Perfidia’s Precedents

“Traitor, Monster, cold and perfidious Slave; 
A Slave, not daring to be free!”
— William Congreve, 
The Mourning Bride (1697)

Her name says it all. Perfidia Beverly Hills. First name, “Perfidia,” a Latin word to describe “faithlessness, falsehood, [and] treachery.” Surname, “Beverly Hills,” a nod to an American city known for its affluence, glamour, and exclusivity (including a history of covenants and clauses that barred Black, Jewish, and other people from owning or renting in the area). With a stage name fit for the drama of revolution, the young Black militant of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2025 action thriller One Battle After Another, played by Teyana Taylor, is impossible to forget. As a member of the French 75 — a fictional far-left revolutionary group that frees detainees in U.S. detention centers — Perfidia is introduced as a militant activist, one born to a family of revolutionaries. Her lover, Pat, is a fellow French 75 member. The fallout from their revolutionary love is sparked by Perfidia herself; her name serves as a forecast of the storm to come. 

The darkening skies are signaled by Perfidia’s desire. During a raid, Perfidia begs Pat to “fuck when the bomb goes off.” While freeing detainees, Perfidia stops to sexually humiliate a lone military officer for no apparent reason. Later, when this same officer discovers her attempt to plant a bomb, he gives her two “choices”: have sex with him or go to prison. Perfidia “chooses” the former. Shortly after this unsettling encounter, Perfidia becomes pregnant. Thankfully, this does not lead to an infidelity plot; rather, tragically, Perfidia abandons her child and Pat in the name of returning to the work of revolution. And in due time, it is revealed that she has made a deal with the Feds to provide intelligence about the French 75. In breach of the presumed social contracts of maternal obligation and revolutionary integrity, Perfidia’s traitorous actions defy audiences’ liberal expectations for Black women to save us. Perfidia is not a Black woman to trust. The choices she makes are necessarily constrained. Hemmed in by state violence and maternal responsibility, Perfidia retreats. In flight, Perfidia proves that even the flashiest performances of fugitivity cannot be mistaken for freedom. 

The film has received critical acclaim and 13 nominations for Sunday’s 98th Academy Awards. Taylor has earned her first Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. On the heels of her critically acclaimed lead performance as Inez de la Paz in A Thousand and One (2023), playing once more a young Black mother, Taylor lends to Perfidia her singular physicality, dynamism, and depth. Whereas her previous character, the formerly incarcerated Inez, is fighting to reclaim her child from foster care, Perfidia doesn’t battle for her child so much as she fights to return to the pursuit of freedom that preceded her birth. In interviews about the film, Taylor has suggested that Perfidia suffered from postpartum depression and advocated for a sequel that centers on the character, telling Indiewire: “We need to see what Perfidia did in those 16 years.” 

Taylor’s interest in the character is certainly deeper than Anderson’s. The director manages to introduce a wildly charismatic and challenging character without summoning much curiosity about her inner life, or about the meaning of traitorous acts by a Black woman engaged in revolutionary politics. Perfidia has raised the brow of many critics versed in the history and politics of race, gender, and media representation. Perfidia resonates with the history of “controlling images” of Black women, particularly those that marshal hypersexuality as an alibi for subjecting Black women to sexual violence. In her brilliant review of the film, “No Rape Involved: Racial Fantasies and State Violence in One Battle After Another,” Fania Noël writes that what the “Jezebel trope ensures is that Perfidia could not herself be innocent, or a victim of sexual harm.” Perfidia’s posturing of sexual and gendered power — her performance as “the most stunning subversive to flaunt an automatic weapon while heavily pregnant,” and her abandonment of her maternal and revolutionary post — ultimately excuse the sacrifice of the film’s brazen and boisterous queen, so that its king, a washed-up white militant who adopts the nickname “Ghetto Pat,” can dominate the board.

Here, we might, for a moment, reassess the game laid out by Anderson and make sense of Perfidia alongside other Black women, fictional and historical, who have negotiated revolution and betrayal. By placing Perfidia alongside representations of Black women’s roles in revolutionary activity in the Americas, we can see how she might be more interesting than Anderson’s limited imagination allows.

Precedent 001

Perfidia is singular but she is not unprecedented in modern representations of Black revolutionary women. In Gender, Race, and Nationalism in Contemporary Black Politics, Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd writes about the “black woman as traitor,” a trope she traces in Black Power-era rhetoric and art, wherein Black women are cast as “a threat from within” Black revolutionary struggle. Coining the term, “Black Malinche,” Alexander-Floyd suggests that this trope of the traitorous Black woman is “similar to the much maligned and appropriated figure of Latina/o culture, Malinche. A key figure in Mexican history and mythology, Malinche (aka Malintzin) is a woman who served as a native interpreter for the Spanish conqueror Cortés, and, thus, was seen as facilitating the Spanish colonization of her own people.” In her words, “ Like Malinche, the Black woman as traitor is presented as the ever available and convenient entry point through which those with misplaced motives can pierce the veil of racial community, solidarity, and stability.” In the case of Perfidia, who bears the name of the famous 1939 bolero written by Mexican composer Alberto Domínguez, and is last seen in the film escaping to Mexico, there is additional purchase. 

Precedent 002 

The closest thing to Perfidia on the page is another fictional Black woman radical, Meridian Hill — the titular character of Alice Walker’s 1976 novel Meridian. Her name is Latin too, from the word meridianum, used to denote the point of midday when the sun crosses the meridian. Caught in the midday of her own political becoming in the civil rights era, Meridian struggles openly with navigating the social contracts of romantic relationships, motherhood, and revolutionary organizing as a young Black woman for whom militancy is intuitive. Like Perfidia, Meridian is caught in an interracial “love” triangle. Unlike Perfidia, Meridian is not caught between two white men but rather is left by her Black lover for a white activist and remains in their orbit. The two characters enjoy their greatest resonance around motherhood and community. Over the course of the novel, two pregnancies signal the development of Meridian’s political consciousness. The first pregnancy occurs during high school; intent on pursuing college, she opts to give her son up for adoption. She terminates her second pregnancy, from her college romance with a fellow activist. As the novel unfolds, Meridian comes to think of motherhood as “what slavery is like,” becoming “disgusted with the fecundity of her body.” The novel is filled with examples of how the unbounded caretaking responsibilities of maternity become a kind of solitary confinement. 

 By the end of the novel, however, Meridian’s political investments in the Black community inspire her to develop a different relationship with Black children. In this way, Meridian’s political vision crosses over into its greatest depth when she concludes her “sentence of bearing the conflict” caused by societal imposition. Once she has effectively secured a life without motherhood, Meridian returns to community politics on her own terms, fighting for children as an activist. When Black children are drowning in a local drainage ditch due to government neglect, Meridian, in protest, brings the corpse of a Black child to a town meeting. 

Perfidia, on the other hand, a Black radical woman whose life as a counterinsurgent and fugitive has forced her into exile from nation and community, cannot reemerge in service of anyone, let alone her own child. Still, Anderson attempts to initiate the suturing of her maternal breach rather than let it be. For Perfidia, there is no return to social life; there is a letter she sent to a daughter, Willa, who doesn’t know her own birth name (“Charlene”). We don’t even know Perfidia’s. 

Precedent 003

“It is particularly hard to watch One Battle After Another […] following the death of fugitive Black liberation activist, Assata Shakur,” wrote Ellen E. Jones in her 2025 review for The Guardian. Shakur, a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, was captured and convicted by the state of New Jersey for the first-degree murder of a state trooper in 1977, and sentenced to life in prison. Shakur maintained that she could not have killed the officer due to an injury she sustained in the shootout. While incarcerated, Shakur gave birth to her daughter, conceived during her trial. In 1979, Shakur was broken out by her comrades and subsequently granted political asylum in Cuba, where she arrived around 1984, after being reportedly smuggled through Mexico. The similarities between Assata and Perfidia are striking, but on the issue of betrayal, the two could not be more different. Shakur infamously asserted that “the greatest betrayal that a revolutionary can participate in is to become like the people you are struggling against. To become like your persecutors.” It is unlikely then that Shakur would’ve looked favorably upon Perfidia’s participation in counter-revolutionary activities or even her refusal to “rejoice” upon the birth of her child. In the wake of Shakur’s passing, Perfidia appears hollow. Stripped of revolutionary character, Perfidia emerges as a kind of grotesque or even half-baked foil. A sister to none. 

Perhaps it is fitting that the most expressive critics of Perfidia in the film are a group of Black revolutionary nuns operating out of a convent in California. Sisters in a safe house. The nuns embody a complex calculus of judgment: they opt to protect Willa when she is being hunted by the aforementioned military officer, yet they clearly resent this duty, disparaging her “rat” origins and openly questioning their decision to harbor a traitor’s child. And soon enough, the girl’s presence jeopardizes their entire operation. We do not see what becomes of these women when they are captured in the officer’s pursuit of Willa. But we know that their disapproval of Perfidia and her child made them no less vulnerable to the violence arrayed against them all. 

Precedent 004 

Perfidia is a Black woman who pursues revolutionary action while haunted by the scripts that precede her. She attempts time and time again to break free in a mystifying series of dramatic betrayals, which only ensnare her further. Would a sequel, like the one Taylor calls for, reveal her coordinates and inner conflicts? What would it mean to reveal Perfidia’s secrets? Where to begin? Where to stop? Will Perfidia continue to follow Assata’s fugitive flight plans and head to Cuba? What asylum exists for a Black revolutionary who betrayed her cause and comrades? Perfidia and the ghosts of revolution remain on the move. 

Afro-Cuban artist Belkis Ayon’s stirring 1998 collagraph Perfidia is one of a larger series of works about the lore of Abakuá, a “secret, all-male Afro-Cuban society,” and Sikán, the mythic feminized traitor who exposes their secrets. In Abakuá lore, Sikán is a singular figure. She is “the only woman in Abakuá lore,” and she is a convicted betrayer of the oath-based initiation that secures the fraternal order. A princess who is put to death for “revealing the religion’s secrets to her fiancée,” Sikán is confined to an infidelity plot which is concerned not with matters of sexual or marital fidelity, but rather with the threat she poses to the precarious security of patriarchal order. Her very presence is a breach which gives way to more violations. With Perfidia, Ayon reconstructs the drama of Sikán’s betrayal using the collagraph technique, a printmaking method whose materials and processes mirror the complexity of Ayon’s retelling. In black, white, and shades of grey, Perfidia exposes the secret and unsettling nature of betrayal: that power often determines the terms of transgression and grievance, that breaches give contracts their meaning. If only Anderson’s Perfidia had been afforded so much texture. —Jordan Taliha McDonald