Inherent Vice

At the end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, LA Detective Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin) who sports a flattop busts down the front door of the private eye Larry “Doc” Sportella's (Joacquin Phoenix) house. In Anderson’s The Master Phoenix played Freddie Quell, the primitive on whom Lancaster Dodd (Phillip Seymour Hofmann), the L. Ron Hubbard type figure of the title, will attempt to work his cure. In Inherent Vice, Phoenix as a dopper investigator has a similar animal energy, but the goodness, as well as his potential a Christian soldier, is less camouflaged.    Bigfoot puffs on Doc’s joint, then eats the roach, and his whole tray of marijuana leaves, Zig Zag papers and all. “Are you OK, brother,” Doc asks. “I’m not your brother,” Bigfoot says, “But you could use a keeper,” says Doc. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood was based on an Upton Sinclair novel and Inherent Vice is adapted from the Pynchon. The Master which was about the attempt to change human beings, wasn’t based on anyone’s novel. However, in revisiting the origins of scientology, one of the most perverse forms of therapy ever conceived, in a supra-realistic setting (reminiscent in some ways of the vertiginous realism Kazan employed in East of Eden), the movie  exuded the density and intensity of a great l9th century novel— like say Zola’s Germinal. But Inherent Vice is neither a movie with novelistic leanings nor simply a good adaptation (nor by the way are it or any of Anderson’s other aforementioned films, period pieces--though Inherent Vice and The Master do have the courage to sport the now anomalous and forbidden sight of women with actual pubic hair). It's a novel in film form, a complex modernist work inspired by the work equally complex writer. Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), a realtor who’s building a massive development called Channel View Estates surrounds himself with members of the Aryan Brotherhood, despite his Jewish background. He gets kidnapped and tells Doc “I made people pay money for shelter and all along I didn’t realize, it was supposed to be free.” Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), Doc’s former girlfriend, who has run off with Mickey says about him, “Mickey was so powerful he could almost make you feel invisible.” Golden Fang Enterprises presided over by Dr. Rudy Blatnoyd (Martin Short), a dentist, is a drug cartel that runs on the principle of "vertical integration" and owns a death ship (a la B. Traven) called The Golden Fang. They provide the drugs and profit from their addicted clientele’s stay at the rehab they run. The locutions and conceits come fast and furious as does the unpredictable soundtrack which finishes with Chuck Jackson’s 60’s soul classic “Any Day Now,” rather than a more predictably druggy sound. So much is going on that you feel you're on the defensive, intellectually at least.  You almost wish this movie version of the Pynchon novel were a book whose pages you could flip back and forth in at will.

Kim Jong Rodman

                                                                     Photo: Reuters/KCNA

The Times quoted Dennis Rodman as saying “Guess what, I love him. This guy’s really awesome,” about Kim Jong-un upon his departure from Pyongyang (“Way to Reach Kim Jong-un? Follow the Ball,” NYT, 3/1/13). Vice Magazine had sponsored the attempt at what it called “basketball diplomacy,” and as the Times remarked, it was “an allusion to the ping-pong diplomacy that helped open United States relations with China decades ago.” But what was in it for Rodman, who is pierced and tattooed and has been known to cross-dress? North Korea is a pretty repressive place, but perhaps he felt he’d met his counterpart in Kim Jong-un, who is as much a bad boy as a politico, as Rodman  is as a sports celebrity. Could Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan be next on deck? Surely they could be promoted to the North Korean leader as equally out of the box thinkers who might also see something in Kim Jong-un that the international diplomatic community has missed. Who knows Kim Jong-un might turn out to be one of the only people on earth who liked Lohan’s portrayal of Elizabeth Taylor in the recent made-for-TV movie, Liz & Dick? But getting back to Rodman, you can’t help wondering what’s in the back of his mind? Lots of celebrities have done wild things. Tom Cruise and John Travolta embraced Scientology. Perhaps Kim Jong-un will be his master, his L. Ron Hubbard. Years of media blitzing can do strange things to a person’s mind. Maybe Kim Jong-un has become a role model to the aging basketball star. Maybe Rodman is planning on modeling the next chapter of his life on the as yet short-lived career of his “awesome” new friend. Kim Jong Rodman could make headlines as the next head of the DPRKBA, Democratic People Republic of Korea Basketball Association.

The Master

The theme of The Master is the whole human project, that is the endeavor of reforming human character--as represented successively in Rousseau, in Marx and Freud. The director Paul Thomas Anderson is a retrograde form of original. There Will Be Blood, his previous film was jagged edged, a larger than life East of Eden with Lawrentian overtones. Here too the palette is rich and full of leitmotifs. The director loves the sea and the gnarled morphology of imperfect bodies. There’s a wonderful scene of fulsome nudes that could easily have been drawn from Poussin. You are confounded by hosts of associations. Is Anderson presenting man in nature or man in some self-created hell? Is there an Adamic or for that matter Rouseauesque form of innocence to return to? To discountenance The Master’s debt L. Ron Hubbard, is to hijack the ambition of the movie, which deals with a science fi writer who invents a form of therapy called “processing” (Scientology’s Dianetics) which deals with both past traumas and past lives. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the Master, Lancaster Dodd. His disciple is Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), who bears no small resemblance to the savage Alex of A Clockwork Orange. He is the litmus test, the petrie dish in which Dodd’s theories will be tested. If The Master is filled with cultish perversity, Quell is one of Freud’s case studies, The Rat Man for example, viewed in a fun house mirror. But the brilliance of the film lies in a disquisition which defeats causality. Scenes occur with no warning and no build up. The chaotic Freddie drunkenly stumbles onto a yacht where a wedding is about to take place and enters history. We go back into his past as he is treated with harrowing “applications.” Then his own psycho-history takes on a life of its own, in which he is eventually released from the jaws of memory into something worse, the despair of his own life. Abandoned by his Pygmalion, Freddie returns to one of the earlier set pieces of the movie, as a helpless creature curled up against the haunting figure of a woman carved in sand.

Mad!

Interesting that The New Yorker, a magazine long associated with parody, particularly in its Shouts & Murmurs section, has itself become the subject of a parody. The Times reported that the Church of Scientology has published a parody of the magazine which they have passed out in front of New Yorker headquarters (“Scientology Strikes Back at The New Yorker,” NYT, 8/31/11). What incited the parody is a 25,000-word exposé of Scientology written by New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright back in February. However, what distinguishes the Church of Scientology parody from your typical Shouts & Murmurs piece is the amount of time, effort and money that has obviously gone into it. The New Yorker may parody the Times, as it has done  on numerous occasions, but it doesn’t go to the trouble of having its parody printed up on Times newsprint, using  typeface close to that used by the Times along with other symbols (the Scientologists expropriated Eustace Tilley for their purposes). Nor does it hire people to hand out its parodies in front of the Times offices. Nor does it attempt to go after particular Times staff members, such as the church does when it “singles out editors, fact-checkers and other New Yorker staff members who worked on the article by name and prints their photos.” Parody and satire are fun—there have been satiric versions of both the Times and The New Yorker that have been printed up as gags over the years—and also function as means of social criticism. To this extent, the church has every right to parody whatever it likes to. However, parody becomes a form of intimidation when the parodist creates a garish mask of the subject he or she is parodying and shows up at that subject’s front door.