One Trailer Post After Another

I’d say I painted myself into a corner last week when I promised a trailer breakdown for One Battle After Another, but the fact is, I painted myself into a corner a number of years ago when I decided to write a book on Paul Thomas Anderson. At that point, I kind of bound my soul up with his for as long as the two of us are drawing breath, so where what I’d really like to do is just sit back and soak in the new trailer for his new movie, for better or worse, all of my analytical muscles are kicking into gear as I watch this thing. So we may as well get into it.

First off, we meet Leonardo DiCaprio as a character conspicuously not named Zoyd Wheeler, the protagonist of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. Instead, we have a character with the distinctly not Pynchonesque name of Bob Ferguson. But from everything about this trailer, it does seem clear that we’re working with Vineland in a pretty loose sense.

That said…it does, indeed, seem like we’re working with Vineland! I wish we could get some kind of confirmation on how openly Anderson is going to be crediting this as an adaptation, or whether he’ll distance himself from the source the way he did with Oil! when There Will Be Blood came out. Will he try and establish this as a PTA movie first and foremost? He deferred to Pynchon almost reflexively on Inherent Vice, saying he was more like a secretary than a screenwriter. That does not look to be the case here whatsoever.

I’m going to throw to my friend Justin Hairston, who’s going to be co-anchoring a Vineland podcast miniseries for the Broad Sound feed this summer in anticipation of the movie. As Justin said in the Broad Sound Discord: “This is definitely the most convincing Vineland evidence yet. Missing daughter, pestering lawman, revolutionary wife with a disapproving mother.” I’m only about four or five chapters into my first Vineland re-read, so I can’t get too specific in my parsing of these clues. But this trailer has an antic vibe I wasn’t necessarily expecting, and one that does feel fairly Pynchonesque. We haven’t had a Pynchon novel in a good long while, and I’ve been curious what he’d make of the 2020s. If Anderson is doing some kind of speculative Pynchon fan exercise…well, I’ll be intrigued.

Worth noting here that we have what looks to be our first glimpse of Alana Haim (in the top center there) in what seems to be flashback sequences to Bob’s time as a revolutionary. But I’m going to move right on to…

An extremely pregnant lady shooting a dangass machine gun!

So this image feels extremely loaded in the context of PTA’s general thematic thing. The mother is an image or archetype he returns to continually—there’s Reynolds Woodcock’s divine spirit of the departed mother in Phantom Thread, and on the other end of the spectrum there’s Dirk Diggler’s emotionally abusive matriarch in Boogie Nights. In Licorice Pizza, there’s an absent father but a present mother who’s almost the inside out of Dirk’s mother, a pal and collaborator, while in Magnolia mothers are often either absent or ineffectual in relation to the domineering fathers. There’s a lot to be done with the Andersonian mom, and it mirrors what seems to be a fairly fraught youthful relationship with his own mom (they’ve seemingly mended fences over the years).

It seems like here we’ve possibly got a mother departing the picture (a Vineland element for sure), which calls to mind Inherent Vice—whether or not this is a Pynchon adaptation, Anderson may be playing a repeated chord with a missing and longed for object of affection. But time will tell how much the mother character (seemingly the great Teyana Taylor) stays in the picture, and the effects of her presence or absence.

We get a quick look at Regina Hall, and along with Taylor in the prior shot, we’ve got the two most prominent Black actors in an Anderson movie in an awfully long time. I made a pretty big deal in my book (TheCinemaofPaulThomasAnderson:AmericanApocryphaavailablewhereveryougetyourbooks) about the fact that he’s basically eschewed non-white characters and perspectives since the 20th century, and that he did an only-OK job back then. He had Black characters in his first few movies, but Buck Swope in Boogie Nights is very much an object of fun (Anderson has admitted he just thinks a Black cowboy is a great sight gag) and if you want to hear me go on and on about Magnolia’s white-centric view of the Valley, well, grab the book. Inherent Vice has Michael K. Williams…as a Black Panther ex-con. Licorice Pizza has…a waterbed sales girl.

Do you think PTA read my book? I wouldn’t if I were him. What a nightmare that would be. But I wonder if his kids did. If I were his kid, and a new book about my dad came out, I’d flip through it. And I’d probably gravitate to the parts where the author dinged your dad. And maybe I’d bring it up. Who knows. I’m just asking questions.

We have the arrival of Sean Penn as Steve Lockjaw (OK now we’re in Pynchon name territory) who seems to use a militia to raid Bob’s house—so far so Vineland. As I wrote about last week, it’s a big deal that Anderson is working in the present again, and moreover, he’s grabbed the present with both hands and gotten into governmental overreach and, seemingly, a very late 2010s/early 2020s protester/police violence. When he got a big budget and an IMAX screen, he decided to wade into politically loaded territory he’s never worked in before—if anything, he's studiously eschewed the political implications of his work. It’s something else I made kind of a big deal about in my book.

Do you think…OK actually I won’t ask.

It’s worth noting the return of the Anderson run, an image I’m extremely fond of. From Barry in Punch-Drunk Love and Freddie in The Master both hoofing it away from threats to Gary and Alana speeding from escapade to escapade in Licorice Pizza and even the oil grunts of There Will Be Blood sprinting towards the burning derrick, characters in flight has become kind of a visual leitmotif for Anderson, and he always does something memorable with it. Revolutionaries on the run would seem to be a great opportunity for some new fleet-footed shots.

I don’t have a lot more to add except that this all looks great. We’ve got a confirmed Director of Photography here, Michael Bauman, which means Anderson isn’t doing the “no official DP, we’re all just pals shooting a movie together” vibe he took on Phantom Thread (still a buckwild choice I kind of wish he’d stuck with). This is Bauman’s second feature after shooting Licorice Pizza. With nothing but some Feud and American Horror Story in between, I’m very excited to see him back with Anderson making new images. Licorice Pizza had a gorgeous nostalgic vibe all its own. This looks beautiful as heck.

Welcome back Benicio Del Toro, maybe a sort of helpful sidekick like he was in Inherent Vice. Maybe he’s got a Vineland equivalent, I’m not there yet, I’m sorry. Either way, he really slots nicely into a Pynchonesque landscape with his weird brand of relaxed volatility. Glad to see him mixing it up with Leo/pushing Leo out of a moving car.

There’s something happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear, but I’m pumped as all get-out about it. If this is actually a BLM movie like early reports indicated, that’s Anderson going as hard as possible in a direction I accused him of running away from. Do you think…no, enough. I’m really excited by this suggestion of politically charged action. Anderson is such a smart, sharp guy that it’s really bugged me to see him intentionally avoid engaging with a fraught century. He did so much with the antiseptic paranoia of early 2000s LA with Punch-Drunk Love, and this looks like a much more overstuffed paranoia with some reason to be paranoid. Real right-now shit. If anything, there’s just the concern that by dialing in really hard on the moment, he could have missed the moment—will this be a first-term Trump movie in a second-term Trump world?

Anderson doesn’t always bring in a gun, but he never does it carelessly. He’s not someone to fetishize the weapon—when Doc finally fires on someone in Inherent Vice, there’s a weight and tragedy to it, and the deep horror bubbling under the surface of the Rahad Jackson scene in Boogie Nights is basically just “Oh Jesus, oh fuck, there are guns in this room.” So when I see an image like this, I trust it’s not just being used for cool-dude swagger. Guns are going to be used in this movie, and they’re going to mean something. It looks like it’s going to get heavy.

But mainly it looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun. As usual, Anderson never lets the heavy get in the way of the funny, which only makes the funny funnier and the heavy heavier. He has a great impulse to play with all the colors on the wheel. If this looks like his most serious-minded movie since maybe ever (There Will Be Blood is a Great Epic, but it’s also sort of a snow globe story with only allegorical connections to the real world), it also looks like a blast. I can’t wait for September.

God damn it, viva la movies!