{"id":183836,"date":"2025-09-26T21:40:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T21:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/183836\/"},"modified":"2025-09-26T21:40:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-26T21:40:10","slug":"all-the-changes-to-thomas-pynchons-vineland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/183836\/","title":{"rendered":"All the Changes to Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThis article contains spoilers for \u201cOne Battle After Another<\/a>,\u201d now in theaters.<\/p>\n

\n\tEver since \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d entered development, rumors percolated that Paul Thomas Anderson<\/a>\u2018s new film would be based on Thomas Pynchon<\/a>\u2018s 1990 novel \u201cVineland.\u201d The director, who is a fan of the post-modern author and previously adapted his 2009 novel \u201cInherent Vice\u201d with the 2014 film of the same name, has long expressed interest in making a \u201cVineland\u201d film. The Film Stage<\/a> reports that during a Q&A after an early \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d screening, Anderson confirmed, \u201cI struggled for years to try to adapt it.\u201d Conceptualizing \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d as a proper \u201cVineland\u201d adaptation waxed and waned over time as details about the film emerged. Now that the film is out, those bold enough to read Pynchon\u2019s maddeningly complex work can finally provide a diagnosis.<\/p>\n

\n\tNotably, \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d\u2018s credits do explicitly read, \u201cInspired by the novel \u2018Vineland\u2019 by Thomas Pynchon.\u201d While that seems definitive, \u201cinspired\u201d is truly the apt word. As Anderson noted in the same Q&A, \u201cI\u00a0loved\u00a0that book. I\u00a0loved\u00a0it, and I loved it so much that I thought about adapting him. But the problem with loving a book so much when you go to adapt it is that you have to be much rougher on the book to adapt it. You have to kind of not be gentle.\u201d Accordingly, the film retains certain elements of the novel, but omits or changes others. <\/p>\n

\t\tThe Characters\t<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film\u2019s main retention is the characters. Though their names are changed, Leonardo DiCaprio\u2019s Bob Ferguson is a clear ringer for \u201cVineland\u201d protagonist Zoyd Wheeler: an ex-revolutionary living out retirement in northern California. The film also includes Bob\u2019s reluctant daughter Willa Ferguson (Chase Infiniti), who parallels Zoyd\u2019s daughter Prairie Wheeler; Willa\u2019s estranged mother and ex-revolution leader, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), who stands in for the book\u2019s Frenesi Gates; and antagonist Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who mimics the book\u2019s federal prosecutor Brock Vond. Other characters also have their parallels, but these are the most identifiable throughout.<\/p>\n

\n\tThese principal movie characters share similar dynamics as those in the book. Bob and Zoyd are both paranoid in the wake of their rebellious pasts. Respectively, they miss Perfidia and Frenesi deeply, and fear for Willa and Prairie. Willa and Prarie, meanwhile, are both skeptical of their fathers\u2019 fears, but come to understand them as his past reemerges. The film and the book also both establish love triangles between Bob, Perfidia and Lockjaw and Zoyd, Frenesi and Vond, respectively. However, Frenesi and Vond\u2019s romance is far more sincere in \u201cVineland\u201d than Perfidia and Lockjaw\u2019s is in \u201cOne Battle After Another.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tThis brings us to the differences between the characters, which point to pivotal schisms between Anderson and Pynchon as storytellers. As is the case in most of Pynchon\u2019s novels, \u201cVineland\u2019s\u201d characters are rather archetypal. The denizens of Pynchon\u2019s worlds often serve to personify and expose a nuanced message about society or humanity. We don\u2019t easily identify with them, but instead, see our ideas and ideologies questioned and reflected through them.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnderson, by contrast, gives great depth to his characters. Bob, Perfidia, Willa, Lockjaw and everyone in between showcase identifiable emotions and growth throughout the film. A portion of this dichotomy may be due to the translation from book-to-screen, as it\u2019s easier to process the emotions and reactions of actors on a screen than of names in text. Nevertheless, Pynchon\u2019s characters are more like the mysterious figments of an avant-garde film; they rarely feel like actual people.<\/p>\n

\t\tThe Plot\t<\/p>\n

\n\tThese avant-garde, post-modern elements of \u201cVineland\u201d may be what distinguishes it most from \u201cOne Battle After Another.\u201d While the plots are similar\u2014 an ex-revolutionary is forced back into action after his daughter is kidnapped by a former nemesis\u2014 the film lands as a much more straightforward action movie, following relatively conventional story beats.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d is a rescue narrative. We follow Bob trying to save Willa, as Willa learns about her parents\u2019 history. \u201cVineland\u201d has the same premise, but once Prairie is taken away, Zoyd practically disappears from the story. What would linearly be considered the second act of \u201cVineland\u201d is mostly made up of flashbacks, where Prairie learns who her mother was, what her revolution stood for and how she developed her contentious relationship with Vond. <\/p>\n

\n\tThen, when Zoyd eventually returns, there is hardly a proper resolution. While neither Zoyd nor Bob end up being their daughters\u2019 true saviors, in the film, Willa at least fights her way out and reunites with Bob as a changed person. By comparison, \u201cVineland\u201d ends ambivalently. In the final pages, as Vond is pursuing Prairie in a helicopter, the government suddenly cuts his funding. When Vond tries taking control of the vehicle to maintain the chase, he crashes, leaving Prairie free, yet stranded in the California wilderness. The serendipitous turn of events provides an ending, but hardly closure \u2014 it\u2019s classic Pynchon.<\/p>\n

\t\tThe Worlds\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cVineland\u2019s\u201d conclusion is indicative of much of the novel. Like much of Pynchon\u2019s work, \u201cVineland\u201d takes place in a bizarre alternate reality, one where southern California seceded from the U.S. in the 1960s, where the revolutionaries were a film collective hellbent on exposing fascism on celluloid and where the federal government takes the War on Drugs quite literally.<\/p>\n

\n\tTaking place in 1984, the book is a satirical commentary on America\u2019s shift from the \u201960s to the \u201980s. It reflects the failure of the hippie revolution to inspire change and that same generation\u2019s regression into Reagan-era conservatism. Zoyd is an archetype for a 1960s hippie 20 years later, ideologically castrated and dependent on the government he fought against. Meanwhile, the rise of technology and television \u2014 both of which play major roles in the book \u2014 has institutionalized the cinematic means that the revolution once weaponized.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cOne Battle After Another,\u201d by contrast, doesn\u2019t lean quite as allegorical. While there is a 16-year chronological leap in the film\u2019s first act, it doesn\u2019t make a dichotomous statement about the two timelines\u2019 respective decades. The movie\u2019s settings are relatively interchangeable, both appearing contemporary, if not eerily set fifteen-minutes-in-the-future. Considering that the film was conceived several years ago, Anderson\u2019s depictions of federal government raids, aggressive approaches to deportation and reckless law enforcement all feel unnervingly prescient for present-day America.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film\u2019s chilling representation of American politics may be an unintentional departure from the novel\u2019s more whimsical energy. Though \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d certainly has a sense of humor, its central conflict taken from \u201cVineland\u201d feels less absurd today than it may have in 1990. Even the film\u2019s eccentricities that do feel out of a Pynchon novel \u2014 notably Lockjaw\u2019s desire to join a secret society of white supremacists called the Christmas Adventurers Club \u2014 read as plausible in the current political climate.<\/p>\n

\n\tMaybe, 35 years after \u201cVineland\u2019s\u201d publication, reality has caught up to post-modern fiction, and we are actually living in Thomas Pynchon\u2019s world.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat world is one that does not lend itself easily to cinematic adaptation. It\u2019s a world that blends high and low culture, with profanity and poetry warped into one. It\u2019s an encyclopedic world that readers were thrust into with his debut novel \u201cV.\u201d in 1963 and reached a zenith a decade later with the publication of \u201cGravity\u2019s Rainbow.\u201d It\u2019s a world that continues expanding to this day, as the elusive 88-year old author is releasing his ninth novel, \u201cShadow Ticket,\u201d later this year. Despite extreme density, nothing is explicated in Pynchon\u2019s world, making it a hard narrative experience to emulate in a medium like film.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile Anderson\u2019s world can be post-modern and surreal, as showcased in films like \u201cMagnolia,\u201d \u201cThe Master\u201d and, indeed, \u201cInherent Vice,\u201d his filmography is tonally broad, with intense period pieces like \u201cThere Will Be Blood\u201d and \u201cPhantom Thread\u201d standing alongside offbeat dramedies like \u201cPunch Drunk Love\u201d and \u201cLicorice Pizza.\u201d In \u201cOne Battle After Another,\u201d Anderson takes select elements of Pynchon\u2019s world \u2014 the characters, the premise and the broad themes \u2014 and grounds them. As he stated in press materials, \u201c\u2018Vineland\u2018\u00a0was going to be hard to adapt. Instead, I stole the parts that really resonated with me and started putting all these ideas together.\u201d The result is still thought-provoking, but a more palatable, contemporary and ultimately entertaining experience than the hefty, yet rewarding, labor of reading Pynchon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This article contains spoilers for \u201cOne Battle After Another,\u201d now in theaters. Ever since \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":183282,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206,89051,56940,62793],"class_list":{"0":"post-183836","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-one-battle-after-another","11":"tag-paul-thomas-anderson","12":"tag-thomas-pynchon"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183836"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183836\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/183282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}