Poor Hollywood. Now that Paul Thomas Anderson has adapted Thomas Pynchon’s work not once, but twice — the upcoming One Battle After Another riffs on Pynchon’s 1990 novel, Vineland, with Leo to boot — someone’s assistant might actually have to read Gravity’s Rainbow. (That is, if they can’t get their hands on an advance copy of the author’s much shorter new novel, Shadow Ticket, out next month.)

Pynchon’s daunting masterpiece, a white whale of a Great American Novel, is stuffed with pun-tastic songs, rocket science and World War II-era occultism. It’s the kind of book grad students dare each other to read under the influence of illicit substances. But Hollywood should do its homework. If Pynchon is the high priest of 20th century postmodernism, he’s also proved a prophet of America’s 21st century. Across his oeuvre, he trumpets a constant warning against America’s penchant for both shambolic rebellion and playing footsie with fascism — and Southern California is the Rosetta stone to decode it all.

These days, Pynchon is a resolute New Yorker. His Upper West Side neighbors protect the famously press-averse 88-year-old author like a Praetorian guard. And his novels’ Byzantine plots span the globe. But Pynchon traversed California far and wide in his youth. Gravity’s Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49 were partly written here, in Manhattan Beach. The latter riffs mythopoetically on the region’s aerospace industry, and the former features an anthropology of our freeways any native Angeleno could get behind. Vineland is putatively set in NorCal but pops down to chronicle old Hollywood’s labor struggles; and Against the Day leads its shaggy-dog revenge play to L.A.’s Bradbury Building, of Blade Runner fame. Then, there’s the first book PTA adapted, Inherent Vice, a Raymond Chandler-meets-Cheech & Chong love letter to the SoCal counterculture of his youth. (No surprise, Pynchon’s papers are now at San Marino’s Huntington Library.) Clearly, we left our mark on the genius.

Or, rather: We gave him a vision. Pynchon’s work is often labeled “apocalyptic” — the most obvious tangent point. After all, Hollywood loves its disaster movies. Between wildfires and earthquakes, the End Times are the closest thing we have to seasons. Ours is a geography of cataclysm: Santa Anas wreak their psychic wrath; the odor of disaster seeps from the street like that sulfurous egg smell of the La Brea Tar Pits. Forget Randy Newman’s crowd-pleaser “I Love L.A.” — The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm” is our true spiritual anthem. It’s as if Pynchon mainlined that vibe and found the perfect metaphor for his great theme: the dark plate tectonics that snapped when the American dream ran out of frontier to conquer.

His books chronicle a Newtonian duel between force and counterforce in the American character: On the one hand, we love telling authorities to fuck off. On the other, we have a quasi-erotic fascination with domination and submission. Gnawing paranoia inevitably awakens Pynchon’s characters to the matrix of control enveloping their lives. Cracks of light seep through only for them to seek out sexual encounters with the agents of fascism behind it, from Oedipa Maas in Lot 49 to Shasta Fey in Inherent Vice to Frenesi Gates in Vineland. We hate kings, but oppressive bad boys always exert their hypnotic pull. If anyone saw Trump’s election — and reelection — coming, it was Pynchon.

No place better embodies that ethos than Southern California. For every authoritarian impulse, we’ve generated an insurrectionist response, and vice versa. This is the land that gave us both Dragnet and the Watts Rebellion (whose fallout Pynchon himself covered). We launched Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, even as the 1992 riots took down Daryl Gates, the man who brought S.W.A.T.’s Vietnam tactics to America’s streets. This summer’s uprising against ICE’s cruelty was just the latest in a long tradition. Making beach bonfires out of Waymos was a middle finger to both Trump’s Big Tech collaborators and his cruel shadow king, Stephen Miller, a product of Santa Monica’s public school system.

But there’s another golden thread SoCal left in Pynchon’s sewing kit. If one didn’t know better, one might call it hope. Inevitably, his fascists self-destruct. Vineland’s repressive villain Brock Vond ends ferried to hell by two Eastside vatos locos, while the hippie father Zoyd reunites with his daughter at an anarchist family picnic. Even Gravity’s Rainbow culminates at an L.A. movie theater, a thermo-nuclear warhead hovering overhead, eternally about to drop, as the audience sings an anthem of inclusion: “Now Everybody!”

Against the doom of flailing despots, Pynchon offers a kazoo-playing chorus of wastoids, potheads and ADHD dreamers to remind us there could be a better world, if … Could there be a better description of L.A.? Of that land where America dumps all its loose nuts? Of the roiling mass of restless natives, cranky artists and tattered idealists who rose up across the Southland this summer to flip off darkness and call America back to its better angels?

This story appeared in the Sep. 3 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.