print
Does It Ever End? | Paul Thomas Anderson's "Inherent Vice"
by galen

    For “The White Album,” the Beatles recorded three versions of the song “Revolution:” “Revolution 1” was a slow blues, while “Revolution 9” was a startlingly abstract musique concrete; splitting the difference was the proto-metal b-side version of the song, released simply as “Revolution.” The tune was such a popular release that, months later, in the final year of the 1960s, pop-rock outfit Thunderclap Newman had to rename their own “Revolution” track as “Something in the Air” in order to avoid confusion with the music-buying public. And while “Something in the Air” never reached the cultural ubiquity of “Revolution,” its sentiments of peaceful rebellion were catchy enough to be commodified by advertisers in later years, who passed the song around and used it to hawk wares as various as a telecommunications company, British Airways, and the Austin Mini (“Revolution,” meanwhile, was used to sell Nikes), betraying every core tenant of the movement it represented. This likely did not escape the attention of Thomas Pynchon, who used the song to humorous effect in the novel Inherent Vice: while chasing a mysterious schooner called The Golden Fang (which seems to float at the heart of Shasta’s case), Doc notices a Department of Justice cruiser also tailing the Fang; on it are a crew of DOJ lawyers and bikini-clad dancers, all partying “to the revolutionary anthem…with every appearance of sincerity—though Doc wondered how many of them would have recognized revolution if it had come up and said howdy.”

    This is the mood and point of Pynchon’s novel in microcosm: an angry look back at an era left unprotected against inherent vice, a time so irrevocably changed that its deepest, most profound beliefs and works of popular art were then used to sell shoes and soundtrack fuzz dance parties. It is as if Pynchon traced some irreversible American trend towards entropy and obliteration right back to this moment, in Doc’s time. And while Pynchon refuses to give interviews or explain himself, Anderson has offered his own opinion about the author’s motivations, noting that “2009 is when the book came out. But as somebody who was there, who wrote in the ‘60s, it’s worth asking ‘what’s still nagging at you that you’ve gotta look back? You could write about anything.’ But there’s something obviously still nagging at him to want to talk about it again…there’s still some unresolved business that he felt the desire to write about.” Yet it was not so much Pynchon’s anger that Anderson identified with, but rather his sense of loss, and longing, for something beloved stolen by the inherent vice of time. “Amidst all these crazy jokes and everything else…what else is there? What’s the real thing? And the real thing in the book is [Doc’s] love for Shasta, his pining, and that obsession with an ex-old lady that got away, that’s maybe not the one you want to be with, but you can’t help but think of her all the time…What the book was about to me was about how much we can miss people…as it applies to people, or as it can apply to the past in general.”