In the opening paragraph of Blossoms & Blood (2013), I wrote: "I stumbled quite by accident into a screening of Hard Eight during its initial theatrical run in early 1997. The film just happened to be playing at the Indianapolis art cinema I frequented during my formative teen years. It's very rare to go into a movie with no sense of what it is--but I had that privilege fifteen years ago. I'm probably one of the few people alive who can honestly claim to have seen every single one of Paul Thomas Anderson's films during its original theatrical release [. . .] I didn't go to see Hard Eight because I thought it was the start of anything meaningful. But then what are Anderson's narratives if not meditations on the aftereffects of random chance and fate?" (ix).
I haven't given Anderson's films much new thought in the last several years. Some of that is my attentions have been elsewhere (also here). My interest in Anderson was always a snapshot of a moment.
I enjoyed Phantom Thread very much at the time, though I never felt compelled to say much about it (Inherent Vice I was less enthusiastic about, even as I recognized it reaffirmed many of the ideas I described in my book about postmodernism as both an aesthetic and a historical moment).
I'd like to say if I make it long enough, I will probably want to do a second edition of B&B, but I cannot say that's true. Yet when a new one rolls around, I still find myself obliged to continue the above streak after all these years (even in the midst of a pandemic--luckily, I was literally the only person in the entire auditorium that Saturday morning, so my guilt was minimal, and to add to my bragging how many people can say they've had their own private screening of a PTA film?).
I don't know that I loved the movie, but it was highly enjoyable. My original impressions of the film were not positive, as the early trailers seemed to suggest more of a raunchy, sex comedy, which thankfully the film isn't really at all. I'm not sure everything works (John Michael Higgins' character is such a vision of cringe racism that it all can only make sense if the character was actually based on a real person and not just a screenplay invention for attempted laughs).
Much has already been made of the casting of the two leads--the idea that they look like real kids and not Hollywood's version of "real kids" (which is ironic in a movie partly about the journeys of child actors, as well as one which features Spielberg's actual kid in a cameo). And as others have pointed out, Anderson's films are often viewed as wandering, indulgent narratives, which fits Licorice Pizza as well. But what I found refreshing here was it doesn't have the self-important flash of some of Anderson's earlier epics, which seemed insistent on announcing their talent. Despite its flaws, Licorice Pizza has a charming slice of life vibe--a mature story where much of the plot goes unspoken.
Nostalgia is a funny thing--although it feels refreshingly different from them, Licorice Pizza evokes memories of Anderson's early career. The deceptively simple love story of Punch Drunk Love, set in the industrial shadows of Magnolia's white noise celebrity culture after it has been re-imagined through the implied childhood nostalgia of Boogie Nights. It also doesn't feel like any of those either, and that's a good thing. One age old debate in auteur theory is to what degree should we expect consistency with a filmmaker and to what degree we should welcome evolution and change (that I had rented The French Dispatch the night before I went out to see Licorice Pizza this weekend was a sharp contrast not lost on me at the time).
Nostalgia is also of course at the narrative and stylistic heart of Anderson's new film, a semi-autobiographical, day in the life narrative about coming of age in 1970s San Fernando Valley. While partly influenced by Anderson's own childhood memories, the primary story was largely based on the experiences of friend and movie producer Gary Goetzman, a former child actor and one-time waterbed salesman.
I wonder if anyone else has noted yet that Cooper Hoffman's turn selling waterbeds in the film cannot but help evoke memories of his famous dad's turn as the "Mattress Man" in Punch Drunk Love--a role, coincidentally, that originally was supposed to go to Sean Penn, who finally makes his PTA debut here in Licorice Pizza.
Anderson's world definitely has a wonderful circularity to it after all these years--Penn is playing a movie star based on William Holden, which fills me with tremendous joy not only because of my own fondness for the legendary actor's work but because, to bring it back to Hard Eight above, the first time I was watching Anderson's debut film all those years ago, actor Philip Baker Hall in the lead role of Sydney kept insistently reminding me of a vintage Wild Bunch, Network-era Holden (I noted as much in the book).
Maya Rudolph also makes another appearance (I swear I heard that she was Emily Watson's stand-in in PDL for some scenes, but when I went to go include that in the book I couldn't find the source, so I left it out). And the same sequence in which Hoffman's character, Gary, is selling waterbeds also features the wonderfully glorious return of John C. Reilly to PTA's orbit in a blink and you'll miss it cameo as Herman Munster (if he was hiding in the background of Phantom Thread or Inherent Vice, I missed it).
Anderson cast not only longtime friend Alana Haim but also her whole family to play said part. All in all, the casting reinforces how Anderson's affection for family, long-time friends, and the Valley was at a level arguably not seen since Magnolia.
The film made me a little nostalgic too for when I wrote Blossoms and Blood, mainly because its a movie that brings back so many of the themes and ideas I developed in the book, what I called the "white noise celebrity culture" of the films' collective vision of the US as the embodiment of late 20th century postmodernism, the cultural logic of late capitalism.
To follow this idea, It would be easy enough to think of Licorice Pizza as another "nostalgia film" (in my most recent work on the genre, though, I unpacked how complicated even that term is). But my interest in postmodernism when I was writing about the first fifteen years of PTA's career was defined in much more ambitious terms in Blossoms & Blood (one criticism of the book I reject is the idea that I didn't define what I meant):
"on the surface of Anderson's films, we see many of the usual 'trickle down' [Michael Newman's terms for how critical theory influenced indirectly aspects of Hollywood aesthetics] postmodern attributes: the persistent self-reflexive emphasis on celebrity culture, media's history and function in mediating social relations, and countless inter-textual references to other films and filmmakers. Beneath that, there is also an admirably consistent exploration of the economic imperatives that ground these otherwise immaterial surfaces: the numerous characters who work as salesmen, the explicit centrality of commodities and transactions to everyday life, and the dissatisfaction with (yet dependence upon) material wealth" (13).
Licorice Pizza is probably the most direct, almost literal representation of what I was writing about in the book (I reread the first 10-15 pages today--not as a narcissist but because honestly a decade later I've forgotten a lot of details about what I wrote--and I was relieved at how PTA's latest seems to slide effortlessly in the discussion)--not only the various autobiographical impulses but also, beneath the puppy dog love, coming of age story, a vision of hustlers, salesmen, and celebrities within the self-reflexive mirrors of Southern California.
Is it a coincidence that Gary's first scene involves flirting with Alana while getting ready to take his HS photo (or that she offers him a mirror beforehand)? Both Holden and Jon Peters offer visions of real-life celebrities whose inviting screen-friendly personas mask darker impulses beneath the surfaces. Aspiring mayoral candidate Joel Wachs (Benny Safdie) is unable to reconcile the family friendly persona he seeks to project to voters with his own private life as a closeted gay man.
Licorice Pizza also makes me look back to a time when I decided to first write a book on his films--his were not the obvious choice they might be today (which is why my book was able to beat several others--some quite good--to market). In 2008, Boogie Nights and Magnolia had as many detractors as fans, and the critical debate was whether There Will Be Blood was a turning point or a fluke (for me, the turning point remains the earlier PDL, for reasons I exhaust in the book--whether one loves the final result or not, a lot of my argument centered on how the film was made as much as anything else).
I remember having a conversation around that time with a pretty well-known Chicago-based cinephile and filmmaker. He asked me which filmmakers I was interested in and I mentioned I wanted to do sometime on Anderson. He just rolled his eyes; I could feel the elitist contempt (one of the reasons, in retrospect, I began to lose interest in cinephila). In fairness, we didn't get off to a good start that day because he was new to his position and was basically making me interview for my job all over again.
So, anyway: nostalgia is delicate, but potent. Its satisfying to see Anderson eventually climb to such a position of respect (not just a 90s flash in the pan like a few out there) but one of the greatest contemporary American filmmakers.
Am I personally as interested in his films as I was two decades ago? Probably not, but I never wrote about Anderson's films back then because he was my "favorite" filmmaker. I wrote about them because I genuinely thought there was something worth saying, something which I am comforted by how much of it Licorice Pizza's ideas seem to confirm, which is a very important distinction when talking about the continuing value of auteur theory today.
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