A little more emphasis on dispossession and Inherent Vice (2014) becomes a great film, especially given Joaquin Phoenix’s masterful hippie gumshoe and the Pynchon web. Paul Thomas Anderson’s fragmented stoner noir, shot through a sinuous 1970 SoCal, is at times tedious and in the end empty. Yet there is the suggestion that there could be more. Inherent Vice is at least in part about private property and loss—loss of rights, home, and livelihood—with the promise of gentrification and suburbanization (accumulation). This loss is regrettably only hinted at in a conversation or two (most memorably between Phoenix and Michael Kenneth Williams) and some THC-induced cartography, but it’s a line that should be developed. Otherwise, Inherent Vice is more postmodern whimsy, an abstraction of drug culture and cult from its economic relation.
“What the project of a genre system for film implies is rather that the reality socially constructed by Hollywood
‘realism’ is a map whose coordinates are parceled out among the specific genres, to whose distinct registers are then assigned its various dimensions or specialized segments. The ‘world’ is then not what is represented in the romantic comedy or in film noir; but it is what is somehow governed by all of them together – the musical, that gangster cycles, ‘screwball comedy,’ melodrama, that ‘populist’ genre sometimes called social realism, the Western, romance, and the noir (but the enumeration must be closely and empirically linked to a specific historical moment) – and governed also, something more difficult to think, by their implicit generic relationships to each other. The unreal – the not-said, the repressed – is then what falls outside of the system as a whole and finds no place in it (or else – in this moment of 20th-century mass culture ‘realism’ – finds its place in the accompanying ‘high art’ or modernism of the period).”
What if the rise of reality culture is ultimately a disciplining of labor that brings studio and network heads greater profits in the immediate sense (i.e., a cost-effective labor strategy like offshoring, temping, and wage suppression)? Wouldn’t this mean that late capitalism produces the reality aesthetic and its three attitudinal corollaries: skepticism, cynicism, and voyeurism?
‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’
I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?
SUSAN: Everybody puts on an act. SANDY: So even if you meet somebody, you don’t know who you’re meeting. SUSAN: Because you’re meeting the act. SANDY: That’s right. Not the person. SUSAN: I’m not sure I agree. SANDY: With what? SUSAN: With what you said. SANDY: No, I don’t either. SUSAN: You don’t agree with what you said? SANDY: How do you feel about it? SUSAN: I think people only like to think they’re putting on an act, but it’s not an act—it’s really them. If they think it’s an act they feel better because they think they can always change it. SANDY: You mean they’re kidding themselves because it’s not really an act? SUSAN: Yes, it is an act, but they’re the act—the act is them. SANDY: But if it’s them then how can it be an act? SUSAN: Because they’re an act. SANDY: But they’re also real. SUSAN: No. SANDY: You mean I’m not real? SUSAN: No. SANDY: I’m an act? SUSAN: It’s all right. I’m an act, too.
“For Kant, however, the public space of ‘world-civil society’ designates the paradox of the universal singularity, of a singular subject who, in a kind of short-circuit, by-passing the mediation of the particular, directly participates in the universal. This is what Kant, in the famous passage of his ‘What is Enlightenment?’ means by ‘public’ as opposed to ‘private.’ ‘Private’ is not one’s individual as opposed to communal ties, but the very communal-institutional order of one’s particular identification; while ‘public’ is the transnational universality of the exercise of one’s reason. The paradox of the underlying formula ‘think freely, but obey!’ (which, of course, poses a series of problems of its own, since it also relies on the distinction between the ‘performative’ level of social authority and the level of free-thinking where performativity is suspended) is thus that one participates in the universal dimension of the ‘public’ sphere precisely as a singular individual extracted from or even opposed to one’s substantial communal identification—one is truly universal only when radically singular, in the interstices of communal identities. It is Kant who should be read here as the critic of Rorty. In his vision of the public space of the unconstrained free exercise of reason, he asserts the dimension of emancipatory universality outside the confines of (social) being. This is the dimension missing in Rorty” (Zizek, Violence 144).
STEVEN WEXLER 