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Ep. 27: 'One Battle After Another' & Why Storytelling is Important
16 Plays2 months ago
In this episode of 'Adaptation: The Book to Movie Podcast,' Nate and Chris discuss 'One Battle After Another,' Paul Thomas Anderson's 2025 opus, and its source material, 'Vineland' by Thomas Pynchon.
The two discuss why both the book and the movie are considered instant classics. In their discussion, recorded just days after the death of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis at the hands of an ICE agent, they also discuss political storytelling and why it's more important than ever to be consuming stories like this one.
Be sure to check out the winners of our Adaptation People's Choice Awards on Instagram!
UP NEXT: 'Hamnet' by Maggie O'Farrell and the film adaptation directed by Chloe Zhao.
Follow us on social media:
Nate's Letterboxd (@professor_n8)
Chris's Letterboxd (@cjanderson878)
Hosts: Nate Day
Producer: Nate Day
"Adaptation Theme"
- Written by: Chris Anderson, Jem Zornow
- Performed by: Chris Anderson, Jem Zornow, Nate Day
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Transcript
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New Year Episode & Vineland Film Discussion
00:00:37
Speaker
Welcome to Adaptation, the Book to Movie podcast.
00:00:39
Speaker
I'm Nate.
00:00:41
Speaker
And I'm Chris.
00:00:42
Speaker
And today we have a very special episode, our first episode of 2026.
00:00:46
Speaker
Happy New Year, Chris.
00:00:48
Speaker
Happy New Year.
00:00:50
Speaker
Today we are discussing One Battle After Another, the film adaptation of Thomas Vineland, or what?
00:00:58
Speaker
Thomas Pinchon's Vineland?
00:01:00
Speaker
There we go.
00:01:03
Speaker
Sorry, Mr. Pinchon.
00:01:06
Speaker
for what it's worth, I guess you've created a very immersive text to scramble my brains a little bit.
00:01:12
Speaker
It really drew us in.
Podcast Awards & Personal Updates
00:01:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:15
Speaker
But before we get into that, we did want to just quickly share that our Adaptation People's Choice Awards winners have been announced on Instagram.
00:01:25
Speaker
So be sure to check us out at adaptation underscore pod to see the winners.
00:01:29
Speaker
And thank you to those who voted and
00:01:31
Speaker
Congrats to the winners.
00:01:33
Speaker
There were more ties than I expected, so we might have to remedy that.
00:01:37
Speaker
That surprised me too.
00:01:39
Speaker
Like dead heat ties.
00:01:41
Speaker
But you know what?
00:01:41
Speaker
The more love we can spread, the better.
00:01:43
Speaker
So maybe not.
00:01:44
Speaker
I really appreciated the most joke category of all, the reality TV show one.
00:01:51
Speaker
I knew you'd be excited about that one.
00:01:53
Speaker
Chris's most enthusiastic contribution won that category.
00:01:58
Speaker
But how has your 2026 gone so far as regarding reading?
00:02:03
Speaker
We're a couple days in now.
00:02:06
Speaker
Slower than I hoped.
00:02:08
Speaker
I was, unfortunately, in the middle of a few books all at once, which I had finally gotten away from.
00:02:13
Speaker
For years and years, I always had like eight books going at once.
00:02:18
Speaker
And near the end of 2025, I was finally like starting one book and finishing it.
00:02:24
Speaker
And then suddenly this week I looked down and I was like, why am I in the middle of five books?
00:02:31
Speaker
And this book is very much the culprit of that, I believe.
00:02:35
Speaker
Not entirely, but predominantly.
00:02:38
Speaker
Yeah.
00:02:39
Speaker
Because I would read like 10 pages and just be sick of it.
00:02:45
Speaker
I've heard it's super dense.
00:02:47
Speaker
Yeah, so I would put it down and go back.
00:02:49
Speaker
And part of the problem is one of the books I'm in the middle of is similar length to Pillars of the Earth.
00:02:55
Speaker
It's another like thousand page grand voyage.
00:02:58
Speaker
So those always take a while.
00:03:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:00
Speaker
And I read a few in between, which is probably why they take a while.
00:03:03
Speaker
Right.
00:03:04
Speaker
Yeah, because you got to get those brain breaks in.
00:03:07
Speaker
Exactly, exactly.
00:03:08
Speaker
And that one's easier to, you know, read a few pages and fall asleep.
00:03:13
Speaker
I kept trying to read Vineland before bed and it's too...
00:03:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:18
Speaker
It's a bad idea.
00:03:19
Speaker
It's like reading The Shining before bed.
00:03:20
Speaker
Yeah, no kidding.
00:03:21
Speaker
You're just a little too wound too tight and a little too much in thinking mode.
00:03:27
Speaker
Yes, exactly.
00:03:28
Speaker
Exactly.
00:03:29
Speaker
So I've only actually finished one book so far, which is woefully behind for the 10th of January.
00:03:37
Speaker
I just finished the novella for Minority Report.
00:03:43
Speaker
Oh, look at that.
00:03:43
Speaker
Good.
00:03:44
Speaker
I think we're going to maybe cover that one later this week.
00:03:46
Speaker
year, as long as our schedule that we've crafted holds up the chaos of movie release dates shifting and whatnot.
00:03:54
Speaker
So I'm excited to talk about that one.
00:03:56
Speaker
And that one Philip K. Dick has a crazy number of, um, stories that have been adapted.
00:04:03
Speaker
Uh, but it was very interesting to go back and read, you know, being one of my favorite movies and it was super short.
00:04:11
Speaker
It's like 118 pages or something.
00:04:13
Speaker
Oh, really?
00:04:14
Speaker
Wow.
00:04:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:15
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't know that before.
00:04:16
Speaker
Huh?
00:04:17
Speaker
Cool.
00:04:18
Speaker
What have you been watching?
00:04:19
Speaker
Similar.
00:04:20
Speaker
This is kind of a slow time of year because movie studios are a little more focused on campaigning for awards than they are releasing good movies this time of year.
00:04:30
Speaker
Also partly because, you know, weather is bad in a lot of the country and people have
00:04:36
Speaker
New Year's resolutions to spend less money or just like prerogatives to do so after the holidays.
00:04:41
Speaker
So usually good movies don't really come out this time of year.
00:04:44
Speaker
January and February are known in the in the industry as dump you, Harry, because it's sort of where they release the films that like
00:04:51
Speaker
They're like, yeah, this didn't turn out all that good.
00:04:53
Speaker
So we're just going to put it right in this corridor where people aren't really watching many movies.
00:04:59
Speaker
But that being said, I do have a few Christmas releases that I don't know if I really covered.
00:05:04
Speaker
I saw Marty Supreme, which I know I've told you off mic is I'd love that movie.
00:05:09
Speaker
That's the Timothee Chalamet ping pong one.
00:05:11
Speaker
Fantastic movie.
00:05:12
Speaker
Song Sung Blue is the sort of biopic of the Neil Diamond cover band.
00:05:17
Speaker
Oh, actually really pretty good movie as well.
00:05:20
Speaker
I like that one a lot more than I was expecting to.
00:05:23
Speaker
And just yesterday, last night, watched The People We Meet on Vacation, which is actually an adaptation of an Emily Henry novel that hit Netflix recently, I guess.
00:05:36
Speaker
It's sort of the first new movie of the year.
00:05:38
Speaker
And it actually was not that bad for being like a silly little rom-com that, you know, Netflix has a habit of like scooping up the rights to this kind of book and quickly and cheaply producing a movie adaptation.
00:05:52
Speaker
And then it's usually like
00:05:53
Speaker
kind of unsatisfying, but I actually kind of liked this one.
00:05:55
Speaker
It was kind of cute.
00:05:58
Speaker
That book was huge, and I'm receiving a lot of articles about the adaptation.
00:06:04
Speaker
The book side of Instagram is very excited about it.
00:06:06
Speaker
Yeah, and I think I might be
00:06:09
Speaker
mixing up my services here, but I think Netflix has optioned the rights to a few other Emily Henry books.
00:06:15
Speaker
I think she's found a good home adaptation home at Netflix for her there.
00:06:19
Speaker
So good for her.
00:06:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:21
Speaker
Big couple, big couple of days for her big, big year so far.
00:06:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:25
Speaker
I've, I've, I've had that book recommended to me a number of times.
00:06:28
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good, I'm sure it's like a beach read.
00:06:30
Speaker
It's a good, cute, easy thing.
00:06:34
Speaker
But we do have a specific assignment today, a little more intense than I think people we meet on vacation is.
00:06:41
Speaker
A little.
00:06:42
Speaker
Yeah, as far as I know.
00:06:43
Speaker
I mean, Lord knows I didn't read the book.
00:06:45
Speaker
But
Exploring Thomas Pynchon and Vineland's Themes
00:06:46
Speaker
why don't you, Chris, tell us about Thomas Pinchon's novel Vineland?
00:06:51
Speaker
Yes.
00:06:51
Speaker
This was a crazy one to research.
00:06:54
Speaker
Okay.
00:06:54
Speaker
So I'll tell you what we do know to start.
00:06:57
Speaker
Thomas Ruggles Pinchon Jr. was born in Long Island in 1937, went to Cornell, and it is believed now to currently reside in the Upper West Side.
00:07:09
Speaker
He is considered one of the preeminent postmodern American authors.
00:07:14
Speaker
The book was so strange while I was reading it.
00:07:18
Speaker
that I went to go look for interviews because I was like, who the heck is this guy?
00:07:24
Speaker
You cannot find a filmed interview with him anywhere.
00:07:29
Speaker
Really?
00:07:31
Speaker
Famously has spent the last five decades, well, started publishing in the 60s, so six decades, very deliberately not giving interviews, not showing up to appearances, does not want himself photographed, a very elusive cat.
00:07:47
Speaker
Wow.
00:07:48
Speaker
Interesting.
00:07:49
Speaker
It's so much so that there are even like these splinter groups who claim Thomas Pynchon himself does not exist at all and have a list of potential authors that they believe he could be instead.
00:08:04
Speaker
Oh, God.
00:08:04
Speaker
It's like Shakespeare all over again.
00:08:07
Speaker
Yes, exactly.
00:08:08
Speaker
Exactly.
00:08:08
Speaker
I saw one list.
00:08:10
Speaker
Orson Welles, who else was on the list?
00:08:12
Speaker
Prince was on the list.
00:08:13
Speaker
Someone suggested that it was actually Prince writing all of these.
00:08:18
Speaker
Well, he just published another book in 2025.
00:08:22
Speaker
Oh, so it's probably not Prince.
00:08:25
Speaker
Probably not Prince.
00:08:26
Speaker
Damn it.
00:08:27
Speaker
Can't say for certain, though.
00:08:29
Speaker
There were two fairly particular references to photos.
00:08:34
Speaker
of him made public in the last five decades.
00:08:37
Speaker
Whoa.
00:08:38
Speaker
Damn.
00:08:39
Speaker
This guy's effective.
00:08:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:41
Speaker
When you, when you go to look for a picture of him, the primary photo you will find is from his 1953 yearbook.
00:08:51
Speaker
He did famously record lines for two episodes of the Simpsons.
00:08:58
Speaker
What?
00:08:59
Speaker
Stating that it was simply because his son liked the show.
00:09:03
Speaker
basically.
00:09:03
Speaker
Wow.
00:09:04
Speaker
Good for him.
00:09:06
Speaker
But yeah, we'll talk about that a little bit more later on.
00:09:09
Speaker
I found some very interesting information.
00:09:11
Speaker
There was a little British, couldn't tell if it was like a mini documentary or like a sort of 60 minute style look at a particular individual.
00:09:22
Speaker
from 1990.
00:09:23
Speaker
It was aired the day before Vineland officially came out, which is very confusing because from all accounts, it was already critically acclaimed and was selling out before it was officially released.
00:09:37
Speaker
I do not understand book publication dates.
00:09:39
Speaker
They're like not well recorded and not official.
00:09:42
Speaker
I don't get it.
00:09:43
Speaker
I don't understand what's happening there.
00:09:44
Speaker
Very confusing, especially because
00:09:47
Speaker
For virtually anyone else, you would immediately look at that scenario and say, okay, so this was a PR stunt and a very effective one.
00:09:56
Speaker
Indeed, one of the publishing experts they had on this BBC documentary said exactly that and also specified this has been this guy's MO forever.
00:10:09
Speaker
It's not a publicity stunt.
00:10:10
Speaker
This is just what he does.
00:10:13
Speaker
Whether that was the intention or not, it clearly worked.
00:10:16
Speaker
I mean, they made a movie out of it.
00:10:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:18
Speaker
So here's sort of an order of his big publications that came out.
00:10:22
Speaker
These are just books, right?
00:10:23
Speaker
He's written other articles, some other stuff.
00:10:26
Speaker
His first book, V, just uppercase V, came out in 1963.
00:10:30
Speaker
The Crying of Lot 49, 1966.
00:10:31
Speaker
Famously, you'll probably have heard of this, Gravity's Rainbow.
00:10:39
Speaker
Yes, I have, and I'll circle back to why a little bit later, but only recently learned about this book.
00:10:45
Speaker
Okay, interesting.
00:10:46
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:10:47
Speaker
This is famously, it is often called encyclopedic dense text.
00:10:53
Speaker
It is massive, very accurate, very factually accurate in the science.
00:11:01
Speaker
The entire book is kind of a discussion, rumination, philosophication,
00:11:08
Speaker
if that's a word, of the German development of the V2 rocket.
00:11:14
Speaker
Jesus.
00:11:15
Speaker
Okay.
00:11:15
Speaker
He won the National Book Award for it, and his publisher, knowing that he would not show up to receive the award, actually hired a comedian of that time who was famous for these satirical, pseudo-academic tirades to receive the award.
00:11:36
Speaker
Cool.
00:11:37
Speaker
And the best part is,
00:11:39
Speaker
No one there had ever seen Pinchon himself.
00:11:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:42
Speaker
So the majority of the crowd just assumed it was actually him.
00:11:47
Speaker
Do you know who the comedian was?
00:11:50
Speaker
Yes, it is the comedian, quote unquote, Professor Erwin Corey.
00:11:57
Speaker
Oh, I'm going to have to look that up.
00:11:59
Speaker
I don't think I'm familiar with him.
00:12:01
Speaker
So that was part of it, too.
00:12:03
Speaker
He wasn't a very well-known comedian.
00:12:05
Speaker
I guess he must not be if everyone thought it was Pinchon.
00:12:08
Speaker
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
00:12:09
Speaker
I mean, just incredible.
00:12:11
Speaker
Slow Learner was between these two.
00:12:13
Speaker
So Gravity's Rainbow was 73, massive success.
00:12:16
Speaker
Slow Learner is a collection of short stories he released in 84, and then came Vineland in 1990.
00:12:24
Speaker
Okay.
00:12:25
Speaker
One of the fascinating comparisons that I saw made was that Gravity's Rainbow is like this pillar of dissecting
00:12:37
Speaker
complex, dense literature, right?
00:12:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:43
Speaker
And one of the, again, people that they were interviewing on this BBC piece talked about basically the critical response to Vineland was all these professors loved having this ivory tower.
00:13:00
Speaker
They hold the academic keys to unlock the complexity of Gravity's Rainbow.
00:13:06
Speaker
And then Vineland comes out.
00:13:08
Speaker
It is basically just this kind of like trip of drug-fueled mania.
00:13:17
Speaker
Wow.
00:13:18
Speaker
Involving these constant pop culture references, references to TV shows, references to current artists, former artists, all of these people that essentially the interviewee posited was now a world closed off.
00:13:35
Speaker
to these academics.
00:13:36
Speaker
Yeah, wow.
00:13:38
Speaker
And so because now it's suddenly not something that they understand in their wheelhouse, they find it deplorable and against this massive career that this author's built for himself.
00:13:51
Speaker
Just a comical situation all the way around.
00:13:52
Speaker
Wow, yeah, that's wacky.
00:13:55
Speaker
There was this incredible book critic's quote about him and this mystique that he's built up around himself.
00:14:05
Speaker
They said, the man simply chooses not to be a public figure, an attitude that resonates on a frequency so out of phase with that of the prevailing culture, that if Pinchon and Paris Hilton were ever to meet, the circumstances I admit are beyond imagining, we can agree, the resulting matter or antimatter explosion would vaporize everything from here to Tau Ceti IV.
00:14:33
Speaker
just an incredible comparison.
00:14:35
Speaker
And he himself has often talked about the problem.
00:14:39
Speaker
We discussed this with Frieda McFadden.
00:14:42
Speaker
People think they know who she is.
00:14:44
Speaker
Why would we disturb that?
00:14:46
Speaker
She's gone to such lengths.
00:14:48
Speaker
Who are we, the public?
00:14:50
Speaker
to deny her that, right?
00:14:52
Speaker
We like this person's work so much that we should violate what they've clearly made, you know, their desires.
00:14:59
Speaker
Plus, I don't want to vaporize everything from here to Tau Ceti IV.
00:15:03
Speaker
Well, I agree with this critic.
00:15:06
Speaker
I think that meeting is highly unlikely.
00:15:08
Speaker
Not impossible, clearly.
00:15:10
Speaker
Not impossible.
00:15:11
Speaker
But this idea of he has chosen not to be a public figure.
00:15:16
Speaker
One of the photos that came out was him taking his son for a walk in Manhattan that the National Enquirer found chasing him down.
00:15:26
Speaker
And he contacted them and asked them not to publish it.
00:15:29
Speaker
But where with other media figures, clearly this would boost his sales.
00:15:36
Speaker
Right?
00:15:36
Speaker
Right.
00:15:38
Speaker
And he has chosen, no, I've made this literature for you.
00:15:42
Speaker
albeit crazy literature, let that speak for itself.
00:15:46
Speaker
So the book, Vineland, it is a reference to a place that is now turned into, I believe, Eureka, Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest.
00:15:56
Speaker
It is at the exact intersection, in my opinion, of the crazy stream of consciousness
00:16:05
Speaker
nearly indecipherable writing of Ulysses or Dubliners, James Joyce, which I am not the first person to compare his work to James Joyce.
00:16:16
Speaker
But it feels very much like that to me.
00:16:19
Speaker
Anna Karenina, these massive Russian epics of literature where you are spending 30 pages hearing about some guy just mowing the grass with a scythe, and you're like, where is this going?
00:16:34
Speaker
And On the Road by Jack Kerouac, the beatnik sort of lucid, is this reality, is it not?
00:16:45
Speaker
I want to call it genre bending.
00:16:47
Speaker
I suppose maybe that's what they mean by postmodern.
00:16:50
Speaker
It's a wild book to get through.
00:16:52
Speaker
Wow, cool.
00:16:55
Speaker
There are clearly some main characters, many main characters, in fact.
00:17:00
Speaker
I would hesitate to call any of them the protagonist.
00:17:04
Speaker
What was there a clear protagonist in the film?
00:17:07
Speaker
There's actually a lot of argument around this because I think that there's two.
00:17:11
Speaker
Some people feel that there's only one and that would be Leonardo DiCaprio's character.
00:17:16
Speaker
Okay.
00:17:17
Speaker
And that's the dad.
00:17:17
Speaker
He, uh, Zoid or something I think is his character in the book.
00:17:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:24
Speaker
And then his, his wife, Frenessi.
00:17:28
Speaker
The names in the book are just insane.
00:17:29
Speaker
Their daughter is Prairie.
00:17:31
Speaker
Frenessi's mother's name is Sasha and her dad, it's like Hub, like Hubbard or Hubbard.
00:17:39
Speaker
Like it's just, it is all over the place.
00:17:42
Speaker
They're being chased around by this FBI man or CIA or secret service of some type named Zond, Brock Zond.
00:17:51
Speaker
It's just wild and completely outside of chapter breaks, just suddenly one paragraph to the next, you're suddenly following this, this
00:18:01
Speaker
woman named DL and her path to become a master ninja.
00:18:05
Speaker
And then these two guys who run a tow business and impound cars called Blood and Vato.
00:18:12
Speaker
All of it is kind of built around the post McCarthy red scare in Hollywood of unions and scabs and strikers and the government turning people and offering them deals to narc on other people that they know.
00:18:29
Speaker
the student organizations in the universities, they're sort of guru, pseudo messiah, academic professors that they cling to that the professors don't know why.
00:18:39
Speaker
It's just this wild, wild trip.
00:18:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:44
Speaker
Sounds like it.
00:18:46
Speaker
It's been called essentially a quintessential piece of the 60s, not piece of writing of the 60s, just like a dissection, a slice of that time period.
00:18:56
Speaker
Okay.
00:18:57
Speaker
Got it.
00:18:57
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:58
Speaker
And I think that was essentially his goal.
00:19:00
Speaker
He does use it very effectively to discuss those themes, the war on drugs, a lot of references to Nixon and Reagan, the effects of television on the populace, right?
00:19:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:14
Speaker
the opioid of the masses.
00:19:16
Speaker
I don't think he ever says that specifically, but there is a gentleman who's literally addicted to it.
00:19:21
Speaker
What do they call them?
00:19:22
Speaker
Like tube heads or something.
00:19:23
Speaker
They just call it the tube, the entire book.
00:19:25
Speaker
They don't call it television much.
00:19:28
Speaker
And they, they kind of capture the idea of what is a plight, a cause, a battle of an entire generation.
00:19:38
Speaker
How do authorities respond?
00:19:40
Speaker
How do changes, if any, happen?
00:19:43
Speaker
Cool.
00:19:46
Speaker
Those are big ideas.
00:19:49
Speaker
It feels like a lot of the... There's so much.
00:19:52
Speaker
There's so, so much across so many people.
00:19:55
Speaker
I don't think it behooves us to get into many of them very deeply, but I wanted to give you an example of the writing.
00:20:04
Speaker
Okay.
00:20:06
Speaker
So, Zoid's not yet wife yet.
00:20:10
Speaker
He hasn't met her yet.
00:20:12
Speaker
They're at this...
00:20:14
Speaker
like Oceanside University in California and this student group rises up and they're suddenly listening to rock and roll and doing drugs.
00:20:25
Speaker
And so the government decides they need to step in and quash this, right?
00:20:29
Speaker
Sure, yeah.
00:20:30
Speaker
And they form this like film co-op essentially.
00:20:35
Speaker
I think we can all picture it, right?
00:20:36
Speaker
Bunch of kids decide this is how we can make an impact.
00:20:40
Speaker
We'll go film each of the times
00:20:43
Speaker
the man comes in to put the people down and distribute it, right?
00:20:48
Speaker
Okay.
00:20:49
Speaker
And so they're talking about creating this archive of what's going on.
00:20:54
Speaker
And it says, they particularly believed in the ability of close-ups to reveal and devastate.
00:21:02
Speaker
When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face.
00:21:11
Speaker
Who could withstand the light?
00:21:13
Speaker
What viewer could believe in the war, the system, the countless lies about American freedom, looking into these mug shots of the bought and sold?
00:21:27
Speaker
That is masterful.
00:21:28
Speaker
Yeah, I'm like rereading it right now because it's also even that's dense and I'm like trying to navigate the like three sentences you just read.
00:21:39
Speaker
And it is only three sentences, which is a frustrating aspect of his writing.
00:21:44
Speaker
There would be a page and a half that's all one paragraph.
00:21:48
Speaker
I did a lot of rereading.
00:21:50
Speaker
I feel like I read 800 pages in these 400 pages.
00:21:53
Speaker
Oh, man.
00:21:54
Speaker
What a first book for the year.
00:21:56
Speaker
Right?
00:21:58
Speaker
Now, this one in particular, really, really now, I mean, I do not have memorized what the date is this episode will come out.
00:22:07
Speaker
But now, January 10th, 2026, I am immediately thinking of, which I was not because I read this paragraph before this event occurred, but I am immediately now thinking of all of the videos, the immediate body cam footage that we have all now seen of the ICE killing in Minnesota that's been happening, feels like nonstop for a long, long time.
00:22:33
Speaker
Nonstop in a very public way.
00:22:37
Speaker
since George Floyd in 2020.
00:22:42
Speaker
And this is no less true and poignant and powerful now than it was then.
00:22:52
Speaker
And now this is getting very pessimistic.
00:22:56
Speaker
We see the exact same thing happening here.
00:23:00
Speaker
This happened very, very publicly five years ago, and we were all appalled.
00:23:07
Speaker
It is one episode after another throughout this book, and at the end, does anything change?
00:23:12
Speaker
No.
00:23:15
Speaker
And who, as an objective observer, could look at America of today and not think the exact same thing?
00:23:24
Speaker
So that was, it's just, this was simultaneously the most genius and brilliant part of this book
00:23:36
Speaker
and the most frustrating.
00:23:37
Speaker
He took commentary like this, applied it not just to that generation, right?
00:23:42
Speaker
This came out in 1990.
00:23:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:43
Speaker
Right.
00:23:44
Speaker
He was talking about things that were happening in all these people's parents' and grandparents' times.
00:23:50
Speaker
I mean, his time, he was born in 37, but you know what I mean.
00:23:53
Speaker
Yep.
00:23:55
Speaker
And we are now, 36 years later, confronting the exact same thing for our generation.
00:24:04
Speaker
and seeing the exact same inputs and outcomes.
00:24:10
Speaker
Just crazy.
00:24:12
Speaker
I'm glad that you caught on to that.
00:24:13
Speaker
I'm glad that the book resonated in that way with you because I've, I rewatched the movie this morning, just a couple hours ago to, to prepare for this.
00:24:21
Speaker
And it was an extremely emotional, I'm going to get emotional now experience.
00:24:28
Speaker
Um, just to watch it, you know, while these wounds are so fresh,
00:24:35
Speaker
these metaphorical wounds uh obviously because of what we're we're going through you know in the last 10 days really uh of of 2026 um have been really raw and the story i think just could not be more poignant and more oh sorry just it's just really raw you know to watch this and um
00:24:59
Speaker
I can't believe that this movie, I feel like we've been saying this for the last, like since Donald Trump was elected the first time we talk about how these stories are so unbelievably poignant.
00:25:08
Speaker
Um, and you know, obviously at some point that's a little bit intentional by these publishing houses and movie studios that are creating these stories.
00:25:17
Speaker
But this text as a whole has just really drawn that through line from the beginning of modern history, modern American history through
00:25:28
Speaker
today and probably tomorrow and probably the next, you know, a hundred years if we're lucky enough to make it that long as a country.
00:25:36
Speaker
Anyway, sorry for being the first to cry on the pod, but somebody had to do it eventually.
00:25:40
Speaker
It happened someday.
00:25:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:43
Speaker
It's just, it's, it's remarkable.
00:25:45
Speaker
And, um, I think, uh, I think the frustration for me with this book in particular, clearly such a valuable text, these, these bits are hidden.
00:25:58
Speaker
these absolutely essential commentaries.
00:26:02
Speaker
To access them, you, as the reader, must wade through this chest-deep bog of different characters' perspectives, timelines crossing, new characters being introduced, otherworldly powers.
00:26:18
Speaker
This woman, DL, is able to
00:26:21
Speaker
press on the right places in one's body and start a chain reaction where they will not die for another year.
00:26:31
Speaker
What?
00:26:32
Speaker
These crazy things.
00:26:33
Speaker
There's an entire cult of people who all think they're already dead called thanatoids or thanatinoids.
00:26:42
Speaker
Okay.
00:26:43
Speaker
These little sprinklings...
00:26:45
Speaker
of shockingly specific pop culture TV movie references over the course of 400 very dense pages.
00:26:57
Speaker
I'm on an emotional rollercoaster right now.
00:26:59
Speaker
I don't even know what to say.
00:27:01
Speaker
Honestly, I don't know.
00:27:06
Speaker
I am utterly unconvinced what I even think if that is part of the remarkable
00:27:16
Speaker
genius here, or if he has taken a very important message and hidden it away a little bit.
00:27:22
Speaker
Maybe, yeah, maybe buried it a little more than he intended.
00:27:27
Speaker
I don't know.
00:27:27
Speaker
I mean, clearly his writing has stayed the same.
00:27:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:31
Speaker
I believe this is the package in which he intended to deliver his message.
00:27:36
Speaker
Sure.
00:27:37
Speaker
It's just baffling.
00:27:38
Speaker
It was, I wanted to quit reading this book at so many points, but also absolutely could not.
00:27:46
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's kind of the theme of this podcast is I tell you to read a book, you hate it for 95% of it, and then you get that last 5% and you're like, okay, wait a second, we can have a real discussion about this.
00:27:59
Speaker
Oh no, the ending was entirely unsatisfactory.
00:28:04
Speaker
Really?
00:28:05
Speaker
It gets me in the movie, which I don't want to spoil for anybody, but that's too bad.
00:28:10
Speaker
But you have to get to it.
00:28:12
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, politically speaking, that's probably exactly what he was going for.
00:28:17
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:28:17
Speaker
That's why I would really be hesitant.
00:28:21
Speaker
I feel mostly confident in my analysis.
00:28:26
Speaker
And I would also feel hard pressed to suggest any of it, if I'm correct, is not exactly what he intended.
00:28:33
Speaker
Right?
00:28:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:36
Speaker
A lot more details, a lot more very
00:28:40
Speaker
very intriguing quotes that I have left out basically due to time.
00:28:44
Speaker
But yeah, that's the book in a weird, tiny, misshapen nutshell.
00:28:49
Speaker
In a weird, tiny, misshapen nutshell.
00:28:52
Speaker
That's funny.
00:28:53
Speaker
How does that compare to the film?
00:28:56
Speaker
Actually, really interestingly, which I think we should maybe get into after we take a quick break.
00:29:02
Speaker
So we'll be right back.
00:29:08
Speaker
Welcome back to Adaptation, the Book to Movie podcast.
00:29:11
Speaker
We're discussing Thomas Pinchon's Vineland.
00:29:14
Speaker
Got it right that time.
00:29:15
Speaker
And because I took a minute to pull my shit together.
00:29:20
Speaker
And it's a film adaptation, One Battle After Another, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.
00:29:26
Speaker
Diving into the movie side here, as Chris alluded to, this is sort of a loose adaptation.
00:29:31
Speaker
I was thinking about that term this morning after rewatching it.
00:29:35
Speaker
I don't love loose adaptation because I think that kind of implies that it plays with the ideas that the book was putting forward.
00:29:43
Speaker
But it doesn't so much.
00:29:46
Speaker
And I think, especially after hearing you talk about sort of the
00:29:49
Speaker
narrative and thematic chaos that it's presented through.
00:29:53
Speaker
I'm seeing even more parallels to the movie and I can see how writer director, Paul Thomas Anderson, I don't want to say evolve the material because that sort of implies a superiority, but how he adapted it basically interpreted it into
00:30:10
Speaker
this movie.
00:30:11
Speaker
So I guess put loose adaptation in quotation marks.
00:30:15
Speaker
Yeah, I see what you mean.
00:30:17
Speaker
I did read the Wikipedia synopsis of the book, which is extremely brief.
00:30:21
Speaker
It's like three or four paragraphs long.
00:30:23
Speaker
I couldn't believe how short the synopsis was considering how much is in the book.
00:30:29
Speaker
As far as I can tell from that synopsis, the events of the movie do map on pretty well to the events of the book, at least the main thread.
00:30:37
Speaker
There is no cult of people that think that they're undead or DL is not trying to become a master ninja or what did you say?
00:30:47
Speaker
Actually, they use the term ninja.
00:30:49
Speaker
Ninjet.
00:30:50
Speaker
Okay, well, I think the character that's a comp for her is certainly not on that path in the movie.
00:30:56
Speaker
But in many cases, there are one-to-one comps for events and characters between the book and the movie, from what I can tell.
00:31:05
Speaker
Okay.
00:31:06
Speaker
So really a clever reworking of the material is kind of what I'm getting at.
00:31:12
Speaker
Anderson was able to, oh, I didn't even realize that he shares your last name, that he was able to craft this story.
00:31:21
Speaker
Paul Thomas Anderson, or PTA, as he is affectionately called by cinephiles like myself, is widely known as one of the best filmmakers working right now, if not the best.
00:31:30
Speaker
Some of his other movies are Boogie Nights and Phantom Thread.
00:31:33
Speaker
They're pretty much all hailed.
00:31:35
Speaker
as a masterpiece, including this one, which I'll get to later.
00:31:38
Speaker
But he has been working on adapting this book for decades.
00:31:42
Speaker
He fell in love with the book shortly after it was published and
00:31:46
Speaker
has been trying to work out a way to put it on the screen basically since then.
00:31:51
Speaker
And he thought that the public love for the book as well as his own love for the book would have made it sort of impossible to adapt.
00:31:59
Speaker
He wasn't sure he could like tell the story fairly or accurately.
00:32:02
Speaker
I don't know how this man condensed the ideas into a film.
00:32:08
Speaker
It's also really interesting to note that this is Paul Thomas Anderson's most
00:32:13
Speaker
commercial and most accessible film as well.
00:32:16
Speaker
So the fact that he was able to turn it into something that I think can really appeal to the masses in a way that a lot of sort of awards affair that he's created before doesn't is just a stroke of brilliance.
00:32:30
Speaker
I just don't, I'm boggled right now after hearing everything that you said and how like one person could sit down and do this.
00:32:38
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:39
Speaker
But like I said, it took him decades to do it.
00:32:42
Speaker
Also, of course, worth noting, spooky timing given what's happening, like you mentioned, in Minneapolis especially, which is a city that's important to the both of us.
00:32:52
Speaker
So just, God, I'm going to cry again.
00:32:55
Speaker
You know, we want to share our love with the people of that community and the people that are feeling pain right now.
00:32:59
Speaker
And yeah, I don't know, hopefully this movie, this story can offer
00:33:07
Speaker
Certainly not answers.
00:33:07
Speaker
I don't think it's meant to do that.
00:33:09
Speaker
I don't know that any book or movie could, but I don't know, maybe some solace in the fact that this has been a through line forever and ever.
00:33:17
Speaker
I don't know.
00:33:19
Speaker
One battle after another, for the most part, follows a father and daughter who are trying to
00:33:25
Speaker
reunite after being separated by the military sort of acting out of legal boundaries.
00:33:32
Speaker
Again, ironic.
00:33:35
Speaker
They were acting on the personal interest of one man in the military because he was sort of scorned in the past by the daughters, both of the daughters' parents.
00:33:45
Speaker
who were part of a revolutionary group, sort of Antifa-like.
00:33:49
Speaker
I think it's meant to do that.
00:33:50
Speaker
I don't know that any book or movie could, but I don't know, maybe some solace in the fact that this has been a through line forever and ever.
00:33:58
Speaker
I don't know.
00:34:01
Speaker
One battle after another, for the most part, follows a father and daughter who are trying to
00:34:07
Speaker
reunite after being separated by the military sort of acting out of legal boundaries.
00:34:14
Speaker
Again, ironic.
00:34:17
Speaker
They were acting on the personal interest of one man in the military because he was sort of scorned in the past by the daughters, both of the daughters' parents.
00:34:27
Speaker
who were part of a revolutionary group, sort of Antifa-like.
00:34:30
Speaker
That's sort of how they're framed in the movie, called the French 75, which very much puts a target on everybody's back.
00:34:39
Speaker
You know, the father and daughter go into witness protection because the baby mama...
00:34:43
Speaker
gets arrested when she sort of gets in over her head and gives up names and locations of some of her fellow revolutionaries.
00:34:51
Speaker
So that sets the story on its course.
00:34:53
Speaker
All of that's pretty, pretty true.
00:34:55
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:34:56
Speaker
I mean, change names, change time period.
00:34:58
Speaker
Is the movie set to be like fairly modern timeline wise?
00:35:02
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:35:03
Speaker
I don't think they ever state exactly what year anything happens in.
00:35:09
Speaker
But the opening sequence of the movie, which is essentially a prologue, follows the French 75, this revolutionary group, breaking people out of a immigration internment camp along the Mexico border.
00:35:22
Speaker
So it's a very 2025-2026 version of the story.
00:35:26
Speaker
And in fact, a huge sort of B storyline throughout the rest of the movie is, I guess, smuggling immigrants into the country.
00:35:34
Speaker
They refer to it as a Latino Harriet Tubman situation is the actual line of dialogue in the movie.
00:35:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:43
Speaker
So it's just extremely potent in its politics.
00:35:46
Speaker
You can't watch it and ignore what's going on.
00:35:49
Speaker
One of my favorite reviews on Letterboxd.
00:35:51
Speaker
This movie, I think it's like the most liked one on there says if the president sees this movie, he will either ban cinema or kill himself because it's just so left leaning, let's say.
00:36:03
Speaker
Mm hmm.
00:36:04
Speaker
Mm hmm.
00:36:05
Speaker
and frighteningly accurate yeah exactly too too reflective but of course this administration thrives off of that so the antagonists in this movie in addition to the american military and the police force are the members of a group called the christmas adventurers club which is a white nationalist organization that is very well connected and tied to a great many resources it's supposed to be sort of a uh
00:36:31
Speaker
take on the KKK probably, right?
00:36:33
Speaker
A very organized group.
00:36:36
Speaker
Or the CIA.
00:36:38
Speaker
No kidding.
00:36:40
Speaker
Any of those three letter acronyms probably.
00:36:43
Speaker
I think it's very interesting too that specifically, you mentioned that there's kind of some shots of Reagan and his politics in the book because there are some literal shots, film shots, of Ronald Reagan's former Sacramento mansion
00:36:59
Speaker
in the movie, and that's used as the exterior of the headquarters for this Christmas Adventurers Club.
00:37:04
Speaker
So it's really not pulling any punches in the way it's again, sort of modernized and reinterpreted Pinchot's text.
00:37:12
Speaker
As I said earlier, the movie stars Leonardo DiCaprio, I think, as the Zoid character, as far as I can tell.
00:37:18
Speaker
His daughter is played by Chase Infinity.
00:37:21
Speaker
This is her first film role.
00:37:23
Speaker
Teyana Taylor, the R&B star, Sean Penn, Regina Hall, and our boy Benicio del Toro.
00:37:31
Speaker
Chris and I are big fans of Benicio del Toro.
00:37:34
Speaker
Fantastic.
00:37:35
Speaker
The movie was a huge success, especially critically widely considered one of the best and important movies of the decade, certainly considered the best of 2025.
00:37:44
Speaker
Very competitive for many Oscars, including best picture director, screenplay, and even actor Leo's very much in the conversation there.
00:37:52
Speaker
And it even picked up a lot of precursors in the weeks leading up to
00:37:57
Speaker
This episode's release at one of the Critics' Choice Awards.
00:37:59
Speaker
It will probably win at the Golden Globes tomorrow.
00:38:02
Speaker
Basically has a lot of Oscars on lock, but again, we'll get to that in a later episode.
00:38:08
Speaker
It is technically the most financially successful of PTA's films.
00:38:13
Speaker
It's not saying much because most of his movies, like I said, are that kind of inaccessible awards fair, so they kind of
00:38:20
Speaker
like technically bomb.
00:38:21
Speaker
They're not really made to make money, so I don't know if studios really think of him that way.
00:38:26
Speaker
But it's worth noting that this one did perform the best of his handful of films, which is a strong indicator of how it's resonating with audiences, despite the fact that Paul Thomas Anderson is probably not a name that most
00:38:39
Speaker
non-cinephiles are, he's not like a household name.
00:38:43
Speaker
You know what I mean?
00:38:44
Speaker
Had you ever heard of Paul Thomas Anderson before?
00:38:46
Speaker
Nope.
00:38:47
Speaker
Before this, I never had.
00:38:48
Speaker
Nope.
00:38:48
Speaker
Right.
00:38:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:49
Speaker
So just very interesting to check my bias here.
00:38:53
Speaker
I did put down the numbers, a $130 million budget, and it's only made 200 million worldwide.
00:38:59
Speaker
So, you know, it hasn't, it hasn't turned a profit yet.
00:39:01
Speaker
Remember we've talked about a movie needs to make at least two and a half times its budget to turn a profit.
00:39:09
Speaker
But I think it's the first of Paul Thomas Anderson's to cross like 100 million worldwide.
00:39:14
Speaker
So to blow that number out of the water is like definitely a boon for the movie.
00:39:19
Speaker
And, you know, you've got to keep in mind that some of that budget, Leo has a standard fee of $25 million.
00:39:25
Speaker
So that's not, you know, so you can get to 130 million pretty quick when you've got salaries like that.
00:39:31
Speaker
Also just going to throw out there, it has a 95 out of 100 on Metacritic, which we've talked about is sort of a better way to determine the actual quality of a movie.
00:39:40
Speaker
Whereas Rotten Tomatoes is a better way to determine consensus.
00:39:44
Speaker
But pretty similar numbers over there, 94% critic rating and 85% audience score.
00:39:50
Speaker
Wow.
00:39:51
Speaker
And have we talked about cinema score on the mic yet?
00:39:55
Speaker
I don't think so.
00:39:56
Speaker
Okay.
00:39:56
Speaker
It's basically spot polling.
00:39:58
Speaker
Spot polling, you mean literally like as people leave the theater?
00:40:01
Speaker
Yeah, actually, when you walk in, you're given a little card.
00:40:05
Speaker
Basically, you just mark down the answers to a handful of questions that has you fold down pieces of the card based on like, what grade you would give it, why you showed up to the movie.
00:40:15
Speaker
Was it for the stars for the director, because you saw a good trailer, it asks a few very general questions to spot poll random people as they're going in and coming out of the movies.
00:40:24
Speaker
And then you hand it in to the same representative when you leave, and eventually they generate
00:40:30
Speaker
a cinema score which is a letter grade for the movie and this has an a which obviously very strong uh-huh wow wow so people people are digging this people are digging this and it's like i said i mean it's just widely hailed as a masterpiece you don't see movies like this that often yeah we're lucky to be alive in a time that paul thomas anderson is making movies like this one
00:40:56
Speaker
Why is, I mean, it feels, based on your description, well, I guess you also kind of answered it as well, it feels I had never heard this man's name until today.
00:41:06
Speaker
Paul Thomas Anderson?
00:41:08
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:41:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's largely because a lot of his movies are, I don't know that they're inaccessible.
00:41:15
Speaker
They're just not appealing to a massive audience.
00:41:18
Speaker
You know, if what you're looking for when you scroll through Netflix is minority report, you're probably not going to click on Phantom Thread, which is a movie about a dressmaker.
00:41:29
Speaker
Right.
00:41:30
Speaker
And his wife who like psychologically torture one another.
00:41:33
Speaker
Actually, that's kind of closer to Minority Report than maybe some of his other.
00:41:38
Speaker
In the movie, but not in the book.
00:41:40
Speaker
Oh, okay.
00:41:41
Speaker
Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.
00:41:42
Speaker
We'll talk about it in a couple of weeks, a couple of months.
00:41:45
Speaker
But his movies are just of a flavor that don't always appeal to the masses.
00:41:49
Speaker
I mean, they make critics happy and they generally earn a lot of awards and awards nominations, but they don't make a lot of money.
00:41:56
Speaker
So, you know, there's an interesting, you know, flip side to this coin where James Cameron obviously right now is a
00:42:02
Speaker
in the in the news a lot because avatar 3 is doing very very well and he's said in some interviews like screw awards I don't really care about that my movies are the ones that people want to see you know he's the only director to have made four narrative films in a row that have all earned over a billion dollars so so he's certainly on to something you know granted it's three avatar movies in Titanic so like what uh you know
00:42:28
Speaker
Sure.
00:42:29
Speaker
You know, but yeah, Paul Thomas Anderson is sort of the flip side of that coin.
00:42:35
Speaker
And they both make fantastic movies.
00:42:37
Speaker
So interesting way to look at the industry for sure.
00:42:41
Speaker
So really, maybe we can view this and tell me if this is overreaching, but maybe we can view this as a win, you know, a story that is talking about a repeating and very problematic aspect of human history.
00:42:57
Speaker
is not just being swept away as a niche documentary for a select few to enjoy.
00:43:04
Speaker
Oh, 100%.
00:43:05
Speaker
You know, and you pair that with the fact that like Sinners did so incredibly well financially and, you know, had sort of a similar track, I suppose, mental track as far as
00:43:17
Speaker
this is an issue that doesn't really go away.
00:43:19
Speaker
We're talking about it in a different context to highlight that.
00:43:23
Speaker
That seems to be a theme that's really resonating with people right now, which like, no duh, you know?
00:43:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:30
Speaker
I know.
00:43:31
Speaker
As I said it, I'm like, yeah, but also like, is this, but I don't know.
00:43:34
Speaker
We, but we also have to do something
Encouragement for Listeners & Next Episode Preview
00:43:37
Speaker
right.
00:43:37
Speaker
And so if this can be something, I don't know, take care of yourselves folks.
00:43:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:43
Speaker
Please.
00:43:44
Speaker
Discussion questions.
00:43:45
Speaker
What are you, what do you got for me?
00:43:48
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm very curious.
00:43:50
Speaker
I was really under the impression that the, I think you put it well, I won't repeat you, the loosely adapted and what that would mean, clearly really stayed true to the bedrock ideals of the text.
00:44:04
Speaker
I'm curious if you think, was this a choice on Anderson's part to modernize, to make it more accessible?
00:44:14
Speaker
Do you think it would have, because I'm picturing
00:44:16
Speaker
this exact same cast without changing the timeline at all.
00:44:21
Speaker
The book opens in 1984, talking about things happening in the sixties.
00:44:26
Speaker
To me, that also would have been a fun film.
00:44:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:30
Speaker
But would we, I don't know, what are your thoughts on that?
00:44:33
Speaker
This idea of changing the timeline, is it a stylistic choice?
00:44:38
Speaker
Is it to make meaning clearer?
00:44:41
Speaker
Well, I think that partly goes back to what I mentioned about Anderson's nerves to adapt this.
00:44:47
Speaker
He wasn't sure that between his own affection for the book and the public's affection that he could tell like a real version of the story.
00:44:53
Speaker
So I think he maybe intentionally wanted to take a step away to give himself a little bit of breathing room and make what he's known for, which is a masterpiece.
00:45:02
Speaker
I don't, it still boggles my mind a little bit because like I said, he's been working on it for decades and not that these problems are new, these problems that are depicted in the movie, but it's just so of today, it's kind of incredible that he,
00:45:17
Speaker
pulled this off.
00:45:19
Speaker
He said in interviews that he took the approach he did, like I said, because he was nervous about adapting it, but that he decided to tell this as a story through a car chase action movie and about a woman revolutionary.
00:45:32
Speaker
I think he might have four daughters.
00:45:33
Speaker
Well, he's got four kids.
00:45:34
Speaker
At least two of them are girls.
00:45:36
Speaker
So this is a very personal way for him to get into the story as well.
00:45:41
Speaker
And yeah, I don't really have a nice bow to put on all of these ideas, unfortunately.
00:45:46
Speaker
I mean, I'm asking you for conjecture.
00:45:48
Speaker
Yeah, I guess my guess is that this was what he felt was his best way in and also audiences.
00:45:54
Speaker
And that's what, you know, kind of makes this such a goldmine is that he he figured that out and it works so well.
00:46:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:03
Speaker
That makes sense.
00:46:04
Speaker
What else do you have for me?
00:46:06
Speaker
Yeah, the this is more of a film question broadly.
00:46:12
Speaker
Okay.
00:46:12
Speaker
Do you think there is any part of the casting that is along these lines of the actors and actresses' personal feelings, or is it you would do well in this role exclusively?
00:46:27
Speaker
That's a good question, in part because
00:46:32
Speaker
Well, because it is.
00:46:35
Speaker
I have to imagine that you could not feel attacked.
00:46:38
Speaker
Like if you got the script in your inbox and decided I want to do this, I have to imagine that a part of you has to align politically with what this is saying.
00:46:48
Speaker
That being said, Leonardo DiCaprio missed a huge award ceremony a few days ago because he was stuck on Jeff Bezos' yacht and, you know, God knows what ocean.
00:46:58
Speaker
I believe it was Jeff Bezos' yacht.
00:47:00
Speaker
I mean, any yacht.
00:47:01
Speaker
If you're stuck on a yacht, big fucking whoop.
00:47:04
Speaker
Yeah, right.
00:47:05
Speaker
He attended the Bezos wedding last year in Venice and has made some business decisions that sort of align with this idea that there is no such thing as a good celebrity or a good rich person, right?
00:47:18
Speaker
But I think it's also very interesting for Paul Thomas Anderson to choose somebody like Regina Hall to be in this movie, who is primarily known for comedy.
00:47:30
Speaker
you know this is an extremely serious movie she's in an extremely serious role
00:47:35
Speaker
that's not funny at all.
00:47:37
Speaker
And I have to wonder if some of that comes from the fact they're actually they've talked about they're actually next door neighbors as well, Regina Hall and.
00:47:45
Speaker
Oh, wow.
00:47:46
Speaker
So I wonder if he knows her on a closer level and has said you as a person can embody this revolutionary, this extremely left leaning revolutionary better than anybody else in Hollywood, regardless of the public perception of you, which is
00:48:04
Speaker
Funny lady, right?
00:48:06
Speaker
Yep.
00:48:06
Speaker
Yep.
00:48:07
Speaker
And then, of course, Benicio del Toro has Puerto Rican citizenship.
00:48:11
Speaker
So to, you know, to make him a part of this storyline that is assisting immigrants, you know, it's all very poignant.
00:48:20
Speaker
I don't know that it's operating at the level that some movies operate when we talk about casting as an art.
00:48:26
Speaker
Mm hmm.
00:48:27
Speaker
So this is a very long winded way of saying I think that there is some of both.
00:48:31
Speaker
Right.
00:48:31
Speaker
Okay.
00:48:32
Speaker
He probably never would have gotten 130 million dollar budget to make this movie if he did not have the biggest movie star in the world agree to star in it.
00:48:40
Speaker
So there's also some industry politicking going on and
00:48:44
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know exactly.
00:48:46
Speaker
But that's my conjecture is that people probably to make this and to understand what it is to make this movie with Paul Thomas Anderson, they probably have to be mostly politically aligned.
00:48:56
Speaker
But that might also just be kind of wishful thinking because I like everybody in this movie.
00:49:02
Speaker
I'll take wishful thinking at this point.
00:49:04
Speaker
I know.
00:49:04
Speaker
My God.
00:49:05
Speaker
No kidding.
00:49:06
Speaker
Okay.
00:49:06
Speaker
My question for you.
00:49:08
Speaker
I was sort of stunned.
00:49:10
Speaker
This book is like a really big deal and I had not heard of it before this movie, which as somebody who's not a reader isn't hugely shocking, but it's been made to feel like that was like a
00:49:23
Speaker
bizarre blind spot for me like how could i have not have heard of this book or thomas pinchon and that's partly because i see this book and bringing it back to um what was it called gravity rainbow gravity every time i walk into a bookstore which is more often than you would think for a non-reader and i i'm just like baffled i don't know if that's because this movie has raised my awareness of this text or if you know it's resulted in a surge of people
00:49:52
Speaker
interested in this text and Pinchon.
00:49:54
Speaker
I guess I just want to know from your perspective, had you heard of Pinchon before and it was a blind spot for me or was this sort of new for you?
00:50:04
Speaker
No, this was new for me.
00:50:06
Speaker
So if you'll recall, and I know we've discussed it, but our friends here on the other side of the microphone listening device,
00:50:15
Speaker
Whoever happens to decide to listen to this have not heard us discuss it.
00:50:20
Speaker
You had this on the list, and I had never heard of it and kind of said, I don't think I'm interested in that.
00:50:27
Speaker
And then a gentleman I worked at
00:50:30
Speaker
at that summer school last July in Boston, I was telling him about the podcast and he said, you guys have to do this.
00:50:39
Speaker
And so I looked into it more.
00:50:40
Speaker
I had never heard of Vineland until he said it to me.
00:50:44
Speaker
So John, if you hear this, thank you.
00:50:46
Speaker
Gravity's Rainbow had always been on my radar as, in my experience, so if you disagree,
00:50:54
Speaker
I don't care.
00:50:55
Speaker
In my experience, Gravity's Rainbow has always been portrayed in the ilk of David Foster Wallace.
00:51:04
Speaker
These books that more often than not, if you see someone carrying it in public, it is performative.
00:51:10
Speaker
They want people to know that they are reading it, right?
00:51:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:14
Speaker
I do not personally know anyone else who has read Vineland.
00:51:17
Speaker
I knew I would read Gravity's Rainbow at some point, and I still know that I will at some point.
00:51:22
Speaker
But there is this ethos, and this has come up for me a lot mentally as we've had this discussion of, you know, there's the sort of knee-jerk school portrayed, oh, if you read books, you're smart.
00:51:35
Speaker
Clearly not the case, right?
00:51:36
Speaker
And the inverse of that, if you don't read books, you're not smart.
00:51:40
Speaker
Absolutely not a correct ideology to subscribe to.
00:51:46
Speaker
And these books are like the far end of it, you know?
00:51:51
Speaker
People who really want you to know that they've read The Silmarillion are probably people you don't want to hang out with.
00:52:00
Speaker
Sure.
00:52:01
Speaker
And so that was, that was what, what pushed me away from it.
00:52:05
Speaker
Pinchon is absolutely known for this type of writing.
00:52:08
Speaker
And that was a battle.
00:52:10
Speaker
That was an absolute fight to finish the book.
00:52:13
Speaker
And I love reading books.
00:52:15
Speaker
Some might say it was one battle after another.
00:52:20
Speaker
Don't roll your eyes.
00:52:21
Speaker
Come on.
00:52:22
Speaker
I hate that.
00:52:23
Speaker
I hate it here.
00:52:23
Speaker
Well, I've been thinking about that a lot throughout this because as we've referenced, it's not just a good book, a good movie.
00:52:33
Speaker
It is important.
00:52:35
Speaker
Yep.
00:52:36
Speaker
And now, first and foremost, as I just said, I don't think you are dumb or a bad person if you don't enjoy reading books.
00:52:44
Speaker
Along those same lines,
00:52:46
Speaker
Who is to judge what type of books you're reading?
00:52:49
Speaker
We talked about beach reads earlier.
00:52:50
Speaker
I think they're great.
00:52:52
Speaker
Even if that's all you read, I think that's great.
00:52:54
Speaker
Even if you never read one, I think that's great.
00:52:57
Speaker
And so I think the separation of, oh, hard books are hard, read hard books, that can be important.
00:53:04
Speaker
I'm glad that I read this.
00:53:06
Speaker
I'm not surprised I had never heard of it.
00:53:08
Speaker
I'm not surprised none of my friends who also love reading books had ever said, hey, you got to read this.
00:53:14
Speaker
Right.
00:53:16
Speaker
And so it falls at an odd place for me because this idea of required reading, this comes up a lot with books of the hundred classics that you have to read.
00:53:27
Speaker
Right, yeah.
00:53:28
Speaker
And then the equally inflammatory response of, you shouldn't tell people what they have to read.
00:53:34
Speaker
Right.
00:53:37
Speaker
They should enjoy reading.
00:53:38
Speaker
There's nothing I enjoy more than a student who says they hate reading and we find like that comic book or that graphic novel that they enjoy.
00:53:49
Speaker
Great.
00:53:52
Speaker
I'm glad.
00:53:52
Speaker
So it's one, no, you are not behind the curve.
00:53:55
Speaker
I had not heard of this.
00:53:57
Speaker
Had I found it on my own and we were not doing it for the podcast, I mean, for so much of this book, I was like, I'm going to break my own rule.
00:54:06
Speaker
This book's getting two stars on Goodreads.
00:54:09
Speaker
It will not.
00:54:10
Speaker
I have enjoyed it tremendously.
00:54:12
Speaker
Once again, a lot of my context is based on why it exists, what the author's purposes were and what it stands for.
00:54:23
Speaker
But that's kind of what I was saying earlier, what's a little unfortunate about it.
00:54:28
Speaker
It is almost too bad that it's such a dense text that nobody seemingly really wants to read except Paul Thomas Anderson, I guess.
00:54:37
Speaker
Because it does have such a cool message.
00:54:40
Speaker
But would it take away from that message were it written in a different way?
00:54:44
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:54:47
Speaker
We'll never know.
00:54:48
Speaker
Or maybe we will because the movie is sort of written in a different way, you know?
00:54:51
Speaker
And he's still alive.
00:54:53
Speaker
I mean, historically, we shouldn't expect this, but I would be very, very curious at this point to hear Pinchon's thoughts of the movie.
00:55:02
Speaker
What you described, this, you know, the cause that the movie kind of turned into
00:55:10
Speaker
It feels like that's along the lines, remember all of the books that were becoming very popular again in 2020, the response to George Floyd's death.
00:55:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:20
Speaker
And the same thing happened, right?
00:55:22
Speaker
That's virtually the story that American Dirt describes.
00:55:27
Speaker
Okay.
00:55:27
Speaker
People trying to cross the U.S. border.
00:55:31
Speaker
And I won't say it's less serious.
00:55:34
Speaker
Obviously, the subject matter is still quite hefty.
00:55:37
Speaker
But it essentially became quickly another performative gesture of, oh, someone walking around in public with a copy of American Dirt.
00:55:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:45
Speaker
Yep.
00:55:46
Speaker
And I wonder if it had this weightiness, if it had all of these
00:55:51
Speaker
Well, the last book published by him, we have entire college curricula built around.
00:55:56
Speaker
I've seen a thousand opinions online from why he is the most brilliant American author on these topics to destroying other American modern authors and why no one wants to read him.
00:56:13
Speaker
That'll happen with anybody.
00:56:15
Speaker
I've answered your question a thousand times.
00:56:18
Speaker
I had never heard of it myself.
00:56:20
Speaker
And I've heard a lot about Gravity's Rainbow, which has come up for us with other authors too, right?
00:56:27
Speaker
They've got this one thing that they're most known for.
00:56:29
Speaker
Yeah, it's very curious.
00:56:31
Speaker
I've thought about that a lot as well.
00:56:32
Speaker
I'm glad that you asked about it.
00:56:34
Speaker
Yeah, it just sort of blew my mind.
00:56:37
Speaker
when I checked out this bookstore around the corner here and front and center, middle table, right when you walk in, was a Thomas Pinchon book.
00:56:44
Speaker
I was like, you've got to be fucking kidding me.
00:56:46
Speaker
I've never heard of this guy.
00:56:48
Speaker
And now he's everywhere.
00:56:49
Speaker
I found it at the Barnes and Noble three blocks away.
00:56:52
Speaker
Yeah, weird.
00:56:53
Speaker
Okay, well, good for him.
00:56:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:56:57
Speaker
Sounds like a good segue.
00:56:58
Speaker
You said you did not give it two stars on Goodreads.
00:57:00
Speaker
What did you?
00:57:01
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it definitely won't be a five.
00:57:04
Speaker
I have no desire to ever read this again.
00:57:07
Speaker
And so that makes it a tough battle.
00:57:09
Speaker
It certainly was not, you know, just another book that was like, oh, this is fun.
00:57:13
Speaker
This is such important information.
00:57:16
Speaker
And I'm really struggling with why was this very important information tucked away in this weird style?
00:57:22
Speaker
And part of that is I'm just not a fan of that style.
00:57:25
Speaker
Right.
00:57:27
Speaker
I think it's probably going to end up a four, four out of five.
00:57:30
Speaker
Okay.
00:57:31
Speaker
I don't think anyone will be surprised that I've given it five stars.
00:57:35
Speaker
Wow.
00:57:36
Speaker
It is, like I said, the best movie of 2025, possibly the best movie of the decade so far.
00:57:43
Speaker
I was just absolutely levitating in my seat the first time I saw it and have done so every time I've watched it since, which has been several times.
00:57:52
Speaker
And, you know, I don't do like a ton of rewatches.
00:57:55
Speaker
So I think that sort of says a lot in and of itself.
00:57:58
Speaker
It's truly perfect.
00:57:59
Speaker
I give a lot of...
00:58:01
Speaker
movies.
00:58:01
Speaker
If you follow me on letterbox, I'll give a lot of movies four and a half or five stars, even though I can acknowledge that there are some real flaws that maybe should knock that down a little bit.
00:58:11
Speaker
I just, I'm kind of so excited about the medium and the things that I loved about it.
00:58:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:16
Speaker
I don't have a bad thing to say about this.
00:58:18
Speaker
This is a true five out of five.
00:58:20
Speaker
I would give it more stars if I could.
00:58:22
Speaker
Everything, everything in this movie from the camera work,
00:58:25
Speaker
to the performances.
00:58:27
Speaker
The score is fantastic.
00:58:29
Speaker
There's Paul Thomas Anderson is sort of known for kind of a weird sense of humor that gets injected into pieces of this at just the perfect time.
00:58:38
Speaker
I just can't say enough good things about it.
00:58:41
Speaker
And that's not my signature exaggeration kicking in there.
00:58:47
Speaker
That's genuine.
00:58:49
Speaker
You know, that's how I genuinely feel.
00:58:51
Speaker
So yeah, it's a big one for me.
00:58:53
Speaker
Wow.
00:58:55
Speaker
Yep.
00:58:55
Speaker
I mean, you've convinced me, I feel like I have to go watch it immediately.
00:58:58
Speaker
It's so good.
00:58:59
Speaker
Like I said, it's a little tough to watch now.
00:59:01
Speaker
It's been a tough, dark 10 days, but, uh, you know, I, I, I wouldn't turn you away from it.
00:59:08
Speaker
In fact, I'll just jump into my recommendation here.
00:59:11
Speaker
And I, I wouldn't turn anybody away from it in part because it has something for everybody.
00:59:17
Speaker
There is small bits of comedy.
00:59:20
Speaker
There is action.
00:59:21
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:59:22
Speaker
There's obviously political relevance.
00:59:25
Speaker
There's just so much to love.
00:59:27
Speaker
But the flip side of that coin is that I think that people who are connected to the idea of making a better world for the people around them, whether it's because you're a parent, whether it's because
00:59:38
Speaker
you're a political activist, whether it's because you work in social services, I think that they're gonna really, really connect to this story.
00:59:46
Speaker
We've said a hundred times now that it's important, right?
00:59:51
Speaker
And I don't want anybody to be turned off by the fact that I've said a thousand times that it's gonna win.
00:59:57
Speaker
Oscars, because I think that can sometimes almost be a negative to some people when a movie is so a word forward.
01:00:03
Speaker
But I promise you that this was made to be accessible.
01:00:07
Speaker
It's made to be enjoyable, despite being such a heavy subject.
01:00:12
Speaker
And that's why it's a 10 out of 10 movie.
01:00:15
Speaker
You know, it's more important now than it ever has been to consume stories like this, to tell stories like this.
01:00:22
Speaker
And so for those who are interested, it's currently on HBO Max, or you can rent it or buy it, including from Leo's buddy Jeff Bezos on Amazon.
01:00:34
Speaker
So check it out.
01:00:34
Speaker
Just a quick dig.
01:00:36
Speaker
Yeah, got to needle them when you can.
01:00:39
Speaker
No, fair, fair, fair.
01:00:40
Speaker
Who would you?
01:00:41
Speaker
I assume I'm way off the recommendation radar for the book Vineland by Thomas Pinchon.
01:00:48
Speaker
Yeah, it's very difficult.
01:00:52
Speaker
I don't know that I know a lot of people that would get through this whole book in its entirety, even if I did recommend it, which is not to say I wouldn't recommend it.
01:01:02
Speaker
I think
01:01:03
Speaker
I think this would be a great candidate for a, with a book club or a group of people, two sections.
01:01:14
Speaker
Because, I mean, one, first and foremost, it is incredible writing.
01:01:19
Speaker
Okay, yeah.
01:01:21
Speaker
You know, I don't want to take away from that aspect at all.
01:01:24
Speaker
I do want to be clear.
01:01:26
Speaker
It's a style that turns me off.
01:01:29
Speaker
I did enjoy the book on the road, but it is a fraction of the length.
01:01:33
Speaker
Right.
01:01:35
Speaker
And I, and I think there are easily removable sections that tell an important and powerful story that does affect every one of our lives.
01:01:45
Speaker
And it makes a good illustration of that.
01:01:47
Speaker
Um, but yes, unfortunately, simply due to the sheer density, I can think of few people that I would say, Hey, I bought a copy of this for you.
01:01:58
Speaker
Right.
01:01:59
Speaker
Yeah.
01:01:59
Speaker
That would be tough.
01:02:01
Speaker
And it's, yeah, part of that's what makes it fantastic.
01:02:04
Speaker
And part of that's what makes it a tough recommendation.
01:02:08
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:09
Speaker
I mean, your own experience.
01:02:11
Speaker
I told you, let's do this one.
01:02:13
Speaker
And you said, eh, I don't know.
01:02:14
Speaker
It took like another bibliophile to tell you, no, this is worth the read.
01:02:19
Speaker
You know what I mean?
01:02:20
Speaker
And even at that from John, I got, you know, we worked together for a month and lived in the same dormitory up at Tufts.
01:02:26
Speaker
So I got an intimate view.
01:02:29
Speaker
was consuming and vice versa.
01:02:32
Speaker
I think there are honestly other people even potentially that could have recommended this that I would have gotten 30 pages in and thought, what did they see and put it down?
01:02:43
Speaker
I put a lot of trust in his opinion there, which is tough.
01:02:46
Speaker
I think I would maybe say just watch the movie.
01:02:49
Speaker
Wow.
01:02:49
Speaker
Great.
01:02:50
Speaker
Well, thank you all for joining us today for our conversation.
01:02:54
Speaker
Please take care of yourself in these harrowing times and in others.
01:02:59
Speaker
We appreciate that you have stuck around in the new year to enjoy more adaptations with us.
01:03:05
Speaker
And we're looking forward to our next discussion, which will be about Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet and its film adaptation written and directed by Chloe Zhao.
01:03:13
Speaker
And I believe we'll have a special guest on that episode, right, Chris?
01:03:16
Speaker
Yes.
01:03:18
Speaker
Very excited.
01:03:19
Speaker
Good.
01:03:19
Speaker
Thank you again, and we look forward to that next discussion.
01:03:23
Speaker
Bye!
01:03:25
Speaker
That's the show for today.
01:03:26
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in.
01:03:27
Speaker
Let us know in the comments what you're reading, what you're watching, and what adaptations you'd like us to cover.
01:03:32
Speaker
Be sure to follow us on Instagram at adaptation.