The Case of the Missing Texture: Thoughts on Inherent Vice (2009) and Inherent Vice (2014)
Content warning, also, for some brief NSFW discussion.
The images used in this piece come from the trailer linked further in.
I’m pretty conscious of the fact that most of the writing on this blog is about movies, with several posts about video games and only one (maybe one and a half) that cover television series. It was never my intention to focus so much on film, especially since, despite all the words I’ve written about the medium at this point, I’m not actually all that well-versed when it comes to the language, and there’s a certain awkwardness to any attempt to discuss some of the more technical aspects of these works. I’m more comfortable with books, ironically, but books are a lot harder to write about. There’s so much more to keep track of in terms of the sheer volume of specific detail in a very dense format that takes a lot longer to parse. Films, on the other hand, are more obvious and are shorter. A book-focused piece that I would consider satisfactory could take a lot more time and effort than I have for what is essentially a side project for me. In this specific case, though, I felt that it just might be doable to look at a book that has a film adaptation because the comparison and contrast approach means that the book alone does not have to be put under the microscope quite so thoroughly. That was what I thought back in February, at any rate, and yet, now, here’s the result: a real sprawler appropriate for the subject matter.
Thomas Pynchon, author of the original Inherent Vice, is a writer that I consider a big influence on my own creative work, though when I look back at what (and how) I was writing prior to reading any of Pynchon’s novels, it may be less a case of influence than of confirmation. Stylistically, tonally, in terms of subject matter—There were certain Pynchon-like things in young Monty’s work already (or vice versa, technically). The book Inherent Vice was a gift from the professor that introduced me to Pynchon and that I’d tried to read a few times over the years but never managed to actually sit down and finish. At its most basic conceptual level, it’s a detective story in the “A beautiful dame with a short dress and a long story walked into my office one night” sub-genre. Larry “Doc” Sportello is a private investigator out on the west coast in the land of angels who gets a visit one night from his ex-old lady Shasta Fay Hepworth, whose new and wealthy (and married) boyfriend is possibly going to wind up the victim of a conspiracy hatched by, we think, his wife and her boyfriend. That basic premise is pretty much stock (and that fact is acknowledged by Doc himself), but where the novel gets its real power is in what I’ve come to think of as its “texture.” It’s 1970—Culturally, the U.S. is on the cusp of something in more ways than one, and that notion of a world on the brink takes up a lot of thematic space. The novel sprawls, with Doc taking on multiple cases that all overlap with one another while Pynchon gets into all sorts of cultural this-and-that, including music, TV, film, the Manson Family, policing, class struggle, Reagan, Vietnam, and the internet. It ends with Doc on a foggy highway contemplating a broader world in flux rather than focusing on something as mundane as the resolution of a particular case or an interpersonal relationship. It’s a novel about the culture and nature of Los Angeles and of America.
In terms of the private detective story that is ostensibly the focus of the book, Pynchon is both a good and bad fit to write one—and both for the same reason: information overload. One of the qualities of Pynchon’s work that’s both wonderful and potentially off-putting is the casual way with which he inundates a reader with information, both real and fictional. Reading Inherent Vice, I had to pick and choose what I stopped to Google since I knew that trying to trace every thread would basically bring the reading process to a complete halt. There’s probably a book at least the size of Inherent Vice itself to be written about the various references made, many of which are just… texture. This sort of story needs a certain level of obfuscation, of course. The reader needs to be flummoxed by the number of names and relationships. This is Hollywood territory we’re entering: the land of the rich, the eccentric, the freaky, the clandestine. The clues need to be in there but not immediately apparent. Still, since this is Pynchon, it feels like there may be extra, extra layers of confusion. As I said, he’s the best and the worst person to tell this sort of story.
If I’m honest, I was genuinely worried that I’d get to the end of the novel and not know what I was looking at—that Pynchon would give me what was clearly meant to be a satisfying conclusion but that I wouldn’t know what it meant. That the book was too “smart” for me, basically. I did end up flipping back and forth a decent amount, which became harder the deeper I got. After the 200-page mark (or so), I wasn’t so much intentionally referencing a section I remembered so much as I was flipping back and only accidentally finding the clarification I was looking for. My impression early on was that it took so long for the names to start repeating themselves.
I ended up walking away from Inherent Vice satisfied, however. I should have known, really, that Pynchon probably wouldn’t write a totally inaccessible book. With all the references and the postmodern style, it’s easy to mistake Pynchon at a glance for someone very high-minded and Literary, but one of the earliest pleasurable discoveries I made reading his work was that Pynchon seems to love physical comedy and pop culture—low-brow stuff. If there was any temptation to make Inherent Vice too “smart,” it doesn’t show. The novel is very good about tying up many of its plot threads in explicit ways. There is a sizeable monologue from Puck Beaverton, one of the antagonists, late in the game that is straightforwardly helpful in a way that feels cliché for the genre (but is still no less helpful for it). LAPD detective “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, who is most charitably only ever a friendly enemy to Doc, will continue chasing the thread of the Golden Fang conspiracy past the end of the novel, and the phrasing makes the fact that Bigfoot and the elusive Golden Fang organization are exiting the narrative with some mysteries left intact very explicit. On the other hand, it was an especially nice, human touch that Doc even follows up with the fairly (in the grand scheme of things) minor character Trillium Fortnight, who we learn earlier in the novel during Puck’s villain speech had been hurt by him in some way. In the context of a culture that often seems to need endings explained to them, Inherent Vice feels like it does go out of its way to wrap things up thoroughly and clearly except in the few instances where it clearly telegraphs that everything will not be wrapped up.
If I was to criticize the novel some, my list of grievances would be reasonably short. One thing would be that there were certain obviously relevant threads entangled in the case(s) that Doc sometimes seemed slow to follow up on. The fact that he didn’t look into the dealer “El Drano” sooner while investigating musician Coy Harlingen’s overdose/disappearance/(non)death seemed odd to me, for example. Ditto the Chryskylodon mental institution given that Doc knew Shasta’s married beau Mickey might have been committed and that his wife might have been behind it and that they had a financial connection to that facility. The wife, Sloane, had access to Mickey’s considerable money, presumably, so what better place to stash him than somewhere both close by and where they already had a financial “in” that could give her the influence to confine Mickey and make sure that confinement stayed secret? I guess you can explain the potentially meandering pace of the investigation(s) somewhat with the fact that Doc is a “doper” and that he works at least somewhat off “Doper’s ESP” or “hippiphanies,” though that still doesn’t make some of his choices of what to pursue when make perfect sense.
Another negative could include the treatment of women in the novel, especially certain women—like the sex worker Jade/Ashley; Clancy Charlock, sister to the deceased Glen Charlock (whose murder ultimately kicks the story off proper); and the aforementioned Trillium Fortnight—who are possibly most identifiable for their sexual predilections more so than any other aspects of their character. Jade’s obsessed with cunnillingus, Clancy with three-ways, and Trillium with (I think) anal. This is a detective story, so the presence of dames or sexy broads or whatever is to be expected, and this is Pynchon, so the novel is less often outright leering and exploitative and more often wry, cute, clever, and funny when it comes to its explanations and explorations of sexuality, but the pigeonholing still bears mentioning. Similarly, the novel’s treatment of gayness and white supremacy (sometimes as a pair) makes me a little nervous. There is an ambiguity or ambivalence there. Granted, “strange bedfellows” is basically a detective story staple. Doc needs to be willing and able to peaceably sit down with all sorts of people to find the sordid truth, but, the international rise of far-right groups recently being what it is, I can’t help but find the sometimes wry, cute, clever, and funny depictions of white supremacists a little… worrying. Whether gayness isn’t just some sort of comedic element tacked onto certain characters as a part of the quirky information overload more than anything else is also worrying.
I actually started reading Inherent Vice this time back in the fall/winter but put it down after just over one hundred pages and didn’t pick it up again until this spring. My motivation for stepping away was mostly what I saw as a lack of real humanity or stakes in the text. Like I said before, I think Pynchon is very wry, cute, clever, and funny, and that in large part because of the sort of critical or ironic (or something) distance to his work. There’s a certain remove in the narrative voice that makes descriptions of things like Doc getting high and falling asleep on a roof while a murder takes place just under his nose and the cops arrive to find him passed out with his head in the rain gutter very funny. The contrast between that remove, which could be read as high-minded or formal or literary, and the book’s fixation on low-brow stuff like, say, Gilligan’s Island is a big part of what makes it so entertaining. At the same time, there’s a lack of emotional immediacy to the story. We’re kind of in a haze, which is maybe appropriate given the prevalence of pot in the novel but that still made me feel like it was hard to get invested in the characters and their (supposed) struggles. Ultimately, I still think there is a tonal remove in Inherent Vice, but I feel that it actually works in the novel’s favor when Pynchon does decide to dig in. The genuinely emotional moments that are played up—like Doc’s final conversation with Coy when the latter has been freed from working for the Golden Fang and has been reunited with his family—resonate more because the book isn’t in a constant emotional state.
In conclusion: Book good, overall! How about Paul Thomas Anderson’s film adaptation, though? My initial reaction was much more definitively negative, but after watching the film a second and third time, I feel more positive about how well it hangs together. My final assessment hasn’t completely changed, but I can be less enthusiastically critical, which is a downer since enthusiastic delight or dislike both make for more entertaining prose. As it is, in summary, I think that the film is an ok-to-good translation of the book’s basic plot to the screen, but it hews so close to the original without really being able to fully capture what makes it special, at least in part due to the limitations of this new medium, which makes the movie ultimately feel like only a serviceable second-hand version of the much more interesting and expansive original.
Doc and Coy together. I don’t
really get into casting choices in this piece, but I’m going to defend Owen
Wilson here—both in Inherent Vice and in general. He does a great job as
Coy. I think he looks and sounds perfect for the role of a surf rock
saxophonist working undercover. As for Joaquin Phoenix as Doc, I’m more torn.
His performance, particularly the paranoid or freaked out bits, feels a little strained
or forced. The shot of his big scream I altered for the header of this post has
to be the worst offender. It is a terrible comedy scream. My
dissatisfaction with Phoenix’s performance might also come from the fact that I
never quite got a read on Doc in the novel, so the character feels
poorly-defined in general to me. I wasn’t sure, for example, just how much of a
genuine “dangerous hombre” he was supposed to be. The YouTube
description for the film calls Doc “inept,” which was not a word I had
considered and still don’t think is right.
The kindest thing I can say about Inherent Vice (2014) is that Anderson clearly had an affection for the source material. This is most apparent in his handling of Pynchon’s prose. In short, he’s preserved a lot of it, keeping the dialogue basically as-written and also working in some of the narrator’s description and exposition and Doc’s internal thoughts that would typically be cut when going from a medium that communicates at length with written text to one that communicates more briefly overall and often more visually as well. There’s an outright, uncontestable necessity to cut huge swaths from the book to make it work as a film, and Anderson cuts things and re-arranges others but still with the clear intention to translate Inherent Vice as directly as possible to the screen. Some of those aforementioned lines or bits of narration have their roles reversed (dialogue to narration or vice versa) or take place in different scenes or are said by different characters, but they are still present. What’s newly written to help prop up the changes and fill new gaps largely fits with the existing material and is at least inoffensive enough. There is texture to this film as well. Bigfoot’s love of frozen bananas, for example, which is explicitly touched on in the book, is still present in the film but as more of a passing gag without touching on the how or why of it. Something similar happens with a sub-plot that culminates in a Buddhist priest cleansing the mansion where Coy’s bandmates have been staying. In the book, this event explicitly comes up after Doc experiences strange vibes and threatening behavior at the location, but Anderson slips it into the film very quickly as more of a visual reference only when Coy is leaving the mansion to get in Doc’s car at the end. Anderson changes the feeling of the actual ending of the story significantly by putting Doc and Shasta together—focusing on the duo rather than the wider world—but he still places them in a car in the foggy highway setting. Clearly, keeping as much of the book as possible was a priority, down to even smaller details. The dedication to using the original phrasing, especially, reminds me of David Cronenberg’s 2012 adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis or, I suppose, most adaptations of Shakespeare. That latter comparison is especially fitting since there is kind of an understanding that Shakespeare’s words (what is said and how) are art and are as much a critical part of doing his work justice as simply preserving plot beats and characters.
Anderson keeping all this stuff taken directly from Pynchon’s novel is also a risk, however, since phrasing that works in literature doesn’t necessarily make for good film dialogue. Pynchon is one of those writers that I feel tries to capture a certain essential quality of human speech but without much regard for how humans actually sound. That may seem like an irresolvable contradiction, but it’s true. His dialogue in Inherent Vice captures a lot of the wavering and informality in how people communicate while still sounding completely unrealistic when put in the mouths of actual human beings. It doesn’t sound natural in the film, and I can’t actually say that it was unequivocally a good choice to keep it as-written outside of noting as I already have that it does without a doubt help preserve some of the novel’s essence. Also worth mentioning is that the execution of some of these long scenes without cuts and with the unwieldy dialogue makes the movie impressive from a craft level. For example, Shasta tells Doc about her rough treatment by Mickey while seducing Doc, and the two have sex and then continue their conversation seamlessly. Later, after killing Puck Beaverton and his boss, Adrian Prussia, Doc approaches Bigfoot across a room as the two converse and then get in a car and back out, turn around, and drive away in one take as well. Credit where credit is due: There’s obvious talent in front of and behind the camera and a real ballsyness in keeping so much weirdo shit intact and upfront in what is a big-name Hollywood production.
But, as much as has been kept, the cuts were inevitable, and there are some fairly rough ones: cuts in terms of material excised and in terms of the transitions that happen within the film across the space left by that excised material. To an extent, a large percentage of this piece can be said to be about the various “levels” of cuts, perhaps starting with some more minor offending bits and then escalating from there. When Doc meets Jade outside her workplace at Club Asiatique, for example, we go from Doc getting Jade’s note at his office to them meeting in a nondescript foggy space with no proper establishing shot of the club and no real sense of where we are. It feels like that detail is just missing. Similarly, Doc has a conversation about Shasta and The Golden Fang (the boat) with his lawyer Sauncho and returns home, as near as we can tell, on the same day to then receive a call from Sauncho confirming that Shasta has left town aboard the vessel. It feels like not enough time has passed between these scenes. Later, when Doc, his friend Denis, Golden Fang member Dr. Blatnoyd, and rebellious rich girl Japonica Fenway are driving and get pulled over by cops, the actual erratic behavior that gets them pulled over isn’t missing entirely like I originally thought (just much abbreviated compared with the book); however, we do go straight from this scene with the cops to Doc getting the call from Bigfoot that Dr. Blatnoyd has been killed, which, again, feels too soon in terms of actual time elapsed between the events and doesn’t have the weight it does in the book without the scene where they drop Blatnoyd off at an ominous house in the dark.
The vessel called Golden Fang is also unceremoniously captured at the end of the movie without any fanfare or tension, and the moment just feels tacked on as a weirdly arbitrary-feeling conclusive note (like “Oh yeah they also caught the evil boat by the way”). As I keep saying, these sorts of beats feel awkwardly constructed. The impression they create is either of poor pacing and editing or (more likely) that the events in between that would act as connective tissue were cut for time as a matter of necessity. The film is already 140 minutes long, counting the credits, so the omissions make practical sense, but it doesn’t make the obvious gaps in the end-result less jarring. Despite what a Reddit thread swearing by the deliberateness of Anderson’s final cut might suggest, it’s just a known fact that longer films are harder to market. You don’t get as many showings in in a day if you’re a theater playing the movie, and getting people to sit for that long of a period of time is always a big ask, unless maybe what you’re showing is some superhero slap ‘em up these days. You can argue for the supremacy of Anderson’s artistic vision here, but I think it’s incredibly likely that there were other, more worldly considerations.
Whether due to artistic vision and/or cuts, the film version’s unraveling of its various mysteries is much less clear than the book’s. Puck Beaverton’s big speech is gone, for example. A lot of things are only ever implied here, and you could actually argue that this movie is the sort of impenetrable “smart” version of the story Pynchon didn’t write. After finishing the movie for the first time, I was initially satisfied (enough) but then quickly realized that nothing was ever conclusively said about Glen Charlock’s murder or who actually “put the snatch” on Mickey or what the armed forces creeping up on the Chick Planet massage parlor early on meant. The book has answers for all of this: Glen was the actual assassination target of the LAPD “reserves” for fraternizing with a Black Power group while in prison and which, basically, constituted a violation of his Aryan Brotherhood honor code; Mickey saw too much at Chick Planet when he witnessed the hit on Charlock and was snatched by the reserves out of fear and then later handed over to the FBI for reprogramming to get rid of the unfortunate recent crisis of conscience that had him poised to give his very useful money away. This summary is not me interpreting anything. Puck and Bigfoot spell this stuff out in the novel in a very straightforward fashion. Meanwhile, the movie just doesn’t provide explicit answers and does seem to rely on interpretation and implication to a degree that may be considered impenetrable. At first, I thought the entire Chick Planet sequence in the film was ultimately unresolved until I remembered the next day that Doc was knocked out by a baseball bat in the film and that loan shark cum sometimes-hitman for the LAPD Adrian Prussia had walls covered in bats at his office (not to mention another in his hands when Doc meets with him late in the film). On rewatch, I caught that Doc even outright states that Prussia’s weapon of choice is a bat.
So was Glen meant to be Prussia’s target this time? If so, why did the LAPD care about Glen specifically? Why were the reserves there as well in this version if Prussia was already involved? Are they even the reserves this time around, or do we take the official explanation that they’re just civilian guerrilla warfare LARPers who happened to be in the area at face value? How and when did the FBI get their mitts on Mickey? Why did Puck have the same necklace as Shasta, and why was that detail emphasized by the film but never elaborated upon in any meaningful way? I’m not against ambiguity in films, but in a mystery like this one, the book’s approach to tying off as many loose ends as possible feels like the better one, especially when those loose ends hang so obviously all around the central mystery. If there are answers I’m missing, I can’t imagine what a casual viewing audience with no previous experience with the narrative takes away from all this.
As I’ve said, I did watch the movie again, and the second time I did what I don’t usually do when I watch films and actually paused repeatedly to take notes. I debated running through them all here but don’t think I will. I did find some answers, maybe. For one thing, it is implied by Clancy Charlock that Puck may have been on a boat (since he “set sail” after Glen’s murder and Mickey’s disappearance), which suggests he could have been on The Golden Fang like Shasta and possibly for the same potential reason—to let the heat around Mickey die down—which could explain the matching necklaces. Clancy also suggests that Puck didn’t like the idea of Mickey giving his money away, so the implication could be that Puck is one of the “friends” Mickey says brought him to Chryskylodon for treatment, though that still doesn’t meaningfully address the snarl of little details around Chick Planet, like Glen’s murder and the reserves. A third re-watch with another person revealed nothing new about the plot to me, but I think my co-viewer’s reactions both A) spoke to the more accessible charisma of the film (which I largely “missed” the first time around) but B) still confirmed that, yes, the film does not make a lot of sense to a more casual audience.
A shot of Mickey’s wife
Sloane and her boyfriend Riggs from the trailer. I don’t believe this specific
shot is in the film, and, as you can see, it contains information absolutely
vital to the plot. I kid. A different shot of Sloane’s ass still made it
in as she approaches Doc later in this scene. I’ll also just note here that
everyone looks older in the film than they did in my head while reading the
book, and the contrast probably also contributed a bit to the negative reaction
I had during my first viewing.
Speaking of casual and not… casual: One big reason I’ve toned down some of the fire in this piece from when I originally wrote it was because of the critic/academic’s brainstorm I had on my second viewing about what the film wants to say about the actual importance of the mystery plotline. This is one of those things that falls squarely into the category of “works for me because I’m Thinking about this text but probably means nothing to a layman,” but I was struck the second go-round by resonance of the scene where Doc essentially tells his sort of spiritual advisor Sortilège that he’s overwhelmed with it all—a sentiment the audience likely shares by that point. “Leej” helps Doc, and, by extension, the audience, out by helping him find a point to focus on. What’s going to keep him up at night is what she wants to know. What’s the most important thing out of all the things vying for his attention? That ends up being Coy and his unfair separation from his daughter. This scene stuck with me because of how much it feels like a sort of address to the audience as well as a statement of intent: Never mind the excess details, it seems to say, and focus on the very human struggle that Doc chooses to make his priority. This moment resonates thematically with both certain elements carried over from the book and with changes in the film in ways that made it stick with me.
Ultimately, Doc saves Coy from his life as a countersubversive agent for the conservative agenda and gets revenge for the death of Bigfoot’s partner that the cop could never exact himself in his capacity as an officer of the (corrupt) law. Anderson cooks up a special meeting between Bigfoot and Doc—one of the only scenes with no direct analog in the book—after it’s all over, where Bigfoot and Doc momentarily speak in unison and the former tries some pot. It’s here that Anderson works in the idea of Bigfoot as a brother in need of a keeper from the book. “Are you ok, brother?” Doc asks. There’s a big focus on the two men connecting one-on-one. The case may be less important than the simple human connections: Coy back with his family and Bigfoot finally getting on Doc’s level a little bit since he’s given him emotional closure. You could tie the altered final scene in as well by arguing that Anderson cares more about the people of the story than the bigger-picture stuff, and that could explain the narrowed focus on Doc and Shasta (the claustrophobic close-up of them in the car just underlining that intent further). As I said, I don’t think this potential theme of humans over details excuses the film’s confusing handling of the book’s plot, but the apparent intention to push past the noise and capture the human value of what Doc does made me care a bit less about the untied threads and my, in retrospect, petty grievances.
While “objectivity” is almost never not a fraught word to use in discussions like this one, I think the movie’s handling of Inherent Vice’s plot is still objectively worse than the book. I do have some other criticisms that are much more subjective, however. The first and most immediately noticeable of these gripes is with the use of the character of Sortilège as a narrative voice in the movie. I personally cannot stand voiceover narration in movies. It’s an extremely subjective criticism, but I feel that a film should use its medium-specific advantages (the visuals, the music, the actors’ physical presence, etc.) rather than rely on something like narration that feels like more of a book thing. Voiceover seems like a massive crutch—an excuse to quickly cram in information. A movie script that features voiceover needs to go back to the drawing board for revision, is my hot take. The use of Leej in this role makes a certain kind of surreal sense, though, as she’s the most spiritual character in the book, the most in touch with the universe, which translates not inelegantly to the role of formless, omnipresent voice in the audience’s ear. In the movie, she acts not just as narrator but also as something like an actual voice in Doc’s head at points (like his “Doper’s ESP” or whatever). There’s enough playfulness to the execution of this idea that I don’t outright hate hate it, but I still just hate it on principle. One saving grace is in the stylistic presentation, with Leej having a presence in the narrative more akin to a ghost than your usual narrator, and she’s typically reciting Pynchon’s material, which is more interesting or creative or poetic than your average movie script.
Inherent Vice the film also offers what I feel is a weak adaptation of one of my favorite specific scenes in the book, which is when Doc is investigating what may be a Golden Fang office and first meets Rudy Blatnoyd, who offers him some cocaine before slipping out to have sex with the receptionist. Japonica comes in looking for Blatnoyd and meets Doc, and then Blatnoyd rejoins them, and then Denis gets in there too, having crashed Doc’s car, and the receptionist comes in after him, and you get, in the book, all these people with varying levels of awareness of their relationships with one another and with very different ideas about what sort of conversation they should be having right then kind of talking over one another in an office space that also felt comically small to me. That they all, except for the receptionist, end up hitching a ride with Japonica and then getting pulled over by the police is the comedy cherry on top of the chaos sundae. The movie’s version of this scene lacks energy, though this was yet another element that I didn’t think fell quite as flat on a second viewing and that might actually have improved further on the third time through. I thought and still do think that the office is too big to push everyone into uncomfortable enough proximity with one another to make it nice and overwhelming the way I initially visualized it in my mind’s eye, and Denis’ exchange with Dr. Blatnoyd about the merits of, I guess, insanity just feels flatter and less snappy than it does in the book. There is a little more of that sweet, sweet energy to it when they all rush the leftover coke at the end, though.
One positive feature of the film’s office building sequence I will slip in here, however, is that I want to give the movie credit for actually making explicit something that I think the book leaves unspoken. It’s not enough to make up for how many major plot details are just left unexplained, but, in the film, Doc’s visit to the Golden Fang office is explicitly tied to some previous information in a way that actually, clearly computes—that heroin destroys users’ teeth over time and that the Golden Fang is a vertically-integrated organization, not content to just supply the dope. They want to be there profiting at every level, from production to distribution and onward even farther. The movie heavily suggests that the building is actually a dentist office set up to treat the patients the Golden Fang has created through its heroin-dealing. This technically could be the case in the book too, but it’s the inverse of the film—left implied rather than outright explained (at least to the best of my knowledge). Instead of a functioning dentist office, Doc just finds a Golden Fang manual with guidance on how to deal with hippies before he’s interrupted by Japonica. I wasn’t sure in the book if the Golden Fang building was really a dentist office and/or if the Golden Fang dentists (if they existed) were actually meant to be the same Golden Fang associated with heroin dealers and the boat, or if Pynchon wasn’t just having some fun with multiple entities with the same name acting as a smokescreen that created more ambiguity, confusion, and fun around the conspiracy.
Following on from the mention of the energy of that previous scene, I want to say that the trailer for Inherent Vice that I watched is really good, but I feel like it did me dirty by promising a higher-energy affair overall than what I got, which no doubt contributed to my more negative feelings about the film during that first viewing, seeing as I went in with the wrong impression. The tonal experience reminded me a lot of what happened with the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar! (2016), where I watched a trailer that promised a kind of madcap romp and ended up with something else. Both are actually still funny films but in more of a low-key sort of way—more indica than sativa, in a way.
To continue skewing more general in my criticism, I don’t ultimately think Inherent Vice the film is a good adaptation, in large part because it lacks so much of what makes the original book special. As I said already, the ex-old lady with the story about the new boyfriend and a conspiracy isn’t compelling or original on its own, and the film kind of struggles with that story anyway since it seems to fail to fully resolve some obvious questions it raises at the onset of its mystery. What it also lacks in large part is what makes the book special and that helps it rise above the rather rote initial premise, and that, of course, is texture. Cuts had to be made, and though I miss elements like the Vegas trip and characters like Tito the limo driver and recovering gambler that tie in with the plot in the book, it’s the loss of so much of the surrounding and more minute stuff that hurts most. Bigfoot’s frozen bananas and that Buddhist cleansing make the cut, but a lot of the pop culture stuff doesn’t. Pynchon seems to have a genuine love for TV and film and music—and it’s no wonder then that he did some voicework on The Simpsons—but most of that stuff is mostly gone from the film, along with the focus on a world in flux and on things like the fallout from the Manson Family crimes and on the proto-internet. That scope isn’t entirely missing since, for example, there is a good chunk of narration from Leej during the mansion sequence that focuses on the ways that the counterculture of the 60s might have been infiltrated and perverted by the forces of order. However, Inherent Vice the book is also filled with music. Doc even sings a song himself at one point as a part of a distraction at an airport, but the film only has its soundtrack. Music doesn’t feel important to the film despite the heavy focus on Coy Harlingen, a musician in a surf rock band.
Some of the book’s subversiveness is gone as well. I used a big anti-cop quote from Inherent Vice the novel in my previous piece on the 2020 Sonic the Hedgehog film, and there’s a lot of that sentiment in the book. It does still exist in the film, too. There’s some explicit mention of civil rights violations, for example, and we’re shown the LAPD goofing off in the Wolfmanns’ pool while ostensibly investigating Mickey’s disappearance. The exact depths of their corruption and racism are deeper in the novel, however, including the element of the even more explicitly racist reserve forces that killed Glen Charlock and initially abducted Mickey. Perhaps even more subversive, though, is the book’s interest in communism. I wouldn’t call it pro-communism since the narrator maintains the usual remove and applies the same sort of ambivalence and ambiguity I mentioned before, but it’s much more interested in the fallout of America’s obsession with rooting out so-called “subversives,” communist or otherwise, than the movie is. An interesting omission from the film, in that vein, is Doc’s reply to Crocker Fenway when the two are sitting down to negotiate the return of some of the Golden Fang’s stolen product and that leads to the actual resolution of both versions of the story.
Doc wants to negotiate for the safety of people (including Coy), and Crocker is surprised he doesn’t just want money, which is “a lot easier.” Doc asks Crocker, “How much money would I have to take from you so I don’t lose your respect?” To which Crocker replies, “A bit late for that, Mr. Sportello. People like you lose all claim to respect the first time they pay anybody rent.” In the film, we basically jump ahead from here to Doc’s final threat in this scene should Crocker and the Golden Fang not follow through. In the book, however, Doc responds directly to Crocker’s statement about respect and rent: “And when the first landlord decided to stiff the first renter for his security deposit, your whole fucking class lost everybody’s respect.” This conversation continues even further in the book, as Crocker mentions “high-density tenement scum” and Doc has a nice, substantial, particularly subversive-sounding chunk to his name:
Course. Nothin to you, couple hundred bucks, just something to roll up and snort coke through. But see, every time one of you gets greedy like that, the bad-karma level gets jacked up one more little two-hundred-dollar notch. After a while that starts to add up. For years now under everybody’s nose there’s been all this class hatred, slowly building. Where do you think that’s headed? . . . And don’t you ever worry . . . that someday they’ll all turn into a savage mob screamin around outside the gates of PV, maybe even looking to get in?
Why, oh, why, one wonders, would this particular exchange not make the cut in a film that so slavishly and exhaustively works to salvage as much material as it can? Probably no reason at all. Police corruption, in a historical context where it has some plausible distance from our current reality, is one thing, but the implication of the abuse of the masses by the rich and powerful stretching back into the past and forward into the future and what that might eventually lead to? The implication that people who own and rent out property are cheating scum who might one day deservedly be confronted by a justifiably enraged mob of their victims? Hmm. Who’s bankrolling this feature, again, man?
Why this random shot? Looking
through the trailer, I could not find a single image of Sortilège to use, so I
used this one where she is just out of frame to the right. This is interesting
to me, both because of how the trailer otherwise wants to play up the scope of
the investigation and all the moving pieces yet omits this character and
because of Leej’s role in the film and trailer as a narrator. She gets so
little interaction with or acknowledgement from other characters in the film
that I started to wonder if you could craft a little theory about her just
being a creation of Doc’s (though she definitively is not). She’s grown on me
in her role as the narrator and as a sort of helpful presence in Doc’s mind.
The way she helps him figure out the meaning of “Chryskylodon” (essentially
Greek for “Golden Fang”) in the film is interesting given that she’s speaking
to Doc and sitting in his car but not actually present, and the way she
concludes the trailer by saying “Coming just in time for Christmas” is simply charming.
An obvious counter-argument to my claims about the lack of texture in Inherent Vice the film would probably be to point extra hard at what I have already mentioned about the way that a film can’t possibly work in everything from the novel. My counter to this counter is the 2018 film Under the Silver Lake, directed and written by David Robert Mitchell. Silver Lake, when I first watched it a couple years ago, immediately grabbed me, in large part because it reminded me so much of the work of Thomas Pynchon. It’s also about a conspiracy that includes a missing love interest and missing man of some standing and is also set in Los Angeles. It also has lots of texture in the form of an elusive “Dog Killer,” a murderous naked woman in an owl mask(?), a prominent interest in music and pop culture explicitly addressed within the film, secret codes in said pop culture, a secret homeless code, a “homeless king,” a ring of middling actresses moonlighting as sex workers, a mysterious fellow dressed as a pirate, and so on. It better captures the surreal paranoia that Doc experiences in Inherent Vice the book as well, particularly through a select handful of trippy and creepy/disturbing dream sequences—or maybe Andrew Garfield just portrays those feelings more convincingly? My actual point is that it still doesn’t have the level of detail of Inherent Vice the novel, but the spirit of the thing comes closer to approximating that level of extremely varied interests that Pynchon devotes so much space to and that Anderson just doesn’t have room for. That the story written first and foremost for this medium better captures that spirit than a direct adaptation of a book feels… significant.
I joke in my bio over there that I don’t read as much as I used to, and that really does mean something. It’s not even that Inherent Vice itself is so particularly special but that the level of investment I had by the end (all the sleuthing I did, in part, back through the pages) just helped remind me of that feeling that I used to get a lot more as a kid who could and would sit down sometimes and read a book in a day. To stop waxing poetic here, Pynchon’s information overload is a huge part of his work’s charm, and even with Under the Silver Lake out there, it’s hard to imagine that style really, truly working as well as it does in a book. The texture is the charming part of that story, and stripped of that, what you’re left with is not really so impressive or moving. The film may not be as poor of an adaptation of the book as I first thought, but it’s so similar that it just makes the lack of soul stand out all the more. If it was more willing to be different, maybe it wouldn’t matter as much, but this is really one of those situations that raises the admittedly obnoxious question of “Why not just read the book instead?” You might not believe me, but I swear it makes more sense than the film does, despite what people may say about Pynchon being confusing.
My feelings about film adaptations of books have changed over the years. I used to be one of those people that wanted the film and book to match, but in addition to just being kind of a silly impulse (Why not just read the book in that case?), it’s also not practical. I have enough respect for the craft of film to feel that a good adaptation is just that—adapted to the new environment. Trying to just bring a book to the screen is a bad idea, and maybe that’s what Anderson tried to do on some level. To really make it work, he probably should have been willing to change more. Maybe, in the end, mediums should stick to original works which are best suited to utilize the strengths of that given medium. There are powerful video games, like the 2017 action-RPG NieR:Automata, for example, that I think would lose a lot of their specialness via something like direct adaptation. What ultimately makes that game so impactful is the fact that its status as an interactive story is leveraged to create player investment and moving scenarios—like its final credits sequence, which is worth looking into if you don’t know and don’t care about spoilers—that could only work in that medium. A story about the humanity of machines grappling with freewill in a sense makes the most sense communicated through a complex machine that the player controls.
Each medium has its strengths, and yet I think books are still one of the most powerful. They have no budgetary restrictions on special effects or sets, for one thing. They can be democratic or anarchic in ways that media which tend to require larger infusions of cash and more hands on deck can’t so easily achieve for all the collaboration and the scrutiny that comes with their creation, along with the need for a frankly tremendous, even outsized, return on investment in the end-product. Books’ long-form nature and greater flexibility with plot structure also mean that they can offer an exposure to characters and ideas at a level and for a duration unsustainable in other formats. I was struck by that feeling after reading Inherent Vice—that I’d gone on this special journey and that there was nothing quite like a book for that experience. I’m being hyperbolic, of course, since a long-running TV series could pull off something similar (or maybe a long role-playing game), but I’ve had a love of reading far longer than I’ve had a love for any other medium. And, in the end, what I feel for Inherent Vice the book is love, while the film, despite Anderson’s own clear love for the source material, just didn’t spark quite the same way. I definitely would not recommend this adaptation over the original or even really as a supplement when the book is the same story but better and you could just, like, read it twice. Instead, I’d probably recommend reading Inherent Vice and watching Under the Silver Lake as the adaptation truest to the source material in the ways that might matter most. That good old texture again.
