One Battle After Another: Paul Thomas Anderson and the Absurdity of Parenthood

One Battle After Another: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Absurdist Masterpiece

Absurdism thrives in the space between intention and outcome. Beckett gave us tramps waiting for Godot who never arrives. Stoppard gave us Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, fumbling toward deaths scripted by Shakespeare. Pynchon’s novels give us lost souls caught in conspiracies too vast to map. Now, in One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson gives us perhaps the most piercing cinematic rendering of Pynchon yet — a film less about politics than about the futility of raising children once they are grown.

Beyond Politics: PTA’s Focus on the Personal

Yes, Vineland is a political book, and Anderson does not erase that. Surveillance states, failed revolutions, FBI shadows — all are here. But what the movie feels like, what endures in the bones, is not the polemic but the father–daughter dynamic. Anderson has always been drawn to families cracking apart under pressure: Daniel Plainview and his son, Frank T.J. Mackey and his dying father, the lonely figures in Punch-Drunk Love. In One Battle After Another, he takes Pynchon’s material and finds its most universal thread: the absurdity of a father trying, and failing, to shape a daughter who is nearly grown.

The Futility of Control

Bob, our would-be patriarch, embodies the classic absurdist hero. He warns, pleads, scolds, protects — but nothing changes. His daughter makes her own choices, and the plot unspools indifferent to his efforts. It is absurd not in the theatrical sense alone, but in the deeply human sense: the moment every parent reaches when guidance turns into background noise, and the child steps forward on her own terms.

Anderson lingers on this futility with quiet, almost tender irony. Every attempt to control collapses into irrelevance. Bob is like Sisyphus with a teenager: pushing the stone of fatherhood up the hill only to see it roll down again, untouched by his exertion. The absurdity here is domestic, yet no less profound than the cosmic futility of Beckett’s tramps or Coppola’s soldiers in Apocalypse Now.

In the Company of Absurdist Greatness

Anderson’s film belongs in conversation with the giants. Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead revealed the farce of destiny; Coppola’s Apocalypse Now turned war into a psychedelic parable of madness. One Battle After Another takes its place among them by showing how absurdity plays out in the most intimate relationship of all. Where others find absurdism in death or empire, Anderson finds it in parenting — the comedy and tragedy of discovering that your child is free, and that your control is an illusion.

A Conservative Reading: Letting Go

From a conservative perspective, there is something bracing here. The instinct to guide, to guard, even to control is natural, especially for fathers. But Anderson’s film underlines the limits of authority. You can raise a child, but you cannot own the outcome. Freedom, for good or ill, belongs to the next generation.

This is not an invitation to abdication, but a reminder of humility. The most one can give is character, love, and example. After that, the absurd sets in: watching from the sidelines as the child chooses, stumbles, and becomes someone beyond your power. The paradox is that this futility is also a form of love. Trying, even when you know it won’t work, is part of what it means to be a parent.

Conclusion: Anderson’s Finest Absurdist Film

Despite the politics — or perhaps because it refuses to rest on them — One Battle After Another may be the most successful Pynchon adaptation yet, and one of Anderson’s finest films. It captures absurdism not as abstraction but as family life. It stands alongside Stoppard and Coppola, and perhaps even surpasses them in accessibility, because who has not felt the absurdity of raising children?

For Pynchon fans, it is a revelation: a story that channels his wild paranoia into something achingly human. For fans of absurdist literature, it is proof that the genre can flourish not only in theater or war but in the quiet agony of parenthood. And for anyone with a daughter on the cusp of independence, it will ring painfully true: no matter what you do, no matter how you battle, the outcome lies beyond your control.

It is, in the end, one of the finest movies about absurdity, family, and futility — a masterpiece of Pynchon on film, and of Anderson at his most humane.