Lately a fair bit of traffic has been coming to this blog for a posting
from 2013 titled “Pedestrianizing With Pynchon,” my response to Thomas Pynchon’s
novel Bleeding Edge, wondering whether
the great man is a New York flaneur – conclusion: probably. That post can be found here:
And maybe that traffic is arriving because of Paul Thomas Anderson’s new
movie of Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice,
which I saw at the weekend. It’s a noirish
tale, and there are a cool cars a plenty – the hero Doc Sportello (played by Jaoquin Phoenix) drives a 1964
Dodge Dart, and it’s definitely not a walking movie per se, but there’s some
interesting walking in it: stoners detectives, cops, hippie chicks, dodgy
dentists, dodgy doctors, dodgy lawyers, all moving in their own special way.
One big problem the movie had to overcome was to make sure that Doc
didn’t resemble the Dude from The Big
Lebowski too much – and I think it pretty much succeeds in that. Did the Dude do any walking in the Coen brothers
movie? Surely he must have, but I can’t immediately
recall much of it. Does walking in a
supermarket count?
For most of the 160 minutes of the movie of Inherent Vice, I was gently bored, then sometimes I was savagely
bored, and occasionally I was quite entertained.
I have no desire to be a film critic, but I’d say (and my fellow scribe
and psychogeographer Anthony Miller said this first and put into words exactly
what I was thinking but hadn’t quite verbalized) the movie manages to be utterly
unPynchonesque.
Still, seeing the movie did remind me how little I remembered of the
novel. I deliberately didn’t reread any of it before seeing the movie, but
returning to the book now, I see some very interesting mentions of walking,
pacing, wandering and strolling.
Within the first ten pages Doc meets up with his pal Denis (it’s
pronounced to rhyme with penis): “They
walked up to Dunecrest and turned left into the honky-tonk part of town. Pipeline Pizza was jumping, the smoke so
thick inside you couldn’t see from one end of the bar to the other. The jukebox, audible all the way to El Porto
and beyond, was playing ‘Sugar, Sugar’ by the Archies.”
A little later Doc meets up with Hope Harlingen, the wife of a missing sax
player:
“She got up and started pacing.
She was not a weeper but she was a pacer, which Doc appreciated, it kept
the information coming, there was a beat to it.”
I think this is a very shrewd observation about walking, talking and pace. In the movie the actors just sit there and
deliver the lines.
About a third of the way into the book Leo and Elmina (full disclosure - I had absolutely no memory of who these
characters were – they turn out to be Doc’s parents) are staying at the Skyhook
Lodge, “which did a lot of airport business and was populated day and night
with the insomniac, the stranded and deserted, not to mention an occasional
certified zombie. ‘Wandering all up and
down the halls,’ said Elmina ‘men in business suits, women in evening gowns,
people in their underwear or sometimes nothing at all, toddlers staggering
around looking for their parents, drunks, drug addicts, police, ambulance
technicians, so many room service carts they get into traffic jams, who needs to get in the car and go any place, the whole city of Los Angeles s right there
five minutes from the airport.’”
Yes! Hell yes! This is
why we love Pynchon (if we do).
And then in Vegas Doc goes into The Kismet casino: “Doc
got out and strolled under a Byzantine archway and into the seedy vastness of
the main gaming floor, dominated by a ruinous chandelier draped over the tables
and cages and pits. Disintegrating, ghostly, huge, and, if it had feelings,
likely resentful.”
Sure, it’s going to be really, really hard to put that
idea on film, but if you’re going make a version of a Pynchon novel, I think
you really ought to try to find some filmic equivalent.
Oh, and another, not really all that relevant thing, I did find this very sweet picture of Bridges and Goodman doing some fancy walking at a Big Lebowski event.
