Inherent Vice (2014) is one of the greatest American films of the last 25 years. There’s perhaps only a handful of works since As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000) that can easily fit in my mind into the Canon, and Inherent Vice is the one I have the least doubts about. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the film when I first saw it at a Megaplex back home during winter break during my freshman year of college. I wasn’t sure what to make of The Master (2012) a couple of years earlier, either. Yet they both grew into favorites. That’s not to say Inherent Vice is a “perfect” movie, it’s better than that—the contradictions between its authors make it more interesting.
There’s an impossibility to Inherent Vice as an adaptation: the film is loyal to the novel, and of a completely different project. Thomas Pynchon’s oeuvre attracts fanatics, not just because he’s one of the great American postmodern novelists, but because of his conspiratorial explications. Many speculate that Pynchon’s early days and brief navy career could’ve had the bright young thinker brushing shoulders with Allan Dulles’ burgeoning CIA, giving the author unique insight into the elephant of intelligence that was built to maintain American, capitalist hegemony in the Cold War.
I’m a novice Pynchonian—I’ve only read V., The Crying of Lot 49, Inherent Vice, and attempted Gravity’s Rainbow once when I was 18 or 19 and tried to read all of the “challenging” books I could. However, the mechanisms of his conspiracies are clear from those three, with how their narratives are made up of a revealing of signs and their hermeneutics, not unlike a Nabokovian puzzle box. What’s pieced together isn’t just a conspiracy, but The Conspiracy, where the movement of the clockwork is briefly glimpsed through its face. It's the tunnels beneath the earth, it's the secret postal service, it’s the ouroboros of drug rings and the American security apparatus.
This still exists in the text of Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation, but it’s rendered more opaque. Drawing less from thriller and mystery conventions and instead reaching for the beautiful opacity of The Big Sleep (1946) (William Faulkner, while adapting the screenplay, famously called Raymond Chandler having to ask who the killer in the book was) and The Long Goodbye (1973). Inherent Vice, as rendered by Anderson, isn’t so much for following the broad narrative as it’s about living in its moments. It makes Inherent Vice something of an actor’s movie, with career-best leads from Joaquin Phoenix and Josh Brolin’s hostile yet oddly loving hippie-stoner P.I. vs. flat-top conservative cop dynamic, as well as scene-stealing minor roles from Benicio del Toro, Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, Maya Rudolf, Michael Kenneth Williams, Jena Malone, Martin Donovan, Eric Roberts, Serena Scott Thomas, Sasha Pieterse, Katherine Waterston, and with Martin Short and Hong Chau giving two of the best supporting performances from any movie.
Doc Sportello (Phoenix) navigates a conspiracy he’s too stoned to understand, and Anderson’s ellipses and enjambments pull the viewers along in this hazy mindset. It would be wrong to watch Inherent Vice and try to piece it all together while it's still happening, it’s about being along for the ride. It gets to the point that when he comes to confront who seems to be the final piece of the puzzle, Adrian Prussia (Peter McRobbie), Doc doesn’t even remember what he was going to ask him. Nor does the audience, but we felt like we did. It’s a trick that works again and again with every rewatch—gone is my frustration of not knowing what’s going on, and what’s left is the beauty of the moment, the panging sadness of memories, the loneliness of lives long gone.
The camera pulling out of Doc’s driver-side window near the end of the film as Coy (Wilson) runs into the background and out of focus to return to his wife and kids, I’m reminded, as I so often am, of The Searchers (1956), where Wayne grabs his arm like Harry Carey and wanders off between the winds while all the others get to go into the house. It’s not the foundational and racist violence of Ethan Edwards that keeps Doc out of the symbolic house, though, but the ambivalent knowledge of what the world Coy is returning to actually is: the family stands both an essential human experience and also the pillar by which the grotesque American system is willing to ruin so many other lives for. It’s no coincidence—like Ethan and Scar sharing piercing blue eyes—that Coy’s family and the Golden Fang handlers that arrive in a station wagon to whisk the heroin out of the plot are both blond-haired and Anglo. The personal salvation for Coy, to get out of the active participation of the conspiracy, is to recede back into day-to-day white picket fenced life, as if the dream of the American family is a pension for working as a government informant dismantling any and all groups that so much as consider an alternative.
Anderson’s underlying interest in Inherent Vice, as it was with There Will Be Blood (2007) and The Master (2012) before is the development of his beloved Southern California. The three make an unofficial trilogy look at the state’s founding myth of extraction (oil, in this case), to the manifestation of its runaway psyche (as seen through a Scientology parallel), and finally development and redevelopment of Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley at a time when the counterculture was flowering in the historically conservative stronghold. To Pynchon, the redevelopment of Los Angeles is emblematic of the larger system secretly governing America. Pynchon’s novel’s about the displacement of people from social groups, from political ideals, of whole neighborhoods picked up and dropped down by a land developer, who’s caught in the same web as everyone else. Displacement’s the ultimate American condition: whether that’s the displaced fleeing from Britain to the colonies, the displacing of the indigenous peoples of the continent, the displacement of neighborhoods at home for highways, or the displacement of Palestinians abroad for a puppet state—displacement has and always will be the foundation of the American project. And as an active action, one which is done by one to another, it’s a death drive. Of course, to displace a forest is to destroy it entirely.
When I watch Anderson’s movie, however, I feel something more local, more personal coming off the screen. It’s all still there, but the act of turning Pynchon’s words into Joanna Newsom narration has us breezing contemplations that get us to take pause when looking at words on the page. Instead the words move by at 24 frames a second, stuck moving in the unyielding cruelty of time. That’s where Anderson can find the best moments, though, in the brief instances that linger longer than the time they’re allotted. When Shasta Fay (Waterston) sends Doc a postcard about the time they got stuck in the rain following a dope lead, memory overcomes Sportello and we’re suddenly living many summers ago with them as they run barefoot down the concrete and hide from the storm under the cover of a storefront as night sweeps in. Like so much of the film, the sequence is over before we had time to linger, but it sticks and comes back as if it was a memory of our own. Anderson’s eye is looking for how we go on living despite it all.