Inherent Vice and the Evolution of Stoner Noir

December 20, 2014 4:12 PM

Stoner noir certainly replaces the unflappable, sardonic hero of the hardboiled detective novel with a type of fool– the pothead being an ideal modern archetype of the fool, a figure whose fraught relationship with the hardships and nuisances of everyday life we can all identity with to some extent. The Dude, as the Stranger observes, takes it easy for all us sinners – all us perhaps greater fools who are guilty of the sin of actually trying to stay up on the bucking bronco of life, rather than just kicking back and hoping its severer mood swings will just pass us by.
posted by batfish (20 comments total)

Man, I adore the Big Lebowski and loves me some Pynchon, but I'll be damned if Inherent Vice wasn't a painfully boring slog. It took me five times longer to finish than Gravity's Rainbow, and I only did it out of some perverse sense of obligation. I might see the movie, but only because I fear my dream of Terry Gilliam's The Crying of Lot 49 will never be a reality.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 5:01 PM on December 20, 2014 [4 favorites]

IV felt like warmed over Slothrop in the Zone and Vineland to me, but even leftover Pynchon is haute cuisine. I wanna see this movie!
posted by tspae at 5:23 PM on December 20, 2014 [1 favorite]

I guess it's not technically stoner noir, but my favorite of this genre is Brautigan's novel Dreaming Of Babylon.
posted by mannequito at 5:50 PM on December 20, 2014 [3 favorites]

Dreaming of Babylon is, for lack of a better word, hilarious, but it's also masterful. The concept is comedy, the execution, the way the noir story gets pushed to the sidelines and kind of bleeds through and is never explained is postmodern virtuosity.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 5:57 PM on December 20, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yea Brautigan. Richard Farina's Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up To Me seems like another thread or precursor there, in both the Gnossos Pappadopoulis character and the Odyssean plot
posted by batfish at 6:01 PM on December 20, 2014 [2 favorites]

As someone who has outwardly played the Fool, my entire life...

SHHHHHHHSH! Don't give away the secrets. No one worries much about the obvious fool...
posted by Windopaene at 6:25 PM on December 20, 2014

“The best lack all conviction, while he worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”

Yeah. Things have changed so much since the "60s". Or was it the "70s"? Anyway, those decades that we lazily refer to when we want to take about that time before now. Which is the time before the oughts. Which is the time before the 90s. Which is preceded by the 80s.
posted by clvrmnky at 6:28 PM on December 20, 2014

I'll be damned if Inherent Vice wasn't a painfully boring slog

... I have some bad news for you regarding your future damnation :(
posted by thedaniel at 8:36 PM on December 20, 2014 [7 favorites]

Don't forget the High Maintenance webseries. Each one is great, but I think the one that will get you hooked is the first I saw, Qasim. (The new season is pay per view, I think, but there's plenty -- about a full length movie -- in the first.)
posted by Catblack at 9:07 PM on December 20, 2014 [2 favorites]

I'll be damned if Inherent Vice wasn't a painfully boring slog. It took me five times longer to finish than Gravity's Rainbow, and I only did it out of some perverse sense of obligation.

I was the opposite. It took 8 tries to get thru Gravity's Rainbow (I've read it again since), but IV I read through in 3 days, then read it again back-to-back.

I mean ... ZOMES!

Really, it's a pretty quick read. Compared to Vineland, it's a breeze. It's my current go-to recommendation for anyone who's never read Pynchon. (Much better than Bleeding Edge.)

Vineland is the right comparison--mostly comedic novel about the "end" of the counterculture and the rise of the authoritarian uber-state--but IV is much better, imo. So so good. I gotta read it again...
posted by mrgrimm at 10:03 PM on December 20, 2014 [3 favorites]

Loved this essay. Thanks.
posted by So You're Saying These Are Pants? at 10:30 PM on December 20, 2014

I just came from Inherent Vice, and I thought it was about the most perfect synthesis of PTA and Pynchon one could imagine. I think one's tolerance of / enthusiasm for that idea will determine a lot about whether you love or hate this film.
posted by mykescipark at 10:53 PM on December 20, 2014 [1 favorite]

Vast sociological desertions and studies might be written about precisely why The Big Lebowski struck such an indelible chord with a fairly large sub-set of the film-viewing public – particularly men of a certain generation. It was first released in 1998 to a mixed critical response and lukewarm box-office, but repeat viewings on DVD created a snowballing cult phenomenon ...

I can't be the first to point this out, but I wonder if part of the Big Lebowski's DVD repeat watch phenomenon came about through the design of the original DVD animated menu. Once you'd finished it, it would return to the main menu, then if you did nothing in 30 seconds or so automatically start playing the film again. If you were sitting on the couch and were, well, disinclined to stop this happening, the rewatch was an agreeable enough suggestion and the next thing you knew it was some unspecified time at night and you'd watched the thing five times through. And so a dominant mode of viewing was born.
posted by Sonny Jim at 7:21 AM on December 21, 2014

I reviewed The Long Goodbye when it came out, and didn’t mind at all that “Robert Altman decided to relocate the action to modern-day Los Angeles.” Or the cat food, or the nude yoga, but I rolled my eyes when Philip Marlowe pulled a basketball out of his closet. Obviously, Elliott Gould is a big basketball fan – he got a laugh three years after that film by announcing the winner of the NCAA tournament when he was supposed to be naming the winner of the Best Editing Oscar – but I thought that had nothing to do with Marlowe, and was just dumb.
posted by LeLiLo at 8:19 AM on December 21, 2014

There is a gold mine of wonderful stuff in the archives. Lynch and Lovecraft! All the stuff I don't recognize I'm going to have to familiarize myself with. O'Brien's Operators and Things (article) sounds just like my thing.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 11:28 AM on December 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

There is a gold mine of wonderful stuff in the archives.

It's an amazing blog. I've seen it linked from Dangerous Minds a couple times, but I can't believe it doesn't have a wider following. Some of the most enthralling writing on weird/occult/psych/paranoia lit and film stuff I have come across anywhere.
posted by batfish at 1:14 PM on December 21, 2014

Very much looking forward to seeing this.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 2:13 AM on December 22, 2014

First impression: mild amusement, general disappointment
Second impression: MOTTO PANEIKAKU
posted by mrgrimm at 10:32 PM on January 16, 2015

Ok, I loved this movie. I love dense, complex layered plots. I also munched a 180mg "peppermint patty" and smoked a few fat ones before, and that didn't hurt in the least bit.

IV reminded me of Brick in that they were both framed as standard Hard Boiled Detective stories, typical beats and tropes from the Hammett/Chandler goody basket; The Ex in trouble, femmes fatale, the growling authority figure making threats and pointing a finger, the Muscle, the Sidekick, the mysterious name that everybody whispers.

But both movies take the tradition and skew it with a weird lens. In Brick, the lens is High School. In IV, it's weed, blow, and the post-Manson paranoia of early 70s LA.

I believe it was Chandler(?) who first opined that the difference between a standard detective story and a hard-boiled one is that in a detective story, solving the mystery is the point, and every scene is a step closer to the 'A HA!" moment.

In a Hard Boiled Detective story, solving the mystery is borderline immaterial. The scenes are what matter. The dialog, the characters, the interactions, the patter, each moment is it's own goal. Sure, the Maltese Falcon has a big reveal at the end. But that's not the point. From the OP article:

This raises an interesting point about hardboiled detective plots: in one sense they are all important, and in another almost completely arbitrary. For all their complexity, their function is largely to keep the dialogue, and the detective’s encounters with the bizarre, the beautiful, and the deadly, coming hard and fast – to keep, in other words, the “talk hard and the action harder.”

In this interview w/ PTA, he talks about being worried that this movies was essentially "People in rooms, talking." True. And every scene/conversation was it's own kind of fucked-up, and they all add up to a beautiful hot-mess that, when you step back and regard it as a whole, makes a bizarre and elegant kind of sense.

Next time, gonna go for the red velvet cake before viewing. 250mg of Mother Nature's insight and mellow in a wrapped pastry the shade of which rarely appears in Nature.

I think trying to follow this movie straight might give me a headache.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 11:49 AM on January 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

"Doc" Sportello, soft-boiled detective.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 1:59 PM on January 19, 2015