If it’s a P.T. Anderson film, equipped with an armada of guns and rage, we can expect there will be blood. And there is blood in Anderson’s new artful romp, One Battle After Another, but there is also a strange new blood type of gonzo humor and a fluid mash-up of genres and themes.
Blame Thomas Pynchon, whose layered book Vineland was direct inspiration for the latest project from auteur Anderson, who also brought Pynchon’s psychedelic detective novel Inherent Vice to the screen in 2014. Anderson has reportedly been contemplating making this loosely Vineland-referential film for 20 years. In the world according to Pynchon and sometimes Anderson, the clearest route to storytelling is a twisted and chance-taking one. That chemistry can also be detected, in milder degrees of spiciness, in Anderson’s recent masterworks, Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza.
Whereas Pynchon’s storyline in Vineland followed, in swerving trajectories, a young woman in the Reagan era tracing her roots as a child of American revolutionaries from the ‘60s, Anderson updates the setting to today. Tapping into present-day Trump-era points of collective angst, Anderson wastes no time in pointing shock and disapproval over mistreatment of immigrants in detention centers, ICE misadventures, white supremacy elitism (with extreme prejudice), and the flagrant use of the military on the American populace.