On Inherent Vice
“Inherent Vice” by Matt Lyon
Inherent Vice starts at the end. An era has closed in Southern California with death in the wake of the Tate-LaBianca murders, victory for the “Silent Majority” with Yorba Linda’s favorite son Richard Nixon in an intense power hold both nationally and abroad as the President of the United States, and how the hippie dream feels more like a put-on than an escape from the establishment. There is a hazy gray of what anything means or matters now at the beginning of the 1970s and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice captures the confusion that is dense, shaggy, and byzantine in presenting an era and setting in transition. It has been unfairly dogged as ‘Incoherent Vice’ or ‘Inherent Twice’ for how its ‘gumsandal’ neo-noir felt too impenetrable to certain critics and viewers despite the fact Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel is considerably scaled down, characters and non-California locations removed if not reworked through other characters and performances. Anderson's adaptation is, nevertheless, with The Master and Phantom Thread, part of a film trilogy about displacement, connectedness, interpersonal dynamics, identity, loss, and being haunted by ghosts. It is Anderson’s most elegiac film and one of the great American films of the twenty-first century.
Image Credit: Warner Brothers
The premise is simple. An ex-girlfriend named Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterson) returns without notice to her former flame’s Gordita Beach bachelor pad, private investigator Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), to tell him she thinks her rich older boyfriend has been kidnapped and institutionalized against his will. The book and film are married to the tropes and skeletons of hard boiled crime fiction but are filtered from the perspective of disenchantment related to counterculture sixties at a point in which the malaise of the 1970s has not fully set-in but is creeping up after the ‘death’ of the hippie dream has not only failed but become a pacified costume undercut by capitalist forces.
Image Credit: Warner Brothers
Inherent Vice could not exist without the history of Los Angeles. Far beyond the counter-cultural wave and backlash, there is the deeper history of shady land dealings, new age religious movements, radical political movements, gentrification that displaced minorities for big business, the corruption and terror of the Los Angeles Police Department, and the Hollywood Blacklist. One of the biggest ghosts in the film, although apparently alive off-screen, is the film actor Burke Stodger (Jack Kelly), clearly modeled after the real-life actor John Garfield, whose life was basically destroyed by the Blacklist for his ‘communist sympathies’. Doc Sportello soon finds out Stodger, whose associations are tied up in a mysterious schooner that may be tied to other disappearances and also maybe drug trafficking, returned to Hollywood with a much more anti-communist political bent, starring in Red Scare film propaganda to rehabilitate himself. Stodger ties back to other more prominent figures in the book and film strung up in the current counterculture with land developer Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts) and surf rock saxophonist drug addict Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson) each disappearing or, in Harlingen’s case, being pronounced dead when he is still very much alive and working as an informant. Harlingen is useful in his dirty blonde hippie aesthetics making him an easy facade to infiltrate far-left groups for the authorities while Wolfmann’s wealth- that he nearly walks away from in the form of wanting to make his land free for all- makes him too valuable of an asset for the authorities, business leaders, and the government. Sportello begins to see all of the men going through a cycle under the intense watchful eye of government authorities and an elastic shadow group, the Golden Fang. They are ‘cleaned up’ and remade again as useful idiots to the status quo to protect American hegemony and capitalism. Pynchon saw what happened to his generation with government-funded programs COINTELPRO being exposed for American intelligence officers infiltrating the far-left to become the perfect bogeyman and saw it as an outgrowth of the paranoia from the Cold War and Red Scare of earlier. There is that old axiom of, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.’ However, Pynchon and Anderson very much work more within the mindset of the late political writer Mark Fisher, “Those who can’t remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever.” Inherent Vice show where the counterculture meets with counterintelligence and how free-love meets with the free-market.
Image Credit: Warner Brothers
There is a discomforting murkiness in how aspects of hippie culture merged with not just the mainstream but the powers that be in Inherent Vice. But there is also the murkiness in the fact that in this comedown from the turbulent sixties that things are in a shade of gray as opposed to the cleaner, dialectical narrative of only seeing things in black and white. Doc Sportello himself is a private investigator who, while being called a dirty hippie repeatedly, is still very much a more lawful, morally upright citizen than most of the characters he comes across. His nemesis, LAPD flattop strongman Christian ‘Bigfoot’ Bjornsen (a brilliant Josh Brolin), checks off every box as a ‘dirty cop’ caricature, yet also has these aspirations as a working actor and seemingly gets to live out more of the whitewashed fantasy of being a cop on a show like Adam-12 when the facts are that the dirty underbelly of the LAPD took out his own partner. There is a certain futility in seemingly trying to break from these strict viewpoints and culture wars into a more nuanced probing of why the counterculture hates authority and why people are suspicious about their governments. But no matter what, it seems that a force like the Golden Fang and the American status quo will ultimately drag these people back through various systems, both capitalist and law enforcement, and place them ‘back into the main herd’. It is a good, profitable system, to the point that perhaps these forces also decide to get in on getting people hooked on hard drugs like heroin while also getting them clean. Pynchon and Anderson present this Golden Fang ‘vertical integration’ method as very much a predecessor to how the War on Drugs in the Reagan ‘80s turned American law enforcement into suppliers and dealers as much as the anti-drug fighters. To quote the film’s narrator Sortilege (Joanna Newsom), “... As long as American life was something to be escaped from, the cartel could always be sure of a bottomless pool of customers.”
Image Credit: Warner Brothers
Even amid these sobering notions that what we are drawn to may all be a disguise and that there is no escaping American life, there is something both intoxicating and deeply funny about Inherent Vice. Leslie Jones’ editing of Robert Elswit’s cinematography have these crossfades of memory that are druggy and dreamy in equal measure, more spot-on as a period piece and in turn, increasingly less common among contemporary filmmaking today. Mark Bridges’ costumes are immaculately of the period and the production design of David Crank is incredibly detailed and wide-ranging in its recreations. Pynchon’s high-minded stoner humor is still very much prevalent in this labyrinth of the absurd but Anderson brings it a certain heart with Doc and Shasta’s relationship that is more realized than in the book. In the beginning of the film, Doc jokes that Shasta has become unrecognizable arm candy whereas by the end she has been stripped down to her more natural essence of Country Joe and the Fish t-shirts. Yet, her dynamic with Doc has changed, each wanting to recapture a dynamic that has since passed after each tried out many different outfits and outlets of desire when they were apart. They only can remember a time on the beach, a time when they ran in the rain from the direction of a ouija board. They try to ‘play roles’ with each other but there is something quietly devastating in each feeling burned out by the directions of their lives not working out. There is still a trust that binds them but an uneasiness in the unknowns of the future. They have been on the periphery of this madness that has unfolded and in many ways, have been made to feel like they have not seen anything at all. They drive together surrounded by fog with a car headlight breaking through that fog and hitting Doc’s face. Shasta is giving a one-thousand yards stare unbothered by the light while anxious about what happens next, referencing Sortilege and her astrology as guidance. Doc keeps reacting to the light as he drives, the source unclear. Their own relationship status is up in the air but potentially at a place that can be reconciled to a degree. They have been changed by the world around them and have been resigned to finding out they cannot fully change the world. There will always be constant battles but the world has gone someplace else in that moment with Doc and Shasta. Can there be freedom? Can you drift from the unending stream of dreamers who will soon be broken and repaired into somebody else? Can you forget a time and a place that has been taken apart and rebuilt beyond recognition? Even amid the fog of California Highways and dope smoke, there is a clarity in Anderson’s Inherent Vice that mourns the ways in which a generation became lost and found as something else.
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