A Note on "One Battle After Another"

[Prairie Gates]

Last night, One Battle After Another won the Oscar for best Picture, and Paul Thomas Anderson won for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. A note on that last category.

One Battle After Another is a very loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel, Vineland. Very loose: Vineland is set in 1984, with the main characters mostly being 1960s radicals and the various police agents who still torment them. In the film, Teyana Taylor plays Perfidia Beverly Hills; in the novel, the character's name is Frenesi Gates: she's described as blond with blue eyes. Like the film, she comes from a long line of radical activists, but they are mainly labor-movement anarchists. The story of her grandparents and great grandfather - a notorious anarchist dynamiter named Webb Traverse who fights the mining interests in late 19th century Colorado - is continued in Pynchon's sprawling but beautiful Against the Day. Leonardo DiCaprio's character (Bob Ferguson) is named Zoyd Wheeler in the book; DiCaprio's portrayal is probably closest to the character in the novel. The daughter of Frenesi Gates and Zoyd Wheeler is named Prairie Wheeler in the novel; she becomes Chase Infiniti's brilliant Willa Ferguson in the film. In the novel she is younger: 14 years-old at the time of the action. The main plot of the novel is Prairie's quest to find her mother, who had left her with her stoner father and gone to ground as the Sixties began unraveling. Like in the movie, Prairie's mother had a bewildering affair with FBI bad guy Brock Vond (Sean Penn's memorable Steven J. Lockjaw in the film), who is now (in 1984) also trying to track the disappeared Frenesi Gates down.

The book is very different and was at first disliked by critics (coming 17 years after Pynchon's masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow). But it has since become a fan favorite and cult classic. I'm not surprised PTA decided to adapt it; he had already adapted Pynchon's Inherent Vice with Jaoquin Phoenix.

Anyway, Prairie Wheeler (Chase Infiniti's Willa Ferguson) is one of my favorite literary characters. Born in 1970, she is Pynchon's only true Gen X character (OK, fine, maybe Bleeding Edge's Maxine Tarnow). If she had taken her mother's last name instead of her father's, her name would be....

Prairie Gates.