On the face of it, Paul Thomas Anderson’s next film, One Battle After Another, represents one of the least likely commercial prospects for American cinema this year, if not this decade. Not only is Anderson a director who firmly shuns the mainstream, but he has never had a true hit film. His most praised picture, 2007’s There Will Be Blood, grossed a total of $76 million at the international box office (by way of comparison, the Coens’ No Country For Old Men, which beat it to Best Picture at the Oscars, earned nearly $100 million more) and his last film, 2021’s excellent Licorice Pizza, was a considerable commercial flop. It lost as much as $30 million despite being deservedly Oscar-nominated for Best Film, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.
It takes guts, therefore, for any studio to offer Anderson a mega-budget of $140 million for his next project, but that is exactly what the much-maligned David Zaslav’s Warner Brothers has done. The studio has already giant risks on Bong Joon-Ho’s lunatic sci-fi Mickey 17 and Robert De Niro’s Alto Knights (both of which flopped), but neither are as curious – or potentially fascinating – as One Battle After Another. Not only will this film test the box office earning power of its star Leonardo DiCaprio to the limit, but is also based on some of the least likely existing intellectual property for a mainstream blockbuster imaginable.
The newly released trailer for Anderson’s new picture promises that this will be something deeply unusual and original. DiCaprio is playing Bob Ferguson, a dishevelled former revolutionary who was part of a gang called ‘The French 75’, which appears to include Benicio del Toro and Teyana Taylor. They are now on the run from Sean Penn’s bleach-blonde antagonist, Sgt Lockjaw, a military man and ruthless white supremacist. Ferguson is desperately searching for his daughter, and the trailer hints at action scenes far bigger and more elaborate than anything Anderson has ever tackled before in his work.
The film’s official synopsis reads: “When their evil enemy resurfaces after 16 years, a group of ex-revolutionaries reunites to rescue one of their own’s daughter.” This could equally be said of The A Team or Mission: Impossible, meaning that the film will continue to remain mysterious until its September release, were it not for an intriguing, and decidedly Andersonian, nugget.
In 2014, Anderson wrote and directed an adaptation of the American author Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel Inherent Vice. The film was commercially unsuccessful, despite a star-studded cast that included Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Reese Witherspoon and Owen Wilson, but it was nonetheless a watershed of a kind in mainstream cinema, as it was the first time that its creator’s work was put on film. Pynchon is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, despite or perhaps because of a commitment to privacy that made the similarly reclusive JD Salinger look like a fun-loving extrovert.
From his first novel, 1963’s V., up to his most recent book, 2013’s Bleeding Edge, Pynchon has built his literary reputation on a relatively slim canon – he has published seven novels, one short story collection and one novella – which have received considerable recognition for their allusive, tricksy, post-modern qualities. His most famous and respected publication is probably 1973’s Gravity’s Rainbow, 780 pages long and every one of them stuffed with self-reflective wit and invention.
Nominally about the creation of the V2 rocket in WWII, the book abandons conventional chronology or characterisation in favour of a Joycean display of intellectual prowess that led both to comparisons to Moby-Dick. The Pulitzer Prize jury that year called the book “unreadable,” “turgid,” “overwritten” and in parts “obscene”; one critic suggested that he had only managed to get a third of the way through.
It would be fair to call Pynchon a Marmite novelist, were it not for the fact that, if you described him as such, he would probably lead you on a 10,000-word digression through the global history of breakfast condiments before ending with an apposite quote from Nabokov. Or, indeed, The Simpsons. Amusingly, this most highbrow of writers has appeared twice on the show, voicing himself, although he refused to deliver a line calling Homer Simpson a “fat ass” because “Homer is my role model and I won’t speak ill of him.” In his life and work alike, Pynchon revels in confounding expectations and leaving breadcrumb trails for his most obsessive admirers to follow, a quality that he shares with Anderson.
It is therefore inevitable, and fascinating, that rumour and scuttlebutt – as yet formally unconfirmed – have suggested that One Battle After Another is, in fact, a renegade quasi-adaptation of Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland. Anderson has form in taking the bare bones of existing novels or literary works and creating something entirely different from them. There Will Be Blood was very loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s 1920s book Oil!, about a tyrannical oil millionaire, and The Master took inspiration from everything from the life stories of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and Magnolia actor Jason Robards to Pynchon’s novel V. Yet the film-maker’s only ‘straight’ literary adaptation to date has been Inherent Vice, which duly saw Anderson Oscar-nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, and set him on a path to another reckoning with the hitherto unadaptable Pynchon.
Anderson has been candid about his feelings for Vineland. He told Time Out in 2014, around the time of Inherent Vice’s release, that “I’d wanted to adapt Vineland, but I never had the courage. It seemed to be a great way to translate [Pynchon] into a movie.” Yet he recognised that to do so would be, in his words, “borderline pathological”.
He has even hinted that Inherent Vice was a trial run of sorts for his truer passion project. Anderson told Los Angeles Magazine in early 2015, when asked about upcoming ideas, that “Vineland is really near the top for me. I got bogged down with certain things, but the characters still stick with me, the ideas stick with me, the girl Prairie sticks with me, trying to figure out what happened to her mom and dad.” He concluded, apparently jokingly, “I mean, either I’ll do it or just rip a lot of it off.” Amidst persistent rumours that One Battle After Another adapts – or rips off – Vineland, necessitating Anderson’s production company buying the rights to the novel before filming, it is looking increasingly likely that Warners’ largesse has finally given Anderson the chance to make a suitably fast-and-loose version of his beloved book.
Certainly, he has taken on an impressively difficult task. When Vineland was published in 1990, 17 years after the hugely successful Gravity’s Rainbow, it was greeted with a mixture of respect and faint confusion. Its narrative, set in the appropriately Orwellian year of 1984 – Ronald Reagan’s re-election – initially focuses on the hippie Zoyd Wheeler, who is pursued, along with his daughter Prairie, by the implacable federal agent Brock Vond. The FBI is attempting to bring down a counter-cultural collective that Wheeler and Prairie’s mother Frenesi used to belong to, the aptly named “People’s Republic of Rock and Roll” or ‘PR³’ for short. Unfortunately, Frenesi is a government informer, selling out her fellow hippies to her on-off lover Vond.
Interspersed with copious flashbacks to the Sixties, the novel can be interpreted as a eulogy for the free-thinking and open-minded attitudes of a bygone age, compared with the near-fascistic contemporary era. Yet although the book is a comparatively snappy 384 pages, it is so full of digressions, eccentric supporting characters – step forward Weed Atman, an academic who is treated somewhere between a god and a guru – and cultural allusion that it’s a dense, slow read, albeit fascinatingly so.
Nonetheless, when it was published, most critics did not see it as the equal of Gravity’s Rainbow. Salman Rushdie, then in the midst of the Satanic Verses fall-out, was respectful in the New York Times, calling it “free-flowing and light and funny and maybe the most readily accessible piece of writing the old Invisible Man ever came up with”, but also acknowledged that it was not the book that most readers had expected from Pynchon. As he wrote: “We heard he was doing something about Lewis and Clark? Mason and Dixon? A Japanese science-fiction novel? And one spring in London a magazine announced the publication of a 900-page Pynchon megabook about the American Civil War, published in true Pynchonian style by a small press nobody ever heard of, and I was halfway to the door before I remembered what date it was, April 1, ho ho ho.”
April Fools aside, the Mason and Dixon book would eventually materialise in 1997, and attracted the plaudits that Vineland did not. That novel was criticised by the New York Review of Books’ Brad Leithauser in a largely negative review that began ”The further I ventured into Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Vineland, the more pressingly I found myself wondering: For whom is this intended?” Although he acknowledged Pynchon’s “quick intelligence and quirky invention”, Leithauser went on to say, sorrowfully, “one must note that in view of our expectations the book is a disappointment.” This swiftly became the consensus, especially after the publication of the far more popular – if longer – Mason & Dixon seven years later. Even Rushdie, its greatest champion, recognised that the book “either grabs you or it doesn’t”. Most of its readers seemed resolutely ungrabbed.
Thirty-five years on, Vineland has yet to undergo a wholescale reappraisal, which may or may not occur in the unlikely event that One Battle After Another both acknowledges its source material and becomes a commercial success. Still, there have been murmurings. In 2010, the Guardian’s Andy Beckett wrote that, after Pynchon’s 2006 novel Against the Day was published, to exhausted and even dismissive reviews, “the relatively modest and heartfelt Vineland began to look more of an achievement: not ‘a breather between biggies’, but perhaps Pynchon’s last fully realised novel.”
Appropriately enough for a counter-cultural novel, it is much lauded on Reddit, where one commentator breathlessly wrote that Vineland “is so f_____ unbelievably good its [sic] like he took all the insane complexity of his earlier novels & took the insane pain to write something like 49 or GR & instead wrote a novel where every sentence & paragraph are flawless, it’s Nabokov on LSD 25, while Surfing.”
Just as Inherent Vice – novel and film alike – may not have been for the mainstream but were ardently welcomed by the aficionados whom Pynchon and Anderson were surely aiming at, so the prospective reunion of elusive author and allusive film-maker promises to be one of 2025’s most exciting – if commercially risky – creative marriages. And if Anderson has given the seldom seen Pynchon a cameo, as he was rumoured to have done in Inherent Vice, then that will be all the more reason to head down to the cinema in September.
