Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland is about the fallout after the revolutionary fervor of the 1960s exploded. It’s set in 1984, the year that Ronald Reagan crushed the Democratic opposition to win a second term as President. Not coincidentally, it was also the year George Orwell chose for the title of his antiauthoritarian clarion call.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film One Battle After Another is ostensibly inspired by Vineland. Having previously gone to Pynchon’s hallucinatory vision of California with 2014’s Inherent Vice, Anderson adapts the author’s satirical wordplay and bone-deep paranoia to spectacular effect. But Orwell’s vision of the sadomasochistic roots of the fascist will to power looms large over the story. It’s what makes this film so urgently needed in our horrifying moment in history.
Pynchon himself painted fascism as a manifestation of the death drive in Gravity’s Rainbow. “Rocketman,” as that novel’s main character, Slothrop, is known as he wanders through postwar Europe, is also one of the many nicknames Leonardo DiCaprio’s character adopts through the course of One Battle After Another. We first meet “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun as he is trying to kick off a revolution by freeing Mexican migrants in a Southwestern American detention center. He is a member of the French 75, a revolutionary group named in true Pynchonian fashion after both an artillery piece and a fancy cocktail. His partner in revolution is Perfidia Beverly Hills, played by Teyana Taylor in the most badass screen performance since Charlize Theron took the wheel of the War Rig in Mad Max: Fury Road. “Guns are fun,” she says. “The pussy is for war.”
Pat is rightly in awe of Perfidia, but nothing is enough for her. While busting out the detention center, she corners and sexually humiliates Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). Turns out, the rock ribbed military man loves being humiliated, and the freedom-loving revolutionary thrives on domination. The two clandestinely meet for a series of kinky trysts, after which Perfidia falls pregnant. This leads to the instantly iconic shot of Perfidia bracing a heavy machine gun against her swollen belly while she fires torrents of hot lead downrange. “I’m not sure she knows she’s pregnant,” marvels Pat.
The woman her own mother calls the personification of revolution isn’t cut out for motherhood. There’s too much fear, too many enemies. She leaves her new baby Charlene with Pat and her grandmother. But the freedom fighter’s luck runs out when a bank robbery goes horribly wrong, and she is captured by the FBI. She is facing death until Lockjaw intervenes, offering her “the embrace of the Federal Government” if she will name names.
Both Perfidia and Pat go underground in their own way. Perfidia’s witness protection includes conjugal visits from Lockjaw, until she flies that coop, too. The underground gives Pat a new name, Bob Ferguson, and a long list of code phrases to memorize as he retreats to the lawless forests of Northern California.
Sixteen years later, Bob is a wake-and-bake burnout. His daughter is now known as Willa (Chase Infiniti), a karate star who is looking more like her mother every day. Meanwhile, Lockjaw is trying to gain access to an elite, white-supremacist secret society known as the Christmas Adventurers Club. But persistent rumors of a “half-breed” child imperils his membership bid, so he sets out to tie up that loose end in the guise of an immigration crackdown. Lockjaw rolls up what’s left of the French 75 until he locates Bob and Willa. The two are separated as they flee Lockjaw’s operators, leading to an epic three-way chase across the achingly beautiful California landscape.
Anderson’s direction is perfection. One startling image after another jumps off the screen. Skateboarders fly through the air, silhouetted by fire and tear gas. Sean Penn in close up, physically vibrating with racist rage. Cars bob and weave through the desert hills in hypnotic rthymn.
He does all this while also being stupendously funny. DiCaprio brings the slapstick as a radical gone to seed who understands the revolutionary need to charge your phone, and who foils his own getaway because he needs a beer for the road. He skewers the ridiculousness of white supremacy as a secret society who worship Santa Claus.
As our democracy creaks under the backlash to our most recent revolutionary moment, the 2020 BLM protests, Pynchon couldn’t be more relevant. Thomas Jefferson, whose sweeping visions and profound moral failings embodied the American character, conceived of these United States as a land of perpetual revolution, always changing, always striving for perfection we will never attain. Freedom is not a promised land we get to, it’s a process. It must always be fought for, but the war threatens to take our souls. America is One Battle After Another.
