Vineland

"Chase Infiniti" is easily one of the best names in Pynchon canon, right up there with Zoyd Wheeler, Oedipa Maas, Tyrone Slothrop and Webb Traverse.

Once he would have proclaimed, “Because in this country nobody in power gives a shit about any human life but their own. That forces us to be humane — to attack what matters more than life to the regime and those it serves, their money and their property.” But these days he was saying, “It’s wrong [to use violence] because if you pick up a rifle, the Man picks up a machine gun, by the time you find some machine gun he’s all set up to shoot rockets, begin to see a pattern?” Between these two replies, something had happened to him. He was still preaching humane revolution, but seemed darkly exhausted, unhopeful, snapping at everybody, then apologizing. If anybody caught this change, it was much too late to make a difference.

So I had to reread Vineland for the first time in 20+ years before seeing this. And it's an astonishing adaptation; one of those that ignores at least half of the source material apart from the bare bones, changes the settings and the names to protect the guilty, picks a few details that embody the novel and hits them hard to get across one version of the story. I can't imagine any other way to adapt Pynchon, especially since Vineland is... OK, in a lot of ways, it's one of his more accessible books, with a pretty clear plot and a pretty clear moral, but it's also plotted even more frustratingly than the likes of Gravity's Rainbow and Against the Day. 50 pages intro, 300 pages flashback, 30 pages denouement. And PTA somehow tuns this hilarious but angry and bitter elegy of a novel into a hilarious, angry action movie that keeps me riveted for the whole 2 1/2 hour runtime. Neither version of the story is perfect, neither is completely satisfactory, both deliberately cheat us out of a simple solution.

Picture it: It's 15 years after the revolution failed, all the old revolutionaries have sold out or given up or burned out; the ones that haven't joined the winning side (voluntarily or not) or become good little housewives and consumers spend their days stoned in their trailers, ranting about the good old days. That's Zoyd Wheeler in 1984, that's Bob Ferguson in 202whatever this is set in. The only thing left to do is keep the daughter safe, both from the agents looking for them and from the knowledge of who her overly zealous mother really was. And then the shit hits the fan, and off we go, on the road back into America. Whatever that means, however great it may be.

Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep — if he'd allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching — need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family. The hunch he was betting on was that these kid rebels, being halfway there already, would be easy to turn and cheap to develop. They'd only been listening to the wrong music, breathing the wrong smoke, admiring the wrong personalities. They needed some reconditioning.

There's an irony, and I don't know which edge of it lands on top, to the fact that Frenesi in the novel uses a film camera the way Perfidia in the movie uses a gun. The idea that putting the light on something will kill it. We know it won't; Pynchon's proto-cyberpunk of databases and 24-hour TV has given way to billionnaire-owned social media and filter bubbles. So here's the movie version, dodging in and out of shadows, tossing its camera back and forth between Yeats' proverbial best and worst; Sean Penn never better, DiCaprio perfeclty hapless, Taylor a straight line and del Toro an unmovable brick wall. Inbetween them, Prairie/Willa/Infiniti trying to figure out this new world her parents have handed her, where the results are already rigged...

That question runs through novel and film; when have you lost? What is there to fight for? I love some of the additions PTA have made to the story, especially the Christmas Adventurers and the way their quest for purity is simply unsustainable. The revolution will always eat itself, and that doesn't just apply to the ones. We're all screw-ups. There's hope in that. A system that doesn't take our fallibility, and our pigheadedness, into account will always fail. The road is rocky (goddamn, that final car chase) but it's a road.

But as he watched her then, year by year, among these reunion faces her own was growing more and more to look like, continuing to feel no least premonitory sign of governmental interest from over the horizon beyond the mentaldisability checks that arrived faithfully as the moon, he at last began, even out scuffling every day, to relax some, to understand that this had been the place to bring her and himself after all, that for the few years anyway, he must have chosen right for a change, that time they'd come through the slides and storms to put in here, to harbor in Vineland, Vineland the Good.