What P.T. Anderson Used or Did Not Out of Pynchon’s Novel

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, Leonardo DiCaprio, 2025. © Warner Bros. / Courtesy Everett Collection — Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

Paul Thomas Anderson‘s One Battle After Another” is loosely based on Thomas Pynchon‘s 1990 novel “Vineland.”

The director previously adapted his 2009 novel “Inherent Vice” with the 2014 film of the same name.

During a Q&A after an early screening, Anderson confirmed, “I struggled for years to try to adapt it.” Conceptualizing “One Battle After Another” and a proper “Vineland” adaptation waned over time as details about the film emerged.

Pynchon’s maddeningly complex work can finally provide a diagnosis.

Notably, “One Battle After Another”‘s credits state explicitly, “Inspired by the novel ‘Vineland’ by Thomas Pynchon.”

Anderson noted, “The problem with loving a book so much when you adapt it is that you have to be much rougher on the book, you have to kind of not be gentle.”

Thus, the film retains some elements of the novel, while omitting others.

The Characters

Though their names are changed, DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson is inspired by “Vineland” protagonist Zoyd Wheeler, an ex-revolutionary living out in retirement in northern California.

The film also includes Bob’s wild 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), stands in for the book’s Frenesi Gates; antagonist Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who’s the book’s federal prosecutor Brock Vond.

Bob and Zoyd are both paranoid after their rebellious pasts. They miss Perfidia and Frenesi deeply, and fear for Willa and Prairie. Willa and Prarie, meanwhile, are both skeptical of their fathers’ fears, but understand them as the past reemerges.

The film and the book also establish love triangles between Bob, Perfidia and Lockjaw and Zoyd, Frenesi and Vond, respectively. However, Frenesi and Vond’s romance is more sincere in “Vineland” than Perfidia and Lockjaw’s in “One Battle After Another.”

Differences

The pivotal schisms between Anderson and Pynchon as storytellers. “Vineland’s” characters are archetypal, denizens who often serve to personify and expose a nuanced message about society or humanity. We don’t easily identify with them, but instead, see ideas and ideologies questioned and reflected through them.

Anderson gives great depth to his characters. Bob, Perfidia, Willa, Lockjaw show emotionsal growth throughout the film. It’s easier to process the emotions and reactions of actors on screen than of names in text. Nevertheless, Pynchon’s characters are more like mysterious figments of an avant-garde film; they rarely feel like actual people.

The Plot

The plots are similar: an ex-revolutionary is forced back into action after his daughter is kidnapped by a former nemesis. But the film is more of a straightforward actioner, following a relatively conventional story.

The movie is a rescue narrative: Bob trying to save Willa, as Willa learns about her parents’ history. “Vineland” has the same premise, but once Prairie is taken away, Zoyd disappears from the story. What would 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 relationship with Vond.

When Zoyd returns, there is hardly a proper resolution. While neither Zoyd nor Bob end up as their daughters’ true saviors, in the film, Willa 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 cuts his funding. When Vond tries taking control of the vehicle to maintain the chase, he crashes, leaving Prairie free, yet stranded in the wilderness. The serendipitous turn of events provides an ending, but hardly a closure.

The Worlds

“Vineland” takes place in a bizarre alternate reality, where southern California seceded from the U.S. in the 1960s, where revolutionaries were a collective hellbent on exposing fascism, and where the federal government takes the War on Drugs literally.

Set 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 generation’s regression into Reagan-era conservatism. Zoyd is an archetype for a 1960s hippie 20 years later, now dependent on the government he had fought against. The rise of technology and television — both of which play major roles in the book — have institutionalized the means that the revolution once weaponized.

“One Battle After Another” doesn’t lean quite as allegorical. While there is a 16-year chronological leap in the film’s first act, it doesn’t make dichotomous statement about the perspective of the two timelines.

The movie’s settings are relatively interchangeable, both appearing contemporary, if not eerily set 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 feel prescient for present-day America.

The film’s chilling representation of American politics may be an unintentional departure from the novel’s whimsical energy. Though “One Battle After Another” has a sense of humor, its central conflict taken from “Vineland” feels less absurd today than it may have been in 1990.

Even the film’s eccentricities, 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. Decades 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 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 “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 selectivr elements of Pynchon’s world — the characters, the broad themes — and grounds them. As he stated: “‘Vineland‘ was hard to adapt. Instead, I stole the parts that really resonated with me and started putting all these ideas together.”

The result is thought-provoking, but more palatable, contemporary and entertaining experience than reading Pynchon’s novel.

Source: Hollywood Reporter, Variety

One Battle After Another: Anderson’s Movie Vs. Pynchon’s Novel

What P.T. Anderson Used or Did Not Out of Pynchon’s Novel

The Characters

The Plot

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