to challenge the particular moment. The film is loosely based on the 1990 Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland, a dark satire set just after Reagan’s reelection. Anderson has said that the film depicts the timeless nature of fascism but that he was more focused on the journey of its characters. He hasn’t credited Trump as an inspiration for the film. 

“The biggest mistake I could make in a story like this is to put politics up in the front,” Anderson told the Los Angeles Times. 

Still, questions over whether One Battle After Another is radical enough persist online. It’s just another example of a growing tendency for audiences to pigeonhole films politically, regardless of their text or the filmmaker’s intent. People expect a straightforward and instructive political message and then judge the work by that metric. 

Art, of course, can be a powerful vehicle for politics, and audiences are free to extract political commentary from movies. However, these analyses have recently digressed into more reductive takes and, consequentially, misguided demands. 

Many fans claimed that this year’s Superman blockbuster is anti-Zionist with its warring countries representing Israel and Palestine, even though director James Gunn has denied this interpretation. Since being adapted to screen with a diverse cast, fans are narrowing the politics of Wicked, which has been on Broadway for over 20 years, down to a critique of white feminism. On the flipside, critics denounced After the Hunt, a film about a college student’s sexual assault allegation against a professor, for supposedly not being direct enough in its commentary on the #MeToo movement and cancel culture. 

As politics have become an inescapable part of daily culture, people are desperate for movies to telegraph their specific worldview.

“People have become obsessed with categorizing films as morally good or bad in order to neatly insert them into the wider political discourse,” says film critic and programmer Jourdain Searles. “Films aren’t message delivery machines.”

But not every piece of culture intends to “take a side” or make a bold political statement. This myopic way of consuming films might be useful in a debate online, but it’s not how you get the most out of a movie.

The second Trump administration has dedicated much of its authoritarian efforts to dissenting voices in the media and the arts. It’s understandable that audiences would seek films that challenge the status quo, even if they politicize movies that didn’t set out to be political statements. 

After all, the idea that movies can speak to the current moment is “as old as Hollywood itself,” according to Montclair State University assistant professor Joel Penney. Look no further than propaganda films like D.W. Griffith’s 1915 pro-Ku Klux Klan epic The Birth of a Nation or, later, Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 comedy The Great Dictator.

For nearly 50 years, movies with overtly political themes weren’t hard to find. In the 1960s and ‘70s, there was a surge in countercultural and independent movies, many of them made by Black independent filmmakers addressing systemic racism. The ’70s, in particular, commented on the Nixon era with political thrillers, like All the President’s Men, The Conversation, The Days of the Condor, and The Parallax View, all of which grappled with the weakness of political leaders and the disappointment of politics. 

By the ’80s and ’90s, director of George Washington University’s film studies department Elisabeth Anker says Hollywood saw a huge rise in movies “taking place in the walls of Congress” about political leaders and how power works, including The American President, Nixon, JFK, and Wag the Dog. 

In the early 21st century, the extent to which movies took on political subject matter waxed and waned based on public consensus around certain issues and figures and what studios think will make the most money. For example, Kathryn Bigelow’s 2008 Iraq war film The Hurt Locker and her controversial 2012 follow-up Zero Dark Thirty, about the CIA’s hunt for Osama Bin Laden, were box-office successes and eventual Oscar winners.  

“Hollywood appears to have largely stopped making political movies,” wrote Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz of the current landscape in a CBS News column, citing studio executives’ aversion to risk and controversy. This is despite how much politics have dominated the culture in the wake of Trump’s election in 2016. (Adam McKay’s Dick Cheney biopic Vice, from 2018, and his 2022 climate satire Don’t Look Up stick out as rare examples.) 

Mankiewicz points to The Apprentice as an example of what can go wrong. The 2024 Donald Trump biopic had trouble finding distribution, particularly after Trump threatened legal action. The 2020 film The Hunt, which depicted elites hunting “deplorables” for sport, was also censored after backlash from Trump. After the president denounced the film on social media, Universal removed the movie from its release schedule, before sending it straight to streaming. 

“The Trump era has definitely made studios more cowardly about direct political work that implicates the right for its escalating bigotry and politicians, in general, for being directly responsible for the poverty and strife in this country,” says Searles. 

So it makes sense that, with fewer choices of films that directly tackle systems of power, moviegoers want to find messages that meet our historical moment — even if those messages aren’t actually there.

To be clear, this isn’t just a tendency of progressive moviegoers. This hunt for social and political messaging is far more extreme on the right. Regardless of the topic or genre, conservatives have been particularly aggressive about misreading films for political ends, launching outlandish attacks against mainstream movies as a way to insert themselves into pop culture. The past few years have seen pundits, like Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson, categorize anything from The Super Mario Bros. Movie to  Disney’s live-action The Little Mermaid as “woke” propaganda for casting people of color or containing female-empowerment storylines. It amounts to ragebait, but it seems to be having an influence on how movies are discussed on social media. 

None of this means that critics or audiences aren’t allowed to take issue with the content of films like One Battle After Another or After The Hunt and find them underwhelming. But we limit the possibilities of movies and filmmakers when we expect them to provide an answer to our current moment rather than tell their own stories in a way that’s captivating and meaningful. One Battle After Another, “only falls short politically if you expect any fictional political story to bear the weight of this country’s entire history,” says Searles. 

“It isn’t mainstream cinema’s job to provide a clear or coherent political message to the audience,” says Searles. “These are stories about people, and we are watching them live their lives, just as we do.”