IdleRich

IdleRich
There's loads of great stuff in 'Inherent Vice' tbh. It's underwhelming next to stuff like GR at first, but reveals more and more over time: counterfeit bills pulled out of the sea with Nixon's face on, a sex ring that leads back to the governor, COINTELPRO, Doc being an alien, Lemuria, the rot beneath the surface of the whole wellness thing in California, police assassinations, FBI involvement in Vegas and all sorts. A lot of it real.
I think there is good stuff in it, but there was something that I found annoyingly wacky about some of the food and stuff.... just the writing in general at times seemed to cross the line from being interestingly weird to sort of self-consciously hey-look-at-me crazy.
 

version

Well-known member
But - correct me if I'm wrong - isn't the Lemuria stuff part of some kind of extended hallucination or something rather than a literal part of the story? Either way, I can why it had to be snipped from the film.
Yeah, sort of. It's Pynchon though. He leaves it ever so slightly ambiguous, plus his books potentially take place in the same world, a world with angels, talking dogs and whatnot.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Of course, I knew I was not being precise enough in what I was saying there and was leaving myself open to being picked up in that way. But I do think that there are gradations of reality in his books and that stuff was towards the non-real end.... and more simply it didn't really advance the story so it could be cut. Of course the story isn't the thing (necessarily) but if you think that a book of that size* is always gonna need to be cut to make it into a film then it's that kinda thing that is looking vulnerable.



*I'm basing that on the fact that the only books I can think of that I've seen made just directly from the page into a film with no need to cut anything are No Country For Old Men (which is a small book) and Brokeback Mountain (which is a short story or a novella at most)
 

version

Well-known member
I can't be the first person to think that Pynchon is, among whatever else he may be, a kind of serious literature Philip K. Dick

another, near-contemporary, master of conveying reality forever collapsing in on itself, meaning forever slipping away just out of grasp

and PKD's character names often have an ersatz quality, like they were haphazardly chosen out of a phonebook from a warped version of 50's America

all the flop sweat terror and dexedrine tooth grinding underneath the Brylcreem veneer of both the actual 50s and the imagined raygun future of 50s science fiction

Pynchon is obviously the deconstruction of a different formative reality - unraveling the stoned rambling of the 60s, the entire universe is one note, etc

but it's a similar impulse I think, if arrived at via different means
 

version

Well-known member
Of course, I knew I was not being precise enough in what I was saying there and was leaving myself open to being picked up in that way. But I do think that there are gradations of reality in his books and that stuff was towards the non-real end.... and more simply it didn't really advance the story so it could be cut. Of course the story isn't the thing (necessarily) but if you think that a book of that size* is always gonna need to be cut to make it into a film then it's that kinda thing that is looking vulnerable.
Oh yeah. It's certainly one of his more grounded ones, but there's still some odd shit going on in the background. And yeah, it makes sense to ditch it for the film as they had to streamline it somewhat.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
From my crude analysis of those books above I reckon that a hundred page book or thereabouts can be made into a two hour film just as it is, more than that you've gotta cut something.
 

version

Well-known member
Rewatched 'A Scanner Darkly' last night and noticed some 'Inherent Vice' parallels there too. The whole thing with New Path both manufacturing Substance D and running the rehab facilities is just like The Golden Fang in IV owning every level of their drug operation along with the retreat and dental surgeries for addicts with fucked teeth who they then push into COINTELPRO,

"Indochinese heroin cartel. A vertical package. They finance it, grow it, process it, bring it in, step on it, move it, run Stateside networks of local street dealers, take a separate percentage off of each operation. Brilliant."

 

version

Well-known member
One thing that really struck me back when I went on a big PKD reading binge in my teens was how vitriolic his dislike of (some) women was. He's a bit like D. H. Lawrence in that: some of his most psychically villainous characters are women who are portrayed as total energy vampires, poisonous neurotics, a menace to the well-being of all around them. It's something other than standard or straightforward misogyny (although I think it is misogynistic), because it meshes in a particular way with the paranoiac worldview. That which was supposed to be a source of comfort and nurture in the world has become its opposite, an intensely localised symptom of the wrongness of reality in general.
This is really noticeable in 'Valis'; Gloria, Beth and Sherri are basically all depicted as evil and trying to destroy everyone around them. He even describes Sherri as the antichrist at one point.
 

version

Well-known member
But - correct me if I'm wrong - isn't the Lemuria stuff part of some kind of extended hallucination or something rather than a literal part of the story?
The stuff about Fat seeing Rome on top of 70s California reminds me of the Lemuria stuff too.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Interesting evening, bars have kinda re-opened as long as you sit outside so I went to meet this guy I know a bit for a beer, he told me two things which really stuck out.
1. He watched Inherent Vice the other day and it is a much more psychedelic movie than people think "like doing ketamine"
2. He is reading Fanged Noumena by Nick Land
Honestly, @version , have you moved to Lisbon and started pretending to be Australian?
 

version

Well-known member
Interesting evening, bars have kinda re-opened as long as you sit outside so I went to meet this guy I know a bit for a beer, he told me two things which really stuck out.
1. He watched Inherent Vice the other day and it is a much more psychedelic movie than people think "like doing ketamine"
2. He is reading Fanged Noumena by Nick Land
Honestly, @version , have you moved to Lisbon and started pretending to be Australian?
I was actually thinking of rewatching 'Inherent Vice' tonight.
 

version

Well-known member
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IdleRich

IdleRich
Joking aside, it's cool to meet random people who are into this stuff... of course one can go on the internet and find people who are into whatever weird niche thing you are into (and don't get me wrong, when I joined dissensus and realised that there was a whole world of people out there who were interested in the same - or similar - stuff to me it was incredibly exciting and I went to meet loads of them and that was great too of course), but there is something cool about just going for a beer and chatting to someone and understanding that all this really DOES exist in the real world, not just with my imaginary friends on the other side of the screen. You know what I mean?
 
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