![]() Pynchon’s legend, his scary totality of accomplishment, is secured with this 1973 book. Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers, in his review of Inherent Vice, calls the author’s colossal Gravity’s Rainbow “the Pynchon mountain, the Old Testament of cyberpunk.” It’s a novel we should never hope to see a movie come from, because losing yourself in its folds is a Joycean pleasure that can only happen on the page. “He’s fucking with you all the time,” Anderson said of the novelist - and he means this as a compliment.īlinded by science: Secret worlds connected, systems within systems Radiohead's Secret Influences, From Fleetwood Mac to Thomas Pynchon That said, Pynchon can’t help but have a little fun with his musical musings - his vinyl collection must be frightening. Oedipa’s estranged husband in Crying, “Mucho” Maas, becomes a disc jockey at the fictional radio station KCUF and, in between platters, descends into an LSD-fueled mental mush. When pop culture does emerge, it’s often used to make the obliquely critical point that such things often distract us. His ambitious novels are thick reads, studded with references to arcane technical texts, politics, ancient in-jokes and secret historical episodes. ![]() But don’t confuse Pynchon’s frequent embrace of sing-along humor for a mere palate cleanser. Meanwhile, in the dazzling Mason & Dixon - Pynchon’s 1997 riff on Revolutionary-era American history - he somehow crams in a verse about Chinese food into his main characters’ salivating mouths: “Peppers as hot as the Hearth-sides of Hell / Things that Papa has neglected to tell!”ĭo these tunes mean anything? Nope, wonderfully not. (The largely faithful movie version doesn’t include the messianic moondoggie, but does find room for the book’s properly paranoid sax soloist played by fully-baked Owen Wilson) The takeaway is a bone-deep commitment to late-Sixties beach culture, a false innocence under which the author can brew his ill goings-on. Inherent Vice makes a meal out of surf rock, featuring a slew of references to forgotten twangy classics from real-life bands such as Johnny and the Hurricanes, the Chantays and the Trashmen, along with stirring in a devoutly Christian tube rider who literally walks on water. His text frequently breaks off into indented lyrics for completely fictional hits, spinning in a jukebox of his imagination. Commit to Pynchon, and you will discover an unapologetically silly lover of pop songs. You will not get your money back.īy far the funniest takeaway from Crying is its piss-take on Beatlemania, embodied by a struggling band of American teens called the Paranoids who insist on singing in British accents. You will be carried along to a land of profound weirdness by Anderson’s panache and a frighteningly committed cast (one that includes a coke-snorting Martin Short). The movie looks and feels luscious - it’s a unicorn of artistic freedom backed by big-studio support.Īnd still, even with all these hearts and minds in the right place, it’s possible to emerge from Inherent Vice - a two-and-a-half-hour whatsit unlike anything Hollywood has ever tried - with a furrowed brow. ![]() Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, the genius behind Boogie Nights, Magnolia and There Will Be Blood, has emerged as a kindred spirit to Pynchon’s loose-limbed funkiness and expansive interconnectivity. Not through the efforts of a bunch of nobodies, either: Inherent Vice, a Seventies-set stoner mystery, stars America’s finest working actor, Joaquin Phoenix, buried snout-deep in the author’s signature paranoia and hippie haze (as well as some fearsome mutton chops). ![]() Improbably, and with a giddy-making “WTF,” the dense prose of author Thomas Pynchon has finally made it to the big screen. ![]()
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