The Rewind: Inherent Vice (2014)

Paul Thomas Anderson's 2014 stoner masterpiece reminds us to slow down and attempt to disentangle ourselves from capitalism’s web

Inherent Vice (2014)

Catching Inherent Vice at my local rep theater was the perfect way to celebrate 4/20—and a reminder that this is a film that deepens with every viewing. Paul Thomas Anderson’s stoned-noir may seem shapeless at first, but over time, it teaches you how to watch it. You begin to pick up on its rhythms, its hazy logic, and its drifting beauty. The way it glides from one imaginative scenario to the next—seemingly aimless yet always engaging—is easy to take for granted.

This was my third time watching Inherent Vice, and this time around—unburdened by any need to track the plot—I found myself most attuned to the film’s emotional and thematic undercurrents. I’m currently reading Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland in anticipation of PTA’s upcoming One Battle After Another (supposedly adapted from or at least inspired by Vineland), and I’ve been joking to friends that I’ll read ten pages, pause, and think, “Wait, what did I just read?” Pynchon’s non-sequiturs, jokes, and sheer density lull you into a trance until you hit on a sentence as radiant as a diamond.

PTA’s upcoming One Battle After Another

Inherent Vice would make an excellent companion to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood—two richly textured, LA-set mood pieces orbiting the ambient dread of the Manson era. But where Tarantino’s film conjures a revisionist fantasy in which a certain conservative ideal is rescued from oblivion, Anderson’s leans into something more elegiac and countercultural. It’s a story about the fading idealism of the ‘60s, about the “dirty fucking hippie” waging a cosmic, often futile war against the encroaching power of capitalist syndicates and faceless bureaucracies. Though the film is set in 1970, Doc Sportello’s (Joaquin Phoenix) rage against the machine feels timeless. We’d do well to adopt some of his cockeyed clarity today, in a world more systematized than ever.

Joaquin Phoenix and Katherine Waterston

For all the film’s stoner comedy and absurdist noir detours, this viewing struck me as especially melancholic. I still laughed plenty, but what lingered was Doc’s aching loneliness, his barely contained yearning for Shasta (Katherine Waterston). The emotional core of the film remains that rain-soaked sequence on Sunset Boulevard—Doc and Shasta searching for a storefront they’re not even sure exists, as Neil Young’s “Journey Through the Past” plays. A top-five PTA moment—and that’s really saying something.

(Inherent Vice is streaming on Max)