The Wild Political Story Behind 'One Battle After Another'

The novels of Thomas Pynchon—which include towering canonical works such as Gravity’s Rainbow and V.— are challenging. They’re also brilliant: intoxicating, hilarious, maddening, and vulgar, aggressively lampooning the fascist-capitalist sweep of history and rich (sometimes overwhelmingly so) with cultural references. These challenges are key to his appeal among devotees, including Paul Thomas Anderson, the beloved director whose latest project, One Battle After Another , is a loose adaptation of Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland . The film marks his second time grappling with the postmodern author’s ideas on screen, following 2014’s Inherent Vice , a rueful elegy to California counterculture, which was itself the first, and to date only, official adaptation of Pynchon in cinema.