Paul Thomas Anderson's Hush-Hush DiCaprio Movie Has a Title and a Plot, and Yeah, You Should Probably Read ‘Vineland’ Soon

On Friday, lit and film nerds the world over enjoyed an escalating Vince McMahon-meme climax, as news leaked out from a screening in Phoenix that Paul Thomas Anderson’s next project—now officially titled One Battle After Another—will indeed be, as long rumored, an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, a text the auteur has been circling for over a decade. And while anyone who’s already read Pynchon’s 1990 classic featuring Zoyd Wheeler, a burnt hippie trying to survive Ronald Reagan’s American dystopia, no doubt rejoiced immediately at the prospect of Leonardo DiCaprio in a day-Glo muumuu, jumping through a plate glass window in full “Rick Dalton having a meltdown” mode, others now face an age-old dilemma, because they haven’t read the book.

When it comes to chronology, if you want to both read a book and watch the movie based on it, I’m firmly in the “movie first, then book” camp. A book worthy of adaptation almost always clears the film adapting it, and It’s easy enough to dismiss a bad movie and enjoy a good book afterwards, on its own merits. Coming in with pre-conceptions of story and character then being let down by the film version, even when it’s a good film, is far more common, at least for me. But if history is any indicator, you should break with this logic and immediately go to the nearest bookstore, grab a copy of Vineland (warning: Currently out of stock at Strand) and get to work, because the last time PTA adapted one of the reclusive master Pynchon’s nine novels—2014’s one part harebrained noir, one part shaggy stoner comedy Inherent Vice—reading the source material was a prerequisite.

Anyone who has picked up and put down Gravity’s Rainbow a half dozen times before settling on reading it with a companion guide—as if it was written in a foreign language—can tell you any semblance of a remotely faithful Pynchon adaptation to screen presents a daunting, near-impossible challenge. The son of an engineer, born in 1937 in Glen Cove, Pynchon is an unapologetically experimental postmodernist who writes challenging, seemingly unfilmable books that, depending on your bandwidth when the work finds you, either breeze by incoherently or sink in and changes your life. But if any of his novels appeared even remotely suited to a straightforward adaptation, it would probably be Inherent Vice, a late masterpiece and one of the few novels he’s written that could be (very charitably) described as accessible.

Which isn’t to say making the film was a simple task. Vice features Larry “Doc” Sportello, a stoned Phillip Marlowe in Gordita Beach California, a world built by Pynchon as a large cult or a universe in miniature. Doc is the last decent, numbed man trying to live the fading dream of the 60s, grasping at the fraying ties holding the diverse coalition of his community together. He has to track down a missing dame who is also his ex, but that old noir cliché belies a story rife with Pynchonian themes and complications, presenting American life in Nixonland as something you have no choice but to escape from. And the industrial vice complex providing that escape is a fantastic, incestuous, vertically integrated Stonecutter conspiracy grift with its fangs in everything from racial gang warfare to gentrification to surf rock to dental hygiene. It’s a paranoid bad trip stuffed with perfectly surreal Comp Lit PHD dad joke Pynchon character names and food orders. Everyone is undercover with an agenda withholding information and playing each other for competing corporate or government interests, and the many interwoven Hannah Barbera plot tendrils collide via a series of postmodern serendipitous coincidences and a constant torrent of clues hurled at the reader like an crystal ashtray, which clatter and collide with little hand holding because ultimately it’s all meaningless close-up magic scaffolding and Doc is powerless and everything is futile and undone and leads nowhere.

Anderson’s solution to this problem was more translation than adaptation—preserving large chunks of dialogue and narration intact—a wildly different job than he did seven years prior with Upton Sinclair’s Oil!. His film yadda-yaddas much of its byzantine Chandler-on-acid plot, making a coherent watch implausible without pre-existing familiarity. It’s less a standalone movie than an unconventional visual companion to the book, because by animating moments like blowing a duffel bag of coke with dentist Martin Short, the possessed melancholy of Josh Brolin’s rogue detective, developer Eric Roberts’ broken idealism, Owen Wilson’s COINTELPRO snitch being reunited with his wife and daughter, and Joaquin Phoenix and Katherine Waterston’s run through the rain to score dope from a number drawn off a Ouija board, the film adds depth, texture, Neil Young and deeply felt emotion to moments the reader might have glossed over trying while trying to keep a grip on Pynchon’s Rube Goldbergian, cerebral, goofy prose. This creates a true symbiotic adaptation in which the book and film combine to enrich the experience of both reading and viewing. It’s why the film received a muted response for Anderson, even as it was (correctly) upheld as a cult classic by diehard fans of both the director and the author.

Vineland, meanwhile, was a palate-cleanser and a reset for Pynchon, who'd disappeared from public life for 17 years following the National Book Award-winning, Pulitzer-shortlisted success of Gravity’s Rainbow. It is perhaps harder to envision as a film than Vice, though they are two novels very much in conversation with one another. Inherent Vice is something like a spiritual Phantom Menace to Vineland's Star Wars, a prequel written decades after the original. Both contain mentions of Gordita Beach and surf rock, both focus on the comedown from the radical American dream and the cynicism of the eternal make-work “war on drugs”, both tangle with iconographic conservative heads of state, both feature a missing woman at their center. But Vineland doesn’t have Vice’s propulsive noir engine. It’s a novel Salman Rushdie described as “free-flowing, light and funny” in his New York Times review upon release.

Vineland follows the aforementioned Zoyd, who goes underground with his teenage daughter Prarie in pursuit of his estranged ex-wife Frenesi. She betrayed Zoyd and the counterculture when she turned Fed informant for an underground State organization, went into witness protection, and—ahem—mysteriously disappeared. This coincides with the reemergence of Brock Vond, the federal prosecutor Frenesi left Zoyd for, who spends the book in pursuit of Frenesi in an attempt to win her back. There’s also female ninjas, UFOs, a cult of TV addicts, prophetic cyberpunk tech anxiety, bizarre acronyms for government and countercultural organizations with insane functions and reasons for existing. It’s classic Pynchon, creating networks of tangibly linked inventions and errant webbed plots and backing himself into corners to write out of.

Early reports suggest Anderson's Vineland adaptation is less literal than Inherent Vice, beginning with his decision to change some names and update the setting, an exciting prospect for a director who hasn’t worked in the present since Punch Drunk Love in 2002. Rushdie also called Vineland “A major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years,” and it will be interesting to see what threads will be pulled to tie one Republican demagogue to another in this heightened political moment.

Yet the budget and scale—and the advance buzz about this being the most commercial film of Anderson's career—seems blown out for what is on the page,. Zoyd Wheeler has apparently been rechristened “Ghetto Pat”, and Sean Penn’s Brock Vond is—again, allegedly—“Steven J. Lockjaw”. It’s been reported One Battle After Another is an action film whose tone blends two formative ‘80s film-geek texts: Jonathan Demme’s rebellion-and-romance-on-the-run caper Something Wild, with elements of Alex Cox’s apocalyptic underclass freakout Repo Man. If I had to speculate (and my editor has requested I do so please don’t @ me in six months) I’d guess much of the film’s story will be DiCaprio and Regina Hall with Chase Infiniti on the run from Penn and an army of fascist storm troopers in hot pursuit, featuring a series of badass car chases and night raids that gives PTA an excuse to empty his bag of all the cool action-set-piece ideas he hasn’t had an outlet (or budget) for in 30 years. The speculative movie now playing on a loop in my head is a fucking blast.

One would think PTA has too much respect for his hero’s voice and style to completely disregard the source material—as he more or less did with Oil!—but either way, do yourself a favor and go grab a copy of Vineland. In the event the film strays further from the novel than expected, you simply read a great book that in no way will spoil the film. If it turns out Paul Thomas Anderson merely flipped the calendar and has repeated the work of adaptation he did with Inherent Vice, you’ll be prepared. Classic win-win.