One battle after another and the seduction of endless struggle

There are, however, films that refuse this consolation altogether. Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006) does not reassure us that the battle continues, nor does it flatter us with vigilance. It stages a world in which struggle itself has become exhausted - where resistance movements are hollow, politics is reduced to containment, and hope is no longer a usable category. And yet action remains possible. Theo does not act because he believes in the future, or because history demands it, or because endurance has become virtue. He acts without reassurance. Responsibility here is not sustained by repetition, but by exposure to a singular demand that offers no promise in return. This is what non - consolatory ethics looks like when it is dramatized.

Žižek helps us see how resistance can be enjoyed as identity. Badiou helps us see how perseverance without Event is politically empty. Together, they expose the limits of a culture that congratulates itself on knowing that the struggle never ends. What is missing is not realism but courage: the courage to imagine that repetition itself might be the problem. To imagine an end to the battle is not to imagine utopia or final harmony. It is to risk asking whether the coordinates of the struggle could be transformed so radically that the enemy, as we know it, would no longer make sense.

Such an imagination is dangerous: it threatens identities built around opposition, moral clarity, the comfort of knowing one's place in the fight. This is why consolation so often takes the form of repetition. Better another battle than a leap into the unknown.

One Battle After Another is a serious film. Its refusal of easy victory is honest. But honesty is not enough. The danger is that honesty becomes an alibi for resignation. A Žižekian reading warns us that endless resistance can become ideology. A Badiouian reading warns us that without rupture, there is no politics at all. Together, they force a harder question upon us: Are we fighting because the world must change - or because fighting itself has become our way of surviving a world we no longer believe can? To reject consolation today is not to demand optimism. It is to refuse the comfort of repetition. It is to insist that politics, if it is to mean anything, must risk more than endurance.

Otherwise, there will always be another battle - and nothing else.