The Wild Political Story That Inspired 'One Battle After Another'

time.com

The novels of Thomas Pynchon—which include towering canonical works such as Gravity’s Rainbow and V.—are challenging. They’re also brilliant: intoxicating, hilarious, maddening, and vulgar, aggressively lampooning the fascist-capitalist sweep of history and rich (sometimes overwhelmingly so) with cultural references. These challenges are key to his appeal among devotees, including Paul Thomas Anderson, the beloved director whose latest project, One Battle After Another, is a loose adaptation of Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland. The film marks his second time grappling with the postmodern author’s ideas on screen, following 2014’s Inherent Vice, a rueful elegy to California counterculture, which was itself the first, and to date only, official adaptation of Pynchon in cinema.

Nearly 20 years before Inherent Vice was published in 2009, Pynchon mourned the death of the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s with Vineland, an expansive postmodern work that toggles between intricately detailed conspiracies and satire of radical politics and sudden, striking emotional clarity (a tonal shift that’s key to Pynchon’s style). The novel looks backward at a moment in American history when political and cultural upheaval had swallowed whole a generation’s homegrown sense of hope.

When Vineland was published, reviewers received it as “Pynchon Lite” or, in other words, his most accessible novel—which says a lot about how challenging Gravity’s Rainbow and V. were for readers. Vineland begins with the strained relationship between a single dad and his precocious teenage daughter in northern California, before exploding into an exhaustive nonlinear history of a fictional ‘60s revolutionary group, its unique members, their collapse due to federal interference, and the long years of weary exile that culminate in a reunion for enemies and ex-lovers. The novel observes that, while the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s was sabotaged by political forces, the omnipresence of mass culture, television, and passive consumption in the Reagan era would also factor heavily into the struggle of subversive political movements to endure.

It’s unclear whether any Pynchon novel would benefit from becoming IMAX spectacle, but in staging his highest-budgeted film so far, Anderson has refashioned Vineland’s key themes into a straightforward but singular and exhilarating romp. Driven by the essential cinematic momentum of escape and pursuit, the movie follows a flailing and failing father’s quest to save his daughter as a way to establish his credentials as a loving father in the here-and-now rather than a broken relic of a thwarted revolution.

We meet Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio), formerly known as “Ghetto Pat,” the one-time munitions expert of the Los Angeles-based revolutionary group “the French 75.” Far from his revolutionary heyday, both geographically and intellectually, he now lives in a shabby domicile among California redwoods with his 16-year-old daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti), whose coming-of-age has been hampered by her father’s useless stoner paranoia and empty fetishism for his unrealized revolution. She never knew her mother Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), who led the French 75 until she crossed paths with Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). The colonel fostered an intense sexual obsession with Perfidia, and after sleeping with the enemy, he forcibly dismantled Perfidia’s group, chasing many (like Bob and Willa) into hiding and executing others point-blank. In exchange for insider intel, Perfidia was offered witness protection, but fled for Mexico and hasn’t reared her head since. In the present day, Lockjaw reenters Bob and Willa’s lives with merciless force, deploying troops from his immigration taskforce on Baktan Cross, the sanctuary city where Bob and Willa have been laying low in the 16 years since Pat became Bob and baby Charlene, Willa, as the two went on the lam.

This charged and fraught four-way character dynamic resembles what’s at the center of Vineland. Names and backstories are different, but in Pynchon’s text, stoner pianist Zoyd Wheeler is taking odd jobs and government disability checks obtained by staging regular psychotic episodes, when federal agent Brock Vond drives him and his 14-year-old daughter Prairie from their home. Prairie’s mother, Ferensi Gates, had had a long affair with the psychopathic Vond, who used Ferensi as a double agent to bring about a revolutionary-on-revolutionary assassination, destroying a freshly seceded hippie nation (named the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll).

Ferensi was part of a film collective called 24fps whose members amassed reels and reels of evidence against governmental abuses of power. These films are how Prairie eventually learns about her mother—she meets DL, a ninja and formerly Ferensi’s closest friend, who takes Prairie under her wing and brings her to another 24fps ally to unravel the events leading up to Ferensi’s current extended stint in Vond-arranged witness protection.

The basic relations between the four characters are clear: a hapless, stoner single dad trying to protect his daughter; a compromised female revolutionary whose erotic attraction to power jeopardizes the cause; a maniacal agent of United States fascism driven by a vindictive, psychosexual insecurity; and the teenage girl resisting the narrative of her life fed to her suddenly in the throes of danger. But unlike the flashback- and sidestory-heavy structure of Vineland, Anderson favors pure linear momentum—the first act is a pacy recap of the French 75’s activities and downfall before we jump 16 years into the future and Lockjaw reignites his demented need for control. After that, One Battle After Another is all chase (and a lot of Chase).

Anderson carries over some highly specific character details—including that Perfidia/Frenesi suffers from postpartum depression that drives her away from her husband and daughter, that her mother Jennie (Starletta DuPois)/Sasha describes Bob/Zoyd as entirely “inappropriate” for her daughter, and a throwaway reference to Bob’s former bandmates, which is Zoyd’s primary source of employment in Vineland.

But Bob is not a one-to-one translation of Zoyd. Pynchon’s character was never a revolutionary, only meeting Frenesi after she betrayed her comrades (a more active choice than Perfidia makes in One Battle After Another) when she decided to lie low in Northern California—he isn’t even mentioned for about 200 pages, appearing only for the opening and closing acts.

What’s more, Anderson’s supporting characters have less in common with their counterparts on the page. Standing in for Vineland’s DL Chastain, Deandra (Regina Hall) is a French 75 member who comes out of hiding to protect Willa, but she shares none of the “ninja assassin for a bigwig Hollywood producer” characteristics of DL in Vineland. Invented for the film is Sergio (Benicio Del Toro), Willa’s karate teacher, who is the protector of undocumented migrants in Baktan Cross seeking protection from fascistic immigration forces, one of which is led by Lockjaw.

Penn plays Lockjaw as a tense, lumbering maniac with more than a few similarities to RFK Jr. While he appears like one giant swollen nerve, Vineland’s Brock Vond feels more mercurial, attractive, and altogether dangerous. The weed-growing convent “Sisters of the Brave Beaver” where Deandra takes Willa has only a passing resemblance to the “Sisterhood of Kunoichi” mission of female ninjas in Vineland—although the leader of both convents is called “Sister Rochelle,” the only name used by both Pynchon and Anderson.

Most of the female characters in One Battle After Another are Black, and while the film features far fewer faces than Pynchon’s sprawling, expansive book, Anderson has intentionally altered the races of the characters based on Frenesi, Prairie, and DL for his film. This change doesn’t just nod to the history of Black radicals in the U.S. but invites a personal reading for Anderson’s fool protagonist, who is anxious about his confused parenting of a biracial daughter. Race is one of many concerns in Vineland, but One Battle After Another sets itself apart as a studio film with vividly, absurdly ugly racist villains, arguing satirically but unflinchingly that white supremacy continues to be the guiding principle for American power.

Apart from their contrasting structural approaches and character backstories, the biggest difference between text and film is setting. Vineland is overflowing with period detail, often ludicrous and sometimes satirically invented, rooted in the history of radicals being expunged by the Nixonian establishment, leading to the inevitable, reductive confines of Reagan’s “War on Drugs” project. But the immediacy of One Battle After Another—with its ICE-like detention camps, unlawful militias storming American streets, and elites who promote white supremacy in closed-door meetings—was intended to embellish the spirit of Vineland rather than undermine it.

“For twenty years I’ve had all these various strands, and in a way, none of them ever went out of style, because whatever seems to be happening politically seems to always be the same,” Anderson explained in the Esquire interview. “Same sh-t, different year.”

Far from a faithful rendering of Pynchon’s text, One Battle After Another identifies the most cinematic and emotional veins of Vineland’s network of narrative and, true to Anderson’s word, runs like a thief. There is another unmissable link between book and film: empathy, for anybody robbed of agency or power, even though they may stumble as they try to make the world a better place.