Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice is, to date, the only film to have been adapted from the novels of Thomas Pynchon, arguably the greatest American novelist of his generation and possibly the most important of all postmodern novelists. Indeed, Pynchon is such an important figure that it is almost impossible to talk about this adaptation without also addressing the original novel. At the same time, Pynchon is such a complex novelist that his work has typically been regarded as virtually impossible to adapt to film; the fact that Inherent Vice was adapted so successfully can be attributed, at least in part, to the fact that this particular novel is unusually cinematic due to the extent to which it draws directly upon film noir. One of the distinctive features of Pynchon’s fiction is his ability to incorporate, through both style and content, the energies of any number of different genres from both high and low culture, including film and television as well as various forms of literature. Inherent Vice draws upon a narrower range of genres than do Pynchon’s longer and weightier works—such as Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Against the Day (2006)—given that it draws the vast majority of its material from hard-boiled detective fiction and film noir (while also including material from genres such as horror and science fiction, as well as the typical Pynchon allusions to things such as Star Trek, Gilligan’s Island, and Godzilla). Importantly, though, the genres imported into Inherent Vice represent more than the “blank parody” described by Jameson. They interact to produce an entirely new, potentially subversive, message. Or, as Casey Shoop puts it, “through combining noir with other familiar genres, Inherent Vice challenges both the mediums and the messages of American ideology” (210).
Multiple critics have noted how extensively Pynchon draws upon film noir in Inherent Vice, while also noting that he challenges many of the conventions of the genre. John Miller writes of the novel’s “assimilation and parody of noir conventions,” suggesting that it draws in particularly important ways on the convention of Los Angeles, the ultimate noir city, as a place of both promise and corruption (234). Eleanor Gold, meanwhile, describes the novel as an “adjustment” to film noir that combines film noir with other genres to challenge “both the mediums and the messages of American ideology” (210). And Sean Carswell, drawing upon Christian Moraru’s concept of “rewriting” argues that Pynchon’s novel actively rewrites Chandler’s novels, especially The Long Goodbye (1953). It is certainly the case that the cultural context of Inherent Vice (in both the novel and the film) is so radically different from that of film noir and Chandler’s fiction that audiences are given an opportunity to re-evaluate those predecessors from an estranged, renewed, and refreshed perspective.
This estrangement is accomplished partly by simple temporal displacement of so many identifiable film noir tropes into the world of the counterculture in 1970, which seems so different from the noir world of the 1940s and 1950s (though it still contains much of the same corruption and vice). The black-and-white cinematography of the original noir films is replaced by the full-color world of hippie tie-dyes (though the film still contains a number of scenes that occur in fog or darkness). The edgy, jazz-inflected scores of the original noir films are replaced by a collection of mostly familiar hits from period artists such as Neil Young and slightly earlier artists such as Sam Cooke, though it also includes traks from edgier artists, such as the German experimental rock group Can. The tough-guy private detective is now a hippie; the femme fatale has been replaced by an ex-girlfriend of the detective, while sex is now so freely available that she has largely lost the mysterious aura of forbidden access, her mystery replaced by a mutual sense of longing and loss for the failed relationship between the detective and the femme fatale (which rhymes with the sense of loss due to the failure of the counterculture to realize its utopian dreams).
“Doc” Sportello, P.I.
Inherent Vice begins with a voiceover narration by one Sortilège (Joanna Newsome), who is a minor character both the novel and the film but assumes a more prominent role as narrator of the film. This use of voiceover is a common film noir technique, though it is unusual in classic noir to have a woman narrator. What is even more unusual is that Sortilège is a sort of hippie earth mother, whose point of view is much different than the typically cynical point of view of the film noir narrator. Then the action begins with a classic noir scene when a seductive woman client (as close as anyone in this film comes to being a femme fatale) comes to a private investigator to seek his help. In this case, though, the woman is former hippie chick Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston) and the detective is her former lover (still a hippie) Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix). Shasta wants Sportello to help extricate her from a difficult situation in which she has become the girlfriend of wealthy real-estate developer Michael “Mickey” Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), whose wife (along with the wife’s lover) has attempted to enlist her in a scheme to have Wolfmann committed to a mental asylum so they can make off with his money before he (having undergone a recent “conversion”) can give it all away to countercultural causes. Sportello’s subsequent investigation then takes him into a dark and dangerous world of corruption and violence in both high and low places. In short, it takes him into the typical world of film noir—with the twist that Sportello’s “native” environment is the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s, which adds a distinctively new element to the noir lifeworld.
Sportello is strongly anchored at the center of the film as its point-of-view character, which sometimes makes things a bit hazy for viewers, given his drug-addled consciousness. Still, given the clear Chandleresque qualities of Inherent Vice, it seems natural to compareSportello directly with Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, especially as he is represented in the prominent classic noir films Murder, My Sweet (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946). To understand the relationship between Inherent Vice and the entire history of film noir, though, it is also useful to compare Sportello with the Marlowe of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973), a key neo-noir film based on Chandler’s fiction—and one that bears a special relationship to Inherent Vice because it has been modernized to be set in the early 1970s and thus is essentially contemporaneous with Inherent Vice.
Because of his appearances in so many works by Chandler (and in so many film adaptations of those works), Marlowe is probably one of the better-known characters in modern American literature. At the same time, he is a somewhat nebulous figure, and Chandler’s descriptions of him can be somewhat inconsistent. As a result, he has been interpreted in widely varying ways in film adaptations. Dick Powell’s Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet,Humphrey’s Bogart’s Marlowein The Big Sleep (1946), and Elliott Gould’s Marlowe in The Long Goodbye are so different that they hardly seem the same character, except for sharing a name and profession. One thing they also share is a consistent and honorable adherence to a basic personal code of morality, even as they find themselves surrounded by corruption, violence, and even depravity. The code followed by the Marlowe of Chandler’s fiction allows him to be a relatively heavy drinker and to engage in a reasonable amount of sexual activity, even though he tends to choose his partners carefully and not to be taken in by the machinations of the femmes fatales he frequently encounters. Both of these characteristics are necessarily tamped down in the film adaptations that were made during the Code period, though they do provide a point of contact with the pot-smoking, free-loving Sportello. It should be said, though, that Sportello still maintains an updated code of his own (conmmensurate with the vast historical changes that have occurred between the time of the original noir films and the 1970s). Indeed, the gap in ethics between Sportello and the corrupt society around him remains as large as that gap had ever been in Chandler or in the original noir films, suggesting that, in some ways, Marlowe was as much a countercultural figure as Sportello, but without such an established subculture with which to identify.
Indeed, while Sportello’s bad memory and a sometimes poor connection with reality set him apart from the keenly observant and analytical Marlowe, in some ways the difference between Sportello and Marlowe is more a matter of style than substance. Visually, Chandler’s, Powell’s and Bogart’s Chandler are all clean-cut and well-groomed, generally dressed in a coat and tie. Gould’s Chandler is a bit more rumpled, in keeping with the more relaxed styles in his 1970s, but he still operates primarily in coat and tie. Sportello is scruffy and slovenly even by the standards of the 1970s, especially for a “professional,” in many ways more directly related to the Coen Brothers’ Jeff Lebowski than to Marlowe[1]. Whereas Marlowe runs his professional practice out of a somewhat seedy office (thus maintaining a certain professionalism), Sportello has an office of sorts (which he shares with a quack doctor) but seems to operate mostly out of his own rather shabby surfside crash pad. Indeed, Sportello often seems more like an amateur than a professional, solving crimes and finding missing people almost more out of a wish to do the right thing than of a desire to make a profit, suggesting the contempt for materialism in his countercultural ethic.
However scruffy he might be, Sportello shares with the various versions of Marlowe a seemingly easy access to virtually all levels of Los Angeles society. One of his former clients is the ultra-wealthy Crocker Fenway (Martin Donovan), whose runaway daughter Japonica (Sasha Pieterse) he once recovered (and whom he encounters again in Inherent Vice). And if the relationship between Shasta and Wolfmann seems surprising, it should also be noted that Sportello’s current girlfriend is the uptight, highly respectable Deputy District Attorney Penny Kimball (Reese Witherspoon). Meanwhile, Sportello has extensive connections within the highly corrupt Los Angeles Police Department—especially including Detective Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin)—though his relationship with them is even more antagonistic than Marlowe’s had been. In addition, Sportello (like Marlowe) makes many connections among the lowest rungs of L.A. society as well, encountering a variety of prostitutes, drug dealers, gangsters, and hit men. Marlowe, however, is endowed with a certain moral superiority to the lowlifes he encounters, while Sportello moves among these figures with a certain democratic ease.
The Politics of Inherent Vice
At first glance, Inherent Vice might seem to be simply another example of the “nostalgia film” that Jameson associates directly with both postmodernism and neo-noir. Meanwhile, the 1970 setting would also seem to invite nostalgia, both for film noir and for the 1960s counterculture. It is certainly the case that both versions of Inherent Vice display an anti-authoritarian political perspective that is strongly informed by the 1960s counterculture. Of course, the strong influence of the counterculture on Pynchon has long been recognized[2] and can be seen by the fact that two of his earlier novels—The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Vineland (1990)—bookend the history of that counterculture, the first detailing the early years of its gestation and the second detailing the aftermath of its defeat by the forces of regression from the years of Richard Nixon to the years of Ronald Reagan, both of whom lurk in the margins of Inherent Vice, providing important political atmosphere[3].
Inherent Vice, though, is the only Pynchon novel actually set during a fully-formed counterculture, but it is already informed by a sense of the defeat of the counterculture. For one thing, Sportello is somewhat of an aging hippie (Phoenix was 40 in 2014, when the film was released). Meanwhile, 1970 is already late enough that the counterculture is in decline, having peaked, for many observers, in the “Summer of Love” in 1967, after which 1968 saw a series of calamities, including the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in April, the assassination of Robert Kennedy in June, and the police riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention in August. In July and August 1969 the Manson murders (which lurk in the background of Inherent Vice throughout[4]) further darkened the utopian dreams of the counterculture, especially when they were quickly followed by the violence at the Altamont Free Concert in December 1969.
In 1970, the Vietnam war was still raging, something that is reflected in Inherent Vice in a number of ways, perhaps most importantly in the mysterious Golden Fang, various manifestations of which haunt Inherent Vice. Of course, this motifechoes the hints of Orientalism that run through much of film noir. However, in this case, the motif of an Asian drug cartel evading the American authorities can be taken as a more specific reference to Vietnam, or to what Doug Haynes sees as a “representation of the resistance of a non-Western people to American superpower” (6). Thus, as opposed to the Orientalist motifs that are typically used in film noir simply to create an exotic (and perhaps decadent atmosphere), Inherent Vice gives a more active role to Asian culture, while also reminding us of the irony of the long-time motif of the “Yellow Peril,” when it was, in fact, the U.S. that was invading Asia at this time, rather than the other way around.
Haynes (writing about the novel) sees Inherent Vice’s historical setting as particularly important because it marks a crucial moment of transition in American history (the end of the counterculture) and in the history of capitalism, with a transition from Fordism to the beginnings of today’s neoliberalism, a period that would be marked by “the acceleration and refinement of the culture industry, the privatization of pleasure, and the conspicuous consumption of the Apple generation” (15). This notion of 1970 as a turning point is also hinted at in the film, though the emphasis there is mostly on the fading of the counterculture, rather than the coming of a new, more consumerist culture.
Inherent Vice stands strongly apart from the postmodern nostalgia films discussed by Jameson, partly because there is no attempt to mimic the actual style of film noir, while any nostalgia for the lost days of 1970 is disrupted by the specter of Vietnam that hovers in the marginsthroughout and by the hints of the impending collapse of the counterculture (partly at the hands of conspiratorial capitalist forces) that are woven into both film and novel. Indeed, in both the novel and the film, any nostalgia is not for nostalgia but is located in a 1970 that is itself already nostalgic for the time a few years earlier when the hopes of the counterculture were still high and when Doc and Sasha were still together.
The ending of the film particularly tops off this note of displaced nostalgia. In this ending, a stoned Doc, hearing Sasha’s voice in his head as she describes one of their best earlier moments together, starts to lay that head down on a table, possibly to sleep. Then, the scene dissolves into another, in which Doc is driving along a freeway with Sasha at his side. This set-up clearly invites us to interpret the entire final scene of the film as a dream sequence, especially as the Sasha in the car seamlessly continues the speech that Doc had been hearing in his head in the previous scene. Meanwhile, they are surrounded by fog, which enhances the dreamlike atmosphere, as does the odd tenor of the entire scene, including the mysterious light that keeps showing up in the rearview mirror, which reflects the light onto Doc’s face. Perhaps it is just Bjornsen tracking them down, but it seems more likely that this is the lost light of a brighter past. As if to emphasize that this past cannot be restored, Doc’s final line in the film (a callback to an earlier moment in the film) is, “This don’t mean we’re back together,” to which Sasha agrees. We’ll never know for sure what this final moment means, which is a very noir way to end the film[5].
Works Cited
Booker, M. Keith. The Coen Brothers’ America. Rowman and Littlefield, 2019.
Carswell, Sean. “Doc, the Dude, and Marlowe: Changing Masculinities from The Long Goodbye to Inherent Vice.” Orbit, vol. 6, no. 1, 2018, https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/484/. Accessed 12 October 2023.
Cook, Simon. “Manson Chicks and Microskirted Cuties: Pornification in Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice.” Textual Practice, vol. 29, no. 6, 2015, pp. 1143-1164.
Freer, Joanna. Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture. Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Gold, Eleanor. “Beyond the Fog: Inherent Vice and Thomas Pynchon’s Noir Adjustment.” New Perspectives on Detective Fiction: Mystery Magnified. Edited by Casey Cothran and Mercy Cannon, Routledge, 2016, pp. 209–24.
Haynes, Doug. “Under the Beach, the Paving-Stones!: The Fate of Fordism in Pynchon’s Inherent Vice.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 55, no. 1, 2014, pp. 1–16.
Hill, Logan. “Pynchon’s Cameo, and Other Surrealities.” The New York Times, 26 September 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/movies/paul-thomas-anderson-films-inherent-vice.html. Accessed 13 October 2023.
Miller, John. “Present Subjunctive: Pynchon’s California Novels.” Critique:Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 54, no. 3, 2013, pp. 225–37.
Moraru, Christian. Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning. SUNY Press, 2001.
Pynchon, Thomas. Inherent Vice. Penguin, 2009.
Shoop, Casey. “Corpse and Accomplice: Fredric Jameson, Raymond Chandler, and the Representation of History in California.” Cultural Critique, No. 77, Winter 2011, pp. 205-238.
Notes
[1] Of course, Lebowski, despite being a famously laid-back hippie type, is himself something of a Marlowe figure. On the important influence of Chandler on The Big Lebowski (1999), see Booker (Coen Brothers 61–74). On the links among Marlowe, Lebowski, and Sportello, see Carswell.
[2] See, for example, Freer.
[3] Among other things, while we tend to think of the “Reagan years” as the years of his presidency from 1981 to 1989, Inherent Vice reminds us that Reagan was elected governor of California in 1966, so that, for Californians, the Reagan years begin much earlier.
[4] On the role of Manson in the novel—and especially on the way Manson’s female acolytes serve as emblems of female sexual availability in the counterculture, see Cook. Cook’s claim that this motif demonstrates that Pynchon has been “suborned” by the modern California porn industry seems at best questionable, though. Granted, that industry does lurk in the background of the novel (and the film), but it also made intrusions even into the original noir films—as in the pornographic photo session with Carmen Sternwood, clad only in a “Chinese” robe, in The Big Sleep. In fact, one might argue that the Code-inflected hints at sexual conduct in the original noir films are much more pornographic than the free and easy sexuality we see in Inherent Vice.
[5] The novel ends with a very different scene of Sportello driving alone in a fog so deep that visibility is almost zero, cars able to move along (in a final moment of collective solidarity) only by following each other’s taillights. But this fog also reinforces the film’s sense of occurring at a transition point, possibly, miraculously into something truly new, possibly better. In the final sentence, Sportello waits “for the fog to burn away, and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead” (369).