Article on TRP & Hollywood in the Observer (UK)

[rich]

this is a decent piece posted a few days ago. and appears u can read free
online.

one of the interesting things noted is the author's claim some
scholars have had a peek at the Pynchon archives. I can imagine the NDA on
that. haha

https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/reviews/first-as-farce-then-as-tragedy

rich

On Fri, Mar 13, 2026 at 2:07 PM Erik T. Burns <eburns at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> 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
>
> Books
>
> Film
>
> Oscars
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>