PT Anderson’s latest movie Inherent Vice will be released
theatrically this December (stateside, European viewers will have to hold out
until late January.) The film is hotly anticipated by two separate
but likely overlapping cult enclaves: cinephiles because it’s an Anderson
picture, and fans of cult, countercultural literature because it is the very
first cinematic adaptation of the work of the legendary Thomas Pynchon, an
author who stands as one of the few remaining literary voices indelibly stamped
by that turbulent, vibrant state of mind, or period of cultural history, which
is called the 60s, but really
encompasses the 50s through to 70s, whose characteristic embrace of drugs,
anarchism, surrealism, and mysticism still strikes some of us who came along
later as one of the most extreme outbreaks of mass sanity in modern history. His
fans will doubtless make the most of what is likely to be Hollywood’s only foray into Pynchon’s distinctive
literary universe for some time (if not all time, considering the
untranslatable nature of most of his larger works.)
Early
reviews are mixed, but hardly in a way which would unduly alarm anybody
acquainted with the source novel, as they seem to suggest a fairly faithful
adaptation of its befuddling, fractal plot and typically Pychonesque tonal
incongruities. One thing many of the
reviewers are agreed upon is in categorizing Inherent Vice as a stoner
noir. Most anybody who is even going
to be aware of Inherent Vice’s existence
probably knows what stoner noir is, having the Coens’ Big Lebowski in mind as the defining example, the virtual Shane, of this particular sub-genre of
hard-boiled ratiocination. However,
having browsed around the web, I see that there appears to be few (if any)
articles devoted to the evolution of stoner noir as a specific modern variant
of the hard-boiled detective school. By
way of warm-up for Anderson’s Inherent
Vice, that’s what I’m going to do in this post.
In
basic terms, stoner noir is exactly what it says on the tin: a detective story,
drawing on the conventions of the Chandler/Hammett hard-boiled school, where
the protagonist happens to be a pothead.
This crucial interpolation is the main wheeze or ironic pivot around
which the genre is built. Traditionally,
the detective has a certain gravitas, an inherent capability, about him. The
hardboiled detective, as the name suggests, requires at least a modicum of
toughness; otherwise, going down the mean
streets on a routine basis would be life-threatening to an unhelpful
degree. He needs to be able enough in
the realm of verbal and physical drubbing; quick to scoop up a pistol, and put
the drop on somebody, until the next party saddles in unexpectedly, and puts
the drop on him. He needs to be able to
recover rapidly from the blow of a stiff blackjack on a cold night. He’s normally cool, laconic, and
disciplined. He has a certain sex
appeal, even if it’s that weird, rake-thin
longshore man with a mouth on him vibe that was only ever considered sexy
when manifested in the persona of Humphrey Bogart. The hardboiled detective may, in a sense, be
a loser, but only in a noble or tragic manner; in a melancholic rather than
farcical register.
Most of all,
however, the gumshoe, like every other species of detective, by the very nature
of the enterprise, needs to have his shit
together, mentally. Detective plots
are complex – sometimes so complex that even their own authors don’t fully
understand them. Hollywood legend tells
us that during the filming of The Big
Sleep, neither Howards Hawks nor his screenwriters could figure out whether
chauffeur Owen Taylor had committed suicide or been murdered. Sensibly enough, they sent a cable to the
novel’s author, hoping to clarify the matter – but Chandler later conceded:
“They sent me a wire….asking me, and dammit I didn’t know either.” Existing, then, in a universe where even God
doesn’t have all the answers, the gumshoe traditionally lives and dies on his
powers of concentration, the strength of his wit.
The
stoner noir asks us: what would happen if
the gumshoe had to live or die based on the powers of concentration, the
general state of mental adroitness, characteristic of the pothead? In this sense, stoner noir operates to some
extent in the parodic tradition of the mock-heroic. According to wiki, mock-heroic fictions are
“satires or parodies that mock common Classical stereotypes of heroes and
heroic literature. Typically,
mock-heroic works either put a fool in the role of the hero or exaggerate the
heroic qualities to such a point that they become absurd.” This is a fairly good definition, but it’s
worth noting that modern mock-heroics don’t necessary seek to mock the conventions
of their classical models – they are quite often informed by a deep love of
those conventions. However, what
mock-heroics invariably do is take the heightened, perfect archetypes of
classical story-telling, and place them alongside the comic imperfections of
the real world. In so doing, they tell
us something about both the real world, and the story-telling conventions we
employ to represent it in fiction.
Stoner noir certainly replaces the unflappable, sardonic hero of the
hardboiled detective novel with a type of fool – the pothead being an ideal
modern archetype of the fool, a figure whose fraught relationship with the
hardships and nuisances of everyday life we can all identity with to some
extent. The Dude, as the Stranger
observes, takes it easy for all us sinners – all us perhaps greater fools who
are guilty of the sin of actually trying to stay up on the bucking bronco of
life, rather than just kicking back and hoping its severer mood swings will
just pass us by.
“THE BUMS WILL ALWAYS LOSE!”
An Elegy for the 60s Counterculture.
So,
to understood stoner noir, the first thing to note is that its protagonist is
somewhat more scattered, more dishevelled, than the traditional hero – and
perhaps a little bit more like ourselves in this regard. To explore what themes are important to
stoner noir – difficult enough in the context of a very loosely evolved
sub-genre – I’m going to concentrate on two which seem particularly relevant in
approaching Inherent Vice: the
disillusionment at the end of the 60s dream, and the nature of plots themselves. One of the only theoretical articles I did
find about stoner noir was an interesting piece for Boing Boing by Mark Dery called Facebook of the Dead. Dery isn’t really
writing about stoner noir as a genre here, but rather uses the term to
designate a certain malaise in 70s youth culture – a sense of cultural vacuum
opening up when all the idealisms of the 60s were gone, leaving only its
hedonistic escapism to chase an increasingly garish, mass market dragon. This specific zeitgeist, combined with Dery’s
personal, and not altogether rhapsodic, memories of high-school, give the term
a much darker aspect than we typically find in stoner noir as genre, but the
piece is worth quoting:
“By
contrast, the sludge-brained anomie of stoner noir is just what it looks like:
the rudderless yawing of youth culture on the morning after the ‘60s. It’s the numb realization that the tide that
carried in the counterculture’s utopian dreams and cries for social justice has
ebbed away, leaving the windblown scum of Altamont and My Lai, the Manson
murders and the Zodiac killer. Stoner
noir stares back at you with the awful emptiness of the black-hole eyes in a
Smiley Face. Have a nice decade. As late
as the mid-70s, the iconography of rebellion, at least in the track-home
badlands of Southern California, was a politically lobotomized version of
hippie: the bootleg records, blacklight posters, underground comix, patchouli
oil, and drug paraphernalia retailed at the local head shop.”
As
an artistic exemplum of his conception of stoner noir, Dery highlights Charles
Burns’ brilliant, somewhat dark 70s
coming of age comic book Black Hole. The difference between the bleaker stoner
noir of Dery and Burns, and the more mournful, elegiac variety found in
Pynchon, is perhaps the difference between growing up through the 60s, and growing up in its aftermath. Nevertheless, the 70s conceived as a
hang-over decade is crucial to the development of stoner noir – Robert Altman’s
The Long Goodbye, the most important
cinematic precursor to The Big Lebowski,
emerges from the foggy haze of a very specific zeitgeist: the moment when the
insurrectionary, utopian frisson of
the 60s dissipated into the aimless narcissism of the Me Generation. Hunter S. Thompson’s “high and beautiful
wave” had crashed, leaving in its wake a flotsam of glazed pleasure seekers,
health faddists, and pop psychologies, all of which hovered satellite-like
around the nebulous concept of the “self.”
These trends were consistently mapped by the movies; as early as ’71, Alan
J Pakula’s Klute registered a chilly
emptiness in the liberated sexual mores of the new decade, and as late as ’78,
Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers repositioned the Cold War
anxieties of the original firmly in the dense Californian fog of the Me
Generation. In his 1973 adaptation of
Raymond Chandler’s late Philip Marlowe novel The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman decided to relocate the action to
modern day Los Angeles. Modernizing
Chandler was not unheard of (see the trailer for Marlowe, 1969, above), but Altman made this transposition the thematic
core of the film, imagining his Philip Marlowe as a perfectly preserved relic
of the bygone values of the 40s and 50s, somehow transplanted into the flaky
miasma of 70s L.A., a kind of “Rip Van Marlowe.” Ironically, then, the first hero of stoner
noir was not himself a stoner – far from
it, Dude.
The Long Goodbye begins with a classic
mock-heroic gesture, and one of the all-time great film openings. We find Marlowe (Elliot Gould) struggling,
not with brawny hoodlums or brassy dames, but with the dietary whims of his
cat. Woken in the middle of the night,
he is forced to drive to the supermarket to try and buy the pet’s preferred
brand of cat food. When the store is out,
we next see Marlowe engage in an elaborate and ultimately unsuccessful ruse
designed to fool the cat into eating an alternative brand. Having immediately established its
unconventional Marlowe, the opening sequence also firmly locates Marlowe in a
social context of decaying 60s counterculture leftovers. Marlowe’s neighbours are a group of
permanently stoned young woman who will engage, throughout the movie, in nude
yogic exercises on their balcony. Their
existence is funded by the manufacture of scented candles which they sell in a
local head shop, prompting one of gangster Marty Augustine’s hoodlums to
observe ruefully “I remember when people JUST HAD JOBS!”
Marlowe’s
concern for his cat, like his unstinting and misguided loyalty to his friend
Terry Lennox (Tim Bouton), emphasizes his status as a heroic fool. Nobody cares about loyalty and honesty in
this fallen world, and nobody cares about Marlowe’s cat. The winners are ruthless thugs like Marty
Augustine and Terry Lennox. Most likely
well-intentioned people like Marlowe’s hippy neighbours have retreated into a
zonked-out fog of hedonistic self-exploration.
“The best lack all conviction, while he worst/Are full of passionate
intensity.” Like Paul Newman observes in
Harper (1966): “The bottom is loaded with nice people,
Albert. Only cream and bastards
rise.” Or, as the winner Lebowski tells
his loser namesake in The Big Lebowski,
“The bums will always lose!”
It
is this thematic undertow which ironically makes Altman’s movie closer in
spirit to the Chandler novels, although this aspect of the film was and
continues to be misunderstood. Upon its
release, Gould’s somewhat dishevelled take on the detective lead many viewers
to perceive nothing more than a revisionist spoof – even an affront – in the
film. Writing for Time, Jay Cocks wrote that “Altman’s lazy, haphazard put-down is
without affection or understanding, a nose-thumb not only at Philip Marlowe,
but at the genre that his tough-guy-soft-heart character epitomized.” Charles Champlin went even further in the Los Angeles Times: “This Marlowe is an untidy,
unshaven, semi-literate dimwit slob who could not locate a missing skyscraper
and who would be refused service at a hot dog stand.” Partially, the problem was that these critics
were working off memories of previous screen incarnations of Marlowe, rather
than the Chandler novels themselves.
What those previous adaptations lacked was the lonely, melancholic
spirit at the core of Chandler’s creation.
Chandler’s world is inherently a fallen one where the evil prosper, “a
world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which
hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who
made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be a finger-man
for a mob….” The redemptive figure in
all this is the lonely detective who moves through this world seeking a “hidden
truth”, always retaining his own sense of honour and integrity even though it
profits him little in a material sense.
Altman placed this melancholic aspect of Chandler – and this distinctly noirish
conception of the world – to the fore in The
Long Goodbye, whereas previous adaptations had tended to emphasize the cynical
glamour of Marlowe’s world.
But part of
the shock of Gould’s Marlowe was due to the fact that it was, in certain respects, crucially different to Chandler’s
conception. One of the things which fascinates
me about The Long Goodbye is that it
undercuts – whether intentionally or otherwise – its own central premise of the
detective as a frozen-in-time “Rip Van Marlowe.” I would argue that Gould’s Marlowe, despite
his stubborn sense of values, is a very much a product of the 70s. One of the first ways in which this premise
feels undercut is by virtue of the very casting of Gould himself. With the exception of Donald Sutherland,
surely no other actor is as quintessentially a leading man of the 70s? Gould’s Marlowe is a product of a zeitgeist
where the rise of feminism and anti-war pacifism had served to undermine many
conventional aspects of masculine heroism.
(While some may associate 70s masculinity with the Bert Reynolds
moustached stud archetype, it’s worth noting that this decade also witnessed
the iconic prominence of non-alpha type males like Dustin Hoffman and Woody
Allen. Hoffman’s breakout in 1967’s The Graduate apparently provoked a
paranoid freak-out in Steve McQueen, who feared that it signalled the demise of
the alpha male movie star. Sometimes
these days I wonder if McQueen’s freak-out wasn’t entirely unwarranted.) Hence, Gould is infinitely less confident
with women; Bogart’s implicit, unquestioned dominance of women is no longer
possible. As much as he is not a lover,
Gould’s Marlowe is even less a fighter.
The style of wisecracks, too, has changed, absorbing Gould the actor’s
more ironic, improvisatory, and zanier persona.
Marlowe’s characteristic refrain throughout The Long Goodbye – “It’s alright with me” – sometimes appears
amiable and easy-going, but more often carries the caustic, passive aggressive
sting of the later coinage “Whatever.” Like Woody Allen, this Marlowe responds to an
absurd world with wry, ironically detached humour – until, of course, the film’s
nihilistic final reel.
The Long Goodbye’s significance to the
stoner noir cannon lies primarily in the fact that is almost impossible to
imagine The Big Lebowski without
it. Both films present revisionist,
comic twists on the noir genre, featuring protagonists who are not quite the
unflappable and laconic heroes of yore – the mock-heroic tendency, obviously,
being dialled up a few notches in the case of the Dude. Marlowe’s dishevelled supermarket quest for
cat food bleeds into Lebowski’s
iconic introduction to the Dude as an informally-attired nocturnal shopper:
The Dude is
also, we are informed, uniquely a man for his times; yet also, like Altman’s
Marlowe, a throwback to an earlier era, a man out of time. He is a Rip Van Winkle who has not so much
been asleep, as stoned out of his gourd, for decades. The real-life influence for Jeffrey “the Dude”
Lebowski was former political activist and film producer Jeff Dowd. Dowd – along with SIX OTHER GUYS – made up the
“Seattle Seven”, a core group of Seattle Liberation Front members who were
charged with “conspiracy to incite a riot” following a protest at the Seattle Federal
Court in 1970. After the hurly-burly of
60s student activism, the Seven went this way and that, with Dowd drifting to
Hollywood to work as a screen-writer and producer, where he would encounter the
Coens while they were promoting Blood
Simple in the early 80s. To find a
fictional precursor to the Dude, however, we will turn to Vineland, Thomas Pynchon’s novel of California in 1984, the year of
Orwellian undertones and (not coincidentally for Pynchon) Ronald Reagan’s
re-election.
Vineland was the first Pynchon novel
published since the gargantuan Gravity’s
Rainbow, some 17 years earlier.
Perhaps because of this long wait, coupled its shorter length,
comparatively simpler structure, and unexpectedly gentle and sentimental tone, Vineland has been consistently
underestimated by critics and Pynchon devotees, frequently dismissed as
Pynchon-lite. Though by no means as imposing
as the larger quasi-historical works, Vineland
may nevertheless be the most perfectly executed of Pynchon’s novels, and has
struck some readers as the most direct and emotionally resonant. Just as its tie-dye plot spirals off into
multiple flashbacks, tangents, and interludes, before finally returning to its
beginning, Vineland is a novel of
many homecomings: the political past coming home to roast in the present; the
psychedelic adventurers of the 60s coming home after their long, strange trips
to (something at least a little bit like) everyday reality; Pynchon himself,
the literary anarchist/outlaw of the 70s, coming back from the often scary
headtrip of Gravity’s Rainbow to
(something at least a little bit more like) the realist novel, and to themes of
familial responsibility and the American present.
For the
purpose of this essay, our focus is on the novel’s (sometimes) protagonist,
Zoyd Wheeler. Like the Dude, Zoyd is a
burned-out, slightly frazzled aging hippie, who is nevertheless mostly together
(after his own fashion). Washing up in
harsher, less giddily Technicolor decades (the 80s for Zoyd, 90s for the Dude),
the protagonists of Vineland and The Big Lebowski show only partial adaption
to the passage of time: both still smoke large quantities of weed, and both
bask in the recollection of former acid epiphanies. Both find the pursuit of their marginal and
largely placid existences abruptly shattered, Zoyd’s by the re-emergence of his
old Federal nemesis Brock Vond, and the Dude’s by the desecration of his
room-completing rug.
Vineland is Pynchon’s greatest elegy for
the 60s counterculture, a period and ethos which the author clearly celebrates,
for all its woolly-headed flaws, as a unique, almost miraculous time when it
briefly appeared possible for the world to fork off from the highway of modern
history, to veer away from its implacable course of technocratic, militaristic
capitalism, off onto kinder, stranger side-roads. This sense is beautifully expressed in an exchange
in Vineland between Zoyd Wheeler and
Wendell “Mucho” Mass (Opedia Mass’s deejay husband from back in 1966’s The Crying of Lot 49). The timeline of the scene is roughly analogous
to Inherent Vice; with the looming
spectre of Manson, the Nixonian counter-revolution, and the increasing commercialisation
of rock n’ rock, the death of the 60s dream is drawing in.
Mucho blinked
sympathetically, a little sadly. “I
guess it’s over. We’re into a new world
now, it’s the Nixon Years, and then it’ll be the Reagan Years - ”
“Ol’ Raygun? No way he’ll ever make president.”
“Just please be
careful, Zoyd. ‘Cause soon they’re gonna
be coming after everything, not just drugs, but beer, cigarettes, sugar, salt,
fat, you name it, anything that could remotely please any of your senses,
because they need to control all that.
And they will.”
“Fat police?”
“Perfume police. Tube Police.
Music Police. Good Healthy Shit
Police. Best to renounce everything now,
get a head start.”
“Well, I wish it was
back then, when you were the Count. Remember
how the acid was? Remember that
windowpane, down in Laguna that time?
God, I knew then, I knew….”
They had a look. “Uh-huh, me too. That you were never going to die. Ha! No
wonder the State panicked. How are they
supposed to control a population that knows it’ll never die? When that was always their last big chip,
when they thought they had the power of life and death. But acid gave us the X-ray vision to see through
that one, so of course they had to take it away from us.”
“Yeah, but they can’t
take what happened, what we found out.”
“Easy. They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill up every
minute, keep us distracted, it’s what the Tube is for, and though it kills me
to say it, it’s what rock n’ roll is becoming – just another way to claim our
attention, so that beautiful certainty we had starts to fade, and after a while
they have us convinced all over again that we really are going to die. And they’ve got us again.” It was the way people used to talk.
“I’m not going to
forget,” Zoyd vowed, “fuck ‘em. While we
had it, we really had some fun.” (Vineland.)
Inherent Vice is also infused with this
sense of sorrow at the end of youth, the end of an era, and the closing down of
the temporary autonomous zone of the real and metaphorical 60s: “….and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level
bummer he couldn’t find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this
little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back
into darkness…..how a certain hand might reach terribly out of darkness and
reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for
good.” As an aside, somebody really should write a song
(possibly in the psych-Country vein) called Caught
In a Low-Level Bummer (I Can’t Find a Way Out Of).
Conclusion: AS LONG AS THE TALK IS HARD AND THE ACTION HARDER.
Anyway, it is
via Altman’s Long Goodbye, and
Pynchon’s Vineland that we arrive at The Big Lebowski, and hence stoner
noir. (I’m not sure that Vineland was a conscious influence on
the part of the Coens, but it’s always played primarily like a mixture of those
two elements for me.) Vast sociological desertions
and studies might be written about precisely why The Big Lebowski struck such an indelible chord with a fairly large
sub-set of the film-viewing public – particularly men of a certain generation. It was first released in 1998 to a mixed
critical response and lukewarm box-office, but repeat viewings on DVD created a
snowballing cult phenomenon – first noted in Steve Palopoli’s 2002 piece The Last Cult Picture – which would ultimately
result in the near-canonisation of Jeff Bridges, and the sense that the Dude
was some kind of modern archetype, comparable in significance to Hamlet. Maybe it was that a generation of young men, making
their first inroads into the travails of the adult world, were suddenly struck
with the intimation that perhaps trying to stay up on the bucking bronco of
life – earning a crust, advancing in a career, chasing carnal pleasures, pursing
endless trophies or minor affirmations of the ego, voting, everything – might actually
turn out to be the original low-level
bummer that you can’t find a way out of.
Something like what Dustin Hoffman was going through in The Graduate, every time he’d look off
into the near-distance, and Paul Simon’s arpeggios start to fade in over the score.
Or maybe it was just that Bridges’ unique
charisma, likeability, and maturing handsomeness somehow managed to make an
otherwise marginal and unrewarding existence seem idyllic.
Howsoever, I’m
going to finish by briefly considering The
Big Lebowski in relation to the second stoner noir theme I wanted to look
at: plot. The idea of plots – complex, puzzling,
sometimes illusory - ties together the various strands of this story like a
good Moroccan rug. In a sense, the idea
of a plot has always connected the
world of the detective and that of the stoner – the good detective story
requiring a plot above all else, and the stoner often being subject to the
conspiranoid intimation that everything
might be some kind of plot. The complexity of the traditional detective
plot is a large part of the stoner noir gag – witness, for example, the Dude
undertaking a “strict drug regime” in order to keep his mind “limber” enough to
meet the mental rigours of the case:
When The Big Sleep was released in ’46, there
was a general consensus that the plot was mystifying. Bosley Crowther observed that “so many
cryptic things occur amid so much involved and devious plotting that the mind
becomes utterly confused.” Crowther
concluded that the movie “was a web of utter bafflement.” However, a writer for Time argued that the plot’s “crazily mystifying blur” was an asset,
and that The Big Sleep was “wakeful
fare for folks who don’t care what is going on, or why, so long as the talk is
hard and the action harder.” This raises
an interesting point about hardboiled detective plots: in one sense they are
all important, and in another almost completely arbitrary. For all their
complexity, their function is largely to keep the dialogue, and the detective’s
encounters with the bizarre, the beautiful, and the deadly, coming hard and
fast – to keep, in other words, the “talk hard and the action harder.” A good example of this is Robert Aldrich’s
1955 Mickey Spillane adaptation Kiss Me
Deadly. This movie is all plot, and
yet the plot itself is largely made up of an arbitrary pursuit of the ultimate McGuffin – the mysterious, shinning case
which would re-emerge much later in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Kiss Me Deadly’s script feels very
self-conscious about all this, as we see in Velda Wickman’s somewhat
Pynchonesque speech at the mid-point:
“They? A wonderful word. And who are they? They’re the nameless ones who kill people for
the Great Whatsit. Does it exist? Who cares?
Everyone everywhere is so involved in the fruitless search for what?”
The stoner
noir genre tends to engage this aspect of detective plots – their complexity and
ultimate arbitrariness – with affectionate humour. Joel Coen said of Lebowksi that they wanted to “do a Chandler kind of story – how it
moves episodically, and deals with the characters trying to unravel a mystery,
as well as having a hopelessly complex plot that’s ultimately unimportant.” For this reason, the “plot” of The Big Lebowski unravels and evaporates
in the last act into a fog of misdirection and misapprehension which the
various actors had fashioned around an illusory kidnapping. This relates also to the paranoia of
potheads, and the literary paranoia of Pynchon’s work. The paranoiac’s grand plot also tends to evaporate
and vanish, either at the point where the paranoiac realizes that the plot was,
all along, a creation of his or her possibly weed-befogged brain – or, at the
point where the plot reaches it maximal state of complexity, and hence vanishes
because it has become everything and nothing.
This brings to mind the famous passage in The Crying of Lot 49 which many have taken as emblematic of Pynchon’s
work:
In Mexico City, they somehow
wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile
Remedios Varo: in the central paintings of a triptych, titled ‘Bordando el
Manto Terrestre’, were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge
eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower,
embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a
void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and
creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this
tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.
A LOT of strands, in other words, in old Duder’s head. It will be very interesting to see how PT
Anderson fares out in translating Pynchon’s sensibility to the screen, and
whether, in the longer term, Inherent
Vice will follow The Long Goodbye
and The Big Lebowski in eventually acquiring a cult following after meeting with initially mixed responses.
References.
Facebook of the dead, by Mark Dery.
The Simple Art of Murder, by Raymond Chandler.
The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon.
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