Across the nearly two-and-a-half-hour sprawl of Inherent Vice, Coy Harlingen, surf rock saxophonist and heroin addict turned CIA asset, appears in two centerpiece scenes. In the first, soon after Doc has been hired by Coy’s wife, Hope, to investigate his whereabouts, Coy emerges on a fog-cloaked pier to ask that Doc keep an eye on Hope and their daughter, Amethyst, and provides a minor clue as to the significance of the words “Golden Fang.” In the second, Doc finds Coy at a house party, where the anxious and paranoid Coy bemoans his self-imposed alienation from his family and urges Doc to find Shasta before she is enmeshed in the same morass that he is. In both cases, Coy’s appearance is contained within one sustained shot. In the first, he enters the frame to join Doc, they speak for approximately two and a half minutes, and then Coy exits again; in the second, Doc enters the frame to join Coy, they speak for approximately four and a half minutes, and then Coy exits, leaving Doc alone.
Neither of Coy’s scenes is particularly dense with plot detail, but viewers may nevertheless find themselves struggling to grasp precisely what has been discussed by the time he has left the screen. These two encounters slip through one’s fingers like a cloud of pot smoke. It’s not simply the fact that these scenes constitute two disparate points in the vast constellation of incident and intrigue that comprise this paranoid odyssey; rather, Anderson enhances the audience’s hazy reception of his story through sabotaging—whether consciously or otherwise—several of the primary ways in which viewers receive and process stories, including (but by no means limited to) the counterintuitive task of processing dialogue delivered within relatively static shots of extended duration. With Inherent Vice, Anderson makes his most intricate and effective attempt at a goal that has spanned virtually his entire career: engaging viewers in the act of receiving his stories by alienating them from the typically passive experience of viewing a mainstream narrative film.
Amid anecdotal accounts of audience walkouts during the initial theatrical release of Inherent Vice, Steve Rose published a column in the Guardian in February 2015 that analyzed what factors might have contributed to making Anderson’s seventh film “this season’s mustn’t see experience.” Viewers, Rose suggested, were likely lured in by Anderson’s reputation as a populist auteur, a trailer suggesting a light and comic tone, and strong reviews from critics who may be inured to conventional film structure: “Unlike your average multiplex punter on a Friday night, they crave something more challenging” (an echo of the claims made after critics and audiences were divided on Punch-Drunk Love). With these tripartite expectations in mind, Rose reasoned, viewers were likely shocked by what turned out to be an odd and often incomprehensible film. “For most viewers,” he concluded, “the minimum requirement of a story is that it makes sense. Stories are supposed to create order out of the chaos of reality, aren’t they? Inherent Vice is more the other way round.”
Indeed it is, and thus it is hard to fault any viewer who struggled to find pleasure in the film. Yet it is also worth considering that Anderson may have intentionally made the plot difficult to comprehend in order to more effectively convey his protagonist’s addled perspective. Doc Sportello mounts a complex investigation while consistently under the influence of marijuana, a drug known to impair the user’s ability to focus and process information. By doing all he could to communicate Doc’s compromised perception—including limiting the viewer’s perception of the film’s milieu and creating an unusual density of visual information—Anderson risked alienating his viewers in order, paradoxically, to generate greater empathy with his perspective character.
With Inherent Vice, Anderson reconfigures many of his now-hallmark techniques to create effects that are often simultaneously provocative and evocative, all in the service of adapting the worldview of an author long thought unadaptable. Anderson again mixes the tropes of multiple genres, but where injecting spasms of comedy into prestige drama is relatively easy to parse once the surprise has worn off, the hazier mix of comedic and dramatic elements in Inherent Vice contributes to a far more ambiguous tone that might best be described as madcap naturalism. Anderson (along with Robert Elswit) adopts the most unusual visual palette that he has used since Punch-Drunk Love, this time slightly desaturating the image in order to create a feeling of fading nostalgia, as though the audience is watching an image that has been left in the sun for years. The effect is considered and deliberate, yet, like much of Boogie Nights’ visual language, it runs counter to how the viewer is conditioned to receive nostalgic imagery (which is often presented with some form of heightened visual language in keeping with the power of memory, rather than aping the physical qualities of antique objects), meaning that the effect is cerebral rather than immediately empathetic.
Some formal breaches are relatively logical: after Doc ingests amphetamines with Dr. Rudy Blatnoyd, the sequence is speed-ramped to convey his now hyperactive state. Other ruptures are so affective they are difficult to view through any contextual logic: the anthemic chorus to Minnie Riperton’s “Les Fleur” surges on the soundtrack as Doc finishes his meeting with Clancy Charlock, a soundtrack choice that bears no evident connection to the accompanying plot development, the only relationship between sound and image being that the scene features Riperton’s daughter and Anderson’s partner, Maya Rudolph—a privileging of omniscient directorial perspective over character perspective as brazen as any in his filmography. Individually, any of these formal alienation effects might have been forgiven by theatrical audiences. Likely more difficult to surmount, however, was seeing these effects applied to Anderson’s most impenetrable narrative to date—and, indeed, a narrative far more complex than the vast majority of releases from major Hollywood studios. The film’s defenders soon came to tout the intentionality of the story’s impenetrability; by way of contextualizing the film’s goals, Chris McEwen pointed to Anderson’s assertion that “I never remember plots in movies. I remember how they make me feel,” meaning that plot should be taken as ultimately secondary to the mood and tone of the film.
Anderson ensures that the reception of his plot will be further impaired through his concentrated disruption of two key factors identified by Kaitlin L. Brunick and her research partners as essential to processing cinematic storytelling. In their 2013 paper “Low-Level Features of Film: What They Are and Why We Would Be Lost Without Them,” Brunick et al. establish a set of five factors—“physical, quantitative [aspects] that [occur] regardless of the narrative”—that affect a viewer’s ability to comprehend cinematic storytelling. With a significant disruption to these features, the researchers conclude, “our ability to follow a story, understand where scenes begin and end, and identify film structure would all be heavily impaired.” Two of these factors, luminance and color, I have already discussed in this chapter; the unusual lighting scheme of Punch-Drunk Love has a significant distracting effect, as does the unusual saturation level in Inherent Vice. The remaining three factors—shot duration, visual activity, and temporal shot structure—are somewhat less self-evident in their effect but have a significant impact on the ease of narrative processing in Inherent Vice.
Shot duration, as the term suggests, refers to the length of time between cuts, a measurement often looked at in aggregate as the “average shot length” of a film. Visual activity refers to how much motion occurs within the frame during a given shot (due to the movement of either the camera or characters/scenic elements). Temporal shot structure refers to the arrangement of shots of varying durations into a sequence, a significant factor in gauging the tone of a scene (collections of short shots tend to be associated with action, while collections of longer shots tend to be associated with drama) and in keeping the viewer’s attention focused. Research by James Cutting et al. suggests that, with time, conventions of cinematic editing have moved, presumably unconsciously, toward a rhythm of shot lengths ideally suited to maintaining viewer attention.
Anderson’s work is notable for an unusually long average shot length (ASL) by the standards of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Hollywood. In 1930, the average shot length in a typical film was in the range of ten seconds; in the ensuing years, that average has decreased in a steady and linear fashion, until in 2010 the typical ASL was in the range of four seconds. Anderson’s average shot lengths (according to an independent study by film editor Vashi Nedomansky) range from a minimum of 11.1 seconds in Hard Eight to a maximum of 15.4 seconds in Punch-Drunk Love. This average well exceeds that of many of his contemporaries—Nedomansky’s studies have shown an ASL of 6.83 seconds across Wes Anderson’s first eight films, and of 3.86 seconds across eight of David Fincher’s first ten films—and brings him closer to Billy Wilder (Nedomansky’s study of six Wilder films yielded an ASL of 16.75), Ingmar Bergman (for whom Nedomansky identified an ASL of 16.7 seconds), and François Truffaut (for whom Nedomansky identified an ASL of 13.5 seconds).
The ASL of Inherent Vice is on the low end of the Anderson spectrum, totaling 11.6 seconds. However, the film is notable for having five shots that exceed two minutes; of further note is the fact that four of these five shots are exceptionally low on visual interest, while being exceptionally high in narrative density. The film’s single longest shot, which lasts more than six and a half minutes, is that of Shasta’s passive-aggressive nude monologue. Next longest is Doc’s encounter with Coy at the Topanga Canyon party, and third is his encounter with Coy on the pier, the former lasting more than four and a half minutes, and the latter more than two and a half. Fourth longest is Doc’s first scene with Penny, discussing the Wolfmann case while seated on a bench. Fifth and shortest of these excessively long shots is the tracking shot underscoring the opening credits; as it is high on visual interest and low on narrative density, it is not particularly relevant to this analysis.
Key to Brunick et al.’s conclusions surrounding shot duration is that extended shots, particularly those low on visual activity, are less than ideal as vessels to convey plot information. Cuts serve to reorient the viewer’s eye toward the center of the screen, which usually contains the conveyor of those plot details; the longer a shot extends, the more the viewer’s eye will tend to wander the frame, unconsciously seeking further information that pulls focus away from relevant aural details. When being served plot information through dialogue during a shot of extended duration and low visual interest, remaining focused and oriented requires increased unconscious effort. Thus, by adopting this technique continually during an already complex noir narrative, Anderson hampers the viewer’s reception of that narrative to a likely ruinous degree. Yet what could be more evocative of the experience of a perpetually stoned private investigator than sabotaging the viewer’s focus and attention, two of the abilities most impaired by the joints that are never far from Doc’s hand?
In his paper “Hollywood Storytelling and Aesthetic Pleasure,” another effort to identify the line between pleasurable and exasperating alienation, Todd Berliner theorized that viewers derive greatest enjoyment from films that “[strain] our efforts to unify their features, intensifying aesthetic pleasure by making the story construction process more energetic.” Abusing Brunick et al.’s low-level features in Inherent Vice, Anderson pushes the viewer’s effortful unification of the narrative beyond simply forming hypotheses and refining them with the absorption of new clues. Instead, he asks that the viewer unite the film’s content with a form that seems to run counter to the conventions of that content, producing a noir that not just stresses but suppresses the viewer’s processing power.
But, as highlighted by McEwen, Anderson privileges feeling over plot. That quote was drawn from a New York Film Festival event attached to the premiere of Inherent Vice, during which Anderson highlighted five films that served as key influences on his approach to his newest project. Rather than any traditional L.A. noir, Anderson chose North by Northwest (1959), pointing to Hitchcock’s decision to obscure plot-dense dialogue with aircraft sounds, which he called “a great way to deal with exposition that no one cares about.” In a film like Hitchcock’s, he said, “I remember emotions and I remember visual things that I’ve seen, but my brain can never connect the dots of how things go together.” As for those memorable “visual things,” he screened a selection from Journey Through the Past (1974), Neil Young’s experimental pseudo-documentary. Following the clip, in which Young takes a country drive with his girlfriend, stopping by a stream to smoke a joint and eat strawberries, Anderson explained that this scene was a key reference point to “the [feel] of the whole movie.” This referential diptych points directly to Anderson’s intentions with Inherent Vice: create an intricate thriller with the feel of a woozy sensory fantasia. By making use of every facet of his film’s construction—from screenwriting to the duration and organization of shots—in creating this counterintuitive effect, Anderson attempted to thread a perilously narrow needle, risking unsustainable levels of alienation in service of an evocative effect for the subset of viewers not put off by his unexpected techniques.
In his Guardian assessment of Inherent Vice’s alienating impact on theatrical audiences, Steve Rose concluded by hearkening back to reports that more than two hundred audience members walked out of the 1968 premiere of 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Maybe walkouts are the stuff cult classics are made of,” Rose concluded, and Inherent Vice, as of this writing, would seem to be the closest that Anderson has come to producing a genuine grassroots phenomenon; between 2019 and 2020, the podcast Increment Vice dissected the film scene by scene with a rotating panel of admirers as high-profile as director Rian Johnson, a treatment certainly not extended to any other work in the Anderson filmography.
Alongside this discussion of walkouts, Inherent Vice spurred debate over whether critics are within their rights to suggest that viewers displeased with a film might owe it a revisit. “A cinemagoer who has an allergic reaction to [Inherent Vice] can’t be blamed for scoffing at the prospect of spending another £12, and a further two-and-half-hours of her life, watching something that left her bored or bewildered the first time,” Ryan Gilbey wrote in his article for the Guardian in January 2015. Yet that same month, at Vanity Fair, Jordan Hoffman argued for the humility necessary to acknowledge that the first viewing of a film cannot be expected to yield a full comprehension of its scope and effects: “In Inherent Vice, figuring out who put Mickey Wolfmann in the looney bin, or what, exactly, a yacht named Golden Fang has to do with a ring of high-strung dentists, is not what this movie is all about. I knew that much on the first go. But it wasn’t until the second that I was able to recognize how extraordinary Anderson’s movie really is.”
Perhaps surprisingly, Anderson himself has expressed a perspective closer to Gilbey’s: a director should “never [make a film] feeling like it was obligatory to see it twice,” he said while promoting The Master, likely tied with Inherent Vice for the title of Anderson work most benefitting from repeat viewings. “You should attack it feeling like it could work successfully whether it’s on a big screen or whether it’s on a phone or whatever it is.” This quote, rather than making the baldly ridiculous assertion that each of his works should be comprehensible on a plot level after only one viewing, points instead to a particularly Andersonian reception category, one (as he said in presenting North by Northwest) guided by the emotional response to visual stimuli rather than the mental exertion of connecting plot points. If Inherent Vice is a film that sabotages high-level narrative processing, its emotional and visual effects are sharp and acute.
Anderson closes the film with a split-second shattering of the fourth wall as Doc’s eye flicks toward the camera lens, making direct eye contact with the viewer. It’s a jolting effect, one that echoes the closing image of Magnolia, in which Claudia does the same amid Officer Jim’s profession of love. In either case, Anderson chooses to implicate the viewer as the final stroke in aggressive negotiations with their efforts to engage. And then the experience is over, leaving a lingering feeling of a schism in conventional film grammar that requires reconciliation. The effect is provocative, distancing the viewer from the unbroken dream state that so many films aspire to. But it’s evocative, too, inviting the viewer to linger in that dream state rather than let it recede immediately. This is the inherent vice of cinema, the unavoidable risk: viewers looking for familiar types of pleasure may be asked to reevaluate their preconceptions. This type of risk cannot be insured against, nor should it be avoided—those experiences are precious cargo.
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