PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON’S ‘INHERENT VICE’ “What’s on your mind, Doc, beside the usual?”

 © 2015 by James Clark

       A likely response to Paul Thomas Anderson’s film, Inherent Vice (2014), a rendition of Thomas Pynchon’s novel, from 2009, under the same title, would be to maintain that the principals have gorged a bit on the peculiar impertinence of California—specifically, LA—style. The year is 1970 and although the whole population has not been concussed with billiard cues this is a shipment of players that gives outsiders the distinct idea that the locals have enlisted in a gigantic wave of franchising their presumably amazing stories.

But though Pynchon is a resolved and deft student of entropy, his Inherent Vice is far more than that. And Anderson’s film copiously demonstrates that he and his vehicle have bought into that more comprehensive and vastly more difficult to comprehend motive. There are features of Pynchon’s text broaching subtleties and sophistications exponentially transcending the addled dialogue of those acting out. (For example: “‘You need to find true love, Doc.’ Actually, he thought, I’ll settle for finding my way through this. His fingers, with a mind of their own, began to creep toward the plastic hedge. Maybe if he searched through it long enough, late enough into the night, he’d find something that might help—some tiny forgotten scrap of his life he didn’t even know was missing, something that would make all the difference now.”)  Anderson resorts to a voice-over in the person of Sortilege, a woman friend of the protagonist, Larry Sportello (whom everyone addresses as Doc, due to his famously finagling the partners of a medical clinic to rent out an office for his private investigation business [but perhaps also due to his willingness to provide solace]); but her discursive energies, heavily laced with astrological rubrics, do not coincide with those of Pynchon. So it is that our starter’s (namely Pynchon’s) arsenal of other pitches must carry much of the thematic load here. That includes inventively exuberant proper and surnames and a perfect wave momentousness as to veins of true gold in the repository of art predating the (by some) supposed renaissance of those self-beatified diggers of the 1960s.  

Anderson’s shipwrecked vehicle stays afloat by virtue of his understanding of Pynchon’s key pitch, his change-up, which only seems to be a juicy fastball right over the Hollywood plate. Thus both artists are on the same page of deceptiveness about the self-satisfied sybarites hogging the spotlight. One of my favorite phantom pitches in all this is the way the name, “Harlingen,” nibbles the plate. In the course of stirring up a hornet’s nest while seeing fit to help an old flame and her network of limited idealists, Doc is moved to assist a woman (Hope Harlingen) in her hopes to learn the whereabouts of her long-lost musician husband, Coy. Harlingen (Texas) would mean nothing to those unaware of its being the last home, the place of death and site of the unmarked resting place of rock and roll pioneer/rebel, Bill Haley. And while we’re at it, let’s zoom in on something else, pertaining to the by now almost meaningless term, “rebel.” (Anderson’s film is full of self-imagined, and therewith almost completely ludicrous, claimants. [A cop we’ll come to see quite a bit of relishes his perpetual jag of “civil rights violations.”]) Haley, though far from the first rhythm and blues performer, was, by reason of the add-on of country-western instincts and access to white, mainstream markets, the linchpin of ending the reign of generations-long musical entertainment related to operetta, tin-pan-alley and jazz. It was in view of his early discs in that contrarian mode that the term rock and roll came to light. Not for him the showy and corporate niceathon of (catastrophic) Altamont. This is a figure important to Pynchon and Anderson not for musical excellence but for pushing the envelope of epochal respectability and carrying, within his alcoholic lifetime, embers of a hope he would never dream of defining.

There is another, in most respects even more obscure revival than that of Haley, sending out a nearly indiscernible backbeat to the bemusing investigations of Doc. It, too, means to alert the alert about the time and place on view (and its 21^st century residues) as far from all we have to work with. There is a venerable legacy, in both literature and film, of the adventures of Los Angeles private detectives. The chic, poised and witty tales of Raymond Chandler particularly maintain a long-standing prominence. But Doc’s walk on the wild side is imbued with such a stiff shot of ugly stupidities that we have to look elsewhere for the model bearing down upon his vicissitudes. It is foreshadowed, first of all, by his own bemusing name. There is a doctor in LA pulp fiction lore whereby the name of Doc’s first-broached caseload here (as to his troubled former squeeze), a besieged real-estate tycoon, named Mickey Wolfmann, becomes a compass in the form of Mickey Spillane, an exponent of hard-boiled, brainless malice in murder mystery entertainment. His East Coast story, Kiss Me Deadly (1952), was, in 1955 (the moment of Haley and his Comets) shifted to LA by filmmaker, Robert Aldrich vitally sustained by screenwriter, A.I. Bezzerides, like Pynchon an obsessive about the toil meted out by electrodynamics as audaciously perceived to be in a partnership with human sensibility, human consciousness. Wolfmann has a sexually implicated associate, Shasta, a name redolent of ruthlessness and an incisive match for Spillane’s Lily. Shasta is the old flame mentioned above, asking for Doc’s assistance, just as Lily pictured herself as in desperate straits to private eye, Mike Hammer. Like Mike, Doc is not in the good graces of the LAPD. Like Mike, with his Girl Friday, Velda, Doc has Sortilege, a sweet witch, charmer and spellbinder of sorts, though her Valley Girl vocal register, very unlike the candidly sensible Velda, raises doubts about her handling post-adolescent tasks. Like Mike, Doc, in the course of going after the fabulous wealth and power entailed in Wolfmann (or, to Lily, Soberin, Dr. Soberin), gets kicked around quite a bit and, rather surprisingly, does some kicking of his own. Like Mike, Doc crashes a pool party pertaining to the object of his investigations. And, in the course of another daring reconnoitre (our present protagonist using disguises instead of brazen transparency), at a clinic for recovering addicts (Mike’s other suppliant, Christina, being an escapee from a similar facility), Doc is introduced to the director’s assistant, Dr. Lily Hammer.

Before proceeding to the highlights reel whereby the pitching staff leaves us silently in awe of not only the event per se, in its gravitas-instilling performance, but the playlist of the closing credits, we should provide some specificity as to the rather disconcerting grotesqueness of gestures which tend to strain the processes of credibility, putting us on notice to get a grip on what could mitigate its potboiler indiscretions. For instance, Doc’s first sortie into the murky ways of Mickey soon finds him knocked unconscious and coming to, in a dusty construction zone, next to real-estate-Midas Wolfmann’s dead bodyguard. The camera draws back, to reveal dozens of gun-toting police and vehicles surrounding what would be overkill for a jihadist event. This Saturday-morning cartoon facsimile is driven by a nemesis of Doc’s, one Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, a homicide department biggie and apparent splenetic moron. Having arranged to put Doc into a murder rap, which the latter’s lawyer, Sauncho Smilex (a loyal and skilled assistant to the quixotic protagonist), easily defuses, he puts out there, for all to see, a wild-beast predatory rabidity to rack up advantages and thereby capture the spotlight and some monetary increase. He reminds Doc that, more than once the LA Times has referred to him as a “renaissance detective…” This narrative frequently alludes to the chillingly drifting Manson gang and their startling appetites; but more germane to our settling the warp and weft here as something recognizably of this planet would be the OJ case and its procession of self-styled patricians. Bigfoot and his barbarian colleagues demonstrate, within the risky proceedings of Doc’s palpably tentative burrowing toward a moment of justice, how easily a cadre of high-minded violence can slip into fascistic violence, not only fabricating fall-guys for sadistic fun and loutish profit but venturing into alliances with organized crime and right-wing politics. It may be so that Pynchon’s absurdist tale is more metaphor than substance; but he and Anderson subject their pot-braced and yet still true-blue investigator to a regime both purblind and nostalgic the essential hostility of which would be very hard to refute. Thus the film installs a public barrier of cretinous appetite along with threads of private breadth and depth. The on-again/off-again affection between Doc and Shasta constitutes a dramatically fascinating bridge between the two worlds. Actors Joaquin Phoenix and Katherine Waterston give performances consisting of remarkably strong proof against consigning the action to simplism. It is to them that most of the carefully drawn phantom motifs (Haley and Hammer) come into play. As such their textural display will absorb much of the remainder of this appreciation.

That Doc and Bigfoot are old friends, however peculiar, has been nearly concealed by the latter’s storm sewer of vicious hysteria. Bringing upon himself that Manson-level interference, due to unwittingly taking on, by way of Mickey’s adversaries, a constellation of crime including the only too versatile renaissance detective’s collusion with the same organized destruction sidetracking a momentarily socialist (along lines of Dr. Soberin; but here the bomb is free housing) giveaway, we have a markedly tentative Doc, mellowed by both reflective and chemical factors, having to face down a monster whom he knows to be much less monstrous than he at first appears. (Along the way, Christian’s wife interrupts a phone update between them, roars at Doc for sending her husband into expensive psychiatric treatment and orders her big guy to their bedroom for his once-a-week marital duties. Also along the way the Renaissance man alludes to having served time in “Folsom” [prison].) When the dust (sort of) settles, Bigfoot pays a visit to Doc’s beach house (still cartoonishly kicking down the door), shows some distress that the resident hasn’t kept in touch, and gobbles down a large salad of dried marijuana which Doc had been more moderately availing himself of. A bewildered and anxious Doc tells him, “Be careful, Brother…” To which the professional hippie-hunter replies with a snarl, “I’m not your brother.” As he stomps across the wrecked door, on the way out, Doc quietly retorts, “But you could use a keeper…” This moment of lead-pipe impasse and staying the course is quintessential Doc. Inherent Vice boils down to a long simmer of his perseverance, however prone to lapses, in face of cosmic disappointment.

Moments before he kills him, Doc reconnects with someone who knew him as a kid, now doing assassinations for the LAPD (including the assassination of Bigfoot’s former teammate who was not agreeable about the chicanery); the old guy recalls that he thought Larry was cut out to be a priest. Hold on to that impression, as we zoom in on the dingy, cell-like, inner sanctum of Doc’s major occupation, smoking pot and trying to make sense of the general public. The first scene, where Shasta puts him to work, is a rich study of connection about a small thing (Mickey) and disconnection about everything else. Sortilege, showing the merest trace of resentment, sets the scene, Shasta coming along the alley and up the back stairs (like an alley cat), no more faded Country Joe T-shirt and sandals, but carriage trade clothes and slick coiffure, “looking just like she swore she would never look…” Shasta’s materializing like this, giving him a rather embarrassed but not shy smile, causes him some confusion within a disposition of solitary thoughts (in contrast to the man of action demeanor of Mike Hammer; Larry’s moniker, Sportello, however, does include him as a player). “That you, Shasta?” he proceeds, at barely more than a whisper. You couldn’t say he looked glad to see her, but you could say he was trying to look glad to see her. In view of her new look, he’s not slow to tell her he now has an office, “No it’s the whole package, I guess…” (a phrase perhaps deriving from the moments of his undivided attention). She plays the feminine hand, suggesting it would be nice to broach this occasion as if it were a “secret rendezvous.” By the time she’s name-dropping and claiming to be a central player (“She’s [Wolfmann’s wife’s] seeing someone, too [shades of Velda and Mike’s divorce racket]. They think I’m the one who can reach him when he’s vulnerable… I think they want to put him into an institution…”), Doc is snidely referring to “…a gentleman of the straight persuasion,” in addition to, “Are you still trying to find out what’s right or wrong, Shasta?” But though there is painful malaise in every second of this dialogue, the pain includes their sense, however confused, of what might have been. Sortilege keeps us on track here, with her recognition (by way of a pizza party they both show up for, soon after Shasta leaves), “Now she was laying some new heavy cosmetic face ingredients…” Though Doc seals the deal with rather remote aphoristic clichés, “Thinking comes later… See what we can see…” he tells her she can stay overnight if she wants. Her concern tends to be more businesslike: “Don’t let me down, Doc… No, you’re always true… [And the kicker, as she [now so Lily-like] rolls away in a big black [Dr. Soberin-like] convertible, “Watch your toes…” This leaves Doc considerably more troubled than before the visit, his dark-ringed eyes quite lost as he stands on the sidewalk.

Soon he’s approached by another woman with worries about her man, namely, Hope Harlingen. Her demeanor is neither embarrassed nor shy—and that’s the tonal point of her coming forth amidst the intensities of Shasta’s incursions. “Worries” may not be the right coverage of her state of mind. She has far more to say about the relationship’s past than any cogent outlook toward its future. In a rather well-rehearsed monologue she converts Doc’s never having heard of her husband’s musical career to a little chastisement that he and his band, the Boards, were huge in the surfer kingdom. Then she recounts—Doc, all the while, trying not to be disconcerted—how she became a fixture in that pantheon, rushing into the bathroom of a bar, inducing vomit by sticking a finger down her throat to discharge the hippo-level of narcotics, and then also shitting all over the floor while her special-angel-to-be comes by and immediately has a hard-on. In rounding out her patented introduction by showing off her teeth implants, she inadvertently sets in relief the almost pristine comportment of the listener, who was impelled to come running on hearing that Hope’s husband had been a “close friend of a friend of yours, Shasta…” Hope brags about her new career as a drug counsellor (inducing young people to consider sensible drug use) and shows off her and Coy’s little girl. Maintaining the hope that Coy, whose body was never found, is in fact alive, she presents for Doc a piece of work but one that he, now clearly capable of self-effacement without any snideness, can’t abandon. Doc does, after a twisting trail, actually find and free Coy (from lifelong indenture to a fascist pressure group linked to a cartel of Indo-Chinese heroin smugglers, the Golden Fang [a form of Bezzerides’ Pandora’s Box] sustaining a tax-shelter consortium. He drives the new free man over to Hope’s address and a sort of happy reunion ensues. While Doc sits alone in his car at the curb, he glances at the homecoming and then he gazes toward the floor listening unsmilingly to the sort of triumph of love. (In the synopsis of Shasta’s first crashing Doc’s sanctuary, Sortilege declares, “Love, a term way too overused these days…”) Then flamboyant Hope issues forth what probably was an expression of another tricky word, “joy.” Unfortunately its coarseness acts as a reminder of Shasta. (Haley’s widow opted for an unmarked grave to preclude a graveyard circus like that accorded Jim Morrison at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.)

Just before the involvement with the Harlingens, Doc recalls the fraying of the joys of life with significantly inert Shasta. He retrieves memories of the drift as if he were standing in the rain. “Does it ever end?” Sortilege declaims. “Of course it does.” (With an aura of slim pickings in affection picking up the pace, let’s do a quick run-through of how the ways of Doc have been instilled with what it takes to survive not only LA but planet earth. Coy’s limp-wristed fatalism throughout would touch upon Haley’s kiss-curl and debilitation from alcohol; Doc’s legacy from Haley would pertain to how far he’s strayed from easy listening. If we think Big Lebowski in the alliance of Doc and Bigfoot, we have to finish the thought by seeing our protagonist as, while cherishing friendship [having, in fact an extensive network of business partners far more real than Bigfoot], being a lone wolf in most respects. Though very prone to veer into stupidities—like snorting cocaine with a dentist/ Golden Fang shareholder and making coarse noises like those of Hope [whose photo of her infant being temporarily deformed by her mother’s drug background elicits from him a similarly adolescent noise]—he has a track record of quickly bouncing back to cogent poise, as for instance during a witless car ride with that dentist and others, unlike him, in a dither when stopped by a traffic cop. Interviewing the sister of the thug he was briefly arrested for killing, he has accessed an anaesthetic mask from a medic willing to overlook his foibles and enjoy his soundness; and, vaguely like Frank in Blue Velvet, Doc becomes rather unstable. But the simplistic inhaler in David Lynch’s movie only serves an appreciation of our protagonist’s complexity. On her mentioning what an item the dead guy and Shasta were, Doc is saddened and the bearer of those tidings gives him a pep talk he really doesn’t need. “You can only cruise the boulevards of regret so far and then you’ve got to get back up onto the freeway again.”) Shasta soon goes missing and Doc’s anxiety on that score is increased by hearing about the roster of crime figures beyond Mickey she has been sleeping with. Then he receives her postcard from the South Seas, and her multiple invitations: “I wish you could see the waves… I miss those days, with that Ouija board… It wasn’t supposed to happen like this…” In the abyss of his reverie kindled by that unfathomable communication, there is Sortilege introducing them to such magic as far as it goes (here ironically going to the point of the phone number of a drug dealer), their hopefully racing, in a downpour along sidewalks of a strip-mall heaven, in search of the treasure that is not there, and their gleeful and gentle caressing in a grotty doorway. All the while, the Canadian preacher that was Neil Young lays on some suburban profundity that impacts on Doc’s wound, an event transmitting to us by his road-kill visage: “When the winter rains come pouring down/ On that new home of mine,/ Will you think of me and wonder if I’m fine?/ Will your restless heart come back to mine/ On a journey through the past?/ Will I still be in your eyes and on your mind?” Alone in a darkened place,   Doc gives a cinematic, entirely body language indication that he has outgrown the song. Clichéd, luscious postcards and saccharine ditties are, for a few minutes anyway, consigned to an unsatisfactory past, supplanted by an unsatisfactory present. (His 1960s decorative cowboy attire [recalling the Roy Rogers draft swirling around Lebowski’s Dude)  also weighs rather heavily, especially in light of Mike Hammer on the trail of Something Big being dressed for an explosive new and seeming impossible regime, calling for resolutely adult and urbane ways.

Shasta does eventually somehow extricate herself from the Golden Fang’s tall ship and smuggling device (also called the Golden Fang) and once again materializes through the murkiness of Doc’s zone of abiding. She misrepresents her whereabouts (“… away on family stuff… up North [perhaps as far north as Neil Young’s bailiwick], Doc already having been informed by Sauncho that she sailed to Hawaii. (On the other hand, “family stuff” does cover organized crime.) She shows a bit of candor in remarking, first of all, that the advertised romance with Mickey is “all over” (actually Mickey himself being all over as a free agent, his wife having plunked him into Lily Hammer’s place of business to wean him away from hippie madness). Then she goes on to spill quite a bit more: she had seen Mickey as a ticket to do lunches, liquid lunches, in Beverley Hills; she discovered that the real estate powerhouse was “so powerful… not what you would call a considerate lover [in fact using her as an all-purpose hostess]… He could make you feel invisible…” Her adding, “Nice to feel invisible…” could, perhaps, speak to the traces of cogency wafting around this remastering of the cool.

This conversation is filmed with Shasta nostalgically nude (her having first of all gone to the refrigerator for a couple of beers, and then, Doc preoccupied with the difference between his recent depth of feeling for her and the in fact shallow creature he had expended so much hope upon, arranged herself for a successful rebound). She had prefaced the matter of being invisible with a coy gambit she would have used with the caseload at Mickey’s. “What kind of girl do you need, Doc? Maybe [she tweaking a cute nipple] like one of those Manson chicks… During this spate of self-dramatization and self-pity she slowly grinds one of her heels into his leg. The residue of his examining the lei of tiny shells she was wearing, declaring knowingly, “you didn’t get this up North,” only to have her smugly admit, “I went on a boat ride…” becomes an explosion of anger, according with his resemblance to Manson. She had come to a position, on his leather settee, where she was lying prone, her lighted face in the foreground, Doc sprawled back in dark shadows. He lunges upward and slaps her ass with full force, again and again. The surprise and pain on her face becomes intensified when he fucks her savagely from behind. Shasta’s having been used this way (again) registers on her face as a kind of life sentence, the despair of which transforms to a sad little smile. She tells him, “This doesn’t mean we’re back together.”

Next morning they stroll smilingly along the beach, a long valued (and here valueless) prelude to a meaningful relationship. (Mike and Velda, far from smiling in face of an atomic disaster about to kill them on the shore, haunt this scene.) Doc hunkers down to saving Hope and Coy’s marriage, with scant rewards. His rather precious emphasis that a child without a father “don’t sit well with me” lacks perspective.  This episode involves a syndicate lawyer’s club, the Portola, in contradistinction to Mike’s hangout, the Pigalle, which does somewhat live up to its portal motif inasmuch as Doc threatens to kill the effete snob (“You lost all claim to respect from the first time you paid rent”) if he screws up with his interest in the Harlingens. Sortilege arranges for the lovers not back together to get together for a drive together, at least. Shasta seems intent on looking on the bright side, praising Sortilege (“She sees things, Doc”). His eyes can’t be sanguine about what he sees. As they drive on, tension increases. They share a tender kiss. He tells her, “That doesn’t mean we’re back together.” Her smile is faintly miserable. The set of his face, with a California sunbeam targeting his forehead, seems to have (as Shasta’s first split was described) “other fish to fry.” It also implies that he’s at a bit of a loss as to where to look. Doc’s malaise-filled drive with Shasta is sustained in all its miasma and punch-drunk perdurance by the song for the ending credits, “Any Day Now.” “Any day now I will hear you say/ Good-bye my love/ And you’ll be on your way. / Then my wild beautiful bird/ You will have flown/ Any day now/ I’ll be alone…” That last note of solitude revisits the isolation (despite allies) written all over Doc’s sleuthing. The second choice from the playlist for those credits alludes to Coy’s sax work (far, it should be noted, from the surfer genre), reminiscent of the sax interval of Bill Haley’s “Rock around the Clock.” A delightful denouement, don’t you think?