The Lockjaw Inheritance: One Battle After Another Exposes the Parenting Secret Nobody Admits; Sometimes You Look at Your Kid and Feel Regret

Colonel Lockjaw hunts his own daughter in One Battle After Another—not from hate, but shame. This psychological analysis reveals why parents sometimes resent what their children reflect back.

Roll Camera on Your Worst Self

Here’s something nobody says at baby showers: children are surveillance equipment you build with your own body.

You assemble them from scratch—half your DNA, half someone else’s, one hundred percent sentient evidence locker—and then you spend the next two decades hoping they don’t notice what they’re carrying. You teach them to walk. You teach them to talk. You teach them to share and be kind and use their inside voice. And somewhere around year seven, you look across the dinner table and see a tiny human doing that thing—the jaw clench, the dismissive eye-roll, the specific way you shrug when you don’t want to admit you’re wrong—and you think: Oh no. Oh, absolutely not.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a sprawling, chaotic, politically charged action epic about resistance movements and far-right militias and a father trying to protect his daughter from a world designed to destroy her. It’s also, under all that gunfire and VistaVision grandeur, a two-hour-forty-minute horror movie about what happens when your child becomes proof of everything you’ve tried to bury.

Meet Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, played by Sean Penn with the cold precision of a man who has replaced his soul with a filing cabinet. Lockjaw is the film’s villain. He’s a white supremacist. He’s a corrupt military officer who traded revolutionary names for power. He’s also—and here’s where it gets uncomfortably domestic—a father who spends the entire movie trying to kill his own daughter.

Not because he hates her.

Because she exists.

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The Curatorial Instinct (Or: Why You Edited That Family Photo)

Let’s be honest with each other for a second.

You’ve done reputation management on your children. Maybe not consciously. Maybe not cruelly. But you’ve done it. You’ve steered them away from the shirt that makes them look “too much.” You’ve corrected their pronunciation in front of your parents. You’ve felt that tiny spike of irritation when they exhibited, in public, a trait you specifically did not authorize.

Lockjaw just takes this further than you’d ever go. Probably.

Here’s his situation: sixteen years ago, he had an affair with Perfidia Beverly Hills, a Black revolutionary who publicly humiliated him before they became lovers. This produced a daughter—Willa—whose very existence is a biological receipt for Lockjaw’s hypocrisy. He’s spent a decade and a half climbing the ranks of white nationalist power structures, and Willa is walking, talking DNA evidence that he once loved someone he now claims to despise.

So he hunts her.

And I want you to sit with how reasonable that sounds for a second.

Not morally reasonable. Strategically reasonable. Lockjaw isn’t a mustache-twirling monster. He’s a man with a legacy problem and a practical solution. The girl complicates his narrative. The girl undermines his brand. The girl—by simply being alive—forces him to reckon with a version of himself he’s spent years executing in effigy.

If you could edit your children’s traits like a rough cut, wouldn’t you be tempted? Not the big stuff—not their kindness or their curiosity. Just… the parts that came from you. The parts you recognize. The parts that make you wince because you know exactly where they got them.

Lockjaw’s just honest about it. He wants to delete the dailies.

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The Bureaucracy of Blood

There’s a scene midway through the film that I can’t stop thinking about.

Lockjaw has cornered Willa at a convent run by revolutionary nuns (long story, wonderful movie). He’s got her. He’s won. And instead of killing her immediately, he does something stranger: he administers a DNA test.

He already knows the results. He’s known for sixteen years. The test isn’t diagnostic. It’s theatrical. It’s Lockjaw converting paternal shame into bureaucratic procedure—transforming “this is my daughter and I want her gone” into “the laboratory has confirmed we must proceed.”

The DNA test isn’t about science. It’s about distance.

I’ve been reviewing parental behavior studies for the better part of two decades now—there was one from the Pacific Northwest, early 2010s, that tracked how parents linguistically framed disappointment in their children. The researchers called it “clinical distancing”: when you stop saying “my son did this” and start saying “the behavior exhibited by children in this demographic cohort.” It’s how we turn people we made into problems we’re managing.

Lockjaw takes the swab. He waits for confirmation. And when the test comes back positive, he instructs bounty hunter Avanti Q to deliver Willa to a far-right militia. He only backs off when Avanti refuses—not because she’s innocent, but because she’s young.

Her age was the moral line. Not her innocence. Not her humanity. Her birthday.

That scene should be monstrous. And it is. But it’s also—and I hate that I’m writing this—familiar. The DNA test is what we do every time we reduce our children to diagnoses, percentiles, behavioral assessments, and developmental milestones. We take the miracle of a person we created and we run it through systems designed to tell us whether they’re the right kind of person.

Lockjaw just had the honesty to use the results for elimination rather than optimization.

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Cut to a Close-Up of Your Psyche

Here’s where I drop the jokes.

Psychologists have a term for what Lockjaw is experiencing. They call it “children as narcissistic mirrors”—the phenomenon where parents unconsciously resent offspring who display traits the parent has rejected in themselves. Your kid isn’t just your kid. They’re a projection screen. And sometimes the movie that plays isn’t the one you approved.

You look at your child and you see your father’s temper. Your mother’s anxiety. Your own inability to admit you’re wrong, your defensiveness, your tendency to perform confidence you don’t feel. You see the trait you spent your twenties trying to bury, and here it is, alive and loud and asking for more screen time.

And something in you—something small, something you’d never admit at the pediatrician’s office—thinks: Can we fix this in post?

Lockjaw is pursuing Willa because she’s proof of his hypocrisy. But the uncomfortable universality is this: every parent has looked at their child and seen their own worst quality staring back. The impulse to hide that child—to correct them, to redirect them, to shape them into something more palatable—is the sanitized domestic version of Lockjaw’s hunt.

You’re not trying to kill the child.

You’re trying to kill the you that they inherited.

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The Scene You’re Still Living

Here’s the thing nobody prepares you for:

Your children don’t reflect your worst traits. They reveal them.

The trait you hate in them—the stubbornness, the emotional unavailability, the way they go cold when they’re hurt instead of crying—that’s not something they developed independently. That’s something they learned. From you. By watching you. By absorbing, over years of silent observation, exactly how you handle discomfort, conflict, and vulnerability.

When you look at your child and feel that flash of disappointment—”Why are they like this? Where did this come from?”—the answer is almost always a mirror.

I don’t know if this makes things better or worse. I’ve been turning this over since I left the theater, and I genuinely don’t have a clean answer. On one hand, maybe recognizing the mechanism frees you from it. You see the projection. You name it. You choose differently.

On the other hand—and this is the part I’m still sitting with—maybe knowing just makes the weight heavier. Maybe now you can’t pretend it’s their flaw. Maybe now you have to own that the thing you wanted to edit out of them is the thing you’re still carrying yourself.

Lockjaw couldn’t bear what Willa revealed about him. So he tried to make her disappear.

You probably won’t go that far. But you might go quiet. You might go distant. You might find yourself subtly, unconsciously, building a convent of your own—a space where your child exists, but at arm’s length, where they can’t remind you of what you’d rather forget.

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Director’s Final Notes

There’s a moment near the end of One Battle After Another where Bob—the stoner revolutionary who raised Willa, who loved her despite being a mess himself—hands her a letter from Perfidia. Her real mother. The woman who betrayed everyone, including her own daughter.

The letter apologizes. It promises reunion. It tries to rebuild a bridge that was burned before Willa was old enough to remember the fire.

And Willa reads it. And Bob watches her read it. And you realize: this whole movie has been about whether we can love someone who reminds us of our failures—and whether they can love us back knowing we failed.

Lockjaw couldn’t. He chose erasure.

Bob could. He chose presence. Imperfect, terrified, stoned-half-the-time presence—but presence.

That’s the choice the film is quietly asking you to make. Not “Are you a good parent?” That’s the wrong question. The question is: “When your child holds up a mirror, will you look—or will you run?”

I’ll be honest. I’m not sure which one I’m doing most days. I’m not sure the line between protecting my legacy and protecting my kid is as clear as I’d like it to be.

But I watched Lockjaw chase his daughter across California, and I recognized something. Not his actions. His impulse. That quiet, terrible wish that some parts of yourself would just… stay hidden.

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The Strange Assignment

Before you close this tab, try this:

The next time you feel irritation rising toward your child—or your partner, or your sibling, or anyone you’re supposed to love unconditionally—pause. Ask yourself: Am I annoyed at them? Or am I annoyed at the part of me I see in them?

Notice which question is harder to answer.

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Post-Credits Scene: Director’s Commentary

What this article was actually about:

• The projection of rejected traits onto children as a form of unconscious self-attack
• The way bureaucratic distance (diagnoses, tests, assessments) lets us dehumanize the people we’re supposed to love most
• The specific horror of recognizing yourself in someone you’re failing

The self-deception being targeted:

The belief that your disappointment in your child is about them.

One staggering truth in fifteen words or fewer:

Your children don’t remind you of your flaws. They’re proof you never fixed them.

Roll credits. Now go parent like your story matters.