Joaquin Phoenix in Inherent Vice
Ben van Welzen delves into the formal complexity and intentional haziness of Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s sprawling novel.
“We tell ourselves stories to live,” Joan Didion writes in her sprawling essay recounting the tumultuous times of the 1960s, “The White Album.” According to Didion, we collectively impose an overarching narrative onto each moment of our lives, especially those that will never make sense. She paints this phenomenon as escapism, an unavoidable coping strategy to give the illusion of order in a sea of chaos. How, though, can an unwavering belief that every second of your day weaves together into a broader fabric of meaning possibly help a post-Manson generation burdened with conspiracies and cults? Do our storytelling instincts really give us comfort in chaos, or do they perpetuate paranoia by creating connections that aren’t really there?
In the last six decades of interrogating these questions, fewer artists have more effectively distilled the pervasive fear and helplessness from the end of the 1960s than prolific author Thomas Pynchon. In 2009, he revisited his old themes in a period crime novel called Inherent Vice, an overwhelmingly detailed frenzy of private investigators, drug rings, hippies, and enough marijuana to pacify a small town. Then, in 2014, film director Paul Thomas Anderson took on the project and translated the paranoia to a new medium and a new audience. Importantly, both the book and the film take place in 1970 California, immediately after the turn of the decade. In doing so, Anderson’s adaptation presents a historical film that isn’t necessarily period-accurate in its setting or descriptions or recounting of events, but rather communicates the uneasy experience and the inescapable paranoid dread that pervaded every moment.
Still from Inherent Vice
To understand Anderson’s deceivingly intricate film, one must turn to its basis novel and compare differences. It’s difficult to make it 50 pages into Pynchon’s story without losing the narrative thread; according to a crowdsourced online metric, the novel contains over 130 characters, many of which appear for only a page with no indication as to how unimportant they’ll be moving forward. The reader joins private investigator Doc Sportello as he attempts — and fails — to navigate the particulars of the case that he encounters every new paragraph. Luckily, Doc’s hippie attitudes invite us to, like him, give up at the first sign of adversity. After watching the film three times and reading the novel twice, I’ve only just begun to piece together the immense narrative. Like the California hippies searching for clarity through the smog and the brain fog, the reader can only fruitlessly sift through a bottomless pit of nouns to find a meaning that may not even be there.
In film form, these intellectual gymnastics become perceptual since it’s difficult to overwhelm a film viewer with names and words without resulting in something horrifically boring. In the novel, Pynchon operates under the pretense that these details could be important to later events, but by the very nature of the medium, a film can only get so specific. So, instead, Anderson makes the viewing experience more akin to the characters’ own experience. The most obvious example is the inclusion of the aforementioned California fogs. For instance, when Doc (Joaquin Phoenix) first hears that his ex-lover Shasta (Katherine Waterston) has disappeared, he smokes a joint dedicated to her and, as soon as he lights it, the film dissolves to a softly lit close-up of Shasta, presumably a moment from Doc’s memory as indicated by her fleeting glances to the camera. Notably, Anderson does not complete the dissolve, thus resulting in a superimposition of Doc smoking and the hazy image of Shasta that lasts for several seconds. This moment is a clear cinematic embodiment of the several fogs from Pynchon’s text: we see the smoke from Doc’s joint, we see the fog of California in the image of Shasta, and we see the fog of memory through the superimposition itself.
Still from Inherent Vice
Anderson also confuses the audience with a playful callousness that draws upon familiar cultural touchpoints, but never quite delivers sufficient purpose. In one fell swoop, the film amuses, confuses, but leaves just enough bread crumbs to force the viewer to turn the details over in their head to no avail. Take, for instance, the scene where Doc meets Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson) in a commune to deliver news about his family. After their conversation, Doc’s partner snaps a photo of the group arranged very particularly around the dinner table; the resulting frame is a hippie-filled pizza party parody of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper.
Still from Inherent Vice
The striking and fleeting image encourages the viewer to spiral down into a slew of interpretations. Is Coy the central savior of the story? Is he a martyr? Will someone become a Judas and kill Coy? None of these questions have any answers that could satisfy a viewer, and the moment is too quick to have any bearing on the rest of the film, but it throws the audience for enough of a loop to lose any stable footing in the film experience.
A similar moment connects even more with the Doc’s disoriented experience: while casually watching TV, he sees Coy interrupt a random Richard Nixon rally. This moment serves several purposes: for one, it doubles down on the insertion of Coy into Western iconography and, two, it identifies our perception with Doc’s as we both struggle to put these disparate pieces together. On a third and perhaps overly meta level, these moments emphasize the peculiar casting choice of Owen Wilson, a frequently typecast comedy actor whose persona extends beyond his movies and exists in the broader cultural mind. It’s hard not to chuckle when Owen Wilson’s iconic breathy voice emerges for the first time and it leads to a cognitive disconnect when we see him as a hippie Jesus figure or as a heckler at a Nixon rally. Altogether, Inherent Vice plucks familiar symbols from our mind and disorients the viewer by placing these symbols in completely out-of-context scenarios.
Most broadly, the generic framework of Inherent Vice leads the viewer into a trap of helpless confusion. Anderson adopts the genre tropes and stylistic flair of noir and neo-noir film, thus inviting the viewer to partake in the detective work that noir usually encourages. Films like The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon conspicuously hide the missing puzzle piece until the inevitable resolution where Humphrey Bogart spells out how every scene connected to the solution. Inherent Vice does not give such a luxury; instead, the plot comes together rather abruptly and not at all satisfactorily. The viewer’s detective work over the course of the last 150 minutes becomes just another conspiracy, something that can never be resolved but will always feel incredibly close to the truth. The omniscient narrator does not spell out the answers but instead feeds into Doc’s and the viewer’s nervous delusions and paranoia. In the film’s closing moments, this narrator reflects on the lasting impact of these experiences, noting that “there is no voiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness.” Once we abandon our efforts to piece everything together, once we accept the hippie attitude to allow ourselves to get lost, everything goes up into a haze. We swim in this sea of memory and forgetfulness, never remembering the intricacies, but always remembering the uneasiness we felt along the way.
Inherent Vice will be screened at IU Cinema on November 15 as part of the series L.A. Scams Itself.
Ben van Welzen is a lover of cinema and mathematics. After studying both subjects in his undergraduate education, Ben is a PhD student in math at Indiana University, using what’s left of his time to attend IU Cinema screenings, rent movies from local video stores, and attempt to read more literature.