Inherent Vice (2014)

directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

James Brubaker

I. “Hello Little Hippie. How Are You?”

Everything will be fucked, is fucked, has been fucked, and for longer than you think. Don’t mention it to a Boomer though—they’ll be too busy telling you what it was like in 1967 to understand that they were too busy in 1967 getting stoned and laid to notice that the fix was in and nothing they could do was going to save anyone—the 1% had already won. Despair.

This is what Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice is about. This is also what Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice is about, but they’re about it in different ways. We’ll get to that. As for this essay, I’m not sure what it’s going to be about anymore. I began writing it before COVID-19 changed everything. That first paragraph up above, that, or something like it, was always going to be the first paragraph. As for what’s to come? We’ll see. But to be honest, these last few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about a particular cat. We’ll get to that, too.

II. “Paranoia Alert”

Let’s get one thing straight, here. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice does have a plot, and that plot checks out, and it matters. A lot of folks swear the film is plotless, or that the plot doesn’t make sense. They’re wrong. It’s more or less the same plot as Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, but streamlined, and with Anderson putting his thumb on the scale for full-hearted humanism over Pynchon’s stoned alienation. What’s the plot? In as few words as possible: Doc Sportello’s ex-old lady Shasta Fay Hepworth asks him to look into a plot against her new guy, millionaire real estate developer Mickey Wolfman. Then Wolfman goes missing. As it happens, Wolfman was planning on dumping truckloads of money into a real estate development called “Arrepentimiento”—“sorry about that,” the film translates for us—where humans would be invited to live for free, because why should people have to pay for shelter? Of course the wealthy elite couldn’t let a plan like that ride, and so they deem Wolfman mentally unfit, and disappear him to a rehab facility where they rip the hippie idealism out of him, kickstart his capitalist heart, and shove him back into the world. Of course, the Wolfman stuff wraps up early, but as with any good detective story, that first mystery is just a point of entry, sending Doc deep into the dregs of dead American Dreams. Along the way, he meats Hope Harlingen, who believes her husband Coy, pronounced dead, is actually still alive. Coy, you see, had been a saxophone player for a cult surf-rock band called the Boards, and his death was faked for him so he could kick his dope habit and rake in a hefty chunk of change for his family—in exchange, he’d work for a shady organization called Vigilant California, never to return home, which Doc ultimately remedies. Doc also helps avenge the death of asshole cop Bigfoot Bjornson’s partner. And, finally, through all of this, Doc comes to realize he’s wandered into a vast conspiracy run by a mysterious crime syndicate called the Golden Fang—it’s all connected, man.

III. “P.S. Beware the Golden Fang”

The Golden Fang is basically a working model of late capitalism, a prime example of vertical integration that commodifies human suffering. Here’s how their scheme works—using Vigilant California and their political sway, they encourage societal upheaval through war and turmoil (ie., Vietnam and Vietnam Protests). Then, when Americans can’t handle the misery of watching the news, they turn to dope, in the form of heroin imported by the Golden Fang, who also runs the rehab facility where the dopers wind up, and dental practices where the recovered dopers go to get new teeth after the heroin rots their old ones. It’s a top to bottom money-printing enterprise, driven by the elite businessmen and politicians who run the Golden Fang. I mean, sure it sounds far-fetched in such stream-lined form, but is it that different from our current military and medical industrial complexes? Those systems that profit from our pain and misery while all the money in the world keeps trickling up, up, up to those who need it least?

IV. “Simba” by Les Baxter

This is the song that plays when Doc Sportello gets knocked out on his way out of Chick Planet, and wakes up next to the remains of Glen Charlock. It’s that weird, proto-exotica, pre-tiki ditty with the tropical drums and choral voices. I’m only talking about the song, now, though, because it reminds me of Weezer. Not the band—a cat. My wife and I went for a walk recently in our neighborhood in St. Louis. It was one of those shelter-at-home walks, one of the few things we leave the house for anymore, and we started seeing posters for a missing cat plastered all over the street signs and dumpsters. As we neared home at walk’s end, cutting down an alley as a shortcut, we saw a strange cat, swerving like she was drunk and looking as lost and out of place as I’ve ever seen a cat look. Stranger still, the damn thing was shaved with a burst of fur at the tip of its tail. I watched the cat hunch up and awkwardly crawl toward and into an abandoned garage off the alley. I said, “Is that a fucking monkey?” And Jess said, “I think it’s the cat from the poster.” I said, “No way, it’s too dark.” She said, “I’m calling,” and when I turned around, she already had her phone out and was dialing the number from one of the posters on a nearby telephone pole. She described the cat to the person who answered. That person said it sounded like their cat. Told us the cat’s name was Weezer.

We waited on the street for Weezer’s owners, a young couple, probably Gen Z it turned out, so we could show them where the cat was hiding out. Because of social distancing, and because we were worried we’d spook the cat into not coming out if we were hanging around, Jess and I sipped a Miller Lite and a Miller High Life, respectively, on our front steps and waited for the couple to emerge from the alley, one of them lifting Weezer above their head as if she were Simba in The Lion King. The couple didn’t come, and they didn’t come. Something was wrong. They were having trouble coaxing Weezer from her hiding spot. We wanted to help them—felt almost desperate to help. We’d barely left our house for seven weeks, and goddamn we needed this sweet young couple to get their stupid-looking cat back. Jess walked back over to the alley and asked if they needed help, and we brought out an old kennel from our basement and some extra treats and food we hoped would help lure the cat out. Turns out, they’d had Weezer for only a couple of weeks, and so the cat wasn’t comfortable enough to come to her owners easily. We left the supplies, backed away, and waited, wishing we could do anything else to help. We ached to help. What else could we do? I don’t just mean about the cat, but about anything? It seemed like helping those kids get their cat back was the only good we could affect in the world in the face of so much disaster around us, everywhere.

V. “Coy and I Should Have Met Cute, Instead We Met Squalid”

If there’s one big difference between Pynchon’s Inherent Vice and Anderson’s Inherent Vice, it’s the amount of heart each one brings to the table. That is, Pynchon’s doesn’t have a ton of heart. Anderson’s does. We learn about Coy and Hope Harlingen early in the film, when Doc is called out to Hope’s house. She tells a graphic story about vomiting a balloon full of heroin onto Coy while he’s taking a shit. Pynchon’s novel plays it crass, poking fun at these ex-dopers who got clean, whereas Anderson’s take finds the couple and their daughter serving as the film’s unexpected emotional center. There’s something weirdly endearing about Owen Wilson’s Coy Harlingen, desperately pumping Doc Sportello for information about his wife and daughter. “Any sign of the Little Kid Blues?” Coy asks Doc at one point. Doc tells him no. Maybe this is the sappy version of Inherent Vice. Maybe Pynchon’s version, for all its pessimism and cynicism, is the more honest version. For what it’s worth, Inherent Vice is the rare film I prefer to the book. Call me a sucker or a sap, but I prefer the heart.

VI. “The Little Kid Blues”

As Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice winds down, we see disappointment and fear settling over Doc. There’s the sex scene with Shasta, you know the one, uncomfortable and raw, when she tells Doc all about how Wolfman treated her like an object. It hurts Doc not because he is jealous or angry at Wolfman’s misogyny, but because he knows that deep down, he’s not that different. Doc is the Sixties—an outwardly nice ideal that’s fucked to its core. At least Doc recognizes it in himself. Shasta sees it too—she asks Doc, “What kinda girl do you need?” She suggests maybe he’d like a Manson chick, one of those “Submissive, brainwashed, horny little teeners who do exactly what you want before you even know what that is.” After a few beats more, she’s encouraged Doc to fuck her hard and fast, empty and ugly. When he’s finished, Shasta says, “This doesn’t mean we’re back together.” And as Doc realizes his own ugliness, we see, too, that he fully recognizes how fucked and rigged American capitalism has become—if even he is built from the same corrupt pieces, what hope is there for anyone. This is when Doc understands he can’t fix a damn thing by going up against the Golden Fang—the good guys can only lose in this story. The good guys can only ever lose.

But, running parallel to Doc’s defeat, there’s a glimmer of something else—of kindness, of sweetness, of goodness. And we get to it when Sortilege, played by Joanna Newsom, asks, “What’s on your mind, Doc? What’s going to nag at you in the middle of the night?” Doc Sportello says, “Little kid blues” and “saxophone players”—his words sing. He is, of course, referring to the Harligens. Why are these the things that are going to keep Doc up at night? Is it some secret from his past? Did he have a deadbeat dad? Does he have a soft spot for kids? None of that shit matters. The reason this is the thing that will keep Doc up at night is because it’s the one thing he might be able to actually change.

And he does—trading a trunkful of the Golden Fang’s primo smack back to them in exchange for Coy Harlingen’s freedom to be resurrected and return to his family.

VII. “Journey Through the Past” by Neil Young

For our part, Jess and I weren’t going to be heroes in helping the young Gen Z couple catch Weezer. There was only so much we could do. We sat on our front stoop and sipped our beers. I thought about an afternoon not unlike this day I’m talking about, but in Dayton, Ohio, maybe seventeen years ago, when I found a box with three kittens in it sticking out from under an abandoned van in the alley behind the house I was living in. I took those kittens in, and one of them is still living with me. The kittens were young enough I had to feed them with a bottle, put drops in their eyes to stave off infection. They wouldn’t have made it through the night had I not brought them inside all those years ago. This cat in our alley recently, though, Weezer—she was older, for sure, but I don’t think she could have taken care of herself. If a cat can truly take care of itself outside, you’re probably never going to catch it. Weezer, with the puffball tail, and uneven gait, Weezer, weaving down the alley as if she’d just left the bar, Weezer, hiding out in an abandoned garage that we know for a fact is homebase for a wily, rough and tumble pack of strays—if those kids didn’t get their cat back and soon, that poor bastard wouldn’t make it through the night.

VIII. “Precious Cargo that Couldn’t Be Insured”

According to both Pynchon’s and Anderson’s Inherent Vice, the phrase “Inherent Vice” is a maritime insurance term referring to cargo that can’t be covered due to “what you can’t avoid.” Sauncho tells Doc, “eggs break, chocolate melts.” A quick look at a more formal legal definition of the term, though, finds a clearer, more on-the-nose meaning: “Inherent vice means a defect in the goods themselves which by its development tends to the destruction or injury of the goods.” The metaphor is maybe a bit too tidy, but it’s clearly about America, right? The use of this term, inherent vice, is meant to tell us that nothing went wrong with America, but was always, already wrong. The fucked nature of everything has been baked in since the word go, and it’s only been accelerating.

IX. “Remember that day with the Ouija board?”

As Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice ends, Doc and Shasta are driving—where? We don’t really know. Doc looks uneasy. Shasta does a little, too. A beam of light falls across Doc’s eyes, illuminating some heavy dread. Real, pure dread. The kind of dread that tells us he knows he can’t go back to seeing the world the way he did before he encountered the Golden Fang. The kind of dread that cuts hard and deep and draws real blood. A dread that will live on, and on, and on, and on in all of us, even if we don’t know where it came from, because we’ll all always know, deep down, no matter what stories we tell ourselves, that everything is fucked. And sometimes the only way to make it through a day in that fucked world is to reunite a saxophone player with his family, or a cat with its owners.

As we might expect, the film’s closing moments echo this despair, even if it is filtered through Doc’s busted compass, no better than the assholes who’ve been ruining his life through the entire film: right before the light falls across Doc’s face and the film ends, he asks Shasta the one question he has to ask her, even if we know what the answer is going to be—

“Does this mean we’re back together?”

“Of course not,” Shasta says.

X. “Any Day Now” by Chuck Jackson

Here’s something good, though let’s not call it hope: that Gen Z couple, they caught their cat. We weren’t there to see it, of course, but the young woman sent a text. Thanked us for the tip. Told us another neighbor had come out with a trap, and the combination of their trap and the treats we provided had been enough to catch Weezer and take him home. I slept a little lighter that night. Still, I knew I would wake up to a news cycle in which politicians were encouraging working class Americans to risk their lives to protect the interests of billionaire capitalists, who would also be working to squeeze every ounce of profit they could out of the broken health care system that might at least help protect those workers if it actually tried. Fuck. I don’t know how to change any of that. I don’t know that we can. And maybe reuniting a cat with its owners doesn’t mean much when faced with so much awfulness, everywhere, but what else can we do once we realize that everything we hoped to someday win is already, has always been lost?

James Brubaker is the author of The Taxidermist's Catalog, Black Magic Death Sphere: (science) fictions, Liner Notes, and Pilot Season. He lives in Missouri with his wife, teachers writing, and runs Southeast Missouri State University Press.