Film Review: "Inherent Vice" (2014)

"It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads"

Score: 9 out of 10. Masterpiece.

This review assumes the reader has seen the film already.

I.

This is a very simple movie, and its simplicity lies in its misogyny. Doc Sportello, a hippie and private detective, is induced by his ex-girlfriend, Shasta Fay Hepworth, that he is still heartbroken over, to investigate an intertwining plot of real estate development in California and international drug smuggling.

Both the real estate development and drug smuggling conspiracies stand as they were at the end as they were at the beginning. It is fair to say that Sportello’s investigation or efforts have no effect on them. All goes on as it used to. But although these two conspiracies which gradually became semivisible prove to be invincible, Sportello still acquires two minor victories in his adventure.

The first is that during the investigation he discovers another hippie, Coy, who became a confidential informant after his death was faked, and rescues him from great danger, reuniting him with his wife and daughter.

The second is that Doc finds out that a great injustice had been perpetrated upon his friend, Bigfoot, a police detective, and he puts this to right, insofar as anything terrible can be put to right in this world, where a deed, whether good or evil, once accomplished, is embedded forever into the tapestry of existence.

But just like two great conspiracies, his bittersweet romance with Shasta is stationary throughout the plot. Doc and Shasta do not reunite.

So what then is the meaning of this film?

A detective is someone who investigates things that are secret.

II.

The entirety of the story is narrated by Doc’s friend, Sortilège, but her narration’s perspective is not concurrent to the events, but retrospective to the era. The plot itself progresses through events that had already happened or happen off-screen or, and it is their aftermath and their consequences that are depicted. Made so, it could have been a Hitchcockianly cold movie, but it is not, because the characters are drawn very true to life, and their emotions are depicted very honestly, i.e. heartbreak and loneliness, grief and anger, desire for justice and struggle over power, and regret over the past, and hopes about the future.

The story can be divided into these four parts: (1) From the beginning to Wolffman’s return from the rehabilitation center, it is the story of real estate development. (2) Shasta’s monologue shows how corrupt she has become. (3) From the monologue to Doc’s combat it is the Golden Fang drug smuggling story. (4) Then Doc shows that he is pure of heart.

These four things, by the elegiac narration of Sortilège, carry a melancholy tone, which comes from the sense that a beautiful dream was concluded, and it is time to wake up. The dream was the dream of the 1960s hippies, where they believed that they could will another, better society into existence, with their message of peace and love.

But to date no one has been able to adequately explain what drug use had anything to with “peace” or “love”.

III.

Shasta Fay Hepworth, the ex-girlfriend, is the symbol of this dream. Doc is heartbroken about her. She left him, as did the feeling of that era, to become the property-in-common of powerful but ignoble men. The point made by Paul Thomas Anderson/Thomas Pynchon is that this dream found its conclusion at the discretion of women, in what they decided to do. Doc Sportello did not use force or guile to keep Shasta, nor even try to persuade her to stay with him, as the dream was that individuals liberated from self-imposed obligations would naturally choose to be happy. Hence the dream was refuted by its own principle, and the social fabric was torn apart, and Anderson/Pynchon put the blame on the nature of women, which is human nature.¹

IV.

For the kind of society of not only material plenty, but extremely strong social fabric, or “high trust” society the hippies wanted to crystallize and enjoy forever was not built by men like the hippies, pleasure-loving, pacific, and unattached—but by contesting, masterful, warlike men, indeed, by men who were the best at contest and mastery and war. Because in “the state of nature” there is no plenty to enjoy or peace to enjoy it in, but eternal warfare of each tribe against all other tribes, an existence like that of chimpanzees. And the strong social fabric that keep the people together was weaved on by centuries of effort in securing survival of their own and empire over others. The material plenty was created by an ethic of delayed gratification, “low time preference,” and self-discipline.

And what is power is but the decision for exclusive enjoyment? If Shasta is a plaything of Mickey, then she is not the girlfriend of Doc—if Coy and his wife are in the grip of pleasure of heroin, then they can’t have a healthy baby.

V.

“πάθει μάθος”, man learns through suffering. Suffering the consequences of the words we say and the deeds we do is how we learn “what is”, for if words and deeds did not affect the world permanently and irretrievably, there would be no consequences to see and learn from. But who is doing the learning? Does Shasta learn anything? No. The promise she held exists only in Doc’s memories of their time together, in what is already past. None of the hopes articulated by the hippies for a society filled with love and absent of jealousy held true for her. Her naked monologue to Doc demonstrates that the experience of being used and abused by spirited men taught her contempt for the ideas of the hippies.

VI.

The Golden Fang brought in the drugs the hippies wanted to use. How else would the drugs come? Somebody had to grow it, process it, and distribute it. It was only natural that those people would grow wealthy and powerful thereby.

It was not the squares of the previous era with their bourgeois sensibility but unscrupulous enterprising men of the next era of mass vulgar narcissism that turned America from a high trust society capable of conquering the world to a low trust one incapable of upholding domestic order. And it was the desire of the hippies who were lost in their dreams in that still innocent drughaze that generated the profit that brought the abusers into power.

VII.

The name of the movie is Inherent Vice. Shasta says she was the inherent vice on the Golden Fang. The hippies gave their agency, money and power away to the people who supplied them the drugs. They gave away their beautiful women to purchase the drugs they got high with. They gave away the society they inherited to indulge in their vices.

Their era concluded when Charlie Manson murdered Sharon Tate, and the dream turned into a nightmare, and the suppliers of vice and corrupters of youth were firmly confirmed into the parasitic rulers that sucked the nation dry.

Today, happiness and liberation through drug use or free love seems quaint. Widespread chronic disease and obesity have a way of killing erotic longings.

VIII.

Doc Sportello is a compelling vehicle for the plot for the reason of being no ordinary hippie: he is as intelligent, brave, and resourceful as any protagonist in an adventure story. We don’t root for him because he is sad over lost happiness, but because of his integrity, moral compass and undaunted courage.

His hippie lifestyle gave Doc Sportello only the leisure from which to view things. It was not drugs but combat that made him noble and heroic.

IX.

If happiness and freedom is to be regained by the West, it will only be won on ten thousand battlefields across the human heart where what is good will combat what is evil after weighing the better against the worse, and preferring what is better.

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But aren’t we all the authors of our lives, and each other’s lives?

1. Some have contested my assertion that women partake in human nature. I stand by it.