Inherent Vice

“In America, it’s always paranoid time,” writes American libertarian Jesse Walker, in his book dissecting the paranoid culture of American politics and conspiracy theory as part of the core of American culture. For him, conspiracy theories matter not because they may be true or false, but because they function as folklore, revealing social anxieties. Rather than treating them as a marginal symptom, in Walker’s view, from the First World War to the present, American society has located a certain truth in conspiracy theories themselves, and the anxieties and experiences of those who believe in them. Fear of conspiracy recurs constantly across the entire political and social spectrum.

Whatever prompted Thomas Pynchon—the grand old ‘Pope of Paranoia’ in American literature—to return, in 2009, to the early 1970s—a decade of what the American writer Erik Davis describes as ‘high weirdness’—complete with characters who might have wandered out of Paul Morrissey films of the same decade, through his novel Inherent Vice, the author revived a dense, very Californian paranoia, from a time before the confidence of the Californian Ideology took hold. (By this I mean that characteristic Californian way of thinking that fuses free-market libertarianism, technological optimism, and the remnants of countercultural/hippie individualism, consolidated in 90s Silicon Valley and brought back in the late 2000s, when technological determinism appeared as the answer to every problem.) Five years after Pynchon’s novel’s publication, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of the book was released (in the same year, 2014, as Walker’s aforementioned book The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory). PTA rendered with striking clarity the idea that the paranoia of the early 1970s might well resonate with the political condition of America in the mid-2010s. As Charles Manson once put it: “Total paranoia is just total awareness.”

Private investigator Larry “Doc” Sportello, who likes to style himself as a doctor, is visited by his ex-girlfriend, who asks him to investigate her new lover—a wealthy real-estate mogul whose wife and her lover are conspiring to commit to a mental institution. This investigation leads Doc into a wide, complex, blurry, and elusive chain of interconnected cases. The narrative of Inherent Vice is erected out of the atmosphere of early-1970s California after the collapse of the dream of the sixties: a world filled with disorientation, paranoia, boredom, frustration, and a sense of collective loss. The trauma and tumult present in 1970s America were often concealed beneath kitsch and surface phenomena—sideburns, smiley faces, and endless marijuana, all of which Inherent Vice displays so vividly—while beneath that surface lay a spreading fear of terror, ecological collapse, the surveillance society, political cynicism, state conspiracy, and defeat in war. On the surface, the world of Inherent Vice feels funny, stoned, hallucinogenic, groovy, and idiotic, yet beneath it there is madness, loss, repression, and conspiracy. In terms of the film’s form and aesthetics, it is not only the plot that is built out of shadowy networks, never fully settling on an answer; the form PTA gives the film—intensely hazy, layered, full of interference—replicates the experience of mid-2010s contemporary American politics, in which everyone could sense that something was rotten but no one could precisely map it. (Mind you, six months after PTA’s film’s release, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the US presidential election, and in November 2016 he would be voted into office.)

“Conspiracy theory is everyday politics,” writes the American Marxist Jodi Dean. Inherent Vice offers a precise illustration of such. Politics appears not primarily as a clear ideological debate, but in the everyday experience of narcotics, policing, business, media, and intimate secret relationships, all of which seem to infiltrate and intervene in one another. In the world of Inherent Vice, conspiracy is not an exception but the everyday form of social life in early-1970s California. This paranoid world reveals an important logic within the culture of the early 1970s: paranoia is not merely a disorder, but rather a way of reading the world when the boundaries between revelation, coincidence, conspiracy, and hidden patterning begin to waver. Inherent Vice poses an essential question: how can one live when almost everything appears connected, yet never clearly enough to be certain?

PTA reintroduces the conspiracy fever of early-1970s American popular culture—but with a more stoned, more surreal inflection than that decade’s films such as Three Days of the Condor (1975) or Alan J. Pakula’s paranoia trilogy, into a contemporary world in which cinema popularises images of a state subverted from within and betraying public trust. Inherent Vice can be read as a film that reactivates the formal and affective memory of  70s paranoid cinema, born of a time when the machinery of US interventionism was working at full speed beneath the atmosphere of the Cold War—from Vietnam to the Iranian Revolution—and returned home to colonise domestic American life itself. (Counterculture, too, was never entirely outside the American imperial machine; it was a product of the domestic hangover from interventionism.) Thus what PTA brings back in 2014 through Inherent Vice is not merely countercultural nostalgia, but the darker side of that decade itself: a portrait of the transition from freedom of thought to a world full of paranoia and anxiety in America, a condition that continues to be felt to this day, amid a foreign policy that seems unable to stop intervening in other countries.