Inherent Vice and the Glorious Cool of the Stoner Detective

From Sherlock Holmes, to Raymond Chandler, to The Big Lebowski.

Inherent Vice seems destined, even before its release next week, to become a cult classic. Sublimely strange, meandering, filled with sudden bursts of inspired weirdness and oddly unforgettable moments within long and directionless stretches, the movie goes to pains not to be digestible. The source material, a novel by Thomas Pynchon, is, if not outright un-filmable, then close enough. Pynchon is a fabulous writer because of the density of his prose, his hilarious insight into the darker realities of post-Hiroshima American life, and his frantic love of highly expressive language. None of which can be captured on a camera, not even by Paul Thomas Anderson. Inherent Vice works, when it does work, not as a Pynchon adaptation but as a contribution to the coolest of American genres: the stoner-detective story.

I could explain the plot of Inherent Vice to you. That's what I'm supposed to do at this point. But it would be like explaining an acid trip to someone who has never tried acid—I might enjoy it, but you probably wouldn't. And besides, the senselessness is kind of the point. The plot is an excuse to put Joaquin Phoenix in awesome sideburns. He plays Doc Sportello, whose old lady inveigles him into a missing-person case. The case then leads him into various scenarios with various characters—Josh Brolin as Bigfoot Bjornsen, a Swedish cop with a flattop haircut and a violent streak who also acts in real-estate ads, a Jewish tycoon who travels with neo-Nazi bikers, a hippie brothel owner, a group called the Golden Fang that's either a tax dodge for dentists or an Indo-Chinese heroin cartel (or both). The "problem" of the mystery is "solved" with no relation to the actions of Sportello. Inherent Vice resolves itself almost exactly like a high. The tensions simply dissolve. Anderson, even in this impossible film, is a great director with his ambitions always dialed up to maximum. Inherent Vice isn't just a film about being high; it tries to give the viewers the sensation of being high.

The film-noir plot helps generate that baked sensation. The stoner detective is a rare beast, but a magnificent one. The original detective himself, Sherlock Holmes, was a drug addict. Boredom drove him to experiments in morphine and cocaine, which he injected. Even when Holmes is off coke, his habit is "not dead, but merely sleeping," according to Watson.

Sportello huffs a few lines in Inherent Vice, and a bit of laughing gas for good measure, but his true love is pot. Pot and the detective story have a peculiar alchemy. The first example of a stoner-detective story was Robert Altman's 1973 version of Raymond Chandler's 1953 novel The Long Goodbye. The movie played the difference between the hardboiled-detective genre and the easy and crazy openness of 1970s California. Marlowe, the protagonist, is lost in his own time. He keeps some of the lines from the original, but he uses them on the all-female neighbors making "hash pies" and dancing naked under the light of the moon. Meanwhile, the specter of the future California right-wingers haunts the hippiedom—Reagan was in power and, literally, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a thug.

No doubt Altman's detective story was in Pynchon's mind, and in Anderson's, during the composition of Inherent Vice. But it is nearly impossible to see the movie without thinking of The Big Lebowski. That influence is glaring. Both movies star a raggedy haired hippie with dirty feet in a whodunit. Both hippie detectives have counterparts in violent, war-obsessed men with flattop haircuts who have most of the great lines. Both take their strength from the fusion of two genres: the art-house pic and the film noir. Both movies are overshadowed by the twin specters of Nixon and the sixties. Both movies are about the peculiar culture of Southern California.

The reason pot-smoking and detective stories work so well together is that they have several key features in common. Early in Inherent Vice, as Sportello is interviewing a client, a connection emerges and he jots down in his notebook "paranoia alert." Is it the plot or the drugs that are making him paranoid? Or is there any difference? The sudden emergence of connections that are not apparent to everybody is the same whether you're high or reading a Chandler novel. And often these connections are threatening and don't make sense. This was the central joke of Pineapple Express, which imagined what would happen if Brad Pitt's couch stoner from True Romance walked outside and got caught in an elaborate shootout. Chandler himself admitted that he didn't know where his plots were going while he was writing them. The great detective plots, like great highs, are full of narrative holes.

Both stoner culture and the American detective story have their deepest roots in the same place, too: Los Angeles. It is the city of Mickey Cohen and The Big Sleep and Chinatown and L.A. Confidential, of freedom-loving cults and the freak-ins. It's no coincidence that the stoned detective is a creature of Los Angeles in every case. He reflects the confusing, beautiful iconography of America at its extremes: uptight, out of sight, and totally laid-back. Freedom-loving and utterly repressed. The message of Inherent Vice, or of one of its voiceovers, anyway, is that America is a country "that needs to be escaped from." But, in California at least, the Americans are always escaping back into more America. The lesson of the stoned detective story as a genre is a complicated one: Every Nixon has a hippie inside him desperate to get out, and every hippie has a little Nixon cuddled in his heart.

After the premiere of Inherent Vice, Paul Thomas Anderson admitted, "I never remember plots of movies. I remember how they make me feel and I remember emotions and I remember visual things that I've seen, but my brain can never connect the dots of how things go together." There's a kind of tragedy to that condition: The detective and the paranoid stoner are desperate to put the dots together, even though they never can. Not the detective. Not the stoner. Not the viewer either. The initial disappointment eventually gives way to acceptance, even a kind of resigned happiness. Nobody ever really does put the dots together. And that is totally okay. May as well light up another one.

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