How the White Savior Became This Year’s Cinematic Punchline

Warning : This piece contains some spoilers for the movies One Battle After Another, Eddington , and The Mastermind.

About a third of the way into One Battle After Another , the hilarious Thomas Pynchon-inspired film from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson , comes a moment whose absurdity and shrewdness reveals the idiocy of its white male protagonist, Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio). It occurs after Bob receives a call from the revolutionary group the French 75, informing him that not only have they evacuated his endangered teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti), but also soldiers under the orders of the wicked Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) are closing in on his secluded Northern California home.

High and exhausted, Bob arrives at a payphone dressed in black sunglasses, a be