Thomas Pynchon. Vineland. Let’s start there. Let’s start with what was happening in the late sixties, the seventies, the eighties. Watergate. Kent State. Iran Contra. Etcetera. Pynchon is a dividing line. A lot of literary types are not that keen. His writing skirts around the shibboleths of standard lit crit. You can’t really teach someone to write like Pynchon. There’s not much point analysing character or narrative development in his novels. They’re skittish, maverick, and exude a kind of brilliance which is hard to pin down, which might not move you to tears but will have you going - did I really just read that? It’s been a long time since I read Vineland and, guess what, I’ve been thinking about it a lot as we enter this phase of high-USA-fascism. It was all there, in Vineland, I recall, albeit rendered playfully, tucked away in a corner of California, private battles between the state and those who seek to live at the edge of that state. (Many of whom might be rednecks, or would-be Unabombers, but also including those who seek a kinder version of society than late capitalism permits.) Clearly I wasn’t the only one. PTA is a fan, he’s adapted Pynchon before, you can see something of Pynchon in the grandiose, meandering narratives of Boogie Nights and Magnolia.
So the association does not feel casual. One of the talents of an artist is to be on the pulse of where society/ humanity is headed. (“The unacknowledged legislators”.) I am not sure when PTA would have started adapting Vineland, but one imagines it was in the days of the Migra, rather than ICE. Before the full Pynchonesque civil war truly blew up last year. He, like Pynchon, must have sensed what was out there. The sociopathic values given flesh in Sean Penn’s brilliant performance as Lockjaw, the desperation of DiCaprio’s Bob, a desperation that so many who might have coasted through the Obama and the Biden years must be feeling now. (Including PTA himself?). Whilst paying homage to the radicals of yesteryear, the Weathermen and the Panthers, the film locates the punctum of the present conflict in the war on immigration, and specifically Latinos. The Latinos who have occupied California and the southern USA since before the Anglos, (albeit they were colonisers too), against whom the forces of WASP USA are now turning their guns. Benicio del Toro makes amends for his part in Sicario with a beautiful turn as a laconic radical, protecting his people from the state’s grasp. This is where the war is being waged within the USA’s borders, even if other wars are being waged on behalf of this would-be turbo capitalism in other territories in other, more horrific ways.
There’s a moment in the film where Bob is watching The Battle of Algiers. In theory it’s a very knowing, on-the-nose reference, except for the fact that the vast majority of Anderson’s public will never have heard of the film, just as they will never have heard of Pynchon. Hollywood and PTA could not produce a film like The Battle of Algiers. There’s a need for humour, glamour, car chases. PTA supplies this need. It’s a relentlessly enjoyable watch and in this way it gets past the unacknowledged financial censors. It could, were one a radical radical, be accused of extracting humour and profit from the culture war it depicts. But PTA’s sympathies are never in doubt. He knows which side he wants his bread buttered. And he recognises, in a finale which in many ways is the least Pynchonesque moment in the whole film, that there are battles to come, just as the battles being waged are a product of those that were fought (and lost?) before, in the time that Pynchon wrote Vineland. We are on the verge of times that we had hoped we could avoid, but history tells us will always return. My generation, the same as PTA’s and DiCaprio’s and Penn’s, will not be on the front line. It will be a younger generation which will have to choose which side they are on, and who will have to fight to defend their beliefs.
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