You probably have a favorite album that made a singer or band yours. That one album that you would listen to over and over, memorizing every beat, bridge and bassline. That one album that neatly cleaved your life in two: Before and After. The one piece of musical bliss complete strangers created solely for you to commune with them. That experience is the closest thing I can think of to a real-life fruition of having your cake and eating it too. You can listen again and again and while you may change how often you listen to it, every time is like the first time. You and the album—you might change, but it never does.
It would follow then that you would wait eagerly for the next album to come out, so you could play both albums back to back to double your pleasure—and it’s fraternal twin, the fun—commanding late night listening sessions and accompanying aimless car trips to nowhere in particular. But frequently, something happens with that next album, and it causes confusion and emotional dissonance. It’s different. It’s not the same as the old album. Something has changed, and it sure as heck ain’t you. There is a reason for this, and I realized the reason why while watching Inherent Vice.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel is an impossibility—a sunny neo-noir set principally in 1970’s Manhattan Beach (fictionalized here as “Gordita Beach”). Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) is a high-functioning pothead and private investigator. Faithful to the genre, his ex-girlfriend comes to him with a mysterious case that, faithful to the genre, reveals itself to be an insidiously complex maze of greed, lust and a litany of felonies and misdemeanors involving the police, real estate, drugs, erotic services, dentists, rehab clinics and, yes, murder.
Like most examples in the neo-noir genre, the plot is less important as what the film is really about, man. The end of the 1960s peace-and-love revolution is here, and the realization that “The Man” has, far from being defeated, been further empowered is hitting as hard as the smack withdrawals to those who participated wholeheartedly. Doc, to his credit, is coping better with the end, trying to do a little bit of actual good in his para-police work, and staying away from most drugs most of the time.
Just over the dividing line between scuzzy and legitimate is Doc’s unofficial partner/official nemesis LAPD Det. Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin). Bigfoot’s sharp bark and severe flattop hides a moral universe much closer to Doc’s than he would care to admit, and his failure to casually succeed like Doc seems to do eats away at him as he tries to do right when his desires don’t overcome him.
There are some significant stars in this film: Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, Martin Short, Michael K. Williams, Benicio del Toro, Jena Malone, Anderson’s wife Maya Rudolph–but like the plot, the stars are less important than the feelings they portray. Again, appropriate for the genre, the dividing line between the upholders and transgressors of the law is almost indistinguishable the closer you get to it, and after hours it seems that anything goes–which, referring back to the growing realization that hippies aren’t going to change society–almost seems like a reluctant truce.
So what do I make of the unravelling 148 minutes of Inherent Vice? From the Cliff’s Notes, it seems that PTA followed Pynchon’s book pretty closely, and I can imagine that if he set out to faithfully recreate a book he liked he succeeded. If that’s all he intended to do–and Pynchon’s writing style, no less–then bravo! However, he did not make this movie for me, and I feel the emotional dissonance.
My favorite movie of all time is PTA’s 1999 film Magnolia. It’s my cinematic and theological Before and After, and it might be a surprise to you, but Paul made Magnolia for me. Every beat, bridge and bassline of that movie profoundly affected me in way that makes any other explanation laughable. Somehow, Paul knew that 19-year old David Moore needed to see an ensemble piece about the magical/banal/cruel/fantastic experience of everyday life and spent his entire creative energy communicating this story to me. I hope you enjoy it too, of course–I will automatically think less of you if you don’t–but it’s my movie.
Like Inherent Vice‘s hippie population refusal to admit the revolution is over, I have been refusing to admit that the reason I didn’t connect as much with PTA’s post-Magnolia Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood, or The Master is because there is a human behind these films. An artist with his own desires, his own ideas, and his own feelings he wants to communicate. He’s not making movies for me. In fact, I feel strongly after watching Inherent Vice that he made this movie for himself. That’s fine. Just fine. If he can make a movie he wants to do, that’s fine. It’s fine. It’s just…
He’s changed, and my relationship with him, mediated through his work, is not a real relationship at all. He’s not my profundity genie that I can command a aesthetically pleasing, life-altering work of art whenever I want. If I want that, I can put on Magnolia and have that relationship whenever I want. Yet I would be back in the same place of Inherent Vice‘s hippie population, fooling myself into thinking that reality is better than it is.
I really wanted an extension of Magnolia, and after this, the fourth-consecutive non-Magnolia 2 movie PTA is done, I’m ready to just accept and appreciate whatever work he decides to do, because that’s how people in healthy relationships treat each other. Not controlling, not limiting, but happily accepting.
Recently, I was able to have dinner with one of the musicians from the band who’s album caused my musical Before and After. I told him the story of my first experience with the first song on the album, and he looked at me incredulously. He said, “That’s a distorted A chord. Your life was changed because of a distorted A chord?” He marveled at my reaction to that as he mentioned special songs to him that weren’t as special to me.
I imagine having dinner with PTA would be much the same. I haven’t had a relationship with him, so I don’t know him. I might ask him about Magnolia, and he would want to talk about Inherent Vice, because he hasn’t watched Magnolia in years. That’s understandable; he made Magnolia 15 years ago. He hasn’t made Magnolia: Part Deux in four tries, and Inherent Vice plays a role in his own canon more than it makes sense on its own. Obviously, he’s moved on. Now I should, too.