Nolan’s Mortal Odyssey

Not Homer’s immortal work: what we see in Nolan’s Odyssey (2026) is a version full of “errors”, “gaps”, “distortions”, “anachronisms”. A mortal, even deadly work. A film that would have murdered the original. At least that is what most quick-fire critics, and even some good specialists in Ancient Greece, are saying –not to mention, of course, the customary noise of prejudiced conservative reaction.

Now, we should not view the film as an attempt to reproduce the work of a Homer petrified by a long tradition of interpretation. On the contrary, the temporal setting of the fictional narrative is that of Odysseus’s living, present reality, centuries before the composition of the epic poem, which changes everything, as we shall see. As though this were not enough, Nolan’s Odyssey became an object of the culture wars even before most of the public had had the opportunity to see the film. Some, including a respected Homeric scholar, maintain that despite a cast chosen with sensitivity to questions of race and gender, the moral universe of the film remains surprisingly traditional: the emotional core of the narrative continues to be the return of the exceptional man, the restoration of the household, and the reconstitution of political order after catastrophe. As though nothing in the original structure had been shaken. Others, with the air of experts, have complained that there is too much “Christian” guilt and almost none of the cunning and “comedy” of Homer’s turns of phrase – for instance, the pun Oútis/oú tís (“Nobody”), whose irony and supposed “joke”, already ambiguous in the original, would be difficult to reconcile with the meaning sought by the film. For conservatives, by contrast, the most superficial departures from the images inherited from tradition, and from the supposed ethnic homogeneity of Homeric Greece, are enough to prove ideological distortion.

Homer himself offers little comfort to either side. The original Odyssey, to begin with, is far from an unambiguous celebration of war and masculine heroism. Time and again, Odysseus survives because women correct him, restrain him, or outwit him. Athena guides him from beginning to end; Circe instructs him; Nausicaa (unfortunately absent from the film) saves him through hospitality, not force; Penelope, finally, subjects him to the poem’s most demanding test of intelligence (an episode likewise excluded from the feature). Whether Nolan preserves this balance or not is a question for criticism, and something quite different from the insipid discussion around “representation”.

The same misconception structures the debate over the portraying of the Greek warriors in the film. Some commentators object that the director paints the victors of Troy as plunderers and sexual predators, as though this image constituted a kind of postmodern deconstruction of the epic’s masculinity. The criticism takes the Homeric version to be a far simpler and more idealized poem than it actually is. And one that continues to offer itself to interpretation in its concrete material details. One of the most remarkable features of Homer’s Odyssey consists precisely in its refusal to allow military victory to appear as its own moral justification. The poem begins when glory has already been exhausted. Troy has fallen; what remains is its aftermath, life exposed before the unknown. The returning armies carry with them not only triumph, but also the spoils of piracy, brutality, devastated homes, broken loyalties, and men already incapable of inhabiting ordinary civic life. Odysseus’s companions repeatedly prove incapable of discipline. They plunder indiscriminately, ignore explicit orders, slaughter Helios’s cattle despite the most solemn prohibitions, threaten and rape women, and sacrifice long-term survival, again and again, to immediate appetite. The suitors who parasitize Ithaca do nothing more than reproduce this same logic within Odysseus’s own household. Violence, as we can see, is the red thread running through the original narrative.

And it is precisely in this context that Circe’s celebrated transformation of the sailors into pigs acquires all its force. The episode is frequently read as a magical interruption of the narrative. Would it not be more fruitful to understand it, as Nolan does, as a diagnosis? Let us begin there. The metamorphosis, the film suggests, reveals what unrestrained appetites had already made more or less visible to the poem’s interpreter. The enchantment does not invent bestiality; it merely unveils it. What emerges from this is a stratum of internalized violence rooted in a natural history that dissolves culture and time, and which the film also seems able to give real dimension through its formal choices: in the strict sexual asceticism of the relationship between the sorceress and her visitors, replaced by the suggestion of the oral voracity that carries the entire scene; in the filthy place, crammed with old things and animals, both penned and roaming free, which function as a mirror of these marauding beings, made regressive by civilization in ruins.

That said, what the original Odyssey already presents is not the corruption of a few unfortunate men, but the decomposition of an entire aristocratic order organized around conquest. The palace economies of the Late Bronze Age depended not only on the agrarian-pastoral oikos, but on warfare, tribute, enslavement, and the circulation of prestige through plunder. (As scholars such as Moses Finley have shown, the Greeks of the period waged wars to obtain resources, above all bronze and iron, so that they could make more weapons and wage more wars, not wishing, moreover, to be confused with mere seafaring trading peoples.) Victory enriched the dominant households even as it corroded the social conditions indispensable to ordinary political life. The nostos, therefore, is more than a private journey home: it dramatizes the attempt to reconstruct domestic and political order within a society whose ruling stratum had been shaped, from beginning to end, by the violence of civilization.

The movie is not a filming of the original work’s twelve thousand verses. From the very first scene of the feature (as well as in the final sequences), the opening verses of the Odyssey appear in a quite different version, as a simple sketch in the voice of a rhapsode (played by the rapper Travis Scott). This is a narrative technique used in Book VIII of the poem, in which Odysseus weeps upon hearing an aoidos recount his own story at the court of King Alcinous –indeed, precisely the episode of the Trojan Horse. Thus, by employing the same technique as Homer’s text, Nolan is telling both the (supposed) historical reality of Odysseus’s present and the story of the construction of the epic itself. A privileged interpretive key, which seems capable of explaining what follows, all the way to an ending completely opposed to the original, in which the king goes into self-imposed exile in the West, fulfilling Tiresias’s words (in Homer, with the purpose of calming Poseidon’s wrath and achieving reconciliation with his fate).

From this perspective, the film reverses the positions of “historical reality” and “epic text” in order to produce a critique of epic form, that is, a critique of the Odyssey as the heroic epic of a devastating war and, already in its own time, as the terrible destiny of a war that led to social collapse. More than this, according to the dialogue of the higher-ranking characters brought into action, it is an irrational and excessive war, in the sense of being contrary to social and religious laws, which Nolan condenses into the laws of hospitality (xenia). In a word, the film takes the materials of its own construction from the Homeric text itself. Within this key, however untimely, a certain notion of guilt and expiation in the archaic mythical sense can indeed enter: only here it is viewed from the interiority of a melancholy or lamenting consciousness before the calamities of Troy’s destruction – which Homer obviously did not “depict” in all their fullness. (Or only indicated through isolated words and numerous implications, brought to the surface through the “epic naivety” of concentrating on the particular and concrete detail, following Adorno’s reading.) An anti-mythical version of war, then. In this way, too, Odysseus’s “education”, and his final self-correction, was not merely his own, as an isolated individual or as a proto-modern “guilty” subjectivity, but also that of his own men, who, in Hades, in an unexpected scene, are resurrected and revolt against him and against the disastrous effects of war as an imagined conscious mass.

The film’s key question, therefore, is not whether to reproduce the original, but whether to break with its original mythical-poetic context and propose a critique of war, a critique of myths (which therefore appear more or less disfigured), a critique of the logic of sacrifice (of animals, men, women, children, the elderly, and the enslaved), a critique of Odysseus’s own cunning. Such cunning, described by Adorno as a “compass of the lesser evil”, collapses in the figure of Athena, killed as an “incarnate child” at the moment of the battles in Troy – a terrible image that stages a veritable “dialectic of enlightenment” in the midst of the Bronze Age, in which strategic intelligence itself (métis) ends up devoured by the instrumental violence and barbarism it helped to bring into being. For only in this way can cunning prevail as an internal moment of reason within this new, ruinous Odysseus.

Hence the peculiar direction of the cast, which many found strange: the restrained acting, without the pathos of superiority and immortal glory (as Slavoj Žižek also noted in his review of the film); the emptying-out of the magical world before the brutal “materialism” of commercial interest, war, and plunder. In an almost Benjaminian gesture, Nolan’s version does not restore Homer’s work; it “mortifies” it. It tears it away from the status of cultural monument, in order to save it and make it appear as historical ruin through a fundamentally allegorical intention.

It is precisely the non-idealized perspective on war that is concealed by the more common epic reading, which we have grown accustomed to praising merely as a “document of culture”, while concealing it as a “document of barbarism” (drawing on Walter Benjamin). A point of view synchronous with the events and “anachronistic” in relation to the original, certainly, but not entirely so, since in Homer himself, as we have suggested and will examine in greater detail, and in later Greek thought – in Plato (Laws, I and VII), Aristotle (Politics, II), or Euripides (The Trojan Women) – we find critiques of war, of its costs and deleterious effects, as well as of the subordination of political life to preparation for war, exemplified by Sparta. Already in the Iliad (II, 211–278) there is an episode in which a marginal “insolent” soldier – violating the norms of speech and hierarchy governing the assembly of the Argives – questions Agamemnon’s greed and the prolongation of the plundering expedition, even proposing mass desertion, an early return home, leaving the already-wealthy king of kings to his own devices. (The dissident speech of the “agitator”, curiously enough, is not refuted with arguments; on the contrary, the narrator mocks his physical appearance, while none other than Odysseus beats him, literally, putting him back in his place, with the general approval of the Achaean chiefs.) In Homer’s Odyssey, by contrast, the perspective changes; the reproach is articulated by a great hero of the aristocracy. In the episode in which they meet in Hades, Achilles expresses his lament and disillusionment with martial glory: “‘Do not try to reconcile me to death, glorious Odysseus. / I would rather be on earth, as another man’s / hired laborer, even as a man without inheritance and without much sustenance, / than rule over all the dead who have died.’” (XI, 488–491). From this it can be seen that Nolan’s untimely point of view is not a gratuitous anachronism and has the right address in the present condition of the world, especially coming from a region of the world with a history and ambitions of empire.

If this is so, it is as though we were seeing the “true” Odysseus on screen, captured through his almost pure material content, probed through an examination of his mind. Hence the exuberance of the cinematography without any intention to glorify (there would be much to say about the film’s opacity and absence of vivid colors, which nevertheless convey a beauty without aura, quite distinct from typical Hollywood aesthetics); hence the exceptional soundtrack, devoid of orchestra and practically without melody, with no trace of the customary heroic themes; hence, too, the much-criticized use of colloquial language, without sacrificing the poetry that emerges from a direct vision of things, from the very down-to-earth atmosphere of certain settings, such as the court of Ithaca and its excessively gloomy palace, and everything almost under the silence of gods who remain absent in form.

For this reason, too, Nolan opens, with particular iconoclastic relish, a series of deliberate gaps and hiatuses between his “real” version and Homer’s “idealized” version of the effects of war, seeking to show those costs and effects less imagined by the epic poem. On his return, it is Odysseus himself who compares the “myth” he has been hearing along the way with his own consciousness, torn apart by having lost so many men, so many years, and himself finally. For Odysseus lived like a dog, like his dog Argos, who is said to have escaped sacrifice at the beginning, but did not escape sacrifice along the journey, merely fleeing a nearly sacrificial death in his final destiny of self-exile. If in Homer’s version it is on Calypso’s island that the nostos intensifies, in Nolan’s realist version it is not only homesickness but also a certain unification of self and history that rises to the surface. Especially after the end of his use of the lotus administered by the divinity, which also allows us to read the entire journey up to that point (more or less as it unfolded at the royal palace of the Phaeacians), including all the magical-fantastical events, as hallucinatory projections of Odysseus’s tortured consciousness and memory of suffering.

In this rereading, the film must initially present an Odysseus who is far more cruel and inclined to dissolve the mythical “many-sided” character (polýtropos –which may also be translated as “many-turning”, that is, one who, having learned to distinguish words from things, deftly handles the various tropes of language) and the almost invariably “benevolent” figure of the original (in Homer, one of his laudatory epithets is “sacker of cities”). The hero in the film also becomes impulsive, makes mistakes, and hesitates.

In the scene with the Cyclops Polyphemus, for example, he does not speak to the giant at all. Nolan also cuts the implausible scene of the men escaping while clinging to the bellies of the sheep. At the end, he shoots the giant for no particular reason, awakening his fury and nearly ruining everything in the ensuing pursuit, losing ships and many sailors. In Homer, by contrast, there is dialogue and the famous question of identity and its denial (“Nobody”), which serves as Odysseus’s stratagem for escaping the island, though not before he reveals his true identity in a fit of hubris. In Nolan, the scene is told much more crudely: this “many-sided” being is so much a “nobody” that he enters into neither commerce nor dialogue, does not even introduce himself or attempt to placate the brutal giant, who in turn becomes another mortal nobody – a pure force, the son of Poseidon, enraged by the visitors’ violence and deception. The suppression of the dialogue was a choice to present this brutal severing of relations.

In the scene with the Laestrygonians, there is no heroism or poetry left, only the terror of retreat, returned as a kind of mirror image to the group of hungry marauders (much less terrifying than the original, incidentally). The same could be said of the lowering of the mythical status of Circe, Calypso, and the Sirens. The images in grand but almost deserted spaces, without the aesthetic of beautiful appearances found in other modern versions (see, for instance, the representative setting of Odysseus on Calypso’s island, at the moment when he has stopped taking his daily dose of lotus), respond to this demystifying narrative program. As Adorno foresaw, the culture industry contains the possibility of contradiction within its products, at the very heart of the relations of production that determine the use to which its productive forces will be put.

The massacre of the suitors, finally, is told from a much bloodier perspective, in which Odysseus and his son nearly perish in battle (or survive thanks to Athena?) – after all, we are still following the enchanted script of the Odyssey, and the film must “deliver” the fury and aura of the epic action film within the rules and dramatic expectations of the spectacle of the film industry. Hence its mortal superficiality in the construction of characters, in performances and dialogue, and above all in the speed of the sequences which – in quintessential Nolan fashion – come and go like a puzzle, imagining the fragmentation of the space of events and of Odysseus’s traumatic memory.

By contrast, if the work truly functions through allegory, distortion, ellipsis, anachronism, and the decapitation of myth are formal procedures necessary for speaking to the “time of now”, to the urgency of present conflicts. The film ceases to function precisely when it follows the original literally and begins to unfold more successfully when it deactivates it, generating what Giorgio Agamben would call its “inoperativity” (inoperosità). In a certain sense, this reaches its apex when we are shown that the sovereign king does not return merely to “restore order”, but at the same time to “abdicate the throne” (temporarily?), wandering like a kind of “living ruin” of the war – the embodied allegory of erased historical trauma.

Here, at the same time, ideology perhaps infiltrates through the universalization of a logic of “lassitude” and “let it be”, or “letting oneself be carried along”, constructed in the scene in which the general finally leaves Calypso’s island – a reason external to, not only the Homeric text (Odysseus in the original prays to the gods, but also speaks with himself, assesses the situation, and acts according to what he considers most appropriate for survival, even when this means disobeying a deity’s instruction, the nostos being achieved through the collaboration of intelligence and fortune, not through the abandonment of the former), but also the film’s own intention, which is, as we have seen, to question automatic, unreflective behavior in relation to war. What was specific and even plausible in its inoperativity becomes here a flaw that deactivates what had already been deactivated (as though aristocratic domination were now governed by the didactic value of pacifism and letting oneself be carried along!), causing the epic illusion of a mythical-symbolic world enclosed within itself by divine instruction to return. (At the same time, as we have seen, he nevertheless fulfills, in his own way, Tiresias’s prophecy.)

In the closing sequence, the self-exile in the West functions, within this hybrid engine of inoperativity and a certain ideology of a withdrawn and benevolent empire, as a transfiguration of this new Odysseus/Homer becoming “Nolan”, who has come to tell us the “real” version of events: the war was a disaster that destroyed everything and everyone at the very beginnings of the West, on the shores of its contact with the East at Troy. A pile of rubble that will be repeated throughout History – as a perfect epic or tragic myth, entirely without gaps – just as it exists in the minds of today’s reactionaries, who dream of remaking Homer through Artificial Intelligence in order to recover a supposedly “historically correct” and “politically pure” version of him.

[This piece was co-written with Cláudio R. Duarte between July 29 and August 4, 2026. It appeared in Portuguese, with unjustified editorial changes, on A Terra é Redonda.]

Ranking Under Duress

The Guardian recently put out a poll asking readers to nominate the greatest novels of all time: what would occupy the top of your list, the sacred top three, the books you’d take to a desert island or rescue if your house were on fire?

I admit I love this kind of thing. Maybe because after enough exposure to the daily weather system of horrible news, each headline arriving with the by-now familiar atmosphere of low-grade apocalypse, it feels good to remember that life extends beyond the narrow bandwidth of the present tense; that the new order of things, however infernal it insists on becoming, has not yet annexed everything.

So here goes: my top ten novels of all time (three simply wouldn’t do), an almost impossible task – not only choosing but ranking them – liable to change with weather, mood, planetary alignment, and whatever obscure sentence happens to ambush me next time around, but worthwhile all the same. (It was only after writing it down, and with some embarrassment, that I realized I had forgotten one major novel. Since removing any of the others now felt both impossible and faintly disloyal, the list has become an ungainly top eleven instead of a top ten. Statistical purity, it seems, was never really an option.)

11. In Search of Lost Time – I know. I know. I know. By all accepted protocols this should probably occupy the top position, glaring reproachfully downward at everything beneath it. But since I still have not, to this day and age, found the time (yes, yes, the irony remains available to all) to read it in full, it seemed dishonest to place it any higher. Yet even in fragments, and despite prolonged intervals between volumes, it feels impossible to leave out – as if it already carries the rumeur des distances traversées, even when only half-read.

10. The Magic Mountain – Much as I liked Death in Venice (read during a trip to antebellum Syria) and the Doctor Faustus, this was the one that lingered. A novel that somehow converts suspension into movement, where people speak, fall in love, eat (prodigiously!), speculate, fall ill and die, and time itself – stretched into waiting, and waiting into a form of life – becomes the main event.

9. Light in August – During Covid I went through a Faulknerian campaign, reading all of the major novels in succession. Another could have occupied the spot, but this was the one that remained: for its heat, its violence, its tenderness, and because few novels convey so well that people are simultaneously condemned to history, haunted by the impossibility of fully knowing themselves, and yet absurdly free within it.

8. The Scarlet Letter – Amid all the spiritual darkness, surveillance, punishment, and public choreography of guilt, there appears that brief opening in the forest: one of those small utopian clearings literature occasionally grants us before withdrawing the offer. The fact that it doesn’t last only makes it more compelling.

7. The Ambassadors – “I remember the palace...” (burned to ashes by the Communards) and, of course, “Live all you can.” I’ve always liked reading those two lines together, perhaps because they seem to pull in opposite directions and somehow arrive at the same destination: memory and experience, possibility and deferment, the life examined and the life squandered. A socialist’s compromise with luxury.

6. Lord Jim – While Heart of Darkness (though more novella than novel) is without doubt Conrad’s greatest achievement, and while Victory may have given me more immediate pleasure, Lord Jim stayed, particularly the sequence around Stein, the butterflies, and “the destructive element”. Less comfortably, it made me aware of certain Bovarystic tendencies of my own, to the point that, if forced into the old cliché of naming a book that changed my life, this would most definitely be the one.

5. The Charterhouse of Parma – The breathtaking pages describing the coulisses of Waterloo alone would justify its place here, but everything afterward is just pure delight. Like James, Proust, and Mann, Stendhal here deploys a temporality in which duration resists the imperatives of plot, making room for delay, digression, detour, experiential excess – a life not yet fully disciplined into (narrative) efficiency.

4. Under the Volcano – Intoxication, failure, history approaching from a distance (the Spanish Civil War and the spread of fascism looming behind the action and between the lines), revolution raging “in the tierra caliente of each human soul”, and then all at once private ruin and collective catastrophe becoming indistinguishable. Few novels make consciousness feel so crowded, so simultaneously lucid and doomed. And then there is Lowry’s language: incantatory, allusive, endlessly digressive, yet somehow always under exact control. On a trip to Mexico last year, many years after reading it, the Consul – alongside Eisenstein, Rulfo, and Arturo Belano – was constantly with me, as if the book had spilled beyond its covers and carried its feverish logic into the textures of the journey itself.

3. Ulysses – I read it the year my son was born, eleven years ago. What began as another title from the long civilizational checklist of “books one must read before dying”, became unexpectedly one of the great reading pleasures of my life. Every morning before dawn I would advance slowly through a dozen pages: coffee beside me, baby and cat distributed across my body in no particular hierarchy. And somehow Joyce, despite all the noise about difficulty and genius, turned out to be astonishingly companionable. For a while afterward, it became difficult to imagine wanting to read anything else.

2. Huckleberry Finn – First read at twenty, in college, then returned to a few times over the years, most recently aloud to my son. And each time I let myself be seduced by the same passages: the egalitarian raft-community of Jim and Huck, adventurously drifting through the night; smoking, chatting, drinking coffee by day – temporarily exempt from the laws of “sivilization”. One of my favorite images of “utopia amid overall disgrace” in all literature.

1. Don Quixote – Not only for affective reasons (my father used to read parts of it to me when I was a child) but because I increasingly suspect it really is the greatest in almost every register available to the novel: funniest, freest, strangest, most generous, most hospitable to contradiction. Contestatory without dogma, melancholic without resignation, utopian without innocence. Every great novel after it feels, at least occasionally, as though it knows it is arriving late to something already accomplished in the early seventeenth century.

P.S.– No, Dostoyevsky won’t be making an appearance in my top eleven. I realize this may sound like heresy to some, but, for all his greatness, he has never quite been my cup of tea (I’m still to read The Idiot, though). I also remain, somewhat shamefully, outside the orbit of War and Peace and The Man Without Qualities, both of which I intend to enter sooner or later, pending whatever improbable alignment of time, discipline, and planetary indifference makes such entries possible. And yet, once one begins to think in terms of lists, exclusions, and accidental hierarchies, the borders start to loosen. A top eleven is already a kind of compromise with overflow; a top 101 would, of course, dissolve into something closer to a map of compulsions than a canon. In that expanded, and frankly uncontrollable, version, Kafka and Machado de Assis would appear immediately (how did they fail to make the cut at all?) alongside The Savage Detectives (remembered less as a book than as a kind of call to life), Vineland, The Lost Steps, Hopscotch, The Time of the Hero, Father Goriot (read in two days, as if in a fever), The Waves, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (once upon a time my absolute favourite), Journey to the End of the Night (which accompanied me somewhere around my thirtieth year like a kind of diagnostic instrument), The Thief’s Journal (same around my twenty-fifth), Moby Dick, The Grapes of Wrath, For Whom the Bell Tolls (not Hemingway’s finest, perhaps, but the Spanish Civil War always exerts its own gravitational pull upon me)… and so many others that any attempt at closure begins to feel arbitrary rather than descriptive.

Residual Revolution

The Quiet Politics of Vineland and One Battle After Another

When Thomas Pynchon published Vineland in 1990, the novel read as a post-Reagan elegy for the long twilight of the ’60s, populated by ex-radicals, countercultural communes, and a society that had learned to domesticate dissent. Thirty-five years later, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, his loose, fever-bright adaptation of Vineland, feels tuned to our late-digital moment: a vision of political disillusion refracted through cinematic spectacle.

One Battle After Another has been justly praised on many fronts: for its storytelling, plot construction, pacing, and blending of multiple tonal registers (political satire, action thriller, noir comedy), as well as for the profound humanity of the main characters, so vividly rendered that even the worst of them, the cruel and despicable Col. Lockjaw, elicits a fleeting sense of empathy by the end , which is not the case with the even more vile and obnoxious “Christmas adventurers”.

The cast, to be sure, delivers career-best performances, breathing life into every nuance. And visually, the film is indeed a feast, filled with arresting vistas and breathtaking sequences  – from the opening border-wall tableau to the final car chase, with the camera arcing and plunging like a surfer chasing a monstrous wave –, all crafted with artistry and bound together by Jonny Greenwood’s astonishing score, which functions not merely as accompaniment but as an interpretive force in its own right.

And yet, critical reservations have emerged, particularly regarding the film’s depiction of revolution and political action, and the ambiguity of its moral centre; reservations that open a window onto its dialogue with Vineland.

Pynchon’s novel is a sustained meditation on lost revolutionary potential and how remnants of that energy might still be tapped at a time of political exhaustion. Set in 1984, it continually flashes back to the ’60s counterculture, where spectral figures  ( the Thanatoids ) are haunted by the defeats of that era’s radical movements. By contrast, One Battle After Another has been criticized, particularly from a leftist perspective, for transforming political longing into spectacle, turning resistance into mere display. In this view, revolutionary desire becomes kink or stylistic flourish rather than collective orientation, obscuring the subtler, enduring political currents that Pynchon cultivates.

Such a binary  – the power of memory versus the seduction of spectacle  – misses the deeper continuity between the works. Vineland reflects a moment of disillusionment. Pynchon looks back at the ’60s through the lens of the Reagan era, defined by corporate dominance, militarization, and the emergence of the culture wars , features that today attain the paroxysm.

Though the Vietnam War was over, the psychic aftermath of both the war and the counterculture’s failure to sustain its radical ideals remained vivid. The novel is thus less an exercise in nostalgia than an inquiry into the collapse of a particular vision of freedom and revolution, exploring the gulf opened between promise and reality.

Pynchon portrays a generation suspended between the remnants of non-conformism and the entrenched conservative order that replaced it, a moment when resistance was simultaneously fragmented, repressed, and co-opted, caught in the constant tension between the desire for transformation and the crushing weight of power structures.

The connection between the two periods is tenuous but not entirely lost. Prairie Wheeler, the fourteen-year-old daughter of former radicals, embodies this fragile continuity. She may not inherit her mother Frenesi Gates’s revolutionary fervor, yet she still inhabits a world shaped by that earlier struggle.

Beneath its comic surface, Vineland exposes the legacy of COINTELPRO-style repression and the ways in which the state systematically dismantled and absorbed anti-establishment dissent. Though that utopian charge has waned, Pynchon suggests that traces persist, in memory, in scattered acts of resistance, and in the absurd resilience of figures like Zoyd Wheeler.

In Vineland, the middle names of Prairie’s parents  –  Frenesi Margaret Gates and Zoyd Herbert Wheeler  – function as covert historical signifiers that condense the ideological shift from the radical ’60s to the neoliberal ’80s. “Margaret” invokes Thatcher and the consolidation of market hegemony, while “Herbert” alludes to Marcuse, emblem of the countercultural Left. Frenesi personifies seduction and betrayal: a onetime radical turned state collaborator, moving from underground film collectives to work for the Nixonian political pornography machine. Zoyd, by contrast, now hapless, aging, and stuck in ritualized rebellion, represents a ghostly trace of that earlier intellectual ferment, now faded into nostalgia and farce. 

Their unlikely union, producing Prairie, allegorizes the fusion of these antagonistic legacies: the utopian impulse of the ’60s  –  the radical vision of a civilization of Eros  – absorbed and neutralized within the hyper-commodified, “post-ideological” landscape of the Reagan era. Through this pairing, Pynchon dramatizes the passage from the utopian and collectivist aspirations of the New Left to the besieged and managed subjectivity of late imperial America.

That’s where the deviations and overlapping between Pynchon’s novel and Anderson’s film come into play. As critic Rory Doherty notes in his review for Time magazine: 

“Apart from their contrasting structural approaches and character backstories, the biggest difference between text and film is setting. Vineland is overflowing with period detail, often ludicrous and sometimes satirically invented, rooted in the history of radicals being expunged by the Nixonian establishment, leading to the inevitable, reductive confines of Reagan’s ‘War on Drugs’ project. But the immediacy of One Battle After Another  – with its ICE-like detention camps, unlawful militias storming American streets, and elites who promote white supremacy in closed-door meetings  – was intended to embellish the spirit of Vineland rather than undermine it.”

Both novel and film imagine the wreckage of American radicalism, but they do so through different narrative devices and angles. In Pynchon’s novel, the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll (PR³) and the film collective 24fps form a paired allegory for the counterculture’s collapse into image and surveillance. In One Battle After Another, the militant faction French 75 re-stages that collapse in a more literal, violent key, turning the mediated irony of Pynchon’s world into a cinematic drama of insurgency and defeat. Taken together, they trace the passage from revolution as festival to revolution as ghost story.

In Vineland, PR³ is born from the irreverent utopian impulse of the ’60s: a college enclave that proclaims itself a sovereign micro-nation of peace, music, and weed. Pynchon renders it with the tone of a deadpan fable: the moment when political desire turns theatrical. Yet its very theatricality bears the imprint of its undoing. The members of the commune are already performing their freedom for the camera, which belongs to 24fps, the film collective that both documents and aestheticizes dissent. When Frenesi, 24fps’s camerawoman, begins filming for the authorities, the line between art and surveillance blurs. The revolution’s dream of visibility curdles into exposure. 

Allegorically, PR³ and 24fps represent the two faces of late-’60s radicalism: the yearning for liberated community and the fatal belief that liberation could be seen , that image was truth. Pynchon suggests that the counterculture’s tragedy lay not in repression alone but in its transformation into spectacle, its incorporation into the media economy it meant to overthrow.

One Battle After Another retools this parable into a more direct historical allegory. Its insurgent cell, French 75, condenses the real-world Weather Underground and similar militant groups that turned from protest to armed struggle. Where PR³ parodies the carnival republic, French 75 enacts the firing squad’s logic, yielding to the twin temptations of moral witness and elite voluntarism: the despairing revolt of a dissident petty-bourgeois group without a popular base.

The film compresses Pynchon’s layered temporality into a streamlined narrative of rise and ruin: bombings, betrayals, the erosion of ideals. Allegorically, French 75 stands for the afterimages of the ’60s, the moment when the spectacle of revolution sought to shatter itself through violence, only to become another genre of entertainment. The movie’s sleek cinematography and rhythmic editing make its very depiction of militancy complicit in the spectacle it critiques, accentuating that in both media ecologies, there is no exit from mediation.

Thus, PR³/24fps and French 75 form a dialectic. If Pynchon’s countercultural rebels are undone by representation, Anderson’s radicals implode in the immediacy of outrage. One is undone by the camera, the other by the gun. Between them unfolds the allegory of American idealism’s decay: the slow drift from communal euphoria to paranoia, from visibility to its weaponization.

By transforming PR³’s stoned republic into French 75’s guerrilla network, One Battle After Another trades Pynchon’s postmodern melancholy for tragic immediacy, yet both works end in the same space: the Reaganite (or Trumpist, it makes no difference) wasteland where rebellion survives only as image, an image that, in Anderson’s hands, intensifies rather than resolves that condition.

In that sense, PR³, 24fps, and French 75 are not different factions but sequential masks of the same fallen dream. Each names a stage in the long allegory of resistance: first the commune, then the camera, then the cell, each crushed, recorded, and replayed, until nostalgia is all that remains.

Yet there is another side to this story. Despite their differing emphases, both book and film are less concerned with simply recalling the past than with imagining how resistance, drawing on past experience, might persist in the present.

In Vineland, Pynchon’s focus on family (Prairie, Zoyd, Frenesi) and on the fragile solidarity of those left behind after the collapse of the counterculture points to the endurance of resistance through everyday care, loyalty, and kinship. If One Battle After Another carries this impulse forward, then what might appear to some viewers as spectacularization becomes instead a cinematic retranslation of that same political energy: a vision of how small solidarities, improvised alliances, and acts of attention persist within the hypermediated landscape of late neoliberalism. The parallel with Vineland might, in this sense, shed further light on this transformation.

Pynchon’s novel moves in the dreamlike, mnemonic, and fragmentary logic that defines his work: memory, transgression, failure, and the not-yet matter as much as the ostensible plot. Dreams and fantasies in Pynchon often operate as latent sites of political desire.

In Vineland, Prairie, the teenage girl yearning to reunite with her mother, stands in for the desire to maintain continuity with a radical past, a past foreclosed amid Reagan’s re-election campaign and by the then already omnipresent Tube (television), yet enduring virtually. Prairie inherits history and its defeats, though not in the same way as her parent’s generation. The crushed utopian energies of the ’60s persist, lingering in the present and waiting for another historical opening.

Watching archival footage of an earlier protest, she feels a belated surge of its lost intensity: 

“Even through the crude old color and distorted sound, Prairie could feel the liberation in the place that night, the faith that anything was possible, that nothing could stand in the way of such joyous certainty. She’d never seen anything like it before.” (Vineland, London: Minerva, 1990, p. 210)

Unlike in other Pynchon novels, where stronger revolutionary dynamics offer some measure of redemption  –  think the rocket counterforce in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) or the anarchists of Against the Day (2006)  – Vineland presents a kind of smaller-scale survival. This has little to do with the survivalism of contemporary ideology; it concerns instead the endurance of a daughter, a broken family, a deferred dream. The novel’s ironic, “sitcom-like” closure signals the collapse of grand revolutionary energies, yet it also preserves the conditions for residual hope, as a not-yet-conscious desire.

Domesticity, seemingly apolitical, acquires a quiet political charge: everyday intimacy  – family, storytelling, solidarity  – carries its own utopian weight, a quiet refusal to surrender to surveillance and state power.

Back to Anderson’s film, reading it solely as a spectacle-driven flattening of utopian potential misses its attention to alternative forms of resistance: the ways family (however dysfunctional), lasting friendship, and the solidarity of margin-walkers operate as loci of present-day political possibility, echoing Vineland’s intimate counterforces.

In both works, “family” does not mean private retreat but a resistant social microstructure. In Vineland, Prairie’s search for her mother and the reconstitution of family becomes an allegory for rebuilding social memory and solidarity among the dispossessed. In One Battle After Another, family or communal ties among marginal figures resist incorporation into spectacle.

The margins, here, are not merely social but ontological , spaces of possibility where people can still act outside pre-scripted media narratives. This is Pynchon’s “counterforce” transposed into the visual register: not heroic revolution but distributed, everyday persistence.

Consider, for instance, Sensei Sergio’s  (Willa’s Latino karate teacher)  quiet kindness, resourcefulness, and composure, each put to work within the underground network protecting undocumented immigrants from fascist violence. Also, in the same sequence of this whole alternative organization of urban daily life  – one of the film’s highpoints –, the row-on-skateboard shot: youth in motion becomes a visual motif for marginality and improvisation, recalling the latent, restless energies of Pynchon’s world.

Skateboarding and urban or suburban youth culture resurge here as a figurative synthesis of life pulsating through camaraderie, rebellion, freedom, and the survival of alternative social spaces within rigidly structured, often oppressive environments. Like Prairie’s navigation of domestic and marginal spaces in Vineland, these fleeting moments of youthful mobility suggest the ongoing possibility of living otherwise, of asserting autonomy and solidarity under conditions that would otherwise constrain and surveil. In such gestures, Anderson’s new film finds its quiet politics: not the spectacle of sacrifice, but the slow labour of care. Not, therefore, a revolution televised, but one quietly sustained, in movement, memory, and ongoing attention.

Still, as Richard Brody recently noted in The New Yorker, whereas films such as Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) and Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) sustained a documentary rapport with real activists and with the immediate experience of the political action they depict, One Battle After Another privileges instead the register of affective labor, resulting, according to the critic, in a film that is at once “brilliant and hollow”, “a vision of hopeful possibilities” yet “unmoored from realities”.

What may appear as vacuity, however, is less a failure of the film than the index of an objective impasse. The absence of direct “revolutionary labor” reflects the very logic of late neoliberalism, in which collective action, in the context of displaced industrialization and hyperproductivity, has been utterly fragmented, depleted, and aestheticized.

Ultimately, both Vineland and One Battle After Another converge in the imagination of a politics of the remainder, a politics of what persists when the grand narratives of emancipation seem exhausted. Pynchon had already intuited, amid the conservative backlash of the ’80s, that resistance would survive less as armed insurgency than as residual energy, dispersed through everyday gestures of care, memory, and solidarity. Anderson, in turn, translates this intuition into the visual regime of the twenty-first century, in which total mediation and spectacle have replaced direct experience. His wager is that pockets of meaning and community can still be cultivated within this regime: autonomous zones of affect and attention, where politics is relearned as a patient and shared practice.

Far from standing in opposition to collective organization, these zones may in fact be more closely in tune with forms of control of economic power devised by and for the working class, rooted in networks of material solidarity, mutual care, and the democratic reappropriation of urban space, and the available resources and means of production and survival.

What the film inherits from Vineland is not merely disillusionment, but the persistence of the possible in a time when we seem unable to see even a hand’s breadth ahead: a minimal utopia, that insists on germinating beneath the ruins of the spectacle.

[A previous version of this piece appeared in Portuguese on A Terra é Redonda]