INHERENT VICE’S LAST SUPPER SHOT

The day after Paul Thomas Anderson’s seventh movie, Inherent Vice, premiered at the 2014 New York Film Festival, Anderson joined festival director Kent Jones on stage to discuss the movie and its many influences. The first one mentioned was short-lived TV series Police Squad!, starring Leslie Nielsen as bumbling Sgt. Det. Lt. Frank Drebin. So what did 12-year-old Paul learn when his dad sat him down to it? ‘You can fill the frame with crazy shit.’

Packed with dopers, hustlers, hippies, sex workers, surfers, cops and coke-snorting dentists, stoner-noir Inherent Vice, adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s kaleidoscopic novel, is two-and-a-half hours of crazy shit, as PI Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) investigates a suitably hazy kidnapping case in Los Angeles, 1970. But perhaps the craziest shit of all is the moment when Doc snaps a picture of a bunch of hippies chowing down at a long table just as the blocking replicates Da Vinci’s mural The Last Supper. Only with pizza.

‘Things come from all places to help you,’ said Anderson of his reference points, and Jesus breaking bread with the disciples one last time slots alongside nods to existential LA noirs like Chinatown and The Long Goodbye, Neil Young’s experimental debut film Journey Through the Past, and, er, The Muppets. As a throwaway sight gag, it’s perfection. But it’s also, maybe, something more, just as Doc’s investigating of many meandering plot strands does, perhaps, uncover political corruption on a national scale.

THE BIG SHOT

After all, Inherent Vice, for all its silliness, is a deeply romantic and melancholic picture that captures the loss of the counterculture dream in the face of Vietnam, Charles Manson, Nixon, gentrification and more.

Might it be, then, that the Last Supper snap represents a last hurrah of all things flower power before the betrayal, just as Christ was offered up by Judas? Communion plays a vital role throughout Inherent Vice, with Doc and fascist cop Bigfoot (Josh Brolin) often eating together, always with Bigfoot scoffing his grub in a typically violent manner. A chocolatecovered banana or a popsicle represents his masculinity, even as Anderson scoffs at his tough-guy toxicity by watching him slurp on these phallic symbols. Finally, when Bigfoot eats Doc’s joint and then munches down an entire plate of marijuana leaves, the beastly cop is perhaps issuing an apology for his behaviour and crossing over to Doc’s side.

Who knows? Nothing is focused and fixed in Inherent Vice, a pungent, swirling fug of a movie. But, hey man, it’s a groovy thought.