Back to selection
With His “Disrespectful” Remix of Pynchon’s Vineland, PTA Mastered the Art of Adaptation
One Battle After Another Adapted Screenplay. It’s often an afterthought: an extra category on the Oscar ballot, an edge in your betting pool. Unlike the rest of the Academy, screenwriters get two shots at an award: one for original screenplay, one for adaptation. If you haven’t sacrificed your career to the cruel gods of screenwriting, “adapting” may seem less … impressive. Isn’t it easier to have a well-paved Autobahn to guide you, rather than hacking your way through virgin story wilderness? Can’t you just “cut-and-paste?” Do we need a whole other category for that?
I’ll stop there before the WGA revokes my card. Every working screenwriter knows it’s not true. But when the public thinks of adapting scripts, if they think about it at all, they likely imagine Charlie Kaufman dropping himself into Susan Orleans’s The Orchid Thief and calling it Adaptation. For which he won an Oscar! But thanks to Paul Thomas Anderson—the odds-on favorite to win a whole slew of Oscars for adapting Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland into One Battle After Another—we have a case study that illustrates exactly why this art form deserves its own competitive lane.
I’ll start with the obvious: even the thinnest novel is densely packed. There’s just too much good stuff! That’s partly why early studio heads preferred short stories and potboilers to classic doorstoppers like War and Peace. While you can write a novel to any length (and Tolstoy tried), knowing the reader will stop and start at will, in film you have a painfully finite amount of time before the audience itches to leave. Even a page-turner like Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley resulted in an Anthony Minghella rough cut of almost four hours, as well as a Netflix show by master screenwriter Steven Zaillian twice that length.
More to the point: screenplays use words for a completely different purpose than novels, articles, or short stories do. Those forms revel in interiority: narrators (omniscient, first person, or other) tell us everything. Character, plot. Lovely descriptions of leaves. In cinema, voice-over is often seen as lazy or ineffectual. It’s not always fair, but it comes from the professional understanding that “narration” doesn’t work the same way when you hear it on screen. As every screenwriting professor tells their students on day one, film is a visual medium: we watch, like voyeurs, through a director’s frame. Describing how to fill that frame—with action, process, something fun—is your job. A screenplay is an engineering plan, a road map; and the source material isn’t a clean map to anything. Handing a raw novel to a professional film crew would be like giving a bus full of tourists the Complete Works of Shakespeare to get them through London.
But with One Battle After Another, we’re not talking about just any book. Vineland is a Pynchon tome. Considered one of the greatest living American novelists, if not the greatest, Thomas Pynchon writes books that Hollywood has long viewed as straight-up unadaptable. They are often gargantuan—at 400 pages, Vineland is on the briefer side—and as dense as an organic chemistry textbook. In a single sentence, he’ll cross continents and employ literal armies of characters that’d bankrupt any studio trying to capture even a fraction of his scale. When people balk that One Battle After Another cost over $100 million, I tell them to read Gravity’s Rainbow. Anderson gave us a distilled dose of audiovisual Pynchon at a bargain basement price.
In fact, he did it twice! If you’ve forgotten, Anderson’s first attempt to tackle the Pychonian white whale was the hippie-stoner mystery Inherent Vice. While I’m a huge fan of both Pynchon’s book of the same name and the movie, I’ll be the first to admit it didn’t connect like One Battle After Another—and certainly didn’t march towards Oscar domination. If you’ve read the book, you know Inherent Vice is as literal an adaptation as a fanboy could dream of: the plot and characters were rigorously faithful and vast swaths of dialogue were lifted verbatim, down to the trademark zany Pynchon names.
Beyond the written word, Anderson also rendered that era, the late 60s-early 70s Los Angeles that he was born and raised in, in highest filmic fidelity. He perfectly captured the feel and zeitgeist of Manson-era L.A., when Pynchon reportedly holed up in a Manhattan Beach bungalow to write Gravity’s Rainbow. (The author allegedly makes a cameo, which Anderson denies. That hasn’t stopped Pynchon’s legion of fans from coming to their own conspiratorial conclusions.) Anderson even crafted the film as an homage to his filmmaking mentor and hero, a director whose style defined that period in The Long Goodbye and California Split: Robert Altman, as nonconformist and anti-fascist a director as Pynchon is a writer.
One Battle After Another is an entirely different story. You can squint and see the same shape to the characters, tone, and plot of Vineland. And Anderson’s own take on Pynchon’s bizzarro names—Perfidia Beverly Hills—could easily fit in any of his novels. But Vineland’s sprawling story of a counterculture burnout fighting against the sinister powers that destroyed his tiny family, and a daughter learning about her mother’s treachery, has been dramatically shifted from the Reagan era to present day. The looping, continent-hopping Pynchon narrative has also been expertly pruned to an essential, emotional core: a father who will do anything to save his daughter. It’s the same cinematic engine that powers Liam Neeson’s Taken films, and it culminates in a car chase that rivals The Fast and the Furious.
Yet, in one sense One Battle After Another is, in fact, Anderson’s more faithful adaptation. In employing every trick of his trade, he more cleanly captured the ineffably idiosyncratic spirit of Pynchon’s work: a sad disgust with American fascism, an affinity for good-hearted wastoids, and the poignant humanism that even many literary critics fail to see because they can’t get past the goofy names. All of Pynchon’s work is fundamentally about the pale light of love that emanates from those who can’t help but be human and must endure the chaos unleashed upon the world by the stupid, the selfish, and the cruel.
Moreover, Anderson made Pynchon’s soul his own: he took Vineland’s white, blue-collar father-daughter story and superimposed his own family’s experience of our more integrated America. The move yields heartbreakingly personal grace notes, like when a frazzled Leonardo DiCaprio admits to being confounded by his Black daughter’s hair. (Though my personal favorite grace note is Benicio Del Toro’s devilish grin as he dances for the cops: a Latino Harriet Tubman sacrificing himself to the law with a smirk is vintage PTA.) In re-thinking the setting, he’s shown how the great novelist’s themes are evergreen. One Battle After Another was a long-gestating project, set in motion well before Donald Trump got re-elected; yet its story feels devastatingly relevant to what we’re now watching unfold on the streets of Minneapolis.
Anderson will likely win a Best Director Oscar for which he’s long overdue. But it all started with an adaptation Anderson himself guiltily described at one awards season Q&A on the Warner Bros. lot as “disrespectful.” That may be the best reason screenplay adaptations not only deserve but need their own award. There are few things harder in life than disrespecting someone or something you love as much as PTA clearly loves Pynchon. But sometimes, for the greater good, you absolutely must. Because that’s how you push forward to the new, the better, the richer. That is how we all adapt.
