Hello, I'm Dana Stevens, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest, One Banger After Another Edition.

It's Wednesday, October 1st, 2025. This week we'll be discussing, first off, one battle after another, the latest movie from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a burned-out ex-revolutionary forced to take up arms again after his daughter is kidnapped by his old arch enemy. Next, we'll discuss long story short, the new animated series on Netflix that come from the creators of BoJack Horseman.

Finally, we'll look at the state of the Broadway musical, which, according to a new report in the New York Times, appears much more dire than I had previously known.

I'm joined today, all of us cozzly in Slate Studio together by Slate Senior Writer Sam Adams. Hey Sam.

Hello, Dana. Thanks for coming up on the train to be with us in New York.

Oh, my pleasure. It's lovely to have all three of us stuffed into this tiny little room. And also by Isaac Butler, long-time friend of the podcast, an author of many good books, including the upcoming.

Yes, I turned it in last week. Oh, congrats. Eight days ago. I now get to not think about it for two weeks while I await the fact-checking and copy editing reports, which will, I'm sure, ruin my life. But it's called The Perfect Moment. The subtitle changes many times, like every day it changes, so I'm not going to give that. But I will tell you that it is about the culture wars of the 80s and 90s, or as I like to refer to them, the quaint culture wars. All right. Well, I cannot wait to read that. If you've read Isaac's previous book, The Method, I think you know that that is a book to get in line for when it comes out. I'm already waiting in line. You're the first in line just standing there at a bookstore. The bookstore will probably no longer exist by the time it comes out, but I'll still be there.

Paul Thomas Anderson's 10th feature-length film, One Battle After Another, is also his biggest

movie in scale by quite a large margin, with budget of about $150 million, which one critic

estimated is around the cost of all his previous

movies combined. It's also the first film from PTA that could be classified as an action thriller,

though there's a lot more going on than that. This film is very loosely based on the Thomas

Pynchon novel Vineland. It tells the sprawling story of a fictional revolutionary group,

the French 75, and their armed acts of resistance against a repressive authoritarian regime.

This is just one notch on the dial away from our contemporary political reality.

In the first half of the movie, we meet two members of the resistance who are also romantic partners, the incendiary perfidia Beverly Hills, played by Tiana Taylor, and her somewhat

less fiercely committed boyfriend, Ghetto Pat, aka the Rocket Man, Leonardo DiCaprio.

During a raid on a migrant camp that the group is attempting to liberate, will encounter the figure

who becomes the movie's villain, Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw, played by Sean Penn.

All right, so it was not to give away too many more plot points. I'll just say that the second half of the movie jumps forward 16 years in time. Perfidias and Pat's baby daughter is now a teenager, Willa, played by Chase Infinity, and she and her father are living under assumed identities in a remote part of Northern California when the dreaded Colonel Lockjaw sends his goons to kidnap Willa, thereby drawing her father out of hiding to come and find her.

Let's listen to a scene from the movie. Here, Leonardo DiCaprio's Bob, which is the name he's now

living under after having gone underground, is on the phone with a fellow member of the French 75,

...