LA Dreamscape: Inherent Vice, The Big Fix, The Big Lebowski, The Long Goodbye

When did the 1960's end in California? Or more accurately when did the optimistic spirit of the 60's end? With the election of Richard Nixon? With the assassination of Robert Kennedy & Martin Luther King? With the deaths at the free Rolling Stones concert at Altamont? With the murder of Sharon Tate? Whenever it happened the mood in the 1970's was quite different from that of the 60's. The naive hedonism of the baby boomers was cured by Watergate, the oil crisis, recession and defeat in Vietnam. The 70s was a disillusioned cynical age. To be honest I'm not a huge fan of the baby boomers. The Greatest Generation won World War 2 and put a man on the moon but the boomers don't seem to have done much of anything have they? No cure for cancer, no mission to Mars... Still they did give us good movies and the 1970's might well be the greatest decade that there's ever been in American cinema. The other day for a bit of fun I curated a little film festival for myself watching 4 movies set in Los Angeles in the post 60's hangover. 
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Inherent Vice (2014) dir by Paul Thomas Anderson is based on the Thomas Pynchon novel of the same name. Its about the misadventures of a stoner private eye who gets mixed up in a complicated missing persons case after doing a favour for his old lady in and around Manhattan Beach circa 1971. A funny diverting novel has been turned into a kind of dull movie by LA native Anderson. Without a budget to film exteriors this is basically a chamber piece. Joaquin Phoenix does his usual terrific job as the lead and the supporting cast is good but the story bogs down badly in the second act. Paranoia, betrayal, police corruption, the little man fighting the Man are the themes of IV. The film like the book is a shaggy dog story and loses even more momentum in the final act... Still I think its pros weigh just a little more than its cons and its probably the only Pynchon film we are ever going to get...
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I followed Inherent Vice With The Big Lebowski (1998) which I've watched and written about many times before. Although it is set in 1990 Lebowski is about the 60's generation's attempts to cope with a world that has moved on. I know it divides people but I love this movie and Jeff Bridges's boomer Lebowski is a lot more sympathetic than than the 'goldbricking' blowhard millionaire greatest generation Lebowski. Joel and Ethan Coen have said that the biggest literary influence on Lebowski was Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and you can certainly see what they are talking about: both works are classic visions of Los Angeles and both films follow similar trajectories: a foil gets involved with a disabled rich man, the rich man's daughter, and a runaway from his family who gets mixed up in pornography. Paranoia, police corruption, betrayal, the little man fighting the Man are the themes of TBL. Joel Coen has also said that he was influenced by Robert Altman's 1970's remake of Chandler's The Long Goodbye which I saved for last in my little film festival. Next up however was a film I hadn't seen before: 
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The Big Fix (1978) was directed by Jeremy Kagan and based on the novel by Roger L. Simon. Richard Dreyfuss plays private detective Moses Wine who gets mixed up in a political corruption scandal connected to the California governor's race. Divorced Dreyfuss's troubles begin with his old lady (very much a move of Vice and Long Goodbye) and get worse as he uncovers the layers of a conspiracy. Moses Wine is a good if unconventional PI who - adorably - brings his kids on various stakeouts because he cant get a baby sitter. This movie doesn't have much of a following on Rotten Tomatoes but I thought it was really good with a kind of low rent Rockford Files vibe. Paranoia, corruption, betrayal, the little man fighting the Man are the themes of TBF. 
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Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973) was the last on my list of films. A slightly baked version of Marlowe played by the excellent Elliot Gould drives around a duplicitous (can a landscape be duplicitous?) sun-baked decadent Hollywood encountering the kind of people we meet at Paul Simon's party in Annie Hall (1977) or the rich folk who realise they've been out-generalled by Columbo (which began filming around the same time).  Although largely panned on release The Long Goodbye has aged well. Beautifully filmed, chock full of crazy characters (wearing fantastic early 70's clothes) and reasonably faithful to the book The Long Goodbye is a gem of a movie that captures a time and place to perfection. Chandler purists hate the ending and Gould in the role but I loved this film. Paranoia, betrayal, police corruption, the little man fighting the Man are the themes of TLG.
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Chinatown (1974) which came out a year after The Long Goodbye wasn't on my little self curated film festival list but you might consider it for yourself. Although it's set in a dreamily shot 1930's it was filmed in the 1970's and shares many of the themes, actors and ideas of the films above. And finally you might also want to check out Cutter's Way (1981) a noir classic filmed in the same milieu. 
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Hope this little list has given you some ideas for your own 1970s LA movie party as an escape from these troubled times. As always additional suggestions appreciated in the comments below: 

It's an LA Thing: Pynchon, Ellroy & Philip K Dick

In the early 1970's James Ellroy, Thomas Pynchon and Philip K Dick were all living within a few miles of each other in Greater Los Angeles. Ellroy was a 23 year old kid beginning his first experiments with writing, Pynchon was 34 and editing the book which would become Gravity's Rainbow and Dick at 42 was reaching his peak as a novelist, having the experiences and working on the book which would become A Scanner Darkly. There must have been something about that time and place because - joining Scanner - we've now gotten Pynchon's version of events in Inherent Vice and Ellroy's take in Blood's A Rover and they all seem to share certain thematic unities: pandemic drug use, paranoia, corrupt LAPD officers, belief in government conspiracies, supreme disillusionment with politics, and, in the case of Ellroy and Pynchon, an odd obsession with Las Vegas and Howard Hughes. The overriding impression you get from these novels is that America as an ideal has reached a dead end here at the edge of the continent among the wastrels, drug dealers, dreamers and movie stars. And it might even go deeper than that - not only has America failed, but the whole enlightenment project has failed. The modern world is fundamentally broken and cannot be fixed; democracy has no future - you either have total license or total tyranny and the proponents of these extremes are shrill and crazy.

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But that just may be Los Angeles. Don't get me wrong, I like LA. Fat Burger and Santa Monica and Malibu Creek are worth the drive, but I don't think you could have written Rover, Scanner or Vice in New England where people are not known for their demonstrative or hyperbolic nature. William Faulkner tells a story about how he was driving in Maine once and asked for directions. "Can you get to X, from here?" Faulkner wondered. "Yes." a local farmer responded. "Thanks," Faulkner said and off he drove before finding that the road he was on ended in the middle of nowhere. He drove back and encountered the farmer again. "I thought you said I could get to X from here," he wondered. "Not on this road," the farmer told him. Faulkner claims that he was impressed by the Mainer's precise answer to his question. In Mississippi they would have gone out of their way to show you the right road, but that was unnecessarily verbose in Maine.

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I have to say, although Faulkner was subtly dissing the north east, I really like it up there: people keep to themselves, they're suspicious of authority and innovation and they don't fall easily for the latest trends. Perhaps in the Los Angeles of 1971 America's future seemed bleak - as it does today - but drive up to New Hampshire or Vermont or Maine (and many other places in the heartland I'll bet) and you'll see a landscape and culture unchanged in nearly four centuries and a hardy, skeptical people who are not afraid of the future and who can handle just about anything.

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(Except maybe the terrible circumstances of another novel I read recently - Cormac McCarthy's The Road. )

Book of the Year

I read a lot of quality fiction this year from the likes of Garbhan Downey, Ken Bruen, Colum McCann, Hilary Mantel, AS Byatt, John McFetridge, Cormac McCarthy, Orhan Pamuk, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, Colin Bateman, Zadie Smith, Alan Glynn, Dec Burke, Gita Hariharan, Stu Neville et. al. but for me the novel I enjoyed most was Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice. At a party in July I had a bit of a friendly row about Inherent Vice with the crime reviewer of The Times; he felt that the book was disjointed and overly silly and not a proper crime novel but those were three of the reasons that I liked it. It is silly and its more of a riff on detective fiction than an attempt to fully engage the genre. Mainly though I liked the book because of its Big Lebowski vibe and the fact that its very funny. Chronologically it lies between The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland and it sort of inhabits the same paranoid, druggy, conspiratorial, trippy, ascerbic universe. Here's a paragraph explaining why there are no blacks in Gordita Beach: "When a black family had actually tried to move into town [after the War] the citizens, with helpful advice from the Ku Klux Klan had burned their place to the ground and then as if some ancient curse had come into effect refused to allow another house ever to be built on the site. The lot stood empty until the town finally confiscated it and turned it into a park, where the youth of Gordita Beach by the laws of karmic adjustment were soon gathering at night to drink, dope, and f**k, depressing their parents though not property values particularly."
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I've already posted about Inherent Vice twice, here and here so that's probably enough for now.

My Oh My - Vice!

Ok let me warn you straight away that I am a Thomas Pynchon fanboy. I've read all the novels, short stories, essays, and some books that most people haven't even heard of - Mortality and Mercy in Vienna for example, which I read and re-read happily in the Butler Stacks at Columbia University until someone stole it. I even struggled through Against the Day which is probably Pynchon's least accessible book but which had some memorable scenes set in my, then, manor - Denver, Colorado.
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Thomas Pynchon was born in Glen Cove, Long Island in 1937, went to Cornell University, joined the navy, became pals with Richard Farina and published his debut novel V in 1963 to great acclaim. He followed up with the brilliant Crying of Lot 49 and cemented his reputation with the WW2 masterpiece Gravity's Rainbow in 1973.
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After a long period of silence he produced Vineland in 1990 which divided critics, Salman Rushdie raved about it but Harold Bloom thought it was so bad that it "had to be the work of an impostor." I was of the former school of thought - Vineland for me was dark and funny and uniformly terrific. In some ways Inherent Vice is a prequel to Vineland or possibly a sequel to Lot 49. It's Pynchon's surreal, intelligent, re-interpretation of detective fiction. Set in LA at the tail end of the 60's it reminded me a little of Robert Altman's version of The Long Goodbye with Elliot Gould playing Marlowe. The plot follows the adventures of private eye Doc Sportello, his girlfriend and what happened or didn't happen to the whole counter culture movement in America. The book does what it says on the tin - channeling all the tropes of crime fiction through TP's warped, encyclopedic and densely clever imagination. I'm not cool with spoiler reviews however I will say that the narrative is maybe a little too familiar to those of us who are The Big Lebowski obsessives, though Lebowski itself was an homage to Chandler and Hammett. Like TBL, Inherent Vice is hilarious, laugh out loud funny, but also a sort of antidote to Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem and the California that gave Nixon and Reagan their shove into the big time.
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As much as I admired Against The Day life's too short to re-read it and I really enjoyed this looser, more relaxed Pynchon; I hope there are many more books like Inherent Vice festering in his big brain.
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Sunday update: I found this YouTube Video apparently made and voiced by Thomas Pynchon himself inhabiting his main character who is revisiting his Manhattan (Gordita in the book) Beach manor of 1970.