Ep. 2: One Battle: Conversations on Film, Fatherhood, and Art

In this second installment of “El Speakeasy” our hosts take on fatherhood, the masculinity question and the disillusionment of leftist revolutionary narratives in contemporary culture. The fellas engage in a lively and personal discussion around the new movie release by Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle Battle After Another” which sparks conversations around our current political moment, fatherhood and the role of art in social change.

• One Battle After Another, Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Leonardo Dicaprio, Benicio Del Toro, Regina Hall and Teyana Taylor. The three compadres engage multi-layered conversation around why this film either resonates or does not in this particular cultural moment. Our hosts dive deeper into character, plot development and more nuanced ideas around the idea of revolution, fatherhood and resistance.
• Bill Kelley Jr has been reading The Two Parent Privilege by Melissa Kearney. She argues that the number of parents in one's household is the single greatest determining factor in a child's life and that the decline of married, two-parent households, especially among college-educated Americans, has widened inequality by limiting children’s access to time, stability, and resources.
• Francisco Ortega recommended we all watch the Netflix Documentary Film Come See Me in the Good Light, which focuses on the relationship between Poet Andrea Gibson and her partner Poet Megan Falley as they grapple with Gibson’s terminal cancer diagnosis. This is a moving depiction of two deeply creative and expressive individuals coming to terms with death and mortality.
• Juan Devis recommended we watch Apocalypse in the Tropics, another Netflix documentary film that tracks the growing influence of the evangelical movement in Brazilian politics, especially during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro’s tenure as President of Brazil. This film depicts eerily similar dynamics of the growing political power the evangelical movement in Brazil that mirror what is taking place here in the United States as well.