bewilderment.

Last night, I was restless and achy, so I went to see Inherent Vice at the local Regal.

The only Thomas Pynchon work I've read was The Crying of Lot 49, recommended to me by K, whose recommendations are less "recommendations" than "demands, on the level of a hostage-taker negotiating with the frantic family." Luckily for me, I loved Crying. It was a dizzying stumble through a city and maybe a brain or two; a weird adventure of the sort one might have on a daily basis without even noticing, except this time someone noticed; only tolerable because the protagonists were as confused by the proceedings as I the reader was, and if they could accept it, slammed as they were right into the middle of it, then by golly, so could I.

Inherent Vice is, if the movie's anything to go off of, more of the same—and devastatingly, thrillingly so. As noted, I haven't read the book off of which this film is based. I've been told, though, that Crying is fairly typical of Pynchon's writing style, so I approached Vice as a film with the hope of seeing on the screen the atmosphere I so loved in Crying—that franticness, that befuddlement, those moments of unsettling tenderness and heartbreaking humanity interspersed with pure, unadulterated drugged-out pants-on-head crazy. And boy, oh boy, did I ever see exactly all of those things.

Word on the street is that Paul Thomas Anderson wrote the screenplay by typing up the entire novel and selectively deleting. Paul Thomas Anderson himself being pants-on-head crazy, it wouldn't surprise me if this were true. It also doesn't surprise me to hear that Pynchon gave the screenplay his blessing. I can't adequately judge the screenplay, having never read the book, but to my uneducated eyes, it was a thing of goddamned brilliance.

Pynchon's language is weird in the truest Dr. Thompson sense of the word. Like most of my favorite authors, he writes like a man whose vocabulary of experience is on a level above that of most people you know—because it is. He's one of those people who sees the fantastic, the diabolical, and the insane in every aspect of mundane life. But, while most of us get driven to distraction if we notice the madness, Pynchon nods, makes note of it, and shrugs it off, ambling through the madcap acid trip that is everyday life with the dry observational humor of a society lady at a cocktail party. Depending on who you ask, Pynchon is either babbling to himself in a corner, or the chillest cat you've ever laid eyes on, and that's why I love the guy. And who better to star in a film based on this dude's writing than the ultimate babbling cool cat, Joaquin Phoenix?!

Joaquin Phoenix is Vice's protagonist, a dude who fixes things in spite of himself, a mild disaster of a human being who bumbles his way into every possible fiasco and yet still comes... if not out on top, at least out. Phoenix's character is a hero to every loser and a shining example of what's wrong with society for anyone who's ever spent most of their time obsessing over the finer nuances of Right and Wrong... people like, for example, the jerkface jock-cop (who just might just want to be loved) portrayed to creased-pantsed perfection by Josh Brolin.

Setting Phoenix and Brolin opposite one another—seeing them act together, in the dialogue scenes of which they are, intelligently, given quite a number—is just a fucking treat. The audience is paralyzed with hilarity at the sheer nonsense of their interactions; the petty jabs, the petulance, the sheer vitriol, obviously loathing each other with every denim-and-corduroy fiber of their beings. Yet simultaneously, we see that these two men have every reason to love each other, every reason to be best friends, brothers even, because who among us hasn't had that one best friend who was as different from us as we could imagine, whom we hated the same way we loved, fiercely and without reserve? That's Phoenix and Brolin's relationship—except instead of coming out hugging, they came out of that ring swinging, and it's beyond repair, what they might have had, and that kills us to see, even as it brings tears of laughter to our eyes.

I could write all night long about this film, I really could, but most of it would be gibberish and no doubt inferior to the experience you, dear reader, could take away just by going to see the damn thing yourself—or, hell, by reading the novel! Read Pynchon, you losers. You read me, for chrissake, and I'm peanut shells on the floor of a dive bar compared to him. Novel or no novel, GO SEE THIS FILM, I urge you; revel in the languid tidepools of its language, the sudden cold-water plunges of its humor, the seasick dizziness of its honesty. Don't try to chart its path; let it wash over you, curling waves of feeling and nonsense and profundity, and emerge damp and rimed with salty cynicism, flush with swells of passion that you might later let break, cyclical, crashing, on the shores of your mundane, weird everyday life.