21st Century American

Paul Thomas Anderson ends his trilogy about the 21st century America with a Thomas Pynchon adaptation of Inherent Vice. The film might make less sense on its own, and it is the least successful film of the three, than it does as a part of a bigger picture. On a surface level all three are movies about 20th century America, but curiously enough each have similarities with topics currently plaguing the US.

Anderson never admitted that There Will Be Blood’s (2007) obsession with oil and selfishness had anything to do with Iraq, but then he followed it up with a post-war film about a troubled war veteran (The Master, 2012). He’s currently in the midst of making a promotional tour with the same kind of grin on his face denying any contact with Thomas Pynchon despite evidence to the contrary. (So, one could conclude that he is somewhat reluctant to reveal his filmmaking secrets.)

If There Will Be Blood is about a self-made man who’s unwilling to share anything with others (money, among other things), Inherent Vice is a film about inequality. While it’s suitable to the time that Joaquin Phoenix’s aloof war veteran was able to bounce back several times in The Master’s depiction of the 50s, it’s equally fitting that Phoenix’s Doc in Inherent Vice’s 1970 seems a lot more sceptical (and, yes, paranoid) of his prospects in the downward spiral he’s in. Phoenix’s character is able to escape — society, the occult, or whatever you think he wants to get away from (American life, perhaps) — in (or from) The Master, but dreaming up such an alternative for Doc seems intermittent at best.

Inherent Vice, is above all else, about the disillusionment of the 1960s dream, which is lyrically coined by the narrator (played stunningly well by the musician Joanna Newsom) towards the end:

“Was it possible, that at every gathering — concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back East, wherever — those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?”

Kent Jones, in probably the very first article about the film, describes the mood of the film quite aptly:

The “conspiracy” is not specific, but rather a vast and ominous aura called Capital, momentarily embodied by Martin Donovan’s Crocker Fenway in his contemptuous speech to Doc: “People like you lose all claim to respect the first time they pay anybody rent.”

That line, like most of the paranoia, is obviously played for laughs, or with a slight wink, but sympathies are more on Doc’s part than his antagonists. Like Anderson himself put it for the New York Times:

“Like anybody who was a part of that time, with all those ideas floating around, Doc feels he’s been ripped off,” Mr. Anderson said. “There’s a sadness underneath it all. And that’s certainly been a theme in Pynchon’s work, over and over again.”

“I wholeheartedly agree with the worldview of this book and it would be very hard to contribute five years of my life to it if I didn’t”

And what is the book’s worldview? In London Review of Books Thomas Jones titles his review of Inherent Vice as ‘Call It Capitalism’ and has this to say about the book’s most prevailing conspiracy:

there’s a vast and secretive organisation with tentacles that appear to be busily squirming in every dark corner that Doc pokes his nose into. It’s called the Golden Fang and, unlike Farben, it’s undocumented anywhere outside the fiction of Thomas Pynchon. When Doc warns someone that ‘this is the Golden Fang you’re about to rip off here, man,’ he gets the dismissive reply: ‘That’s according to your own delusional system.’ But ditch the silly name and the comic-book headquarters, and it’s hard not to agree that a system like the Golden Fang exists, only most people call it, more prosaically, capitalism.

In the New Yorker review of the film, Anthony Lane describes the period piece as a reflection of today:

By and large, though, Anderson doesn’t treat the era as a funny foreign land. He wants it to drift toward our own time, hinting — and this is true to Pynchon — that the befuddlement of ordinary folk has hardly changed while “the ancient forces of greed and fear” have, if anything, tightened their clutch upon our lives.

In interviews Anderson might downplay the critique of capitalism or greed, but I assume it would be even harder for him to finance his films if he was straightforward about all of the themes he’s interested in. Clearly he’s an actor’s director, and the human elements in each of his films are very important, but even without him admitting anything, most negative reviews of There Will Be Blood described Upton Sinclair (the film is based on his book Oil!) as a communist.

With that in mind, it’s surprising Anderson shared his concern for bigger themes for the New York Times. It might be closest he’ll ever get to discussing anything as grand as that:

“In the editing room, all the time, I was just trying to be a surrogate to his compassion and his concern for the American fate,” he said, using an earthy adjective for Mr. Pynchon’s attitude. “Has America really lived up to its potential?”