Film Notes: Inherent Vice

Inherent Vice (2014) film notes by John Trafton for the L.A. Noir: Shadows in Paradise series, presented by Greg Olson Productions. The series runs through November 2025 at SIFF Cinema Uptown. 

There’s a quote from Thomas Pynchon’s novel "Inherent Vice" that I often think about—one that doesn’t appear in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film adaptation. LAPD detective Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen bluntly tells private eye Larry “Doc” Sportello how American society views hippies after the Manson murders:

“Well, what I’ve been noticing since Charlie Manson got popped is a lot less eye contact from the straight world. You folks used to be like a crowd at the zoo—‘Oh, look, the male one is carrying the baby and the female one is paying for the groceries’ sort of thing—but now it’s like, ‘pretend they’re not even there, ‘cause maybe they’ll mass murder your ass.’”

Inherent Vice uses L.A.’s past to prophesy its future. Anderson’s film examines the constant clash between old and new Los Angeles—and how Hollywood functions as the city’s alter ego. Joaquin Phoenix’s Doc Sportello is part Neil Young, part Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Josh Brolin’s Bigfoot has a “John Wayne walk,” a “flattop of Flintstone proportions,” and speech patterns that evoke Sterling Hayden. Visual references to Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and classic noirs such as The Big Combo and The Postman Always Rings Twice exist alongside nods to Alex Cox’s punk-rock Repo Man and the television spoof Police Squad!.

And then there’s a moment reminiscent of the children’s scenes in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, while Doc’s friend and narrator Sortilege (Joanna Newsom) laments the erasure of neighborhoods and ethnic enclaves to make way for private redevelopment: “Mexican families bounced out of Chavez Ravine to build Dodger Stadium. American Indians swept out of Bunker Hill for the Music Center. And now [a Black] neighborhood bulldozed aside for Channel View Estates.” The film is simultaneously tuned to a cinematic memory of Los Angeles and aware of how cinema itself has obscured the city’s real history. It takes up theorist and video essayist Thom Andersen’s observation from Los Angeles Plays Itself: “If we can appreciate documentaries for their dramatic qualities, perhaps we can appreciate fictions for their documentary revelations.”

Inherent Vice unfolds just before the downtown boom that Mike Davis calls “Chinatown revisited.” This so-called skyscraper boom (1973–1986), with future mayor Richard Riordan as its chief fixer, became “a publicly financed civics project that had generated a windfall profit for a wealthy ring of insiders.” In the film, 1970 Los Angeles becomes a grotesque realization of urban development schemes dating to the 1920s—plans that led to the freeway system and the city’s ongoing struggles to revive public transit despite overwhelming public support. These plans underpin Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Chinatown, and in all three films—as in Davis’s iconic book exploration of Los Angeles’s history, City of Quartz—the secret of who really rules L.A. lies hidden in plain sight (exemplified strongly by the Dark Prince of Palos Verdes in both Inherent Vice the film and novel). Chinatown set the precedent for films that “replace a public history with a secret history.” By the time Inherent Vice arrived, it was no longer clear how secret that history remained.

Consider the film’s opening sequence. The first shot of Gordita Beach, framed through an alley between two seaside houses, evokes the legacy of Venice and Redondo Beaches during the era—the former immortalized by the music of The Doors. Sortilege, backlit by the warm California sun, appears in a low-angle shot reminiscent of 16mm film stock from the period. We soon find Doc on the couch in his beachside bungalow at night, bathed in blue light. The couch is red, the pillow beneath his head white. When his ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), dressed in “flatland gear,” visits him for a “secret rendezvous” involving her new lover, the wealthy real estate developer Mickey Wolfmann, the red-white-blue motif feels deliberate. Some see it as a nod to American symbolism; others, as a visual echo of Anderson’s earlier Los Angeles films like Punch-Drunk Love. Either way, these colors reinforce the film’s historical critique while linking it to Anderson’s larger cinematic universe—a welcome return to Los Angeles after There Will Be Blood and The Master.

Inherent Vice occupies a unique place in the lineage of Los Angeles noir. It’s a hazy, sun- drenched elegy for a city caught between utopian dreams and capitalist reinvention—a place where paranoia becomes realism and nostalgia becomes resistance. Anderson’s adaptation channels Pynchon’s absurdity and melancholy to show how L.A.’s myths, both onscreen and off, have always blurred the line between fantasy and documentary. In doing so, it reminds us that the city’s true story—its secret history—isn’t buried beneath its surfaces but written all over them. We may never learn truth, but that’s ok, as Doc Sportello puts it: “Thinking comes later.”