Some Playful Soul Shows up with a Bucketful of Piranhas

 

Thomas Pynchon writes like a great big dumb-ass, and I love it.  Often touted as a postmodern stylist and just as often derided as an emperor without clothes, he writes with a strange reptilian gusto that allows each novel to be totally hot and totally cold at the same time.  Every writerly move he makes seems arbitrary and yet preconceived, intelligentsia-stylized but also urgently infantile, smart but totally silly, funny-haha and not-so-funny-weird.  I've read every book he's published because I truly love the worlds he makes, and the distinct flirty mannerist folly all his books seem to go after.  He's not interested in "fiction" or "characterization" or "plot" or anything of that bull-shit.  He's looking for a way out while also reveling in the shimmery nonsense he churns out sentence after sentence.  His best book, the one I just reread in anticipation of the Paul Thomas Anderson movie based on it, is Inherent Vice.  It is his perfect dumb-ass masterpiece.

 

The story is like a Quinn Martin production, all private-investigatory flourishes parenthesized by pothead exhaustion and pornographic sex scenes and the sadness of the sixties hitting the seventies with a great big whimper.  Everything is hazy but the words he uses to describe the haziness are sharp as knives, a zoom-zoom vernacular from Laugh-In, Dark Shadows, and 1970 soap operas merged with a Saul-Bellow arrogance along with a sweet hint of forgiveness provided by a love of total losers.  Laugh-out-loud hilarious most of the way through, the whole book has an atmosphere of privacy being invaded by questions that can't be answered, a swirl of neon and ice cream and palm trees and concrete and acid and bullet-holes, like a James Rosenquist painting turned into a verbose puppet-show.  It ends so beautifully there's an ache but it also flails and fractures all the way through so that as you coax yourself toward that ending you give up trying to understand what's going on and enter into a Pynchonian coma, comfortably numb and also a little pissed off.  And yet still that ending has lyrical finality, a shut-lid on Pynchon's strange brew full of jokes and sinister tensions and silly little asides that never add up but then add up when you're not thinking about things adding up. 

 

Here, close to the start of the book, he's describing Hollywood right after the Manson murders (which play an inherent role in Inherent Vice's overall schizoid thematic structure):

 

“Odd, yes, here in the capital of eternal youth, endless summer and all, that fear should be running the town again as in days of old, like the Hollywood blacklist you don't remember and the Watts rioting you do - it spreads, like blood in a swimming pool, till it occupies all the volume of the day. And then maybe some playful soul shows up with a bucketful of piranhas, dumps them in the pool, and right away they can taste the blood. They swim around looking for what's bleeding, but they don't find anything, all of them getting more and more crazy, till the craziness reaches a point. Which is when they begin to feed on each other.”    

 

Wow.  The metaphor bleeds, right?   But it's chaotic and vibrant enough to gain steam, until it's sort of a joke, sort of not.  

 

PT Anderson cast Joaquin Phoenix in the role of Doc Sportello, the private-dick at the center of the Vice tornado/revelry/big-sleep, and I think he'll work because he's got a long streak of dumb-assed-ness all his own to pull from.  (And that, fully formed and perfectly executed dumb-assed-ness, is truly Pynchon's major gift to readers, the nonsense of the gods, first truly and grandly conjured in his penultimate tome, Gravity's Rainbow, which is loftier and heavier than Inherent Vice, but does a lot of the same things, only with a lot more grimness and determination.  You might even code Inherent Vice as Gravity's Rainbow Lite.)  Phoenix's off-kilter countenance and need to be methody is perfect, because that's kind of a Pynchon gig as well:  the egotistical freak-out guest on a Letterman episode spliced with Johnny Cash on Benzedrine, down-home funk and spectacularly self-aggrandizing stunts, full-on American glory built for the ages.  Yup Phoenix will do. 

 

In conclusion, Inherent Vice is fucked-up, stupid and brilliant.  Thomas Pynchon is Evil Knieval.  Let's hope PT Anderson gets the joke.

   

Beam Me Down Scotty

Boogie Nights is one of those seminal (no pun intended) movies that make you understand what movies should and can do when created by someone with a point of view that exists on a level beyond people-pleasing and beyond spectacle.  Paul Thomas Anderson has never been able to accomplish that eerie altered state of both steely-eyed contemplation and movie-movie ecstasy since.  He's tried but usually he stumbles on the "steely-eyed contemplation" part, creating epic yet somehow small-minded, serious-minded pictures that try so hard to be original they lose their minds.  (The Master is probably his worst attempt yet.)  Boogie Nights takes on the 70s and 80s porn industry with a Robert-Altman-frenetic kind of flourish and bombast, but then somehow slows itself down long enough to harden into a real-life dream.  There are textures and perpheries in Boogie Nights that seem both manufactured and incidental, accidental and somehow right on the money.  The early party scene, when Dirk Diggler is taken into the Jack Horner fold, is mesmerizingly messy yet completely controlled.  

It's that sequence in which Scotty first appears.  As performed by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Scotty is both buffoon and moral center, a holy fool who haunts Boogie Nights in a way that always brings it back to itself.  I think that's probably what is missing from The Master and all the other movies Anderson has directed since Boogie Nights, that off-kilter, jaggedy nobody who somehow reinvigorates the atmosphere with a sense of  innocence and need.  You feel Scotty's predicament in a deep way because he is not being focused on.  He's always in the background, yearning to be included in the spotlight, but in end he just winds up holding the spotlight on the porn performers he both envies and idolizes.  

If Scotty were to be a central figure, his power as a character would be lost.  His dramatic vigor comes from his intense desire and his banishment to the edges of each scene.  When he does come into focus, he's either chided or bossed back into place, and yet as you follow the overall structure of the movie you also begin to understand that the movie truly is about him.  Hoffman understands this intrinsically, giving Scotty just enough "zaniness" to be comic relief, and just enough tragic splendor to choke you up.  The scene after he lets Dirk know that he loves him is one of the most powerful moments I think I've ever witnessed in movies.  It simply consists of Scotty crying behind the wheel of his car, calling himself names.  It's kind of like a Will-Ferrell lark but also a Tennessee-Williams crescendo, as if Blanche Dubois and Ricky Bobby had a big fat sweet baby.  

I don't ever want Scotty to have his own TV show, or even be featured in Boogie Nights 2.  But I do want to relish the memory of him.  He's more than the sum of his part.