America, as told by Cinema #1: 'Inherent Vice'
Paul Thomas Anderson's nostalgic adaptation laments American decay by way of pot-smoking private investigators, reformed hippies, street-level cops, CIA snitches and the faceless hand of fascism.
For the first installment of America, as told by Cinema we’re going to talk about Inherent Vice (2014), Paul Thomas Anderson’s first Thomas Pynchon adaptation. 2025 is the year of Pynchon: another PTA adaptation is soon to come, as well as an unexpected new novel from the man himself. Each week I will write about one movie that perfectly encapsulates the American experience in some way, regardless of scope or intent. You can follow the Letterboxd list I’m working off of here. Feel free to suggest more movies— there’s a lot I have yet to see, surely!
“May we trust that this blessed ship is bound for some better shore, some undrowned Lemuria, risen and redeemed, where the American fate, mercifully, failed to transpire.”
Considered his most accessible and narrative-driven work, it took me one read-through of Thomas Pynchon’s original book and two watches of Paul Thomas Anderson’s on-screen adaptation to grasp Inherent Vice, but once it clicks, a skunked-out postmortem of America’s mid century counterculture and revolutionary dreams reveals itself.
Inherent Vice is a story about a private investigator, Doc Sportello, who lingers around in the aftermath of 1960s California hippie surf culture and is less interested in solving material crimes than he is in moral righteousness, smoking really good weed and affording his soon-to-be untenable California lifestyle. Though written in the 21st century when the American Empire was already in freefall, the story takes place in the 1970s when that fall was just beginning, when America was on an inevitable crash course, just crossing the point of no return— but a time when a deadbeat private investigator with few prospects could still afford Gordita Beach waterfront property. The halcyon days weren’t quite over, but anyone with two eyes, a brain and a beating heart could see their imminent demise. The hippies were on their way out; if they hadn’t yet hightailed out of town to take their rightful place at Daddy’s hedge fund or burgeoning tech start-ups a few hundred miles north, they were likely either languishing from advanced addiction to harder drugs or making a paltry living as a low-level CIA operative. The dream was already dead in the minds of the culture if not yet in the concrete.
Pynchon’s (and PTA’s) exegesis on the American Problem is American in itself, with its counteracting paranoia and humor steeped in consumerism and escapism— otherwise, the only rational response to stay sane in an increasingly insane and exploitative country. It’s all one big facade, portrayed in the movie by The Golden Fang, some faceless, state-run, hedonistic cabal whose chief aim is to keep its people subjugated through cyclic dependencies on addictions and subsequent rehabilitations. In the end, only the lucky few can break the pattern. For most of the story, it’s only Sportello who somehow exists outside that world. He is Pynchon’s most triumphant hero, but the bar is low.
“As long as American life was something to be escaped from, the cartel would always be assured a bottomless pool of new customers.”
PTA’s adaptation of Pynchon’s paranoid ode to dope-smoking burnouts works not only because of his innate understanding of the source material but because of the pathos he imbues into it. Pynchon’s greatest strength is his earnestness— a trait some of his most cynical contemporaries or predecessors, like Bukowski and Burroughs, failed at— which is why his musings are so resonant to readers. He’s dialectical, at once understanding and pitying the hippie’s meaningless politics and inevitable death while also genuinely loving, appreciating and remembering that era with a rose-colored lens. It’s clear that Pynchon loves weed and the warmth and the crashing Pacific waves against a blood red Western sunset (he himself lived in a similar house in Gordita Beach around this time, so there’s surely something semi-autobiographical going on.) He fundamentally understands that for all our warts, this country has produced great people, products and cultural exports: he loves Golden Age Hollywood stars, classic turn-of-the century pastoral literature, huarache sandals, roach clips and disturbingly decadent diner food with sticky sweet cocktails to boot. It’s not random that one of his only public appearances was on The Simpsons.
The adaptation, for me, though, takes the source material to another level in its romanticism of culture. PTA is more of a sentimentalist. Despite his earnestness and evident love for this era, Pynchon at times struggles with the humanity of it all, opting instead for outlandish caricatures and absurdism to get his point across. PTA took Inherent Vice and bathed it in spirituality and ardor. Vignettes of Doc Sportello and Shasta Fay-Hepworth in the good old days, getting caught in the rain while trying to score dope, prancing along undeveloped city streets over a perfectly tender Neil Young needle-drop; the bromance that blooms between Doc and street-cop-slash-arch-nemesis Bigfoot Bjornsen, with their gradual realization that despite their decades-long rivalry they’re more alike than anyone else in the story, upon which a potential partnership looms; and the ending, when Doc finally saves Coy Harlingen from being a deep-state operative and the engrossing California sun beams into the old wide-body sedan while Doc gets to be saccharine and tells Coy he can finally start the rest of his life— these are moments beautifully done by PTA, a welcome addition that Pynchon probably doesn’t have the chops to do himself.
It’s worth noting that for all its half-psychosis and pessimism, Inherent Vice has a uniquely positive ending, with Coy Harlingen returning to his family while Doc drives off into the distant golden California haze. Sure, the Machine drones on— we’re not dumb, we know we can’t stop it now— but this unremarkable life must be worthwhile somehow if you can do some good in this world, no matter how small. Catharsis waits for every man, even if it comes from changing the life of just one person or just one family. And that, at least, is still an attainable American ideal.