Games

I really like your analysis of Bob's character but I think I frame it differently.

I'll have to rewatch it to confidently make this point, but I'm not certain Bob's character arc was about overcoming paranoia so much as overcoming the trauma that caused his paranoia, and a key part of that journey was the deaths of the people directly searching for him. External change leading to internal change, more than the other way around.

When Bob's paranoia is portrayed as over the top, I see it more as "this is what the system actually does to the people we'd otherwise see as heroes" than "look at this silly man being paranoid". He's one of the only ones of his original crew to survive, after all, and iirc his daughter having a phone leads to the capture of dozens of revolutionaries. So if anything, we're supposed to get the impression he's paranoid, but realize he's at least partially correct, given the circumstances in which he finds himself after working with the French 75.

The contrast with del Toro is then more about the circumstances that allow him or encourage him to be nonchalant. The wider, integrated community support and (most importantly, I think) dual power structures give his movement much more stability and staying power. They operate under the spectacle rather than trying to break into it.

While I think we can make favorable comparisons with del Toro's tactics versus the French 75, I don't think we can say the former is inherently superior in every way. In some ways they both represent necessary aspects of revolution, the active militarized vanguard and the logistics network necessary to support it. And I got the impression that they did support each other to some degree in the movie, although since all of this is more of a backdrop to the characters we aren't really shown the whole picture. It somewhat resembles the dual-structure model that George Jackson laid out in Blood in My Eye iirc. Actually I think his model was more like an above-board, legal org that secretly funded and funneled members to an underground active vanguard. In any case this is tangential to what you're saying. But I like to see it as, at least in part, a portrayal of two different aspects of revolution.

But I'm gonna walk that back a bit lol, because you're definitely right about the fatal flaws of the French 75. I remember now that my first impression when watching the movie was a comparison between western revolutionary spectacle versus third-world revolutionary pragmatism. That might be the proper reading actually. But I still got the impression that we're supposed to have a critically positive opinion of the French 75, similar to how we might think of well-meaning but failed revolutionary movements. Because they had some success before being decimated, and their failures were due to specific tactical choices, bad luck, and personal flaws rather than their choice of violent praxis. As such I don't think a lib critique like "active resistance is futile, only passive integration works" actually sticks. Maybe a contrast between being image-driven versus outcome-driven. Idk.

I can see the infosec/opsec is for losers reading, but since we're shown multiple times the repercussions of bad opsec, I don't fully buy it. There's certainly a conflict, but I think the opsec/paranoia itself is downstream of larger conflicts (trying to be safe versus trying to live a normal life versus trying to be a revolutionary) and the way people interact with those conflicts is used to color their characters. In Bob's case it's symbolic for his relationship with the world as well as his internal outlook or progress in processing trauma. He's hyper-obsessed with spectacle (fireworks, revolutionary movies), so a lot of his motivations are about his image and (in)visibility. I'm repeating myself lol, but del Toro's approach to spectacle is almost opposite: maintain a neutral, care-free image while actively running a massive underground network. So maybe I'd argue that part of Bob's internal arc was his relationship to spectacle rather than his approach to opsec? He flip-flops between extreme attraction to spectacle to extreme avoidance of it, then learns to value something material at the end. I dunno I'll have to rewatch. In any case, Bob loosening up on it wouldn't be feasible if some of the key villains were still alive and searching for him.

To try to more directly respond to what you're saying, I mostly agree with how you characterize Bob, but see these conflicts and developments more as descriptive results of his circumstances and motivations, rather than a prescriptive critique of his outlook and choices. None of his choices make a large impact on the plot, he's just a human trying to navigate and survive in a world he doesn't understand.

Of course since PTA isn't an ML revolutionary, we can't and shouldn't try to actually learn correct tactics directly from the movie lol. And I don't think we're meant to. The worldbuilding and characterization of both reactionary and revolutionary people/forces just happens to be nuanced enough to provide ample ground to draw comparisons to various aspects of real-life struggles. More than most movies with quasi anticapitalist aspects at least, like Mayhem or El Hoyo. And the fact that every single revolutionary is portrayed as good (even if flawed) and every single oppressor is betrayed as evil (even if banal/nice/incompetent/ridiculous) puts it above 99% of movies for me.

Maybe kind of that trope of an unideological auteur accidentally creating agitprop just by writing realistic or well-rounded characters navigating a complex world lol.