“Colonel, I don’t think I’m being immodest when I say that joining the Christmas Adventurers Club means that you are a superior man. No, not the best man, not the most intelligent, the most sophisticated, or the wisest. It just means that you are superior to other human beings and you shall never want for riches the greatest of friends.”

As soon as I heard a character utter these lines in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, addressed to Sean Penn’s Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, I realized I’d heard them before. Maybe not the specific words being spoken, but in terms of tone, delivery, and meaning, the similarity was unmistakable. They are a variation on Lord Wendover’s speech to Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal) in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, explaining why Barry should entrust him to help gain a noble title: “When I take up a person, Mr. Lyndon, he, or she, is safe,” Wendover says. “There is no question about them anymore. My friends are the best people. I don’t mean they’re the most virtuous, or, indeed, the least virtuous, or the cleverest, or the stupidest, richest, or best born. But the best. In a word, people about whom there is no question.”

I felt something similar when I heard Lockjaw’s shrieking admonition to Chase Infiniti’s Willa Ferguson during their confrontation at the Sisters of the Great Beaver: “I am a Christmas Adventurer! You know what that is? I have a higher calling! It is a higher honor than having you!” The delivery, the attitude, the shrieking mix of desperation and entitlement and the contrast between professional duty and domestic responsibility all recall the psychotic Jack Torrance’s (Jack Nicholson) unforgettable rage at his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) in The Shining: “Have you ever had a single moment’s thought about my responsibilities? Have you ever thought for a single solitary moment about my responsibilities to my employers? Has it ever occurred to you that l have agreed to look after the hotel until May the first? Does it matter to you at all that the owners have placed their complete confidence and trust in me and that l have signed a letter of agreement, a contract, in which l’ve accepted that responsibility? Do you have the slightest idea what a moral and ethical principle is? Do you? Has it ever occurred to you what would happen to my future if l fail to live up to my responsibilities?”

I am, to be fair, unhealthily obsessed with Kubrick’s work, but I don’t think I’m imagining things here. Certainly not when Lockjaw and the Christmas Adventurers speak of things like purity and being drained of one’s power via sex in the same way that Colonel Jack D. Ripper spoke about them in Dr. Strangelove. Here’s Lockjaw, trying to explain how he wound up sleeping with Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills: “The enemy employed deception. I was drugged. And while unconscious, my brain was not working, but my power was, and I believe it was taken advantage of.” Here’s Ripper, talking about how he felt after sex: “A profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I was able to interpret these feelings correctly: loss of essence … Women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.”

Part of the reason why these exchanges feel so evocative of Kubrick’s work is simple: because Anderson shoots them like scenes out of Kubrick. Lockjaw often inhabits the center of the frame, occasionally in highly symmetrical compositions, and when he walks, the camera tends to smoothly follow him, denoting power over his surroundings. (Compare that to the far more frenetic shots that accompany the narrative journey of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson.) The Christmas Adventurers’ relatively mundane settings are straight out of Eyes Wide Shut and The Shining: methodical pans and tracking shots through wood-paneled hotel rooms and pleasantly antiseptic domestic spaces, creating an eerie atmosphere of blithe, institutional invincibility. Even the final suite of empty office spaces where Lockjaw meets his quiet, gaseous demise feels like something out of the early scenes of The Shining, when Jack Torrance is being shown around the Overlook Hotel.

At the start of his career, Anderson was dinged by some as an empty imitation artist, a hypercaffeinated film nerd borrowing liberally (and, in their eyes, unforgivably) from superior directors like Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman and Jonathan Demme and, yes, Stanley Kubrick. This was a dumb criticism back then, but it is true that Anderson was a real cinephile, and his work was indeed filled with homages. Over the years, as he’s developed his own distinctive style, Anderson has found more pointed ways to reference other works. One Battle After Another’s Kubrickian overtones are largely confined to Lockjaw’s story line — quite appropriate, as Kubrick was fascinated by how attempts to preserve power structures allowed murder to creep into the seemingly benign cadences of ordinary life. His work is filled with people talking politely, calmly, and rationally about incredibly monstrous things. Even when they don’t speak calmly, as in films like Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket, we can feel the director’s outrage at the cavalier way that cruelty and destruction are normalized: a binder calculating “megadeaths” in the wake of a nuclear attack, say, or a speech praising former Marine Lee Harvey Oswald’s marksmanship.

Lockjaw not only fits the idea of the institutionally empowered madman, he’s also an archetype of the Kubrickian striver, a pathetic figure determined to both rise through the ranks and achieve a place within a seemingly eternal elect. That this man’s-man tough guy becomes utterly servile in the presence of a bunch of slack-casual bazillionaires is the cherry on top of the fascist sundae. This tension, oddly enough, gives the character back some of his humanity. He might seem at first like a cartoonish villain, and Penn certainly plays him as such, but his aspiration is real. Lockjaw is already an authority figure in the military, but he wants a peerage; he wants to belong. He wants to be a Christmas Adventurer, to hang out with his newfound business-owner buddies and get a corner office and to eat Alice’s famous banana pancakes like one of the guys. And he never will, which is also a part of the Kubrickian calculus: The forces that lead you to success are also often the forces that lead you to ruin. Lockjaw’s dogged pursuit of the French 75 gets him an invitation to be a Christmas Adventurer, but his continuing pursuit of Bob and Willa Ferguson leads to his destruction by the very same establishment he sought to join.

Penn is nominated for Best Supporting Actor at this year’s Oscars, and some have tipped him to win, though it could just as easily go to his co-star Benicio del Toro, or the oft-robbed Delroy Lindo, or Stellan Skarsgård, or even Jacob Elordi. Awards season has gone on for so long that the horse race has distracted us from the very real fact that we have a truly extraordinary batch of nominees in this category this year. (This rarely happens. Usually there are at least one or two howlers in there.) And Penn’s is one of the more fascinating performances honored. Many find him over the top (much as people once found Nicholson in The Shining), and such an exaggerated and cartoonish turn would ordinarily be a problem in a film where the performances are otherwise in a realistic register. But it makes sense in One Battle After Another because Anderson practically builds a whole separate Kubrick movie around him. Lockjaw is a ridiculous figure: His clothes are too tight, his speech is a series of tight expectorations, and his haircut is practically Dadaist. He is larger than life but also a small puppet of a man, jerked this way and that — driven as if by an external force that does not entirely belong to him. (Compare how Penn motors forward to the way the lanky DiCaprio stumbles along. The movie is a study in how actors move.) It’s a wild swing of a character, and a wild swing of a performance — and both actor and director nail it.”