One Battle After Another
Fatherhood, America, and The Underground - another Paul Thomas Anderson triumph
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“In the cities of the nation, me and Paul”
It happens every few years. He works a bit quicker than Kubrick did in his peak years, three a decade rather than one or two. It’s enough time to build up the anticipation, but not so long as to become a mysterious, Malickian figure. Like grief, first comes denial. No, he’s not actually adapting Vineland. Paul Thomas Anderson making a large-format action blockbuster? Yeah, I’ll believe it when I see it. I felt the same way the first time I saw an online rumor about the follow-up to Inherent Vice being a British film about dressmaking. Then comes the beautiful anticipation.
I’d been going back and forth on whether or not I wanted the “truly fresh” experience on my first viewing of this film, which has more to do with the trailer than anything else. I watched the Licorice Pizza trailer ahead of a matinee of Singin’ in the Rain at the New Beverly – both items on 35mm, of course. This led to me obsessing over the trailer, memorizing its editing rhythms like I did with Anderson’s masterful tease of Inherent Vice. However, this being a blockbuster in The House that Warners Built, The House that Zaslav Seeks to Destroy, initial press releases looked a bit… suspect. You should never judge a film by its marketing campaign, but I understand the impulse when the filmmaker has cut plenty of his own trailers in the past.
So, with the first posters, teaser, Fortnite collab, and eventually the full trailer, I opted for abstinence. I saw the image of Leo tinkering with an explosive fuse, and turned off the trailer before it cut to the reverse, Teyana Taylor looking seductively at her man. At each of my theatrical engagements that was preceded by this trailer over the last month, I’ve ducked out of the room with my head down, trying hard as I can to block out the sound. I look like an absolute fool trying to shield my eyes and ears. Remember in Fever Pitch, “lobster fingers”? It’s like that.
But perhaps that is where the difficulty comes in; Fallon wasn’t a baseball beat writer in that film, he was a die-hard Sox fan. And so, distinguishing my adoration for Anderson with my duty as a critic becomes harder and harder with each passing year. This is not “fandom” in the pop star sense of the word, it is more like the educational dedication one takes to writing their dissertation on one particular artist’s body of work. And I’ve been chipping away at this dissertation since I started watching movies. Despite what the high-low-vanquishing postmodernists will tell you, there is a difference between fandom/standom and the dedication of one’s critical faculties to the upholding of those who they find to be truly important to their field. The deities of the medium. Everybody else gets critique or evaluation from me, but these figures simply get analysis. Highly positive value judgments are implied.
So, what’s this one all about, then? Leonardo DiCaprio’s gringo zapata Ghetto Pat – later renamed Bob Ferguson – and his lover, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), are with the French 75, a post-new-left-adjacent liberation movement focusing on direct action and guerilla tactics1. On their tail is Sean Penn’s Colonel Lockjaw, who Perfidia seduces at the opening detention center liberation (with an incredible visual gag involving Lockjaw’s hard-on) before eventually falling prey to him at a bank heist foiled by downtown traffic. She’s first placed in the witness protection program, before going rogue. Lockjaw has very clearly transferred his feelings of capture to that of love, if he’s capable of said feeling. Now his pet project has fled the coop, and he’s on a mission. Meanwhile, Bob and newborn Willa – her father not objectively proven to be the radical or the colonel, as the film sets up this paternity duel very slyly – are shipped off to hide with new names in a new town.
Flash forward to Willa’s teen years, now played by Chase Infiniti, and those of Bob’s burnout. Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work” signals a tonal sigh of relief after the breakneck pacing that defined the first movement of the film. She essentially takes care of her hyper-paranoid ex-radical pop in between school and karate class (led by the great Sensei Del Toro). He tries to put the pieces of his past together, waiting for the ex-old to walk through that door not unlike how Doc Sportello waited for Shasta Fay in Inherent Vice. Then, due to Lockjaw’s pending status in the Christmas Adventurers, a white nationalist group with beaucoup funding, Penn’s caricature that picks up where Bigfoot left off sets out to clear his tracks of past race-mixing and pussy-based corruption. Willa, like her mother, flies the coop, ending up at a weed-growing nunnery, a kush convent. And so the genre premise is set, with spoilers to come later in the review: An unconventional custody dispute between an ex-radical on the run, whose memory is the victim of smoking shitty weed and drinking cheap beer for thirty years, and a fascist military officer on a warpath to prove his credentials to the only people more evil than himself. Anderson takes a similar approach to his previous Pynchon adaptation, Inherent Vice, in parsing down the great conspiratorial novelist to the push-and-pull of a few central relationships and the general tone and thematics. This one is considerably more liberal with its source material than Vice, for the better. Anderson also adds a most crucial element to the text, that of race.
Notes toward a new fatherhood
In most of Paul Thomas Anderson’s work, the idea of the paternal has been a fraught one. Sydney in Hard Eight lays down the laws of gambling, the boisterous type of father-figure unconventional for real life, but if anything, too conventional for a genre picture. Then, in Boogie Nights, porno power couple Jack Horner and Amber Waves essentially adopt a young Dirk Diggler to exploit his penile potency, leaving his cuckold father and drunk mother from Torrance in the dust. In Magnolia, the ensemble is powered by shitty showbiz dads, whether they are of the Parent-Coach, Parent-Molester, or Parent-Producer variety. Punch-Drunk Love is the filmography’s first zag, with Barry (Sandler) being surrounded by a surreal/comical amount of women in his family, which wholly defines his neuroses. The brothers-in-law won’t be of any help, either. Where are the fathers… Of course, Daniel Plainview is the most intimidating and bastardizing father of them all, as There Will Be Blood’s cruelty is that of capital itself. In The Master, holes are truly punctured in this line of thought for the first time. Lancaster Dodd’s subservience to his wife’s ultra-serious hand jobs, his son’s gestures toward repudiation, and his addiction to the company of Freddie Quell (whose relationship toes the line between lust and all things filial) battle against his tendency to bloviate, and his urge to be a father to all who need one. This contributes to a turning of the corner, in this particular respect of his filmography. In Inherent Vice, the father figure is Bigfoot Bjornsen, who, at one point, tells both his real son and Doc Sportello to go to bed. “Why would I go to bed? I’m working.” He’s a straight-up fascist, but an ironic, satiric one, far less imposing than what Philip Baker Hall brought to those early films. Doc is almost on his level. As for Licorice Pizza, I’ll repeat a question so many have asked in our current day and age… where are the fathers? It’s a film about a maternal figure. Is he… done making movies about dads?
No, he just needed some time to adjust. Married to Maya Rudolph and father of four, Paul Thomas Anderson transposes Vineland into a take on his own contemporary nightmare, with specifics that ring true to his own work + life and broad strokes that define everyday America. The father-figure is bifurcated into opposing forces with Bob and Lockjaw – one represents the filmmaker today, the other, his father figures of yesteryear.
Political violence, hate-based groups with seemingly unlimited funding, horrifying immigration detention centers, police taking selfies with arrested suspects, revolutionaries getting pedantic about language; it’s all here. How can we wake up from our national nightmare? Perhaps by doing what Senator Bulworth once suggested.
This has, by far, the most non-white characters to appear in a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. If you’re trying to read this aspect politically, you probably won’t get any further than a liberal acceptance of all people. It’s not so much politics of representation as it is realism. If you read it personally, however, it’s quite moving. The starlet who his camera fell in love with in Licorice Pizza, Alana Haim, plays one of two white revolutionaries beside Leo, and dates a great if-underutilized Wood Harris. Tom Petty’s “American Girl” plays over the end credits, as Willa walks out the door. This is the new America, the new “nuclear” family, one that represents our cultural melting pot, and ideals that run counter to the hyper conservative ideas of race and family that damned American life and culture for so long, and continues to in so many ways. This is a hopeful film for the future, a sincere Bulworth.
Oh, and it has about five action setpieces, with scope and physicality that I never thought I’d see in a Paul Thomas Anderson film. The first section of the film is essentially an extended montage of French 75 hits, One Setpiece After Another. In a scene drenched in paranoia, one of the French 75 gets assassinated at the supermarket in a moment worthy of Scorsese. Around the midpoint, Benicio’s operation is raided, which leads to a fantastic rooftop sprint. Plenty of other interesting stuff is going on during this action, but let’s focus on that rooftop. The VistaVision photography genuinely evokes the opening of Vertigo, but in a world where Hitchcock never had to use rear projection. Leo follows a trio of the Sensei’s boys in silhouette over an expressionist purple sky2, until he can no longer keep up with their youth.
But since we’re pretty deep into this review, let’s talk about the best one.
Peaks and valleys [SPOILERS]
The film climaxes with a four-car chase, sans-dialogue, that can at once recall the primitive origins of silent action cinema (often bound to trains, not cars) as well as the hallucinatory qualities of the 1960-70s genre cinema of psychedelia, in which the rod was so often featured as an extension of its driver’s persona. It’s La Roue and Vanishing Point, it’s Griffith’s Lonedale Operator3 and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry; Tarantino wept, for he was no longer the greatest cinematic excavator of historic thrills.4 The Two-Lane Blacktop sits atop the hilly California desert plains. At the apex of these large bumps, one can see the apexes ahead and behind. In the depths, one is essentially blind. It’s a setpiece built out of the geography of the highway, which circles back to an idea from the very first image of the film: Perfidia Beverly Hills on foot, ascending a highway offramp that towers above an immigration detention center that the French 75 were preparing to liberate, as unsuspecting cars pass by. She’s an avatar for the viewer in this shot and this shot alone – she can hitch a ride and turn her back on the movement as America continues to crumble at the hands of right-wing ideology, or she can commit domestic terrorism to fight against it. Nobody at my screening turned their backs on the film.
Yet another “spoiler warning”, because people are really sensitive about this stuff.
Now, about that climax… since the opening shot, a generation of political strife has passed, as have the plot points of the film. This is, of course, where the spoilers really come in. A real food chain of bad hombres comprise the chase: Lockjaw in his Private Military Contractor-style black SUV is being duly pursued by, one, the keeper of the keys to a yuletide-themed white nationalist group in a bright blue Mustang, and two, Leo’s Bob Ferguson, who zips around in a stolen purple Nissan that sounds like a 2-stroke motorcycle. Willa Ferguson is not in either of these cars, however, and is instead driving the bounty hunter's white Charger, the vehicular equivalent of a plainclothes NYPD officer sporting a Yankees fitted.
The ups and downs of these hills mean so much more than the ups and downs of life – if that was the only visual meaning, we’d still be okay, but this is The Master we’re talking about. As Willa is eventually pursued by the Christmas Adventurer who drives Lockjaw off the road, the metaphor of the opening shot returns, in a new form, with new meaning. Eventually, her mother did turn her back on the movement and her family, to save her own life. But the blue Mustang behind her isn't going to cut a special deal. He's not in law enforcement. He just hates people of color.
This setup is quite lovingly protracted, as we see Chase Infinity drive over the top of plenty of these peaks before devising her plan, deep in thought, as I mentioned earlier, veering into hallucination and psychedelia. As we drive through a California desert with mirages every quarter-mile, her reality collapses. In the depths of these ups and downs, she is alone. At their peaks, she is exposed, with two sets of headlights in the rearview. You can't hide at the bottom for very long. At the top, the unknown is ahead, that mystifying mirage of the unknown. Behind? The past. And we know how Anderson feels about the past. Related: Clint Eastwood’s A Perfect World.
Tunnels and the Underground Man
The insect on the shelf was back. It didn’t seem to do anything. It just came out of the hole in the girder onto the edge of the steel shelf and sat there. After a while it would disappear back into the hole in the girder, and he was pretty sure it didn’t do anything in there either. He felt similar to the insect inside the girder his shelf was connected to, but was not sure just how he was similar.
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest5
The long and the short of it is, gentlemen, that it is better to do nothing! Better conscious inertia! And so hurrah for underground! Though I have said that I envy the normal man to the last drop of my bile, yet I should not care to be in his place such as he is now (though I shall not cease envying him). No, no; anyway the underground life is more advantageous. There, at any rate, one can ... Oh, but even now I am lying! I am lying because I know myself that it is not underground that is better, but something different, quite different, for which I am thirsting, but which I cannot find! Damn underground!
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
The lows of this hilly highway terrain relate to another major theme of this film: tunnels and the underground. The use of drugs in the film, with its protagonist’s Doper’s Memory actually biting him in the ass several times over, but still reserving harsh judgement, ran counter to that of Inherent Vice. While kush is the elixir that kept the gears in Doc Sportello’s mind turning, this post-hippie revolution seems a lot less bent on tripping out. I found the tunnel networks fascinating, and an extrapolation of some aesthetic strategies found in “Daydreaming”, Anderson’s Radiohead music video that sees Thom Yorke opening a series of surreal doors, transporting him from one locale to the next. Tunnels and the underground are where we hide.
First, as you may expect, these are utilized by criminals linking one underworld safe zone to another. The film goes beyond a fully negative connotation of hiding underground however, because perhaps what’s above ground can be just as sinister, which represents the film’s incredibly messy sense of morality, appropriate for the source material of a postmodernist like Pynchon. Tunnels are used by Benicio Del Toro’s Sensei, for what he describes as a “Latino Harriet Tubman” operation. A tunnel saves Bob Ferguson from the feds when they bust down his door. And most notably, the underground secret lair visual schema is brought to its peak of elegance in the den of the Saint Nick-hailing hate mongers, racevestigating the uberfash Colonel Lockjaw. Hiding from the world.
Criminals hide because they know what they do is wrong in the eyes of the law. Immigrants hide because they know that detention centers await on the surface. And the Christmas Adventurers hide, because why the fuck would you openly participate in a Christmas-themed white nationalist group? Are they David Foster Wallace’s insects? Or are we? In a modern day, scrolling the timeline, you might see all of these people-insects. They hide underground, in their phones. It seems that the Underground Man of Dostoevsky is appearing on the surface more and more.
Let’s do a selfie…
I was always really annoyed by the chorus of people on film twitter (I’m deadnaming the site now, because I’m referring to a pre-Elon phenomenon) who claimed filmmakers like Anderson or Tarantino were “scared” to make a contemporary film, one that featured smartphones. Perhaps Anderson stuck to period pieces (after Punch-Drunk Love), because he is a visual sensationalist, a sensory pleasure-seeker, and the contemporary world is so god damn ugly that it no longer has room for the raw pleasure that the first hour of Boogie Nights brings.
Hey, did you guys hear that nostalgia is actually reactionary?
So, I was delighted to see Anderson face the issue head-on here. After a chunk of typical espionage-related no-phone rules, Bob is predictably anti-mobile for both his and his daughter’s sake, before slowly getting sucked into the necessity of the unit. However, after The Sensei bails him out of a jam – sixer of Modelo in hand, swaggering like a Latino Tom Atkins in Halloween III – they take a selfie from the angle that a streamer would film himself driving, before asking Siri for directions. At the end of the film, in perhaps its most traditionally movie-star-charming moment, Leo endearingly fidgets with the flash on his iPhone before taking his first solo selfie. I think it’s safe to say the issue has been settled.
More Fun
I’m not sure I’ve ever laughed harder at Leo, particularly when he gets high before a parent-teacher conference. The act of smoking weed in your car and not hiding it whatsoever but pretending that you are very much hiding it… let’s just say that I’m familiar. His internal battle, all in the eyes, leads to a hunched over side-saddle posture, as he ducks his head onto the passenger seat to briefly disappear from the view of any onlookers for a quick toke, is Looney Tunes funny.6 After a feigned attempt to air out the car by swinging the door open and shut (a detail that does feel like Pynchon, or at least one that he'd find a better way to describe than I just did), the conference itself is a riot. A US history class, the ultimate battleground of stoner conspiro-politics. Choking on a vape hit, his eyes pink pools, Leo refers to Benjamin Franklin as “The Grand Wizard” as the climax of his dressing-down his daughter's ideological education. Or at least, the part of her education that was out of his hands. Through codes and procedures established in minutes between father and daughter, followed by this one-sided intellectual sparring match, we understand that he has always fought the “education” system. Another hilarious scene involves his investigation into his daughter’s school chums who pick her up for the dance, which is the best of its sub-genre since Bad Boys II, and the start of a great running joke, Bob’s use of “homie.”
Sean Penn is something like 1970s Warren Oates in a Stanley Kubrick movie, with the physical frame and tight shirts of a guy who hocks protein powder on Instagram. The Kubrick comparison really clicks in a moment where two shots are match-cut together: a pair of his uniformed goons marching on the straight dolly track of Paths of Glory or Full Metal Jacket. Penn and Anderson are quite good friends, and get lunch on a very regular basis according to some Real Auteurist Sources. I love the idea of Penn anchoring his nu-repertory company. In a recent (extremely sweet) clip, John C. Reilly said that he’s not in these movies anymore because he told Paul to stop casting him on the basis of their friendship. After seeing Penn’s name on the Licorice Pizza trailer, I did not think that I’d compare his work with Anderson to that of John C. Reilly or Philip Seymour Hoffman, but there is a very obvious personal connection on screen. It was wonderfully teased when he played William Holden trying to get Alana Haim in his version of Breezy in the last film, but this time, he’s full-bore. The exploitation of his horniness at the hands (the rear-end, really) of Perfidia is hilarious. Not since that scene in Inherent Vice has Anderson so seductively shot an actress, particularly when Leo playfully grabs a chunk of her ass while Lockjaw peeps through binoculars, punctuated with a great unzipping foley sound. It’s the evil version of the moment where Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Scotty first laid eyes on Wahlberg’s Dirk, down to the optical iris effect. However, where Scotty and Nurse Phil were pure of heart in Boogie Nights and Magnolia, Penn’s Lockjaw is as demonic a central character as Anderson has ever written. He’s Bigfoot if Bigfoot had a figurative Punisher skull tattoo instead of the banana fixation.
There’s plenty more fun to hit on78, but I’m afraid that over four thousand words into a movie review, you must be growing weary of me. In summation, I’ll hand it over to Mr. Glinis:
Leo watches The Battle of Algiers while smoking weed on the couch. I know many of you can relate.
The only other time I’ve seen a sky that shade of purple was in episodes 3-4 of Twin Peaks: The Return.
Sorry, D.W., you just got race-cucked by the Paul Thomas Anderson. Take that, you dead piece of shit.
An ironic point, considering Anderson’s films were so obviously indebted to his masters at a young age, before shedding the on-sleeve influences and developing a more personal and unique style, while Tarantino continues burrowing his head into history, a privilege he has more than earned.
PTA was briefly Wallace’s student at Emerson, where the author taught DeLillo’s White Noise. To be a fly on that wall… Also, if Anderson adapted White Noise instead of Baumbach, we’d be in the “best timeline” or whatever those geeks talk about.
I’m glad this was made at Warners, because one of the kids at Sensei’s place has a Tasmanian Devil backpack, and there’s a Foghorn Legorn ‘Tune on TV in the background. If anyone at WB Property (where I’ve applied for many a job) wants to hook me up with the Taz Pack, it’d be worth upwards of thirty of my dollars.
Eddie Vedder Halen is probably the best fake Pynchon name ever, or second to Hesse’s tweet about “Sprite Zero.”
The last song that Willa enjoys with her friends before being extracted from the dance is Sheck Wes’ “Mo Bamba.” I can’t believe this real.
Great piece, man. I think your totally on the money regarding this movie's relationship to the mainstream - PTA wants to make his biggest movie yet, so he has to make it about people in the underground, and as far as what he says to say about fathers and daughters, and the future, well that last needle drop really says it all.
I'm "liking" this without having read more than the beginning and the end, because my shit is WHETTED, and I don't want to know any more than general impressions till I see it next week. My 'most anticipated film' in quite a while. Reading VINELAND again currently and in 7th heaaven. Alongside CINEMA 1, of course...