One battle after another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025) is a very loose adaptation of Vignelandnovel by Thomas Pynchon published in 1990. But the most interesting thing is that Anderson’s version dialogues with the entire Pinchonian universe and not only with the book he wrote, transmitting his particular way of understanding politics and the world, especially with his masterpiece, The rainbow of gravity.
Between Vigneland and its film adaptation there are obvious similarities: in Pynchon’s novel the action takes place in a small Californian town of the same name. Zoyd Wheeler (who in the film Anderson transforms into Bob, played by Leonardo DiCaprio) is a former hippie who every year pretends to be suffering from dementia to collect a state benefit. He lives with his teenage daughter and his ex-wife (who is called Frenesí in the book) is also a former political activist who abandoned them years ago. Everything changes when the ghost of his ex-wife reappears, along with that of the lover she left Bob for (in the film Colonel Lockjaw, Sean Penn), a federal prosecutor obsessed with her.
Although the premise is well recognisable, from here the differences multiply. In the film the present seems to be a reality very similar to ours, but dystopian, in which the repression of migrants has reached a point of no return, while in Pynchon’s novel the action is set during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, with the echoes of the failure of the 1960s still resonating in the “revolutionary” past of the protagonists. This temporal distance is important: Vigneland This is a country that has tamed dissidence, which perhaps was condemned at its base. His characters are not heroes, but depoliticized survivors: the protagonist has never been a true militant; His rebellion was limited to music and drugs, and his missing ex-girlfriend was never as heroic as the one in the film; If he changed sides it was out of desire and not out of fear. In the book, then, both characters embody, each in their own way, the disenchantment of a generation that believed it could change the world and ended up being absorbed by the same system it opposed. Even when it comes to the parallel political organizations that surround the characters in both the book and the film, the difference remains: while Pynchon’s characters are paranoid without reason (and their organizations and protocols are ridiculous and border on the absurd), Anderson’s characters have reasons to be wary, as they live in a present where surveillance, manipulation and control are more than real.
In Pynchon’s novels it seems that every revolution is destined to be swallowed up by the system, transformed into a new product or a new form of control.
Another notable change between the film and the book is the issue of race, which Pynchon only addresses in this chapter Vigneland tangentially. The title of the book and the fictional county in which it is set refer to the Viking settlement of America, which perhaps draws a line between that first act of colonization and those remnants of hippieism who believe themselves emancipated. However, there are almost no racialized characters in the novel, and those that do exist (somewhat more fascinating and useful to society than their non-racialized companions, it must be said) are secondary and have been merged into the figure of Benicio del Toro. However, it is easy to understand why Paul Thomas Anderson decided to focus on this question, which Pynchon explored in his most ambitious work, The rainbow of gravitywhere colonialism, white supremacy and black fetishization are the central motifs.
This is not the only reference to Rainbowperhaps because Anderson is aware that, as much as he would like to bring it to the big screen, it is an impossible novel to adapt. One of the most obvious nods is Leonardo DiCaprio’s nickname rocket man, like that of the protagonist of Pynchon’s great novel. Furthermore, some of the film’s most iconic scenes (such as the escape through the toilet) are unmistakable nods to the Rainbow and don’t do it Vigneland. Even the title One battle after another, derives (or so I dare to venture) from a passage in Rainbow in which Pynchon reflects on how human history is ultimately reduced to a succession of wars, each repeating the mistakes of the previous ones: “It must not be forgotten that the real business of War is buying and selling. (…) The massive mass of death in wartime is useful in many ways. It serves as a spectacle, amounting to diversionary maneuvers from the real movements of War. It provides raw material that will be recorded by History so that it can be taught to children as a chain of violence, of one battle after another.”
This quote, from which the film’s title perhaps derives, shows perhaps the most important difference between Pynchon’s vision and that of Anderson. In the film there is a sort of nostalgia for the lost revolution, a melancholy for that collective energy that once challenged the system and which ends with dignity in the same film, even if the enemy has not stopped winning. On the other hand, Pynchon’s reading is critical and even cruel towards revolutionaries: reading his novels, it seems that every revolution is destined to be swallowed up by the system, transformed into a new product or a new form of control (or, in any case, into a cultural cliché, a bad joke). Human history, he suggests, is nothing more than a succession of battles, one after another, in which the victors leave behind a series of unredeemed corpses and traumas.
Sara Barquinero She is a writer. His latest novel is titled ‘Los Escorpiones’ (Lumen, 2024).
