Inherent Vice (USA: Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014: 148 mins)
Bernstein, Arielle and Nelson Carvajal. "The Inherent Vice in Paul Thomas Anderson's Films: A Video Essay." Press Play (January 2, 2015)
Brody, Richard. "Paul Thomas Anderson's Nostalgia Trip." The New Yorker (January 9, 2015)
Flight, Thomas. "The Evolution of Paul Thomas Anderson." (Posted on Youtube: December 21, 2021)
Goi, Leonardo. "In Sunny Southland: Paul Thomas Anderson and Thomas Pynchon’s California." Notebook (November 24, 2025) ["By 1970, when Anderson was born in Studio City, Pynchon had quit his gig writing safety articles for Boeing in Seattle and decamped to Los Angeles. He landed in a small apartment in Manhattan Beach, which would appear in his books as the fictional Gordita Beach, a last resort for bums, drifters, punks, and drop-outs determined to steer clear of the straight life. And though his novels have journeyed far and wide—from New York City (V., 1963; Bleeding Edge, 2013) to Chicago (Against the Day, 2006); from the American colonies (Mason & Dixon, 1997) to Europe, Namibia, and Siberia (Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973)—Pynchon has become closely identified with the countercultural hangover that swept through post-Manson California and serves as backdrop for the two texts Anderson would go on to adapt, Inherent Vice (2009) and now Vineland (1990). Novelist and filmmaker are unmistakably smitten with the textures of “sunny Southland,” to use a phrase popularized in the late 1800s by newspaper editor Harrison Gray Otis (who incidentally lifted it from the Confederacy). But they reserve their deepest feeling for its eccentric residents—drifters who straddle the old and the new, who have only just started to realize how the changing of the guard is leaving them behind, who have seen their turf transform to the point they can barely recognize it. Still, neither artist has ever simplistically romanticized that bygone milieu. Their characters fumble as they navigate a world rife with signs, secrets, and conspiracies, a California candied not with “identifiable cit[ies]” but with “grouping[s] of concepts,” where everyone and everything suggests “a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning,” per The Crying of Lot 49. That novel came out in April 1966, just a few months before Reagan was elected governor, promising to crack down on the “filthy speech movement” fueled by the student protests at Berkeley and to send “the welfare bums back to work.” The repression and censorship that would dominate Reagan-era California (and eventually all of the United States under his presidency) permeate Vineland and Inherent Vice, in which the actor-turned-politico serves as an omnipresent specter, a kind of daemon ex machina restoring fascism at home and abroad. A mood of chronic paranoia permeates Pynchon’s prose and Anderson’s cinema; what binds them isn’t just some autobiographical affair with Los Angeles but an interest in its sinister side: In the words of Inherent Vice’s Detective Lieutenant “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, “The dark forces that are always there just out of the sunlight.”"]
Jones, Kent. "What’s Up, Doc?" Film Comment (November/December 2014) ["The dream horizons and phantom vibes of 1970 California are brought tangibly close in Paul Thomas Anderson’s spaced-out private investigation."]
Knudsen, Tyler. "What I learned (about filmmaking) from watching Inherent Vice." (Posted on Youtube: December 10, 2014)
Lane, Anthony. "Swinging Seventies: Inherent Vice." The New Yorker (December 15, 2014)
Lee, Kevin B. "The Career of Paul Thomas Anderson in Five Shots." (Posted on Vimeo: 2013)
Morgan, Kim. "Inherent Vice." The New Beverly Cinema (May 16, 2017)
"Paul Thomas Anderson." The Close Up #1 (November 2014)
Ratcliff, Travis Lee. "The Legacy of Paranoid Thrillers." (Posted on Vimeo: June 2017) ["Paranoid thrillers are constant in cinema's history, but at any given moment they reflect our specific anxieties back to us and reveal how we feel about our institutions. Here, I explore how paranoid thrillers crystalized as a genre in American cinema and examine the possibility of a contemporary renaissance in conspiracy fiction."]
Ratzlaff, Jeremy. "Paul Thomas Anderson: A Chronological Timeline." (Posted on Vimeo: November 2015)
Sabo, Lee Weston. "Peace Out and Fuck You: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice." Bright Lights Film Journal (January 20, 2015)
Warren, Ethan. "The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha (Columbia University Press, 2023) New Books in Film (March 29, 2023) ["Paul Thomas Anderson’s evolution from a brash, self-anointed “Indiewood” auteur to one of his generation’s most distinctive voices has been one of the most remarkable career trajectories in recent film history. From early efforts to emulate his cinematic heroes to his increasingly singular late films, Anderson has created a body of work that balances the familiar and the strange, history and myth: viewers feel perpetually off balance, unsure of whether to expect a pitch-black joke or a moment of piercing emotional resonance. The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha (Columbia UP, 2023) provides the most complete account of Anderson’s career to date, encompassing his varied side projects and unproduced material; his personal and professional relationships with directors such as Jonathan Demme, Robert Altman, and Robert Downey Sr.; and his work as a director of music videos for Fiona Apple, Joanna Newsom, and Haim. Ethan Warren explores Anderson’s recurring thematic preoccupations―the fraught dynamics of gender and religious faith, biological and found families, and his native San Fernando Valley―as well as his screenwriting methods and his relationship to his influences. Warren argues that Anderson’s films conjure up an alternate American history that exaggerates and elides verifiable facts in search of a heightened truth marked by a deeper level of emotional hyperrealism. This book is at once an unconventional primer on Anderson’s films and a provocative reframing of what makes his work so essential."]
---. "On the Hazy, Ethereal Noir of Inherent Vice." Crime Reads (March 9, 2023) ["With Inherent Vice, Anderson reconfigures many of his now-hallmark techniques to create effects that are often simultaneously provocative and evocative, all in the service of adapting the worldview of an author long thought unadaptable. Anderson again mixes the tropes of multiple genres, but where injecting spasms of comedy into prestige drama is relatively easy to parse once the surprise has worn off, the hazier mix of comedic and dramatic elements in Inherent Vice contributes to a far more ambiguous tone that might best be described as madcap naturalism. Anderson (along with Robert Elswit) adopts the most unusual visual palette that he has used since Punch-Drunk Love, this time slightly desaturating the image in order to create a feeling of fading nostalgia, as though the audience is watching an image that has been left in the sun for years. The effect is considered and deliberate, yet, like much of Boogie Nights’ visual language, it runs counter to how the viewer is conditioned to receive nostalgic imagery (which is often presented with some form of heightened visual language in keeping with the power of memory, rather than aping the physical qualities of antique objects), meaning that the effect is cerebral rather than immediately empathetic."]
Goi, Leonardo. "In Sunny Southland: Paul Thomas Anderson and Thomas Pynchon’s California." Notebook (November 24, 2025) ["By 1970, when Anderson was born in Studio City, Pynchon had quit his gig writing safety articles for Boeing in Seattle and decamped to Los Angeles. He landed in a small apartment in Manhattan Beach, which would appear in his books as the fictional Gordita Beach, a last resort for bums, drifters, punks, and drop-outs determined to steer clear of the straight life. And though his novels have journeyed far and wide—from New York City (V., 1963; Bleeding Edge, 2013) to Chicago (Against the Day, 2006); from the American colonies (Mason & Dixon, 1997) to Europe, Namibia, and Siberia (Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973)—Pynchon has become closely identified with the countercultural hangover that swept through post-Manson California and serves as backdrop for the two texts Anderson would go on to adapt, Inherent Vice (2009) and now Vineland (1990). Novelist and filmmaker are unmistakably smitten with the textures of “sunny Southland,” to use a phrase popularized in the late 1800s by newspaper editor Harrison Gray Otis (who incidentally lifted it from the Confederacy). But they reserve their deepest feeling for its eccentric residents—drifters who straddle the old and the new, who have only just started to realize how the changing of the guard is leaving them behind, who have seen their turf transform to the point they can barely recognize it. Still, neither artist has ever simplistically romanticized that bygone milieu. Their characters fumble as they navigate a world rife with signs, secrets, and conspiracies, a California candied not with “identifiable cit[ies]” but with “grouping[s] of concepts,” where everyone and everything suggests “a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning,” per The Crying of Lot 49. That novel came out in April 1966, just a few months before Reagan was elected governor, promising to crack down on the “filthy speech movement” fueled by the student protests at Berkeley and to send “the welfare bums back to work.” The repression and censorship that would dominate Reagan-era California (and eventually all of the United States under his presidency) permeate Vineland and Inherent Vice, in which the actor-turned-politico serves as an omnipresent specter, a kind of daemon ex machina restoring fascism at home and abroad. A mood of chronic paranoia permeates Pynchon’s prose and Anderson’s cinema; what binds them isn’t just some autobiographical affair with Los Angeles but an interest in its sinister side: In the words of Inherent Vice’s Detective Lieutenant “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, “The dark forces that are always there just out of the sunlight.”"]
Jack's Movie Reviews. "Paul Thomas Anderson - Finding a Purpose In Life." (Posted on Youtube: March 11, 2017)
Jones, Kent. "What’s Up, Doc?" Film Comment (November/December 2014) ["The dream horizons and phantom vibes of 1970 California are brought tangibly close in Paul Thomas Anderson’s spaced-out private investigation."]
Knudsen, Tyler. "What I learned (about filmmaking) from watching Inherent Vice." (Posted on Youtube: December 10, 2014)
Lane, Anthony. "Swinging Seventies: Inherent Vice." The New Yorker (December 15, 2014)
Lee, Kevin B. "The Career of Paul Thomas Anderson in Five Shots." (Posted on Vimeo: 2013)
Morgan, Kim. "Inherent Vice." The New Beverly Cinema (May 16, 2017)
"Paul Thomas Anderson." The Close Up #1 (November 2014)
Ratcliff, Travis Lee. "The Legacy of Paranoid Thrillers." (Posted on Vimeo: June 2017) ["Paranoid thrillers are constant in cinema's history, but at any given moment they reflect our specific anxieties back to us and reveal how we feel about our institutions. Here, I explore how paranoid thrillers crystalized as a genre in American cinema and examine the possibility of a contemporary renaissance in conspiracy fiction."]
Warren, Ethan. "The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha (Columbia University Press, 2023) New Books in Film (March 29, 2023) ["Paul Thomas Anderson’s evolution from a brash, self-anointed “Indiewood” auteur to one of his generation’s most distinctive voices has been one of the most remarkable career trajectories in recent film history. From early efforts to emulate his cinematic heroes to his increasingly singular late films, Anderson has created a body of work that balances the familiar and the strange, history and myth: viewers feel perpetually off balance, unsure of whether to expect a pitch-black joke or a moment of piercing emotional resonance. The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha (Columbia UP, 2023) provides the most complete account of Anderson’s career to date, encompassing his varied side projects and unproduced material; his personal and professional relationships with directors such as Jonathan Demme, Robert Altman, and Robert Downey Sr.; and his work as a director of music videos for Fiona Apple, Joanna Newsom, and Haim. Ethan Warren explores Anderson’s recurring thematic preoccupations―the fraught dynamics of gender and religious faith, biological and found families, and his native San Fernando Valley―as well as his screenwriting methods and his relationship to his influences. Warren argues that Anderson’s films conjure up an alternate American history that exaggerates and elides verifiable facts in search of a heightened truth marked by a deeper level of emotional hyperrealism. This book is at once an unconventional primer on Anderson’s films and a provocative reframing of what makes his work so essential."]
---. "On the Hazy, Ethereal Noir of Inherent Vice." Crime Reads (March 9, 2023) ["With Inherent Vice, Anderson reconfigures many of his now-hallmark techniques to create effects that are often simultaneously provocative and evocative, all in the service of adapting the worldview of an author long thought unadaptable. Anderson again mixes the tropes of multiple genres, but where injecting spasms of comedy into prestige drama is relatively easy to parse once the surprise has worn off, the hazier mix of comedic and dramatic elements in Inherent Vice contributes to a far more ambiguous tone that might best be described as madcap naturalism. Anderson (along with Robert Elswit) adopts the most unusual visual palette that he has used since Punch-Drunk Love, this time slightly desaturating the image in order to create a feeling of fading nostalgia, as though the audience is watching an image that has been left in the sun for years. The effect is considered and deliberate, yet, like much of Boogie Nights’ visual language, it runs counter to how the viewer is conditioned to receive nostalgic imagery (which is often presented with some form of heightened visual language in keeping with the power of memory, rather than aping the physical qualities of antique objects), meaning that the effect is cerebral rather than immediately empathetic."]
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