"If the experience of watching One Battle is so propulsive that you leave the theater feeling like you haven't taken a breath in hours, Vineland is far more digressive, switching genres by the page, with a plot that's more varied than the relatively simple man-tries-to-rescue-daughter story of One Battle. For one thing, Vineland has significant supernatural elements, including the existence of a class of person called a Thanatoid-souls caught between life and death."
"The script for the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie One Battle After Anotherhas been percolating for more than 20 years, and Anderson has said he only added elements from Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland partway through the process. Vineland was about 1960s radicals dealing with the increased repressions of the Reagan era, and Anderson's loose adaptation-the film's credits note that it was only "inspired by" Pynchon's book-is about radicals in the present day, dealing with the fallout of actions they performed 16 years ago."
Paul Thomas Anderson's script for One Battle After Another evolved over more than twenty years, with Pynchon's Vineland elements added partway through the process. Vineland focused on 1960s radicals confronting Reagan-era repression, while One Battle relocates radical fallout to the present day, centered on actions taken sixteen years earlier. Both narratives feature splintered families: a militant mother who betrays comrades then hides, a father who slides from activism into reclusive burnout, and a teenage daughter whose politics are emerging. Vineland is digressive, shifts genres, and includes supernatural Thanatoids—souls trapped between life and death—alongside a compelling, addictive Tube. One Battle treats its ghosts metaphorically, with Bob Ferguson functioning as a liminal, alive-but-stuck figure.
Read at Slate Magazine
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