I am neither a diehard Pynchon fan nor completely immune to his charms: I loved V and The Crying of Lot 49 when I read them in college, fought my way to the end of Gravity’s Rainbow the same summer I manfully wrestled William Gaddis’ The Recognitions (what was I trying to prove?), and, to be perfectly honest, bogged down in the middle of Inherent Vice when I tried to read it on a cross-country road trip with my dad a few years ago. (Others, like Anna Schectman at the Los Angeles Review of Books, are less impressed with Anderson’s adaptation skills.) Just to have adapted a Thomas Pynchon novel at all gives Anderson special bragging rights - the author has never before allowed one of his books to be optioned for film - and the fact that he’s ended up with an interesting and watchable movie is icing on the cake. For O’Brien, as for many other diehard Pynchon fans, the miracle of the book’s cinematic transubstantiation is reason enough to cheer: “ To say that Paul Thomas Anderson has faithfully and successfully adapted to the screen is another way of saying that he has changed it into something entirely different,” O’Brien writes. What links the three movies is the theme of the objectification of women.Ī lyrical, comprehensive review of the first film - the one that most critics have apparently been discussing so far - comes from Geoffrey O’Brien at the New York Review of Books blog. a personal film about lost love, which may or may not contain an encrypted portrait of Anderson’s ex-girlfriend Fiona Apple. an homage to the broad sex comedies of the late 60s and early 70s and, a letter-perfect adaptation of Pynchon’s novel, which is preoccupied (as usual) with conspiracy, exploitation, sadism, entropy, and the inevitable failure of countercultural attempts to bring about Utopia in our time Inherent Vice is really three movies in one, with wholly different generic duties to discharge, but they cooperate so skillfully you hardly notice. Even on its own terms, it’s not a perfect movie - it might be the most flawed film Anderson has made, though I’d give the edge to Punch Drunk Love - but, like all of his movies, it is touched with enough greatness to justify the price of admission and bear careful scrutiny. I’ve seen the film twice, and found it intensely pleasurable, but I will try to show how the nature of the pleasure it offers might not be available to everyone, and how that might be a problem. It’s an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel Inherent Vice, and you should see it, unless you hate all of Anderson’s movies (some people do) or Pynchon’s books (ditto), because in various ways it represents tendencies that have long been latent in each of their work, and in American literature, film, and culture more generally. The new movie by Paul Thomas Anderson is out, in most major U.S. That is the intention of this article.” -Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) “It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. Well, Shasta Fay, what I have is dick feelings, and my dick feeling sez-’”- Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (2009) ‘You know how some people say they have a ‘gut feeling’? “Doc stroked his chin and gazed off into space for a while.
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