12/28/2023 0 Comments Inherent vice pancakes![]() ![]() Paranoia: Paranoia, again, as the means to make the chaotic cohere. Or maybe Doc, six or seven years after Oedipa’s lead, has assumed the alien paranoia necessary to navigate America. Eternally present.” Doc’s reply-“Groovy”-indicates a soul perhaps more at peace with the undecidable than Oedipa is. Doc has just met with Sparky, a character from the novel’s ARPANET plot (elided from the film). Sparky: “It’s all data. This dissolution is prefigured in a scene just a page or two before. Doc is solitary but joins a convoy of other drivers whose lights create a transitory community, ad hoc, meaningful but bound to dissolve. This passage comes after Oedipa drinks a lot of bourbon and decides to drive “on the freeway for a while with her lights out, to see what would happen”-precursor for the final moments of the novel Inherent Vice, where Doc-alone-drives around LA in a fog both literal and metaphorical. There is either meaning, or there is not meaning.į. For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia. Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. At Vesperhaven House either an accommodation reached, in some kind of dignity, with the Angel of Death, or only death and the daily, tedious preparations for it. ![]() Tremaine the Swastika Salesman’s reprieve from holocaust was either an injustice, or the absence of a wind the bones of the GI’s at the bottom of Lake Inverarity were there either for a reason that mattered to the world, or for skin divers and cigarette smokers. In the songs Miles, Dean, Serge and Leonard sang was either some fraction of the truth’s numinous beauty (as Mucho now believed) or only a power spectrum. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth. The final pages of The Crying of Lot 49 find Oedipa trying to make sense of the labyrinth (my emphases in bold):įor it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. A favorite line from a favorite passage from The Crying of Lot 49: “the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself.” Paranoia as a kind of sustained hope, a way to find meaning, order, a center.Į. Any number of details substantiate this claim (and alternately unravel it, if you wish, but let’s not travel there)-we could focus on the settings, sure, or maybe the cabals lurking in the metaphorical shadows of each narrative-is The Golden Fang another iteration of The Tristero?-but let me focus on the conclusions of both novels and then discuss the conclusion of PTA’s film.ĭ. Another way of saying this: Inherent Vice is sequel to The Crying of Lot 49. Oedipa Maas, precursor to Doc Sportello, trying not to lose the thread as she leaves the tower for the labyrinth, rushing dizzy into the sixties.Ĭ. It seemed much stronger the second time-not nearly as silly. I read The Crying of Lot 49 and then immediately reread it. I remembered the novel’s vibe, its milieu, but not really its details.ī. ![]() The first time I saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Inherent Vice, I was in the middle of rereading Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49, which I hadn’t read in fifteen years. ![]()
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