Article on TRP & Hollywood in the Observer (UK)

[Erik T. Burns]

https://observer.co.uk/culture/film/article/why-hollywood-has-fallen-in-love-with-thomas-pynchon

Why Hollywood has fallen in love with Thomas Pynchon

The reclusive author’s novel Vineland inspired Oscar frontrunner One Battle
After Another, and his surrealist satire captures the mood of the moment

Photo of Anthony Cummins
Anthony CumminsBook critic

It’s safe to assume that Thomas Pynchon won’t be present at the Oscars on
15 March – although how would we know if he was? The most stubbornly
reclusive of all American novelists, he makes the late JD Salinger seem
positively gregarious in comparison. Only three images of him circulate – a
couple of high-school pictures and a headshot from his naval service. CNN
filmed him in the street against his wishes nearly 30 years ago; he
insisted through lawyers that the footage was deleted. Very rarely, he’ll
pop up out of the blue in print – he wrote to the Daily Telegraph to
defend Ian McEwan from plagiarism allegations in 2006 – but you won’t hear
him on Front Row; we know what his voice sounds like only from two cameos
he agreed to play on The Simpsons in which his cartoon self appeared with
a bag over his head.

Still, Pynchon will very much be there in spirit at the Academy Awards.
His 1990 novel Vineland, about a knot of Richard Nixon-era subversives
gone to ground in Ronald Reagan-era California, is the inspiration for Paul
Thomas Anderson’s movie One Battle After Another, nominated for 13
awards, including best film and best adapted screenplay. A breathless
action thriller – car chases, gunfights, hostage drama – it centres on a
washed-up revolutionary whose mixed-race daughter is pursued by a
hard-right military officer, the terrifying comic villain Col Lockjaw,
who is obsessed with her mother, Perfidia, with whom he once had a sexual
relationship. That main setup comes straight from Pynchon’s novel,
although the names are changed, and in the book, Perfidia’s character and
her daughter are white. Ian Rankin, who had once planned to do a PhD on
Pynchon, before abandoning the idea, posted recently on X that he had
managed to watch One Battle After Another without once realising it was
based on the novel.

Anderson started working on the idea of a film of Vineland around the
millennium year. Given its pot-hazed blur of timelines, and digressive and
often surreal structure – several characters are part of an underground
community of the undead known as Thanatoids, something One Battle After
Another avoids –the book was a daunting proposition to adapt. But what drew
Anderson to it, by his own account in interviews, was wondering what a
novel about the afterlife of the 1960s, written in the 1980s, would have to
say about George W Bush’s America.

Two more decades on, his film has been hailed as a scathing commentary on
Donald Trump’s unhinged administration, its paramilitary war on
immigration and its strains of white supremacism. But if Anderson had an
intuition it would capture this moment, it was the loosest kind of
prophecy. When he started working on the adaptation, he had other threads
of stories in his mind – a more conventional car-chase thriller, and a
character who was a female revolutionary. He nagged at it every couple of
years until the story started to cohere; at one point the draft screenplay
ran to 600 pages. “I stole the parts [from Vineland] that really resonated
with me,” Anderson has recalled. All of his stealing was done, he said,
with Pynchon’s express blessing.

One of only three circulating pictures of Thomas Pynchon, from his 1953
high school yearbook
One of only three circulating pictures of Thomas Pynchon, from his 1953
high school yearbook

Lockjaw, Anderson’s version of Pynchon’s character Vond, is played in the
film by Sean Penn. (It is typical of the uncanny experience of reading
Pynchon – always 20 steps ahead of his nation – that the actor is also
actually mentioned in Vineland.) In the book, Vond arouses amused
suspicion as “a federal prosecutor carrying the torch for some
third-generation lefty who’d likely’ve bombed the Statue of Liberty if she
could” – but the relationship is torqued in the film by Anderson, who has
said: “I wanted audiences to feel like, this is really a movie about a
Black revolutionary.”

Other elements that feel as if they must be lifted from the book are 
Anderson inventions or riffs on Pynchon’s themes. The white supremacist
cabal that Lockjaw aspires to join, the Christmas Adventurers, is one such
addition, but it’s very Pynchonesque – tapping into his rich seams of
conspiracy that hint at the unseen forces shaping the US. If some of the
particulars of the plotting change, the emotional drama comes straight from
Vond’s desire to get in with the ruling class at any cost. “Though his
defects of character were many,” Pynchon writes, “none was quite as
annoying as this naked itch to be a gentleman, kept inflamed by a stubborn
denial of what everyone else knew – that no matter how much money he made,
how many political offices or course credits from charm school might come
his way, no one of those among whom he wished to belong would ever regard
him as other than a thug whose services had been hired.”

Ultimately, Anderson has used the ingredients of the novel for a different
dish in the film. The scene near the start in which Perfidia holds Lockjaw
at gunpoint, demanding his visible erection, reworks a moment in Vineland
in which Vond visits the Perfidia character – called Frenesi – in a
detention centre: “She looked in his eyes, then at his penis – yep erect
all right, creating pleats in the front of the pale federal trousers.”

Before Anderson, most people had previously assumed Pynchon’s novels to be
unfilmable. But the director has plenty of previous with the novelist.
Pynchon’s son, Jackson, was an intern on Anderson’s 2012 film The Master.
The director went on to adapt Pynchon’s 2009 novel Inherent Vice, a
detective narrative at the lighter end of the writer’s output, which in
2014 became a black comedy in the manner of The Big Lebowski.

Pynchon’s appearance on The Simpsons
Pynchon’s appearance on The Simpsons

Pynchon himself is best known for his 1973 book, Gravity’s Rainbow.
More than 750 pages of run-on sentences toggling between a vast cast of
characters spread out over five continents, it set the stylistic template
for much that followed. The book centred on a sex-mad US soldier’s quest
for a mysterious German rocket during the blitz. Surreal interludes
included a custard-pie fight and an octopus attack. When the plotting cut
you adrift – as it often did – the verbal invention spurred you on.
Pynchon’s writing has always grappled with the horrific violence of history
– particularly American history – but has also frequently been liable to
break into song.

Many of his contemporaries were not sold on Pynchon’s wayward vision. John
Updike, for example, admired his sentences but once observed: “Give me the
[Henry] Jamesian summer afternoon tea and a few almost impalpable love
triangles and that’s all the information about life I can stand.”

To a later generation, however, Pynchon often represented the acme of
literary ambition. The British novelist Philip Hensher was so enthused by
his Mason & Dixon (1997) that he vowed to physically eat any American
novel that “came near this marvellous, proliferating thing this decade”.
The quirky acronyms, dizzying lists and labyrinthine plots left an imprint
on the fiction of generation X, most notably David Foster Wallace’s
Infinite Jest. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth was hailed as the authentic voice
of north London but its presiding influence came from across the Atlantic,
as a multigenerational comedy of empire, war and genetic engineering,
written – Smith has said – with a passage from Gravity’s Rainbow pinned
on her door. The role White Teeth gives to a fundamentalist youth group,
“Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation”, or Kevin, is a
touch of pure Pynchonesque tomfoolery.

Pynchon’s most recent novel, Shadow Ticket, which is set partly in the
“Semi-Military Entity Greater Milwaukee Area”, or Smegma, shows he
hasn’t grown out of those touches, which have an air of laughter in the
dark. Shadow Ticket is a novel partly about the rise of US fascism, a
spectre that looms continually in his work.

The novels have gone in and out of fashion. The New Yorker literary critic
James Wood chided Zadie Smith for maximalist excess influenced in part by
Pynchon, calling it “hysterical realism”; by Smith’s third novel, she was
looking to EM Forster as a model instead.

Wood argued that maximalist writers knew “a thousand different things –
how to make the best Indonesian fish curry! The sonics of the trombone!
The drug market of Detroit! The history of strip cartoons! — but [not] a
single human being.” And a single human being is what much recent fiction
has come to be about. For a couple of decades, fiction has tended to have
an autobiographical grounding and a premium on velocity over complexity;
publishers want novels you can read without a dictionary to hand. The
encyclopedic girth of Pynchon and his followers was seen as a kind of
literary manspreading; in some circles, Wallace’s Infinite Jest became a
joke.

But it could well be that we’re in a maximalist moment again. One Battle
After Another heralds something of a revival for those digressive fictional
high jinks. The recent 30th anniversary of Infinite Jest was greeted with
a mea culpa by some critics. The year’s most hyped American debut, Lost
Lambs by Madeline Cash, shows that gen Z is rediscovering the antic style
anew. And the master himself is still going. Pynchon turns 89 in May;
Shadow Ticket, published last year, features a strikebreaker turned
gumshoe using telekinesis to track a runaway heiress to a cheese fortune
(it’s always a fool’s errand to summarise a Pynchon plot). The verbal
pizazz is undimmed: witness the line about “a former city cop obliged to
retire early after his enthusiasm with the dizzy-stick finally dishevelled
a hairdo too well-connected to be squared that easily”.

It can seem, too, that we have once again entered a recognisably
Pynchonesque world; a place in which, for example, in Vineland, federal
police forces might be “terrorising the neighbourhood for weeks, running
up and down the dirt lanes in formation chanting ‘War-on-drugs!
War-on-drugs!’ strip-searching folks in public, killing dogs, rabbits,
cats, and chickens, pouring herbicide down wells that couldn’t remotely be
used to irrigate dope crops, and acting, indeed, as several neighbours
observed, as if they had invaded some helpless land far away, instead of a
short plane ride from San Francisco”.

When reality is too terrible to contemplate, readers may once again turn
to Pynchon for a surreal mirror to make sense of it all. A – possibly –
Oscar-winning movie is a good place to start.

Key facts
Thomas Pynchon was born on Long Island, New York, in 1937. He will be 89 in
May.

His 10 novels include The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Vineland (1990) and
Shadow Ticket (2025).

He worked as a technical writer for the Boeing missile programme between
1960 and 1962.

Famously publicity-shy, in 1973 he sent a comedian, “Professor” Irwin
Corey, to accept his national book award for Gravity’s Rainbow.

He had a cameo appearance on The Simpsons in 2004, appearing with a paper
bag over is head, shouting at passing motorists: “Hey, over here, have a
picture taken with a reclusive author!”

Photographs by 2026GG/Penske Media/Getty Images, Wikipedia/Oyster Bay High
School, The Simpsons

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