Pynchon meets PTA productions

I was never a fan of Thomas Pynchon but I did have a good day with him at the beach in Santa Monica in the late Eighties, when I still read books. I'd found it on the caroussel rack of a used book store, when they still had those, and back then I had the feeling that any book I found randomly that shined on me for a moment I was meant to read, and I tried not to use too much intellect when this happened (as if I have much intellect!). I'd heard of Pynchon from working at Book Soup when "Vineland" came out and it was the book du jour, but it didn't interest me in the least. I knew he was one of those hard to read writers that people boasted about reading more than they actually read, and his most challenging work was "Gravity's Rainbow," a tome that was compared to Joyce's "Ulysses," the other great tome of the 20th century up to that point, but I never met anyone who read it outside of academia, nor did I crack it. I took "The Crying of Lot 49" to the beach on a weekday and there was no one there and I really felt like I'd never like Pynchon more. I still remember walking down the stairs to the big empty beach, and sitting on the sand for hours leafing through the small paperback, and thinking that's all I had to do with my life. I really clicked with the L.S.D. tinged Sixties prose that reminded me of Thomas Wolfe's "Electric Kool Aid Acid Test," yet Pynchon was writing about a new kind of electric suburban housewife, who wouldn't have been 'on the bus,' and in the words of the Merry Pranksters from "Kool Aid" 'you were either on the bus, or 'off the bus.' Pynchon may have been that middle ground Sixties figure who was neither 'on the bus,' or 'off the bus' but watching it roll by out his modern appliance kitchen window and marveling that the bus existed like his heroine Oedipa Mass. I never finished "The Crying of Lot 49" nor do I remember really trying to, or thinking I had to. To me, it was more like a painting that I'd been allowed to glimpse for a couple of idle hours, and I loved the photographs of California, even though there were no photographs in "Crying." It was like watching a hyper exaggerated version of "The Partridge Family," or "The Brady Bunch," from a Gen X perspective.

I saw "Inherent Vice" the other night and I was reminded of all the reasons I was never interested in reading Pynchon. The most I got from the Paul Thomas Anderson's film was that everyone in the Sixties counterculture spoke in an unintelligible rap that really didn't lend itself well to literature, let alone conversation. It was almost as if Pynchon, or Anderson, got this because at one point Josh Brolin, a cop who also talks in Sixties Nixonian jargon, says "I hope this report is not another of those unabridged hippie monologues that have no beginning or end," or so I paraphrase, and I couldn't help but think Pynchon via Anderson was poking fun at himself, because "Inherent Vice" made no sense, nor was it particularly entertaining. Watching it, I thought of Pynchon more than Anderson, for some reason, because it wasn't really a Paul Thomas Anderson movie in the least, or not how I think of the great director/writer/visionary of such masterpieces as "Boogie Nights," and "Magnolia." I couldn't really blame Pynchon for writing like he was in the Sixties, because he was in the Sixties, though even this is up for debate because he's one of those writers who has spent his life in hiding. (In a case of art imitating life, many believed in the Nineties that there was no Thomas Pynchon and he may have been J.D. Salinger, or an alien because he was never photographed, or hadn't been for a long time, and no one knew where he lived, unlike Salinger who had been spotted in New Hampshire). But Pynchon probably existed in real time and I suppose it was courageous that he tried to make literature of a hippie rap that tore the language to shreds with new words that hadn't stood the test of time, but it may mean that Pynchon won't stand the test of time, or maybe he will, but if he does it will be as a speicific example of what L.S.D. did to the english language, and I don't think many consider it a very successful experiment circa 2015. I can't blame the movie "Inherent Vice" on Pynchon since I doubt he had much to do with it, and yet I felt like I was watching a strangely faithful adaptation.

Artistically, I'm really not sure why Paul Thomas Anderson made this movie except that he's obsessed with making art of California. In a way, it's almost a prelude to "Boogie Nights," one of his best films, that segues from the Seventies to the Eighties in broad sweeping strokes. Even Anderson's recent biopics ("There Will be Blood," and "The Master") are insights into giant figures in the world of business and spirituality who made their mark in California, so this is his terrain. I understand that Paul Thomas Anderson was perhaps trying to understand California through Pynchon, but the movie was a mess on so many levels it's really hard to know where to begin. For starters, it's just not funny and it was a comedy/drama, though not a dramedy, but a comedy/drama in the great tradition of Robert Altman, Anderson's hero, with each scene intended to slip between profound reflection and absurd humor like a knife cutting through air. I'll admit that "Inherent Vice" is so verbally dense that it could take repeated viewings to even begin to understand what the characters are saying to each other, so I guess it's interesting on this level, but it's not visually dense and this may be my biggest critique. There's almost no visual poetry to the movie at all, save a shot or two, and I thought this was its greatest failure, aside from it making no sense, since Pynchon doesn't always make much sense, or more kindly put writes challenging prose. Almost every scene in "Vice" is a close cropped dialogue between 'Doc' (Joaquin Phoenix) and one of the many characters who drift in and out of the neverending script. If I were a professional movie reviewer I would've written down how many close ups Anderson did of Phoenix talking to either Brolin, Witherspoon, Del Toro, or many others, and these scenes had the creativity of watching a "Charlie's Angels" episode. There was almost no rhythm or movement to the camera at all, and coming from a director so blessed with visual poetry I found this odd. Sure, he captured a sort of grimy early Seventies wasted feeling that was the opposite of the clean hyper futurized vision of "The Crying of Lot 49," when the Sixties were ending, but these snapshots were few and far between.

"Inherent Vice" is being compared to Altman's great "The Long Goodbye," but it's not a fair comparison. Sure, Doc is a P.I. like Elliot Gould playing Marlowe, but he's not a man out of step with his times, but rather one right in it, or trying to carry on his times to a new age. The name 'Doc' is an obvious literary reference to 'Doc' in "Cannery Row," and the character leads a similar life. He lives by the ocean like 'Doc' in Cannery Row, but he's neither a romantic character, or an anti romantic character, and he mostly mumbles through the movie so that we can only understand a word or two of every sentence, and this becomes very frustrating considering how much dialogue there is. To be fair, Altman's "The Long Goodbye" really moves in classic three act fashion, and is one of his more coherent movies, though I love them all, but it really does set up a murder mystery that Marlowe really tries to solve in drugged out Seventies L.A., but the movie was shot in real time, so Altman wasn't homaging Seventies L.A., he was living it through a classic hard-boiled detective born too late and it's very funny, deep, and endless. "Inherent Vice" is a reimagining of the Sixties but has nothing to do with the present, and made me wonder how well the characters understood the past. I'll admit Paul Thomas Anderson via Pynchon may have nailed something of the era, but the movie mostly made me glad I didn't live through the Sixties and could sometimes speak in the English language.