A few early notes on the film version of "Inherent Vice"

Thomas Pynchon's 2009 novel Inherent Vice opens with an epigraph: "Under the paving stones, the beach!" which the author designates as "Grafitto, Paris, May 1968." The sentiment is frequently credited to the philosophers and activists now called "the Situationists," and beyond the nod to a certain mode of radical thought, the quote's resonance as the novel begins is, depending on how much context you freight the quote with, both melancholy—the events of the book take place in 1970, well after the May strikes were squelched, and soon after Manson and Altamont and all that perceptually put a stake through the heart of the counterculture—and kind of wry, as the semi-lost souls who populate the book are operating in and around a California beach town inspired, it is said, by Manhattan Beach, where Pynchon reportedly lived in the late '60s and early '70s while writing Gravity's Rainbow.

Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson's film of the book places the epigraph at the very very end of the movie, after the final credits unroll. It's the movie's "stinger," so to speak. I can't speak to why Anderson chose to place it at the very end, whether that means he's paying a perfunctory respect to the philosophical current it represents (I don't believe that anyway) or whether he thinks that waving the Situationist flag in any form these days is perceptually the contemporary equivalent of going and carrying pictures of Chairman Mao. But it's there. And it's not unimportant. 

More prominently placed in this beautiful film (and it is beautiful, from the very beginning, when a tight shot of a serene Joanna Newsom is interrupted by what looks like a blossoming deep blue lens flare, which turns out to be a dissolve into the nocturnal weed haze inhabited by the lead character "Doc" Sportello, a Firesign Theater idea of a private dick if there ever was one) is an observation about addiction and recovery and who's running that whole show in these United States. On investigating an entity called "the Golden Fang"—an entity whose identity shifts, in absurd and absurdist degrees, through Pynchon's narrative—the paranoid (or, rather, "paranoid") Sportello hits on an idea: "It was occuring to Doc now, as he recalled what Jason Velveeta had said about vertical integration, that if the Golden Fang could get its customers strung out, why not turn around and sell them a program to help them kick? Get them coming and going, twice as much revnue and no worries about new customers—as long as American life was something to be escaped from , the cartel could always be sure of a bottomless pool of new customers." The second half of that passage is repeated verbatim in Newsom's voiceover, and it's crucial. 

The movie walks a very particular high wire, soaking in a series of madcap-surreal hijinks in an ambling, agreeable fashion to such an extent that even viewers resistant to demanding "what's the point" might think "what's the point."  Which isn't to say the humor isn't delightful. Anderson has mentioned Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker (EARLY Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, to be sure) as a reference point, and it's there, as in the near-obscene sight of Josh Brolin relishing a chocolate-covered banana in soft focus, or the dialogue misunderstanding beginning with "Go to bed." Hints of Jerry Lewis, too, as in a wonderful shot of a line of people veering to their right while Sportello, holding up the rear, continues straight ahead. But this is a Paul Thomas Anderson movie: the fun stuff engages but holds you in suspension, waiting for the kick in the gut. Which does happen, There is, about an hour and forty-five minutes into the film, a turnabout, a scene which again reproduces the dialogue and to a certain extent the action of a scene in the novel, but shifts the emphases in a way that's pure Anderson, bringing a shocking amount of raw emotion and wrong to an exchange that the book almost throws away. The scene delivers what the film has been withholding, and this places everything that's come before in a sort of relief, and colors everything that comes after. It is, to my mind, pretty incredible. And despite the scene being "only" two people in a room, it speaks to everything the movie has on its mind. It's funny; we can talk ourselves silly about how Gone Girl may or may not have a "woman problem," but when it comes to discussing the notion of how dominant ideology in a capitalist system also determines power relations between the sexes, it's "check, please" time. I'll leave it at that for now. 

In hewing close to Pynchon, Anderson finds a new freedom, or a further elasticity to the freedom he started exercisng most strenuously in Magnolia. I've seen a scene in which Sportello is surrounded by a group of nose-picking FBI agents described as "cringeworthy;" and it is, if what you demand from motion pictures is a straight line, an unwavering tone, a particular fidelity to, I don't know, EXACTLY what it is that Altman or Ashby did and you no want his One True Inheritor to keep doing, or something. Pynchon's freedom is manifested in, say, the above-quoted sentences, which contain mordant observations on this American life juxtaposed against a character named "Jason Velveeta." The whole of Gravity's Rainbow, from banana breakfast to the head of a V2 missile touching the roof of a London cinema, is a musical, for heaven's sake. 

I wasn't going to write about this movie until more people were able to see it, but I wanted to get these ideas out there, as people are talking about it and are going to talk about it. I'll have more at a future date. I should extend my appreciation to the New York Film Festival for the opportunity to see the movie at such an early date (it comes to theaters on December 12). I think it's great. 

Comments

[Petey]

The last TWO Pynchon books both had amazingly wonderful epigraphs.

[jbryant]

I don't generally go out of my way to read a book before the movie comes out, but a few weeks ago I devoured both GONE GIRL and INHERENT VICE, and I've been looking forward to seeing how they've been adapted. GONE GIRL has its challenges, but I assume Fincher was more than up to them (haven't seen it yet). But INHERENT VICE struck me as being next to impossible to adapt, so I've been most curious to see if Anderson has pulled it off. The trailer suggests to me that he has, and your review supports that hope. But I'm still a little wary -- the book's plot is so convoluted and so much of it is conveyed through dialogue that I can't imagine a single 2 1/2-hour film containing it all and remaining coherent. I think I read that Anderson began the task by transposing the entire novel into script format, then paring it down from there. I suppose that exercise made it clearer to him what could be cut without much harm to the story and tone. All I know is I don't envy him that task. I can see how the book would be catnip to an Altman fan possibly looking to make his own LONG GOODBYE.

[Petey]

"But INHERENT VICE struck me as being next to impossible to adapt..."

Huh. One of my first thoughts after finishing it a few days after it was released, (besides, 'wow, that was so uncommonly tasty that I've got to read it again right away'), was that it was the first Pynchon book that seemed easily adaptable to cinema.

It's so goddamn RELATABLE for a Pynchon.

[Tony Dayoub]

It is pretty great isn't it? And its incoherence had a lot of the critics sitting around me this short of collectively exploding their head SCANNERS-style because they just couldn't figure out why they liked it so much if they didn't entirely get it.

I believe most folks who really get excited about Anderson's work allow for the notion that one grows to understand his movies more and more over subsequent viewings. In other words, one of the most rewarding qualities of his films is that there's enough density there to take you through a number of viewings, whereas other movies rarely have anything new to say after a single viewing.

[jbryant]

Petey: It was my first and thus far only Pynchon, so I can't speak to the adaptability of his other work, but maybe I should clarify. While I could see every scene in the book as a scene in a movie, it seemed like it would be a very talky and confusing one. There's a lot of info, clues, revelations, that only come out in dialogue, especially as the story is wrapping up, so I felt that a truly faithful adaptation, besides being very long, would likely be of limited or intermittent cinematic interest, especially if you hold to the old "show, don't tell" maxim (and no, I don't consider that to be a rule that can't be broken). If the job had fallen in my lap, I'd probably have pushed for a mini-series or one of those ten-episode "TV events" such as FARGO or GRACEPOINT.

[jbryant]

A further clarification: Of course I realize that scenes of people talking can be re-conceived visually, via flashbacks or other narrative means. But in this instance, it seemed like a daunting task to me. Kudos to Anderson for even attempting it.

[Petey]

"If the job had fallen in my lap, I'd probably have pushed for a mini-series or one of those ten-episode "TV events"

Well, that's one of the several reasons why I so deeply loved Todd Haynes' Mildred Pierce mini-series. Dude really did 'faithfully' adapt the book.

As to the larger point, pretty much ALL books don't 'fit' into feature-film length. (With quite a bunch of exceptions along the lines of The Maltese Falcon.)

But when you adapt pretty much ANY book into a feature-film, you are forced to adapt one of various kinds of slash and burn techniques to cram far too much material into the allotted time. In short, I don't think this is an issue specific in any real way to Inherent Vice.

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"especially if you hold to the old "show, don't tell" maxim"

I've been mainly avoiding reading about the film, as is my wont for films I know I'm definitely going to go see, (only read the first and last paragraph of Glenn's post here), but I seem to have elsewhere caught a spoiler that's it's V.O. driven. So, assuming that's true, (and I don't want to know if it is or isn't), it's not holding to that maxim.

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"It was my first and thus far only Pynchon"

If you enjoyed the book to any significant degree, I recommend Bleeding Edge. It's not QUITE as goddamn relatable as Inherent Vice, but it's still really good stuff. Dude's getting consumer-friendly in his old age...

[jbryant]

Oh I know very few books "fit" into feature film length, but as a screenwriter I'm always curious as to what I'd include, what I'd leave out, what I'd change if I were doing the gig. Some books are easier to get a bead on than others in that regard. My imagination failed me with INHERENT VICE, except as a longer-form work.

I agree about MILDRED PIERCE. I recently found an old notebook of mine from many years before Haynes' version that included "MILDRED PIERCE mini-series" on a list of "dream projects." I had read the book and thought it would make a great long-form project. The Joan Crawford film is excellent, but really quite different from the book in tone.

[Petey]

I was going to point out an interesting piece on Gawker I just read to Glenn, but upon finishing the piece and reading the endnote, I decided not to.

(Also, I just finished The Disappearance of Childhood by Neil Postman, guided by Jeet Heer's feature-length twitter on Tony Scott's disappearance of adulthood thinkpiece, and woah! Why did no one ever tell me this was an essential book? But, anyhoo, for the moment at least, I think the Postman book Explains Everything, including both Glenn's Gawker piece, as well as his "Cool Girl" post. In short, I highly recommend the Postman book. It get's a bit dated in the very final section, but otherwise, it's still incredibly relevant.)

[Petey]

VERY tangentially speaking of drug-infused motion pictures:

One of my favorite plot elements of The Knick is the introduction of cocaine as a topical sex aid.

Back in my younger days, I was a big aficionado of the technique. I stopped snorting cocaine within a couple of years after first trying it, for all the obvious reasons. But for a LONG time after quitting, I maintained a small stash of the drug purely for topical sex purposes. A bit of powder, dissolve in olive oil or the like, apply directly, and bliss.

Given the technique's garden of earthly delights, I've always been astounded to see its almost complete exclusion from motion pictures, as well as from popular culture in general.

Previous to The Knick, the only time I've ever seen it depicted in motion pictures was in the sleazy Zandalee (1991).

So, big props to Soderbergh for performing a highly beneficial public information campaign, all in the guise of a teevee series.