Inherent Vice: "She's not just a boat, Doc... She's much more than that."

Postmodernist author and notable recluse Thomas Pynchon has only had one of his novels turned into a movie, and for good reason. Loose plots, unintelligible conspiracies, social satire, clever wordplay, and brobdingnagian length combine to make most of his works prime candidates for "unfilmability." Not to be intimidated, America's cinematic master Paul Thomas Anderson took up the challenge, adapting Pynchon's Inherent Vice into a film of the same name. 

In an atmosphere of pothead paranoia, Anderson crafted a sunny California noir, where Doc Sportello ( a hilarious Joaquin Phoenix) , a malingering hippie gumshoe living in southern Los Angeles in 1970, receives a request from his ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay Hepworth 
(Katherine Waterston)to find her missing millionaire boyfriend (Eric Roberts). From here, plots and subplots converge; diverge; disappear, only to be picked back up again. Eccentric characters- most with indiscernible motives and all with something to hide- flicker in and out of the film's periphery, pushing and pulling Sportello on his quest to restore Los Angeles to the peaceful optimism of the 1960s.

The tangled plot is, of course, reminiscent of those films noir of the 40s and 50s, with all the same stock characters (detective, femme fatale, millionaire involved in a troublesome organization) and convoluted mysteries. Anderson populates his version of the noir with California beaches and hopeful neon lights punctuating a haze of pot smoke in the darkness. Here, the mystery is really unsolvable, because the mystery is never what Doc (or the audience) thinks it is. The bigger mystery, bigger than Wolfmann and Harlingen and the Golden Fang, is what exactly has happened to Calfornia, which was to have been the last refuge of the idealistic; the version of America that might have been. The shopping malls are taking over, the cracks are beginning to show: even Doc's Los Angeles has fallen apart. The America of the imagination has been unintentionally self-destructing, and as the sixties roll into the seventies, there is nothing good left. Human nature will inevitably ruin even what it tries to create. Not even Doc's hippie counterculture is safe from destruction. 

The film opens up with an epigraph: "Under the paving stones, the beach!" This refers literally to the 1968 Paris student riots, where protesters pulled up paving stones to throw at the police, only to discover that sand lies underneath. For Pynchon and Anderson, it means that the construct of the corrupted American society conceals and suppresses the ideal life that lies beneath. Inherent Vice tells us that it's too late to save even the Doc Sportellos; that Los Angeles is no longer a refuge. That eventually even the ark sinks.