Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, One Battle After Another, recently dropped a trailer, giving us a better look at his Leonardo DiCaprio-led comical action thriller. One Battle After Another marks a few firsts for Anderson, who has never worked with DiCaprio before and has never made a full-on action/thriller. His latest movie seems like a step up from his usual scale and is the first time Anderson has directed a film with a budget over $100 million.
Despite all these firsts, One Battle After Another marks Anderson’s second adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel. His latest film adapts the novel Vineland, but Anderson also directed Inherent Vice in 2014, based on another Pynchon novel of the same name. Inherent Vice undeservedly sits at the bottom of Anderson’s filmography on Rotten Tomatoes, albeit with a solid 74% rating. The stoner comedy/noir doesn’t garner as much praise as Anderson’s other films. What most people won’t realize is that One Battle After Another seems as though it will continue the broader story of Inherent Vice, and may prompt viewers to give it another chance.
‘One Battle After Another’ and ‘Inherent Vice’ Are Connected

To understand how these films are linked, we need to know more about their story. Inherent Vice’s story can be hard to follow at times. Told from the perspective of a drug-addled hippie private investigator, Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), Vice follows a classic California noir conspiracy set against the backdrop of the hippie movement in full swing. While there’s an endless list of noir thrillers set around a Californian conspiracy, Inherent Vice sticks out by creating a vivid picture of 60s California, perfectly capturing the culture from the perspective of an author who lived through it. Vice shows how hippiedom impacted different groups of people and ties the death of hippiedom to real historical events like the Manson murders. If we look at Vineland’s story, we may see a strong link between the two.

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Set in Northern California, Vineland follows Zoyd Wheeler, an ex-rebel who fought for a radicalized group of hippies in the 60s. The novel describes NorCal as the ‘last refuge of hippiedom’ during a period when Wheeler’s group fought against Nixon-era ‘fascism’ that arose during his war on drugs. The film cuts between present-day 1984 and the ’60s, as Wheeler laments over his youth and a war he ultimately lost. Across the two stories, Pynchon tracks the rise, fall, and aftermath of the hippie movement that influenced California from the 1960s to the 1980s. Pynchon isn’t afraid to expose hippiedom’s flaws, but he frames the movement as a tragedy. Showing how oppressive government regimes triumphed over those who fought to live freely. However, Vineland carries a more uplifting message, and Anderson’s intentional change to their release order retells the story in a better light.
Inherent Vice places the audience in the shoes of a helpless bystander who witnesses the counterculture’s failure to provoke change, which results in self-destruction. So many characters succumb to drug addiction or fall in with the wrong crowd and end up murdered. Perhaps the only thread of hope in Doc Sportello’s story comes from reuniting a former hippie with his estranged wife and newborn. Interestingly, this minor subplot bears a striking resemblance to the main story of Vineland, and One Battle After Another by proxy.
How ‘One Battle After Another Finishes the Story

In Vineland, Zoyd Wheeler, played by DiCaprio in the film, reunites with his daughter to track down her missing mother, who supposedly turned coats on the revolutionaries and ran away with a narcotics agent. It will be interesting to see Dicaprio take on a paternal role, given he has so few roles that focus on him as a parent. One Battle After Another is switching things up a little. We know from the trailer that Wheeler is trying to track down his daughter, as opposed to her mother. We catch a glimpse of his daughter in the trailer, played by Chase Infiniti, who appears to be another victim of radicalization in some way, as we see her angrily firing off rounds of a machine gun. This contrasts with the book, where Wheeler’s daughter lives with him and lives a more materialistic lifestyle that clashes with her father’s. In the trailer, Wheeler looks to have lost his grip on life, and his family by extension. Vineland intercuts flashbacks from the ’60s while Wheeler tries to figure out where he went wrong in life and ultimately decides to let go of the past and prioritize what’s most important, his family.
Though Inherent Vice precedes Vineland, the novel was released almost twenty years after Vineland’s publication. So Vice acted more as a prequel, following the events that set the stage for Wheeler’s journey. Anyone who read Inherent Vice after Vineland knew this era of rebellion would be short-lived, so the story has a sense of doom similar to the Star Wars prequels. However, Paul Thomas Anderson has opted to release the stories chronologically, providing a more uplifting story with a message about maturing, instead of regressing.
Capturing California’s Culture Across the Decades

Image via Warner Bros.

Pynchon has a distinct talent for tracking cultural shifts in America through his stories, with many centered around California. Anyone familiar with Anderson’s filmography won’t be surprised that he resonates with Pynchon’s novels. From Punch-Drunk Love and Boogie Nights to Inherent Vice and Licorice Pizza, Anderson is in love with California and Los Angeles. He enjoys capturing different eras and the major cultural linchpins that define the period. Inherent Vice marks a crucial turning point in California, and America by extension.
Inherent Vice failed to strike a chord with audiences to the same degree as Anderson’s other films. This is partly due to the meandering nature of the story and slow pacing. However, those elements are what make the film such a perfect recreation of 60s California, and help convey how perplexing it was to live in that place and time. The story follows a helpless bystander who struggles to find any agency between strict government agendas and drug-induced fantasies, turning a simple noir mystery into a labyrinthine conspiracy. One Battle After Another conducts a post-mortem of that era, exhibiting self-awareness around that period. If One Battle After Another stays true to the novel, it will illustrate how Inherent Vice’s story is a crucial piece in a larger puzzle that shaped modern America.
It will be interesting to see how the film differs from the original novel. Inherent Vice remained relatively faithful to the source material, though Anderson certainly homed in on Sportello’s relationship to find a more engaging core of the story. These changes will likely prompt an even stronger comparison to One Battle After Another, which similarly focuses on a relationship with hippiedom, more so than the movement itself.
One Battle After Another comes to theaters on September 26.

Inherent Vice

Release Date

December 12, 2014

Runtime

148minutes

Director

Paul Thomas Anderson

Writers

Paul Thomas Anderson