![]() ![]() And I think that it was this revelation that functions-in my interpretation of Hawks’s career-as the fulcrum between the first and second halves of his oeuvre. Hawks realized that he could draw on the fundamental insuperability that the detective film offers to lay bare the aimless maze-like wanderings that define our existence in the modern the world. The point was that by not caring about the logic of the act of detection itself, the author was able to focus on more important, atmospheric themes. ![]() When they couldn’t solve this puzzle on their own, they called up Chandler on the phone, but he admitted that he didn’t know the answer any better than they did. There’s a famous story of Hawks and his screenwriting collaborators William Faulkner and Leigh Brackett going through the Raymond Chandler novel trying to figure out who killed the character of Owen Taylor. ![]() But that’s because Anderson understood something about noir’s potential for capacious destabilization, a lesson brought to the screen originally in Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep, perhaps the ur-text of the modernist detective film. The movie, as you can see, took me to strange places. “You’re losing/You’re losing/You’re losing/You’re losing…/Your faces” and each time the chorus returned, I screamed out these words louder than the time before, imagining an open meadow swathed with snow, a blizzard coming on, and a row of small faceless children huddled together as a band of wolves spilled over the horizon to descend upon them. ![]() After the seventh or eighth playing, I lifted the needle and set it down at the beginning yet again and fell so deeply under the song’s hypnotic spell that I found myself lying on the floor, writhing-partly like a snake, partly as if inhabited by the ghost of Damo Suzuki himself -and groaning out my own lyrics to the chorus: “Hey you,” I sang. According to the lyrics web sites I’ve consulted in the ages hence, what he’s actually screaming is, “Hey you…/You’re losing/You’re losing/You’re losing/You’re losing…/Your Vitamin C,” but just at the moment when he allegedly sings the song’s title, some swelling chords blanket his voice to make his words even more cryptic than usual, so that back in the day I interpreted his yelps as a lament for his addressee’s lost “faces.” I remember that afternoon clearly. Lead singer Damo Suzuki’s lyrics were so mysteriously incomprehensible they seemed to emerge from some wolf-like bundled core of inner pain. The song took me back, as the movie, with its acid-flashback style tends to do-not to the 70s-but to the 90s, when I used to put the krautrock geniuses’ album Ege Bamyasi on the stereo and crank up the volume, and to one afternoon in particular when I was home alone on a Saturday afternoon and I put on Side B, and when the song was over I picked up the needle and played it again. Anderson, having its world premiere here at t he New York Film Festival) the moment at the tail end of the opening sequence when Joaquin Phoenix, with his Chia Pet forest of sideburns, staggered out into the hippy seaside streets and suddenly the snares and bass of Can’s “Vitamin C” filled the soundtrack as the title-in all its 70s-style outline-font neon splendor-appeared-almost pulsatingly, I’d say-on the screen. I knew I was going to love Inherent Vice (directed by P.T. ![]()
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