Jonathan Lethem on OBAA

[j e l]

from The New York Review:

https://archive.ph/lp740

Frantic Realism

[Jonathan Lethem]

Paul Thomas Anderson fits a generation’s worth of cineplex joys into One
Battle After Another, but the revolution refuses to get off the couch.

November 20, 2025 issue

Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland features a distinctive running joke in
which titles of Hollywood films are marked with the years of their release:
“They were talking about Return of the Jedi (1983), parts of which had been
filmed in the area.” This holds even when a title is mentioned in dialogue,
by a character who can hardly be expected to have cared to cite the year of
a given film’s release, or even to know it:

“Let me guess—2001: A Space Odyssey [1968].”
“Try 20,000 Years in Sing Sing [1933].”

The suggestion may be that Pynchon’s sentences occupy both a novel and a
film studies text. His books are drenched in cinematic nods both high and
low; dude loves going to the movies. He may live there. But the whiff of
scholarly apparatus reminds us of another trait we may safely impute to our
elusive hero: Pynchon haunts the archives. He knows the dates of things.
This specificity entrenches his conspiratorial Looney Tunes in hidden
histories and secret causalities.

Pynchon also apparently wastes his time between books watching what he
calls “the Tube,” revealed in an avalanche of references to The Mod Squad,
Hill Street Blues, and Gilligan’s Island; David Foster Wallace complained
in a letter that Vineland read as if Pynchon had “spent 20 years smoking
pot and watching TV.” Is it revealing that the TV shows mentioned in that
novel don’t get their years appended to them? A kind of qualitative fire
wall between cinema and mere television is a typical mid-twentieth-century
bias. Films are regarded as glamorous, possibly an art form; television, an
invader squatting in our homes to replace the book, the hearth, the
babysitter, and the family piano, is squalid and disposable. To grow
addicted to it is to become a solitary tippler, a day drinker. Nowhere is
this bias more evident than in the medium of film itself. All That Heaven
Allows (1955), A Face in the Crowd (1957), Network (1976), The Truman Show
(1998), and Requiem for a Dream (2000) variously offer the senior medium’s
warnings about the evils of the junior.

For my generation—Paul Thomas Anderson’s, approximately—the distinction is
less clear. By the time I was a latchkey kid flipping channels, I wallowed
not only in I Love Lucy reruns but in old films recycled as filler for
local broadcast. My first experience of the Godfather cycle was when in
1977 Francis Ford Coppola, to suit the late-1970s craze for prestige
miniseries, recut the first two films into Mario Puzo’s The Godfather: A
Novel for Television, an event for which we crowded onto my friend Joel’s
parents’ bed for four successive nights. And, of course, there were the
yearly ritual viewings of West Side Story and The Wizard of Oz. I saw much
of Hitchcock first on WNET, alongside MacNeil/Lehrer, I, Claudius, and
Monty Python. Meanwhile, movie stars had shipwrecked onto TV—Groucho,
Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Tony Randall.

Anderson had an unusual vantage on the taming of the big screen to the
small: his father, the disc jockey and announcer Ernie Anderson, served
from 1963 to 1966 as “Ghoulardi,” the horror film host on a local Cleveland
television station. His father’s run as host was finished before Anderson
could have seen it live, but the Ghoulardi legend—which inspired
underground Ohio bands like Devo and Pere Ubu—was such that he attached
Ghoulardi’s name to his production company, beginning with his second film,
Boogie Nights (1997). That movie, which made Anderson famous, reworks the
theme of one medium’s distaste for the next in its tale of a proud
pornographic film industry on the verge of destruction by a flood of
cheaply produced videos. The story recapitulates, in a satirical key, film
culture’s tendency to self-mourn. Think of Gloria Swanson in Sunset
Boulevard, bemoaning the loss of silent film: “We didn’t need dialogue, we
had faces!” Subsequent travesties include the partition of movie palaces
into multiplexes; interventions like colorization and pan-and-scan
and—needless to say—the rollout of television and the ever-yet-smaller
screens that have followed.

Anderson’s curiosity about new media halts at television; he has skirted
any portrayal of characters’ use of the Internet, most often by setting his
films decisively in a precomputer past. A devotion to celluloid has
culminated in Anderson’s revival of the nearly lost VistaVision process for
his newest film, One Battle After Another. Like Cinerama, CinemaScope, 3D,
and Smell-O-Vision, VistaVision was introduced to lure postwar filmgoers
back into theaters for unique experiences unrivaled by the television
screen. Many notable English-language directors of Anderson’s
generation—Kelly Reichardt, Lynne Ramsay, Andrew Bujalski, Sofia Coppola,
Jonathan Glazer—have dallied with digital or video cameras, and with them,
smaller production footprints. Even among those who expressly connect their
work to the classical studio-era style—think of Todd Haynes, with his
reverence for Douglas Sirk—there may be variations from the model: newer
cameras, occasional television series, or features for streaming. (The same
has been true of some of the older directors, like Robert Altman, Francis
Ford Coppola, and Michael Mann.) Anderson, then, dwells in a purist aerie,
with only the more fetishistic Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino (the
latter has called digital projection systems the “death of cinema” and
“television in public”) for cover.

Without commanding a popular audience the size of Tarantino’s or, like Wes
Anderson, inspiring museum exhibitions and coffee table books (and endless
parodies) because of the peculiar inventions of his style, P.T. Anderson
has for many been accorded a loose status as “arguably the preeminent
Hollywood filmmaker of his generation.”1  For my part, already amazed by
Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999), I began holding my breath at word
of each new Anderson release after the experience of There Will Be Blood
(2007). I liked the next, The Master (2012), even better. Anderson has at
times resuscitated my faith that genuinely big films, new ones, might still
fulfill their terms with subtlety, wit, and verve.

Vineland is set firmly in 1984, at the doorstep of Reagan’s second term.
Much of the book consists of flashbacks to his characters’ participation in
a late-1960s and early-1970s revolutionary left; within these come further
flashbacks, to equally grounded accounts of earlier twentieth-century
politics: Wobblies, McCarthyite purges, the blacklist. In One Battle After
Another, Anderson has delivered a free adaptation of Pynchon’s wistful
book, one that is at once “updated” for our times and unmoored from any
literal history. The film appears to take place, somehow, in two different
renditions of a loose “now,” renditions bridged by a sixteen-year gap
(during which an infant grows to be a teenager). Critics have already tried
to secure a timeline based on the makes of cars and the legends on
T-shirts, but the film floats loose of chronology. Perhaps its later scenes
are set in some version of the future? At the same time, the result has
been widely acclaimed for its thrilling currency, its outrageous, supersize
relevance. Has the director here overthrown his typical
preference—unmistakable and beguiling—for the past? Or is something
stranger going on?

Perhaps the times can bring themselves to meet a given work of art.
Anderson has remarked that he’d been fooling with an adaptation of
Pynchon’s book for twenty years, but it seems unlikely that his early
conception of the project included extensive depictions of militarized mass
deportations (not a subject in the novel). One Battle After Another,
prepared and shot before Trump’s reelection, is something more than
prescient; it seems to have won an existential gamble, on a high and
devastating level, in staging scenes of a US invasion of its own cities,
scenes in which officials with guns occupy high schools and hospitals, all
under an official pretext originating in a corrupt and insane commander’s
personal vendetta. And at a time when the onset of contemporary fascism has
reached such brazenness that it openly shops for a Reichstag fire to call
its own, we watch a scene of troops confronting street protesters and
creating a false flag Molotov cocktail attack on their own barricades in
order to justify fighting “fire with fire.”

The concurrences galvanize our attention to an uncanny degree. It is as
though the director had flowed his vision out of the tiny nightmare reels
and risible memes we lately find on our phones and directly into the
massive and collective sensorium of a first-run movie theater. Anderson’s
alternative present has been embodied by famous actors working with a
commitment and invention that match the movie’s psychedelically rich visual
texture, accompanied by a soundtrack by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood
(Anderson’s regular collaborator since There Will Be Blood), a soundtrack
set to nervous-system overdrive, offering a wave of sonic panic you ride
inside with delight.

A further piece of serendipity was even more specific, and perhaps more
awkward: Assata Shakur, a permanent fugitive from US justice, died
twenty-four hours before the film was released. The life of Shakur, a
member of the Black Liberation Army and the godmother of the rapper Tupac
Shakur, echoes that of the protagonist of the film’s first forty-minute
section, Perfidia Beverly Hills, played by Teyana Taylor. Though her
costars Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn may for many viewers be more
familiar, Taylor is the eye of the storm, seizing the attention of the male
leads while they are still unknown to each other and initiating the crises
that will drive the story past the sixteen-year gap to its later calamities
and rescues.

On first viewing, this long, hectic prelude is both exhilarating and
uncomfortable—a challenge. Taylor’s character is provocatively hostile and
absurdly sexualized, with an impulsiveness that seemingly overrides her
political commitments. She makes a boyfriend out of DiCaprio’s Ghetto Pat,
hapless bombing expert at the periphery of her revolutionary cadre, and
juggles the malicious attentions of the white supremacist super-soldier
Steven J. Lockjaw—Penn—by kindling in him a bewildering new erotic self. Of
these two men, one is responsible for her pregnancy. The world requires
revolution. At the crossroads of these pressures, and likely terrified at
the possibility that Lockjaw is the father, Perfidia will run, abandoning
the infant daughter to Pat’s care. The dialogue is fractured, breathless,
and sloganeering, suggesting a film with too much on its mind to slow down
and help the viewer make sense of it.

Even if one has never heard of Assata Shakur, the casting may set off
alarms. In transplanting Black identity, and a Black radical family, into
Pynchon’s plot, which centers on Frenesi Gates—a white, blue-eyed activist
too aroused by men in uniform not to betray her principles and the members
of her cell—Anderson has done something more than evoke US racial legacies.
He has also forced us to recall that the Black Panthers viewed the Weather
Underground, the real-life group whose actions and fates most resemble
those of Anderson’s fictional French 75, as indulgent, undisciplined, and
privileged—childish bomb throwers incapable of real organizing. There’s no
mistaking the source for the French 75’s rhetoric and methodology; Anderson
has titled his film after a Weather Underground statement published in New
Left Notes in 1969, while a letter from Perfidia to her daughter, read
aloud in the film’s closing moments, reproduces several lines from a former
member’s “Letter from Underground” (as quoted in The Weather Underground, a
2002 documentary directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel 2).

I wondered whether Anderson had also been watching Robert Kramer’s Ice
(1970), an anomalous no-budget masterwork featuring unknown and mostly
untrained actors as revolutionaries in a near-future New York City.
Kramer’s velocity, his roving interest and willingness to satirize his
dissidents’ sexual foibles, as well as his vagueness about temporal
setting, suggest a possible source. The reverberations, dislocations, and
provocations of One Battle After Another’s opening generate ferocious
energy; we wait to know whether they will generate meaning as well. For me,
after two viewings, the first forty minutes seemed, however unclarified,
however nerve-shredding, by far the best. They offered promises the film
wasn’t ready to keep and made trouble it couldn’t sustain.

On the verge of the film’s leap across decades, Perfidia slips all the
traps laid for her, making a desultory escape from the film. At this, for
all the wild pleasures of the two hours that follow, the film about
revolutionaries escapes with her. What we’re given instead is the most
seductively complacent needle drop of Anderson’s career: Steely Dan’s
“Dirty Work.” It announces the new film, the predominant film: a mash-up of
a Gen X loser comedy and a kinetic and gritty chase movie, one suggesting
that Anderson has folded Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984) and Sam Peckinpah’s
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) into his kit of influences.
Penn’s villain is a Brechtian marvel, a Frankenstein of lust, rage,
masculinist conformity, racism, and deep terror, at the intersection of Dr.
Strangelove and Pete Hegseth. Maybe even better is a new character
introduced only after the break: Benicio del Toro as Sensei Sergio, a
karate instructor who casually multitasks an underground railroad for
persecuted migrants (or, as he calls it, his “little Latino Harriet Tubman
situation”). Del Toro’s best scenes ignite the curiosity and wit of
Anderson’s camera and cutting; they seem to self-invent like bebop, and
almost rescue the movie. The amplitude, the riot and hoot, the tonal and
vehicular swerves and collisions of One Battle After Another make for
cineplex joy. It is only once out of the theater that we may sense that
this frantic diversion has left its central material essentially
unconfronted.

The problem doesn’t lie at the film’s edges, which sizzle with detail, but
is instead a matter of what has been subtracted from its very center and
what has been substituted. Nor does the fault lie with DiCaprio’s
performance as the former Ghetto Pat, who has assumed a new underground
identity as the long-suffering dedicated solo dad Bob Ferguson. A great
physical comedian, DiCaprio shades Bob with incomprehension, remorse, and
true charm, making the most of what he’s been given. Yet we’ve seen this
stoner’s bathrobe before; it once belonged to the Dude in The Big Lebowski.
That Bob is a cipher to himself is a pretty good joke, but not good enough
to mask that the film has now met him in the same place. Anderson’s old
method, of dropping a Candide-like innocent into a Machiavellian
world—consider Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights, Joaquin Phoenix in The
Master and Inherent Vice (2014), or nearly any role he’s given to John C.
Reilly—has betrayed him. We miss Teyana Taylor, and Perfidia Beverly Hills,
too dearly. We miss her angers, her betrayals, her risks, which include the
risk that the film in which she appears won’t be capable of explaining her
to us any better than Pynchon managed to explain Frenesi Gates. (I’m pretty
certain he didn’t.) The only thing we can’t abide is for it to quit trying.
Quit trying is what it does.

This lapse, it seems to me, isn’t only thematic but formal—and material.
Certain stories need to subtract characters in order to proceed: Charlotte
Haze must die for Lolita to be orphaned into Humbert’s care; Dickie
Greenleaf must be murdered so that Tom Ripley can impersonate him. Yet
films call forth our somatic responses to actors; it has always seemed to
me that Shelley Winters’s and Jude Law’s performances are too vital and
funny for Stanley Kubrick’s and Anthony Minghella’s films not to be damaged
by their exits from the scene. Conversely—perhaps unfairly—a tale made of
sentences can allow a missing character, say a disloyal runaway terrorist
mom, to go on existing even after she vanishes. If everyone goes on
speaking and thinking about a character like Frenesi Gates, as everyone
does in Vineland, then she still exists for us nearly on a par with those
doing the thinking and speaking, since they are only made of sentences
themselves.

The ending of One Battle After Another, which encourages us to
sentimentalize this damaged family romance, is the worst of Anderson’s
career—particularly mysterious given that he’s previously demonstrated a
special gift for the Pynchonian nonending, one that solves nothing and
throws an audience back into its own wondering. Instead Bob, that goof, is
on the couch, learning to take a selfie. The future has been handed off,
approximately, to his daughter, God help her. She’s off to participate in
a… something…in Oakland. Their hearts have been healed by the transmission
of a secret letter from Perfidia, the nearest the film comes to contending
with its missing, mythic, monstrous center—too little, too late, too lame.
The gist of the letter is that the bad mother concedes her role to the good
father. Because the letter’s lines are partly borrowed from a real
revolutionary document, the filmmaker has failed to notice that he’s
rehashed the finale of Kramer vs. Kramer.

Ultimately, Bob’s decades of stoner fugue set him outside of time in such a
way that this film, which may seem to flirt hard with the present, at last
ghosts it. Sacred tokens of revolutionary desire, like Gil Scott-Heron’s
“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” anchor Bob and his movie—for it
turns out to be his movie—in a crate-digging sensibility, and seem to
decorate a political nullity. As squalid and depressing as most cinematic
depictions of the Internet tend to be, the online realm is painfully real
in its influence on our present circumstance. How can it be that Pynchon’s
thirty-five-year-old novel about fractured revolutionary solidarity seems
to have more to say about the problem than Anderson’s update? Screen
addiction in Vineland is a symptom of collective surrender to fascist
repression: “Give us too much to process, fill up every minute, keep us
distracted, it’s what the Tube is for.” Anderson’s diffidence about
uncinematic screens may help explain why this film so flatters the
vicarious wish to be free of it—our present circumstance, I mean.

I’m not immune. I felt a delighted rush at glimpsing a few frames of Gillo
Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), which Bob screens for himself.
Yet I fear the real Bobs—I know a few—have moved on to other diversions.
Some of them have been dabbling, in their wounded innocence, in VHS tapes
of the September 11 conspiracy thriller Loose Change (2005). Others are
heavily online, lurking in forums where they wait for another drop from
QAnon. The question raised by Scott-Heron’s anthem is this: If not
televised, where will the revolution unfold? It is the question that ran
away with Perfidia Beverly Hills.

The second time I went to see the movie, I took my fifteen-year-old son.
Afterward we shared his excitement, and my reservations. “Politically it’s
a little incoherent, don’t you think?” I asked. He shrugged his agreement
but then added, “At least it takes some time to show the concentration
camps.”

I liked that he used that term—the right term, it seems to me, one that
doesn’t appear in the film. And perhaps this is enough. On one point, at
least, Anderson and I are in perfect accord: the kids are all right.

But I do think that Bob should get off the couch.