I don’t know if you’ve had this experience of leaving a movie theater: feeling for a few minutes or hours that you now exist within the world of the movie. I remember seeing 28 Years Later a few months ago and as soon as I exited onto the street sensing that a zombie might run after me at any moment. Rather quickly, this feeling faded—I got a drink with a friend and forgot about it.

But last week, I saw One Battle After Another, the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie about revolutionaries trying, and mostly failing, to affect change in an increasingly fascistic United States of America—one in which the police and military are always watching, always ready to ruin people’s lives, and frequently doing so for petty, personal, ego-driven reasons—and something shifted in me.

I saw it at one of the few venues projecting it in VistaVision—the screen was huge and the sound surround and the experience so, so much fun. And as I exited the Union Square Regal at 2am, that familiar feeling returned. I was in the movie. A cop car turned the corner and I nearly grabbed one of my friends to jump behind a barricade to evade some theoretical arrest, as if I was Leo DiCaprio, on the run for my involvement in a series of semi-violent anti-state actions.

Except, this time, the feeling did not fade. A week later, it still hasn’t. Instead, it’s transformed into something more subtle, and yet more all-encompassing. It’s not that I’m ducking and running from cop cars every day; it’s that the movie has convinced me the world it represents is not only our own, but somehow realer than our own.

In “real” life, it is very easy to become distracted and impotent and give in to a kind of pre-defeat, figuring that anything you do cannot possibly change the increasingly fascistic world around you. But in the world of One Battle After Another, these issues—fighting for migrants, fighting against capitalism, doing whatever it takes to ensure that the most psychotic power-hoarders on earth do not ruin the earth more than they already have—feel as constantly present and consequential as they actually, in real life, are.

The facts of the world as represented by OBAA are not necessarily realer than the real world, but the feeling of the world in the film—stripped from all the distractions and mundanities of real life—is, in my opinion, realer.

In the real world, there is a near-constant gauze wrapped around my eyes, separating me from all I know to be true—that I am depressed and anxious and fearful because of the evilness all around us, and that that must be directly confronted if anything is to change. The camera lens of One Battle After Another is gauze-free. It is clear-eyed. And, thus, by watching it, I felt the gauze between me and my world begin to unravel as soon as I left the theater. In short, its fictions clarified reality...