Inherent Vice (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014)
The only reasonable way to begin writing about the film Inherent Vice is to direct you elsewhere. Travis Woods’s essay “Does It Ever End?: The Sweet Heartbreak of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice” at Bright Wall/Dark Room and Kim Morgan’s program notes for the New Beverly Cinema are both much better and more thoughtful than anything I could ever hope to write on short notice. The film is too dense, too layered, too complicated, too damn long to sum up in a few sentences, and if I were to incorporate notes and observations on Thomas Pynchon’s novel and body of work, then we really would be here all day, because I have thoughts about that, which I am still slowly piecing together.
No, the best I can offer is a simple appreciation for the film, its talented cast and crew, and Paul Thomas Anderson, who is perhaps the best American filmmaker working today.
First and foremost, I agree with most of what Woods and Morgan write about the film. Inherent Vice is the greatest breakup movie ever made. I love its blend of melancholy, humor, and paranoia. It recreates a vanished moment in history. Anderson did the impossible and made a Pynchon novel work onscreen. It is a complete triumph, and its failure at the box office and with mainstream critics speaks volumes about the limitations of the ‘marketplace of ideas’.
One point I must bring up is how the adaptation managed to alter my perception of the original novel. While I am a fan of Pynchon, I have always had some difficulty with his work. Doesn’t everyone? Even a relatively straightforward novel like Inherent Vice has dozens of characters and draws upon an intricate knowledge of Los Angeles, the counterculture, and the underculture of parapolitics, crime, law enforcement, and espionage. That’s nothing compared to the death haunted phantasmagoria of WWII era Europe in Gravity’s Rainbow, the antiquated prose of Mason & Dixon, or the sheer, staggering length of Against the Day.
The problem I had with Pynchon, though, was less complicated than all that, though. It was simply that I had difficulty imagining his characters. I wasn’t one of those people who called them flat or inhuman. The friendship between Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon is touching, and the doomed romance of Roger Mexico and Jessica Swanlake in Gravity’s Rainbow is rending. But, you know, sometimes it’s a little hard to picture them speaking the dialogue out loud. The names, brilliant as they are, usually don’t help either.
As it turns out, the best way to remedy this was simply to have actors just say the lines. Seeing Joaquin Phoenix as Doc Sportello and Katherine Waterston as Shasta Fay Hepworth together at his Gordita Beach apartment began to make everything click into place. The strange, stylized diction made sense now, which is an accomplishment given Phoenix’s usual mumblemouthed delivery. Seeing that “flattop of Flinstonian proportions” fashioned on Josh Brolin’s square skull made ‘Bigfoot’ Bjornsen into a more naturalistic character for me. It’s not that he wasn’t necessarily unrealistic in the book, but having a flesh-and-blood person welcoming Doc into “a world of inconvenience” helped immensely.
The other great thing that Anderson did with the text was to preserve Pynchon’s prose by making a minor character, Sortilege, into an omniscient narrator. As it happens, Joanna Newsom makes Pynchon soar and I am upset that no one has offered her a dump truck full of money to record audiobooks of all his fiction.
My only real issue with Anderson’s film is that it ends too soon. There are people out there who will tell you that 149 minutes is an excessive length for a film with no obvious structure, and you can ignore all of them because they are wrong. I read the book, and this film is as streamlined as it could be while still being faithful to characters and plot. If it incorporated the diversion to Las Vegas and digressions on everything from ARPANET to the replacement of private detective shows with police procedurals, it would have been twice as long, but hey, I sat through Satantango and way less happened in that.
Curiously, the film’s necessary abridgment actually helps articulate aspects of Pynchon’s novel. Set amid the paranoid post-Manson murders background of California in 1970, Doc Sportello’s investigations involve him in everything from missing real estate developers to Indochinese heroin cartels to dental cartels to COINTELPRO. The connection between all these seemingly disparate threads is better realized in the novel, but their depiction in the film is a wonderful demonstration of the wisdom found in the Proverbs for Paranoids scattered through Gravity’s Rainbow:
1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
2. The innocence of the creature is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
4. You hide, They seek.
5. Paranoids are not paranoids because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
You can never know the true extent of the conspiracy or just what the Golden Fang is. You can have your suspicions and you might put two and two together about–for instance–where we are waging a war and where all that heroin flooding the neighborhood came from. The best you can do is not be a total fucking idiot and to “keep cool, but care” as is jazz musician McClintic Sphere’s motto in Pynchon’s first novel V. That is ultimately what Doc does, and Anderson’s decision to preserve the emotional core of the book over total fidelity to the plot makes that clear.
oliveresque 