Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Inherent Vice
2014 · Paul Thomas Anderson · Inherent Vice on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch Doc write notes to himself on a pad. (performance)
Phoenix plays Doc as almost entirely reactive: flinching, mumbling, scribbling reminders like not hallucinating. A detective is supposed to act on what he sees. Doc mostly gets carried.
Payoff: The case happens to him. Once you notice that, the confusion stops being a problem you have to fix. In the reading: crisis of the action-image. The reading calls this the crisis of the action-image: a man who perceives everything and can act on almost none of it.
Listen to Sortilege narrate over scenes she is not in. (sound)
Joanna Newsom speaks Pynchon's prose in a dreamy, oracular voice, floating free of the picture. The needle-drops work the same way, with Neil Young and Minnie Riperton supplying feeling the plot cannot.
Payoff: The voice is not there to explain. It turns a shaggy chase into a lament you are asked to read. In the reading: the readable image. The reading calls this a lectosign: an image that stops being self-evident and asks to be read while a voice floats over it.
Notice how often the camera just settles and holds. (camera)
Elswit shoots on 35mm through doorways, windows, and smoke, keeping Doc's face in the middle. Compared to Boogie Nights the camera barely moves, so performance carries the long scenes.
Payoff: The film watches the way Doc watches: drifting, patient, sharpening into clarity and then losing it again.
Count how many new characters arrive with new information. (structure)
A dentist, a lawyer, a saxophonist, a federal agent, an ex-girlfriend. Each scene opens another corridor instead of narrowing one. The leads multiply faster than anybody can sort them.
Payoff: The film is a drift rather than a chain. Stop tracking the case and track the mood it leaves.
Look at Doc's sandals next to Bigfoot's flat top. (setting)
Mark Bridges dresses the two sides of 1970 against each other: mutton chops, denim, and bare feet against a pressed establishment uniform. Brolin's haircut is a policy position.
Payoff: The era's argument is worn on the bodies. You can read the politics of a scene from the wardrobe.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the faces, not the clues. The film was never really about the case.