Licorice Pizza · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Licorice Pizza asks its camera to behave the way adolescence actually feels: loose, unhurried, perpetually arriving a moment after the decisive thing has happened. Michael Bauman shoots on long lenses with handheld or barely stabilized rigs, the frame drifting to catch Alana Kane mid-stride or Gary Valentine mid-scheme — an aesthetic of vérité / direct cinema that makes the San Fernando Valley feel less like a set than an overheard conversation, the film observed rather than arranged. The look matters because Anderson refuses goal-directed plotting; Gary and Alana are not trying to do one thing but accumulate a series of doings — waterbed companies, pinball machines, a brushfire during the oil embargo — each episode complete in itself, surrendering cause-and-effect for sheer time-image duration. Alana especially is a seer rather than an agent: she wants something she cannot yet name, drifting through Valley spaces where desire circulates without resolving, the camera watching her watch her own life. Anderson sustains this by leaning on the long take, letting scenes breathe past conventional cutting points; the film's climax is not a declaration but a sprint across a darkened parking lot, physical motion filling the space where romantic grammar would normally demand dialogue. The episodic skeleton descends directly from Hal Ashby's The Last Detail (1973), which propels its characters through loosely connected scenes via accumulation rather than causality — abrupt scene-to-scene transitions that foreground present sensation over narrative destination — a structural rhythm Anderson inherits and transposes into California sunshine, swapping Ashby's bitter cold for warmth without surrendering the irresolution.