Day: December 30, 2014

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.

Outside Genre

“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).”

—Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible