Boogie Nights

In March this year, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another swept the Academy Awards, winning Best Film and Best Director, among other accolades. That this came thirty years after he shot Boogie Nights, his epic second feature, in the summer of 1996, felt all the more significant. During the intervening decades Anderson’s filmography had received 23 Oscar nominations (including three for Boogie Nights) but only three wins (Lead Actor and Cinematography for There Will Be Blood, and Costume Design for Phantom Thread). One Battle’s victories cemented the Hollywood establishment’s long-awaited embrace of PTA, and showed how the tastes and priorities of the mainstream industry have shifted as the voting pool has diversified and the range of middle-tier Hollywood movies being made has bottomed out.

It is easy to pigeonhole Anderson as the ultimate film-bro filmmaker, but Boogie Nights inaugurated Anderson as one of the great comedy directors—I’d argue most of his films since have been comedies in one way or another, albeit tragic ones, with the hilarious One Battle After Another no exception—and suggested that for all his ostentatious displays of virtuosity PTA is ultimately an odds-and-ends sort of guy, drawn to long sequences of schlubby buddies goofing around inside exquisitely detailed period recreations. Upon Boogie Nights’ release, the 26-year-old Anderson was hailed as an Orson Welles-like megawatt prodigy of the New 90s, riding high on the artistic freedoms afforded by the film’s generous $15 million budget and New Line Cinema’s gamble on granting the young director the creative control he craved, after his negative experience with dispiriting studio interventions into his debut Hard Eight (1996). Along with outstanding performances by Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, and Burt Reynolds, as well as a perfectly terrible-wonderful Mark Wahlberg, part of the edginess that made Boogie Nights a surprise hit with audiences stemmed from its salacious subject matter: the making of pornographic movies, specifically the transition from the industry’s Golden Age of the 1970s to its rapid decline in the 1980s.

Anderson grew up in the San Fernando Valley, slowly realising that the warehouses and suburban houses all around him were being used as porn sets, a parallel moviemaking industry hidden in plain sight. An expansion of Anderson’s mockumentary short The Dirk Diggler Story (1988)—itself a loving send-up of the porn documentary Exhausted: John C. Holmes, the Real Story (1981)—Boogie Nights was greenlit by New Line in the febrile atmosphere of that ‘90s indie boom. Following a phallically gifted busboy (Wahlberg) who turns into a major porn star, the film shows his rise and fall through the euphoric heyday that followed the “porno chic” boom, into the coke‑addled video era. Around him are a dysfunctional family of misfits, outcasts, and broken people of all kinds, who engage not only in hedonistic acts of sex and drug taking but also, prodigiously, in the nuts-and-bolts labour of making pornographic films. The young Anderson, intoxicated by the rituals of a disreputable industry, strives to depict people who chase perfection inside a system that sucks them dry.

This Golden Age of porn resulted in some remarkable films, but not even the best of them can quite match PTA’s bravura stylisation in Boogie Nights, enabled by its lavish budget and characterised by ostentatious Steadicam sequences blitzing through the living rooms and impromptu sets of this world of industrial sleaze. What is heady and absorbing in the first half—all those sinuous tracking shots through a landscape of chintzy interiors that paradoxically seem endless and open—gives way to frantic, paranoid desolation in the second, the editing and camera movements growing more ragged and fragmented as cocaine and the strains of a collapsing industry gnaw at the edges of this world. By 1984, when the story concludes, pornography had begun to transition decisively to cheap video. With this sea change, directors were forced either to abandon ambitious style altogether or to pivot to more “real” POV docu‑porn.

Take Roberta Findlay, one of the only women making commercially distributed X-rated films in the period depicted in Boogie Nights. In the 1970s, she was making several artistically ambitious pornographic films each year, all shot on 35mm film; by 1985 she would make a cynical half‑documentary cash‑in on the suicide of starlet Shauna Grant, stitching together “real” interviews and recycled hardcore footage, and by 1989—the year of Jamie Gillis’s On the Prowl, the original “gonzo” film Anderson paid dubious tribute to in Boogie Nights’ doomed street‑porn episode—she had left filmmaking altogether. In its own way, Anderson’s porn epic is another artifact of that previous moment: a mainstream studio feature that takes Golden Age hardcore seriously as a meaningful film culture, even as video and gonzo had by that time more or less totally torn it apart.

Ultimately, even a warm and tight-knit family as this one is doomed because it is based on business and on anatomy. When the conditions change—financing models break down, personal traumas explode into the open—the whole family dynamic grows toxic and starts to collapse. That narrative is also a parable about the state of the film industry more broadly. In Boogie Nights, Jack Horner’s pride in shooting “real film, with real stories” in a small‑scale Eden that is about to be wiped out by cheaper formats parallels what the 1970s “New Hollywood” American cinema— which PTA idolised and continues to consciously draw inspiration from—looked like from the ‘90s vantagepoint: a paradise that had been supplanted by a more tightly ordered, anonymous industrial model. Throughout his career, Anderson would return time and again to stories of obsessive men and fragile communities trying desperately to keep precarious worlds like these intact as the earth shifts beneath them.

As Boogie Nights winds down and the characters are faced with the consequences of their many ill-judged decisions, one can feel Anderson fighting against the impulse to easy moralism. It’s his love of these people, his ability to depict their personal failings with tenderness and without the kind of flippant condescension so familiar to that 90s era, that gives Boogie Nights its heart.