There are actual, material steps I could take to make this website more popular. A picture, maybe, somewhere, wouldn’t be a bad start. Perhaps a picture of a pig – pigs are earnest, and pure, and have the cutest little noses, and if all of these qualities are admirable in men they are even more impressive in beasts, who must balance any movement towards innocence and grace with the harsh calculus of Darwinism, calculus which basically boils down to “everyone is trying to eat you, always.” Yes, Oinky the Porker would be a coup for my attempt at a rebrand, the plump little bastard just twinklin’ away from the top of the frame, an easily-forgiven face for the readers’ eyes to return to when they encounter the effluvia eternally wafting, indefatigable, from pages below. I could also cool it with words like effluvia and indefatigable, whose presence among my writing amount to little more than me standing there, arms folded disapprovingly, leering with pointless acid at anyone provincial enough to come skipping, homeward and free, across my dark little webspace. They do not deserve, these pleasant revelers, to be treated like criminals, for it is not a crime to be happy, it is not a crime to skip free. And Best Of lists! Why not make a Best Of list? Everybody likes Best Of lists – they discourage adjectives, which usually amount to little more than a morass, pooled gelid and gross, between reader and comprehension.

These are all good, strong ideas, and merely by considering them I have caused some brand manager, somewhere, to wipe a tear from his eye like he just heard “November Rain” for the first time, and whisper to himself, “he gets it. He finally gets it.”

But I’m not going to do any of that shit! Instead I’m going to do weird things, like watch Inherent Vice and note with the doggedness of a detective chasing a serial killer, or a dumped boyfriend stalking his ex on social media, all of the interesting facets of the film’s lighting and wide shots, and then present my findings in an essay with a name so self-serious I could have a goddamn chorus of angelic bacon-boys lining the top of every page on this site and the sheer concentration of fart juices would still burn your eyes to little cartoon wisps of nothing.

And I’ll stop using the word effluvia when I’m good and fucking dead.

Changing Under a Different Light – Visual Storytelling in Inherent Vice

I hear lots of complaints about Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of the Thomas Pynchon novel Inherent Vice. These complaints – which are silly, and wrong, for the movie hovers, immaculate, above us, granting absolutions with the same ease that most men do ill – usually boil down to it not being much of a movie. No real visual identity to speak of, fairly structureless in its plot, devoid of any real tension; an adaptation too enamored with its source material to knead that source material into an experience more befitting the whole sitting in a dark room, watching a big screen thing. And I will grant that Anderson’s visual voice in Inherent Vice doesn’t seem to lilt to its usual unmatchable reaches in the higher and lower registers, especially when compared to his earlier films, where the dude would just belt sometimes, just to remind you that he can.

But this is the part of the essay where I say “however!” and then blow your fucking mind. So here we go: the criticisms of Anderson’s take on Inherent Vice come from eyes too accustomed to seeing things rendered large on the screen, are voiced by people who take for granted that step one in adapting a book to a visual medium is to pump that shit to mandatorily cinematic levels of light and sound. You see Anderson, out of respect – or just the sheer challenge of it, he’s kind of a scamp that way – for the lighter touch of novels takes it upon himself to imitate that same approach with his direction, crafting the silent visual language of his film with a literary hand defined by slight strokes and missable moments, eschewing almost entirely the loud camera movements we associate with cinematic storytelling and instead doing his best work almost exclusively through lighting and framing. Do I have examples of this? Ahaha, oh, boy.

A Preface

Before we start, I want talk a little about where essays come from. This will inform the rest of the piece, and I think we’ll all be richer for the experience. First, you need to be lonely. We’re talking deeply, profoundly adrift in life; so anchorless that, while you’re sitting alone at the food court, hoping that some equally despondent counter-jockey at the Chick-fil-a has slid a razorblade into your grilled chicken club and you are, mercifully, only one or two bites away from having bigger problems than the clockwork diarrhea scheduled to blast out of your asshole precisely twenty-five minutes after you dab your mouth on a Moana-branded napkin that you’re almost positive God put on your tray to mock you, an idea for an argument, ideally a petty one, emerges, already fully-formed in its weirdness, in your brain. That box being checked, it’s time to go to the source and collect evidence. Collecting evidence is like going outside except you stay inside instead and do nothing that can even thematically be compared to going outside. I just wanted to keep the grim flavor of this paragraph going, like any one of the intestine-slaying offerings available at your local Chick-fil-a. God, I’m so fucking good at writing. Anyhoo, now that you have your evidence, the thesis should be obvious if it wasn’t already, and the work should practically write itself. Really, the hardest part of the whole process is realizing that the vast, vast majority of the pieces of evidence you’ve collected are basically the thrusters getting a spaceship out of Earth’s gravitational pull – awfully impressive in the abstract, but necessary to shed before the whole endeavor can really function the way it’s supposed to.

And this is where I’m glad I don’t have an editor, because, brother, I’m taking a turn on this one. See, I don’t feel like excising my list down to something Hemingway would approve of – just picking one or two or three of the many, many examples I have, and then stepping back from my work and admiring its nearly caustic leanness. This shit took a long time to collect, and I am not a subtle man! So here’s the argument, and then we’ll get to the business, son:

The argument: Pynchon crafts in Inherent Vice, as he does in most of his novels, a threat simultaneously all-encompassing and incompetent, participated in by nearly everyone, yet too insidiously localized in its many tendrils to be connected to a larger and understandable body, this rolling mass of alien light indifferent to borders temporal, cultural, national, political, or anything else that would typically stop a thing, whatever that thing’s true agenda may be, from moving with sociopathic impunity. To make matters worse, because everybody sees through the lens of their own neuroses, if asked to describe even the slightest aspect of this thing that’s strangling life and spontaneity with intensely-focused but also seemingly aimless cruelty each person would give a completely different, directly contradictory answer. This would not be a consequence of the conspiracy’s members brilliantly obfuscating the trail of their madness – it’s just that even they have no idea what’s going on. The parameters are borderless, and the will indefatigable, and everything else is throwing rocks at the ocean, or trying to define the word entropy.

This is hard to express visually! But you know what comes close, at least as far as emotions, the vector through which stories are best told, are concerned? Creepy-ass light. Just imagine, going about your day, and every time you find yourself getting too close to the weird heat resonating from this intangible monster you’re suddenly bathed in light that could not, in good conscious, be described as friendly. It would be like the soundtrack swelling in a horror movie right before Jason kills you, this noctilucent air, appearing suddenly and obscuring the world outside your window, morphing futurity into something fully owned by someone else, and never, under any circumstance, shared with you, or even coherent to you.

And this notion comes to us a lot through the visual storytelling. Like, a lot, a lot. So much a lot, in fact, that I’m just going to leave you with this, this testament to my shame:

Bad Light

– The film opens on an image of pale and ill-intentioned light swelling over the ocean. Two surfers are blown to silhouette against this ascendant omen. I’d say something douchey and borderline psychotic like, “keep this in mind,” but your brain’s hands are going to be full over the next few thousand words, so just do the best you can.

– Doc and Shasta have their opening conversation in darkness, and light only starts blasting across their faces (they make sure to shift positions in order to maximize this effect) when Shasta reveals that this is not some usual matrimonial affair she is caught up in, but something much darker.

– When Doc goes to the incipient stirrings of Channel View Estates, and starts to truly get caught up in the conspiracy for the first time, the doors in Chick Planet Massage are blown out with that same alien light we started the movie with.

– After being taken in by the fuzz because of the whole “found napping next to a dead guy” thing, Doc has a sit-down with Bigfoot Bjornsen, possible member of the conspiracy, who is framed against a window that is – and we’re going to see this a lot, like so much – blown the fuck out.

– When Doc hugs Hope goodbye a light, again sourceless and disturbingly nacreous, hits her and only her in the back, from the right side of the frame.

– When Doc walks Penny back inside her office, unaware that she is leading him into a rendezvous/shakedown with the FBI, the two are first framed in a massive hallway which terminates in an equally massive window. Is said window blown-the-fuck-out? If it wasn’t it probably wouldn’t be on this list!

– In said meeting with said Feds, the FBI dingus-boys are framed against, you guessed it, another blown-out window, one positioned in such a way that it almost seems like a third interrogator sitting across the table from Doc. Doc, conversely, has no such light behind him.

– We cut right from this revelation of how deep the conspiracy seems to go to Doc’s office, where he’s chilling. The window behind him? Looks like he’s about to be abducted, that light is so nacreous.

– Doc goes to Club Asiatique at Jade’s request right after this. We get our first explanation of the Golden Fang, the schooner, and the Golden Fang, the institution, at this point. This entire scene is rendered in darkness and fog, from which Coy simply emerges in a casual gait, and into which Doc eventually twirls nervously, trying and failing to get his bearings. You are smart, and do not need me to explain this. But please, I beg of you, notice the complete lack of light at the first attempted explanation of the Golden Fang.

– When Sancho relates the story of Burke Stodger, reaffirmed capitalist after his flirtation with government-no-no’d left-wing politics, are the windows blown out again? Mm-hmmm…!

– And in the next scene, when Doc gets the call from Sancho telling him that Shasta was aboard the Golden Fang when it put out to sea, Doc immediately looks off-screen to the right, directly into a – ruh-roh! – nacreous light, like he’s seeing for the first time just how rapidly the opportunities for the future are winnowing down.

– And from here we go into a delightful little visual flourish of an ethereal Shasta, floating in darkness, with a sourceless red light washing over her face. She is looking left, which matches up with Doc, looking right in his framing, back in the present day, awash in the blue light of dusk, and peering with binoculars at something unseen. Both of them, locked in their limited lights, their limited framing, and their limited futures.

– Ahaha, there are so many fucking more examples to go. Why am I even doing this.

– When Doc meets Coy at the creepy mansion that has been reclaimed by forces from a house of musical anarchy to the dosed and benumbed meeting-place of kowtowed former artists? Our two studs are framed under a narrow light, and it’s that darkness outside again, as the Golden Fang’s role in society is given another attempted explanation.

– Doc heads to the LAPD building after this to talk to Bigfoot, and as our favorite gum-shoe makes his walk down the line of desks to his contact/frenemy, are the windows running parallel to the camera’s angle of movement blown out? I trust you know the answer in that big, wonderful brain of yours!

– From this we cut to Doc back in his office, getting high as fuck on some unnamed gas. No thematic linkup here, it’s just nice to see him having fun, doing some self-care.

– But back to business: when Clancy Charlock, sister of Glen, shows up to revive Doc’s interest in (or, maybe, obligation towards) the case Doc leans in towards her, directly into the pale and sickly light. Doc’s re-engagement with the case is marked with a re-engagement towards the nasty light of whatever is going on, here. I feel like I am a crazy person, noting all of this!

– When Doc walks Clancy out of his office building, blown out windoooooows.

– When Doc returns to his office to have a think right after walking Clancy out of his office building, blown out windoooooows.

– Doc goes to Dr. Blatnoyd’s office to talk with Martin Short, which is always a fun idea, but more importantly as Doc is introduced to yet another wrinkle in the conspiracy (is the Golden Fang just a tax dodge, or is Blatnoyd bullshitting him?) we are also treated to blown out windoooooows.

– When Japonica, out of her mind, monologues about…whatever it is she’s talking about (the point is that she’s caught up in all of this) she’s framed from way down low, so low that we get a ceiling light just above her head and out of focus in the background, like a sick halo granted to her by the conspiracy.

– When Blatnoyd, Denis, Japonica, and Doc are driving away from the Golden Fang Corporate HQ – and, symbolically, also trying in vain to escape the conspiracy that is metastasizing around them – they are pulled over by a police officer who gets their attention by blasting a violent light through the back of Japonica’s car window.

(I’m trying to avoid a literary breakdown and just focus on the visuals, but here’s an added component to this scene that my eagerness just won’t let me leave out. The opening exchange between the police officer and a suuuuper fucked-up Japonica goes something like:

“You know you’re driving without your headlights, ma’am?”

“But I can see in the dark.”

(A scion of the Golden Fang, an institution/idea/conspiracy/stand-in for the decline of Western prosperity if not basic freedom/possible dentist-centric tax shelter whose name is literally always accompanied by darkness, claiming that she can see in the dark? Not enough hmm? faces in the world, my friends)

– When Doc and Bigfoot meet up for a conversation about Coy and Puck Beaverton and Adrian Prussia, are the windows blown out again, specifically blown out behind Bigfoot, who is of course manipulating our dear Doc? This is me, nodding feverishly, like a cartoon dog.

– Also, when Doc doesn’t take the bait, gets up, and leaves, does Bigfoot turn and glare after him, in doing so staring directly into that same light in a way that we’ve seen other characters stare, with levels of fear and intensity varying depending on their familiarity with or contempt for the conspiracy? I hope you’re fully erect right now, too, otherwise this might be weird!

– When Doc is driving to the Chryskylodon Institute to check in on what’s worth checking in on, the light outside his driver-side window is overpowering, as usual. This is a fine thing to note, but works even better when related to its sister observation, which is:

– When Doc actually arrives at the Chryskylodon Institute and is being led inside, the door he’s moving towards is so fucking blown-out with light that the two people standing in front of it are rendered in pure, black silhouette. Doc is getting to the beating heart of the conspiracy, and violent light is bursting from the fucking seams.

– When we finally see Puck Beaverton for the first time, the window behind him is very easy to see through. I’m fucking with you, it’s impossibly opaque with a monstrous light!

– During a deeply creepy sex scene Shasta manipulates Doc into taking her from behind while she, her harrowingly sanguine face waaaay into the foreground, smiles at an unseen source of light offscreen. It’s that damned futurity again, the obliterating power of a bought-and-sold fate. That’s what arouses her – Doc is just there to provide the requisite engine-revving. He’s a vibrator for her while she thinks about the thing that truly makes her go vroom, which is the total submission required to exist in a space owned by someone else, someone else who hates you entirely on principle. Jesus fuck.

– We’re so close, you guys.

– When Doc goes to the DOJ to look at Adrian Prussia’s jacket, is Penny, revealed once again to not be a co-conspirator in all of this so much as an indifferent enabler, framed against a blown-out window? You’ve done well to know what I am going to say, my friend; you’ve done well.

– Aaaaand when Doc goes to visit the Prussia-meister himself, is Adrian also framed against the light? Mm-hmm! And is Doc not, because he’s one of the few people not in on this conspiracy? Hm-mmm!

– The climax of the movie, to the extent that it has a traditional climax, features Doc in a throwdown with two of the Golden Fang’s crudest enforcers. And the showdown at the OK Corral happens almost entirely in darkness. Hey, darkness, Golden Fang, that’s another neat little observation, now isn’t it?

– And finally, when Doc has the “twenty-kilo inconvenience” in his home, and when he makes the handoff with the Golden Fang operatives a little while later, the light is oh-so-pale and creepy.

– Well, I guess the real “finally” is when Doc is driving with Shasta and a square of light falls directly on Doc’s face, but that is obvious, and I am a violent hipster, so I barely acknowledge it.

An Interjection

“But wait, Rain Man,” you might be saying. “Aren’t those just examples of, uh, lighting? Like, as a concept? What you’re doing is the equivalent of saying that Paul Thomas Anderson must be making a commentary on the use of dialogue in movies because people talk in this film. Those are too many examples you’ve provided, rendering your whole argument unfalsifiable.”

My God, you’re right. In order for the above examples to come together under the forces of thematic cohesion there would need to be a contrary kind of light, in this case wonderful and optimistic, appearing only in scenes of hope, against which we can exact a comparison. But where would we find such a

Good Light

– In her opening narration Sortilège is framed, beautifully, against a backdrop of natural sunlight, twisting all golden and haloed through her hair as she begins the story. This is the beginning, when all is, as far as we know, still hopeful and pure, and the lighting reflects that.

– Nearly every scene in Gordita Beach, home of the Hippie Lifestyle, and accidental last stronghold against The Forces Out There, is lit naturally. When Doc and Denis get coffee? Natural lighting. When Doc walks Shasta to her car, even though the act is abandoning her back to the violent movements outside the haven of Gordita Beach? A calm, peaceful night, lit innocently. When we check back in with Doc towards the end of the story, when Mickey has re-entered society, and our hero is reading the paper, trying to decompress? You wouldn’t even know the world was ending, for the light.

– In an inversion of the creepy, pale light of an unwanted futurity having the backs of the FBI agents, in the scene right after that we get Doc and Sancho checking out the Golden Fang with binoculars. At their back is a warm, natural light, low and early-morning. Doc and Sancho are cool, and still bathed in the real stuff.

(in the novel there’s a line about Doc, upon entering Chick Planet Massage, surrounding himself with a white light. There’s definitely a link-up between that line and Doc and Sancho still being granted the good light by the universe, but more importantly I want to make sure everybody knows that I totally read books, too)

– The flashback with Shasta. When she and Doc are trying to score weed on a rainy afternoon the sunlight breaking through the clouds is fucking resplendent, redolent with hope and providing a fond eye back to when the storm was natural, and would eventually end, and could even, possibly, be enjoyed while it was happening, ultimately harmless as those natural rains tend to be.

– As an added fucking bonus to the above: at the end of that flashback we see Doc and Shasta in a doorway, laughing. Doc is framed in blue light, and Shasta in red, just like in their moment of separation listed in the Bad Light section, but in this instance they are intermingled, understanding, and clean. That sound you hear is me dunking on the universe, rearranging the cosmos into a cosmologically-scaled tribute to my balls, which are robust, and strong.

– When Coy has been freed from the clutches of Vigilant California, the LAPD, the Golden Fang, the Golden Fang, and probably Nixon’s dumbass dog, too, we see him running from the house he’s been staying at with his fellow Boards and towards Doc’s car. In this glorious moment of return and rebirth Coy gallops straight through a blast of soul-cleansing, gold-yellow sunlight, which is the movie announcing that he’s going home, baby.

– And when Coy does get home, baby, we see him and Hope in the background of the shot, standing in their doorway, the sun having gone down, and the house filled with even more golden light – less extravagant than the solar blast our favorite sax player was treated to in the previous example, but more precious for the peace, as it fills up his home, keeps him and Hope and Amethyst (and any little kid blues she might have) safe against the dark.

A Breather

Hot damn, that’s a lot of stuff! But I am a firm believer that if you’re going to deep dive into a world most Pynchonian you need to dive fucking deeply, and this is a man who spent like a quarter century researching Mason & Dixon. Besides, if the worst thing I had to endure in compiling the above list was watching one of my favorite movies a few more times, then pain is the new pleasure, baby.

But something bothers me still.

I have only made half the argument.

Did I not mention lighting and framing?

The Framing

There’s a simple rule at play with the framing in this movie: tight shots are everyone’s default context, and are suffocating, and are isolation personified in a world where basic human connection has been commodified, if not outright excised from the culture, but are still preferable to hoisting your head into the currents of change going on in the air around you, wherein you are exposed to a monstrous presence dominating all horizons and futures. Tight framing, bad for you; the full context of a wide, somehow worse. Let’s dig in!

– The ocean as seen at the beginning of the film is framed between two buildings – the vices already closing in, and the ocean, once a symbol of freedom, is increasingly owned by The Forces Out There.

– Our first true wide shot of the film is the desert that will be Channel View Estates, hanging dead as a horse behind the makeshift strip mall that the construction crew has erected. Just like the sea being revealed as good and dying in the film’s opening shot, the future of the land is also painted with the same destitute brush.

– When Doc goes to visit Sloane Wolfmann she is introduced framed against the LAPD having a pool party in the background. Once again, upon looking into the background we see something terrible, in this case the rich owing the police and the police happy to be their playthings.

– Doc framed against all of Mickey’s ties, i.e. the real estate developer’s trophies, his ownership and reduction to commodity of all those people he looks down on.

– The Golden Fang is supposedly in the background of the shot when Doc meets Coy outside of Club Asiatique, but we never see it for the fog (hey, remember the Bad Lighting section, where we’re in darkness whenever the Golden Fang is mentioned?)

– When Doc thinks about Shasta after finding out that she’s aboard the Fang they’re isolated in different frames (this is the blue/red moment from the lighting section).

– The creepy, pseudo-religious band house is framed tightly through a doorway, obscured by smoke and candlelight. And behind that is an even tighter framing of Nazis in a back room keeping an eye on everyone, making sure the agenda is being followed.

– During Shasta’s voiceover we see her framed with the ocean stretching out into the background, but lost in a tempestuous cloud cover before you can glimpse the horizon. Another wide, another reveal that the future has no spontaneity, possible even space, left in it.

– When Jade is telling Doc that the Golden Fang is a heroin cartel she is framed through the window, and the camera pushes in hard and fast. The shot ends on Doc’s face taking up half the frame. The very next shot? A wide of the LAPD building, looming large, as it has been revealed to be intimately-intwined with the conspiracy.

– The framing of the Golden Fang HQ, having established residence in a spot previously belonging to one of Doc’s dearest memories. The Golden Fang is building on top of your soul, now.

– When we finally get another, true wide shot it’s the terrifying Chryskylodon Institute, declaring proudly that “Straight Is Hip” and continuing the bidding of the Golden Fang, this time helping to run drug addicts through the ringer under the guise of helping them get clean.

– The suddenly reveal that Shasta is completely naked and offering herself to Doc is done in the least romantic way possible, with a sudden cut to a wider shot that just hangs, miserable but unable to look away, at her bought-and-sold body.

– When Doc gets a chance to flip through Adrian Prussia’s jacket at the DOJ our hero is framed against all of the government’s collected information on, uh, everyone.

– After Puck drugs Doc and is going to kill him with a heroin overdose we’re in a wide, technically, but also framed through a small window. Just like the buildings-as-pincers in the opening shot the Forces Out There have closed in, this time on Doc himself.

– The wide shot when Doc makes the handoff with the Golden Fang. It’s bland as fuck because the movie wants to stress how the insidiousness of the Golden Fang has seeped into even the most quotidian aspects of everyday life. I mean, the operatives who make the exchange are middle-class WASPs.

The Upshot, Which is a Downer

Those two lists took fucking forever to make, so I’m rewarding myself by going long on the home stretch. If you don’t want to watch a man pleasure himself with words, then congratulations, you’ve reached the end of this post. If you’ve ever wondered if auto-anal is possible, both physically and in a universe governed by the eyes of an otherwise loving God, then feel free to continue. Let’s boogie:

There’s a misery to this movie sewn into the very fabric of its frames. It is not monologued about – much – as Sortilège’s narration mostly serves to embellish the movie’s motions with a requisite tone, a tone that detours into the simple or the free as often as it invokes images of societal decline. No, the texture is left up to the framing and the lighting, and the work done on that front is spectacular. Doc is waging a hilariously small battle in a war that wasn’t just decided long ago but was never even allowed to be risked in a fight, pushing back against walls that were erected before anyone even noticed that the crews were there, or that nobody could quite place the logos on their hats and jumpers. In our delicious and damning emotions we elevate his noble flailing to something Herculean, which in some capacities it might be, but in feeling our way through his conflict under the auspices of earned camaraderie we assume he is accomplishing more than he ever really gets done. The movie reminds us of this schism between expectation and result, frequently, and almost always through the light.

Doc and his Gordita Beach friends, the hippy movement in general – hell, people of good taste and values, just in the abstract – find themselves in a fight against a very mid-twentieth century, very Richard Nixon kind of falling apart – one whose violence doesn’t manifest as the obvious arm reaching from the confines of A Place You’re Not Supposed to Strike Back Against, rendered monolithic and proud in its iniquity, just kind of hovering a few thousand feet above downtown, blocking out the sun, daring you to challenge it. I mean, it’s also that, because evil is kitsch as fuck, but its more insidious and therefore effective avenues are a monstrous reappraisal of what constitutes waking, and what we can recover by sleeping; this kind of cold moment that no amount of leaping into your Buick and gunning it can outrun – the breeze is ubiquitous, and indifferent, but somehow also crafted with each victim personally in mind, so the winds of change, in all of their newfound artifice, will just be waiting for you at wherever you convinced yourself that you’d be safe. You’re going to be framed alone, and you must be, because any expansion of sight to encompass the relieving company of others will by definition also invite the new context in, and the new context is too grim to be seen, and survived.

This is shown to us unambiguously in one of the few true wide shots in the entire movie, one that takes us nearly twenty minutes to get to: Doc’s arrival at the place that will be Channel View Estates. The framing that welcomes him there might as well be this movie’s thesis statement for how small our hero is, and how voracious is Mickey Wolfmann’s appetite. It’s the desert, as it recedes to the horizon, still comfortingly unobscured by futurity’s light and fog, but only for a little while longer. Once upon a time and numberless reappraisals ago this was the region’s completely reasonable conception of a physical understanding of God, so feared and followed it was by virtue of its violent inexpressibility and the almost accidental way it shaped the development of the entire region – reigning sovereign over this place’s condition because it was this place’s condition, and therefore deaf to argument – while everybody else just kind of evolved alongside concurrently; happy, if not a little nervous, just to be allowed along for the ride. But this level of power was appropriated by people in suits, who kept the violence but elided from the canon the egalitarian fairness of the motions, draining from the land its claims to any supposed beauty and reducing it to The Lot We’ll Be Building On Next, or That Thing Behind the Strip Mall That Is Available, Should We Want to Expand.

Or how about other places, less grandiose but equally beloved, that have also just fucking disappeared? At least the natural forces of decline have some ameliorating causality to them, entropy announcing its presence long before it finishes its erasure, giving you time to adapt to its presence – for God’s sake, find a religion – as it sends you, information-packet-by-information-packet, somewhere apparently unrecoverable. But under the violently incurious eyes of a real estate developer who excises the soul – even the uncompromising, downright fucking brutal kind of soul – from whatever vista he has decided is simply too breathtakingly vibrant for its own good, challenges his clammy and mostly beige vision, until he has with the determination only a bland sociopath could trot out trans-fucking-morgified the once brutally-moving land into a kind of kingdom defined by its every component’s defanged and stultified ability to offend with off-putting newness, instead marked for ownership by an agonizing and universal kind of bleh, there is no dignified falling away. The very concrete of Tyreke’s home turf is just ground up and replaced; Doc and Shasta are forever whisked away into isolated frames, searching for each other through something heavier than lack of light.

(You know, when the cosmic event horizon gets far enough away future species won’t even be able to tell that Earth was here, too far outside the reaches of light we’ll have been redshifted by then. Just, heh, something to think about.)

And speaking of sex, let’s trace the violating presence of the light and its sovereign, the saturated future, all the way down to the level of the naughty-naughty and the super-fun – it just wouldn’t be a me-post unless I pondered deeply the mysteries of boning. The consideration at play here is that sex is, well, an awfully personal place, a little house of two-person (or, if you’re Italian, three or four-person) culture that can be staked into the ground wherever there’s enough space to get a head comfortably back, and at least two legs in the air. It really is a nifty resource, completely independent of the “fuck yes I’m having sex” dynamic! But there’s no way the forces that be were going to allow that retreat to go unbought, unpackaged, and unsold back to the people who actually, like, feel something when they get all freaky on each other. Too lucrative a resource, too efficient a cudgel by which to browbeat the masses and their dumb reliance on emotions.

As a defeated Shasta says after essentially tricking Doc into having sex with her,

“This doesn’t mean we’re back together.”

The End

I like sad things! They’re like happy things, but for dirty boys. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be happy, and being so silly smiling as often and as loudly as possible. But there are countless and delicious avenues of thought that explode into functionality when you allow yourself to accept that any one of them probably culminates in a bear trap covered in tabasco sauce, or an open grave that already has all of your favorite albums and your childhood blanket waiting for you in it. You make friends with people you would otherwise, in your parallel, pinkish existence, have no reason to interact with! A horizon that reveals itself to be nothing more than a calamity of hungry light is a wonderful ice-breaker, if nothing else.

Really, though, being entirely along is nothing to whine about, and it’s certainly not excuse enough to be lonely. Books like Inherent Vice, the glorified rounding error that constitutes the people you’ll meet along the way who see things the same way you do – they’re all like bottles washed ashore your island, right? You uncork the message and unloose the ribbon and the letter says something like,

“Well, this sucks.”

And even though you were hoping for a little more poetry in your first contact with the outside world in what feels like forever you still can’t help but nod at nothing in particular and say, out loud, to no one in particular, because the letter doesn’t even have a name at the bottom, “buddy, fucking tell me about it.”