1) “Thomas Pynchon announces Shadow Ticket, his first novel in more than a decade“
Very good news. Wasn’t sure we’d get another one. I’ve marked October 7 on my calendar.
Also good news, but not on the same level:
2) THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME – Official Trailer [HD] – Only in Theaters May 30
I’ve marked May 30 on my calendar as well.
Just got back from vacation. Yay.
Sometimes people ask what I did on vacation (and, sometimes, did I take pictures of it).
The answer is usually, mostly, “no.” This year, however, I did Do Something (although I didn’t take pictures of it): I read Bleeding Edge, one of the two Thomas Pynchon novels that I had never read. Began it on the bus to Cape Cod, and finished it on the bus coming back.
I had started it before, at least once, but it usually takes me a few tries to get a good momentum going with Pynchon. First I get bogged down with all the characters and names and stuff, and then, finally, I decide to power through and I resign myself to the fact that I probably won’t have any idea what’s going on. To quote Publisher’s Weekly: “[R]eading Pynchon for plot is like reading Austen for sex.”
(What’s interesting is that, in Inherent Vice at least, the plot is very tightly constructed. It’s easy (and fine) to ignore that, but the structure is there if you look, and it’s solid.)
And, of course, as always, Bleeding Edge reads like Pynchon, which is always a pleasure. It has so many wonderful, wonderful sentences. I’ve said it before, but, still, despite my best efforts, every sentence Pynchon has ever written is better than any sentence I’ve ever written. To quote Publisher’s Weekly again: “Luckily, Pynchon and Austen have ample recourse to the oldest, hardest-to-invoke rule in the book — when in doubt, be a genius. It’s cheating, but it works. No one, but no one, rivals Pynchon’s range of language, his elasticity of syntax, his signature mix of dirty jokes, dread and shining decency.”
To quote the New York Times:
Thomas Pynchon is 76, and his refusal to develop a late style is practically infuriating. The man’s wildly consistent: the only reason Bleeding Edge couldn’t have been published in 1973 is that the Internet, the Giuliani/Disney version of Times Square and the war on terror hadn’t come along yet.
As my mother used to say about certain very old jazz musicians and painters, “He’s still doing his thing.”
And, obviously, one of the many things you can learn from Inherent Vice is that the Internet was already in motion several years before 1973. It didn’t look anything like the Internet of today, but that’s part of what this novel is about. Bleeding Edge, which takes place in 2001, is steeped in the end of the Internet (not that the Internet is done, obviously, but the early, optimistic days were long ago overtaken by massive engines of profit and surveillance).
And, yes, this is a September 11 novel, though it takes its time to get to the events of that morning, and what came after.
This is not a review, obviously. I’ve only read it once, which with Pynchon is barely a beginning.
One more quote from the Times:
In summary: Despite the lack of personal information supplied about the author, it’s plain, from the sweep and chortle of his sentences, from the irascible outbreaks of horniness, from the pinpoint rage at popular hypocrisy and cant, that young Pynchon is a writer of boundless promise, sure to give us a long shelf of entrancing and charismatic novels. I believe he has a masterpiece or three in him. I look forward to seeing what he’ll do next.
Later update: You want to know what it’s like to read a novel by Thomas Pynchon? At least for me? (Although I am definitely not the only one.)
In the Douglas Adams novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything is revealed to be the number 42. This novel, which does not propose any ultimate answers to anything, has 41 chapters. Is this intended to tell us…
Anyway, you can see how it goes.
Three mistakes in the screenplay for Inherent Vice (the movie)
First off, I’m not talking about things which were changed, or things which were left out. Both of those have to happen a lot if you’re going to make a movie out of a novel, and if you’re going to make a Hollywood movie there are even more restraints (nudity, sex, drugs, cigarettes, driving while intoxicated, gay people).
No, within those restraints, if anything the movie is entirely too devoted to the details, while in some ways missing the point. And in some places where changes were made they are, for movie purposes at least, an improvement.
But here are the three mistakes.
1) The movie makes no sense.
It is a common misconception that the book makes no sense. Most of the reviews I’ve read of the movie refer to this — that the book is some stoned detective tale where nothing ties together at the end and who cares.
This is absolutely wrong, and it may show that movie critics should stick to movies and not start talking about books that they probably didn’t read and certainly didn’t understand.
Because the book is very tightly constructed, and everything makes sense at the end. This is not The Big Sleep (book and movie) where there is never any answer for the question of who killed the chauffeur or why.
For one example, late in the book Doc ends up with something very inconvenient in the trunk of his car. Why was it placed there? In the book, Doc makes an assumption, that it was just plain meanness on the part of somebody. But he’s wrong — it was a deliberate part of a very carefully worked out plan.
In the movie? No explanation.
I think it matters — if a story has a point to make, it makes a difference whether the story has a strong foundation or is floating in midair. This is not The Big Sleep (or Lucy!) — it’s a very different kind of story and it should actually make sense.
2) I mentioned before that the movie goes way more sentimental then the book (the book is not sentimental at all, in fact — romantic, in various ways, but not sentimental).
The two main ways this comes out are in Doc’s relationship with Shasta Fay, his ex old lady, and in his relationship with Bigfoot Bjornsen, his cop nemesis. I won’t go into details, but it really makes the focus of the ending very personal, very individual, which is the opposite of the book.
3) Here’s one specific about the ending which makes a big difference. I’m going to get into some details here, so I guess…
Spoiler alert!
The scene near the end when Doc sees Shasta Fay again, and she urges him to spank her and then have sex with her.
Well, it’s from the book, kind of, but in the book there’s a big question about whether it really happens.
People more obsessive than I am (yes, really) have figured out exactly on what day of 1970 everything in the book takes place (this is possible mostly because Doc is avidly following the NBA playoffs throughout). And, through this, it’s been possible to determine that there’s an extra day in the middle of the book. A day on which there is no mention of time, the only clock mentioned is stopped, and everybody Doc meets acts wildly out of character.
So, if you take a scene (in which Shasta Fay acts wildly out of character) from that day and plop it into “real time,” it’s going to skew things quite a bit.
(I have my own theory about that day, as a matter of fact, which I wrote about here.)
I read a pretty good piece on the New Yorker website that clarified some of my misgivings about the movie Inherent Vice: “Paul Thomas Anderson’s Nostalgia Trip“
Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of “Inherent Vice” bears the burden of his manifest devotion to Thomas Pynchon, but it’s second to his apparent devotion to Robert Altman.
Yes, exactly.
Anderson was a friend of Altman’s (he was on set for the entire production of Altman’s last movie, because Altman couldn’t be insured otherwise), and it’s long been obvious that he’s a fan (Magnolia was clearly his attempt to do Nashville — it even has two of the same actors, which can’t have been a coincidence).
But there are major problems with both of his devotions, to Pynchon and to Altman.
Many reviewers have talked about Inherent Vice as a book (and movie) where the plot doesn’t tie together, where everything is just seen through a cloud of pot smoke, where the questions aren’t answered and who cares.
Um, well, no.
In the book, the plot is tight. All mysteries are solved, all motivations make sense, and everything ties up. In the movie that’s not the case, and that’s a huge difference. What was solidly based in reality is now free floating, not tethered to anything, and, as I said before, very, very sentimental. Which the book pretty emphatically is not.
On the other hand, the only way to make an Altman movie… well, the only way to do it for real is to be Altman, but if you’re not, you at least have to work the way he did. You have to let the reins be loose, trust your actors, and pay as little attention to the script as possible. This movie was pretty obviously not made that way, and that’s the only way it can be done.
Altman used to say that when he was shooting a movie he never had a copy of the script. Someone on the crew (in Hollywood traditionally referred to as a “script girl,” but I have no idea if they were all women or not) kept track and made sure key plot points were covered in each scene, If not, if there was a great performance from the actors and something was missed, Altman would ask if that point could be placed somewhere else, or if it could be discarded.
This is why he was pretty universally loved by actors, and grudgingly admired, at best, by screenwriters.
You can’t get a stack of staff paper and create a great jazz solo, any more than you can get a bunch of musicians together to improvise a concerto.
To go back to the New Yorker piece, I agree that comparisons to The Long Goodbye do this movie no favors. That movie is based on a book also, but it’s not hampered by excessive reverence for the source material.
And I’m going to have to think about the switch of focus to the women in the story by having a female narrator. That would be an interesting tie back to Nashville, which was also, although not obviously, about the women.
A few quick things.
1) Yes, it’s another year where I maintain my streak of forgetting my blog anniversary (three years in a row! ::fist pump::). And this time I forgot it clear into December (surpassing all previous records!), and even at that I had to be reminded by T.S. Bazelli commenting on her blog anniversary.
Hey, nine years. Memory-challenged, but still going strong. It all started here.
2) A few more thoughts about Inherent Vice
Why does Doc, a private detective, have an attorney who specializes in marine law? This is sort of explained in the book, but not at all in the movie, though in the movie more business is added to call attention to the discrepancy (there’s some added dialogue, and Sauncho, the attorney in question, wears a yachting cap in his first appearance).
You can see the scene here.
Also, why does Jade show up in a scene near the end (she’s not in the corresponding scene in the book) when the subplot which could explain her presence is not in the movie?
Who knows?
As I said last time, if something doesn’t make sense, don’t try to hide it.
There was a pretty good review of Inherent Vice in the New Yorker (not perfect, but pretty good), and I wanted to quote four specific points.
Nobody has ever turned a Pynchon book into a movie before, for the same reason that nobody has managed to cram the New York Philharmonic into a Ford Focus.
…one of the fables on which “Inherent Vice” ruminates is “The Long Goodbye,” and the loping, unflustered movie that Robert Altman made of it, in 1973, with Elliott Gould as Marlowe.
What Anderson does not do is stuff “Inherent Vice” with wads of period detail. It’s much quieter on the senses than “American Hustle,” … By and large, though, Anderson doesn’t treat the era as a funny foreign land. He wants it to drift toward our own time, hinting—and this is true to Pynchon—that the befuddlement of ordinary folk has hardly changed while “the ancient forces of greed and fear” have, if anything, tightened their clutch upon our lives.
“Inherent Vice” is not only the first Pynchon movie; it could also, I suspect, turn out to be the last. Either way, it is the best and the most exasperating that we’ll ever have. It reaches out to his ineffable sadness, and almost gets there.
Kudos to any reviewer who realizes that this is even the goal.
3) And, because this is a blog which knows which Paul Anderson is the main one, here’s a pretty good article about the Resident Evil series (which tends not to get a lot of good press):
“Alice in wasteland: A play-through of the 5 Resident Evil movies“
I saw the movie Inherent Vice today. I will write more about it (that’s a pretty safe prediction), but here are some initial thoughts.
I have no idea whether I should recommend it to anybody who is not obsessed with the book, but my hunch is is that it’s well worth seeing. I definitely enjoyed it. It passed the butt test (it’s around two and a half hours long and I had no idea while I was watching it that I was going to have a sore butt and an apparently pulled leg muscle when I stood 1up).
The best idea writer/director Paul Anderson had (as I knew the minute I heard about it) was when he figured out that: 1) the movie needed a narrator, 2) the narrator couldn’t be Doc (the protag) — for the same reason that the book is in third person limited, rather than first person, and 3) the narrator should be Sortilège, a minor character, an astrologer, Doc’s former secretary. #3 was the stroke of genius. There are a couple of times when Doc is driving somewhere and Sortilège is in the car with him, but when he arrives at his destination he’s alone. Was she astral traveling in his car? Was he just hallucinating her presence? Either would be possible.
Many things from the book are left out, which is good. That’s how you make a movie. So, I might miss the Vegas trip, or the songs, or most of the Gilligan’s Island references (or all of the Dark Shadows references), but that’s fine. My only complaint on that front is that, in several ways, the ending veers into sentimentality rather than romance and regret. The camera zooms in when it should be pulling back.
And, even with all the things which were left out, the story does zoom along a bit too fast in a few places, and Anderson turns this into a virtue, getting a laugh out of the day that a whole series of clients show up to hire Doc for cases which all, almost immediately, turn out to involve the same group of people.
That’s good storytelling — rather than try to conceal your story’s weaknesses (and all stories have them), turn them into positives.
More to come…