One Battle After Another: How the movie remixes Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland.

The script for the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie One Battle After Another has been percolating for more than 20 years, and Anderson has said he only added elements from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland partway through the process . Vineland was about 1960s radicals dealing with the increased repressions of the Reagan era, and Anderson’s loose adaptation—the film’s credits note that it was only “inspired by” Pynchon’s book—is about radicals in the present day, dealing with the fallout of actions they performed 16 years ago. Each story features a splintered family—a militant mother who rats out her compatriots before going into hiding, a father who goes from an activist to a reclusive burnout, and a teenage daughter whose own politics are just emerging—but that’s nearly as f