One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025).
Thomas Pynchon’s books have on Paul Thomas Anderson the effect of Proustian madeleines. When asked about his fascination with the notoriously reclusive writer, the director defers to childhood memories. Speaking with Kent Jones during the press tour for his first Pynchon adaptation, Inherent Vice (2014), Anderson recalled reading the novel and luxuriating in its myriad references to the sounds and visuals of his early years in 1970s Southern California: the now-defunct Zody’s retail stores dotting the San Fernando Valley, the Police Squad! (1982) episodes beaming on ABC, Mike Curb crooning on the radio. To read Pynchon, for Anderson, is to rekindle impressions of his old stomping grounds and indulge a desire to return to them—among the chief concerns of his cinema and the source of its charms.
By 1970, when Anderson was born in Studio City, Pynchon had quit his gig writing safety articles for Boeing in Seattle and decamped to Los Angeles. He landed in a small apartment in Manhattan Beach, which would appear in his books as the fictional Gordita Beach, a last resort for bums, drifters, punks, and drop-outs determined to steer clear of the straight life. And though his novels have journeyed far and wide—from New York City (V., 1963; Bleeding Edge, 2013) to Chicago (Against the Day, 2006); from the American colonies (Mason & Dixon, 1997) to Europe, Namibia, and Siberia (Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973)—Pynchon has become closely identified with the countercultural hangover that swept through post-Manson California and serves as backdrop for the two texts Anderson would go on to adapt, Inherent Vice (2009) and now Vineland (1990). Novelist and filmmaker are unmistakably smitten with the textures of “sunny Southland,” to use a phrase popularized in the late 1800s by newspaper editor Harrison Gray Otis (who incidentally lifted it from the Confederacy). But they reserve their deepest feeling for its eccentric residents—drifters who straddle the old and the new, who have only just started to realize how the changing of the guard is leaving them behind, who have seen their turf transform to the point they can barely recognize it. Still, neither artist has ever simplistically romanticized that bygone milieu. Their characters fumble as they navigate a world rife with signs, secrets, and conspiracies, a California candied not with “identifiable cit[ies]” but with “grouping[s] of concepts,” where everyone and everything suggests “a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning,” per The Crying of Lot 49. That novel came out in April 1966, just a few months before Reagan was elected governor, promising to crack down on the “filthy speech movement” fueled by the student protests at Berkeley and to send “the welfare bums back to work.” The repression and censorship that would dominate Reagan-era California (and eventually all of the United States under his presidency) permeate Vineland and Inherent Vice, in which the actor-turned-politico serves as an omnipresent specter, a kind of daemon ex machina restoring fascism at home and abroad. A mood of chronic paranoia permeates Pynchon’s prose and Anderson’s cinema; what binds them isn’t just some autobiographical affair with Los Angeles but an interest in its sinister side: In the words of Inherent Vice’s Detective Lieutenant “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, “The dark forces that are always there just out of the sunlight.”
Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014).
Anderson’s devotion to Pynchon long predates his first adaptation of his work, Inherent Vice, in 2014. After an initial, abortive stab at Vineland in the early aughts, the director turned to the author’s debut novel, V., in which a discharged Navy sailor and hopeless schlemiel winds up hunting alligators in the sewers under Manhattan. Early versions of Anderson’s script for The Master (2012) reportedly sent Joaquin Phoenix looking for the reptiles, but those plans were scratched in preproduction. His first real crack at Pynchon, Inherent Vice, barely strays from the book, lifting lines of dialogue verbatim and conjuring a mood as rambling and freewheeling as its source text. That bagginess isn’t a bug so much as evidence of a writer and a director operating in a kind of symbiosis. Pynchon’s prose radiates an astonishing creative exuberance—his books often seem to be thinking themselves through as they go along—and Anderson is faithful to that energy. A neo-noir picaresque, Inherent Vice hangs in a marijuana haze, with Phoenix playing Larry “Doc” Sportello, a hippie-cum-detective living in Gordita Beach circa 1970. Much of the pleasure is watching Doc shoot the shit with fellow misfits—drug addicts, healers, gangsters, sex workers—and smoke his way through a film that’s less beholden to its intricate plot than to its fuzzy, psychedelic backdrop.
Still, neither film nor novel are ever treacly about that setting. Like many an Anderson joint, Inherent Vice begins at the end of an era. Laments to the idealism of the ’60s (that “little parenthesis of light,” per Pynchon) crop up throughout, as do references to the social unrest (the 1965 Watts riots, the Berkeley student protests) and the brutal Manson murders that symbolically brought it to a close. The United States is led by President Richard Nixon, California by Governor Ronald Reagan, and while the Los Angeles Police Department is still “vibrating with the post-Mansonical nerves,” strange conspiracies begin to flourish, none stranger than one concerning a mysterious schooner out in the South Bay that may or may not be linked to a heroin cartel, a dentist syndicate, and a neo-Nazi guerrilla. For Pynchon, Gordita Beach is itself a kind of wasteland choked by the stench of crude oil washed up its shores, so thick and omnipresent it sticks to one’s feet (for Doc, it was “like living on a houseboat anchored in a tar pit”). Anderson turns the detective’s seaside turf into something closer to a neon-doused fantasy—shot by Robert Elswit, Inherent Vice might well go down as one of the director’s most visually ravishing. But the film is just as concerned with what Pynchon sees as “the long, sad history of L.A. land use” and the ways that obscure networks of power and capital can make the city change, seemingly overnight. At the center of Pynchon’s novel—to the extent that a book so digressive could be said to have a center—is the abduction of one Mickey Wolfman, a wealthy real-estate developer behind an exclusive residential complex set to destroy a working-class neighborhood. Except Mickey has experienced something of a moral U-turn; “a rich guy on a guilt trip,” he had vowed to give all his cash away and build another housing complex where people can live for free before he disappeared without a trace. The LAPD, FBI, and a sordid cast of SoCal patricians are all after him: As the mystery deepens, gum-sandal Doc finds himself brushing shoulders with the city’s landed gentry. “We’ve been in place forever,” a plutocrat warns him. “Real estate, water rights, oil, cheap labor—all of that’s ours, it’s always been ours. And you, at the end of the day, what are you?”
Doc doesn’t answer, but in both book and film the PI shuffles across the Southland as some kind of relic—flotsam of its golden era floating back to sea. In a film that seldom strays from its source, one of the most significant departures is to leave out something Pynchon calls the ARPAnet, a network of computers connected by phone lines and capable of poaching files from data banks and archives across California. The ARPAnet is manned by Doc’s associates, but it doesn’t take long for him to see it as competition, and for Pynchon to warn against what it might portend (“Someday everybody’s gonna wake up to find they’re under surveillance they can’t escape”).
Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997).
Obsolescence haunts Anderson’s and Pynchon’s protagonists alike. While watching Doc shuffle through an ever-changing city, more than once my mind wandered to Burt Reynolds’s Jack Horner in Boogie Nights (1997). Anderson’s breakthrough second feature captures Hollywood’s adult film industry just as the warm, shot-on-celluloid porn that earned Jack his fame is being replaced by videotapes. Like Anderson—who’s shot all his works on film and employs anamorphic Panavision lenses to mimic the feel of his 1970s touchstones—Jack’s a man out of time; he wants to make a “real (adult) film,” dramatic arcs and all, at the very moment when the industry is abandoning his beloved format. Celluloid isn’t just a stylistic choice but corresponds to Jack’s entire worldview, and that connection—between a dying format and a character’s way of life—is part of the reason Anderson cannot be written off as a mere nostalgist. The true-to-themselves eccentrics populating his films do not simply yearn for some rose-tinted past but try to orient themselves as time and technology march inexorably forward; his cinema hinges on an imperfect synthesis between the old and the new. Having finally embraced the new mainstream, Jack smiles for a video camera while introducing his latest, reality-TV-adjacent idea for porn: “We’re going to make film history right here…on videotape.“
Pynchon’s body of work, like Anderson’s, has always been fueled by a clash between outcasts and elites, between corrupt cops and stray detectives, between rebellious drifters and the entrenched forces hellbent on yanking them back onto the beaten track. Even his latest novel, Shadow Ticket, a Depression-era caper following one Hicks McTaggart, a Milwaukee PI hired to locate the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese empire in early-1930s Europe, sees its lonesome protagonist repeatedly tempted to surrender to “the joys of suburban married life and middle-classiness,” or join the throngs of Nazi sympathizers Pynchon imagines festering all around Lake Michigan (“Der Führer is der future!”). Hicks doesn’t cave in, nor does Doc when the LAPD and FBI try to turn him into a snitch, and nor does Vineland’s Zoyd (Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in One Battle After Another) when asked to rat out his dope-fiend pals around Gordita.
There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007).
This arm wrestling with the establishment animates Anderson’s oeuvre. Daniel Plainview’s megalomania in There Will Be Blood (2007) isn’t all that different from Lancaster Dodd’s, the L. Ron Hubbard–type guru fighting to assert his doctrine in The Master—two Californian stories of reckless land acquisition and alternative belief systems that suggest the thematic affinities between Pynchon and Anderson stretch well beyond the two out-and-out adaptations. It’s no spoiler to say that these bids seldom end well, that the closer characters get to fulfilling their dreams of status and recognition, the emptier their lives become. From Plainview screaming in abject horror “I have abandoned my child!” to Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) reckoning with the same epiphany in One Battle, Anderson’s cinema teems with spiritually broken wanderers negotiating the price of their ambitions.
The powers that be are the only immutable fixture in Anderson’s cosmogony. Like Vineland’s omnipotent federal prosecutor, Brock Vond, they’ve understood popular demands for change “not as threats to order but unacknowledged desire for it.” Halfway through Inherent Vice, Doc realizes that the drug-trafficking ring ferrying heroin into Los Angeles also runs a rehab center assisting the very same poor souls they’ve strung out. “As long as American life was something to be escaped from,” narrator Joanna Newsom quips in voiceover, “the cartel could always be sure of a bottomless pool of new customers.” That’s one major “hippiephany” (Pynchon-speak), and perhaps a way of thinking about Anderson’s cinema, too. Over a career spanning four decades and ten features, the director has mourned the hollowness of American life while offering a way out of it through Altmanesque comedies, piercing character studies, and richly textured forays into the nation’s past. But that alone doesn’t account for his distinctive brand of nostalgia. How you respond to Anderson’s works won’t depend on how familiar you are with the myriad cultural and geographical references disseminated throughout them. As someone who’s never stepped foot in California, I am won over by his elegies to 1970s SoCal because they’re not so concerned with resurrecting a specific milieu, however meticulous they might be in those attempts, as with reviving a certain way of being in the world.
Even his most outwardly pleasant work to date, Licorice Pizza (2021), hastily pegged upon its release as a “love letter” to the early-1970s San Fernando Valley, is in fact shot through with uncertainty and restlessness. The environs Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) and Alana Kane (Alana Haim) traverse bear the marks of a country on the brink of collapse. Nixon ranting on TV about the moribund economy, rows of cars besieging gas stations at the height of the 1973 oil crisis, the violent threats dogging the campaign of closeted mayoral candidate Joel Wachs (Benny Safdie): for all its whimsy, the film doesn’t gloss over the era’s anxieties. Its melancholia stems from a longing to return to that critical moment in a young person’s life when the world opens up and everything seems at once possible and out of reach. “Love letters” make for great marketing buzzwords, but they risk obscuring the angst that permeates Anderson’s cinema as well as Pynchon’s writings, nowhere more vividly than in the director’s latest and the book that inspired it.
Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021).
When Vineland came out, seventeen years after Gravity’s Rainbow, there was a general sense among critics that Pynchon was suspiciously sentimental about the turbulent times he chronicled. Set in 1984, the novel seesaws between the nadir of Reagan’s America and flashbacks to the peace-and-love ’60s—at the risk of simplifying an extraordinarily rich text, you could take Vineland as a chronicle of the hippies’ inexorable devolution into yuppies. While reviewers like Salman Rushdie saw it as heralding a refreshing break toward political clarity, the overall consensus was that the book wasn’t offering a critique so much as dealing in what Alec McHoul called a “60s nostalgic quietism” as to the shortcomings of the social movements the decade spawned. But that’s to downplay the fierce debates Pynchon stages between different generations and his critical reading of the activism each championed. Vineland orbits three women: teenage Prairie, her mother Frenesi, and grandma Sasha—each embodying a distinct chapter in twentieth-century US history as well as different ways of resisting the establishment and relating to screens big and small: Sasha fought against the anti-communist witchhunts as a screenwriter in 1930s blacklist Hollywood. Frenesi, a member of the subversive 24 Frames Per Second film collective, spent the 1960s turning her camera on cops to document their violence against so-called degenerates. As ’80s television baby Prairie surveys her ancestors’ seditious deeds, Pynchon never simplistically puts the older generations on a pedestal, but takes aim at their failures—chief among them the inability to understand how TV wound up atrophying our ability to resist. “Whole problem ’‘th you folks’s generation,” Prairie’s boyfriend tells her father Zoyd at the end, “is you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out there for it—but you sure didn’t understand much about the Tube.”
Where Inherent Vice was a purer distillation of Pynchon’s book, One Battle’s much looser grip on Vineland recalls There Will Be Blood, not so much based on as inspired by Upton Sinclair’s 1926 novel, Oil!. Shot across several cities in California and Texas, Anderson’s latest isn’t tethered to a clear geography. While Vineland combines real-life locations with others of Pynchon’s making (the Retreat of the Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives, the College of the Surf, and Vineland itself), One Battle is set in a sort of Anytown, USA. But though the film also never clarifies exactly when the action unfolds, its present-day buzzwords, consumer technology, and omnipresent doom suggest a distended stagnancy of the George W. Bush and Trump presidencies. By layering some of the anxieties of the 2000s over the aesthetic and revolutionary history of the 1960s and 1970s, One Battle becomes a work of sedimented political histories—one of the few affinities with its source text. Pynchon too grafted some of the paranoias of the 1980s over the struggles of the 1960s, and flashed further back to those struggles’ origins in the 1930s, pointing to a radical tradition that stretched across decades.
One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025).
Anderson begins in medias res, following militants of the fictional French 75 insurgency as they storm a migrant detention center along the US–Mexico border; the prisoners are freed, soldiers locked up in their stead. “This is the announcement of a fucking revolution,” Perfidia Beverly Hills advises bomb expert “Ghetto” Pat (DiCaprio), soon to become her lover, “so give it a worthy show.” Pat and Anderson heed the call—the opening sequence is one of the director’s most pyrotechnic, and One Battle sustains that energy for an impressive length of time, at least until Perfidia is captured and compelled to rat out her comrades by Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a cartoonishly evil army man with whom she has become sexually involved. Snitching lands Perfidia a spot in the Witness Protection Program and a house in some nondescript stretch of suburbia, which she soon abandons for a life on the lam, at which point One Battle brings its focus back to Pat and the daughter Perfidia left behind, Willa (Chase Infiniti).
The sixteen-year gap between Perfidia’s disappearance and the day Lockjaw returns to hunt down Pat and Willa is the only unequivocal temporal marker in a film that often registers as something cribbed from the headlines. Migrants are persecuted and treated abhorrently before and after the ellipsis, with children locked up in cages and Lockjaw’s forces—a stand-in for Customs and Border Protection or ICE—raiding sanctuary cities and beating up protesters, underscoring the unbroken history of those practices through the past quarter century. One of Anderson’s most notable interventions is to imagine Perfidia (white-skinned and blue-eyed Frenesi, in the book) as a Black woman, and Willa as her mixed-race child. Racial purity wasn’t a big concern for Brock Vond, but it is for his screen avatar, Lockjaw, and for the terrifyingly powerful Aryan men–only cabal whose ranks he wants to join, “The Christmas Adventurers Club.” There’s no mention of such a group in Vineland, but the inclusion of a ridiculously named gang of power players who greet each other with “Hail Saint Nick” and secretly convene in bunkers sprawling just below a lush mansion (Reagan’s former Sacramento home, no less) is the film at its most Pynchonesque. For writer and filmmaker both, comedy is inseparable from social critique, and One Battle exhibits their penchant for melding the very serious with the very profane; the CAC isn’t a frivolous way of dismissing some very dangerous white suprematists but a means to emasculate the powerful.
On Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025).
By 1969, the progressive movement known as the Students for a Democratic Society had splintered, and Revolutionary Youth, a faction that sought to convert the SDS into a Leninist vanguard, became the Weather Underground, a cell that conducted bombing campaigns against government buildings all through the 1970s. Anderson’s French 75 was inspired by their activities: Perfidia’s “declaration of war” echoes the Weather Underground’s own; late in the film, a letter she writes to her daughter cribs from a real-life missive sent by a young WU member on the lam to his father (“Hello from the other side of the shadows…”). Yet One Battle never simplistically idealizes the French 75: Pat, Perfidia, and company are not symbols for political ideologies but flawed human beings wrestling with the end of an era and their diminished roles inside a new one. Having relocated with Willa to the fictional sanctuary town of Baktan Cross to escape the government’s crackdown, Pat’s a former man of action surviving on booze, weed, and reruns of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966). The past is irretrievable, the French 75’s imploded, but Anderson doesn’t couch any of it as tragic. The terms of One Battle are not success and failure but action and inaction, and the belligerent, no-nonsense swagger Willa accrues as her own battles pile on suggests that the radical tradition of her parents’ generation will survive through her own.
A lesser film might have peddled some grand statement about the French 75, or turned into a trite compare-contrast exercise between Willa and Pat, the young and the old, different approaches to resistance. But One Battle is more astute than that. This is a film about the kindness and solidarity of strangers, about the small, quotidian efforts of people to help each other confront an omnipresent and atomizing evil. The revolution will not be televised—per the title of Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971’s Black liberation anthem, adapted here into a passcode and battle cry—nor delivered by an algorithm; you have to come to it, joining strangers in a fight over the integrity of the nation and all those who live inside it.
One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025).
In a film full of indelible characters, no one approximates that better than Benicio del Toro’s “Sensei” Sergio, the “Latino Harriet Tubman”–like leader of an underground network helping Latin American migrants in Baktan Cross escape the federales (“all legit, from the heart, no money,” he proudly tells Pat). Late into One Battle, as Sensei and Pat race into the desert to rescue Willa, the former French 75 “Rocket Man” succumbs to despair. He says he “got lazy”, “wasn’t paying attention,” a remark that could be taken to mean his failure to protect Willa as much as his inability to understand just how much the world has deteriorated since he last tried to set it right. Sensei cuts him short: “Don’t go dark on me, man.” Pynchon would love that line—it may not feature anywhere in Vineland, but it recalls almost identical exchanges in that novel and several others: no sooner do his characters give into fatalism or wallow in nostalgia than others yank them out of their miserabilist torpor.
As catastrophic as they might appear, One Battle and Vineland bristle with the same subversive hope in the future. By choosing to take action, Pat, Willa, and Sensei transform history into a continuum. The past, and one’s nostalgia for it, which might have been paralyzing, becomes instead an invitation to look back at and draw strength from a long radical tradition. Though the heyday of the French 75, or the Weather Underground, or the Black Panthers may have passed, we can continue to learn from their feats and failures. In the end, Willa gets to interpret her mother’s legacy how she wishes, and decide if and how she will act upon it. Vineland ends with Prairie reuniting with Frenesi, in a huge family gathering that sees generations of activists breaking bread and trading anecdotes from their militant years. Anderson doesn’t grant Willa the same happily-ever-after. But he gives us something much more electrifying: a young woman running out the door and into another battle, defiantly and deliriously free.