161 One Battle After Another: A West Newton Cinema Discussion with Peter Coviello and Ethan Warren (JP)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: New Books Network – Episode 161

One Battle After Another: A West Newton Cinema Discussion with Peter Coviello and Ethan Warren

Aired: December 4, 2025
Host: John Plotz
Guests: Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson expert), Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon expert)
Topic: Paul Thomas Anderson’s film One Battle After Another and its adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland

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Episode Overview

This live-recorded episode, taped at West Newton Cinema, brings together film critic/author Ethan Warren and literature professor Peter Coviello for an in-depth post-screening conversation on Paul Thomas Anderson’s (PTA) new film One Battle After Another—an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland. The discussion explores how the film updates Pynchon’s themes for 2025, the nuances of adaptation, and the shifting politics and aesthetics of both creators. The experts analyze the core messages about fascism, family, revolution, and the representation of America’s contemporary moment.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introducing Pynchon’s Vineland and Its Core Themes

• Peter Coviello gives an overview of Vineland:
  • Vineland (1990) is both “hysterically, anti-cartoonishly funny” and “a novel about the police state.”
  • It details the aftermath of 1968’s counterculture, showing how American governance “organizes itself on the model of counterinsurgency”—a state that identifies and eliminates internal ‘insurgents’ (03:38).
  • The book mirrors the paranoia and anti-fascist thread across decades (04:47).

2. PTA’s Evolution and the Present Moment

• Ethan Warren situates the film in PTA’s oeuvre:
  • First film by Anderson set in the 21st century since Punch Drunk Love (2002) (05:40).
  • This film is “messy” and reflects the “ugly sides of life in America” in 2025, including direct engagement with racism and immigration (05:40-06:30).
  • Anderson’s work divided into thesis-antithesis-synthesis:
    • Early period: Overly expressive, ensemble casts.
    • Middle period: Inward, loner protagonists.
    • Recent films: Sprawling, less direct—this film marks a new phase (07:26-08:23).

3. Antifascism, Paranoia, and Political Resonance

• Pynchon’s warnings about fascism and capital:
  • Pynchon is “a career-wide antifascist,” questioning standard WWII narratives and seeing “fascist potentials of American life” that are continually renewed (09:06).
• How PTA “reads” Pynchon:
  • Anderson remains faithful to the sense of “the police as an antagonistic force” (04:47, 09:57), preserving the anti-fascist spirit, although the film is less overtly comedic than the novel (10:08).

4. Family, Romance, & Revolution

• Family as recurring motif:
  • PTA’s films often explore complex family dynamics, particularly strained or non-nuclear families (13:06-14:12).
  • The movie ends with a “family romance resolution” but in tension with Pynchon’s text, where “family romance is always being subordinated to a different romance—the romance of a long revolutionary tradition” (14:12).
  • Coviello notes, “Here we have this mother who is explicitly selfish… I don't know how he sometimes feels about mothers, and he has a complicated relationship with his own” (13:44).

5. Politics & Aesthetics: Humor, Violence, and Mobilization

• Comparison to Kubrick and comic tone:
  • Spielberg’s review linked the film tonally to Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, which the panel both affirms and problematizes; Anderson’s film is “warm-blooded” and deeply moving in its depiction of fear and solidarity (15:04-15:44).
• Insurgency/violence:
  • The adaptation makes the insurgents in the film “armed”—a more direct stance than the book, reflecting the world’s shift and raising questions about justified violence under oppression (11:52, 24:05).
• Mobilization vs. Cooption:
  • Pynchon’s work often warns of the dangers of “mobilizing and getting co-opted”; later novels (e.g., Mason & Dixon) move beyond pure paranoia towards “sentimental admiration about unions and organizing” (31:22-32:08).
  • Anderson’s film reflects similar ambivalence: organizing as the “opposite of fascist organizing isn't violence necessarily. It's organizing” (29:32).

6. Race, Immigration, Authority

• Risks and rewards of representing racial politics:
  • Both experts note their surprise at Anderson centering “white supremacy, immigration, the raw politics of policing in 2025”—a notable departure for a white filmmaker (05:40-06:45).
  • Immigration and abortion are smart as “handles… easy to visualize” for screenwriting and connect directly to 21st-century counterinsurgency (22:37-23:16).

7. Mixed Personal Responses & Criticisms

• Coviello is “alarmed” and not a huge fan:
  • “I don’t like this movie that much… grim and unpleasant… politics are a little bit fuzzy” (20:18-21:28).
• Warren finds it “one of my favorite writers thinking hard about antifascism” and deeply admires its engagement, especially with anti-fascist armed networks (21:41).
• Both agree some comic elements (ex: “supervillain” Christmas Adventure Club) didn’t work and felt out of step (25:22-25:54).

8. Key Motifs in Authority, Policing, and Identity

• Modern authority visualized under the heading “POLICE,” reflecting the post-2020 American landscape (26:06-26:37).
• Questions about whether anti-fascism inherently requires violence, and the tension between family loyalty and revolutionary solidarity (28:12-28:50, 29:11-30:30).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Peter Coviello on Vineland’s core:

  “It's a hysterically anti-cartoonishly funny book while being the funniest novel you've ever read in your life. My Hand of God. It’s also a novel about the police state.” (03:38)

• Ethan Warren on Anderson’s engagement with the present:

  “This is a messy movie about how messy it is to be alive in 2025… It's his first movie with significant non-white characters in a long time, and it's a movie that engages with racism pretty directly.” (05:40)

• On the anti-fascist thread:

  “Pynchon is a career-wide antifascist… interested in the fascist potentials of American life… He wants you, his viewers, to think about the shape of fascism in the 21st century.” – Ethan Warren (09:06)

• On family and revolution:

  “For Pynchon in the novel…the family romance is always being subordinated to a different romance. The romance of a long revolutionary tradition.” – Ethan Warren (14:12)

• On weapons and the revolution:

  “The insurgents are armed. And the movie just is unblinking about that.” – Ethan Warren (12:06)

• On politics of adaptation:

  “I find this a really grim and unpleasant movie. Yeah. With politics that I think are a little bit fuzzy.” – Peter Coviello (20:18)

• On mobilization and organizing:

  “The opposite of fascist organizing isn't violence necessarily, it's organizing. Does that preclude the possibility of violence? No, it does not.” – Ethan Warren (29:32)

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• Introduction of guests and framing the discussion – 01:42-02:20
• Peter Coviello on Vineland’s themes – 03:38-04:38
• Policing and the security state, film as adaptation – 04:47-05:17
• Anderson’s career and this film’s place – 05:40-08:23
• Antifascism and Pynchon’s vision – 09:06-10:08
• Sentimentality, family, and adaptation differences – 10:34-12:23
• Motherhood and generational trauma – 13:06-14:12
• Comic tone, Kubrick, and the “warm-blooded” film – 15:04-15:44
• Individual vs. collective action in Anderson’s films – 18:02-19:43
• Cellphones, modern paranoia, and Anderson’s present-tense engagement – 19:43-20:09
• Experts’ opinions diverge: criticism and admiration – 20:16-21:41
• Why immigration and abortion frame anti-fascism – 22:27-23:39
• Armed insurgency: adaptation choice and critique – 24:05-25:54
• Police as the unifying symbol of modern authority – 26:06-26:39
• Authority, skepticism, and systemic power – 26:39-27:52
• Debate over revolutionary purity and family ties – 28:12-29:11
• The power and risks of organizing vs. co-option – 29:11-32:08
• Future of PTA: is this a new political phase? – 32:08-33:00
• Final summary by experts, closing gratitude – 33:30-33:49

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Closing

The episode offers a rich, sometimes contentious discussion about adapting literature to film, the evolving work of Paul Thomas Anderson, and the ongoing political resonance of Pynchon’s critique of America. It’s a must-listen for lovers of postmodern literature, contemporary cinema, and those interested in the links between art, activism, and the changing face of the American ‘police state.’

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Transcript

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[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

You're the devil.

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[John Plotz (Podcast Creator/Host)]

Hello, I'm John Plotz. Welcome to Recall this Book, where we invite scholars and writers from different disciplines to make sense of contemporary issues, problems and events. Always something new under the sun, even in the podcast booth. Today's episode about the new Paul Thomas Anderson film One Battle After Another was recorded live before an audience at the storied West Newton Cinema on opening weekend back in September 2025. And it was a conversation between two experts, two consummate experts in the worlds of Paul Thomas Anderson and of Thomas Pynchon. With that alluring introduction, let me draw the curtain up on an excellent conversation.

[John Plotz (Host)]

I'm John Plotz, host of Recall this Book, and today we're really lucky enough to have watched this film in the company of two experts whose expertise together, like peanut butter and chocolate, adds up to a single perfect confection for today's event. I'm just going to quickly introduce you and then my role is more or less Gentlemen, start your engines. The writer and playwright Ethan Warren modestly describes himself as the author of the Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson, American Apocrypha, which was released in 2023 by Columbia University Press. Really enjoyed your book and look forward to hearing your thoughts. With Ethan, we're going to have Peter Coviello, who's head of English at University of Illinois Chicago, the author of six books, including Make Yourself Gods, Vineland, Reread Long Players, which is a memoir, and most recently Is There God? After Prince Dispatches from an Age of Lost Things. So welcome to you both in your dramatic roles here as the yin and yang of one battle after another studies. So I'm going to ask you some questions and I'm actually going to invite you also if you want to ask one another questions, perhaps, and let the conversation flow. And then after a decent interval of listening to our experts, there's going to be time as well for questions from the audience. So, Pete, let me start you off with a tiny question. How would you introduce this audience to Thomas Pynchon's Vineland?

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

Thomas Pynchon's Vineland? That's a great question. Is not perish Thomas Pynchon novels? He's very famous for writing Gravity's Rainbow, this 70s epic. In 1990, this weird book came out which was about the afterlife of 68 hippies who lived in Northern California, in Arcata, where that movie was filmed. What you don't know from watching the movie is that it's a hysterically anti cartoonishly funny book while being the funniest novel you've ever read in your life. My Hand of God. It's also a novel about the police state. It's very seriously a novel about American governance organizing itself more and more entirely on the model of counterinsurgency, that there are insurgent elements of the nation and they need to be eliminated by any means necessary. And it thinks of 68 as a moment of solidification of that. And that's why it's thinking about the 60s. This movie obviously moves that presciently and smartly. If you're asking me into the 21st century, that would be my pitch for awesome.

[John Plotz (Host)]

I love the description you're making of the sort of carryover of the logic of the police state. Is there a single moment from the movie that jumps out at you as catalytic and ignition point?

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

Yeah. I'll just say very briefly in the novel, which is again antically hugely funny. There's a campus revolution and ambling through it and he watches a cop beating the student and it's not funny. And he says in that moment the picture of the police was revealed to him. Every shot of post 9-11-Security in this movie seems to me to get that extremely right to be very faithful pension in that sense. So that's what I would say. That's great.

[John Plotz (Host)]

And so, Ethan, you are.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

Please don't deny it.

[John Plotz (Host)]

You're a dyed in the wool PTA expert. Okay. And that's who I need you to be. And you're the man who persuaded me to go back and watch Hard 8, which I'd love. And so you have chronicled his brilliance and also his peccadilloes. So can you just position this film for us within what you see as the PTA arc?

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

Yeah, I think what is really crucial here, first and foremost, is that it's his first movie set in the 21st century since Punch Drunk Love, which was 23 years ago. This is a movie that really tries to engage with the American moment in a way that I have suggested in the book. He has shied away from in the past as he has told more and more stories that are farther and farther from his lived experience. He's now getting into the mess. And this is a messy movie about how messy it is to be alive in 2025. It's his first movie with significant non white characters in a lot long time. And it's a movie that engages with racism pretty directly. I was alarmed by that. Surprised by that. I think it's to his credit he's getting into the ugly sides of life in America.

[John Plotz (Host)]

Can you say more about alarmed by that?

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

Well, you know, he's a white guy and he's making his first movie with non white characters in a really long time. And what he's choosing to deal most directly with white supremacy. It just took me by surprise. Yeah.

[John Plotz (Host)]

So you're thinking about the Christmas Adventures Club. Because I thought when you first started talking about the rawness and the messiness, I thought you were talking about sort of the immigrant plot, like the question of Borders.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

Yep.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

Is that too. They lay siege to this whole community and you see the Harriet Tubman or disrupt his own efforts. Yeah, it's both.

[John Plotz (Host)]

You have a wonderful model in your book about the thesis and antithesis of pta and you put Inherent Vice, which is a movie. I hope we'll get to that. Mentioned the earlier Hannes mentioned adaptation. I feel more comfortable saying adaptation for that one. You see him coming back and undoing things that he had done or mirroring things that he'd done in earlier films. Do you have a hot take here about thesis, antithesis, synthesis?

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

I broke it down to. This is his 10th movie, so I had nine to play with beforehand. And I mean, Thesis is the first three. Heartache, Boogie Nights. I say that it's him sort of in the way that some young filmmakers do, putting his foot down and saying, this is who I am, this is what I'm about. I make movies that feel like Robert Allman movies. I make movies that have a ton.

[John Plotz (Host)]

Of expressiveness, that are just screenplays that.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

Are overflowing with dialogue. Yep. And then his next three are very inward movies. Punch Drunk, Love, There Will Be Blood, the Master are movies with protagonists who are very internal and inexpressive. And then I use the next three, which is Inherent Bites, Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza as the synthesis. These are movies that sort of are less concerned with what came before and less concerned with stating their own purpose and more just content to let themselves sprawl. This, if I'm going by that model, is the start of what I would hope is a new mirror. And it'll remain to be seen what.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

Sort of emerges from this.

[John Plotz (Host)]

Pete, can I sort of turn this back to Pynchon, but in an oblique way? I want to really pick up Ethan's point about the presentness of this. And so for those of you who haven't had a chance to read Vineland, written in 1990, but a Reagan era novel, a novel about his own day, I think he has a line in it. Drugs, sacrament of the 60s, evil of the 80s. He's interested in a kind of mirroring between the past and the present that he brought to life in 1990. So here we are in 2025. We've already talked about white supremacy, the sort of migration crisis and the raw politics of policing nowadays. Is there something you saw here that seemed to you to really ring true for like a pynchant Preoccupation.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

Yeah, pensions, great preoccupation. I will go to the mat for. He's a career wide antifascist and he's been thinking about fascism since he was 27. He wrote a book, Gravity's Rainbow, about World War II, which is about. For Pynchon, I would argue over at 700 sprawling and saint pages about the sort of non antagonism between capital, the story that one wants to tell of World War II, that democracy, that is capitalism, conquered fascism. That's not Pynchon's story. This book is very interested in what he thinks of as the fascist potentials of. Of American life. And he thinks of 68 not as a moment of initiation, but of like Solidification. And he's thinking of that through 1984 and through 1990 when he is reading. Anderson has read it very well, and he wants you, its viewers, to think about the shape of fascism in the 21st century. Okay.

[John Plotz (Host)]

And it won't shock you that I also want to ask you the flip side of the same question, but just is there something you want to either address object to or note as something that the film is doing that you don't think is pinchinesque?

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

It's not as funny, but of course, it's a novel. The novel is so full of puns and songs and silliness. The novel's antic, silly and cartoonish.

[John Plotz (Host)]

You could put that in a movie if you wanted to.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

I was very happy with that. I was very moved by that. I found myself moved by that. Extremely moved by a movie that is fundamentally thinking about the fascism of the present tense movie. I think it did a lot. So I'll probably have objections later, but at the moment I think, wow.

[John Plotz (Host)]

Not as an objection, but in terms of thinking about something that's there. That really stuck with me, you know? This movie ends with Tom Petty's American Girl. It ends with a family romance resolution, including the phantom presence of the mother. I kept waiting for her to reappear. Verdad. But she doesn't. She reappears. Like her indexicality is like that letter. So that resolution of the family feels like in some kind of interesting tension with Vineland and Pete. You and I talked about this just yesterday, actually. Like, there's a way in which Pynchon is interested in how Brock is like a genuine other romantic possibility.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

Yeah, he's the other father.

[John Plotz (Host)]

Yeah, the. Not so much Sean Pen.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

But Pynchon also in the novel, is kind of interested in the family unit. Parodically funny. Like the. The in the movie is Brock confronts. In the book it's Brock and Prairie. And he says, but Prairie, I'm your father. Which is a joke, because Star wars joke. It's a Star wars joke. The whole movie is filmed where Star wars was filmed and everyone talks about that. And she produces a very complex insult back to him. So the movie is more sentimental in that sense. But also, God bless. There are insurgents in the movie and they're armed and the movie is not against them.

[John Plotz (Host)]

Yeah.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

And the girl in the movie, the insurgents are filmmakers.

[John Plotz (Host)]

In the book they aren't they. But we have front 75. But in the book it's F. The F24.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

Is that right?

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

Yeah, they're guerrilla filmmakers.

[John Plotz (Host)]

Yeah. Do you ever thought about that? I mean, in other words, you turn to make a film about people where you have heroic makers at the center of the novel, but they don't appear.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

I mean, I would love to hear anything about that. Very moving. In the movie, Frenese is part of a film group, and that's their radicality. And there are. They're being beaten up by the police and they're around violence and. But they are not armed in this movie. The insurgents are armed. And the movie just is unblinking about that.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

Yeah. I mean, my only thought is they lose. They all lose. And I don't know how optimistic it is, except that when Willa gets that letter in the end where the mother says, maybe you'll be the one to fix it all. So then she goes out into the world with that sense of hope. But it strikes me as often a somewhat pessimistic Louisiana.

[John Plotz (Host)]

Actually, can we kind of go with that? Because I was thinking about the potency of the word rat, like informer, betrayer, double crosser. But there's a way in which. And this I feel much more in the novel, but I got to think about how it works in the film. Complicity, collaboration, selling out. Yes. Compromising, changing. I don't know. How do you think about that? You see it as pessimistic, Ethan?

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

Not necessarily, but it's the first word that comes to mind. Perfidia is. Is the one who leads to the downfall of everybody. She fires on the bank securing her. And that sets in motion this entire chain of events that the movie then follows. And it's somewhat dark to take the mother figure here and make her, yeah, explicitly a turncoat. She does what she has to do to protect herself. But she is following in a. In a history of Anderson mothers who are not fulfilling typical mother role. If you look at Dirk's mother in Boogie Night, she is this absolute sort of screaming heartbeat of a woman who rejects her son, sends him running out.

[John Plotz (Host)]

Into the world of the porn underworld.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

And here we have this mother who is explicitly selfish. She says to Bob, pat, I only care about myself. And that. That strikes me, I don't know how he sometimes feels about mothers. And he has a complicated relationship with his own.

[John Plotz (Host)]

So in other words, to revisit the point I was trying to make about the family romance, you think I'm kind of burring off the edge there? Actually, it's a romance that has a missing side to it, or it certainly does.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

And she chooses to leave her family.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

And for me, that's super interesting to know because I don't know much about Anderson, truthfully. So knowing that about mother stuff, I think for Pynchon in the novel, certainly the family romance is always being subordinated to a different romance. The romance of a long revolutionary tradition. In the book, Farnese is the daughter. She's the granddaughter of wobblies and daughter of people who were blacklisted. And the book begins and ends being revolutionary traditions inside of which the family romance is small, is ministry. And the thing that's being carried on by prairie or by the kid is a revolutionary tradition that is not located in or isolable in the family. It was read in the 90s as an optimistic book. Because of that, I would say maybe.

[John Plotz (Host)]

I can connect the Blacklist to one of the early reviews, which I believe, at least according to the article I read, comes from Steven Spielberg. And he said that. I haven't seen a movie that is so tonally irrelative to Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. Does that resonate for you guys as.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

A madcap, you know, closed room drama body?

[John Plotz (Host)]

And this, you know, it's.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

This is a goofy, goofy movie in a lot of respects, but it's also incredibly dark and bleak.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

Yeah, and warmblood. If Kubrick is so famously, interestingly, fantastically cold, the Coen brothers are just borrowing.

[John Plotz (Host)]

His violent coldness all the time.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

And I don't, I don't know, I just watched it now like you guys, but this seemed to me a very warm blooded movie. It's funny when Leonardo cries, but it's less funny when he's afraid. The looks of people being afraid were very moving in that movie for me. You know, like when the police are there, however brave you are, you're frightened. And I thought that was very moving in a way Kubrick would not be.

[John Plotz (Host)]

Pete, you would say that's a movie about power, right? I mean, it's really a movie about the system behind. But in some ways it's also about very strong individuals as well.

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[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

Know that I. I think we probably disagree a little bit about that. I also think that the incredibly moving parts of that movie were about something solidarity in systems. It's very moving when Sensei del Toro but Isteo del Toro is not acting alone, man. He's got a network of people. Leonardo is not acting alone. They've got a network of people. One of the things that I find to admire.

[John Plotz (Host)]

There's an underground power there's not the.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

GOK is super interested in. There's a moment in the book that I love, it's very small when one of the characters who's not in the movie is breaking her out of prison and she sees, hey, who's in the prison campuses? Can I get you out? He says, no, no, they're going to get me back in tomorrow.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

And she says, all right, brother.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

And it's a moment of, you are my revolutionary comrade, and we share a revolutionary world together. And I think that it's played as close to straight as you can get. And Anderson picks up on something of that because these strong characters are networked.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

I do see it really as a story about individuals because something that is so often present in Anderson's movies is. Are two central men who in some way oppose each other. Starting with Punch Drunk Love. You go through and, you know, it's. It's always comes down to two guys who are the flip side of each other's coin. And here we have the two fathers, and one is hyper violent, one is generally gentle. It's Bob never kills anybody.

[John Plotz (Host)]

Can we go back to the question that you guys began with, which is the question of setting this in the present and not the past? I mean, you know, maybe, Ethan, I could start with you, because as you said, I mean, PTA really loves not just the past and the California of the past. And he gives you. I mean, even the past with which this begins, which is, I guess, 2008 or 2009, doesn't feel very past. Right. It feels pretty present.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

Yeah. What comes to mind for me is people have accused him of being scared of cell phones. You know, Punch Drunk Love is a movie that is about handheld telephones and power and the terror of those, and it's a movie that falls apart with cell phones in the mix, and then he veers off into the past of the exact minute that we all started carrying phones in our pockets. So the fact that this one engages with what it means to carry a phone and the paranoia of that is interesting to me.

[John Plotz (Host)]

Can I just ask if you guys have things you want to say to one another and, you know, you have your matching expertise here, so I want.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

To know, did you like it because it's getting so celebrated and everything?

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

Yeah. I was hoping not to have to say directly, I don't like this movie that much. It's not. It's not my favorite PTA movie by any stretch.

[John Plotz (Host)]

It's.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

It may be last in line for me at this point below Hard 8, a movie that I've lived with for so long that I love Hard Day. It has, actually. I always.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

My opinions are different.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

I always say that anybody who says anything aside, if you put anything aside.

[John Plotz (Host)]

From Hard Eight at the bottom of.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

Your ranking, you're just trying to make a point. And maybe I'm trying to make A point. I don't know. It's. I find this a really grim and unpleasant movie. Yeah. With politics that I think are a little bit fuzzy. And I don't think he engages as directly as he could with anti fascism. Actually means it's just a sort of a little carpet underneath this story. Or father and a daughter and he's always so concerned. Stories about the father's children. This reminds me so much of There Will Be Blood, their story about a found family, a father raising a child, that he sort of fear whether Claude knows Will is not his or suspects that biologically. Yeah, Biologically, it's. I think there's. The craft is impeccable. There's so much to admire. It's not a movie and I like that much.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

And that's something I've wrestled with in.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

The last two watches. So my question for you is. Have you seen. You have seen in our advice.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

Yeah. Yeah. So how.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

What's your preferred flavor? The really loose adaptation of the very great.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

I think we very strongly disagree about this movie. I think its politics are smart in the sense of. Anti fascism for him requires networks of opposition that are armed. And he's not fucking playing around about that other one was so good because he read this bonkers novel. Some of you have seen Inherent Vice, kind of a bonkers, funny novel. And he made a coherent film out of it when I was 12. And this. He didn't do that. But you'll read Wineland and it's a different novel. But he said I can hang something on the. Want to do that. Because I think this was one of my favorite writers thinking hard about anti Fascism in its. In its cyclical moments between 68 and 69, 84, 85, 1991. And that matters to me now between whatever it was 2020 and 2025.

[John Plotz (Host)]

So I think this might be a good time to turn and see if there are audience questions. So the question is why immigration and abortion as the key mobilizing anti fascist topics for. For this film as opposed to something.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

Like freedom of expression. That's not hard when armies are being mobilized against insurgencies from within. The insurgencies within at the current moment look like immigrants. There is no army that's literal armies larger than every local police force. They're being mobilized against immigrants. And I think Anderson knows that. That's not to say that one cannot think about other things, but for the purposes of counterinsurgency as a mode of governance via the police. I think immigration was a smart choice.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

And do you want To. I mean, I think those are just easy handles. Handles for him to grab as a screenwriter.

[John Plotz (Host)]

It's.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

It's easy to go after the anti abortion politician and to talk about immigration. It's harder to visualize, I think, freelance, whoever the other example was for Capital.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

It's hard to make a movie. I mean, genuinely, he's doing There Will Be Blood. Exactly. It's hard to make a movie about Capital as such. There Will Be Blood is one version of it, but yeah, I think I.

[John Plotz (Host)]

See another hand in the middle here. Great. So just to rephrase that really quickly, it's a question about the fact of the armed insurgency that we see in the film, as opposed to the less armed or almost unarmed, I guess, of Vineland and that connecting that question to the 60s versus the 70s and the moment of the ramping up or where the turn comes from the good revolutionary fervor of the 60s to the dangerous power, I guess, of the 70s very quickly.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

I think you're going to love the novel Vineland because it seems to me part of what Vineland is about, being written in 1990, is what Pynchon thinks of as the anesthetizing metabolization of the 60s. So the film crew doesn't have guns, but the people they run with do. So it's not a book like there are good and bad revolutionaries. It's absolutely not. But it does think that over the course of the 70s, and particularly the 80s, the 60s was metabolized in a soft focus, generation gap, counterculture kind of way, in a way that completely invisibilized the world that he's invested in, which is a world of insurgents going underground, which is what happens in the movie. He's a real figure for that, I will say.

[John Plotz (Host)]

That's just reading it in 1990. I remember as a very young person trying to make sense of what was going on in my world. That metabolizing turn was amazing. I mean, if the present of the 60s story that it was telling, I really loved that, which is one of the reasons that I'm trying to argue with you a little bit, Pete, about the importance of Brock, the complicity or collaboration with Brock, the notion that the strength of the 60s also turns into a desire to emulate the power of authority as well as rebel against it. That's the tension. So the question is whether you're. It's taking away from the message to make the Christmas adventurer. Adventurer. Thank you. Whether that comic supervillain quality takes away from the message.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

I. I'm going to say yes, it really. That joke just doesn't land for me. The. I mean, you've got what is. I mean, essentially the Ku Klux Klan. Are they even broader, more. More centralized power? I mean, they're acc.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

Sure.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

And it just. To wrap it in this joke, it's a wholly outlandish choice and I find it very strange. It doesn't work for me.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

I agree with Ethan. That's the least. It's the moment in the movie that is most. Oh, now you're doing X Files.

[John Plotz (Host)]

Yeah, man. And Pete, it's more than a moment, though. I know that first thing is the.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

Moment I was like, oh, it's a joke. But it's not real. And that's not. I would say that is a departure from the novel, though. Again, God bless. You're making a film. You need to again, picture capital in certain ways. But he's done it better, is what I would say.

[John Plotz (Host)]

So the question is the significance of the fact that they're all labeled police and not any other kind of governmental authority.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

Yeah, he's making a movie after 2020. Right. That's obviously the catalytic part of his movies. Thinking about the Black Lives Matter protests and stuff like that. And police is the heading. Lots and lots of different forces of security. You'll notice that it traipses across the boundary of military and non military, of private and public. Police is a good single word for that. And I think he's smart to do that. That would be my quick answer to that.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

I'll co sign them.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

Ethan.

[John Plotz (Host)]

Do you have further thoughts about Paul? Tom Sanderson depicts government and authority and other moves I'm trying to think of. You know, how those figures come in.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

I mean, he's got a healthy skepticism of authority and all of the systems that make the world go around. The master is his skeptical of organized religion. So is there people I. You know, the whole headline of Inherent Vice is you are corrupted the minute you are born. He is a skeptic while at the same time being the beneficiary of a lot of institutional and systemic power in this country. And his movies, I think, sometimes wrestle with the fact that he is so privileged and is telling stories about people who are sometimes not. Yeah.

[John Plotz (Host)]

In Inherent Vice there's even a joke about. Is being a PI being a cop or not? Right. Do I get the discount at the.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

Strip club that the cop. I mean, that's a real tension through line. He's thinking about the history of the. In Inherent Vice, the novel, he's thinking about detective fiction as being A great version of cops who are hated by cops. And that's the end. So he goes, he thinks about the cinematic history of counter policing that is the PI movie. And I think that part of probably what it attracted Anderson to it, other than that he just likes pinching.

[John Plotz (Host)]

Oh yeah. That's sort of a connection to Altman as well.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

Yeah.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

No, truly.

[John Plotz (Host)]

So there's a lot to unpack in that question. But whether the through line here is the armed antifascism or whether armed antifascism just comes back as a single rifle at the end. And it's more about the purity of the revolutionary or the question of the ethical tensions of how do you stay true to a cause in this altered era.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

Afterwards, I would just very quickly couple things. One, I don't think the point for either Pynchon or Anderson is guns are not necessary. The point is they're not disqualifying that a person having a gun doesn't make them say a domestic terrorist. So that would be the first thing I'd say. The second thing I'd say is there are a lot of guns after the first guns. They're just all held by the police. There's an innumerable number of guns in the movie that the police are holding. Third thing I would say is I don't know about purity so much as the idea that being in a movement with others laterally is going to be in tension with the family seems right. But I don't know that that's a matter of being pure of heart enough for being devoted enough.

[John Plotz (Host)]

You think you want to.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

Oh, I think it's really significant. The question of whether Willa is equipped to be revolutionary by virtue of being the daughter of a rat and then says to her that the child or rat is a baby rat. And I think there's. That can shed who her parents are and following path. And it's in the end he does choose.

[John Plotz (Host)]

I think there was another hand.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

Yeah. Great.

[John Plotz (Host)]

So the second question about a different through line that we could see and the importance of the Benicio del Toro character, the Sensei and his. That whole family based solidarity alliance where everybody is under threat and everybody responds, I guess kind of in a mutual aid way where everything is brought together and how that plays either with or against the French 75 movement, I will.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

Give a very quick answer which is. That's such a great observation. I would say that for this movie and for Pynchon, for Anderson particularly, especially in a movie that's interested in unions and wobblies, the Opposite of fascist organizing isn't violence necessarily. It's organizing organization. Does that mean, does that preclude the possibility of violence? No, it does not. But both of these outfits are organized. Organized, you know what I mean? And they're organized in different ways. And the mother understands the state could be at war with her.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

Yeah, I mean, I think Anderson seems to just be saying this is, this is the reality of it. If you are an immigrant in America in 2025, you may be called upon to mobilize in some way. And I mean, it's also a comedy beat. Bob is tumbling around trying to find somewhere to plug in his phone while this is all happening around him. But you know, I said earlier that I was sort of surprised and distressed by the racial racism angle. And it's. I think the counter to my own point is just he's. He's not ignoring the ugly realities of what you're going to have to do.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

Can I ask you guys, how old is he?

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

He is about 55 at this point.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

So he's like my age. Exactly. He's like perfectly my generation. We were dialed to the same susceptibilities.

[John Plotz (Host)]

Can we turn over this mobilization question one more time? I think it's really interesting because I really hear what you guys are saying and I really appreciate that question about the, about Sensei and his group. I still feel. And Pete, maybe I just want you to kind of correct me or amplify this for me. Like I, when I read Pinch him and I would go way back to like crying the blot 49 and the moments of sort of paranoia about these underlying systems that are controlling us, that we don't know it. I see and pinch in a lot of what I see in people like Ursula Le Guin or Buster Keaton to go back further. But like a distrust of mobilization, like, like I see a worry about mobilizing and getting co opted. I think that's why I tried to put the web to implication or collaboration into play.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

Yeah, I totally hear what you're saying. I think he outgrows them. Like the 60s are totally that. And even in the whole sick crew, like he's worried a lot about they. As they call the drainbow. But 17 years later he wants to talk about the Wobblers and he wants to talk with almost sentimental admiration about the various kinds of unions he encounters. And he sort of never leaves that. The later books are not big rips about paranoia in the same way. And you can see it drift in Mason and Dixon, which is probably My favorite pension. That's a wonderful model. But he writes it over 20 odd years. Right. And some of it at the beginning they're paranoid about the, about the holding company. That's not where it ends. It ends being about like imperial capital.

[John Plotz (Host)]

Interesting. So, Ethan, can I kind of ask you. You have a wonderful phrase to describe his PTA's work generally as decidedly apolitical. And clearly I think one of the reasons you put this at the bottom is that you don't see it as decidedly apolitical. I guess the question would be say this is the beginning of a new phase for him. Is there something that you can imagine growing to love about this phase too?

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

Absolutely. I mean, if he is now, you know, more willing to open the door to explicitly talking about now, I think that's. That's something to be heralded and I think that's. It's something I complained about in my book is that his movies have become increasingly snow globe worlds and this is, this is exploding the snow globe a bit. And if he's more interested in doing that, I think that's great. I think to talk about a little bit about the mobilization thing. Inherent Vice is the pinch on that I'm most familiar with just from reading, rereading it to talk about the movie.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

It's.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

It seems to be a story that is about the strength of individuals and the individual choice as the only thing we have faith in. Doc realizes that, you know, America and the world are seemingly hopelessly corrupted by the Golden Fang. And the only thing he could do is go out there and save one family, make one individual choice to save one individual person, extract them from the Golden Fang and resume or, you know, return this family to normalcy. And so that. That does not seem to be a story that has a lot positive to say about mobilization.

[John Plotz (Host)]

I think maybe we should just thank our amazing experts.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

Thank you.

[John Plotz (Host)]

Thank you so much, Wes Newton, for organizing this.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

Thanks, Jamie. Yeah, thank you.

[John Plotz (Host)]

And your sister was awesome.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

Also, we didn't even talk about the most important sin in the movie, which is between Leo and the history teacher.

[John Plotz (Host)]

Yeah, she was great.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

She crushes it into great art. Thank you. Appreciate your all coming out to support.

[John Plotz (Host)]

The cinema book C.

Recall.

[John Plotz (Podcast Creator/Host)]

This book is the creation of John Plotz and Elizabeth Ferry. Sound editing is by Kamiyah Bagla. And music comes from a song by Eric Chaslow and Barbara Cassidy. We gratefully acknowledge support from Brandeis University and its Mandel center for the Humanities. We always want to hear from you with your comments, criticisms or suggestions for future episodes. Finally, if you enjoyed today's show, please forward it to five people or write a review and rate us wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.

[Peter Coviello (Thomas Pynchon Expert)]

Limu is that guy with the binoculars.

[Ethan Warren (Paul Thomas Anderson Expert)]

Watch watching us. Cut the camera. They see us.

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Only pay for what you [e-mail].

[John Plotz (Host)]

Savings.

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Very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.