Leonardo DiCaprio and Benicio Del Toro in 'One Battle After Another.' Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment At the start of the second act of One Battle After Another, filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson's dense action thriller about leftist radicals on the run in California, a villainous military man called Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) gets the call he's been dreaming of: He's finally landed an admissions meeting with the Christmas Adventurers Club, an invisible group of wealthy white supremacists with untold power in America's top echelons. Lockjaw's deepest fear during the intense and not-so-subtly racist and anti-Semitic interview process is that his secret affair a decade-and-a-half-ago with a Black radical feminist named Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) from the French 75 would be discovered by the all-powerful, all-knowing Christmas Adventurers. Related Stories Movies How Paul Thomas Anderson's 'One Battle After Another' Brought Leonardo DiCaprio to TikTok Movies With 'One Battle After Another,' Paul Thomas Anderson Captures the Shortcomings of His Generation If all of the nouns in the above description seem totally absurd, that's because they are, as is the notion of a clandestine hate group greeting each other with, "Hail, St. Nick!" But these names, which signal both over-the-top satire and dramatization of extreme politics, are some of the small nods and Easter Eggs that Anderson includes in his script for One Battle After Another, which distill the preoccupations of novelist Thomas Pynchon. One of the 20th century's most lauded authors, who may also be the least read and most misunderstood of the great American writers, Pynchon's unifying themes are brought to bear on today's political theater and tested against a unique family and intergenerational dilemma in Anderson's action-thriller. Pynchon references were certainly not part of One Battle After Another's marketing pitch. But from the film's broad themes and the tiny nuances of the script (Leonardo DiCaprio's stoner revolutionary shares the nickname "Rocketman" with Tyrone Slothrop, the hapless hero of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow), it's all there and it's undeniable. There's a lead character's creeping paranoia, a plot driven by nefarious and clandestine powers that be, the encroachment of the past on the present. All are the hallmarks of the author's books, from early works V. and The Crying of Lot 49 through his magnum opus, Gravity's Rainbow, and up to his comeback gumshoe thrillers Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge. Blink and you'll miss it, but in the film's credits is the fact that One Battle After Another is a loose adaptation of - "inspired by" - Pynchon's Vineland. That 1990 novel - not exactly beloved or considered essential Pynchon, but still a rich, wonderful and sometimes weird book- is a father-daughter story with flashbacks and a winding narrative that's steeped in the ideas of where exactly the politics of the 1960s had landed by Reagan's 1980s. And, for the author who was deemed so impenetrably "unreadable" by the Pulitzer Advisory Board that no literature prize was handed out in 1973 when Gravity's Rainbow was unanimously voted the winner, Vineland is an accessible, breezy book. And light, at just 385 pages. It also utilizes some of the classic Pynchonian themes of paranoia, radical counterculture politics, generational trauma, the signature uneasy mix of comedy and menace, and the question of how individuals survive within sprawling and oppressive systems. One Battle After Another marks Anderson's second Pynchon adaptation after 2014's Inherent Vice. That film goes to great lengths to stick to the book's winding and intricate plot. Kudos to Anderson for that, but audiences were left a little puzzled - fair enough for a film where the off-screen narrator has to psychically connect with Joaquin Phoenix's stoned protagonist to move the plot along. With his second swing adapting Pynchon, the writer-director managed to take many of the aforementioned ideas and themes that permeate the author's oeuvre and transplant them into struggles unfolding in a version of our present day. "Realistically, for me, Vineland was going to be hard to adapt," Anderson noted in a recent conversation with Steven Spielberg after a screening around the film's release. "Instead, I stole the parts that really resonated with me and started putting all these ideas together. With [Pynchon's] blessing." One of the signature devices that he stole for One Battle's script and germane to Pynchon's work, like The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, and Vineland, is the suggestion that unseen forces-government agencies, elite cabals, powerful corporations - are pulling the strings in America and have been doing so across history. One Battle After Anot