Here’s Why You Hated ‘Inherent Vice’ (And Why You Might Need To See It Again)

Inherent Vice was nearly ruined for me, a self-professed obsessive Paul Thomas Anderson and Thomas Pynchon fan. No, not by average movie-goers or by poorly written reviews, but by diehard fans of the director. Fans who, just a few months ago, paid nearly $300 to go and see Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood live-orchestrate the soundtrack of Anderson’s perennial There Will Be Blood during a special screening. But after screeners of the filmmaker’s latest visual epic started circling, the universal let down was a startling surprise. “I kept asking myself, ‘Is this a comedy or a drama?'” was one remark. “More like Incoherent Vice,” was another. Har har har. The universal complaint went something like, “It’s too difficult to get through, I had to cut it short.”

Inherent Vice tells the story of Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), a pot-smoking private investigator who’s approached by his ex-girlfriend, Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), when her new beau, a real estate mogul, goes missing. Shasta believes that the couple they swing with might have something to do with his mysterious disappearance, and she needs Doc’s help to get to the bottom of it.

After getting my hands on a screener of my own, I knew five minutes in why so many refused to stick with it. It reeked of Thomas Pynchon: an author whose words are so mind-boggling, confusion overwhelms the choice to adore or despise.

Pynchon is an enigma of an author. His novels are winding, confusing, open-ended in parts and dead-ended in others. His complex characters are riddled with idiosyncrasies even they don’t seem to understand, giving the reader little to no hope of dramatic irony. He likes to toy with themes of paranoia, astrology, technology, and conspiracy; reading between the lines takes on whole new meaning when trying to make sense of his densely complicated chapters.

After studying and falling in love with Pynchon’s verse my freshman year of undergrad, I couldn’t help but laugh when I first came across the trailer for Inherent Vice back in the fall. I thought two things. The first: there’s no way in hell someone can adapt a Pynchon novel. The second: whoever’s in charge better do it justice. When I saw Anderson’s credit pop up at the end of the teaser, I sighed a sigh of relief. After being introduced to the author through The Crying of Lot 49, desperately trying to grasp V., and quitting Gravity’s Rainbow after a week of pure frustration, I thought that finally the world will be able to visually understand a Pynchon story. Thank goodness for Paul Thomas Anderson.

But the audience reaction was one of universal disappointment, and though I’m baffled by the backlash, I believe this is for a couple of reasons.

First to blame is the instinctual need to genre-fy a film. Reiterated to us through generalized advertising campaigns and trailers, audiences walk into theaters expecting a comedy, a drama, an action-thriller, a musical, and so on and so forth. When we’re given a hybrid we didn’t necessarily expect, based on what we saw in a 60-second clip, we go into scoff mode: “Well, this certainly isn’t what I thought it was going to be.”

Paul Thomas Anderson’s filmography can be broadly categorized as “drama,” yet thinking back on Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, and The Master; his films transcend cookie-cutter labels that play so nicely with Hollywood marketing techniques: poster, teaser, trailer, movie, cha-ching, sequel, cha-ching.

Second is the need to understand a film the first time around. To walk away from a finished product with a ready review: “I loved it,” “I hated it,” or the non-conformist: (shrug) “It was okay.” Anderson did right by Pynchon by not dumbing down a tangled knot of a detective story so audiences could “get it” and go on their merry way.

The thing about Inherent Vice (and Pynchon’s novels in general) is that it leads us down the road we want to believe — or rather, one we can understand (in this case, a detective story) and makes it about something bigger. Much bigger than the pages in your hand, much bigger than the film adaptation you’re watching. Anderson’s adaptation is not about the plethora of characters that walk in an out of the frame, but rather about paranoia and the changing dynamics of a generation. A generation that tried so desperately to change the country, whether they were about free love or the war on drugs, and ultimately fell short because of their own demise. Inherent vice, by definition, means to deteriorate from within, rather than to be broken by external forces. The film captured a space in time — late ’60s / early ’70s California — and united every quirky character through the universal feeling of paranoia, a way of living that has defined American life since Europeans beached North American soil way back when.

Every character in this film — the stoners, the prostitutes, the cops, and the business moguls — all share a certain sense of heightened paranoia not only toward each other but also towards the way the country is shifting. Doc and Lieutenant Christian F. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin) are two totally different men on the surface, but their unifying characteristic is their fear of the unknown. Just something to keep in mind when you’re watching this film the second time around (like you did with The Master).

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Photos: Everett Collection