Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014, 148 minutes

Private investigator Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) investigates the disappearance of his former lover Shasta (Katherine Waterston) and property developer Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts) in early seventies Los Angeles.

Fascinated by hidden histories and esoterica, Thomas Pynchon has a reputation as a ‘difficult’ writer who seasons his prose with clever in-jokes and eclectic cultural references. ‘Inherent Vice’ (2009), a hybrid of literary noir and conspiracy theory is his most accessible novel. Paul Thomas Anderson sets his film adaptation of ‘Inherent Vice’ in 1970 when the high tide of sixties liberalism was almost past. He avoids nostalgic cliché and instead creates a rich, intoxicating sense of period. With Watergate just around the corner, Charles Manson and war in Vietnam make hippie aspirations of peace and love seem like a bad joke. Nixon’s America is balkanised as conservative interests strive to regain the cultural initiative. Pynchon’s absurd, paranoid world with its inept conspiracies, dirty money and rank hypocrisy feels more relevant now than it did when the film was released in the closing years of Obama’s presidency. ‘Inherent Vice’ shows us how the optimism of the sixties turned sour, mired in a morass of bad trips and reactionary politics as ‘the man’ reasserts his (or her) authority. Corporations subvert social revolution and counterculture is colonised by market forces seeking new opportunities for profit. Anderson seems ambivalent about the failure of flower power. His view of this period with its self-interest, self-actualisation, and dodgy gurus is more ambivalent than Pynchon’s who expresses a keen sense of loss and missed opportunity in his later novels, particularly ‘Vineland’ (1990). With hindsight it’s easier to recognise the shallowness of hippie spirituality; selfish, spoiled children pursuing instant enlightenment and to forget the sense of ‘something in the air’, the possibility of social change that now seems so remote. The film is a reminder that although we simplify the past as distinct decades history is more complex. The sixties didn’t swing the same way for everybody. Pynchon’s characters are aware that the times are changing and perceive that that whatever measure of personal freedom they have gained will soon be swept away by a resurgent mood of social austerity and puritan morality.

Pynchon’s Los Angeles is lovingly recreated by Anderson and his crew: With its surfer communes, apocalyptic cults and frenetic redevelopment, L.A. feels closer to the chaotic urban futures of Philip K Dick; it seethes like a huge frontier town, a merciless, twentieth century Deadwood, ripe for exploitation. Robert Elswit’s fine photography contrasts vivid period colour and moody atmospherics which underscore the sense of impending change.  This city, where rot hides just underneath false smiles and pretty faces has been exhaustively mapped in noir cinema from ‘Sunset Boulevard’ (Billy Wilder, 1950) to ‘Mulholland Drive’ (David Lynch, 2001) but Anderson charts his own route around the City’s corrupt psyche. He carefully avoids melodrama: The personal crises of these characters are underplayed and never lapse into soap opera. The city teems with an hallucinogenic host of eccentric characters, many of whom are intriguing enough to have a whole film to themselves: At the centre there is Joaquin Phoenix’s wonderful character study: Doc is sweet, perceptive and tougher than he appears; his gentle hippie confusion and pacifist mien are matched by the keen grasp of situations, steely resolve and stringent code of honour common to other noir protagonists. This medicated Philip Marlowe is a dependable guide through the labyrinth of plot and counterplot. His thought process may be different from a ‘straight’ or ‘square’ detective, but his reefer-enhanced consciousness allows him to make unlikely connections between seemingly unrelated facts as well as feeding his sense of paranoia. Doc veers between stoned bemusement at life’s absurdities, through slapstick to mellow melancholia but never lapses into caricature.

None of the idiosyncratic characters of ‘Inherent Vice’ can be taken at face value: Although the LAPD remains as corrupt as it was in the days of Ellroy’s ‘L.A. Confidential’ (1990) detective Bigfoot Bjornson, played by Josh Brolin is an ambivalent presence, intimidating one moment and disarmingly vulnerable the next. Musician Joanna Newsom whose eclectic lyrics and esoteric imagery inhabit a very similar universe to Pynchon’s prose is well cast as Sortilège, Doc’s oracle and spiritual anchor, who also narrates the film. Katherine Waterston’s Shasta represents the unattainable fantasy of free love, pleasure without responsibility or consequences. More like a ghost or dream than a real person, she represents the failure of sexual revolution, and her motivations remain obscure. Shasta fulfils the role of noir femme fatale, but she breaks the unwritten rule that bad girls must pay for their transgressions, and this makes it difficult for some viewers to relate to her. Some have labelled the film as misogynistic, but Pynchon’s writing reflects the stereotypes of the early seventies and the conventions of the noir form. Shasta personifies the paradox of power within gender relationships and uses her sexuality to succeed in a world dominated by the needs of men. Doc is ultimately powerless in the face of his attraction to Shasta; driven by his need to protect her he ultimately realises that she is eminently capable of taking care of herself. The climax of Shasta and Doc’s strange relationship is an unsettling moment and it’s difficult to decide who really holds the power in this encounter. Anderson struggles with the novel’s outmoded sexual politics but applying the moral standards of the present to a more permissive past is an exercise in futility. The film is set in an era where sex was a more casual transaction. This is difficult for a twenty-first century viewer to understand, we are more conscious of sexual exploitation and sexual interaction is subject to more intense moral scrutiny. In legal terminology ‘Inherent Vice’ is the innate quality of an object that causes it to break. The film’s title is singularly appropriate: Social revolutions fail because of the limitations of the people that create them; we continue to want relationships that can never work out. Shasta is Doc’s ‘inherent vice’; his built-in vulnerability; his pursuit of lost love and thwarted longing haunts the film and lends a touch of melancholy to the proceedings.

Like Arthur Schnitzler’s ‘Traumnovelle’ (1925), the source of Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (1999), or John Landis’ more playful ‘Into the Night’ (1985), ‘Inherent Vice’ takes the viewer on an engrossing, convoluted dream-journey where fate and chance govern the action. Anderson has explored this idea before; providence and random coincidence also play a strong role in the storylines of both ‘Boogie Nights’ (1997) and ‘Magnolia’ (1999). These magic-realist shades and some thoughtful, elegiac moments make it a sharper and stranger noir pastiche than Cohen cult favourite ‘The Big Lebowski’ (1998) but this is certainly not a sombre film. ‘Inherent Vice’ is a welcome return to the wit of Anderson’s earlier films and contrasts the oppressive sobriety of ‘There Will Be Blood’ (2007) or ‘The Master’ (2012). The Academy may disagree, but Anderson is at his best when he’s in mischievous form and free to indulge his raucous sense of humour. Anderson relishes Doc’s barbed verbal sparring with the forces of authority who take every opportunity to bash the hippie. Much of the fun comes from the menagerie of LA eccentrics: Josh Brolin’s damaged detective has a wonderful line in bleak sarcasm and Martin Short is a riot as priapic orthodontist Dr Rudy Blatnoyd.

‘Inherent Vice’ is an idiosyncratic film noir set in a Los Angeles that is very different to that inhabited by Philip Marlowe or Jeffrey Lebowski. It creates its own niche somewhere between the character-based social observation of Altman’s ‘Long Goodbye’ (1973) and the unhinged surrealism of Lynch’s ‘Lost Highway’ (1997). The long running-time may discourage casual viewers, but this is a complex film that rewards repeated viewings which reveal subtleties of theme and characterisation. Turn on, tune in and fall about as Doc unravels a stupefying knot of narrative twists whilst the Summer of Love disappears into a polluted fog of grubby politics and bad karma.

Quote:

“Was it possible that at every concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in and freak-in here, back East, wherever some dark crews had been busy all along reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?”

Sortilège (Joanna Newsom)

Connections:

Film

‘The Long Goodbye’ directed by Robert Altman (1973)

‘Into the Night’ directed by John Landis (1985)

‘Lost Highway’ directed by David Lynch (1997)

‘Boogie Nights’ directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (1997)

‘The Big Lebowski’ directed by Joel and Ethan Coen (1997)

‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas directed by Terry Gilliam (1998)

‘Magnolia’ directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (1999)

‘Eyes Wide Shut’ directed by Stanley Kubrick (1999)

‘Under the Silver Lake’ directed by David Robert Mitchell (2018)

‘Licorice Pizza’ directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (2021)

Reading

Arthur Schnitzler, Dream Story, Penguin, 1925, ISBN 978-0241284483

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, Vintage, 1966, ISBN 978-0099532613

Thomas Pynchon, Vineland, Vintage, 1990, ISBN 978-0749391416

Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice, Vintage, 2009, ISBN 978-0099542162

Music

Country Joe and the Fish: ‘I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die’, Vanguard Records, 1967

Joanna Newsom: ‘Divers’, Drag City, 2015