"One Battle After Another"

This film is purported to be based on the Pynchon novel “Vineland.” I have to say they could hardly be more different.

I’ve read nearly half of Vineland. It’s slow going, for me at least. There is so much going on in the text that could not possibly be rendered into film. The story is not meant to be believable, which makes it difficult for me to become absorbed.

By contrast, the film is an utterly conventional run-and-shoot yarn, well done for what it is, but very ordinary. I will say its depiction of rebellion versus state repression, especially motivated by the oppression of immigrants, is contemporary in flavor, but the extent of left-hippie rebellion compared to the 1970s and certainly now is grossly inflated. The violence in the movie is roughly proportional as to the contending sides, whereas in actuality the violence overwhelmingly came from the State.

I realize the text is supposed to be ‘satire’ or ‘postmodern.’ I’m not sure what that means. It is clear the story in the novel is not meant to be taken literally. By way of clarification, one of the few novels I’ve read over the past year, Zone One by Colson Whitehead (I mostly read non-fiction), is thoroughly science fiction, but everything that happens in the story, once you buy the zombie-apocalypse setting, is something the could actually happen. Vineland is all fantasy.

There are a couple of echoes of the book in the film. One is the character of Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, well-played by Sean Penn. The name is something that Pynchon could have easily made up. His counterpart in the book is one ‘Brock Vond.’ Another Pynchonesque bit in the film is the bad guys’ diabolical “Christmas Adventurers Club,” also a name that could come from Pynchon. There are other character parallels as well.

The bigger overlap is in the depiction of the dissolute hippie elder, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie. The absurdity, the drug-addled mental chaos of the 60s-70s counterculture is a recurring theme in Pynchon, nearly a cliché. The film shows it well enough, but there isn’t much more there.

In reality, the 70s hippies were never that political, and the most political people were never much like hippies. Nor were the politicals nearly as well-organized as the rebels in the film. The repressive government counterpart in the movie is much more efficient than the one in the novel. So the movie tools up both the Resistance and the State, whereas in the novel both sides are staffed my loony nincompoops.

One amusing little surprise to a “Kill Bill” fan like myself is to spot the origin of the “Five-Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique” (sic). It’s in Vineland. Probably there are older origins.

Reading Vineland is a project. The movie is easy to take in. I’ve gotten curious about where Pynchon’s head is more recently. The novel came out in 1990. I’m curious about his new book, Shadow Ticket, after a hiatus of a dozen years.