Why Alana Haim wears a Star of David in ‘One Battle After Another’
Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic is a vibrant cross section of the America that makes white nationalists mad
Alana Haim at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Photo by SAMEER AL-DOUMY/AFP via Getty Images)
By PJ Grisar October 8, 2025
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A few minutes into One Battle After Another, a Black man kisses his white girlfriend goodbye on her way to work and reminds her that she’s a normal, everyday “white working girl.”
She looks the part. Her hair up, a prim white collar peeking out from under her navy dress. She passes easily through security in a government building. But while she sneaks in contraband — part of a plan to bomb the site in her real work as a member of the revolutionary group the French 75 — our eyes detect there’s more to the everyday white girl act. She’s wearing a Star of David necklace.
What, precisely, this conveys, doesn’t neatly map out onto the film’s schema of race in America, its prevailing concern. The most superficial explanation is that the actor, Alana Haim, is Jewish and director Paul Thomas Anderson drew extensively on her background in his last film, Licorice Pizza, going so far as to cast her sisters and bandmates as her sisters and her parents as her parents. (Haim’s mother was Anderson’s elementary school art teacher.)
If you were so inclined, you could read something cynical into the production choice: To pass as a “white working girl,” there’s no better way, in some imagined hierarchies, than to announce one’s Jewishness. But that’s hardly in keeping with the film’s spirit. Taking a step back from the plot, one can read into the costume design how white Jews might use their white privilege — however provisional — to partner with people of color.
The French 75, which is for “free borders, free bodies, free choices,” is largely made up of Black fighters, fronted by the flamboyant Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). Haim’s character, credited with the alias Mae West, is indeed deployed for her whiteness. But the hint that she may be Jewish, and is defiantly displaying that identity, speaks to the major roles Jews have traditionally played in groups like the Weather Underground.
The world of Anderson’s film, quite loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, has a foot in that lo-fi revolutionary past. iPhones make pivotal appearances, but the tech is strikingly analog — as are many of the cars. Its America is vague, but likely more recognizable than anyone anticipated when it began production.
The dividing lines between ICE, the police and the military are fudged. Cops in camo descend on a sanctuary city on the apparent caprice of a mad colonel named Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). He’s after Perfidia’s 16-year-old daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti), a loose end he must tie up before he enters a group of genial white supremacists known as the Christmas Adventurers.
The Adventurers’ admission committee wants to address rumors he was “soft on racial purity” and to ensure he was “American-born gentile.” While Willa was raised by her single father “Bob” (Leonardo DiCaprio, aging well into the twitchiness Scorsese recognized early on), Lockjaw has reason to believe Willa may be his.
Of the many battles, the losing one is that of the Christmas Adventurers, generations too late to stop the multicultural American project. It’s reasonable to infer this is a personal project for Anderson, who is white and whose wife, Maya Rudolph, is Black and Jewish, as are their kids, but we’re peppered with reminders that there’s no turning back the clock to align with standards of purity favored by the Adventurers, whose commitment to Christian principles only seems to extend to that most commercial of avatars, Saint Nick. (They “hail” him in greeting.)
Lockjaw relies on a Native American bounty hunter. A scene at the secret lair of the adventurers is underscored by Ella Fitzgerald’s version of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.” A molotov cocktail thrower, brought in by the police to sow chaos during a protest, is referred to as Eddie Van Halen (who was half Dutch and half Indo). Benicio Del Toro plays a Latino karate sensei inspired by Harriet Tubman.
Haim’s Mae West, with her glittering Magen David is a reminder that Jews have a role to play in the revolution — and that just existing is enough to make all the right people mad.
