Fans of Thomas Pynchon are the kind of people who thrill at plot detours involving a giant adenoid about to swallow London. They can recite his famously bonkers character names, like Roger Mexico, Mike Fallopian and Scarsdale Vibe. They have read the 1,085-page “Against the Day” — twice.
Right now, they’re in heaven.
The famously reclusive author’s first piece of writing in 12 years arrives next week. His ninth novel, “Shadow Ticket,” seems to have all the hallmarks of Pynchon’s most beloved works: a zany plot, ridiculous puns, shady political organizations, many absurd proper nouns.
All of those Pynchonian elements can be found, too, in “One Battle After Another,” filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson’s loose adaptation of Pynchon’s “Vineland” starring Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s being talked about as one of the finest movies of the year, and it is bringing Pynchon’s writing to unsuspecting new audiences.
It’s also a surprising choice for Anderson, even though he already made one close adaptation of a Pynchon book — the trippy detective yarn “Inherent Vice” — in 2014. “Vineland” was divisive upon its 1990 release, in part because of the 17-year wait that came after his National Book Award-winning “Gravity’s Rainbow,” a postmodern masterpiece about World War II, V-2 rockets and, yes, a giant adenoid threatening to devour London (briefly, kind of). With “Vineland,” he offered a lovable, shaggy work that followed former 1960s revolutionaries during the Reagan-era war on drugs, with a plot that managed to contain a separatist republic, screeds about television and a Godzilla-like force of destruction. It does not scream “easy to adapt.”
For academics who’ve spent their lives studying Pynchon, a blockbuster comedy-thriller adapted from “Vineland” that cost at least $130 million to make is nearly unthinkable. Even stranger is the hype around it, talk of Anderson’s potential first Oscar and a loving reception from mainstream moviegoers, with an A rating from the audiences polled by CinemaScore.
But Anderson, who built up some goodwill among Pynchon fans (self-described “Pynheads”) with that faithful take on “Inherent Vice,” has taken the basic plot of the Pynchon novel and left behind what he didn’t need. Joanna Freer, a lecturer at the University of Exeter, sees “One Battle After Another” as a fascinating modification where some of Pynchon’s spirit still punches through.
“Especially with this film, Anderson seems to be pulled toward wanting to be commercially successful, while at the same time pulled toward trying to adapt somebody whose writing is almost the most anti-commercial writing you could possibly have,” Freer said. “Somehow, in ‘One Battle After Another,’ he’s pulled off a spectacular merger of those two aims.”
Not long after “One Battle After Another” begins, it’s clear that it diverges from “Vineland” just as much as it retains some particulars. Sure, Anderson’s adaptation includes Pynchon references all over (including a few nods to “Gravity’s Rainbow”), but most importantly, the film keeps the novel’s basic setup.
Spoilers below, Pynheads.
We first meet left-wing activists Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) while they work for a radical organization, fall in love and have a baby, Willa (Chase Infiniti). The couple is chased by Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who develops an obsession and then a physical relationship with Perfidia. After a run-in with the law, Perfidia rats out her comrades and enters into witness protection without Bob or Willa. Years later, Willa is in high school and Lockjaw comes back for her because he believes he is her father.
The political context that underlies these events is quite different. In the 1984-set “Vineland,” the feds return to the novel’s titular California town as part of the repression of the war on drugs. “One Battle After Another” shifts the action into the 21st century, where Lockjaw runs a detention center for immigrants and his return to find Willa comes under the guise of a roundup in a sanctuary city. And while Bob’s counterpart in the novel is framed for growing marijuana by a government that wants to come after him, the Bob here is just a stoner with memory problems.
“The fact that Bob uses a vape pen throughout instead of rolling joints … signifies the legalization of marijuana and how that’s no longer the point of entry of a villainous, racist political repression into the lives of ordinary people. Today, it’s immigration,” said Michael Mark Cohen, professor of American studies at the University of California at Berkeley. “And so it gives way from DEA to ICE as the enemy.”
But Anderson’s adaptation also zooms in to stuff as minuscule as character names. Pynchon has always been known for his hilarious monikers — Steven Lockjaw’s analogous character in the novel is Brock Vond — but Sascha Pöhlmann, professor at Technical University Dortmund and the co-host of next year’s International Pynchon Week, thinks Anderson located the right balance for his revitalized characters. “Lockjaw is actually a better name in a way. It’s just as Pynchonian,” Pöhlmann said. “It’s not a parody, it’s also not just imitation, but it just makes sense in its own right.”
Anderson’s film takes further steps to update Lockjaw’s character, showing us his initiation into a white supremacist organization called the Christmas Adventurers Club. Lockjaw was involved once in an interracial relationship with Perfidia — a major problem for an organization that is dedicated to “racial purification.” To make sure he doesn’t have any difficulty in joining the Christmas Adventurers Club, Lockjaw decides to chase Willa down and have her killed.
Lockjaw’s murder plot springs much of “One Battle After Another” into action, but it also runs in contradiction to the emotional crux of the movie: the tender, parental relationship between Bob and Willa. Even if Lockjaw actually is Willa’s biological father, as the movie suggests, Bob is her dad.
“It’s clearly saying that genetics don’t really matter,” Freer said. “It’s about the relationship, and that’s what fatherhood is. Probably something like that, that kind of updating would have been done in conversation with Pynchon. I wouldn’t be surprised if Pynchon wanted to see these kinds of changes to his own work coming through in the film.”
Whispers around Anderson adapting “Vineland” began to spread just after he burst onto the scene with “Boogie Nights” and “Magnolia” in the late 1990s. With the kaleidoscopic structure and endless characters of “Vineland,” a close translation was a challenge. “[T]he problem with loving a book so much when you go to adapt it is that you have to be much rougher on the book to adapt it,” Anderson told Steven Spielberg at a recent screening. “You have to kind of not be gentle. So I struggled for years to try to adapt it.”
Anderson said in the film’s production notes that he received Pynchon’s blessing, although it’s unclear ultimately just how involved the novelist was. But “One Battle After Another” remains a thrilling adjustment for Pynchon scholars and fans, a modernization that maintains the verve, politics and humor of the original book.
“In this age of general political venality, to have Pynchon’s voice rising to the surface to me is so exciting,” Cohen said. “I’ve been waiting my whole life for this.”
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