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The sexy girl was languidly gyrating atop our seated hero when the drugs began to take hold. Her every slow deep rhythmic breath sending electric thin twisty second chakra waves through my senses, me buried in a seat next to a giant who never took off his leather coat, my own giant winter coat all around me, contraband spilling everywhere, the image of these two drug-addled lovers, bigger than life on the BAM screen, on Doc's couch, coming deeper into 3-D focus with each inhale; each shadowy spiderweb sketch line filaments of the deep seething photography like a mental brushstroke framing the pair of them against the darkening afternoon of the apartment. Her Tropic of Cancer-style twisted sexual bondage extended single take narrative slowly driving our hero into a ferocious rutting frenzy. Beginning to end of a single take, single shot, it turned me on in ways I forgot were possible for a movie to do, the way being turned on by a pretty girl's breathing can trigger the onset of whatever substance you took as the movie started, the way her whole aura trembles and vibrates, a being of pure delicious energy that works its way into your soul deeper with every inhalation. It's all right there in FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, where just being an elevator with a laughing Cameron Diaz is enough to send Benicio del Toro's acidhead lawyer into a slow-building howl of pain that infects his mind and body for the rest of the trip and results in him even pulling a knife on her friend. Ya dig?
GF later tells me I was moaning softly all through the scene. Not the first time I've been told that. I never notice it, but who notices anything when they're so transfixed in the dark of a crowded BAM? I had my first psychedelic moment at a late night double feature of YELLOW SUBMARINE and HEAD in 1986... not knowing what to expect and excited in the dark and then, as the Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds plunged down on her carousel horse and the animation shifted into an Art Nouveau Matisse rotoscope, I plunged down with her, the floor opening up beneath me and my idea of what was possible in the realm of my perception and experience widened into a once-in-a-lifetime flash awakening. It was like that again, with INHERENT VICE, in that scene, but sexier. Every strand of her hair and flush of desire in her eyes morphing in shimmering thin spiderweb heat lines. the deep mind-blowing breathing second chakra freak-out of this moment. Everything that came before and after in director Paul Thomas Anderson's crowded canvas impossible to all savvy in one viewing, but this one scene something like the erotic heart of all things, and a reminder that lurid stories of domination and submission often work more powerfully when told (as in PERSONA) and not seen (which is why 9 1/2 WEEKS is so much hotter when you haven't seen it - and why people are going to be laughing all through 50 SHADES OF GREY). Unlike THE MASTER, though where there wasn't any character worth hanging with, especially not all those pink bow-tie cult members, or Phoenix's mangy scrawny townie sailor or Hoffman's bouncy infant. But this is, man... we still got Phoenix but his fierceness has more value since it's brought out only when needed; but more important we got a damned good anima, not just for him but the entirety of PTA's emotionally stunted male character psyches--in the great breakout vividness of Katherine Waterston; a moving and very weird scene with the great Eric Roberts (this is to him what KILL BILL was David Carradine). And most of all, rather than Monterey or wherever the hell in the dullard post-war 40s-50s, this is1970, California, via the literary tripper's choice, Thomas Pynchon. I want to hang onto everything but most of it is a blur of names and faces and places. A stray streak of sunshine on Doc's face during a drive to the beach, a sunrise reunion of a reformed junky family, the glow of the doorway and the horizon line behind matching in perfect transcendentally lucid pink, and that Waterston monologue --that's what I remember most. Just a stem and a cap to heighten the gorgeous golden magic hour moments, just a little Gordita Beach Turkey Ranch, that's all I got. Just a couple of acres. And the Marx Brothers, weren't they there? Groucho looking out from the ANIMAL CRACKERS arch and talking to Doc like a cross-mediated platform surfer? Stuff was on TVs. I remember that much. Always is in a Pynchon, he'd be a great film critic if he wasn't so high-falutin' - kind of the best part of the books, to be honest. He knows his pop culture shit, and blends it and spikes it with post-modern glug glug glug real nice.
But this is INHERENT VICE: Ultimately, as the narrating Joanna Newsom notes, a nameless eternal evil has seeped like a vapor out from the ancient opium Pacific and co-opted the Age of Aquarius, which in this part of 1970 California is apparently very near becoming such a dominant culture that cops don't even bat an eye when you spark up a joint in their presence. They do beat you up for having long hair though. Ain't no gettin' around that. So just assume the passive stance of protecting head and fingers and groin and let the billy clubs fall where they may.
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Then there's Joaquin as old Doc, the hippie detective. His office lurks deep in a medical suite, his 'office' including his gynecology chair that he sits in when smoking weed and staring at the window, huffing laughing gas when the myriad threads get too much for a single viewing. Seeing double somehow comes out them focus to. And the weird way heroin and Manson-esque cults were the dead end of the counterculture: ouija board, astrology, all-star cast including Anderson's ex-girlfriend Maya Rudolph as his doctor office receptionist (along with another, real, doctor) whose mother Minnie Ripperton's song "Les Fleurs" rises triumphantly from the soundtrack during Doc's mosey back to his office:
the people everywhere that the flower has come
Light up the sky with your prayers of gladness
Light up the sky with your prayers of gladness
and rejoice for the darkness is gone...
Of course 1970 it was still possible to be idealistic enough to believe that. And it's Anderson's genius that he can recreate not only our Gen X collective memory of that era, which being when we were children a source of lasting mythic resonance, every flare of a girl's jeans some kind of enchanted forest, her ironed-straight long blonde hair forever marked in our idea of a perfect woman. My mom volunteered at a runaway shelter. My dad's company bought them a coffee percolater. Toots was the name of the girl who came to stay with us for Xmas, a gorgeous thing in a jean jacket and perfectly pressed long blonde hair, my mom gave her two packs of Marlboros as an Xmas present, along with some other things I don't remember. But I remember her, and how she left me forever a-swoon for the type. But that's it right there-- she was a runaway, damaged, seeking some dream and leaving some parental abuse and finding.... us. For Xmas, my rapture over her every movement paralyzing me so I still remember how hard it was to ask her if she wanted to do Doodle Art. But it was mainly that fate had deposited her there, on my orange shag rug, like a gift from the karmic wheel. In the safety of my family, there she was, and able to let it all hang out. And it's a family affair in H.O. double hockey sticks why double-you double Oh-Dee too, in camp PTA: Sam Waterston's sexy daughter Katherine blows the film apart with her hotness as Doc's ex-girlfriend. Is Martin Donovan as the angry dad of a similar hippie chick the stand-in for Col. "I enjoyed that drink as much as you did" Rutledge, or old perma-slur Sam himself? Elaine May's daughter Jeannie Berlin is Doc's savvy New Yorker Aunt Reet, whose 'face' is a mess and who signifies Doc's Jewishness and police roots; Josh Brolin is James Brolin's son; Eric Roberts is Julia's brother; Serena Scott Thomas is Kristen Scott Thomas' sister; Jena Malone is an emancipated minor... her mom had too much Lindsay Lohan's mom-style leeching going on. Some of us remember Joaquin didn't grow so much as appear from the shadow of brother River once he joined the angels outside the Viper Club, and as every lover of old blues knows, 'viper' is what they used to call potheads back in the 20s-30s when weed was the sole proclivity of the negro jazzman. Joanna Newsom as the narrator and Doc's platonic girlfriend friend is married to Andy Samberg who later that same night (that we saw VICE) showed up on Eric Andre Show, uncredited, as Eric's double and their schtick together goes back to 1933's DUCK SOUP, starring the Marx Brothers, and the street name Gummo Marx Way--Gummo famously the only Marx Brother never to appear on film--is on one of the papers looked over by Doc at the Hall of Top Secret Records. And there's GUMMO by Harmony Korine, who also made SPRING BREAKERS, set also on a beach involving pretty people doing crimes while engaging in deep druggy binaural second chakra breathing. Of course that film was set in Florida, where Elmore Leonard set so much of his oeuvre, and that oeuvre a clear inspiration for Pynchon's source novel, along with Hunter S. Thompson (Doc and Duke sharing Benicio del Toro's eccentric lawyer) and The Firesign Theater's How Can you be Two Places at Once when You're not anywhere at all. And back around again. Gummo Marx's film oeuvre, a study through which someone in some Allen film obtained some film doctorate... which brings me back to VICE yet again, and Martin Short's obscene corrupting uncut Cockaine dentist love.
Of course 1970 it was still possible to be idealistic enough to believe that. And it's Anderson's genius that he can recreate not only our Gen X collective memory of that era, which being when we were children a source of lasting mythic resonance, every flare of a girl's jeans some kind of enchanted forest, her ironed-straight long blonde hair forever marked in our idea of a perfect woman. My mom volunteered at a runaway shelter. My dad's company bought them a coffee percolater. Toots was the name of the girl who came to stay with us for Xmas, a gorgeous thing in a jean jacket and perfectly pressed long blonde hair, my mom gave her two packs of Marlboros as an Xmas present, along with some other things I don't remember. But I remember her, and how she left me forever a-swoon for the type. But that's it right there-- she was a runaway, damaged, seeking some dream and leaving some parental abuse and finding.... us. For Xmas, my rapture over her every movement paralyzing me so I still remember how hard it was to ask her if she wanted to do Doodle Art. But it was mainly that fate had deposited her there, on my orange shag rug, like a gift from the karmic wheel. In the safety of my family, there she was, and able to let it all hang out. And it's a family affair in H.O. double hockey sticks why double-you double Oh-Dee too, in camp PTA: Sam Waterston's sexy daughter Katherine blows the film apart with her hotness as Doc's ex-girlfriend. Is Martin Donovan as the angry dad of a similar hippie chick the stand-in for Col. "I enjoyed that drink as much as you did" Rutledge, or old perma-slur Sam himself? Elaine May's daughter Jeannie Berlin is Doc's savvy New Yorker Aunt Reet, whose 'face' is a mess and who signifies Doc's Jewishness and police roots; Josh Brolin is James Brolin's son; Eric Roberts is Julia's brother; Serena Scott Thomas is Kristen Scott Thomas' sister; Jena Malone is an emancipated minor... her mom had too much Lindsay Lohan's mom-style leeching going on. Some of us remember Joaquin didn't grow so much as appear from the shadow of brother River once he joined the angels outside the Viper Club, and as every lover of old blues knows, 'viper' is what they used to call potheads back in the 20s-30s when weed was the sole proclivity of the negro jazzman. Joanna Newsom as the narrator and Doc's platonic girlfriend friend is married to Andy Samberg who later that same night (that we saw VICE) showed up on Eric Andre Show, uncredited, as Eric's double and their schtick together goes back to 1933's DUCK SOUP, starring the Marx Brothers, and the street name Gummo Marx Way--Gummo famously the only Marx Brother never to appear on film--is on one of the papers looked over by Doc at the Hall of Top Secret Records. And there's GUMMO by Harmony Korine, who also made SPRING BREAKERS, set also on a beach involving pretty people doing crimes while engaging in deep druggy binaural second chakra breathing. Of course that film was set in Florida, where Elmore Leonard set so much of his oeuvre, and that oeuvre a clear inspiration for Pynchon's source novel, along with Hunter S. Thompson (Doc and Duke sharing Benicio del Toro's eccentric lawyer) and The Firesign Theater's How Can you be Two Places at Once when You're not anywhere at all. And back around again. Gummo Marx's film oeuvre, a study through which someone in some Allen film obtained some film doctorate... which brings me back to VICE yet again, and Martin Short's obscene corrupting uncut Cockaine dentist love.
And a wow of a super sexy girlfriend free spirit played by Katherine Waterston (Sam's daughter) named Shasta Fay Hepworth. She basically owns the movie, no mean feat considering the heavy hitters in all directions. She's the mystery, and by the end we can understand why this stoner but brilliant detective is so crazy about her. Like Lebowski about that rug, or Gould's Marlowe about that friend, or Hackman for poor Melanie in Night Moves. Woke last night to the sound of thunder / how far off I sat and wondered / started gummin' a song from 1970... was it Minnie Ripperton's "Les Fleurs?"
Throw off your fears, let your heart beat freely
at the sign that a new time is born
Yo, Maya was that fleur? She was born two years after that song came out. So no. She wasn't even a gleam in her father's eye. But Hindustani texts all know Maya is illusion and eternally beguiling. No black coating of terrible weave could hide the value from PTA's eyes. Maya, under the Moorish wall, flower in her 'hair' like the Andalusian girls used; Maya, the woods we must hack our way clear of towards the clear-cut riverside of Nirvana, with no Excalibur machete or golden ankh to wave. And let's just take a look at this fabulous Yucatan Blue, priced only what the traffic will allow, delivered to me, Ralph Icebag, by a brown-shoed square, in the dead of night. Yeah, two Communiss on that cover - one Lennon, one brother of Gummo. Neither one of them into guns or sharp swords in the hands of young children, or frozen bananas sucked on / by Josh Brolin.
By 1970 we had already, in some ways, given up on the utopian ideal for a united and very hip America, one inflated to new heights by the California experiment: love, reefers and LSD would convert every last square to the One True Vibe. Instead: Altamont. Instead: 'free love' grubbers from the 'burbs. Instead: Manson decoding The White Album. Instead: evil cokehead troglodytes dropping by your intimate ego-dissolving LSD party at four AM and drinking all your bourbon, stealing CDs, and harassing the women, and you realizing you need your ego after all, because only your ego could get aggressive enough to get rid of them and all you can do is try, vainly, to formulate a coherent sentence without contradicting the love vibes you've vouchsafed. Instead: peaceful but filthy barefoot hippies clogging ever last public bathroom pore of the Haight and everyone being too cool to work or pay money and just presuming they'll be taken care of by the very social order they spit on. Instead: communes all slowly coming unglued as psychedelic unity and the blazing tribal consciousness that had emerged from the primitive inner rolodex for the first time in 1,000 years giving way to petty squabbles, malnourished infants of uncertain parentage, and tension over undone chores. Squalor, in short, reducing even the most enlightened of near-Buddhacatholichrists back down to grouchy adolescent earth, craving comfort of mom's clean sheets and the now-weakened capitalist behemoth's car keys.
But we had brought all the trappings of the counterculture with us back to our home suburbs, and 1970 signaled the beginning of that smooth Laurel Canyon sound. The radio lit up with songs that managed to be sexy and vaguely dangerous to us kids without seeming to offend or challenge in any way. Parents and children in unison swooned from the emotional connection of "American Pie" or "You Light Up My Life." Vietnam still sulked around but we'd given up on protesting. Instead there was bridge mix, wife swapping, martinis, and above all kids unleashed, you understand. Us. We loved Fleetwood Mac. Whatever dreams Stevie Nicks wanted to sell, we'd buy them. I stole every cent I could to buy Wacky Package. We ran loose in packs, like dogs. We could still get spanked in public and no one bat an eye. One whack for every year on our birthday in front of the whole class. At home, indoors, we towered like Godzilla over wood block towers we'd smash with our tail before sloughing back into the depths. Wood paneling was our sky; orange shag carpet the jungle canopy; couch cushions laid in a line on the floor our Bridge of Toome in County Antrim Ireland whereon we'd march and pretend to be hung like Rodney McCorley. PTA was there, I was there. Were were you, Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Smith of Anytown, USA?
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I don't know how many times I've seen BIG LEBOWSKI. I don't even like it but it's endlessly re-watchable, some part is always just right for the moment its on, and its always on... Sooner or later though, it grates on my nerves, somewhere around the funeral home. But it's never the same film twice, until now, for Jackie Treehorn's shoe prints are all over the Pynchon PTA's lovingly detailed semi-sordidness. VICE even uses the same Les Baxter-Yma Sumac Tropicalia vibe that was Treehorn's leitmotif to conjure the same crossroads between the Jack Horner nurturing free love spirit and the Treehorn mobbed-up porno-decadence. But that's just one of a thousand twuggy-druggy twiggy-wiggy branches. You can dig it. I can dig it. Cyrus, the one and only, can.... But most of all, Paul Thomas Anderson has exhumed himself from beneath THE MASTER's weighty muck to re-dig it. Who knows what would have been the result if Welles had done a 70s stoner detective film ala Coens, ala Altman. Would it have been INHERENT VICE? Or is there just no character titanic enough to hold his interest? In the end, that may be the thing. There's no core to the VICE. Phoenix is a great actor, but he's a shell, a short wiry little weirdo. We don't gravitate to him like we do to Warren William or Bogart. As for the detective narrative, it's more coherent than some, but trying to explain i to my underwhelmed GF, all I could do is relate the anecdote about Hawks calling Raymond Chandler from the BIG SLEEP set to ask who actually killed Owen Taylor and Chandler not knowing the answer either. It doesn't matter. I've seen BIG SLEEP a dozen times at least and I'm almost ready to blame Joe Brody, but Joe's saying he just sapped him for the incriminating picture from the back of the head of Krishna, So don't even draw the connections. Just soak in Eric Roberts' brilliant monologue that rips the guts out of capitalism with an LSD trowel and reveals nothing but jewelry-coated vultures, falcon predators, the breathing, cinematographer Robert Elswit's spiderweb lines of light and shadow haloing around every actor, the visible auras, the great clothes and cars like some old album come to life, and Phoenix like a little monkey wiggling free of his angel dust entrapment and every drug you watching have ever done shivering to your DNA surfaces. You're home, in this murky mythic din. Even if you were three years old at the time you remember the morning when every TV channel was the streaky shot of astronauts bouncing around the moon in molasses air, like they were underwater. In some strange way that was true love. Our whole identity formed in those moments. Harper Valley, we didn't know how much you meant to us until we thought we'd lost you. But a new time has come, we're free to love movies like those mythic moon moments, free to see you again in the same slow motion bouncing astronaut ground zero persona-dissolving mythic glow. A new go-to comfort food bible is born, if you care to blast for it. It's the Adventures of Sam Spade, Detective, brought to you by Wild Root Cream Oil Hair tonic. Yeah, it tastes electric... crimson... almost like fire. Almost. But were real 70s cars ever this collector clean? Or ever a humor in this woman one? Take this lozenge from my tongue, this pink and blue Tab (languette) of / Purple Barrel Plums / Untie from me the TruCoat, Ralph Spoilsport. Though our bodies may break and our souls separate, why the long face? Rejoice for the darkness has come back! Remember Les Fleurs, Walter! Les Fleurs! Ils brillent dans le noir. And most of all... Rejoice, sisters and brothers and siblings transgendered: there's finally a movie where being a stoner isn't the same thing as being a sophomoric idiot. I never in a million addled years thought we'd overcome that dopey stigma, let alone Washington and Colorado. Let alone, baby. Let alone.
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Al Shean Presents: Vice Grip of the PYNCHON