The Myth of America in Vineland: Will Thomas Pynchon’s Political Pluralism Prevail?

On September 26, 2025, director Paul Thomas Anderson released his latest film, One Battle After Another. After the official premiere in Los Angeles three weeks prior, Anderson explained to Steven Speilberg that his inspiration was Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland (1990): “Vineland was always going to be too hard to adapt, so I stole the parts that spoke to me and just started running like a thief.” Anderson acknowledges stealing the “core of the story,” namely, the three intersecting plots: Pat (renamed Bob)-Perfidia-Willa, Lockjaw-Perfidia-Willa, and Bob-Willa-Lockjaw. As a viewer of Anderson’s film and a reader of Pynchon’s novel, this reviewer agrees with Anderson’s assessment of his work in comparison to Pynchon’s: his immense outer layering, focused on the action-packed dismantling of the militant, far-left revolutionary group called the French 75 by demonic, far-right fascists, is his own rendering in support of political resistance. Pynchon’s politics, however, differ markedly from Anderson’s. He leans left in his critique of capitalism, but his vision in Vineland is more politically centrist than Anderson’s radicalized vision.

The novel’s backdrop is America’s “War on Drugs,” which began in 1971 with Richard Nixon and intensified under the first term of Ronald Reagan’s presidency (1981–1984). Not surprisingly, Pynchon sets his novel in California in 1984. This nod to Big Brother implies that he is less interested in drugs themselves than in drugs as pretext for governmental oppression. His main concern lies in the fact that the government’s massive campaign to eradicate drugs from American life creates “spores of paranoia” in the people due to the omnipresent dread of surveillance by or persecution from the Department of Justice. For Pynchon, the federal “war on a botanical species” is part of a larger and more sinister government plot, targeting those citizens who have dropped out of the American economy. In this view, the “War on Drugs” becomes an easy excuse to harass the nonconforming.

For the “carefree dopers,” the real fight is against “Mammonism,” that is, American consumerism and materialism. According to critic Eugene McCarraher, “Mammonism is the meretricious ontology of capital, in which everything receives its value—and even is very existence—through the empty animism of money.” Pynchon’s response to this vacuous reality resembles the Beatniks of the 1950s, whose literature, poetry, music, and painting impressed him as a young man. The century’s greatest challenge to “Mammonism,” however, came not from the Beats but from the Hippies of the 1960s, epitomized by the Free Speech Movement in 1964 at UC Berkeley. This episode of cultural history is rendered by Pynchon’s keen characterization of The People’s Republic of Rock and Roll (PR3) and its doomed leader, Weed Atman, whose murder is the novel’s central act of injustice. The federal government’s intolerance of the Counterculture Movement embodied in the rise and fall of PR3 sends Weed into oblivion and relegates him to the realm of the Thanatoids, those “insomniac unavenged” Hippies, who linger as ghost-like creatures until they can confirm that justice operates within the universe.

Like the Hippies, Pynchon promotes a drug mystique as an attempt to re-enchant a world engineered by the cold calculations of American Puritanism. He agrees with Max Weber’s thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) that the course of Western history, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, has been profoundly influenced by the annihilation of the Church’s sacramental system during the Protestant Reformation, resulting in widespread secularization. All of Pynchon’s novels trace the present American character and consciousness to its Puritan ancestry, expressing his deep sense of history and theology underneath these cultural changes. The spiritual legacy of Puritanism boils down in his view to its Calvinism, particularly the division of humanity into the two predetermined binary categories of being: the state of election (God’s choosing a few predestined for salvation) and the state of preterition (God’s passing over the many predestined for damnation).

In Pynchon’s structure of American history, these Calvinistic doctrines translate into societal terms. The elect are those who embody the Protestant Ethic accepted in the social imaginary: the virtue of sobriety and plain living; the intolerance of idleness and leisure; the sanctity of work and acquisition. The preterite, a neologism used by the heretical William Slothrop in his seventeenth-century hymn sung at the end of Pynchon’s previous novel Gravity’s Rainbow, are referred to as the reprobate by John Calvin. Simply put, they are the marginalized of society who possess antithetical qualities to the elect. The reader encounters this dualistic “Christian Capitalist Faith” in Vineland when one of the preterite remarks about the establishment: “You’re up against the True Faith here, some heavy dudes, talking crusades, retribution, closed ideological minds passing on the Christian Capitalist Faith intact, mentor to protege, generation to generation, living inside their power, convinced they’re immune to all the history the rest of us have to suffer.” The federal prosecutor Brock Vond, who is the heaviest dude and chief villain, exemplifies the Protestant Ethic without being religious. In Weber’s words, he’s a “specialist without spirit, sensualist without heart.” He represents the agents of managerial bureaucracy, especially their certainty of election and their license to condemn the preterite.

Pynchon titles his novel Vineland in direct reference to “Vinland,” the name given to North America by Leif Eriksson, when he sailed there from Greenland around the eleventh century. The etymology of the Old Norse word vin is “pasture” or “meadow.” In the novel, the Edenic pastureland of “green free America” has turned into a “scabland garrison state.” Yet through his thread of Prairie’s search for her mother Frenesi, Pynchon suggests that a successful search can restore a semblance of wholeness. Searching for the mother is a search for familial and communal roots rather than the search for the father—for authority, reason, and order—found in Pynchon’s earlier novels V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow. Further, Prairie’s eventual reunion with her mother allows Pynchon to conclude his novel with an expansive view of family during the climactic Traverse-Becker family reunion. Notably, just Brock Vond is excluded from this vision. Instead of partaking in merriment, he wrecks a stolen helicopter and is last seen staring across an astral river into hell itself. Let us not mistake Pynchon’s topsy-turvy ending as an attempt to replace those who are the elect with those who are the preterite, though he remains consistent in questioning the privileged and expressing sympathy for the dispossessed.

The political force of faction, of an interest group willing to sacrifice the public good for its own private purposes, operates during the climax of the novel. Recalling James Madision’s Federalist No. 10 (1787), Pynchon understands faction as a part of human nature that can only be eliminated through total conformity enforced by a political regime akin to totalitarianism. And because human nature can never be totally uniform without force, factions will always arise from people’s various and unequal temperaments, perspectives, endowments, and abilities. For Madison, citizens can either live within a pluralistic society of factions or seek terrifying alternatives: “There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.” The demolition of liberty and free speech is far worse than competing factions.

In the face of this dreadful threat of totalitarianism, Pynchon pleads for a return to the Founders’ idea of permitting factions to preserve our inalienable rights. Madison prescribed the large territory of the North American continent as the remedy for the political disease of faction: “Extend the sphere and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength and to act in unison with each other.” By reaffirming the belief that an enlarged republic can encompass a variety of different perspectives and interests, Madison ensures American citizens that no single faction could ever dominate the polis. Like Madison’s political philosophy, Pynchon’s myth of America envisions a robust pluralism where intellectual and religious differences can coexist peacefully.

Seen through the lens of the Founding, the Traverse-Becker family reunion, then, is a microcosm of America. It brings together a wide range of individuals who heartily disagree but still recognize a healthy bond. In the space of the reunion, these characters interact productively despite their disparate political affiliation. “‘Political family,’ Zoyd remark[s], ‘for sure,’” to Flash as they watch attendees engage in an annual tradition when “some shouted, some accompanied by spit, the old reliable names for hours of contention, stomach distress, and insomnia—Hitler, Roosevelt, Nixon, Hoover, Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger.” The reunion is the site of vigorous political debate among multiple generations, yet the conflict neither dissolves the union nor resolves into a singular perspective. The people endure as a society precisely by living with the tensions between their members. In the end, everyone agrees, as did the Founders, that unchecked central power from any direction tends to stifle the freedom of speech and, thus, the quest for truth.

During the reunion, Jess, the Traverse patriarch, addresses the key issue of “karmic imbalances—unanswered blows, unredeemed suffering, escapes by the guilty” that have plagued the disenchanted preterite for their entire existence. He quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The Sovereignty of Ethics” (1878), insisting that justice covertly holds its own to right past wrongs: “Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the Divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles for evermore the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil.” The Thanatoids now possess a right to a peaceful afterlife. Nonetheless, this relief for them does not naively anticipate an idealized “Vinland” to miraculously reenchant North America in some prelapsarian sense of universal harmony among the elect and the preterite. Although the preterite may always sit on the doorstep of the mansion of American prosperity, they should be permitted to forge individual identities and a shared community in the pursuit of happiness. Both ideals, after all, are protected by the pluralistic underpinnings of the Constitution of the United States of America and its Bill of Rights.

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