“A Southern California Beach That Never Was”:
Adapting the Noir City in Inherent Vice

Hiroyuki Inoue

In Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (2009) and Paul Thomas Anderson’s
cinematic adaptation of the novel (2014), the urban and suburban spaces of Los
Angeles figure prominently in the narrative. While generally reproducing thelanguage and atmosphere of the adapted text in a faithful manner, Anderson, whose
works have repeatedly revisited the U.S. West (Sperb 5), experiments with a unique
way of representing the city in his film. The film transforms Pynchon’s meticulous
topography by deliberately confining its space. The fragmentary representationof space in the film makes it difficult for the viewer to reconstruct the narrative
space in its totality. At the same time, however, Anderson inserts some moments ofgeographical specificity into his film and subtly merges the extratextual Los Angeles
into the fictional world. The film gradually charts its fictional city with its separate
spatial fragments from the ground up, no matter how incomplete the resultant
narrative map might remain to be. Anderson’s film, in a sense, is an adaptation not
only of Pynchon’s novel but also of the urban space itself. Going back and forth
between the intratextual and extratextual spaces, the film constructs a dialogic spacethat is located somewhere between the two.
As David Fine remarks in Imagining Los Angeles, Los Angeles emerged as aresult of a land boom near the end of the nineteenth century and began its existence
as a literary city in the 1920s (4, 14). Since then the city has given birth to manystories of unrealized dreams, broken promises, and impossible escapes, stories thatcan be subsumed under the novelistic and cinematic categories of hardboiled fiction
and film noir. The state of California, with its location on the continent’s westernedge, has historically figured as an ultimate destination of the U.S.’s westward
expansion. Southern California has also produced romantic dreams and hopes for a

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new life by containing one of the world’s dream factories, Hollywood. At the sametime, novelists and filmmakers have been sensitive to the dark side of this GoldenState, transforming “[t]he land of the fresh start . . . into the land of the disastrous
ending” (Fine 82). Southern California has been an amorphous narrative space thathas adapted itself to the imagination of the storyteller, and the American dream ofstarting over has always coexisted in tension with a nightmarish awareness of theimpossibility of escape. Pynchon’s novel and Anderson’s film adaptation continue toexplore this tension by bringing the conventions of hardboiled detective fiction andfilm noir into contact with the Los Angeles of 1970, a time that is characterized bya sense of loss, disappointment, and disillusionment, a time that comes after the “[e]nd of a certain kind of innocence” (Pynchon, Inherent Vice 38).
Inherent Vice constructs a unique narrative space with this transitional moment
as its historical background. For one thing, the Los Angeles in Inherent Vice is aspace where the actual and the imaginary merge with each other, with the boundary
between the two constantly blurred. References to historical incidents and reallife figures exist side by side with fictional events and quirky characters, and thefoggy and smoggy atmosphere and the possibilities of drug-induced hallucinations
sometimes threaten to encroach upon the reality of what is happening within the
narrative. And construction businesses and their restless cycle of land development
and destruction make buildings and places appear and disappear almost overnight
and contribute to the hallucinatory nature of the urban and suburban spaces,
forcing, for instance, one victim to feel that he “must be trippin” after observing that
his old neighborhood has totally vanished (Pynchon, Inherent Vice 17). At a different
level, while Anderson’s film is an adaptation of Pynchon’s novel, the adapted novel
itself is aware of and refers to its generic precursors, both literary and cinematic. The
homicide detective Christian F. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen tells the protagonist Larry “Doc”
Sportello to forget “that old-time hard-boiled dick era,” while Doc thinks of Sherlock
Holmes as a “real” detective living “at this real address in London,” worships “great
old PIs” such as “Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, . . . Johnny Staccato,” and wears asuit that John Garfield is supposed to have used in the film version of “The Postman
Always Rings Twice (1946)” (Pynchon, Inherent Vice 33, 96, 97, 344). These allusions
suggest that Pynchon’s text can hardly be called an original text because it could nothave existed without its generic precursors. In addition, the genre of detective fiction
has been particularly susceptible to the process of adaptation in a somewhat different
sense. As Scott Macleod argues, this narrative genre, including its hardboiled variant
often associated with Los Angeles, has been characterized by “its ability to adapt to

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changing cultural movements and social anxieties” (114). The process of adaptation,
then, is not a one-way transformation of the original text into its cinematic version
but “an endless process of recycling, transformation, and transmutation, with noclear point of origin” (Stam 5). The Los Angeles in Pynchon’s text is already anamalgam of the real and the imaginary, the city as a real geographical entity and its
representations in literary and cinematic texts. Inherent Vice adds one more thread tothe meshwork of texts that has constituted the city.
Another prominent characteristic of Inherent Vice in terms of narrative spaceis that it does not provide the reader or viewer with a comprehensive view of thesociety in its totality. This issue concerning space is to an extent related to thenature of Inherent Vice as a (hardboiled) detective story. Doc incessantly moves fromone place to another, trying to give a definite shape to the enigmatic events andrelationships that he encounters. Despite his effort, mysteries continue to proliferatethemselves in front of his eyes, and he ends up not even knowing what it is that heneeds to know. The narrative unfolds itself in a chaotic manner without leadingstraightforwardly from a mystery to its resolution, as if to imitate the sprawling
expanse of the city itself. This kind of plot complication has accompanied hardboiled
detective fiction almost since its beginning, the most well-known examples
being Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939) and Howard Hawks’s 1946 film
adaptation (O’Farrell). Chandler and Hawks construct a plot complicated enoughfor the reader or viewer to understand that the focus of the narrative is not so muchon the intellectual puzzle of solving a case as on the individual characters and therelationships between them that gradually emerge as the story moves forward. The
Big Sleep is also an important precursor in its representation of urban space. In
his book on Chandler’s fiction, Fredric Jameson says that Los Angeles is “a newcenterless city,” “a spreading out horizontally, a flowing apart of the elements ofthe social structure,” in which each social class “is isolated in its own geographicalcompartment” (6, 7). In such a fragmented space, Jameson continues to argue, thedetective figure had to be invented “to see, to know, the society as a whole” (7).
In each of Chandler’s novels, Philip Marlowe at least can close a case—no matter
how bitter or depressing that closure might be—after driving and wandering
around the city and visiting various places and people associated with the social
structure from its highest to lowest strata. As a result, Chandler’s fiction gains “akind of completeness” and provides the impression that the author “has touched
all the bases, that this itemization of the flora and fauna of Los Angeles county is
an exhaustive one” (Jameson 51). This is not the case with Doc and Inherent Vice.

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Here again, each class or group of characters is “isolated in its own geographicalcompartment,” but the detective fails not only in solving his case—since he does
not even know what it is that he has to solve—but also in seeing and knowing “thesociety as a whole.” Even if he cannot grasp the total big picture, however, Doc
continues to drive through the streets of Los Angeles and tries to help his clients andpeople in need as much as he can, without expecting any financial reward.
Anderson’s film has generally been praised for adapting the work of anunadaptable novelist and for its faithfulness to the novel’s language and atmosphere.
But many critics and reviewers have pointed out that the film departs from theadapted text in at least two notable respects. The first point concerns the assignmentof the narrator’s role to Sortilège (Joanna Newsom).1 In the novel, she is a relatively
minor character who “used to work in Doc’s office” and is said to be “in touch withinvisible forces and could diagnose and solve all manner of problems” (Pynchon,
Inherent Vice 11). Her position as Doc’s ex-assistant and her knowledge of spiritualmatters apparently make her an appropriate candidate for the narrator’s role,
allowing her to move into and out of the narrative world almost like a ghost.
Sortilège’s mysterious nature is emphasized at the end of the film when Shasta
Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston) says to Doc (Joaquin Phoenix), “She knows
things, Doc. Maybe about us that we don’t know.” At the same time, by giving abody to the voice of the novel’s invisible and impersonal, if not omniscient, narrator,
the film seems to limit the possibility of a detached, all-seeing perspective on the
narrative world.
This limitation of the narrator’s point of view is related to the film’s second
point of departure from the novel: the intense compression and fragmentation of
its narrative space. Pynchon’s novel abounds in toponyms. It provides a meticulous
verbal map of the places visited by Doc during the course of his investigationand follows his movement from one place to another, inviting the reader to haveactual maps of Los Angeles County and Las Vegas on hand. Compared with thenovel, Anderson’s topography is terse and laconic. As Howard Hampton remarks,
Anderson’s restrained use of landscapes and exterior shots is one of the film’s mostnotable characteristics (30). Instead, the film often jumps from place to place,making it hard for the viewer to visualize a larger whole within which each filmed
space can be located as its constitutive part. Questioned about the frequency of
dialogue scenes taken in long takes and close-ups, Anderson answers in an interview
as follows:
It’s claustrophobic . . . . I came up in an era where, if you’re making a period film,
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you’re obligated to have an unmotivated crane shot in the street—a mass of cars,
a mass of billboards. What a waste of money, time and feet of film. An avenue
to hopefully making an audience feel they’re inside a film was to get rid of those.
That coupled with not just having enough money—it was just, “What is theminimum we need to do to open it up and get on with the most important
thing?” (qtd. in Romney 23)

Here, it is hard to tell whether the director is being honest or not. As he says,
reducing the number of crane shots or establishing shots will certainly help to lower
the budget required to shoot a film, especially a period piece like Inherent Vice. But it
might be difficult for some viewers to “feel they’re inside a film” without the sense ofa larger space within which each shot or scene is to be placed. Whether it is the resultof practical concern or not, Anderson’s decision confers a particular atmosphere on
the narrative space of his film. This is an issue that deserves to be examined in detail.
Probably the most comprehensive view of space offered in the film is a
cartographic image that appears on the screen near the story’s beginning. An exconvict named Tariq Khalil (Michael Kenneth Williams) visits Doc’s office to talkabout the sudden disappearance of the old neighborhood of his street gang, the“Artesia Crips,” an allusion to the real Los Angeles gang named Crips. After hearingthat the neighborhood is now being replaced with Channel View Estates, one of
the redevelopment projects devised by the real estate developer Mickey Wolfmann(Eric Roberts), Doc says to Tariq, “Okay. Can you show me up here on the map?”
As a medium close-up of Doc’s client dissolves into the image of a map of Los
Angeles County, Sortilège’s voice-over narration begins to quote almost verbatim a
passage from Pynchon’s novel: “Long, sad history of L.A. land use. Mexican families
bounced out of Chavez Ravine to build Dodger Stadium, American Indians swept
out of Bunker Hill for the Music Center. And now Tariq’s neighborhood bulldozed
aside for Channel View Estates.” The map shows the general regions of the South
Bay, South Central (now renamed as South Los Angeles), and Gateway Cities, with
Artesia Boulevard running horizontally and dividing the map in its middle.2 The
viewer cannot determine the exact location of Channel View Estates, but the novel
suggests that it is located somewhere between Gardena and Compton (17). The
map’s image then dissolves into a two-shot of Doc and the ghostly Sortilège, as they
drive on a sunny street to the place in question.
This cartographic image is interesting in what is not directly shown on thescreen. First, although the static image of the two-dimensional map cannot tell the

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history behind each of the places it represents, Sortilège’s narration adds a temporalor historical dimension to the map. Her words about the “[l]ong, sad history” ofdispossession and forced relocation that non-white groups of residents have gone
through make the viewer realize that there is more to this map than meets theeye. Behind each of the land development projects mentioned here is a scheme of
racial segregation and “rearguard social containment” (Heise 172). The rich and thepowerful try to grab the lands of ethnic and racial minorities, erase the traces of theprevious residents, and circumscribe themselves within spaces of privilege. In theprocess, the urban space is divided into separate fragments. Considering that Tariq
regards Wolfmann’s project of gentrification as “white man’s revenge” for “Watts”
in the novel (17), it becomes meaningful that Anderson’s map shows the toponymat its top center. As Thomas Heise remarks, the Watts riots of 1965 were “[t]he mosttraumatic inner-city disturbance the country had yet witnessed,” and the eventchanged the cityscape of Los Angeles “by sparking further retrenchment” (174). As
will be discussed below, Anderson will respond to this historical moment once again
later in the film. Combined with Sortilège’s narration, the map quietly tells thehistory of the city’s division into separate geographical compartments. Second, theway Anderson crops the map’s image is effective in partially hiding the toponyms
shown on the left edge of the screen, particularly the names of the three beachcities. The viewer can of course compare this map with a more complete one andidentify these places as Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, and Redondo Beach.
But the effect of the film’s map is to merge the fictional Gordita Beach into these
extratextual locations by transforming the latter into, as it were, anonymous beaches.
While establishing ties with the actual Southern California, Anderson’s map
simultaneously points at the fictionality of the film’s narrative space. To borrow thewords of the novel’s narrator, what emerges here might then be called “a Southern
California beach that never was” (6).
The comprehensive view of space offered by this map, however, is an exception.
The film’s confinement of its narrative space can be observed at multiple levels. At
the most macroscopic level, Anderson never goes out of the area around Los Angelesby omitting the scenes that take place in Las Vegas. In the novel, Doc’s accidental
and almost anti-climactic encounter with—or rather, his “blurred glimpse” of—Mickey Wolfmann occurs in this city (243). The film transplants this significant
event to a rehabilitation facility named Chryskylodon in Ojai, and Wolfmann’sreconversion to capitalist endeavors after his brief adoption of communal ideals is
succinctly conveyed with the images of newspaper photographs and headlines.

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The claustrophobic atmosphere is enhanced further by the frequency of interiorsequences, the compression of the characters’ movement in terms of both time andspace, and the story’s sudden transitions from scene to scene. As Rolando Caputo
remarks, “so many edits from scene to scene seem abrupt” because of “the absence oftraditional ‘filler’ shots (such as establishing shots) that generally buffer the transition
from one scene to a new situation.” The scarcity of panoramic shots of landscapes orcityscapes is one of the film’s most conspicuous visual characteristics, and Anderson
rarely shows the exterior of a place that appears in the story for the first time. The
scene in which Doc wakes up from unconsciousness at the future site of Channel
View Estates, for instance, is suddenly cut to the one of a dialogue between him and
Bigfoot (Josh Brolin) inside a room in Parker Center; Doc’s phone conversation with
Hope Harlingen (Jena Malone) in his living room directly segues into their faceto-face dialogue in the living room of the Harlingens’ suburban house, supposedly
located in Torrance; and the two-shot of Doc and the marine lawyer Sauncho(Benicio Del Toro) watching and talking about the schooner Golden Fang is cut toanother two-shot of them continuing their conversation in a seaside restaurant. Also,
the film contains some scenes of driving, but the viewer is often prevented fromgazing at the landscape outside the vehicles’ windows. An extreme example of thisvisual confinement is the film’s extended final shot, which frames the faces of Shasta
and Doc riding a car while its windows are totally clouded in a dense fog. In theseexamples, the spaces surrounding the scenes and characters are almost absent, andit becomes difficult to situate these scenes within a larger geographical whole. The
film’s focus is apparently not so much on the individual locations where the scenes
take place as on the characters’ faces and the dialogues between them. The almost
unnatural frequency with which these facial close-ups appear on the screen fortifies
the sense of confinement and anxiety in the fictional world (Tochigi 86).
In addition to splitting the urban space of Los Angeles into myriad fragments,
these methods of representing space have the effect of conferring strange anonymity
on the individual locations that appear in the course of the narrative and, byextension, on the city as a whole. By refusing to show the larger space in which thesescenes are to be situated, the film seems to rob each location of its uniqueness andsingularity. The Harlingens’ house could be located in any suburban residential
tract; the restaurant visited by Doc and Sauncho could be any restaurant with anautical atmosphere; the foggy San Pedro pier where Doc meets Coy Harlingen(Owen Wilson) for the first time could be any location by the sea; and the mansion
Doc visits to talk with Sloane Wolfmann (Serena Scott Thomas) and her current

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boyfriend, Riggs Warbling (Andrew Simpson), could be any residence locatedin one of the affluent hillsides surrounding the city. Each of the places remains
a separate geographical fragment, as if to show that these characters are living indifferent worlds totally separate from each other. And as the film continues to
cut from one location to another, the city itself gradually loses its singularity andacquires anonymity. The Los Angeles in the film, in other words, is transformed
into a nameless space that could be any city. This foregrounds the imaginary andphantasmagoric quality of this fictional world. As will be discussed below, however,Anderson’s film also contains some moments of geographical specificity that do nothave their counterparts in Pynchon’s text.
Finally, at a more microscopic level, some qualities given to the film’s individual
images circumscribe the scope of its narrative space. In Pynchon’s novel, theintrusive narrative voice moves back and forth freely between detached descriptions
and less impersonal passages colored by subjective thoughts and perceptions, often
abandoning its pretense of omniscience and sharing the detective’s confusion.
Anderson’s film imitates this unique voice of Pynchon’s narrator by visuallyprivileging Doc’s perspective and state of mind. When Doc appears for the first timeon the screen, an overhead close-up of his face shows him lying supine on a couchin his room at twilight. The camera cuts to a medium long shot of Shasta in her“new package,” looking down at her ex-boyfriend while standing partially framed
by a partition wall and the open doorway, which is an appropriate way to introduce
a woman who has come out of the past to haunt the present. This is a point-of-view
shot taken from Doc’s perspective, looking up at her from a slightly low angle. The
shaky handheld camera also adds to the subjective quality of the image. The next
shot forms a shot/reverse shot pattern by reproducing Shasta’s point of view, andthe camera shows Doc’s face again in close-up as he sits up on the couch to lookup at her face more closely. The scene then cuts to a close-up of Shasta in shallow
focus, with the background blurred in contrast with her face. Throughout thefilm Anderson frequently employs some of the visual elements observed here: thelow-angle (point-of-view) shot, the handheld shot, the close-up composition thatgrows tighter and tighter as the camera gradually and surreptitiously closes in on
its subjects, and the shallow depth of field that is sometimes combined with foggy,
smoggy, or smoky backgrounds. All of these elements contribute to circumscribing
the spectator’s vision as well as to forcing him or her to share the detective’s limited
understanding of the world around him.
Of particular interest is the relatively lower position Doc occupies in this

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opening scene. Here, Doc remains lying or sitting on the couch and looks up
at his ex-girlfriend while the latter looks down at him from above. This spatial
positioning of the two characters is not limited to the relationship between him
and Shasta. Whether he is talking with Tariq, Bigfoot, Sloane Wolfmann, two FBI
agents (Timothy Simons and Sam Jaeger), Clancy Charlock (Belladonna), Mickey
Wolfmann, Penny Kimball (Reese Witherspoon), Adrian Prussia (Peter McRobbie),or Puck Beaverton (Keith Jardine), the film often captures Doc’s opponent froma low angle or shows him or her looking down at the detective from above. Of
course, this can be explained by the protagonist’s generally relaxed attitude and his
characteristic posture: Doc usually makes himself comfortable, or makes himself
appear to be comfortable, by sitting back on chairs. At the same time, however,
the other characters’ downward gaze directed at him implies that—in spite of his
laid-back posture—he is not always in control of the situation around him. In
this context, his posture might be read also as a sign of his passivity. It is the seriesof characters and the increasingly complicated relationships between them that
control him and stir him into action. One notable exception is the scene in which
Doc shoots Adrian Prussia from the top of the stairs and kills him, but this is an
exception that proves the rule because it is the only moment in the film that forces
him to resort to violence in self-defense.
Doc’s relatively lower position within the film’s spatial arrangement therefore
ties in thematically with its refusal to offer panoramic or comprehensive views of
the narrative space. The film makes the viewer share the perspective of the detective
who cannot grasp a geographical expanse in its entirety. In this respect, Doc’s gazediffers from that of a cartographer or map-reader, who can look down at a spatialwhole from above. But as he recalls at one point in Pynchon’s novel, “the word is not
the thing, the map is not the territory” (194). What he can do is to dive into “theterritory” itself, continue wandering around the city, excavate what is hidden behind
its surface, and gradually build his spatial knowledge from the ground up, notfrom above. And the viewer accompanies him in this piecemeal construction of thefictional urban space, no matter how incomplete or fragmentary it might turn out tobe.
The Los Angeles in Anderson’s Inherent Vice is a fictionalized city that retains
only tenuous ties with its extratextual counterpart. But at the same time the director
includes some rare moments of topographical specificity. The opening shot of thefilm, for instance, shows two beachfront houses with a view of the Pacific Ocean
between them. While the film specifies its location and time by writing on the

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screen, “Gordita Beach, California / 1970,” the viewer can read a small sign on
the left house that indicates the house number as “4210 / THE STRAND.” Thisis an actual address in Manhattan Beach that is not mentioned in Pynchon’s text,
although the author is supposed to have lived in the area while he was working on
Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). The same location will appear once again near the endof the film, with the camera placed a little further away from the houses and thebeach. By superimposing the name of the fictional beach city onto a very specificstreet address in Manhattan Beach, the film deliberately rewrites the place andconflates the intratextual and extratextual spaces in this opening shot. Anotherexample is Parker Center, also known as the Glass House, probably the most easily
recognizable landmark in the entire film. Doc visits the building several times in thecourse of the narrative, but its exterior appears for the first time midway throughthe film. Anderson captures the building in one of his characteristic Steadicam
tracking shots as Doc walks toward the entrance and comically dodges somepolice officers who threaten to knock him down. Named after “the infamous Chief
William [H.] Parker,” Parker Center housed the headquarters of the Los Angeles
Police Department from 1954, entailing “the displacement of much of Little Tokyo”(Pulido, Barraclough, and Cheng 55), until the department moved to a new locationin 2009, the year of the publication of Pynchon’s novel. Completely closed in 2013,
the building is now being threatened by possible demolition (Smith), which might
add one more episode to the city’s cycle of erasure and redevelopment. The extended
exterior shot of the now vacant building connects the fictional world to the past of
the actual Los Angeles, while also preserving on film this monument to the LAPD’s“troubled past” (Pulido, Barraclough, and Cheng 56). A third example of the film’s
geographical specificity is the address mentioned by a phone answering machine
in a flashback sequence: “4723 Sunset Boulevard.” This is another instance of thefilm being more specific about a location than the novel, since Pynchon’s narrator
only mentions “an address down Sunset somewhat east of Vermont” (164). In thefilm, Doc and Shasta, desperately hoping to find a dope seller, rush to the location,
only to find a vacant lot. Doc later revisits the place in the story’s present and finds
a literal Golden Fang, a ridiculous, hallucinatory building that has probably beenborn out of one of the city’s redevelopment projects. In the extratextual world today,the building of a medical facility can be found at this address, which is a little west,
not east, of North Vermont Avenue. In all of these moments, the real and the actual
quietly merge into the film’s otherwise anonymous geography. Of course, theseappearances of specific locations can be regarded as a result of the visual nature of

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film as a medium, which has to show in images what novels describe in words withvarious degrees of specificity. Still, such moments stand out in contrast with thegeneral avoidance of spatial specification in Anderson’s film.
One last example of the film’s specific depiction of Los Angeles can beconsidered in this context. In addition to the shots of the beachfront houses andParker Center, a rare establishing shot appears on the screen when Doc goes tovisit the office of the loan shark Adrian Prussia. As Sortilège’s voice-over narration
continues from the preceding sequence, Doc gets out of his car, which is parked ona deserted street, and walks across the street while the camera moves horizontallywith him from left to right. On the left side of the screen a long fence standing
along the street hides what appear to be freight rail tracks, while on the right side
is a portion of a somewhat dilapidated industrial area. One of the factories or
warehouses on the right has a sign that reads, “L&M STEEL CO.,” which helps
the viewer to identify the shooting location as North Alameda Street, between
East Weber Avenue and East Dixon Street, in the city of Compton, Los Angeles
County. Here again, the film is more specific about the location than the novel. In
the passage that corresponds to this establishing shot, Pynchon’s narrator says that
Adrian’s office “was tucked somewhere between South Central and the vestigial [LosAngeles] river, hometown of Indians and bindlestiffs and miscellaneous drinkers ofMidnight Special, up a wasted set of what looked like empty streets, among piecesof old railroad track brickwalled from view, curving away through the weeds” (315).
As in the case of the possible location to find a dope dealer, the novel only indicatesa general location. Anderson could have chosen to go along with this description
and avoided including any element that would make it possible to identify the place,just as he did in so many other scenes in the film. But he did not. Considering what
happened in the 1960s, especially the Watts riots of 1965, this street acquires aparticular significance. As Becky M. Nicolaides writes, Alameda Street functioned
then as a fissure, a border, that divided the surrounding area into two totally
separate worlds: “Black and white were sharply divided here, with Alameda Street
constituting a virtual ‘wall’ between the races. Blacks lived to the west, whites to theeast. In this area, segregation was a visible reality, especially in the realms of housing
and education” (285). Appropriately, Adrian seems to live on the eastern side of this
dividing line.
Pynchon does not mention Alameda Street in Inherent Vice, but he was awareof the actual and symbolic significance of the street. In his 1966 essay titled “A
Journey into the Mind of Watts,” which Thomas Heise calls “a psycho-geographical

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exploration into the perceptions of violence from the perspective of Watts’s residents”(211), Pynchon regards the street as a border between the real and the unreal:
The white kid digs hallucination simply because he is conditioned to believe somuch in escape, escape as an integral part of life . . . . But a Watts kid, brought
up in a pocket of reality, looks perhaps not so much for escape as just for somecalm, some relaxation. And beer or wine is good enough for that. Especiallygood at the end of a bad day.
Like after you have driven, say, down to Torrance or Long Beach orwherever it is they’re hiring because they don’t seem to be in Watts, not evenin the miles of heavy industry that sprawl along Alameda Street, that gray andmurderous arterial which lies at the eastern boundary of Watts looking like theedge of the world. (Pynchon, “Journey”)

In this essay, the novelist, a descendant of an Anglo family with a long history inNorth America, deliberately adopts the perspective of African-Americans living on
the western side of the dividing line. While regarding the media-saturated “whiteculture that surrounds Watts” as “unreal,” Pynchon repeatedly calls Watts “a pocketof bitter reality.” Whether the director was thinking about this essay when shooting
on location or not, Anderson’s inclusion of this “gray and murderous arterial” thatmarks “the edge of the world,” then, is a sudden intrusion of what is real and actual,what is geographically and historically specific, into the otherwise anonymous
narrative space. The film subtly connects its fictional Los Angeles with the past of its
extratextual counterpart.
Like many film noirs, Inherent Vice tells a story that is obsessed with the past.
At one point in the novel, Mickey Wolfmann is quoted as saying, “I wish I could
undo what I did, I know I can’t” (150). In another scene, Coy Harlingen also tells
Doc that going “[b]ack where I was would be nice” (161). These words succinctly
summarize one of the dominant themes in film noir: the desire to go back in time
and the fatalistic awareness of the impossibility of doing so. But Inherent Vicediffers from other works in the genre in that it lets the protagonist partially succeed
in undoing the wrongs that have been committed in the past. Doc visits Adrian’s
office in order to look into the case of Coy as well as to avenge the death of Bigfoot’s
partner, Vincent Indelicato. He does well in both of these cases without expecting
any financial reward. He returns Coy to his family and thereby brings back the
supposedly dead to the world of the living after a long period of separation that the

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saxophone player has suffered as the result of a wrong career choice made in the past.
In one of the most emotionally charged moments in the film, Coy says, “You knowwhat the Indians say. You saved my life, now you’re responsible for it,” to which Doc
replies, “You saved your own life, man. Now you get to live it.” Pynchon’s novel also
refers to this saying twice (171, 363). These words become all the more powerfulin the film because they resonate with Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), anothercinematic work about bringing back the dead to the world of the living. In a wellknown scene that takes place on the edge of the Pacific Ocean in this now classic
film noir, which is also an adaptation of Boileau-Narcejac’s novel (1954), John
Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) says to a woman who plays the role of Madeleine
Elster (Kim Novak), “I’m responsible for you now. You know, the Chinese say thatonce you’ve saved a person’s life, you’re responsible for it forever, so I’m committed.”3
But of course Scottie cannot save her. He tragically repeats the past that haunts him,
failing to undo what he has done. Whether the saying is of Chinese or Indian origin,these words connect the two narratives and highlight the contrast between them.
Where Scottie fails, Doc succeeds. He can help others to move out of what Pynchon
would call their bad karmic cycles.
Perhaps Inherent Vice most radically deviates from its generic ancestors andrewrites the noir tradition by implying that sometimes it is possible to go back to thepast, in order to excavate and actualize what could have been. Comparing Pynchon’s
Inherent Vice with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925)—another novel thathas many thematic connections with Vertigo—David Cowart remarks that “Gatsbylike, Pynchon wants, as it were, to change the past” (127). In this context, it isappropriate that Anderson closes his film with the image of the detective looking
into a rearview mirror and quietly smiling, just after telling his ex-girlfriend that“[t]his don’t mean we’re back together.” Despite his words, Doc’s face seems to besuggesting that sometimes it pays to look back into the past.
In these manners, Anderson’s film gradually constructs a narrative map of
Los Angeles with its miscellaneous fragmentary spaces. On the one hand, the film
renders the urban and suburban spaces partially anonymous by refusing to provide
the viewer with comprehensive views of the individual scenes that take place. In
doing this, Anderson adheres to the noir tradition, which has been characterized
by a strong sense of nightmarish confinement and entrapment. At the same time,
Anderson opens up the film’s narrative space by subtly building connections with its
extratextual counterpart in terms of both geography and historiography. No matter
how fictional or hallucinatory it might be, the film suggests, this is an extension of

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“A Southern California Beach That Never Was”

the actual Los Angeles in this actual world. The film accompanies the detective in
his piecemeal mapping of the city from the ground up, uncovering what has beenerased by the city’s endless cycle of destruction and construction. What emerges in
the process is a middle and mediating ground located somewhere between the actualand the imaginary Los Angeles, a Southern California beach that perhaps never was
but still could have been. Once again, the city of Los Angeles adapts itself to theimagination of the storyteller by offering a geography of subjunctive hope.

Notes
1. As critics have pointed out, this change allows the film to deviate from the male voiceover narration typical in film noir, thereby subverting one of the genre’s conventions. See,for example, Hatooka 145-48; O’Farrell; and Tochigi 85.
2. The renaming of South Central took place in 2003, just six years before the publicationof Pynchon’s novel, which, of course, uses the old toponym in the narrative. The changeof the area’s name can work both ways. It can result in erasure of the past with “theofficial, state-sanctioned term,” but at the same time it might lead to the recovery of what
has been “obscured by sensationalistic media depictions and popular understandings ofSouth Central” (Pulido, Barraclough, and Cheng 122).
3. Pynchon’s novel does not fail to mention Vertigo, but in a different context (298). And
regarding Anderson’s film, one blogger says that Penny Kimball’s clothes, in the scene
in which she sits on a park bench with Doc, are similar to the Kim Novak character’s in
Vertigo (“Inherent Problems”).

Works Cited
Caputo, Rolando. “California Dreaming: P. T. Anderson’s Take on Pynchon’s Inherent Vice.”
Senses of Cinema, no. 74, Mar. 2015, sensesofcinema.com/2015/feature-articles/california-dreaming-p-t-andersons-take-on-pynchons-inherent-vice/. Accessed 1 Dec. 2018.
Cowart, David. Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History. U of Georgia P, 2011.
Fine, David. Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction. U of Nevada P, 2004.
Hampton, Howard. “Everybody Must Get Stoned: The Rainy Day Women (and Men) ofInherent Vice.” Film Comment, vol. 50, no. 6, Nov.-Dec. 2014, pp. 28-32.
Hatooka, Keita. Eiga gensakuha no tame no adaputeshon nyumon [Why Adaptation Matters to
You: From The Great Gatsby to Inherent Vice]. Sairyusha, 2017.
Heise, Thomas. Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature
and Culture. Rutgers UP, 2011.
“The Inherent Problems of Inherent Vice: A Technical Review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s
New Film and Why It Polarises Viewers.” Burning Paper Tigers, 10 Feb. 2015, burningpapertigers.wordpress.com/2015/02/10/the-inherent-problems-of-inherent-vice-an-analysis-of-

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paul-thomas-andersons-flawed-homage-to-hardboiled-detectives/. Accessed 1 Dec. 2018.
Inherent Vice. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, Warner Bros., 2014.
Jameson, Fredric. Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality. Verso, 2016.
Macleod, Scott. “Playgrounds of Detection: The Californian Private Eye in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Inherent Vice.” Pynchon’s California, edited by Scott
McClintock and John Miller, U of Iowa P, 2014, pp. 113-34.
Nicolaides, Becky M. My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los
Angeles, 1920–1965. U of Chicago P, 2002.
O’Farrell, Tim. “Los Angeles Plays Itself: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice.” Senses ofCinema, no. 74, Mar. 2015, sensesofcinema.com/2015/feature-articles/los-angeles-plays-itself-paul-thomas-andersons-inherent-vice/. Accessed 1 Dec. 2018.
Pulido, Laura, Laura Barraclough, and Wendy Cheng. A People’s Guide to Los Angeles. U of
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—. “A Journey into the Mind of Watts.” The New York Times Magazine, 12 June 1966,
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Romney, Jonathan. “‘It’s Funny. Why Are You Sad?’” Sight & Sound, vol. 25, no. 2, Feb.
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Smith, Dakota. “L.A. City Council Backs Plan to Knock Down Parker Center, Build OfficeTower.” Los Angeles Times, 24 Mar. 2017, www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-parkercenter-vote-20170324-story.html. Accessed 1 Dec. 2018.
Sperb, Jason. Blossoms and Blood: Postmodern Media Culture and the Films of Paul Thomas
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Vertigo. 1958. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Universal Studios, 2012.

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