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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 filament of the deep seething photography like a haunted hazy amnesia-curing brushstroke, framing these lovers against the darkening afternoon of his Godita Beach apartment, her Tropic of Capricorn-style twisted sexual bondage extended single take narrative slowly driving our hero into a ferocious rutting frenzy. Beginning to end, a single take, single shot, 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 a half hour or so after the movie started and then forgot about; the way her whole aura trembles and vibrates; a pure delicious energy works its way into your soul deeper with every inhalation.
It's a real thing that any sexually frustrated shroomer knows, seen and breathed before only once 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 above-described VICE scene. Not the first time I've been told that by girlfriend while we watch an erotic or romantic moment on a theater screen. I never notice it, but who notices anything when they're so transfixed in the dark of a crowded theater? 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 and a bit scared, there in the dark... and then, as the "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" girl plunged down on her carousel horse and the animation shifted into an Art Nouveau Matisse rotoscope, I plunged down with her, the floor of the student union theater opening up beneath me and my idea of what was possible in the realm of my perception and experience widened. 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.
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| Benicio is a very attentive lawyer (from top: FEAR, VICE) |
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. The question is just where has the vapor condensed, a hard thing to trace in a 1970 California, where hippie-dom 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 still. 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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| Milk |
PTA's always been first and foremost a filmmaker for de facto brother or father relationships, and part of what BLOOD's power emerged from was the relative lack of a feminine element. Certainly, to my memory, no female character has a line of dialogue. Instead it was like a boy scout-cum-capitalist narrative nursing on the crude oil teat of the Paul Bunyan masculine John Henry Steel Driving consciousness to craft the dark father of capitalism. THE MASTER tried to do the same, but Amy Adams' as Hoffman's wife snaked forward with more power perhaps than even Hoffman (as his Clinton-esque hand job indicates). Now, in VICE, it's even narrated by a woman, and not a Spacek in BADLANDS blank slate but a savvy all-knowing Cali free spirit shamaness of no small wit, harp expertise and mystic acumen. Her albums rich with great existential lines that would stagger Whitman and leave my iPod devastated--"and though our bodies recoil / from the grip of the soil / why the long face?"--she and Waterson are not stealth buzzkills like Amy Adams, but wild untamed goddesses of strange alliance, orbiting men in motion like moons but belonging to no single planet or direction.
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Then there's Joaquin as old Doc, the hippie detective. His office lurks deep in a medical suite, his gynecology chair a zone for smoking weed and staring at the window, huffing laughing gas when the myriad threads get too much for a single viewing and the dentist next door permits. Seeing double somehow allows the plot to come into focus for old Doc. Heroin and Manson-esque cults were the dead end of the counterculture: ouija boards, 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 percolator. They listened to a Cheech and Chong album nonstop in the living room. 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. It left me forever a-swoon for her type. But that's it right there-- she was a runaway, damaged, seeking some dream and leaving some parental abuse and finding.... us. She was, in a sense, a bad screen for an anima projection, which for most animas is the screen of choice.
For Xmas, my rapture over her every movement paralyzing me so I still remember how hard it was to croak, "Hey Toots, want to do Doodle Art?" Those words etched into my brain with some small shame, the way my voice broke on the word "want."
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, who signifies Doc's Jewishness and police roots; Josh Brolin is James Brolin's son, Bigfoot a name connecting him to the wild redwoods of Northern California; 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 come up the ladder to fame so much as be revealed standing there in the cold dawn outside the Viper Room, once the shadow of brother River flopped fishily away. 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 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 the mirror scene 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.
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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 percolator. They listened to a Cheech and Chong album nonstop in the living room. 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. It left me forever a-swoon for her type. But that's it right there-- she was a runaway, damaged, seeking some dream and leaving some parental abuse and finding.... us. She was, in a sense, a bad screen for an anima projection, which for most animas is the screen of choice.
For Xmas, my rapture over her every movement paralyzing me so I still remember how hard it was to croak, "Hey Toots, want to do Doodle Art?" Those words etched into my brain with some small shame, the way my voice broke on the word "want."
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, who signifies Doc's Jewishness and police roots; Josh Brolin is James Brolin's son, Bigfoot a name connecting him to the wild redwoods of Northern California; 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 come up the ladder to fame so much as be revealed standing there in the cold dawn outside the Viper Room, once the shadow of brother River flopped fishily away. 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 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 the mirror scene 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, price 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. We thought universal 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: cokehead troglodytes dropping by your intimate ego-dissolving LSD party at four AM, drinking all your bourbon 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 instead 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, 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 gave way to petty squabbles, malnourished infants of uncertain parentage, and tension over undone chores.
Instead: Squalor 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 "Go Your Own Way" or "You Light Up My Life." Vietnam still sulked around but we'd given up on protesting. Instead there were bridge games, 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 Packages. We ran loose in packs, like dogs. We could still get spanked or slapped in public by people not our parents and no one would 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 our jungle canopy; couch cushions laid in a line on the floor our Bridge of Toome in County Antrim, Ireland. We'd march up and down it in time 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. 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.... 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 made a 70s stoner detective film. Would it have been INHERENT VICE, or is there just no character titanic enough within the story to hold his interest? In the end, that may be the thing. There's no core or center to VICE, no 'hurrah' moment like the pool party in BOOGIE or the "I'm the antichrist" climax of BLOOD. Phoenix is a great actor, but he's a scrawny shell of a thing, a short wiry little weirdo whose hipster disaffect on talk shows is alienating and less clever than he thinks. We don't gravitate to him like we do to Warren William or Bogart in similar roles, or even Dick Powell or big Jeff Bridges (or his father, Lloyd Bridges, for that matter, alas, Michael Shayne). As for VICE's detective narrative, it's more coherent than some, but trying to explain the plot 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, baby. 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, the breathing aurae of cinematographer Robert Elswit, spiderweb lines of light and shadow haloing around every actor; the great clothes and cars like some old album come to life, Phoenix a little monkey wiggling free of his angel dust entrapment cuffs and every drug you have ever done shivering to your DNA surfaces. You're home, if you're like me, in this murky mythic din of countercurrent flashbacks. Every time you smoked angel dust it was because some dirtbag laced his joint and didn't tell you til it was too late. You were only an infant but you well remember the morning when every TV channel showed only the streaky continuous feed of astronauts bouncing around the moon in molasses air, like they were underwater, the audio just transmitted astronaut chatter and space interference, hour after hour, the usual old science fiction movies of the morning pre-empted, their futuristic fiction now outmoded into ancient fact.
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| "Ain't been high since '69" |
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Al Shean Presents: Vice Grip of the PYNCHON