You Say You Want a Revolution

On ‘One Battle After Another’ and Pynchon’s ‘Vineland’

Traffic Stop in San Leandro, California, Photograph, 1985, Getty Images

There is a buzz in the air. Electricity skitters across telephone wires, rubber sheaths stretched from pole to pole, drooping above rooftops. Signals ping between satellites and television antennas. Microwaves zap frozen dinners. Static has become the incessant white noise in the nation’s collective head. Later that autumn, “Miami Vice” will premiere on NBC, broadcasting a world of pastels, cops, cocaine, and excess onto the Tubes in every household. Brewing over that sweet Northern California summer — like the bulbous belly of a helicopter skimming the crests of evergreens, its blades whirring and shearing the air — is the presidential election. Everything is shifting. The world is unrecognizable.

It is under these circumstances, in the year 1984, that Thomas Pynchon’s fourth novel, Vineland, begins.

The basic facts of the story are as follows: In the 1960s, Frenesi Gates was part of a revolutionary group called 24fps who captured instances of injustice and abuse of power by the government (“A camera is a gun. An image taken is a death performed”). She falls in love with FBI agent Brock Vond, who convinces her to be his informant. Following a collapse of a college-turned-seceded republic, an organized hit, and a stint in a re-education center, Frenesi escapes Vond’s snare. After this, she marries Zoyd Wheeler, a hippie and keyboardist for The Corvairs. They have a child together, Prairie, but Frenesi sees her as a parasite, “robbing her of milk and sleep, acknowledging [Frenesi] only as a host.” While Prairie is still an infant, they divorce and she returns to Vond. She ends up in witness protection, married to another man with another child, but escapes, and at the start of the novel, Zoyd learns that the 24fps, Hector Zuñiga, and Brock Vond are all looking for her. Then, for two-thirds of the novel, Zoyd is dropped, and we focus on Prairie and DL’s (a 24fps member) search for Frenesi, navigating a disassembled nesting doll of classic Pynchonian narrative that includes characters like Karmic Adjuster Takeshi Fumimota, Weed Atman, the quasi-cult leader of a seceded Californian state calling itself “The People’s Republic of Rock and Roll,” Blood and Vato, two chthonic towers who prowl the interstates in search of the biggest bang for their towage buck, the Thanatoids (“like death, only different”), and a slew of other misadventures that defy brief explanation.

More or less (mostly less), this is the basic plot that Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another sticks to: Ghetto Pat and Perfidia Beverly Hills are lovers and revolutionaries, part of a collective who call themselves the French 75. They have a child, a girl named Charlene, but Perfidia resents her, especially because she is an obstacle to her revolutionary commitment. A bank heist goes wrong; Perfidia is arrested. Lt. Steven J. Lockjaw offers her immunity if she provides him with the names of the rest of the French 75. She enters witness protection, joins “Mainstream America,” and resides in the prototypical, cookie-cutter suburban house. It doesn’t take long for her to escape. As she slips out and across the Mexican border (breaking Lockjaw’s heart), Pat and Charlene are forced into hiding, into an asylum-like society called Baktan Cross where they assume the identities of Bob and Willa Ferguson. Sixteen years later, Lockjaw emerges from the shadows to raise hell and capture Willa, who may or may not be his biological daughter. Before he can get his hands on her, she flees with the help of Deandre, a member of the French 75, and Lockjaw’s indefatigable pursuit sparks a chase that asks Bob to rekindle his former spirit if he wishes to find his daughter.

We’ll get to One Battle After Another in a moment. First, let’s rewind the clock four decades.

When I started reading Vineland¹ (partly because of the imminent release of One Battle After Another — referred to as OBAA from here on out — and partly because I’m evolving into a bit of a Pynchonhead), I thought, oh, how pedestrian. In the 17-year span between Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland, perhaps Pynchon decided to opt for convention. Sure, the whole transfenestration concept² — for Zoyd to continue receiving his disability checks, he must perform an annual public act of craziness — isn’t exactly Jamesian realism, but in the wake of Gravity’s Rainbow, I found it tame. Not surprisingly, the straightforwardness lasted all of 30 pages before things canted towards typical Pynchonian zaniness.

Transfenestration completed, Zoyd catches up with his old federale pal Hector Zuñiga, who’s been trying since the 1960s to turn him into a fink. Hector tells him that his estranged wife had been in the witness protection program, but due to Reaganomics-induced budget cuts, is no longer in the program. Their conversation grows heated (ideological differences), but before it can boil over, a SWAT team with the word “NEVER” stenciled on their helmets raids the place and Hector flees. The pursuing party in question is Dr. Dennis Deeply, head of the National Endowment for Video Education and Rehabilitation (NEVER). This is the world Pynchon portrays, where people are sent away to Tubaldetox for humming the “The Flintstones” theme or reciting the names of “The Brady Bunch,” where television has permeated the American mind to such an extent that the passage of time is tracked by “daytime” and “primetime,” where people act as if they’re “characters in a television sitcom,” where the television is sentient and announces “From now on, I’m watching you.”

Back in the day, Vineland did not receive stellar reviews. In the long wait after Gravity’s Rainbow, perhaps readers were expecting something more prophetic, more akin to the grandeur of its predecessor. Expectations are often the bane of pleasure. Yet, from the moment I picked up Vineland, I couldn’t put it down. My literary affair with Pynchon is in its nascency, which means my critical capacities are blunted by the giddiness of the honeymoon phase. That’s not to say I don’t recognize the novel’s flaws, but I am more than willing to ignore them, to give myself over to Pynchon’s nimble hands. Perhaps in 1990, Pynchon’s depiction of television’s enormous influence seemed less salient. In 2025, however, I’m amazed at how precisely he predicted the 24-hour news cycle, the TikTok-induced wilting of our attention spans (“They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill up every minute, keep us distracted, it’s what the Tube is for . . . ”), and the pervasion of pop culture.

What struck me most about Vineland is its heart and its optimism. Yes, I was lured and mesmerized by the antics, the narrative twists, the band of eccentric characters, but I found myself deeply moved by the broken family at the center of the story. In particular, the penultimate chapter when Zoyd is acclimating to domestic life without Frenesi, with a young daughter in tow, pushed me to the brink of tears. It describes Zoyd’s move to Vineland, depicted as a “Harbor of Refuge,” a green, arboreal Eden. There’s a moment when he’s looking at a 3-year-old Prairie and realizing the duties of fatherhood, the love he has for this innocent child, and if you read one passage from Vineland, there’s a strong case to be made that it be this one:

After a while Zoyd was allowed into the Traverse-Becker annual reunions, as long as he brought Prairie, who at about the age of three or four got sick one Vineland winter, and looked up at him with dull hot eyes, snot crusted on her face, hair in a snarl, and croaked, “Dad? Am I ever gonna get bett-or?” pronouncing it like Mr. Spock, and he had his belated moment of welcome to the planet Earth, in which he knew, dismayingly, that he would, would have to, do anything to keep this dear small life from harm, up to and including Brock Vond, a possibility he wasn’t too happy with. But as he watched her then, year by year, among these reunion faces her own was growing more and more to look like, continuing to feel no least premonitory sign of governmental interest from over the horizon beyond the mental-disability checks that arrived faithfully as the moon, he at last began, even out scuffling every day, to relax some, to understand that this had been the place to bring her and himself after all, that for the few years anyway, he must have chosen right for a change, that time they’d come through the slides and storms to put in here, to harbor in Vineland, Vineland the Good.

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Before I went into OBAA, I urged myself to consider not how closely Paul Thomas Anderson (PTA from here on out) would adapt Pynchon’s work (for one thing, it’s clearly “inspired by” rather than “adapted from”; and second, it is impossible to depict the wild diversions, the neologisms, the Brobdingnagian cast of characters that inject Pynchon’s writing with that unflinching energy), but why PTA is the director best suited to capturing and inhabiting Pynchon’s spirit.

Both men are quintessential Californian artists. PTA is the poster child for the San Fernando Valley; Boogie Nights is an ode not just to the later-abandoned artistic integrity of the 1970s porn industry, but also to the suburban sprawl of the Valley. Although Pynchon was born and grew up in New York, he lived in California throughout the 1960s and ’70s. In his Manhattan Beach apartment, listening to the lapping waves of the Pacific Ocean, he wrote Gravity’s Rainbow. Three of his novels — The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice — comprise the so-called California trilogy. His prose embodies a spirit that I find hard to associate with a New York writer. When I think of New York, I think of the New Yorker, the literati, the patina-coated Statue of Liberty, the history of immigration and the history of the country itself. California, conversely, is full of contradiction. The redwood forests in the north, the surf communities and the South American-influenced culture in the south. The Hollywood sign, erected on the side of the Santa Monica mountains, looms over Los Angeles. The state is also home to that small-in-geography but monumental-in-reach canton: Silicon Valley. This contrast, and irony, between the moneyed world of tech and the free-wheelin’ attitude of the coast serves as a major ideological conflict in Vineland.

Then, there’s the sheer scope of their creations: big ensemble casts comprised of big, bombastic characters. These characters are often thrown into a snarl of circumstances. In that occasionally disorienting entanglement, both Pynchon and PTA seek to uncover some truth about the nature of human existence, or at least to gain a foothold of clarity.

Perhaps the most contentious aspect of their oeuvres is that their work is largely retrospective. Though I have not heard of any polemics aimed at Pynchon for his history-oriented tendencies, PTA has been maligned for his reluctance to interrogate the present (his last film set in modern day was 2002’s Punch Drunk Love). As someone whose reading, listening, and viewing habits exist primarily half a century in the past, I’d like to defend PTA and Pynchon, and anyone who chooses to probe history. Certainly, artists ought to try and make sense of the present — doing so can help to predict the future — but by delving into the past, rooting around for clues, those particularly astute artists are able to stumble upon patterns, to discover the buds that flower into the future. PTA and Pynchon are two such artists.

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Woolgathering aside, let’s turn to OBAA.

Lest any accusations of bias should emerge, I will admit that I consider Paul Thomas Anderson a genius. He is one of my favorite living filmmakers — and probably my favorite contemporary filmmaker. Whatever bone or neural arrangement is responsible for bestowing the talent of filmmaking to such figures as Scorsese and Fellini, PTA has it. Many months ago, when grainy photos of DiCaprio hunched by a phone booth first surfaced on the web, I was prepared to shell out any amount of money to witness it on the silver screen ($55.36 for two adult IMAX tickets).

With PTA at the helm, it’s no wonder that OBAA is elevated by its both lovable and love-to-hate-them characters.

It’s hardly stating the obvious to point out that Leonardo DiCaprio steals every film that he’s in, but perhaps the most compelling, complex performance in OBAA is that of Teyana Taylor as Perfidia Beverly Hills. While Lockjaw represents the objective evil that has pervaded our society and Bob is a paranoid dad trying to raise a daughter in an upside-down world, Perfidia’s character is morally ambiguous — and PTA, rightly so, does not label her as good or bad. Although her greater aims are good (freeing hundreds of migrants, fighting for truth and freedom, for the “little man” of society), she also commits several wrongs (killing a man, rejecting her daughter). This ambiguity reaches its apex in her relationship with Lockjaw. Sexually, hers is the dominant role, and it appears that by virtue of her eroticism, she overpowers Lockjaw. Yet, her freedom remains in his hands — were it not for him offering her a deal, she would have been imprisoned. Though she flees to Mexico, does she really escape? Because of Lockjaw, she cannot return to the country, to her home, to her revolutionary métier, to Bob and Willa. Such uncertainty regarding the distribution of power makes their relationship, and Perfidia’s character, unquestionably riveting.

DiCaprio is at his best when he plays lethargic losers, bumbling bums, and down-and-outers. Crawling and drooling in a Quaalude-induced paralysis, melting down in a trailer after flubbing his lines (“eight goddamn fucking whiskey sours”), or donning a plaid bathrobe and post-cataract-surgery sunglasses, stumbling after a squad of ninja-esque skaters across rooftops, jogging with the athleticism of a pinochle player. This is primo, electrifying DiCaprio, and it is this version of him — much more than the cherubic blond of Titanic or the straight man of Revolutionary Road — that makes it impossible to look away from the screen. His performance as Bob Ferguson embraces the slapstick. Jumping from building to building, he falls through the gap, is tased upon standing, and topples to the ground in a manner that would make Chevy Chase proud. Seething, spitting, sobbing, he tries in vain to negotiate with the revolutionary hotline, whose operator refuses to give him the rendezvous points unless he supplies the answer to “What time is it?” (“You should have studied the revolutionary text more carefully,” the snarky operator tells him). His character’s entanglement is filled with such Kafkian maladies. In these moments, DiCaprio’s portrayal of Bob epitomizes the Kafkian³ protagonist: a man trying his best to do good but stumped at every point by bureaucracy and the absurdity of his circumstances.

Alongside Bob there is Benicio Del Toro’s Zen sensei Sergio St. Carlos and Bob’s daughter, played wonderfully by Chase Infiniti. The latter’s chemistry with DiCaprio is undeniable; their father-daughter bond is palpable, tender, and without it, the film would be a shell of artifice. Most of the narrative sees Willa thrust into a foreign, dangerous environment; except for initial help from Deandre and the Sisters of the Brave Beaver, she is forced to navigate it alone. In the end, she survives not because of her father or members of the French 75, but because she acts as agent of her own fate. Living in a world struck by paranoia and violence, largely inherited from her parents and their generation, Willa is asked to untangle herself from an imbroglio she doesn’t deserve to be in. Through Infiniti’s blend of humor, pathos, and fear, the audience is plunged into this eerily familiar world alongside her. Del Toro’s cool, calm, and collected performance is a necessary balance to DiCaprio’s manic, discombobulated energy. While Bob is running around and ducking on the dojo’s mat, Sensei is talking placidly on the phone, putting on one cowboy boot, then the other, as though the streets beyond his window are not burning, not the site of a citizen-militia stand-off, not illuminated by and vibrating with the blares of police sirens.

Undoubtedly, the character that burns himself into your mind is Lt. Steven J. Lockjaw, portrayed astonishingly by Sean Penn. We’re introduced to Lockjaw’s character via his cock. During the opening sequence, in which the French 75 raid and free an immigration detention center, Perfidia breaks into Lockjaw’s office. She wills his penis to stand erect and leads him outside, his cock directing him forward. Though she enchants him, she also, by virtue of that spell, ties herself to him forever — “his erect penis had become the joystick with which, hurtling into the future, she would keep trying to steer among the hazards and obstacles, the swooping monsters and alien projectiles of each game she would come, year by year, to stand before . . . .” In some demented way, Lockjaw and Perfidia are like Shakespeare’s doomed lovers.

Lockjaw is the most cartoonish character of all, and Penn commits, admirably, to the bit. He struts as though his pistol is still lodged up his ass; his lips (the smacking, the licking, the labial dexterity) constitute their own character; his veins pulsate and protrude from his boulder-like physique. He is an anthropomorphic G.I. Joe, a caricature of masculinity and the military. Part of his character’s arc is the desire to join a secret society, The Christmas Adventurers Club — a clear parody of the Elks, the Moose, the Lions, and their members’ khakis, navy blazers, and red-striped ties. White supremacy is never mentioned by name, but membership in the club entails that you are inherently a superior human, even if you’re not more intelligent, more talented, or more successful.

In his satire of the military, PTA makes use of irreverent monikers (second only, perhaps, to the Strangelovian sobriquets of General Buck Turgidson and President Merkin Muffley). “Lockjaw” is self-evident, but “Throckmorton,” of Virgil Throckmorton, the head of the Saint Nick acolytes, requires a brief surf of the web. The Throckmorton sign is a radiological slang term that “refers to the position of a penis as it relates to pathology on an X-ray of a pelvis.”⁴ They’re everlastingly amusing, and in classic PTA phallic-and-genitalia-gag manner, they augment an already scathing depiction of the military-industrial complex.

The only thing about Penn’s performance and Lockjaw’s role in the film that gave me pause was how out of place it often felt. Don’t get me wrong, OBAA is certainly satirical, but either that satire is underplayed in the Bob / Willa parts or overplayed in the Lockjaw / military parts. Sitting down in the cinema, having avoided 90% of the discourse already preempting the film, my only two reference points were Vineland and Dr. Strangelove (Spielberg’s comparison). Dr. Strangelove plays in a consistent satirical tone; every line of dialogue, every scene and scenario is a farce. That’s not the case with OBAA. Naturally, the film takes a more earnest approach to the depiction of the detention centers, the blazing battle-in-the-streets between the citizens and the militia. Because Vineland was on my mind, I yearned for more of the bizarre, more of the Lockjaw-ian sensibility that couldn’t be translated to the screen: Zoyd’s annual act of transfenestration, the Kahuna Airlines debacle, Takeshi and DL’s mishaps, romance, and the Vibrating Palm technique, the Puncutron machine for reversing said technique, Prairie’s stint in the Sisterhood of Kanoichi Attentives, and the Tubaldetox.

Were it not for its pace and PTA’s deft directorial hand, the film could have been derailed by the shifts in tone. Because of these two qualities, though, we’re able to glide over such oscillations and revel in the pure entertainment value. To be fair, Pynchon often jumps from tone to tone, sometimes illogically, and had I gone into OBAA sans-Vineland, perhaps I would not have noticed these oscillations at all.

What it harks back to, I suppose, is expectation as the bane of pleasure. Part of my fondness for Pynchon’s writing stems from his appetite for confusion. He does not shy away from throwing the reader into a morass, leaving them to fend for themselves. I relish this feeling. This feeling happens to be one of many reasons why I rank PTA a genius, why I salivate at the news of another of his films hitting the theaters. Despite the obvious ambition of the subject, of capturing what it’s like to live in the tatters of a world and what to do about a shrinking future, and the expansive vistas, OBAA seemed a little too neat. It may be counterintuitive to fault someone for their faultless creation, but PTA’s films ascend into the spiritual when they welcome messiness, when they toe the line between reality and absurdity. Take, for instance, Punch-Drunk Love. On the surface, it’s a simple romantic comedy. Until the harmonium is introduced, on which Sandler’s character plays the same sequence of three descending notes amidst chaos. Until we hear the stunted nature of the dialogue. Until we learn of the seven sisters, the “fungers” (a portmanteau of “fun” and “plungers”), the airline miles / Healthy Choice hack. The film occupies that delicious uncanny valley, where we know what we are watching is real, yet we sense that every element is slightly askew, as though we’ve entered a sliver of reality formerly forbidden. Perhaps because it is PTA’s most commercial film, his most straightforward in plot, and thus, most likely to appeal to a wider audience, OBAA, even when the bizarre and the satirical reach their apotheosis, remains grounded. Again, for what it aims to achieve and for the mirror it puts up to the last decade, grounding is the intended effect. And yet, I cannot help but yearn that the scales were tipped in favor of the enigmatic.

What OBAA deserves praise for is its ability to lean into big-budget commerciality without slipping into the moral turpitude oft-associated with commerciality. Clocking in at 170 minutes, the film plays more like a taut 90-minute thriller. The percussive, staccato score — composed by frequent PTA collaborator Jonny Greenwood — heightens the tension and stakes of every scene. The set pieces are awesome. Complex, kinetic, and sensorially panoramic, they evince the importance of watching a film in the theater instead of on a TV (or, god forbid, an iPhone).

The camerawork, particularly in the sweeping wide shots of the desert, is wondrous, amplified by the filming in VistaVision. Fact is, film is better than digital. Digital presents a barrier to immersion, whereas film — with its graininess and tactile surface — invites the viewer into the scene. The handheld shots of Bob scrambling through the hallways and up to the roof of Sensei’s apartment are frenetic and exhilarating. There’s a sequence towards the conclusion of the film that tracks a car chase with the Christmas Adventurers’ assassin, Prairie, and Bob. Keeping the camera glued to the ground, along the undulating desert roads, PTA creates a literal sense of momentum, putting us in the passenger seat as we rock and sway across the billowing tarmac. Surely, this will cement itself in PTA’s already expansive compendium of hypnotizing shots.

I won’t be surprised if OBAA becomes PTA’s most successful film at the box office. As someone who loves meandering, plotless, arthouse films, I also understand that they are not for everyone. If OBAA draws people to the theaters, if it exposes non-cinephiles to the rare mastery of Paul Thomas Anderson, if it invites its audience into dialogue and discourse, if it inspires us to seek out anarchist literature and to question unearned, unjust authority, if it asks us to look inward and reckon with the qualities of ourselves, of our society we dislike, then there will be no denying its triumph.

There’s one last matter to discuss: revolution.

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Revolution is about sacrificing your now for someone else’s future. It seems facile in theory, especially because most of us would like to believe that we are not slaves to our ego, that we are able to survive under dire circumstances, that the luxuries we take for granted are not necessary to our comfort. Being a revolutionary, though, is much harder than we make it out to be. It is easy to be whipped up in the rousing frenzy of manifestos and pieces of art. How many of us, though, when there’s fecoventilatory collision,⁵ will return to swiping on our phones and watching mind-numbing reality television? Perhaps we will gather with our similarly world-weary friends and complain, over a few beers, about the government, the capitalist machine, the injustice, roused momentarily by the buzz of a couple burbling pints, only to sway home and stumble into the supple comfort of our beds, then wake in the morning, go to jobs where we schlep after cruel and crude bosses in hopes of earning an end-of-year bonus, slide back into the grooves of the system, those cries of rebellion now no more than hollow words fading into the void of memory.

There’s no question that my attitudes tend toward the nihilistic and the cynical. In many ways, my cynicism, the dwindling belief of the Baby Boomers as they confronted the reality of Reagan’s ’80s, and the similar Generation X malaise that is the focus of OBAA, is exemplified by Weed Atman’s evolution from mathematics professor to quasi-cult leader:

Once he would have proclaimed, “Because in this country nobody in power gives a shit about any human life but their own. This forces us to be humane — to attack what matters more than life to the regime and those it serves, their money and their property.” But these days he was saying, “It’s wrong because if you pick up a rifle, the Man picks up a machine gun, by the time you find some machine gun he’s all set up to shoot rockets, begin to see a pattern?” Between these two replies, something had happened to him. He was still preaching humane revolution, but seemed darkly exhausted, unhopeful, snapping at everybody, then apologizing. If anybody caught this change, it was much too late to make a difference.

As I write this piece, though, I am beginning to find that elusive, hope-inspiring “but.” Like the film’s title suggests, change is about one battle after another, putting one foot in front of the other. We cannot expect change to happen in an instant. Change is accrued. Whether it reaches that critical mass in ten years or one hundred, in my lifetime or my grandchildren’s lifetime, it will happen. Yet, there is no ultimate end to change. There will always be battles, fights between good and evil (if it can be reduced so simply), and what OBAA tells us is that we should not give up but adapt. In that I believe. Perhaps that’s what I didn’t formerly understand, or didn’t allow myself to understand for fear of being disappointed by reality: the idea that resistance is not a zero-sum game, that we can take small steps in the positive direction. Evolution in species occurs over thousands and millions of years, comprised of infinitesimal shifts; so too does revolution.

Were OBAA a truly revolutionary film like Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers,⁶ however, it would be centered on the politics of its revolution. Yet, we only catch glimpses of their anti-fascist message: “Free from the eyes, the ears, the weapons of the Imperialist State.” Instead, and I consider this a boon rather than a detriment, OBAA is more interested in the relationship between father and daughter, and more broadly, the way our dreams and unfettered aspirations are trampled upon in middle age, when kids, marriage, and life ask for the bulk of our attention and there is not much left to do but settle into the mainstream. In fact, it should not be judged as a revolutionary film, nor do I think it was PTA’s intention to espouse a concrete ideology for how to combat our country’s increasingly authoritarian arrangements. If you consider all of PTA’s films, they are concerned with fraught relationships: a cocksman and his estranged father, a British dressmaker and his headstrong muse, two youths discovering the labyrinth of love. Like Vineland, OBAA is propelled by PTA’s exploration of an imperfect family in the midst of a crumbling and impossible-to-explain world. This purported decision on PTA’s part allows the film to achieve universality. Every revolution is different. The rebellion in Algiers against the French government is different from the civil rights protests and counterculture movement of the 1960s, which is different to the aggressive, dynamite-fueled methods favored by the French 75. What will our next revolution look like? To be determined, but it is heartening to know that a one-size-fits-all policy does not apply.

Granted, when I walked out of the cinema, and in the days following, I did not experience that transcendent, spiritual lift that accompanied, say, my first viewing of Magnolia⁷ or The Master. And perhaps Vineland was partially to blame for this, as I continued to sift through the similarities and deviations, where the film embraced its source material and where it fell short. Yes, in spite of my best intentions not to evaluate one in terms of the other, I could not help myself. To this day, Vineland exists in my consciousness as though it were a chip implanted into my brain. So, if this review seems a little equivocal regarding OBAA, it’s because I feel equivocal. Perhaps in another month, or upon rewatch, I will feel differently. I wrote most of this piece on September 27 — the day after I saw OBAA — using a Bic pen, on 15 pages of a legal pad, the pages rife with arrows, notes in the margins, tangential spirals and parenthetical remarks (“How do I capture the Pynchonian ethos?” “Where am I going with this?” “Vineland — boomers, OBAA — Gen X”) — very much like a conspiracy theorist stretching red string across a board of clues and facts, seeking one clean, cohesive answer — and after three straight hours, I had to pause, relieve my bladder, allow the potassium levels to recover in my right hand, for my customarily neat handwriting had begun to devolve into a doctor’s scrawl, the letters seeping into one another in a lazy cursive, until my mind moved too fast, and my cramping hand too slow, so that the end of each word wilted into illegibility, reduced to a hieroglyph whose language I no longer knew.

This compulsion to write, I think, is a testament to not just the ambition and drive of OBAA, but also to the greater power of PTA as a filmmaker. When the credits roll, you feel as though you’ve been embossed with something. Sensations and sentiments have been stamped onto your brain. He and his characters take root — they intertwine with your quotidian concerns, the grocery lists, the bill payments, whether you’ve left the stove on.

Despite my equivocations, OBAA remains the work of one of our finest, most daring filmmakers vivifying the ideas and the prescience of one of our most idiosyncratic, inimitable novelists. During a decade when both cinema and literature have been languishing, when fewer people are going to the theater to watch non-MCU movies and reading literary fiction, and on a grander scale, when both of our democracy’s political parties are foundering and no one listens to one another and we seem to be spiraling towards a chasm in our nation’s history, the achievement of OBAA is not to be undermined, but to be applauded.

In the last chapter of Vineland, Isaiah Two Four,⁸ Prairie’s drummer boyfriend, provides us with one of the novel’s most cutting passages:

“Whole problem ‘th you folks’s generation,” Isaiah opined, “nothing personal, is you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out there for it — but you sure didn’t understand much about the Tube. Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative America, el deado meato, just like th’ Indians, sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970 dollars — it was way too cheap . . . .”

I’m fortunate enough to be part of a book club that culls its members largely from a first-year seminar that reads the entirety of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Every month, we gather on the Upper East Side to discuss Cousin Bette, Moby Dick, or the stories of John Cheever, and lament the tragic downfall of the humanities, as well as express megrims about the state of the world, cultural and otherwise. Most recently, we bemoaned the lack of a bohemia and a counterculture. Selling out is hip. Music is sold not on the basis of the lyrics or the uniqueness of the sound, but on the glossy appearance of the artist. Streaming has reduced film and television into the offal of its once-meaty substance. Literature has abandoned formal experimentation. Underground movements never totally disappear, yes, but their presence seems to be at an all-time low. This explains why I rhapsodize about the days of the Village Voice and Bob Dylan’s plangent, political ballads and the peak of American cinema. It’s much more than romantic nostalgia — it’s a yearning for something meaningful and nuanced.

In Vineland, Pynchon’s thesis is that the Reagan era, the cultural turn towards materialism and profit, the rise of television et al., squashed the counterculture ideals cultivated in the 1960s, and pivoted those young radicals and optimists into cynical, resigned suburbanites. In OBAA, PTA does not explicitly tie the death of revolutionary ardor to a specific root — though with the benefit of hindsight, we can trace the events of the last decade that led to disillusionment. The question stands: What culture will we return to? The 1980s? Not a chance. Reviving the 1960s seems impossible unless a mass virus wipes out all smartphones, their associated apps, and screens smaller than a 24-inch Panasonic television. Do we return to the 1990s? The 2000s, pre-financial crisis?

One Battle After Another, on its own, will not provide an answer. It will not even flip the switch that urges us into revolution, cultural or political. On both fronts, however, it is a step in the right direction. Let’s not stop there, though. Let’s take heed of Isaiah Two Four’s warning and ask ourselves this: What is our Tube, and what can we do to understand it so that we avoid the pitfalls of our progenitors? How can we escape intellectual death and forge a culture that preserves our humanity?

Daniella Nichinson is a fiction writer from Philadelphia, where she is an avid tennis player and an old soul. You can find more of her work here.

1. My introduction to him transpired under eerily Pynchonian circumstances. I began reading V. on the beaches of Netanya, during a trip to Israel, on the recommendation of a friend. Primarily, though, I read most of V. on the nearly 11-hour flight, via El-Al Airlines, from Tel Aviv to New York, during which, unbeknownst to me (for I had taken a test, which returned negative, prior to departure), I was in the early psychoactive throes of a COVID infection. Mercifully, I was seated alone in the exit row, directly across from the lavatory, into which I ducked every 15 minutes or so to hack up phlegm, then returned to my seat for another cough-suppressing bout of silence and another dose of V.

2. The transfenestrative personality being one that jumps through windows, as opposed to the defenstrative personality, which jumps out of windows.

3. There are Kafkian elements throughout Vineland. For instance, the following exchange is eerily similar of The Castle and the permanently hidden nature of bureaucracy:

“That case, shouldn’t somebody be goin’ after that Rex guy, the one who did it?”

“Rex, why? He’s only the ceremonial trigger-finger, just a stooge, same as Frenesi. Used to think I was climbing, step by step, right? toward a resolution — first Rex, above him your mother, then Brock Vond, then — but that’s when it begins to go dark, and that door at the top I thought I saw isn’t there anymore, because the light behind it just went off too.”

4. See here.

5. One of Pynchon’s delicious neologisms; literally, “when shit hits the fan.”

6. At one point in OBAA, Bob is seen watching the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers and reminiscing about the good ol’ days. Other examples might be Warren Beatty’s Reds, Oliver Stone’s Salvador, and Costa-Gavras’ Z.

7. Technically speaking, Magnolia is a much messier film than OBAA. It might even be silly at times (how similar is that sequence when the entire cast sings Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up” to the ballads and ditties scattered throughout Pynchon’s novels?), but I think, despite OBAA’s epic budget and scope, it boasted greater ambition.

8. For those inclined towards hermeneutics, this is the Isaiah 2:4 passage:

“He will judge between the nations
and will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
nor will they train for war anymore.”