The first hints of what Inherent Vice was like came in July. Paul Thomas Anderson screened his new movie months early for select writers and industry people, and word got out about what they saw. Various impressions were compiled by Kevin Jagerrnauth over at The Playlist, including the following insider assessment: “It’s BONKERS—weird, weird, weird. It made me laugh out loud several times, but not in the ways you might expect. The humor is not so much Boogie Nights, as I think a lot of people are expecting. For reals, it tips into, like, Zucker Bros.-level gags and broad humor. But, obviously, mixed with his other sensibilities. Strange, beguiling tone.” (The Big Lebowski and The Long Goodbye were mentioned as well, which makes sense for an LA noir story about a stoner private detective made by an unabashed Robert Altman fan.)
When I reviewed Inherent Vice at Unseen Films during the New York Film Festival (NYFF), I mentioned seeing Anderson in conversation with festival director Kent Jones. Anderson showed clips of work that informed his approach to Inherent Vice. He opened with Police Squad!, the short-lived 1982 show by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker that would spawn The Naked Gun series. Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker were also responsible for the oddball cult comedy The Kentucky Fried Movie and the classic spoofs Airplane! and Top Secret!. Anderson said that he didn’t try to redo Police Squad! with Inherent Vice, but he found the spirit of the work both liberating and encouraging as he was beginning the project. It makes sense to look to madcap comedy when tackling a Thomas Pynchon novel—he can be complicated, but he’s often funny and always entertaining.
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A number of reviews of Inherent Vice have said the film is like a Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker movie.
But it’s really not.
There’s a difference between influence and likeness, and some of the comparisons with Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker are grossly overstated. Inherent Vice is its own animal that moves at its own pace and with its own rhythm, and not necessarily the rhythm I get when reading Pynchon.
Watch a clip from Airplane! or The Naked Gun and you’re getting a gag every 10 seconds, if not faster, and often more than one gag. Coming at all angles and different levels,the best Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker comedy is a meticulously crafted gag machine. One scene may be a reference to another film or a genre trope, and if the reference isn’t funny on its own, there’s usually wordplay and snappy verbal exchanges, and if that’s not enough, there’s usually a sight gag somewhere in the frame that winds up being funny; and if none of that was funny, it’s on to the next gag as if the previous one didn’t bomb. The zaniness is built on a blend of perfect timing and seemingly reckless velocity.
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Inherent Vice, by comparison, doesn’t have the gag-every-10-seconds aesthetic. The trailers, maybe, but not the film itself, with its long takes and whispery dialogue, and wigged-out vibe rather than outright zaniness. It’s a different kind of movie with a different kind of sensibility—paranoia rather than anarchy, and disillusionment rather than playfulness, which figures for a movie about the children of the 1960s realizing that they blew it and that the battle for the American soul was already lost.
To put it another way, if Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker is the comedy equivalent of Cliff Friend and Dave Franklin’s “The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down” and Raymond Scott’s “Powerhouse”, Anderson’s Inherent Vice is like Can’s “Vitamin C” and Neil Young’s “Journey Through the Past.” (Both are on the film’s soundtrack. More on Young a bit later.)
Police Squad! may have given Anderson the initial push, but Anderson is definitely the person pedaling the bike, which is why Inherent Vice has much more in common with The Master than The Naked Gun. While the fall of the counterculture is at the heart of Inherent Vice, Anderson uses the novel as a way to continue his exploration of relationships between men in opposition, sometimes diametrically. It was Daniel Plainview and Eli Sunday in There Will Be Blood, and it was Freddie Quell and Lancaster Dodd in The Master. Here it’s hippie-dippie Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) and straight-edged Bigfoot Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), and it’s also the hopey-dopey 1960s vs. the disillusionment of 1970s.
Part of the overstatement of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker influence is the parroting that people do when they hear an informed opinion. We’ve all at one time or another taken received perceptions as our own without actually processing them, and that may be at play here. Yet I think a larger part of the overstatement has to do with the need to find familiar footholds in a work that, like the insider mentioned at the beginning, is strange and beguiling in tone.
Anderson’s combined a number of influences in the film; other clips shown during the NYFF conversation included Alex Cox’s The Repo Man, Neil Young’s Journey Through the Past, Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, and the music video for “Oblivion” by Grimes directed by Emily Kai Bock. Different sources, different tones, and different ways for Anderson to get in the groove to make his movie, but it’s purposeful: even though Inherent Vice isn’t Pynchon’s most difficult novel, it takes footholds in the familiar to explore seemingly unfamiliar territory like the writing of Thomas Pynchon.
And maybe that’s why I get a different vibe when I read Pynchon than what Anderson gives in his adaptation (which is missing all of Pynchon’s fake surf rock songs, sadly). When I read Pynchon, I usually think of The Marx Brothers and their zany, breakneck pace, but filtered through a mind obsessed with grand conspiracies, forces of opposition, the unending conflict between the preterite (the common folk) and the elect (the elite), and how to negotiate this world with that sort of worldview. Anderson gets a lot of that too, but to adapt is to give one’s own take on something, and Anderson’s take is filtered through his footholds and his obsessions. If it takes familiar footholds to explore the seemingly unfamiliar, it might take personal obsessions to adapt and reinterpret the work of an obsessive.
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So rather than Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker comparisons, the real heart of Inherent Vice may be Young’s wayward 1972 film Journey Through the Past, and perhaps Young’s dark phase with “The Ditch Trilogy.” Anderson showed a clip from Journey in which Young drives his vintage car into the woods, gets out, smokes a joint with his girlfriend, eats some strawberries, mumbles something, and then they get back in and drive off. It’s a long single-take, a sunny day; it’s a simpler time, and sort of beautiful because it’s so worry-free and purpose-free. There’s a scene in Inherent Vice over which Young’s song “Journey Through the Past” plays, and it’s one of the most memorable and moving parts of the movie, because it’s about a simpler time, worry-free and purpose-forgotten, and there’s just that residual love of the missing past before the future came and screwed everything up. In the past, an open lot, a dream; in the present, the dream’s been replaced by the most vulgar kind of progress—a skyscraper.
While Pynchon’s fake songs aren’t present in Inherent Vice, Anderson brings two Neil Young songs that suit his sensibilities as a filmmaker, and that suit the film’s overall sensibility. I’ve written that the Anderson who made Magnolia probably would have made a more Pynchon-esque film than the Anderson who made The Master, and while I still think that (and that Magnolia feels more Pynchon-esque to me than Inherent Vice), I have to admit that the old Anderson isn’t the man in the present. And I should be groovy with that.
I want to rewatch Inherent Vice and listen to Neil Young’s output during the first half of the 1970s, because that may be one of the ideal footholds into this film, and while Young’s music may not be in the novel Inherent Vice, there are shared sensibilities in scope. The disillusionment with the 60s was there in 1972’s Harvest (“The Needle and the Damage Done” was written for Danny Whitten of Crazy Horse after he died of an overdose). From “The Ditch Trilogy,” the albums are titled Time Fades Away, On the Beach, and Tonight’s the Night. Those titles taken together seem to hint at the shape of Inherent Vice with regard to the movement of time, and while the Pynchon in my head plays differently, Anderson’s covering Pynchon in the style of Neil Young (among others), which is probably just the way it sounds in his head.