Inherent Vice: Why is this thing I didn’t like still nagging at me?

I saw Inherent Vice three weeks ago. I’d very much been wanting to see it, though I’d already heard it was somewhat divisive and sometimes confusing. I’ll tell you up front: I don’t think it’s all that confusing, certainly not any more so than Chinatown or The Big Lebowski, two other movies about unconventional dudes in Los Angeles who stumble into larger conspiracies. (Slate has a nice piece on “Slacker Noir” here.) I’ll tell you what else: I kept thinking, the whole way through: “Shit. I think I don’t like this.” And that was a bummer.

I’m a HUGE Paul Thomas Anderson fan. Boogie Nights is one of my favorite movies of all time, if not the favorite. Inherent Vice relies heavily on a love (not just a tolerance, I guess) for Pynchon and a fondness for absurdism. I don’t really possess those two things. I love satire, but I do not so much love a wacky satire. The krazy names are fun — “Japonica Fenway” has been rattling in my brain for two weeks now — but that on top of hyper-articulate scary authority figures on top of demented dentists who live at the heart of twisted, interconnected conspiracies on top of deadpan banter about fucking: it all feels like a recipe that, while it may have been invented by Pynchon himself (with a lot of help from Mr. Vonnegut), has also been used, in varying degrees, by a certain kind of Dude Writer for decades now, from Tom Robbins to Elmore Leonard (whom I like) to Dave Barry and Carl Hiaasen. In any case, it’s not my bag, man.

Here’s something else, though: I can’t stop thinking about that goddamn movie.

It’s the little things, like when Joaquin Phoenix’s Doc throws himself to the ground and curls into a ball as a flank of cops approach, just because he’s come to expect a beating. Or when characters return, multiple times, to an important location and find it’s been replaced with new construction. Or, best of all, the weirdly tender relationship between Doc and Bigfoot Bjornsen, the square cop who yearns for an acting career but can never stop being The Man. (A relationship which ends with a very 1970 version of “I drink your milkshake!” from There Will Be Blood.)

I also like the narrator, Sortilege, who appears as a participating character in scenes with Doc, but also appears in scenes where she narrates but clearly isn’t seen by the other characters. It’s a stagey device, but it works here, where levels of consciousness and reality are constantly being upended. She’s either a Visible Narrator, like the Stage Manager in Our Town, or she’s the only reliable narrator Doc knows — can’t trust himself, can’t trust Shasta — and therefore the one he’s chosen, consciously or not, to tell his story.

Lastly, I like the doomed (?) love between Doc and Shasta, the “dame” of this private-eye story. Katherine Waterston plays her as someone who’s just too smart for her times and surroundings, wherever she may be, and Phoenix’s face aches every time he looks at her. He knows how this is going to end, but this is where he’s throwing all his chips anyway. For all his technical excellence* and cleverness, Anderson is goddamn earnest at heart. He likes his characters, and he worries about them (so crucial), and I hope he never loses that.

But then you have all the Golden Fang shit and Owen Wilson’s junkie musician and the goofy, cartoony sex, and lots of yelling, and then I just don’t know all over again. And I do get it, by the way. When someone online says they didn’t like Inherent Vice, there’s always someone else — a dude — who chimes in with, “You have to watch it again! It’s just really complicated!” Well, it’s not really all that complicated, because the mystery itself is ultimately (and purposefully) kind of meaningless. And also, maybe that person just didn’t like it.

(Note: I have noticed a pretty even split on this between women and men, by the way. Among people in my social networks who had screeners of Inherent Vice, I don’t know that I counted one woman who liked it, with several of them quitting partway in. Meanwhile, there are a number of guys in my network who loved it and have seen it multiple times. I don’t think a movie is inherently (aha) bad because it appeals more to men, but I do know I’ve kind of lost patience with the movie that does.)

So is Inherent Vice to me a good movie? Bad? Some third thing? I was disappointed in it the whole way through, yet it keeps popping up in my subconscious and nagging at me in a way other films — ones I’ve liked more — haven’t. (Except Boyhood. There are snippets of Boyhood running on loops all day long in my brain.)

If anything, it reminds me of my relationship with the writing of Faulkner. In no way, except for As I Lay Dying, do I enjoy the act of reading Faulkner. Yet, there’s stuff of his I’ve read twenty years ago that still claws at me — scenes, characters, his insistence on the word “manthighs.” So while I generally don’t love the work of Faulkner, I like that he exists, I guess. I like what he’s trying to do to me, and I like dipping into that world every now and then, kind of the way you keep trying wine or Indian food even if everything in you tells you you will never like wine or Indian food.

So I think that’s it: I don’t like Inherent Vice, I’m okay with not liking Inherent Vice, but I love what it tried to do to me. If it comes up on cable when I’m walking by the TV sometime, I will stop and watch for a few and I will probably like a little of what I see, which is exactly how I continue to feel about The Big Lebowski. And now I would like it to leave me alone for a little while.

*There’s a shot, in a bordello, where the camera backs away as Joaquin Phoenix walks toward it, but the camera’s not dead-center in the hallway, it’s hugging the wall. So the wall starts filling the frame as the perspective increases, and suddenly the viewer is filled with a kind of dread or unease because the symmetry’s off. (Wes Anderson would never use this shot.) It lasts a couple of seconds, but I know the same camera move was in Boogie Nights, too (possibly while Little Bill is walking through the house, looking for his wife on New Year’s Eve?), and I was so happy to see it again.