[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ased on Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest feature film marks the first adaptation for the screen from the literature of the infamous and reclusive postmodern American novelist. Pynchon is the author of major works (similarly considered “unadaptable”) such as the widely read, canonical The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow, a book so dense Anderson himself has admitted to never finishing it. The auteur writer-director of mostly California-set films, from Boogie Nights (1997) to The Master (2012), Anderson’s process of adapting this hippy detective story began with his optioning and securing of the rights, receiving the manuscript from Pynchon’s publisher in advance of the novel’s public release in 2009. Anderson has since manually converted the novel of 400 pages into a screenplay of 120 pages, forming the backbone of the film audiences can see on Irish screens from January 30.

Inherent Vice is recognisably the metaphysical detective narrative typical of Pynchon’s oeuvre, elliptically and distractedly trying to follow our dumbstruck doper hero “Doc” Sportello’s search for his missing ex-old lady Shasta, a plot that may or may not be (because ultimately, who knows) related to the mysterious body of something called… The Golden Fang. It’s 1970. In the wake of the Manson murders, the violence at Altamont and the Vietnam War, old ideals of love and peace are sidelined as Nixon-era neoliberalism and co-opting commercialism steadily creeps in. Paranoia is running the day and frequently blazed private investigator Doc navigates through an agitated, twitching Californian megalopolis that teems and tremors with neuroses.

Inherent Vice is somewhat of a departure from Pynchon’s usual broadly meta-scientific approach to narrative. The underlying logic that seems to govern the universe of Inherent Vice — and its proliferating paranoia — is drug-fuelled. This emphasis might make the postmodern condition analogous to a hangover, a rollover, or worse: like waking up in dread, on a damp sofa, with the spins, trying to fill in the ambiguous gaps and lost time. Perpetuating constant invention, the mystery is labyrinthine and with no dead-ends, just a constant onslaught of new risk-laden moments riddling out in all directions. Doc’s jagged and endless line of enquiry, from one newly-introduced character to the next, projects the freewheeling metaphysical masterplot, a reticulate and ever-reticulating nervous network where no information is meaningless, but rather, everything has a meaning of some indeterminate, ambiguous value.

When contemplating the success or fidelity of a film adaptation, there’s an essential difference to consider between the two elements that comprise a narrative: its story and its narration. While story can be freely adapted, represented and mediated in film, the novel’s narrative discourse cannot help but undergo a radical transformation as it’s adapted into a different mode of representation, moving uncomfortably and unwillingly from one medium into another. Arguably, it is Pynchon’s writing which gives his novel much of its power, Inherent Vice not being a case of style-over-substance, but one where style really is substance. The novel is narrated omnisciently, prose littered with pop culture references and proper nouns and polysemous puns, all of which gather together in a new cultural significance, the vibration, or “vibe” it elicits being greater than the sum of its signifiers. This descriptive language lost in film, its shots, scenes, and sequences all narrated by an objective camera, is potentially recovered in Anderson’s mise-en-scène, Joaquin Phoenix’s mumbling interpretation of Doc, and Jonny Greenwood’s intra- and extra-diegetic music. Though Anderson’s execution is impeccable, watching his Inherent Vice is still not the same as reading Pynchon’s. It’s a different experience watching the film — like Roadrunner Pynchon’s impossible sentences outpace even the wiliest of readers, but they can nonetheless be read and re-read enough times until one can begin to figure it out, whereas a film watched in a theatre, for the sake of your fellow members of the audience, really shouldn’t be rewound. This helpless feeling of forward momentum and transience is both convincing and fitting of Inherent Vice — where Pynchon writes: “Yet there is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever.”

Remarkably, this quotation written in Pynchon’s authorial voice still appears in Anderson’s film. It’s spoken, aloud, by Sortilège, a marginal character (of which there are many) in the novel whose role has been expanded substantially for the film, which, curiously, she narrates. Sortilège is played by celebrated musician Joanna Newsom, who lends to the film her unique, distinctly Californian vocal fry. Sortilège, the vibe-sensitive storyteller and amateur astrologer, is foregrounded early in the film, having broken the fourth-wall within its first thirty seconds. Described by Anderson as a “surfer girl Jiminy Cricket”, Sortilège acts as neither a providential guiding (or sleight of) hand in the film; she’s simply a friend of Doc’s. When the gumshoe unknowingly grapples with things that are beyond him, Sortilège articulates the answers she conjures, her unique position on the threshold and edges of the story’s frame allowing her to insightfully interpret and sort the chaos of the mystery when Doc cannot. Sortilège deciphers the lawlessness of Pynchon’s setting, standing in fantastic contrast to the misogynistic tropes of the classic hard-boiled detective genre Pynchon and Anderson actively deconstruct. Our narrator sometimes suggestively nudges and orients Doc in the right direction — helpfully advising him to consult ouija boards, to change his hairstyle, to devote a written dedication on the skin of a joint “to Shasta’s safety” — but remains mostly hands-off, there to chart the events as if a one-woman Greek chorus, to narrate the story but never really participate in it.

It’s said that when one reads they are in a constant process of adaptation, subjectively interpreting the text given, constructing and reconstructing their impression of its meaning. Thus, seeing someone else’s interpretation of a beloved novel on-screen is likely going to underwhelm or outrage. Anderson’s burden, his thankless task of adaptation, may have been doomed to this fate, and though his necessary fixing of an image — burning it to 35mm celluloid film — may seem to betray the source material, Anderson’s handling of Pynchon’s novel is still, somehow, a success. Pynchon’s novel embraces the inherent vice of how knowledge and evidence is mediated and how information is dispersed, and Anderson’s challenging film triumphantly manages to resonate in a similar way. The doper-ESP relationship between Doc and Sortilège, the first-person subjective participant and the third-person objective onlooker, is not unlike the relationship between Anderson and Pynchon. A die-hard romantic, Anderson as well emphasises the warmth of what might otherwise be considered cold and cerebral material, the too-human sorrow in Newsom’s narrating voice heightening the tragedy the paranoid faces, his projecting of a subjective world rather than trying to live and survive, somehow, in the objective one, the tragedy of existence as the first-person in the third-person.

Inherent Vice is a profound tragicomic pastiche, a frustrating film-going experience, a dizzying trampolining from the cosmic to the comic, from lofty existential pathos to low slapstick humour.