One Battle After Another & the Phantom Behind It
Paul Thomas Anderson meets Thomas Pynchon in a chaotic, compassionate fever dream about paranoia, laughter, and the strange salvation of art.
One Battle After Another is pretty much an unprecedented masterpiece. All the rave headlines about it being Paul Thomas Anderson’s finest film were right, and our skepticism was wrong. It’s a loving, laughing, flaming skull of a cinematic experience that punctures pieties with humor and oppression with heart. The actors deliver command performances, rendering patently absurd characters with heart and affect. It is one of the finest pieces of art we’ve seen in some time.
You oughta make plans to see it ASAP. Especially because of the film’s extraordinarily uncanny prescience. Without giving too much away, it’s all about political violence in a topsy-turvy, oppressive America that hits way, way too close to home.
Defined by paranoia and chaos, the world Paul Thomas Anderson created is a high-proof distillate of its source material, the novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon.
And, for those who don’t know, Thomas Pynchon is one very interesting dude.
Mainly because no one knows who he is. Or what he looks like. Or where he lives. Or what he’s into. Pynchon has been a total recluse since his earliest publication, way back in 1963.
Only a few photos (from his time in the Navy and a college photo from Cornell) exist. He doesn’t do interviews or public appearances or publish much that isn’t a fully hatched novel. He’s asked his publishers not to use his photo, and no errant paparazzi have caught him (insofar as paparazzi are hounding down crusty old author men) on camera.
Thomas Pynchon is not a pen name, but it might as well be, because the man behind the books is both a total ghost and towering father of postmodern American literature.
A funny grad school anecdote about Pyncho’s cone of silence.. We’d been assigned one of Pynchon’s books and, towards the end of our class, were asking our novelist-professor (who]—just to establish his street cred—recently won a Pulitzer) about Pynchon’s reclusiveness.
Our professor said that he had, in fact, met Thomas Pynchon at some kind of literati dinner party. Obviously, the crowd went wild. We pressed our professor for details, which he respectfully declined to provide out of respect for Pynchon’s privacy.
“All I will say,” our professor said, “is that Pynchon is very Pynchon-esque.”
Which is illegible to anyone other than a lit nerd such as yours truly.
But in our once-sharp/now-rusty understanding, Pynchon-esque implies a kind of lush brilliance of language, stories, and information that is fractalized, warped, rendered absurd, and shot through with a touch of hyper-intellectual frat-house humor…but is definitively paranoid.
From his early masterwork, The Crying of Lot 49, to Inherent Vice (also, notably, brought to cinematic life by Paul Thomas Anderson), Pynchon’s stories place their protagonists in totally fragmentary worlds, where webs upon webs of conspiracy render reality itself untrustworthy.
Behind the beautiful, messy chaos of these worlds, there is another vibration at work. There’s a sense that, somewhere amongst the chaotic signals of consensus reality that Pynchon dissects so brilliantly, nefarious forces of greed and oppression are one step ahead of the mayhem.
Cloaked in misinformation and misdirection, yet fluent in the creation of chaos as a smokescreen for control. Working behind the scenes against the good and decent expressions of the human heart.
In Pynchon’s worlds, coincidence and synchronism link vast webs of human energy. And the paranoid reader is always right.
The author and his anonymity, too, embody this singular sensibility. His anonymity seems positioned to resist his own notion of information and systems as near elemental forces that overwhelm the individual. By removing himself from the equation, he’s able to resist the ego-trapping information flood of the modern world the same way a drain resists water.
Which brings us back to One Battle After Another. In the same way, Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now reinterpreted Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness, for a new era and thus magnified its cultural impact…Anderson’s film does the same with Pynchon’s novel, Vineland.
What emerges is a profane, compassionate, and swaggering artistic middle finger to authority. Manic absurdity is deftly juxtaposed against brute reality in that screams: our world is not so far off from this madcap maze of horseshit.
The film refuses to take itself or anything else too seriously, while remaining utterly sincere in tone. It calls bullshit in every direction, from top to bottom. It’s a burning testament to free speech and creative expression, yes, but also a powerful reminder of something key:
Laughter can be the most revolutionary force of them all. That laughter defangs authority. That more than death or punishment, the villains of the world can’t stand ridicule.
Laughter is their kryptonite.
Which is what it seems that Pynchon, for decades now, has been out there trying to say. That, amongst the mind-dismantling stimuli and simulacra, the consumerism and hollowness, the hopelessness of resisting systems far more powerful than any individual human, all we can do is keep a sense of humor, be good to those around us, and keep fighting the good fight.
Whatever it may be,
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