One Battle After Another’ and ‘Vineland’— What Paul Thomas Anderson Used and Cut Out of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel

According To The variety This article contains spoilers for “One Battle After Another,” now in theaters. Ever since “One Battle After Another” entered development, rumors percolated that Paul Thomas Anderson‘s new film would be based on Thomas Pynchon‘s 1990 novel “Vineland.” The director, who is a fan of the post-modern author and previously adapted his 2009 novel “Inherent Vice” with the 2014 film of the same name, has long expressed interest in making a “Vineland” film. The Film Stage reports that during a Q&A after an early “One Battle After Another” screening, Anderson confirmed, “I struggled for years to try to adapt it.” Conceptualizing “One Battle After Another” as a proper “Vineland” adaptation waxed and waned over time as details about the film emerged. Now that the film is out, those bold enough to read Pynchon’s maddeningly complex work can finally provide a diagnosis. Notably, “One Battle After Another”‘s credits do explicitly read, “Inspired by the novel ‘Vineland’ by Thomas Pynchon.” While that seems definitive, “inspired” is truly the apt word. As Anderson noted in the same Q&A, “I loved that book. I loved it, and I loved it so much that I thought about adapting him. But the 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. You have to kind of not be gentle.” Accordingly, the film retains certain elements of the novel, but omits or changes others. The Characters The film’s main retention is the characters. Though their names are changed, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson is a clear ringer for “Vineland” protagonist Zoyd Wheeler: an ex-revolutionary living out retirement in northern California. The film also includes Bob’s reluctant daughter Willa Ferguson (Chase Infiniti), who parallels Zoyd’s daughter Prairie Wheeler; Willa’s estranged mother and ex-revolution leader, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), who stands in for the book’s Frenesi Gates; and antagonist Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who mimics the book’s federal prosecutor Brock Vond. Other characters also have their parallels, but these are the most identifiable throughout. These principal movie characters share similar dynamics as those in the book. Bob and Zoyd are both paranoid in the wake of their rebellious pasts. Respectively, they miss Perfidia and Frenesi deeply, and fear for Willa and Prairie. Willa and Prarie, meanwhile, are both skeptical of their fathers’ fears, but come to understand them as his past reemerges. The film and the book also both establish love triangles between Bob, Perfidia and Lockjaw and Zoyd, Frenesi and Vond, respectively. However, Frenesi and Vond’s romance is far more sincere in “Vineland” than Perfidia and Lockjaw’s is in “One Battle After Another.” This brings us to the differences between the characters, which point to pivotal schisms between Anderson and Pynchon as storytellers. As is the case in most of Pynchon’s novels, “Vineland’s” characters are rather archetypal. The denizens of Pynchon’s worlds often serve to personify and expose a nuanced message about society or humanity. We don’t easily identify with them, but instead, see our ideas and ideologies questioned and reflected through them. Anderson, by contrast, gives great depth to his characters. Bob, Perfidia, Willa, Lockjaw and everyone in between showcase identifiable emotions and growth throughout the film. A portion of this dichotomy may be due to the translation from book-to-screen, as it’s easier to process the emotions and reactions of actors on a screen than of names in text. Nevertheless, Pynchon’s characters are more like the mysterious figments of an avant-garde film; they rarely feel like actual people. The Plot These avant-garde, post-modern elements of “Vineland” may be what distinguishes it most from “One Battle After Another.” While the plots are similar— an ex-revolutionary is forced back into action after his daughter is kidnapped by a former nemesis— the film lands as a much more straightforward action movie, following relatively conventional story beats. “One Battle After Another” is a rescue narrative. We follow Bob trying to save Willa, as Willa learns about her parents’ history. “Vineland” has the same premise, but once Prairie is taken away, Zoyd practically disappears from the story. What would linearly be considered the second act of “Vineland” is mostly made up of flashbacks, where Prairie learns who her mother was, what her revolution stood for and how she developed her contentious relationship with Vond. Then, when Zoyd eventually returns, there is hardly a proper resolution. While neither Zoyd nor Bob end up being their daughters’ true saviors, in the film, Willa at least fights her way out and reunites with Bob as a changed person. By comparison, “Vineland” ends ambivalently. In the final pages, as Vond is pursuing Prairie in a helicopter, the government suddenly cuts his funding. When Vond tries taking control of the vehicle to maintain the chase, he crashes, leaving Prairie free, yet stranded in the California wilderness. The serendipitous turn of events provides an ending, but hardly closure — it’s classic Pynchon. The Worlds “Vineland’s” conclusion is indicative of much of the novel. Like much of Pynchon’s work, “Vineland” takes place in a bizarre alternate reality, one where southern California seceded from the U.S. in the 1960s, where the revolutionaries were a film collective hellbent on exposing fascism on celluloid and where the federal government takes the War on Drugs quite literally. Taking place in 1984, the book is a satirical commentary on America’s shift from the ’60s to the ’80s. It reflects the failure of the hippie revolution to inspire change and that same generation’s regression into Reagan-era conservatism. Zoyd is an archetype for a 1960s hippie 20 years later, ideologically castrated and dependent on the government he fought against. Meanwhile, the rise of technology and television — both of which play major roles in the book — has institutionalized the cinematic means that the revolution once weaponized. “One Battle After Another,” by contrast, doesn’t lean quite as allegorical. While there is a 16-year chronological leap in the film’s first act, it doesn’t make a dichotomous statement about the two timelines’ respective decades. The movie’s settings are relatively interchangeable, both appearing contemporary, if not eerily set fifteen-minutes-in-the-future. Considering that the film was conceived several years ago, Anderson’s depictions of federal government raids, aggressive approaches to deportation and reckless law enforcement all feel unnervingly prescient for present-day America. The film’s chilling representation of American politics may be an unintentional departure from the novel’s more whimsical energy. Though “One Battle After Another” certainly has a sense of humor, its central conflict taken from “Vineland” feels less absurd today than it may have in 1990. Even the film’s eccentricities that do feel out of a Pynchon novel — notably Lockjaw’s desire to join a secret society of white supremacists called the Christmas Adventurers Club — read as plausible in the current political climate. Maybe, 35 years after “Vineland’s” publication, reality has caught up to post-modern fiction, and we are actually living in Thomas Pynchon’s world. That world is one that does not lend itself easily to cinematic adaptation. It’s a world that blends high and low culture, with profanity and poetry warped into one. It’s an encyclopedic world that readers were thrust into with his debut novel “V.” in 1963 and reached a zenith a decade later with the publication of “Gravity’s Rainbow.” It’s a world that continues expanding to this day, as the elusive 88-year old author is releasing his ninth novel, “Shadow Ticket,” later this year. Despite extreme density, nothing is explicated in Pynchon’s world, making it a hard narrative experience to emulate in a medium like film. While Anderson’s world can be post-modern and surreal, as showcased in films like “Magnolia,” “The Master” and, indeed, “Inherent Vice,” his filmography is tonally broad, with intense period pieces like “There Will Be Blood” and “Phantom Thread” standing alongside offbeat dramedies like “Punch Drunk Love” and “Licorice Pizza.” In “One Battle After Another,” Anderson takes select elements of Pynchon’s world — the characters, the premise and the broad themes — and grounds them. As he stated in press materials, “‘Vineland‘ was going to be hard to adapt. Instead, I stole the parts that really resonated with me and started putting all these ideas together.” The result is still thought-provoking, but a more palatable, contemporary and ultimately entertaining experience than the hefty, yet rewarding, labor of reading Pynchon.