Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a remarkable film – and one I wouldn’t have predicted from Licorice Pizza. While continuing his perennial focus on chosen families and adoptive fathers, it returns us to the collective energy and vitality of Magnolia and Boogie Nights. In an extended prologue (the film is close to three hours long), we’re introduced to the French ’75, an American domestic terrorist group who believe that “revolutionary violence is the only way” to create a “new consciousness” in the face of the “imperialist state.” Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) are at the heart of the movement, along with Deandra (Regina Hall). However, when Perfidia has an affair with Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) and gives up the group, Bob is forced to raise Willa (Chase Infiniti), who he believes to be their daughter. The main narrative of the film is set in motion a decade and a half later, when Lockjaw seeks membership in the Christmas Adventurers’ Club, a white supremacist organisation, and sets out to check whether Willa is his daughter in order to erase any potential evidence of his interracial relationship.

On top of all that, One Battle After Another is based on Vineland, one of my favourite Thomas Pynchon novels, and it’s a far more successful encapsulation of Pynchon’s voice than Inherent Vice. That may be because Anderson has gone for a looser adaptation this time around, rather than a more traditional narrative treatment. Pynchon’s weird humour is everywhere here, the perfect vehicle for a contemporary America that oscillates between hilarity and terror with such vertiginous intensity as to produce a kind of second-order terror whenever anything seems comic on first appearance. Anchored in the libidinality of the counterculture, Pynchon is brilliant at capturing the ways that illicit desires penetrate belief systems – what Slavoj Zizek describes as the perverse kernel of ideology – and those desires animate Anderson’s script here. The film is driven by the opening encounter between Perfidia and Lockjaw during a terrorist liberation of an immigrant detention centre that he is supervising. To her surprise, Perfidia is instantly attracted to Lockjaw despite his alignment with the military-industrial complex; to his surprise, he is instantly attracted to her despite the fact she is black. Lockjaw spends the rest of the film trying to rein that surfeit of desire back into ideology, by way of the Christmas Adventurers’ Club, a Pynchonian white-supremacist/white-absurdist organisation that opposes “dangerous lunatics, haters and punk trash” and believes that “if you want to save the planet, you start with immigration.”

While the film never suggests that these extreme left and right wing movements are morally commensurate, Anderson does channel Pynchon’s fascination with the possibility that politics, as we see it, is merely the surface of an enormous underground of continguous, metonymic, rhizomatic networks, all of which are gatekept by their own shifting codes and passwords. Possibly the comic centerpiece of the film is an extended sequence in which Bob, his mind addled by a decade and a half of drug use, responds to Willa’s abduction by dialing into the old French ’75 network – only to be put on hold because he can’t remember the answer to the pivotal question “What time is it?” Pynchon’s rhizomatic underground here bleeds into the bureaucratic and administrative state, as Bob is met with a blandly condescending phone operator who reminds him that “Maybe you should have studied the rebellion texts a little harder.” Despite these incredible comic moments, however, Anderson’s Pynchonian networks tend to register as sublime – a series of escalating narrative possibilities that recall Magnolia in the way they never quite coalesce into an ensemble drama but instead evoke a network drama in which whole groups of people exist obliquely and contiguously in relation to each other without ever experiencing their closeness in a sustained interpersonal way. So much of the film is driven by the awareness, rather than the direct experience, of these networks.

This brings us to the most extraordinary aspect of the film – Anderson’s adeptness at evoking a truly Pynchonian sense of space, something I have never seen achieved on the big screen before. As the purview of the French ’75 overlaps with that of the Christmas Adventurers’ Club, the American military-industrial complex and, perhaps most critically, an undocumented underground railway run by karate teacher Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), the film ceases to move “forward” in a regular way. Instead, we slide sideways from one space to another, as if an extra dimension of space itself has been opened up. Parks give way to alleys which give way to supermarkets; horizontal and vertical collapse, as in a beautiful scene in which a loose collective of skateboarders lead Bob and Sergio across a series of rooftops; and, in the end, Anderson converges his own distinctive vision of the San Fernando Valley with the Pynchonian sprawl of inland California, culminating with an extraordinary showdown shot on the River of Hills, a stretch of highway near the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park where the desert breaks from its customary flatness to crest and fall so dramatically that it splits the difference between real and miraged space. Through all these scenes I was reminded of two moments in The Crying of Lot 49, my favourite Pynchon novel – first, when Oedipa Maas imagines California as a series of doors leading onto more doors leading onto more doors ad infinitum; second, when she wanders along the empty train line in the final scene, the stark materiality of the tracks dissolving, in her mind, into a mirage of digital code, ones and zeroes.

Amazingly, this recourse to Pynchon’s voice doesn’t in any way blunt Anderson’s critique of the present – it sharpens it, paving the way for his first film to be set in the present moment since Punch-Drunk Love, as incredible as that sounds. As the author who brought Anderson back to the contemporary world, it’s an affirmation of how Pynchon’s vision continues to resonate and how brilliant his work continues to be; it astonishes me that, in the plethora of recent retrospectives of literature in the first quarter of the 21^st century, so few have mentioned Mason & Dixon, Against the Day and especially Bleeding Edge, the only novel of these three to be set in the present and so redolent of Vineland in its fascination with the long shadow of the American 60s and 70s. With Pynchon as his guide, then, Anderson crafts one of the best films of his career, a vision of all the people who move sideways and down in America, the country that is supposed to be about moving up above all else. And in that situation, so comic and yet so horrific, he nails the core of the Pynchonian vision, the affect that so many directors have struggled yet failed to capture on the big screen: an absurdly picaresque paranoia that also turns out to be absolutely justified.