Inherent Vice (2014)
I have a hypothesis, not one I can provide actual evidence for, nor one that I'm particularly confident in, that most people who enjoy David Lynch also enjoy Thomas Pynchon and vice-versa. The reasons for which are not as self explanatory as they might appear at a glance. While both the work of the veteran film maker and the reclusive novelist could broadly be described as "surrealistic" an ambiguous term in itself, Lynch's approach to surrealism is instinctive, personal, psychological while Pynchon 's is meticulous, byzantine and very explicitly political, something that Lynch has always gone out of his way to avoid being. It's much easier to convey what makes them different than what they have in common. Although if I had to do so I'd say it is that the work of both greatly concerns itself with the way the mundane, the absurd and the mysterious exist not only next but sometimes within each other and about the way we navigate a world where this is the case.
I've lately been reading Pynchon's informal trilogy of books set in California again, consisting of Crying of Lot 49, Vineland and Inherent Vice. The last of which happens to have a movie adaptation by Paul Thomas Anderson that I wrote about, albeit in German, back when it came out. A review I still mostly stand by, which is why this is really more of a random blog post about my thoughts revisiting these stories about 10 years later. Although Pynchon himself has gone on record dismissing it as an amateurish work, Crying of Lot 49, the shortest and densest of these three books, tells the story of suburban housewife Oedipa Maas (get over the silly names, you're gonna be seeing a lot of them) who was unexpectedly chosen to carry out the will of powerful businessman Pierce Inverarity she briefly had an affair with once who died under mysterious circumstances. As she does so, she finds hints towards an old European secret society named Trystero.
Trystero so she, and we, get to piece together may or may not have been an organization competing with the Thurn und Taxis dynasty in setting up the first centralized European postal system that upon losing out to its competitor lived on as a secret society subverting the public postal service by setting up a clandestine network called WASTE of hidden dead drops and couriers for secret communications between clients that include counter cultural and subversive groups ranging from sexual minorities to fringe scientists to political radicals. It's either that or Inverarity used his considerable wealth and influence to gaslight her into thinking this is the case as a spiteful posthumous prank. Or, perhaps, Oedipa is gaslighting herself into thinking so. This dynamic, this sense of mystery whether there is a network of secrets right under our noses or whether we're just following a series of false leads and perceived synchronicities and whether it even makes a difference is at the heart of a lot of Pynchon's writing.
Lot 49, although the word hadn't been coined yet when it was written, greatly concerns itself with memes. Of symbols that are propagated by people who may or may not be aware of their original context until they are everywhere. The book primarily uses Trystero's symbol, the muted post horn, which shows up as graffiti, tattoos, on signs and billboards and notably as the logo of a group named Inamorati Anonymous (which strangely and hilariously foreshadows what we now know as the Incel subculture) who seem to not even be aware of its original context. Along with the name of the secret communications network WASTE which, we find out late in the story, is an acronym for "We Await Silently Trystero's Empire", sometimes paired with the acronym DEATH (Don't Ever Antagonize The Horn)
Both of these show up throughout the book and much like Oedipa we are left to wonder what their significance is and whether everyone using them is aware of it. To briefly loop back to David Lynch, Inland Empire, arguably his most pynchonian work, does something similar with the phrase AxonN, introduced in the beginning as the "longest running radio play in history" and the phrase "Look at me and tell me if you've known it before", repeated by multiple characters in multiple languages throughout the movie. Twin Peaks does something similar with the recurring phrases and symbols uses by its metaphysical entities. Pynchon himself would, one novel later in Gravity's Rainbow, reference a real life example with the "Kilroy was here" doodle that made its way all around the world being drawn by American soldiers during World War 2 wherever they went
There is something very interesting to the way symbols are both obscured and kept alive as they are adapted by different people and groups for different reasons and it becomes harder to discern what they mean to whom. Consider, for a moment, the famous Eye of Providence. The eye enclosed by a triangle. A symbol originally prominently utilized in the iconography of Christians and Freemasons (many founders of the United States, of course, having been both) but over the years it has become a universal symbol for every type of nebulous totalitarian conspiracy in popular culture, from Deus Ex to the Prisoner to Gravity Falls. As a matter of fact it has become so associated with that, that seeing it in a regular, non-sinister context the other day was outright jarring.
The other oddly prescient element of Lot 49 that Pynchon would also keep revisiting of course is that who controls the means of communication controls its contents. There is a reason Lot 49's big mystery concerns the postal system, even if it may appear as a joke on first glance. To go on another quick detour, this preoccupation also shows up in the more political works of video game director Suda51, perhaps as a direct reference to Crying of Lot 49, between the meteoric rise to power of postal worker Andrei Ulmeyda in Killer 7, the hitmen disguised as mail carriers in 25th Ward and recurring rival Destroyman in the No More Heroes series whose civilian identity is that of a postman.
This is also what finally brings us to Inherent Vice although ironically it's an element downplayed, if not all but exorcised, from its film adaptation. There is a recurring element, barely present enough to be called a subplot, about the invention of ARPAnet, the precursor to the internet, at that point something only governmental institutions and private contractors were connected to. While Thomas Pynchon would later go on to write a novel more explicitly about the internet with Bleeding Edge, notably set in New York City rather than California's Silicon Valley, Inherent Vice, like so many of his books concerned with cultural turning points, implicates it as one of the factors that caused the death of 60's counter culture.
Inherent Vice's ineffable evil force, its equivalent to Lot 49's Trystero is called the Golden Fang, a phrase that shows up connected to a number of different groups and places that are clearly connected in some way neither we, nor protagonist Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix playing him in the movie), private detective, can ever quite figure out. Golden Fang is a name that refers to a boat that is carrying out covert smuggling and human trafficking operations for the American government in South East Asia. Golden Fang is the name of an Indochinese drug cartel. Golden Fang is the name of a psychiatric clinic that is all but stated to pimp out its mentally vulnerable patients and brainwash subversive elements. Golden Fang is a union of dentists, the only member of which we get to know is taking adventage of a patient of that mental clinic. Golden Fang is used as an almost blanket term for all manners of counter-subversive forces in the early 70's.
It's obvious that Pynchon considers ARPAnet another instrument of control of information rather than the liberation of it. One of many. If we consider his three novels set in California a loose trilogy and if we take a minute to ask ourselves why he chose to revisit the state so many times we have to take a moment to consider its place in popular culture. California is thought of as a bulwark of unflappable American progressivism but it's clear that Pynchon sees it as a testing ground for frightening reactionary forces. His California is a place of ruthless allmighty entrepreneurs, nationalist militias, white supremacist gangs, robotic government agents, Operations Paperclip Nazi Scientists, a brutal police force and Hollywood propaganda. At the time Inherent Vice is set the anti-leftist purge of the McCarthy era (something the American film industry to this day hasn't recovered from) still looms large over the setting, the boat named Golden Fang having been confiscated from an actor with leftist tendencies who got turned by the intelligence agencies.
As does television, consistently and derisively referred to as "the tube" by Pynchon, a medium, amusingly enough, regarded with great suspicion by both those born before and after it was the dominant medium. Falling into the latter category, I am very uncomfortable with a medium as inherently didactic as cable television, a medium where content, schedule and message is so firmly dictated by the producers. David Cronenberg of course took this discomfort to its logical extreme with his bizarre horror classic Videodrome which probably still stands as his masterpiece. A story about two secret societies attempting to turn producer Max Renn, played by real life brainwashing victim James Wood, over to their side with television signals that literally alter his brain on a biological level. Pynchon recognizes the inherently authoritarian character of the medium, both Inherent Vice and Vineland showing a deep distaste in particular for its hero worship of the American police.
An institution here mostly represented by Doc Sportello 's frenemy Christian "Bigfoot" Bjornsen, an unflattering if overall sympathetic portrayal of the conservative, hippie-hating, sanctimonious and totalitarian attitude of the institution he serves. A macho, cowboy obsessed tough guy whose moniker "Bigfoot" stems from his love for kicking in doors. While he is a caricature by all means and is clearly intended to be a comedic character he also serves to ridicule the archetype of the Dirty Harry style cowboy cop. Of course one of Inherent Vice 's most poignant bits of dialogue is when, late in the novel, Sportello 's ex girlfriend and instigator of most of the plot, Shasta Fay Hepworth, asks him whether in working as a private detective, he isn't basically just a cop in denial. A sentiment that clearly hits easy going hippie Sportello where it hurts.
The other motive throughout Inherent Vice are the frequent references to famous monsters, mostly but not exclusively of the undead or undead-adjacent variety. The real estate magnate who dissapearance initially drives the plot of the book is named Mickey Wolfmann, a pivotal character is a musician and recovering drug addict who faked his death and "came back" (another scene, also represented in the movie, frames him in a shot that invokes Da Vinci's Last Supper with him in the place of Jesus), there is a band, a thinly veiled Beach Boys standin, that is frequently compared to Zombies and there are a couple of off hand references to Dracula and Godzilla. Which strangely harkens back to a line in Lot 49 where the director of a stage play, which seems to be a loose parody of Hamlet and, I swear, might be some cheeky allegory for the Kennedy assassination, tells the protagonist, inquiring after it's meaning "It means nothing, it's like a horror movie, meant to entertain". If I had to guess where Pynchon is going with this motive of creatures that rise from the dead, in Godzilla's case, from the bottom of the sea (also mirrored by occasional references to the sunken continent Lemurian that Doc once visits in a drug induced dream sequence which some characters believe is due to rise again) I would say that Pynchon is invoking a return of powerful reactionary sentiments that are rising from history's graveyard. Perhaps the same "forces ancient and evil" so poetically described by good Doctor Hunter S. Thompson in his own post mortem of the revolutionary 60's, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Which, on that note, is interesting because Inherent Vice has a subplot set in Las Vegas which is another part of it that somehow didn't make it in the movie adaptation.
From a modern perspective, one might compare Pynchon's plotting to the rightfully maligned "mystery box" style of writing coined by quintessential nepotism-hire J J. Abrams, what engages the reader about them are the questions they raise. What differentiates them from those it is that they never even pretend that they intend to resolve them. Pynchon and perhaps that is another thing that he has in common with Lynch, expects his audience to make their own connections about both plot and themes of his writing. Pynchon's is political and dialectical and Lynch's is psychological and spiritual but perhaps those aren't as separate from each other as they appear. Isn't Twin Peaks: The Return in so many ways about the state of modern America and what made it that way? Are the dynamics of animate and inanimate of elect and preterite that Pynchon keeps returning to so different to Lynch's metaphysics, isn't Eraserhead a movie where life, the animate, exists in a tortured state among a world subsumed by the inanimate of industry and pollution? And why does Henry keep checking his mail and what does he find in his mailbox?
As you probably caught on by now, this is more a rambling diatribe about the books I've read recently and how they relate to my interests as a lover of fiction and aspiring writer myself than it is about Inherent Vice 's movie adaptation which I've written about before. Mainly because I felt it's as good an excuse as any to share my thoughts and impressions upon both rereading them and rewatching the Inherent Vice movie. Some imaginary Mount Rushmore of creators who made me who I am today would probably have the face of Thomas Pynchon carved into it along with David Lynch, Roger Waters and Kunihiko Ikuhara. The ways I think about the political, the sociological, the psychological and the metaphysical owe a tremendous amount to the ideas and concepts communicated by these artists even if they might have evolved in different directions. Pynchon's work in particular, when I first read it in my early 20's is what put me on the path of becoming a politically aware person beyond the very basic principles I had beforehand. Accordingly I thought this was as good an opportunity as any to summarize what 10 additional years of maturity did for my readings of his works. This might not be of particular interest to anyone else but if you've read it all the way through: Thank you. If you found it tedious to read: I'm sorry. If you enjoyed reading it: It means a lot to me.
