the cinema of P A U L T H O M A S A N D E R S O N

DIRECTORS’ CUTS
Directors’ Cuts

Directors’ Cuts focus on the work of the most significant contemporary international filmmakers,
illuminating the creative dynamics of world cinema.

For a full list of titles, see pages 225–227.

the cinema of
PAU L T H O M A S A N D E R S O N
american apocrypha

ethan warren
WA L L F L OWE R new york
Wallflower Press is an imprint of Columbia University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Warren, Ethan, author.
Title: The cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson : American apocrypha / Ethan Warren.
Description: New York : Wallflower, [2023] | Series: Directors’ Cuts | Includes bibliographical
references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022035502 | ISBN 9780231204583 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231204590
(trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231555609 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Anderson, Paul Thomas—Criticism and interpretation. |
Motion pictures—United States—History. | Motion picture producers and directors—
United States—Biography.
Classification: LCC PN1998.3.A5255 W37 2023 | DDC 791.4302/33092—dc23/eng/20221129
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022035502

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America

Cover image: © Warner Bros. / Courtesy of the Everett Collection

For Cait
This [is] a picture of civilization in Southern California, as the writer has observed
it. . . . The picture is the truth, and the great mass of detail actually exists. But the
cards have been shuffled.
—Upton Sinclair, Oil!

I don’t get a sense of American pride. I just get a sense that everyone is here, battling
the same thing—that around the world, everybody’s after the same thing, just some
minor piece of happiness each day.
—Paul Thomas Anderson
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments xi
Foreword by Lindsay Zoladz xiii
Introduction xix

1. On Paul Thomas Anderson’s Career to Date 1

2. On Places and Spaces 25
3. On Influence 44
4. On Domesticity 59
5. On Screenwriting 81
6. On Gender Performance 95
7. On Alienation Effects 118
8. On Faith and Belief 132
9. On Music Videos 149
10. On History 164

Notes 181
Index 215
AC K N OW L E D G M E N TS

in 2002, I bought a ticket for Punch-Drunk Love and entered the theater at what
turned out to be the close of one phase of my life. I exited, dazed and distressed, into
another phase that has carried me across a full two decades, as I have wrestled with
a seemingly simple but persistently puzzling question: What does this Paul Thomas
Anderson guy think he’s doing? This book represents my best effort at answering that
question, and I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the following individu-
als and organizations, all of which were instrumental in seeing my project through to
completion: the staff at Columbia University Press and Wallflower Press, particularly
the support and guidance of editor Ryan Groendyk, who took a risk on a first-time
author without evincing any doubt; the staff at Bright Wall/Dark Room, particu-
larly Chad Perman, Zosha Millman, and Kelsey Ford, all of whom went above and
beyond their professional duties in supporting me, even as my attention was diverted
from our shared work; Adam Nayman, for the invaluable assistance and kind words
early in my writing process; the man known as wilberfan, for research and fact-
finding assistance late in that process; Phyllis Mercurio, for all things related to the
release of Licorice Pizza; Sydney Urbanek for critical editing assistance as I neared
the finish line; my wife, for her unwavering support and belief in me and this project
(which consistently exceeded my own); my children, who accompanied me on my
journey to Haim fandom and developed a working vocabulary concerning films
they won’t be allowed to watch for a decade; and the countless others, both here
and departed, who loved this project into being over the course of its long years of
development. If you wonder whether you might be counted among this group, I can
say with certainty that you are.
FOREWORD
Lindsay Zoladz

in late november 2021, I interviewed Paul Thomas Anderson for a profile I was
writing on Alana Haim, the unlikely star of Anderson’s ninth feature, Licorice Pizza.
When I reached him by phone at his home in the San Fernando Valley on the Monday
after Thanksgiving, Anderson was tired from promotional duties—Licorice Pizza had
just opened in limited release, and before it went wide, he was looking forward to
a rare upcoming stretch of “three or four days with very little or next to nothing to
do”—but even in a state of postholiday exhaustion, I could still detect in his voice
a palpable exuberance about the craft of moviemaking. Having devoted more than
half his life to the task did not seem to have dimmed his enthusiasm in the slightest.
He remained enchanted by the happy accidents inherent in the process; he used
some form of the word magic four times in our conversation. Anderson recalled his
surprising on-set discovery that the actor Haim most reminded him of was, of all
people, Joaquin Phoenix (“You cannot tell if they’re completely out of control, or if
they’re so in their body that they’re able to make it look like they’re out of control,” he
said). When I relayed Haim’s recollection of the moment Anderson asked this first-
time actress to lead his next movie, he admitted—as Haim had already suggested to
me—that their personal versions of events probably varied. “I think I remember it
differently,” Anderson told me. “It’s very likely that my version is embellished as well,
or omits very important details.”
It was a banal moment in our conversation, if a relatable one: who among us
is not at the whim of our selective memory when retelling an anecdote, whether
we are conscious of it or not? But in a larger sense, this moment was also in line
with the overarching concept that Ethan Warren uses to contextualize Anderson’s
filmography in the opening pages of this book, writing of “Anderson’s status as an
apocryphal historian.” That phrase might seem like an oxymoron, with “apocryphal”
undermining the objective authority that “history” connotes. But in another sense,
it is just as true that we are all the apocryphal historians of our own lives, crafting
remembered—and often embellished—narratives from the chaotic mass of details
that make up our days. To translate this messy universal impulse into the streamlined
structures of cinema is of a piece with the humanism that Warren identifies at the
heart of Anderson’s proudly subjective approach to filmmaking.
I had never before considered the idea of “apocrypha” as a lens through which
to view Anderson’s filmography, but for Warren it is an illuminating one—diffuse
enough to allow for a certain fluidity of interoperation, but also clear enough to
bring prismatic new meanings to light. The term captures both the strengths and
limitations of Anderson’s approach as a filmmaker, how cherry-picking particularly
evocative details from cultural history or real people’s lives can create what Werner
Herzog has called an “ecstatic truth,” transmitting Anderson’s idiosyncratic interests
to the viewer and discarding that which he deems extraneous. This is the alchemical
process through which L. Ron Hubbard becomes The Master’s mercurial Lancaster
Dodd, John Holmes becomes the beatific Dirk Diggler of Boogie Nights, or Edward
L. Doheny (as well as Upton Sinclair’s own James Arnold Ross) is transfigured into
the charismatically monstrous Daniel Plainview.
It is also the same process by which Anderson’s films are at the mercy of his
own blind spots, resulting in recurring critiques of what some perceive as political,
racial, and sexual myopia. Magnolia (1999), for example, may be eerily prescient
in its depiction and critique of the so-called men’s rights movement years before
it went mainstream—one of the most startling things to consider when watching
the film now, in the early 2020s, is how much more successful Tom Cruise’s Frank
T. J. Mackey would be in the age of social media—but its decentralization of Black
characters and its clumsiness when depicting homosexuality is, in a contemporary
viewing, harder than ever to ignore. Still, one of the more thrilling developments
in what Warren calls Anderson’s “synthesis” phase (his three most recent features
at the time of this writing) is how much better he has become at writing complex
female characters like Haim’s nervy Alana Kane and, in Phantom Thread (2017),
Lesley Manville’s deliciously prickly Cyril Woodcock and Vicky Krieps’s slyly asser-
tive Alma Elson.
In crafting his own kind of auteur persona, Anderson has, too, cherry-picked
through the film-school canon and repurposed what he has found most alluring
or useful: the peopled sprawl of Robert Altman, the unforgiving American vistas
of John Huston, the formal iconoclasm and self-aware subversion of early Jean-
Luc Godard and François Truffaut. (A postmodern film-school skeptic like Godard
would certainly have appreciated the story, which Warren here recounts, that one of
the only assignments Anderson completed before dropping out of NYU was to try
to pass off an unproduced David Mamet script as his own.)
When he first stormed Hollywood in the mid-1990s, Anderson was widely per-
ceived as a cocky and precocious wunderkind, a status he cemented by shooting
three impressive and increasingly ambitious features—Hard Eight (1996), Boogie
Nights (1997), and Magnolia (1999)—before he turned thirty. But in his reverence for
(and in the case of Altman and Jonathan Demme, his actual apprenticeship to) his
cinematic elders, Anderson has since come to be perceived as something of an old
soul, a craftsman somewhat out of time and possessing what the critic Jason Sperb
has called “a Kubrickian work ethic that emphasizes patience, thorough research, and
absolute focus in the pursuit of one’s own definition of cinematic perfection.”

xiv foreword
 In the decades that I have followed Anderson’s career, it is this slightly antagonis-
tic relationship with the fads and rhythms of the present moment that I have come to
value most. I was perhaps the perfect age when There Will Be Blood came out in 2007:
in my third year of film school. My friends and I saw it repeatedly and devotionally
in theaters, awed that such grandeur was still possible in a moment that seemed to
us defined by coy, mumbly indie features and self-consciously minor works. Here
was a relatively young American filmmaker still daring to reach for greatness and
originality, something that then felt precious and rare enough to forgive him for the
inevitable moments when it evaded his grasp.
In a reverse of the career trajectories of those onetime Cahiers du Cinema scribes
Godard and Truffaut, I have since committed myself to criticism, but from this
vantage I have continued to appreciate the counterpoint Anderson’s work provides
to the deadening modern deluge of “prestige content.” Some of Anderson’s post-
millennial films like There Will Be Blood, The Master, and Phantom Thread at first
appear to exist within the well-mannered boundaries of this aesthetic—before
they suddenly and thrillingly puncture it with pricks of grotesqueness or absur-
dity. Moments like Freddie Quell’s unexpected flatulence and Daniel Plainview’s
highly quotable invocation of the milkshake “serve as something like a joy buzzer
for viewers settled comfortably in their reception stance for prestige pictures,” as
Warren puts it.
Filmmaking has always been contingent upon the whims of the market, and
even Anderson’s most confrontational movies are of course not immune to that. But
in a moment when nearly every new directorial wunderkind seems to be funneled
directly into the homogenizing pipeline of needless remakes, superhero blockbust-
ers, and preexisting IP, an oeuvre like Anderson’s seems like an American anomaly,
defined just as much by what he refuses to do as by what he creates. As of this writ-
ing, Anderson is a rare filmmaker who has not signed on with a streaming service or
tried his hand at “prestige TV”; his short-form bursts of creativity seem satisfied by
the music videos he has shot throughout his career.
There’s a deceptive simplicity to Anderson’s music videos, as Alana Haim pointed
out when I interviewed her. “The thing that people don’t realize is that it is maybe
the hardest thing in the world to capture live music as you see it,” she said. “You
could set up all your instruments, plug in a guitar, set up a camera, but what comes
through the camera 99.9 of the time just doesn’t capture the essence of what is
actually happening in the room.” She and her sisters found “Valentine,” their first
collaboration with Anderson, unlike any shoot they had ever experienced, mostly for
its lack of artifice and interruption in their performance. (It turned out to be a fruit-
ful pairing: as of this writing, Anderson has since directed eight more music videos
for the band.) “It was so simple, there were maybe three or four lights, and Paul was
like, ‘Pretend I’m not there, I’m just going to be a fly on the wall and get everything
in one shot,’ ” Haim recalled. When she watched the dailies for the first time, she
was amazed. “I remember turning to him and being like, ‘Is that real?’ ” Haim said.
“That’s what I’ve always wanted it to look like—that’s what it feels like to be in the
studio with us. You’ve captured the energy, the essence, everything. I don’t know how
you did it, but you did.’ ”

foreword xv
 I love Anderson’s videos for the palpable reverence they have for that “essence,”
or the mysterious and often invisible process by which music is created. He does
not feel the need—as so many music video auteurs did in the 1990s and early 2000s
when he was first cutting his teeth—to hook the viewer’s attention through busy nar-
ratives and eye-catching gimmicks. He trusts the song, and the performer, to do that
job sufficiently just by being themselves in front of the camera. From his late-1990s
work with Michael Penn and Fiona Apple up to his more recent collaborations with
Joanna Newsom, Radiohead, and Haim, almost every one of Anderson’s videos cen-
ters a singer, performing directly into the camera, tapped into a rich and becalming
current of musical creation while the world around them is in chaos. (It is striking
that that description suits both his earliest music video, for Penn’s 1997 single “Try,”
and one of his most recent, for Haim’s propulsive “Now I’m in It.”) Anderson often
uses many members of his trusted crew on these videos, giving them a chance to
experiment with lighting, camerawork, and editing. But I agree with Warren’s detec-
tion of a more thematic common thread, too: “If anything unites Anderson’s music
videos with his feature work,” he writes, it is the “spirit of appreciative engagement
with another artist’s process.”
Does such rejection of spectacle make him old-fashioned? Maybe—not that he
seems to mind. In our phone interview, for example, Anderson waxed rhapsodic
about the traditional theatergoing experience and took an interest in how his films
were being exhibited. When I told him I had seen Licorice Pizza twice in New York,
his first impulse was to ask which theaters I had seen it in—he knew them both—
and how the film looked on those particular screens. Before a recent preview screen-
ing in Los Angeles, he told me, he got to see the audience queuing up around the
block, “like you used to see in the old days.”
“You never see a line at the movie theater anymore, because of the way multi-
plexes are, staggered times and all that,” he added. “I was really just seeing this mini-
dream of mine come true, and it was magical.”
In a time of fragmentation and corporate interests, to create such a coherent body
of work driven by personal curiosity—complete with those long, Kubrickian pauses
for inspiration, research, and extensive preproduction—can indeed feel as precarious
as performing a magic trick. But it is one that Anderson has so far pulled off. The
Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha is certainly fluent in all of the
discourse and previous scholarship that Anderson’s films have inspired, but Warren’s
innovation here is to abandon linear chronology and instead put these films in con-
versation with each other around certain recurring themes and methodologies. Such
a structure allows for sharp insight to emerge about Anderson’s approaches to such
underdiscussed concepts as faith, gender, history, and even screenwriting. Warren’s
close readings of Anderson’s shooting scripts are especially valuable when he notes
what has been left out of the final films, deftly proving the point that, as he has
matured, Anderson has developed as a writer a certain “lightness of touch.”
Does Anderson’s kaleidoscopic and sometimes contradictory imagining of the
San Fernando Valley comprise his own personal “multiverse,” or is it more of a cin-
ematic Yoknapatawpha County? In the rigor and granularity of his study, Warren
treats it more like the latter. As a younger, brasher artist, Anderson might have been

xvi foreword
courting such highbrow comparisons deliberately; after all, he did write a central
line in Magnolia—“we may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through
with us”—that sounds suspiciously like an echo of one of William Faulkner’s most
famous quotables. But Faulkner too was something of an apocryphal historian and,
of course, a Hollywood screenwriter himself. He was in search of his own ecstatic
truth in his creation and constant revisions of Yoknapatawpha, which, Warren
reminds us, Faulkner liked to call his “apocryphal county.” In another medium, in
another time, and in another corner of America, Anderson has created another one.
Let this book be its map.

foreword xvii
INTRODUCTION

two rhyming scenes roughly bookend Paul Thomas Anderson’s first twenty-five
years as a feature director. In each film—both of them sprawling, 1970s-set ensemble
sagas that push past the two-hour mark in their efforts to convey some essential, if
fictionalized, truth about the San Fernando Valley—two strivers who have not yet
cracked the code to happiness come up against a highly combustible, larger-than-life
figure. In Boogie Nights (1997), Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) and Reed Rothchild
(John C. Reilly) meet manic lothario Rahad Jackson (Alfred Molina), a character
modeled on the real-life underworld figure Eddie Nash; in Licorice Pizza (2021),
Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) and Alana Kane (Alana Haim) meet sadistic hair-
dresser Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper), a character modeled on the stylist and soon-
to-be Hollywood mogul of the same name. Both scenes were highlighted in critical
discussion upon initial release—“You’ve got to admit, [Boogie Nights’ Rahad Jackson
sequence is] one of the best stretches of film you’ve ever seen,” Roger Ebert told
Gene Siskel in 1997, while in 2021, Allison Wilmore described Jon Peters’s “vol-
canic font of macho posturing and horniness” as “the movie’s highlight.” Critics
were prone, as well, to compare Licorice Pizza to Boogie Nights more broadly, with
Siddhant Adlakha describing Anderson’s ninth film as “mirroring” his second, and
Aurora Amidon suggesting that by returning to the Valley of the 1970s, Anderson
had “return[ed] to his . . . glory days.”
This particular echo between Licorice Pizza and an earlier Anderson work is nota-
ble given that both sequences are rooted in real-life stories gathered by Anderson
(a Rolling Stone article, in the case of Eddie Nash becoming Rahad Jackson; a friend’s
anecdote, in the case of Jon Peters becoming the hallucinatory “Jon Peters”). In both
cases, Anderson selected the elements of the true story that interested him most and
then—following what he would later call “the screenwriter as shark thing—mmm,
I’ll steal that, use that, and then make up my own thing over here”—rejected any
inconvenient details, replacing them with his own, more dramatic interpretation of
reality. Any director of historical fiction—as Anderson has been on six of his nine
features to date—will end up fictionalizing the reality of a story’s time and place,
but Anderson’s status as an apocryphal historian is marked by a handful of qualities
suggesting that he aims not merely for fictionalization but a sort of ecstaticization,
exaggerating the facts of his given material in order to achieve some deeper essen-
tial truth—what Werner Herzog has termed ecstatic truth, “deeper strata of truth in
cinema . . . mysterious and elusive . . . reached only through fabrication and imagi-
nation and stylization.” It would seem perfectly intuitive to apply Herzog’s credo
to Anderson’s Valley—“He has sifted through a haze of wildly embellished tales and
half-forgotten memories,” Justin Chang wrote of Licorice Pizza, “and pieced together
something that feels more concrete, more achingly, tangibly real.”
In 2014, David Ansen asked Anderson what equipped him to make Inherent
Vice, a story set in an alternate L.A. so cartoonish it approaches magic realism, to
which Anderson replied, “The truth is the truth is the truth”—a remark that Ansen
reported “sounds more like a credo.” With this answer, it became clearer than ever
that Anderson saw his relationship with fact as both meaningful and subject to inter-
pretation. After spending his career basing characters on real-life figures—from Dirk
Diggler (modeled on John Holmes) to Daniel Plainview (modeled on Edward L.
Doheny) to Lancaster Dodd (modeled on L. Ron Hubbard)—with Licorice Pizza,
Anderson dropped the pretense and wrote several real figures into the script. Along-
side Jon Peters, we meet city councilman Joel Wachs (Benny Safdie), restaurateur
Jerry Frick (John Michael Higgins), disc jockey B. Mitchell Reed (Ray Chase), and
casting agent Mary Grady (Harriet Samson Harris), but Anderson has played so
fast and loose with their life stories that the screen versions often approach unrecog-
nizability. “I obviously had some problems with it,” Wachs later reflected, discuss-
ing Anderson’s choice to invent a romantic partner for him where none existed.
Anderson, for his part, saw little imperative to hew to the facts of Wachs’s life. “You
steal like a vampire,” he said elsewhere, “and leave the truth laying [sic] on the floor
somewhere behind you.”
This antipathy toward verifiable truth recalls Herzog’s belief that fact should be
considered “a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.” Herzog is not a

In Licorice Pizza, the fictionalized Jon Peters of 1973 is styled and costumed after Steven Schapiro’s
1976 photograph of the real Jon Peters. Frank Digiacomo, “Only His Hairdresser Knows for Sure,”
Vanity Fair, May 22, 2009, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2009/05/jon-peters-book200905. (Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer)

xx introduction
director generally cited among Anderson’s close kin, but his work is rooted in a per-
sonally interpreted form of Romanticism—not a strictly German Romanticism, as
Herzog scholar Brad Prager has clarified, which would demonstrate “ignorance both
about Herzog and Romanticism”—that aligns well with Anderson’s proclivities.
Herzog’s work is motivated by a Romantic philosophy that strives toward encounters
with the sublime aided by two key factors, as identified by Prager: “the character-
istically Romantic inclination to use the landscape as an external representation of
the complexities of internal psychology” (resonant with George Toles’s belief that
Anderson’s San Fernando Valley is a “hyperbolically vivid . . . place of mythic conse-
quence” in which setting can be viewed as, “in a consequential sense, a space inside
[the protagonist]”), and a usage of irony that might today be termed postmodern—a
“ ‘formal irony’ [used as] a means of acknowledging the author’s presence set against
the illusion that the work exists independently of its author” (resonant with Kim
Wilkins’s belief that in Anderson’s storytelling “the audience is encouraged to recog-
nize that [characters] are constructions . . . [and] intertextual references encourage a
game-like play within the film’s construction”).
Anderson’s films take place in what Jason Sperb has termed a “cinephiliac” land-
scape, one that “sees the past less as a documentable, verifiable series of historical events
and more as a loose, largely apolitical, hyperreal collage of sights and sounds meant
to evoke an affective sense of (cinematic) history.” This style relies on reference and
pastiche, drawing upon a shared language between viewer and artist and using refer-
ence to mediate the audience’s encounter with the narrative—a Romantic (at least in
the Herzogian sense) use of ironic detachment. Yet exactly this detachment might,
according to Elena Gorfinkel, allow for a deeper encounter with the story’s core truths
as audiences are forced “to reconsider their own historical position to film history and
popular cultural memory”—ironic distancing used, paradoxically, to encourage a
more intimate connection between viewer and narrative. This pervasive usage and
utility of irony has long been a hallmark in discussions of not just Anderson but also
his peers among the crop of filmmakers that emerged in the 1990s. Yet conversation
surrounding the meaning of this irony has shifted across the decades—along with the
question of who, exactly, might be counted among Anderson’s peers. These questions
require some historical grounding, as well as a tracked progression, so before reaching
the issue of irony, it’s perhaps best to first discuss the loose clique that Anderson has
been placed within, and its colloquial name: Indiewood.
The term Indiewood, naturally, is derived from independent, itself a notoriously
slippery term that’s all but useless when discussing the industrial intricacies of main-
stream filmmaking; any conventionally distributed film is produced cooperatively,
most often with an eye toward eventual market viability, begging the question of
what, exactly, an auteur should aspire to be independent of. More useful is indie,
a looser term that Michael Z. Newman sees as less a textual category than a film
culture, a shared values system “located in difference, resistance, opposition—in the
virtue of alternative representations, audiovisual and storytelling styles, and systems
of cultural circulation.”
One core tenet of this indie values system is a sense of “common knowledge and
competence,” which Newman has termed shared “viewing strategies.” This term

introduction xxi
is similar to one I will employ throughout this book, reception stance, used to refer
to a viewer’s psychological posture relative to the screen (a guarded stance versus an
open one; an informed position versus a naïve one), which may be the result of any
number of Newman’s viewing strategies. Any preconception, bias, and desire that
a viewer carries into the theater will contribute to that person’s reception stance,
and the broad appeal of some productions that could be termed industrially “indie”
(e.g., Summit Entertainment’s Twilight franchise, which, as Newman notes, “would
count [as indie] no less than films by Jim Jarmusch”) generates a dissonance that
contributes to the indefinability of cinematic independence. In 2019 alone, Uncut
Gems, The Lighthouse, and Midsommar were all produced in-house by boutique dis-
tributor A24, yet each epitomizes the modern conception of indie film, largely on
the basis of detectable auteurist voice, relatively low budget, and a willingness to at
least nominally push the boundaries of mass market appeal. The best answer to what
indie film is independent of might be whatever qualities the connoisseur of indie film
construes as representative of mainstream culture.
In the strictest sense, no Paul Thomas Anderson film has ever been produced inde-
pendent of corporate sponsorship. He has made two major studio productions—
Inherent Vice for Warner Bros. and Licorice Pizza for MGM—while even his under-
the-radar debut, Hard Eight, was produced by Rysher Entertainment, then a subsid-
iary of the global conglomerate Cox Enterprises. Since that time, his films have been
supported from inception by, variously, Time Warner (corporate owners of New Line,
producer of Boogie Nights and Magnolia), Sony (distribution partner to Revolution
Studios, producer of Punch-Drunk Love), Paramount (under whose arthouse wing,
Paramount Vantage, he produced There Will Be Blood ), and Universal (distribution
partner for Focus Features, producer of Phantom Thread ). The Master, his only film
since Hard Eight to be made without the backing of a big-name corporate sponsor,
was cofinanced by billionaire entrepreneur Megan Ellison and celebrity moguls Bob
and Harvey Weinstein. Yet for all this financial support, his work has always existed
comfortably within the aesthetic parameters of indie film, a factor that must be
chalked up to the public perception of Anderson as a name-brand auteur presumed
to have basic creative autonomy.
The origin of the malleable slang term Indiewood is difficult to source, but it
could be said to be roughly synonymous with what Newman terms “the Sundance-
Miramax era,” a period of roughly sixteen years between 1989 (when the mam-
moth success of Sex, Lies, and Videotape established the Sundance Film Festival as a
pipeline to cultural cachet) and 2005 (when Bob and Harvey Weinstein parted ways
with Miramax, the brand name under which they had reigned as indie kingmakers).
During this period, emboldened by stunning returns on investment for works like
Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), major studios were willing—in a way they
had rarely been before and would rarely be again—to bankroll works by auteurs with
“indie” cred, often under the auspices of specialty imprints that distanced them in the
public eye from those holding the purse strings (New Line’s logo of the era afforded
minimal branding space to corporate benefactor Ted Turner). A representative
cross-section of directors epitomizing the “Indiewood generation” might be found
in Sharon Waxman’s 2005 book, Rebels on the Backlot, which profiled Anderson’s

xxii introduction
journey through the Indiewood era alongside David O. Russell, David Fincher,
Quentin Tarantino, Spike Jonze, and Steven Soderbergh. In his 2006 book, The
Sundance Kids, James Mottram widened the scope to include Alexander Payne, Wes
Anderson, Bryan Singer, Kimberly Pierce, and Sofia Coppola—as well as Charlie
Kaufman, the rare screenwriter to achieve name-brand recognition. Combining
Waxman’s and Mottram’s subjects yields a solidly representative “Indiewood dozen,”
characterized as “rebels” by Waxman and “mavericks” by Mottram, in either case
consciously evoking the marquee 1970s auteurs who had already been sanctified as
Hollywood visionaries only two decades after their own heydays.
In a 2002 essay entitled “Irony, Nihilism, and the New American ‘Smart’ Film,”
Jeffrey Sconce cast an even wider net to encompass directors further afield from the
commercial center (and working outside the greater Los Angeles area), including
Todd Solondz, Hal Hartley, Todd Haynes, Neil LaBute, and Terry Zwigoff, among
others. Key to the turn-of-the-millennium indie sensibility, in Sconce’s view, was “a
predilection for irony, black humor, fatalism, relativism, and, yes, even nihilism.”
Anderson has dabbled in each of these qualities—from the black humor and nihil-
ism of There Will Be Blood to the ruminations on fate and relativity in Magnolia—but
Sconce’s identification of irony as a unifying factor has become a contentious issue.
Sconce defines irony in his essay as a “veneer of studied detachment [and] cultivated
disaffection . . . a strategic gesture [that can] instantly bifurcate one’s audience into
those who ‘get it’ and those who do not.” This perspective suggests that irony can
serve little positive social function, and Sconce’s belief is similar to that of David
Foster Wallace, who wrote in his influential essay “E Unibus, Plurum” that from a
post-postmodern vantage, “irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing
anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.”
Wallace’s perspective proved foundational for another major consideration of
Anderson’s cohort, Jesse Fox Mayshark’s 2007 book Post-Pop Cinema: The Search
for Meaning in New American Film. Mayshark narrowed the scope of his study to
exclude directors guided—at least in his perception—by irony, defined here as “chic
cynicism and glib self-mockery,” and thus removed Quentin Tarantino from con-
sideration on the basis of making movies “about pop culture itself [in which] the form
became the content.” Anderson’s work, and that of peers including Wes Anderson,
Richard Linklater, and Todd Haynes, is hardly cinephilic in Mayshark’s view; rather,
these films are characterized by “a sort of self-conscious meaningfulness . . . they rep-
resent, in their own ways and on their own terms, a generation’s efforts to make sense
of itself and the world around it.”
While Mayshark and Sconce agree that irony is a detrimental characteristic
in a twenty-first-century film, Claire Perkins has cast a somewhat more generous
eye on the notion of the cinematic ironic. In her 2012 reconsideration of Sconce,
American Smart Cinema, Perkins defined irony as “reflexivity on the basis of the
films’ awareness of film history and their own place as cultural objects,” a concep-
tion very much aligned with Herzogian Romanticism, in which ironic reflexivity
functions (according to Prager) to “call into question our ideas concerning the limits
or the boundaries of perception.” In Perkins’s eye, this implicit commentary upon
these filmmakers’ own place within an aesthetic tradition functions as productive

introduction xxiii
self-awareness: so-called smart films “demonstrate their recognition of their own
contingency [as well as] their awareness of this recognition as their own utterance.”
Rather than “an expression of judgment or disengagement,” irony within Anderson’s
cohort can serve as “a pluralizing, affective force.”
In 2019, Kim Wilkins returned to Sconce’s essay in American Eccentric Cinema, yet
another effort to put a name to this nebulous tendency among Indiewood auteurs.
Irony, in Wilkins’s view, serves as a way of “[facilitating] an emotional distance from
[the] grave thematic content” often surveyed by what she terms eccentric films. Yet
by centralizing “existential anxiety and the yearning for human connection,” as many
of these films do, the work roots itself distinctly in the end-of-history tenor pervasive
in America during the Indiewood boom. This was a time, as noted by Mayshark,
“permeated by . . . a great sense of summing-up,” allowing room for stories that
situate unrest within the individual soul rather than in the national spirit that had
been so often diagnosed as defective by the auteurs of the Vietnam and Watergate
eras. In the distinctly 1990s worldview that still provides a foundation for eccentric
cinema, Wilkins writes, “the problem of unanchored cultural belonging in the face
of neoliberal free-market logic” produces existential crises that point both inward
and outward, “[eliciting] a tonal duality of irony and sincerity.”
Much of Wilkins’s perspective rests on the forces of capitalism and commerce,
which by the 1990s had pushed for a “market-based individualism” that suggests
“citizens are primarily obliged to ‘empower’ themselves,” most often through some
proprietary cure. This ideal—purchasable relief from alienation—is one that per-
vades Anderson’s work, a canon dense with salesmen, hucksters, and hustlers of all
stripes. Anderson sees twenty-first-century life as akin to being “chained like a fuckin’
cannonball to all this modern shit that’s dragging you down,” yet he is pervasively
intrigued by the forces of capitalism and faith that have coalesced, across a century
of Western culture, into exactly that cannonball. Rather than suggest any meaningful
deconstruction of the impediment to American catharsis, Anderson simply surveys it
from his various ironic (or cinephilic) vantages.
Despite the detachment afforded by irony, Sconce saw smart cinema as an often
“extremely politicized and even rather moralistic” body of work. Anderson has
tended to vigorously deny that his work could be considered political—“It would be
horrible to make a political film,” he insisted in 2007—but by virtue of this strenu-
ous neutrality, his work performs the political role of upholding any number of status
quos. Rarely does an Anderson film question the American patriarchal standard; his
films most often end with some reassertion of those values rather than any decisive
break in cycles that favor the cisgender, heterosexual, white, and male—a framing of
the world that evinces a covert social conservatism, one that has caused socialist critic
David Walsh to label him “non-committal on all the great issues.” In most cases
(and to varying degrees), his work has occupied an essentially eccentric position in
which, as Wilkins puts it, life consists of “unanchored phenomena—ephemeral and
generalized—that occur as isolated, idiosyncratic manifestations rather than reflect-
ing larger cultural occurrences.”
If anything can now be said to unite the Indiewood dozen and their kin, it must
be the unique economic pressures of filmmaking in the early decades of the new

xxiv introduction
millennium. Of the forty films comprising the annual top ten domestic box-office
earners between 2014 and 2017, only three were entirely original properties (Inside
Out [2015], The Secret Life of Pets [2016], and Zootopia [2016]), while fourteen were
based on characters from either DC or Marvel Comics. When the Los Angeles Times
profiled the “New New Wave” in 1999, producer Stacey Sher was quoted as saying,
“directors are the rock stars at the end of this century.” Nearly two decades into the
next one, the Hollywood Reporter divulged in 2017 that Warner Bros. was turning
its eye more or less exclusively toward its stable of intellectual property (including
DC, Lego, and the Harry Potter franchise) and planning to refuse collaboration
with “auteur directors” except for two proven in-house cash cows: Clint Eastwood
and Christopher Nolan. As of this writing, that circle may have constricted even
further after Nolan publicly lambasted the studio for not sufficiently protecting its
directors’ interests.
In this increasingly hostile ecosystem, Anderson has chosen a path of radical posi-
tivity. Asked in 2017 whether he felt competitive seeing another director’s success,
he replied that he felt the opposite: “When something is successful, it’s exciting . . .
because the other side of that would be something really horrible, which is: ‘Right,
you’re not getting any more money, or your budgets go way down, everybody cool
out.’ ” By the time of Licorice Pizza’s release, Anderson was expressing not only tol-
erance of all films but active defense of Disney’s oxygen-devouring Marvel Cinematic
Universe: “I don’t buy it,” he said in 2022 when asked if the dominance of the super-
hero subgenre worried him. “I grew up watching Star Wars. Alec Guinness was in it
and he was great. Look at the cast of Marvel films. How many more great actors do
you need? So fuck off!”
Books in the Directors’ Cuts series most often approach a subject’s career chrono-
logically. However, in developing the outline for this book, the editors at Wallflower
agreed with my instinct that in Anderson’s case, such an approach would prove over-
familiar. As Adam Nayman writes in his own recent (and essential) achronological
work of Anderson studies, Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks, the temptation is
strong to conceptualize these nine films as “[stops] on a retrospectively determined
auteur-pilgrim’s progress.” By eschewing this approach, I hope not only to distin-
guish my book as more than just an expansion of the chronological studies mounted
by Jason Sperb in 2013 with Blossoms & Blood: Postmodern Media Culture and the
Films of Paul Thomas Anderson and George Toles in 2016 with Contemporary Film
Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson (two more foundational studies of the Anderson
canon, both of which I have drawn from gratefully in composing this book). Rather,
I endeavored to reshuffle the deck in a way that might expose new insights into
Anderson’s unique strengths, as well as his shortcomings and biases, a task best served
by aligning distinct slices of these works for comparison.
I have devoted a chapter to each of five salient themes that recur in some way in
every (or nearly every) Anderson feature: places and spaces, domestic relationships,
gender performance, faith and belief, and history. Alternating with these chapters,
I have identified four additional lenses on his career that seem worthy of dedicated
analysis—his influences, his approach to screenwriting, his use of cinematic alien-
ation effects, and his work directing music videos—all of which contribute to a

introduction xxv
holistic assessment of his career and benefit from being discussed separately from
those overarching themes. Each of the following ten chapters uses one of Anderson’s
features (and, in one case, a short film) as a touchstone in order to keep the free-
wheeling discussion from devolving into abstraction. These chapters are not “about”
these works in the conventional sense, but I did take some care in organizing them so
that this circuitous route through his filmography might feel deliberate. After begin-
ning with Anderson’s newest film (Licorice Pizza), I turn to the first one that substan-
tially changed the conversation on him (Punch-Drunk Love) and then double back
to the one that effectively began that conversation (Boogie Nights). I jump forward to
another recent work (Phantom Thread ) and then look back at his debut (Hard Eight).
From there, I turn to two persistently divisive works, first his maximalist chamber
epic (Magnolia) and then his stupefying nostalgic-cum-madcap noir (Inherent Vice).
I then close with two historical epics of masculine rivalry (The Master and There
Will Be Blood ), which I interrupt with a present-day work of feminine camaraderie
(“Valentine”). My goal in curating this progression was that it might serve as a work-
able syllabus for a theoretical seminar on Anderson’s work—counterintuitive, per-
haps, but following some daisy chain of internal logic.
Wesley Morris has related another anecdote testifying to the precarious situa-
tion that Anderson finds himself in as Boogie Nights fades as far into history as the
New Hollywood was at the time of its release: “Someone told me a story,” Morris
wrote in his review of Inherent Vice, “in which Anderson came up in conversation
between two Hollywood studio executives. ‘How did I get stuck making a Paul
Thomas Anderson movie?’ one asked. The other replied: ‘Because it’s your turn.’ ”
This purported exchange suggests that while Anderson’s name can lend an appealing
air of prestige to a studio’s portfolio, his product is divisive enough to make recurring
investment an unappealing proposition. Yet as he is passed around like a hot potato,
at least one vestige of the late-1990s enfant terrible remains beneath his increasingly
avuncular veneer: he shows no sign of conceding to populist trends or executive
comfort level. Reynolds Woodcock’s shrill outburst at the slightest suggestion that
he might alter his style to align with popular fashions—“Don’t you start using that
filthy little word, chic ! Whoever invented that ought to be spanked in public . . .
They should be hung, drawn, and quartered. Fucking chic ! ”—sounds somewhat like
a statement of purpose from the author. If this means that the queue of executives
willing to take their turn bankrolling Paul Thomas Anderson may one day run out,
it also means that, at least for now, there are directors who are, if not rock stars, then
perhaps troubadours.

xxvi introduction
the cinema of P A U L T H O M A S A N D E R S O N
one
On Paul Thomas Anderson’s Career to Date

toward the midpoint of Licorice Pizza, an aging Hollywood director by the

name of Rex Blau (Tom Waits) emerges from the cigarette haze in the bar and grill
/ Valley institution Tail o’ the Cock. Locking eyes with his onetime leading man,
Jack Holden (Sean Penn), Rex recognizes a newfound potential in the night air: the
chance to restage a famed stunt, and not just that—to restage the act of filming it.
“I’m gonna need three wingback chairs from the bar,” Rex slurs to the proprietor,
“need a bottle of Everclear, I need plenty of grease from the kitchen, and I want you
to meet me on the eighth hole by the sand trap . . . We’re burnin’ daylight!” Rex ral-
lies the Tail o’ the Cock’s staff and patrons and leads them onto the golf course in an
eerily backlit parade. A fire is burning in the sand trap but still Rex shouts, “I need
some more flames! ” He raises his hands to summon them, and then bellows, “Can
I have some quiet on the set?” He turns, his face orange with firelight. “Roll sound,”
he says to nobody. “Roll camera A. Roll camera B. Mark it.” And then, with a rever-
ent hush, “Action.”
Here, in the most inauspicious of places, Anderson mounts a tribute to the auteur’s
urge: to reconfigure the world into a more aesthetically pleasing whole. Rex directs
his life because it’s the only way he knows how to look at the world, and it’s the only
way that he wants the world to look. This compulsion to peer at existence through
a viewfinder would be familiar to Anderson from as early as age seven, when—as
the story goes—he wrote in a notebook, “I want to be a writer, producer, director,
special effects man. I know how to do everything and I know everything.” The same
desire to shape the world is shared by any number of Anderson’s characters, from the
personal reinvention of Dirk Diggler to the epoch-shaping industriousness of Daniel
Plainview, but it finds its apotheosis in Gary Valentine, the consummate self-made
man who—like Rex, with whom he briefly crosses paths—directs the world around
him. “I wrote the dialogue,” he repeatedly snaps at his business partner, Alana Kane,
while she takes a sales call. “You’re improvising too much.” There are echoes in Gary
of another precocious Valley voice: I know how to do everything. I know everything.
So do it my way.
 Paul Thomas Anderson has directed nine films in twenty-five years, a body of
work that can be usefully split into three phases. In differentiating those micro-eras,
I will employ a classic three-act framework as rhetorical device, labeling these phases
thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. A chronological telling of Anderson’s career may tempt
the storyteller to present an auteurist folk tale that functions as a microcosm of the
New Hollywood bubble—hotshot auteur burns bright, burns out, and rises from
the ashes to rebuild, aging into an elder statesman—but that framing would rest on
a kernel of truth: Anderson’s career has been marked by a pair of distinct shifts in
(among other things) thematic concern and production practice. While this book is
organized achronologically in hopes of not wearing this rhetorical groove into a rut,
it does seem wise to set down a compressed chronological overview of Anderson’s
career to date, if only to establish a timeline for reference, laying a foundation for the
more elliptical analysis to come.
In his first phase, which comprises three films released between 1996 and 1999,
Anderson assertively established a brand, attempting as quickly as possible to carve
out market awareness of what the term “a Paul Thomas Anderson film” represents.
In his second, comprising another three films released between 2002 and 2012,
Anderson’s work functions in direct opposition to the briefer earlier period, rees-
tablishing his brand as the inverse of the one he had worked to establish previously.
The third phase, comprising three films released between 2014 and 2021, functions
as another revision of the prior phase, relaxing the tension that had accrued in the
previous three films.
Prior to what I term the thesis phase, Anderson wrote and directed two works
relevant to discussions of his oeuvre. The first is The Dirk Diggler Story, a thirty-
two-minute short film produced in 1987, when Anderson was seventeen years old
and a senior in high school. The culmination of several years spent experimenting
with filmmaking alongside friends, the short was shot on video, a technical limita-
tion for which Anderson compensated by choosing a faux-documentary format for
the brief and tragic story of porn star Dirk Diggler. While it features some narrative
overlap with Boogie Nights, The Dirk Diggler Story is anything but a compression of
the eventual feature, as the protagonist’s downward spiral culminates not in a return
to prominence but in a lethal overdose. Further, the core relationship between Dirk
and his costar and best friend Reed Rothchild is explicitly homosexual rather than
the unambiguously platonic bond established in the feature version. It is rare for an
after-school lark (albeit one featuring a recognizable actor, Anderson family friend
Robert Ridgeley, in the role of Jack Horner) to be worth inclusion in an auteur study,
but The Dirk Diggler Story is notable for its significant divergences from the feature
expansion: the tragic conclusion represents a note that Anderson would rarely play
again amid his typical bruised-yet-hopeful endings, and the evident ease with which
he tells the story of homosexual love between Dirk and Reed is one he would struggle
to recapture in his later work.
A more conventional calling-card short, Cigarettes & Coffee serves as the culmi-
nation of several years spent networking as a Hollywood production assistant. The
twenty-two-year-old Anderson managed to call in favors and cash in on personal

2 on paul thomas anderson’s career to date

 Michael Stein as Dirk Diggler in The Dirk Diggler Story. (No production company listed)

credit, amassing professional equipment (the film was shot with a loaned Panavision
camera) and two recognizable actors in Miguel Ferrer and Philip Baker Hall. The
latter, who would become something of an early muse to the young director, later
recalled the sensation of an upstart coffee runner approaching him with a script
during production on a TV movie: “I was wondering, who was the first actor in
the seventeenth century to see a Shakespeare script, and did he know what he was
reading? I certainly knew what I had in my hand.” The film as produced is less
evocative of Shakespeare than of David Mamet, then Anderson’s primary influ-
ence as a writer. The story oscillates between two booths at a Nevada diner, one
containing a bickering couple, and the other a despairing young man who pours
out his heart to a pragmatic older one (Hall); these conversations are intercut
with an evidently nefarious call being placed in the parking lot by a mysterious
operative (Ferrer). The story is so bare and enigmatic as to strain comprehension,
centering on the despairing man’s suspicions that his wife has cheated on him
with his best friend, with that friend ultimately revealed to be held captive in the
trunk of Ferrer’s character’s car. The bickering couple is an apparent red herring,
with the three threads being nominally united by a significant twenty-dollar bill
passed unknowingly between the parties, which suggests a theme of random inter-
connectedness akin to the one Anderson would go on to trace in Magnolia. The
short played several film festivals, with its Sundance screening inspiring the insti-
tute to invite Anderson back for their Director’s Lab, where he expanded the
story of Hall’s Cigarettes & Coffee character into the script that would become
Hard Eight.
In the interim between these shorts, Anderson enrolled in film school at New
York University, but dropped out after only two days. The choice would prove a

on paul thomas anderson’s career to date 3

 Philip Baker Hall as Sydney in Cigarettes & Coffee. (No production company listed)

key building block in his auteur persona, particularly as the Indiewood genera-
tion came to be associated with spurning traditional film school, the better to bol-
ster their collective mythos as instinctual artists. Anderson was happy to regale
journalists early and often with this story, establishing himself as a populist auteur
by centering his telling on the affront he felt when a teacher disparaged Termi-
nator 2: Judgment Day (1991). “Film school is a complete con,” he said in 1999.
“You can learn more from the audio track on the Bad Day at Black Rock laser-
disc than you can in 20 years of film school.” It’s a bold claim given his almost
total lack of experience with such institutions, but that boldness is representative
of the self-righteous bluster that defined his persona during his first era on the
public stage.

Thesis: Hard Eight (1996), Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999)

Anderson’s first three films are defined by their hyper-verbose scripts and increasingly
kinetic camera work, both of which represent an undisguised debt to other film-
makers. These ensemble stories function as declarative statements of purpose from
a director looking to make a name for himself after being (to borrow his own later
phrase) a “card-carrying professional filmmaker” since adolescence.
Anderson’s debut feature, Hard Eight, is modest by the standards of the two nar-
rative tapestries that followed. This chamber drama, set in and around present-day
Reno, Nevada, follows Sydney (Philip Baker Hall), a flinty professional gambler,
who—for initially mysterious reasons—offers to mentor John (John C. Reilly), a
young man down on his luck to the point of near-vagrancy. After two years spent
molding John in his own image, Sydney’s contented lifestyle is upended when he
offers aid to another lost soul, cocktail waitress and part-time sex worker Clementine
(Gwyneth Paltrow). Tasking John with looking after Clementine for the day, Sydney
is shocked to receive word that not only have the two eloped, but that after selling

4 on paul thomas anderson’s career to date

Clementine’s company to another man on their wedding night, the pair have blud-
geoned this aggressive client and are now holding him captive in a motel room. After
helping John and Clementine flee for Niagara Falls, Sydney attempts to cover their
tracks, only to be accosted by Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson), an iniquitous friend of
John’s who has come into possession of Sydney’s long-held secret: decades earlier,
while enmeshed in Atlantic City’s criminal underworld, Sydney killed John’s father,
leaving him with a lifetime’s guilt that he has spent the past two years attempting
to assuage. Sydney pays Jimmy off, but later that night he ambushes and kills the
younger man, retrieving the cash and returning to the scene of the film’s opening,
alone again and with one more death on his conscience.
The road to release for Hard Eight was fraught, another key element in the
Andersonian mythos. As the standard narrative goes, the production company
Rysher Entertainment was distressed by what appeared to be a flagrantly uncom-
mercial product, and executives exercised their right to remove Anderson from the
editing process, stripping his preferred title, Sydney, and replacing it with their
own preference, Hard Eight. Anderson demanded Rysher’s permission to create his
own director’s cut at personal expense, only to submit his version to the Cannes
Film Festival in an effort to canonize his cut as the “true” one. When the film was
accepted by the festival, Anderson and Rysher reached a détente, agreeing that
his would be the version distributed theatrically so long as he conceded on the
retitling—though he would never personally accept the change, referring to his
debut as Sydney for years to come. The Rysher skirmish has been detailed exten-
sively by Waxman and Mottram, both of whom tend to position Anderson as an
uncompromising artist holding strong against an unsympathetic commercial entity.
Returning to the narrative in 2013, Jason Sperb noted credulity-straining aspects of
the Anderson-approved version of events: why would a company, having seemingly
purchased a script in which they had faith, so immediately turn against that script’s
realization? But with Rysher having shuttered in 1999, counternarratives are slim
(much as they are for Anderson’s two-day film school sojourn), and history has been
written by the victor.
After screening at Sundance and Cannes in the first half of 1996, Hard Eight was
held for release until February 1997 and grossed less than $250,000 during its theatri-
cal run (against a reported budget of $3 million). Those who did see it, however, were
largely impressed, with critics lauding Anderson’s storytelling, described by Jonathan
Rosenbaum as “lean and unblemished,” and his humanism. “The movie isn’t about
plot,” Roger Ebert wrote. “It’s about these specific people in this place and time, and
that’s why it is so good: It listens and sees.” Reviewing Hard Eight for the Los Angeles
Times, John Anderson (no evident relation) wrote that “if Hard Eight is forgotten
when the awards start flying around . . . it’ll be a shame. As well as a mystery.”
Mysteriously or not, Hard Eight’s only major awards presence was at the Indepen-
dent Spirit Awards, where it was nominated for five statuettes, including Best First
Feature. Yet the praise was not unanimous: Maitland McDonagh expressed exhaus-
tion with “another trip through the seamy underside of glittering gaming life,” an
allusion to the outsize influence that David Mamet’s House of Games (1987) exerted
over not just Anderson but also many of his peers. The unfavorable comparison

on paul thomas anderson’s career to date 5

to Mamet recurred in Ruthe Stein’s review, which described the script as stiff and
mannered, and Anderson’s storytelling as “careless . . . in little ways as well as big.”
Critical reception would be of little concern to Anderson, however, as prerelease
buzz on Hard Eight had become a springboard to a deal with New Line Cinema for
his follow-up. Thus, Boogie Nights was on the road to production while Hard Eight
languished in limbo, and Anderson’s second feature was released theatrically within
the same year as his first.
Boogie Nights represents a convenient case study of the outsize power afforded to
young auteurs during the Indiewood era. Michael De Luca, then president of pro-
duction at New Line Cinema, had recently failed to secure deals for both the indie
sensation Pulp Fiction and the sleeper success Rushmore, a missed opportunity that
was particularly galling given the proof provided by Tarantino’s film that experimen-
tal narratives dense with violence and sexual provocation could be considered com-
mercially viable. Unwilling to forego the opportunity to shepherd another breakout
effort from an Indiewood rising star, De Luca—who fancied himself the New New
Wave equivalent of the financiers who supported the daring work of the 1970s—
engineered an unusually supportive environment for Anderson’s porn-production
epic. Anderson’s project was conceived as a vision of grandiosity; expanding The Dirk
Diggler Story for the big screen, he proposed a four-hour runtime—including disco
intermission—and an NC-17 rating, two components that would have proved
commercially risky individually and could have spelled box office poison in tandem.
De Luca managed to talk Anderson down to an eventual runtime of just over two
and a half hours and an R rating, and if the resulting film was neither quite the
expansive vision Anderson dreamed of nor quite the cultural and financial sensation
that De Luca did, it nevertheless heralded the arrival of a major Hollywood voice in
a way that Hard Eight could never hope to do.
Boogie Nights is a classic star-is-born narrative, a rise-and-fall-and-rise-again
showbiz myth that’s nearly as old as show business itself. What distinguishes this
particular retelling is the star at the center: prodigiously endowed Dirk Diggler
(Mark Wahlberg), who leaves home in 1977 to make a name for himself under
the guidance of idealistic porno auteur Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds). The decade-
spanning story is fleshed out with an ensemble of porn stars and technicians,
including Dirk’s best friend, the swaggering yet guileless Reed Rothchild (John C.
Reilly); maternal cocaine addict Amber Waves (Julianne Moore); Pollyannaish high
school dropout Rollergirl (Heather Graham); and Buck Swope (Don Cheadle), who
dreams of retiring from the skin-flick game to open a high-end stereo store. The
film’s first half tracks Dirk’s stratospheric rise to industry dominance, but once the
1970s give way to the 1980s at the midpoint—a shift that coincides with Dirk’s suc-
cumbing to cocaine addiction while the porno industry trades celluloid for video as
the preferred means of production—the ensemble collectively begins a vertiginous
fall from grace until each experiences a respective rock bottom (in the case of Dirk
and Reed, the showstopping drug-scam-turned-shootout in the home of wealthy
eccentric Rahad Jackson). At the end of their trials, however, the members of the
ersatz family unit find themselves reunited, bruised but not yet beaten, and pre-
pared to resume their life’s work.

6 on paul thomas anderson’s career to date

The joyous first half of Boogie Nights culminates in a choreographed disco number. (New Line Cinema)

Among major critics, praise for Boogie Nights was virtually unanimous—Owen
Gleiberman described it as “a purer hit of exhilaration than any movie this year,”
while Mick LaSalle declared it “the first great film about the 1970s to come out since
the ’70s”—though reviews were often tempered by comparisons to other artists
(“When is a Martin Scorsese film not a Martin Scorsese film?” Martyn Glanville
rhetorically asked, before answering: “When it’s a Paul Thomas Anderson film”),
as well as qualms over whether Anderson had effectively modulated the mixture
of the outré and the traditional that he aspired to merge. “He hasn’t bothered to
distinguish his good instincts from his bad ones,” Charles Taylor wrote. “It would
be a shame if such great things were expected of him that he wasn’t given a chance
to mature.”
At least judging by journalistic accounts, “mature” could hardly describe Ander-
son’s behavior during the production of Boogie Nights, at least when it came to inter-
action with his benefactors. Seemingly smarting from his contentious relationship
with Rysher, he built as much creative autonomy as possible into his deal and pro-
ceeded to make a nuisance of himself when asked to compromise (one of the more
colorful behind-the-scenes anecdotes involves Anderson receiving a set of notes from
a test screening, only to cram the sheet into his mouth and chew it up before spitting
the wad at the market researcher’s feet). Anderson clearly saw his job as divided
equally between producing a great film and defending that film from theoretically
hostile financiers, an attitude that baffled and alienated De Luca and other top
brass who had so significantly deferred to his demands.
As critics tended to note, multiplex success would be a difficult bar for Boogie
Nights to clear on the basis of sexual content alone, and De Luca’s dreams of New
Line’s own Pulp Fiction—a film that served as a clear road map for the studio, which
hoped a soundtrack of ’70s favorites could be relied on as an additional revenue
driver, just as Tarantino’s surf rock–heavy soundtrack became a hit in its own right—
were somewhat dampened by a worldwide gross of just over $43 million against a
reported budget of $15 million, hardly comparable to the almost $108 million gross
and $8 million budget on Tarantino’s film. Still, Boogie Nights had a strong show-
ing during awards season, at least for Reynolds, Moore, and Anderson, who won

on paul thomas anderson’s career to date 7

a total of thirteen awards from critics groups and were nominated for Oscars in,
respectively, the Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Original
Screenplay categories. This haul, combined with star-making profiles of Anderson
in major outlets (Kristine McKenna described Boogie Nights as “an act of bravado
worthy of Orson Welles”), convinced De Luca and New Line that the gamble had
paid off, and Anderson was presented with an increasingly rare privilege on his next
film: final cut.
Final cut refers to a contractual stipulation that the director’s cut of the film will
be honored and distributed by the studio without any mandated changes. Thus,
while New Line made requests and suggestions on Anderson’s interpersonal epic,
Magnolia (particularly when it came to a patience-straining 188-minute runtime),
the choice was Anderson’s alone, and his choice was most often to stick with his
instinct. If Boogie Nights was a deliberately grandiose vision, Magnolia was even more
self-consciously conceived as a once-in-a-career free-for-all of narrative indulgence.
Equating creative autonomy with quality, Anderson would describe the film as
“unquestionably the best film I will ever make” (a perspective that has certainly not
been shared by either critical or audience consensus). In “That Moment: Magnolia
Diary,” a feature-length behind-the-scenes reel included on the film’s DVD release,
Anderson can be heard telling his crew, “We shouldn’t be afraid to want to make a
great movie!” The fact that this perspective should be framed as one of defiance
testifies to the distrust Anderson felt toward an industry willing to defer to popular
taste at the expense of directorial vision.
Magnolia is a film low on plot but overstuffed with story. Set over the course of
one day in the San Fernando Valley, the story follows (by a conservative count) nine
principal characters, all of whom are united by their association with network TV
magnate Earl Partridge (Jason Robards), dying of cancer at the film’s outset. Earl is
attended to by Phil (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the hospice nurse who picks up the
slack left by Earl’s wife, Linda (Julianne Moore), who’s spiraling in the grip of phar-
maceutical addiction as she struggles with her guilt over years of infidelity. Much of
Phil’s day is spent locating Earl’s estranged son, the radical misogynist motivational
speaker Frank T. J. Mackey (Tom Cruise), and luring the reluctant young man to his
father’s home for a deathbed reconciliation. Meanwhile, Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker
Hall), host of a tentpole of Earl’s production company, the game show What Do Kids
Know?, is diagnosed with cancer, prompting him to attempt reconciliation with his
own estranged child, Claudia (Melora Walters), who numbs herself through drug
addiction and transactional sex to suppress the memories of Jimmy’s long-ago sexual
abuse, an offense he can’t bring himself to acknowledge.
While Jimmy suffers a breakdown during a taping of What Do Kids Know?, which
coincides with the decision of boy genius Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman) to finally
defend himself against the abuse of the adults ostensibly caring for him, Claudia
receives a visit from Officer Jim Kurring (John C. Reilly), summoned by a neighbor’s
noise complaint. Jim is immediately smitten with Claudia and asks her out, but their
date is cut short by Claudia’s attack of nerves, leaving Jim to drive home alone, stop-
ping en route to apprehend Donnie Smith (William H. Macy), a former star contes-
tant on Jimmy’s show, now reduced to stealing from his employer to afford cosmetic

8 on paul thomas anderson’s career to date

braces that he hopes will endear him to a studly bartender. This encounter prompts Jim
to return to Claudia, the morning after a climax that has seen both Earl and Jimmy die
as frogs fall from the sky, newly resolved to prove the strength of his feelings for her.
It’s difficult to find an unequivocally positive review of Magnolia, but it’s simi-
larly difficult to find an unequivocally negative one. Critics seemed primarily baf-
fled, lauding Anderson’s ambition while staking claims at varying points along the
spectrum between admiration and revulsion. Perhaps the most precisely ambivalent
review came courtesy of David Denby: “Everyone has a favorite good bad movie.
Magnolia is a rare case of a great terrible movie.” At the most positive end of the
spectrum, Peter Travers wrote, “Anderson takes risks that make you hopeful about
the future of movies,” and described Magnolia as “a near miracle.” At the most neg-
ative, Charles Taylor (also among those most skeptical of Boogie Nights) described the
film as “obvious and oblique, banal and still locked up inside [Anderson’s] head.”
Others who fell somewhere in the gray area between cheers and jeers differed in their
assessment of what, exactly, the film’s failings might be: Andrew Sarris saw the story-
telling as hesitant, believing that “Anderson has taken us to the water’s edge without
plunging in,” while Janet Maslin saw untamed boldness that eventually “begins to
self-destruct spectacularly.” David Edelstein had the precise opposite reaction to
Maslin’s, as he found the early going frustrating but was so stunned by the late-stage
boldness that “I laughed . . . and forgave [Anderson] almost everything.” If any
critic managed an entirely nonjudgmental assessment of the hyperkinetic, deliber-
ately stylistically incoherent Magnolia, it must be Kenneth Turan, who described the
film as “drunk and disorderly on the pure joy of making movies.”
The production of Magnolia might best be described as a boondoggle, with the
full ballooning scope captured in “That Moment,” a project that was clearly con-
ceived to document the joyous creation of a passion project but ultimately traces
the slow dissolution of Anderson’s nerves and his collaborators’ patience. Early on,
when asked if he worries that New Line might ask for a rewrite, Anderson smirks and
responds, “Final cut. It’s a scary thing to have given a guy like me.” As an already epic
shooting schedule of seventy-nine days bloats to one hundred (including second-
unit photography), Anderson can be seen playing game-show host on the What Do
Kids Know? set, asking those assembled how long the film might be. When someone
guesses eighty-eight minutes, he corrects, “eighty-eight minutes for the prologue.”
Shortly, he changes the question to what the box office gross might be and answers
himself: “A dollar.” Anderson slightly underestimated ticket sales: the film made
nearly $48.5 million on a reported budget of $37 million, certifying Magnolia’s
initial release as the lowest return on investment for any profitable Anderson film.
It was also Anderson’s most expensive to date, as producer Daniel Lupi can be heard
bemoaning late in “That Moment”; having approached Boogie Nights with an aus-
terity mindset aligned with their work on Hard Eight, Lupi despairs that this time
“we’ve just . . . spent a lot of money. Spent a lot of money.” (It would seem no
coincidence that after this exceptionally revealing and arguably damning produc-
tion diary, alongside a megalomaniacal commentary on the Boogie Nights DVD,
Anderson has never again participated in more than the scantest bonus features for
home media releases.)

on paul thomas anderson’s career to date 9

 By the time of Magnolia’s theatrical release in December 1999, the Indiewood
hype machine was in full effect, with Anderson as its de facto mascot. Lynn
Hirschberg penned a lengthy profile for the New York Times Magazine, in which she
described Anderson as “a brat and a genius” and went on to quote his desire to kick-
start “a revolution [that’s] just not happening well enough or fast enough” and his
complaint that “world domination is very complicated.” Having been anointed by
such New Hollywood luminaries as Warren Beatty and Francis Ford Coppola (the
former invited Anderson for a meal to express his admiration only for the meeting
to be crashed by the latter, who wished to express his own), Anderson’s persona
was that of a young man flying high but primed for a crash. Given the box-office
underperformance, mixed critical reception, and meager awards showing (the film
was nominated for three Oscars—Cruise for Best Supporting Actor, Aimee Mann
for Best Original Song, and Anderson for Best Original Screenplay—losing each),
Anderson’s relationship with New Line ended after the release of Magnolia.
Anderson’s persona in this era was one of studied brattiness: in 1998, he walked
the red carpet for the premiere of Soderbergh’s Out of Sight clad in a bucket hat, track
pants, and flip-flops; that same year, while being interviewed for Britain’s Film4, he
slouched with a slice of pizza in his hand, offering self-aware commentary on being
“the young filmmaker with fuckin’ pizza in the interview.” At what might be the
nadir of his public provocations, Anderson took aim at David Fincher’s use of testicular
cancer support groups for dark-comic effect in Fight Club (1999); still raw after his own
father’s recent death by cancer (a major factor in the disease’s prominence in Magnolia),
Anderson told a reporter, “I wish David Fincher testicular cancer, for all of his jokes
about it, I wish him testicular fucking cancer.” The figure taking shape before Hol-
lywood’s eyes was the young auteur who believed that his talent was so undeniable it
could forgive any number of off-the-clock immaturities. The fact that such petulance
was limited to extracurricular time, with his on-set behavior appearing professional and
considerate, must account for a large part of why his reputation has survived such early
PR bumps; Anderson’s story is a marked contrast to that of his contemporary David O.
Russell, who has only come under increased scrutiny for on-set misbehavior.
Prior to the release of Magnolia, Anderson asserted that he had not yet decided
whether he would rather “run the world like Spielberg or retreat to a mansion in
London like Kubrick.” The notion that either option (let alone both) might be
available to him drew cocked eyebrows: “It takes a lot of hubris” to imply such a
choice, Todd McCarthy acknowledged, even as he nominated Anderson as Martin
Scorsese’s heir. But Anderson’s subsequent three-year cool-off period represented
the selection of a lane: while his retreat was hardly Kubrickian, the frantic over-
lapping press cycles of Boogie Nights and Magnolia, combined with the bewildered
response to the self-avowed best movie he would ever make, seemed to chasten
him. In another clean shift between thesis and antithesis phases, the Anderson who
reemerged in 2002 was unmistakably humbled. Though he would never entirely rid
himself of the provocative bent that drew the attention of journalists during this first
phase, his solipsistic gaze would turn outward throughout his next three features,
even as his storytelling interests turned toward protagonists hamstrung by an inabil-
ity to access a world outside of themselves.

10 on paul thomas anderson’s career to date

Antithesis: Punch-Drunk Love (2002), There Will Be Blood (2007),
The Master (2012)

Anderson’s fourth, fifth, and sixth films can be characterized primarily by their stylis-
tic opposition to his first, second, and third. Whereas previously he had been known
for his ensembles, these films focus on single protagonists. Rather than works of the-
matic expressiveness, these are ones of emotional repression and increasingly oblique
storytelling. In place of Boogie Nights’ soundtrack of pop classics and Magnolia’s
Aimee Mann tracks, the sonic palettes of these films are defined by idiosyncratic,
dissonant scores—one by Jon Brion (Punch-Drunk Love) and two by Radiohead
guitarist Jonny Greenwood (There Will Be Blood and The Master). The nods to his
influences become more ironically counterpointed and the construction of his nar-
ratives increasingly enigmatic.
Most crucially, it was during this phase that Anderson loosened his fidelity to
his own scripts. Whereas his first three films were shot and constructed to resemble
their screenplays as closely as possible, he opened himself up to experimentation
and discovery with Punch-Drunk Love. Feeling, as he would say later, that he “had
the job,” he “wanted to dismantle how [he’d] worked before” and rebuilt his pro-
duction methods to allow increased freedom to shape the narrative during editing.
This realignment was facilitated by editor Leslie Jones, who worked on two of these
three films (Punch-Drunk Love and The Master), stepping in for Dylan Tichenor,
editor of Anderson’s first three features as well as There Will Be Blood and Phantom
Thread. These “antithesis” films are distinguished, too, by Anderson’s collaboration
with three leading men each known for taking an active hand in crafting their char-
acters. In the case of There Will Be Blood and The Master, this meant enlisting two
actors—Daniel Day-Lewis and Joaquin Phoenix—known for an intensely immer-
sive approach to embodying a character. But with Punch-Drunk Love, Anderson
attempted an altogether more counterintuitive trick: he recruited his favorite com-
edy star, master of populist juvenilia Adam Sandler, for a radical deconstruction of
the Sandlerian archetype.
In rough description, the protagonist of Punch-Drunk Love, the hapless and emo-
tionally volatile Barry Egan (Sandler), might sound as though he could fit easily
into the world of broad comedies that Sandler starred in between his leading-man
breakout, Billy Madison (1995), and the vehicle directly preceding Punch-Drunk
Love, Mr. Deeds (2002). Particularly intrigued by Sandler’s ability to shift between
meekness and overpowering rage, Anderson set about creating a world operating
on something more closely resembling emotional verisimilitude (though the highly
stylized milieu of Punch-Drunk Love could hardly be described as realistic). Through
this lens, he was able to interrogate the suspensions of disbelief required to tolerate
Sandler’s screen presence and provoke the audience to consider how exactly it might
feel to encounter—or to be—a man balanced so precariously on the razor’s edge
between repression and aggression.
The plot of Punch-Drunk Love is relatively simple: Barry Egan is a pathologi-
cally inhibited owner of a distribution center for novelty utility items, including

on paul thomas anderson’s career to date 11

whimsical plungers termed “fungers.” Harassed constantly by his seven overbearing
sisters and tasked with overseeing a workplace that seems perpetually on the verge
of catastrophic accident, Barry’s routine is interrupted by two simultaneous events:
he impulsively calls a phone sex line, embroiling himself in a maelstrom of harass-
ment and extortion, and he is introduced to Lena (Emily Watson), a preternatu-
rally endearing woman who’s powerfully drawn to Barry despite his seeming lack of
personal magnetism. While this unlikely pair take their first tentative steps toward
romance, the forces of the extortionist kingpin and mattress salesman Dean Trumbell
(Philip Seymour Hoffman) close in on Barry. Following a spur-of-the-moment trip
to Hawaii, during which Barry and Lena consummate their relationship, Trumbell’s
goons attack, injuring Lena and galvanizing Barry to focus his chaotic, aggressive
urges on neutralizing the amoral “Mattress Man.” When Barry travels to Utah to
confront Trumbell at his mattress store, the two come face to face for a surprisingly
nonviolent standoff in which Barry asserts that his love for Lena makes him “more
powerful than you can possibly imagine,” and the two agree “that’s that,” leaving
Barry to return home and begin his new life with his new love.
No description of the plot could do justice to the atonal chamber piece that is
Punch-Drunk Love, a film that externalizes Barry’s agonized interior life via a host of
alienating formal choices, including unnerving interplays between extreme bright-
ness and dank shadows, a nerve-jangling soundscape composed of countless percus-
sive instruments, and an unusual approach to shot sequencing (discussed at length
in chapter 6). The result is an immersive vision of anxiety and alienation, one that
(perhaps inevitably) struggled to find its audience on initial release, narrowly miss-
ing the break-even point (at least according to publicly circulated financial data):
the film’s box-office gross is reported at just over $24.5 million, and the budget at
$25 million. It was the first Anderson film to fail to turn a profit since Hard Eight,
though it would not be the last.
Critical response to Punch-Drunk Love tended toward the positive, though critics
found themselves grasping for a framework through which to view this unusual
object: A. O. Scott suggested that “poetry is perhaps the best way to think about
[the film’s] balance of free-form inspiration and formal control,” while Moira
Macdonald chose another art form, describing the film as “set in waltz time.” Few
critics managed to offer full-throated endorsement as they puzzled over its effects:
David Ansen described it as “an emotional jigsaw puzzle that’s missing a couple of
crucial pieces . . . resulting in a movie more amazing than satisfying,” and Peter
Rainer called it “a startling achievement [that’s prevented] from making much human
contact with us.” Ann Hornaday suggested, with tongue evidently in cheek, that
the enigmas would soon prove the stuff of academic investigation—“You can almost
see the PhD theses now: ‘The Piano and the Pudding: The End of Dissonance and
the Possibility of Just Desserts in the Oeuvre of P.T. Anderson’ ”—and the sugges-
tion that this Adam Sandler film might in fact be inaccessibly erudite contributed to
something of a slobs-versus-snobs narrative as audiences greeted Punch-Drunk Love
with more open contempt than these hesitantly admiring critics.
After the film received a D+ CinemaScore (a poll measuring the immediate
response of audiences exiting theatrical screenings), Barbara Brotman of the Chicago

12 on paul thomas anderson’s career to date

Tribune wrote an article examining this discrepancy between critical engagement and
consumer rejection. Brotman found that audiences felt duped by the film’s market-
ing, with Anderson having described it as his version of an Adam Sandler comedy,
a romcom, and a tribute to classic MGM musicals. The film is all of these things,
but Anderson’s off-kilter approach left some believing that they had been sold a false
bill of goods. As an expert witness, Brotman enlisted Northwestern film professor
Lester Friedman, who explained, “Reviewers see an awful lot of bad films. . . . I think
something which shows a spark of creativity or a willingness to invest genres with
new insights and twists will certainly get their attention.” This phenomenon—mass
frustration from audiences who expected a lighthearted film and felt misled by critics
evidently more open to experimentation—would go on to repeat itself with remark-
able precision twelve years later in the case of Inherent Vice.
The legacy of Punch-Drunk Love—which, it should be said, was not nearly the
unanimous critical darling that Brotman’s article would have one believe, with Peter
Bradshaw describing it as “almost entirely depthless” and J. Hoberman advising
“diminished expectations” for this “one-trick pony that . . . ultimately pulls up
lame”—has warmed in the twenty years since its underwhelming release, particu-
larly as Sandler has gone on to additional seriocomic and dramatic roles that pro-
vide comparison points bolstering the validity of Anderson’s early gamble. In 2016,
Punch-Drunk Love became the first Anderson feature to be released by the boutique
home-media distributor Criterion Collection, and while that company’s choices
often have more to do with available rights than unimpeachable quality, it conveyed
an air of prestige on one of Anderson’s more modest productions.
Anderson has described experiencing significant writer’s block in the five years
between Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood, a lull that saw him largely out of
the public eye save for his role as backup director on Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home
Companion (2006); given the eighty-year-old Altman’s failing health (he would die
five months after the film’s release), the production’s insurance provider refused cov-
erage unless a director was chosen to remain at Altman’s side during the shoot, ready
to step in and complete the project should he prove unable to do so. Altman’s selec-
tion of Anderson represented perhaps the most felicitous sign yet that he should be
considered the heir to the 1970s auteurs, and though his services were ultimately not
required, this tacit apprenticeship serves as a bridge between Anderson’s two recent
present-day works (Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love, the self-evident break between
thesis and antithesis phases), each anxious and energetic in its own way, and the pair
of emotionally remote, deliberately composed period pieces that followed.
Writer’s block finally broke when Anderson encountered Upton Sinclair’s novel
Oil! (1926), which proved an apt match for many of the themes that he was then
interested in pursuing but had struggled to lend narrative form. Adapting the first
section of Sinclair’s book into the first half of There Will Be Blood (and then diverg-
ing from the text entirely to create an original second half ), Anderson partnered
with Daniel Day-Lewis, an actor known for his judicious selection of roles and his
tendency to take an active hand in crafting his characters. Thus, There Will Be Blood
marked the first instance of Anderson’s allowing for anything resembling a cowriter,
a further step away from the rigid grasp that he kept on his scripts during the 1990s.

on paul thomas anderson’s career to date 13

The resulting film would be his first unqualified box-office success, yield the first
significant Oscar presence for an Anderson project (even as a statuette for his own
work continued to elude him), and garner near-universal acclaim. Yet despite the
prestige trappings of this turn-of-the-century epic, Anderson made the cannily coun-
terintuitive choice to premiere There Will Be Blood not at an established global film
festival, but rather at the upstart genre festival FantasticFest, an early indication that
he intended an idiosyncratic framing for a work destined to draw comparison to
George Stevens, John Huston, and Stanley Kubrick. Even as Anderson “established
a style of prodigious grandeur,” David Denby wrote in his review, “some part of him
must have rebelled against canonization.”
There Will Be Blood tells the story of Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis) and his rise
from silver miner to oil tycoon across the first quarter of the twentieth century.
Constructed with heavy use of temporal elision (one of many factors that drew
perhaps counterintuitive comparison to 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968]), the nearly
wordless first act finds Daniel staking his claim on an ore mine in 1898, then jumps
ahead to 1902, finding him at the head of a team constructing an oil well. When the
derrick collapses, killing one of his partners, Daniel adopts the fallen man’s infant
son, cueing the shift into the film’s main action, which takes place in 1911. Alongside
the now nine-year-old boy, dubbed H. W. Plainview (Dillon Freasier), Daniel has
established an independent drilling company, and is approached by Paul Sunday
(Paul Dano), on whose tip Daniel travels to Little Boston, a ramshackle outpost in
southern California that happens to be sitting on an ocean of oil. Selling his services
to the guileless townsfolk, Daniel commences drilling, only to be stymied by requests
for deference and validation from Paul’s twin brother, lay preacher Eli (Dano).
The two men commence an increasingly spiteful rivalry, with Daniel’s bitterness
deepening after H. W. is deafened in a derrick explosion. Daniel’s spiritual degrada-
tion reaches a head after a con artist (Kevin J. O’Connor) successfully poses as his
brother for a period, only to be murdered by Daniel once the savage oilman discovers
the truth. Taking advantage of Daniel’s psychological vulnerability and desperation
to complete a pipeline between Little Boston and the Pacific Ocean, Eli extorts a
humiliating baptism from the resentfully contrite heathen in exchange for the rights
to an essential tract of land, and tacitly declares himself the winner of their feud. One
final time jump brings the story to 1927, with Daniel now sequestered in a lavish
mansion, drunkenly overseeing an empire while being waited on by household staff.
After a devastating split with the now-grown H. W. (Russell Harvard), Daniel is
surprised by a visit from Eli, seemingly prosperous but in fact impoverished. Daniel
extorts his own form of contrition from his longtime rival, and then—in a denoue-
ment so brutal it proved initially alienating to many critics—he bludgeons Eli to
death with a bowling pin.
With There Will Be Blood—which coincided with the ten-year anniversary of
Boogie Nights—Anderson made the shift from Indiewood upstart to established
auteur. The film landed in the number-one slot in many critics’ year-end rankings,
including Lisa Schwarzbaum (Entertainment Weekly), Keith Phipps (A.V. Club),
Glenn Kenny (Premiere), and Mike Russell (Portland Oregonian); grossed more than
$76 million against a reported budget of $25 million; and won Academy Awards for

14 on paul thomas anderson’s career to date

The extortive baptism of Daniel Plainview. (Paramount Vantage)

Day-Lewis and cinematographer Robert Elswit, alongside an additional six nomina-

tions (including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay).
Plenty of critics were happy to risk hyperbole in assessing There Will be Blood:
Richard Schickel described it as “one of the most wholly original American mov-
ies ever made,” while Peter Bradshaw positioned it as “the movie against which
all directors, and all moviegoers, will want to measure themselves,” and Kenneth
Turan characterized it as “the most incendiary combination since the Molotov cock-
tail.” Virtually all noted the distinct gear shift it seemed to represent in Anderson’s
career, with Manohla Dargis suggesting that he demonstrated a new freedom from
“the pressures of self-aware auteurism,” and Wesley Morris arguing that he had
traded a “[desperation] to run us over and knock us out” for a shift to more “patient
art.” Indeed, “if Anderson’s name weren’t on it,” Christy LeMire wrote, “you’d never
know it was his.” Still, there were critics who questioned the urge to immediately
canonize There Will Be Blood: Mick LaSalle lauded Anderson’s “grandiose ambition,”
but where others saw idiosyncrasy, he saw a film that “derails into grand gestures and
deliberate perversity.” Stephanie Zacharek went so far as to dub There Will Be Blood
“an austere folly . . . tempered and wrought to the point of dullness,” while Ed
Gonzalez saw “vivid, overly assertive aesthetic minutiae . . . all that’s missing from it
is a sense of humanity.” Even with these dissenting voices, however, film history has
sided decisively with the enraptured: There Will Be Blood was ranked the best film of
the century to date by the Guardian (in 2016) and the New York Times (in 2017).
Given the rejuvenated faith of both critics and the moviegoing public, anticipa-
tion for Anderson’s follow-up to There Will Be Blood was high, but audiences would
be subjected to another five-year wait before The Master. The project was announced
in 2009 but faced a rocky road to production after its initial financier, Universal
Pictures, chose to drop out, leaving Anderson struggling to find a company will-
ing to back the encore to his career high-water mark. Though some speculated
that producers and financiers may have been put off by the script’s roots in the his-
tory of Scientology, a quasi-religion with deep ties to the Hollywood community,
Anderson himself laid the blame more squarely on a widespread industrial shift away
from the last vestiges of the Indiewood boom toward a new normal centered on

on paul thomas anderson’s career to date 15

four-quadrant appeal and an increasingly global audience. Ultimately, an upstart
boutique production company, Annapurna Pictures, passion project of billionaire
tech heiress Megan Ellison, would step in and add The Master to its first slate of
projects, alongside efforts from other Indiewood holdovers, Spike Jonze and David
O. Russell, both of whom had features (Her and American Hustle, respectively) cofi-
nanced by Annapurna in 2013. Though the move may have been a savvy one artisti-
cally for both parties—Annapurna netted a brand-name auteur during its fledgling
years, while Anderson was afforded creative autonomy to produce a work that inten-
tionally flirted with audience alienation—it would prove less favorable by the con-
ventional metrics of Hollywood success.
Described early and often as “Paul Thomas Anderson’s Scientology movie,” The
Master does borrow heavily from the life and times of L. Ron Hubbard, messiah
to that fringe spiritual movement. More than a treatise on an organization seen
by many as a predatory cult, however, Anderson reconfigures the framework of
Hubbard’s rise to guru status into the story of a mercurial relationship between two
men drawn inexorably toward one another despite (or due to) their polar opposi-
tion. Following V-J Day, traumatized Navy veteran Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix)
struggles to reintegrate into society, repeatedly sabotaging his own efforts by his reli-
ance on homemade liquors that can easily prove poisonous (though “not if you drink
it smart,” he insists). At last, Freddie finds tenuous stability in the form of Lancaster
Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), leader of a nascent spiritual movement, the Cause,
which purports to have scientifically identified methods of accessing memories from
lives lived over the past trillions of years (the fact that this would exceed the scientifi-
cally accepted life span of the planet being of little concern to Dodd and his faithful).
Dodd offers Freddie a sense of belonging while Freddie offers Dodd his unusually
potent liquor, but Freddie’s erratic behavior proves a liability as the members of the
Cause traverse the nation spreading their gospel and evading skeptics and prosecu-
tors. Though Dodd mounts a final concerted effort to indoctrinate Freddie, his own
inconsistent teachings prove too much for the younger man to place his faith in,
and Freddie flees, resuming his itinerant lifestyle. Finally, after what seems to be a
prophetic dream, Freddie travels to England for a final summit with Dodd. Rather
than reconciling, however, the two find that their differences have become irreconcil-
able, and Freddie leaves once more, the only evidence of self-improvement after his
dalliance with the Cause being the coda that finds this perpetually sexually frustrated
man finally achieving long-desired coitus with a woman he meets in a nearby pub.
While audiences might have imagined that The Master would repeat the crossover
success of There Will Be Blood—a logical leap given its analogous historical milieu
and central masculine dyad, as well as the grand ambitions suggested by the use of
65mm film stock, a by-then largely obsolete format associated with sweeping epics of
yore—Anderson instead delivered a baffling, fragmentary work of implication and
ellipsis. In her review of the film’s Venice premiere, Ella Taylor described overhear-
ing one audience member asking another, “So I guess that’s an unfinished print?”
only to be shocked by the revelation that they had, in fact, watched Anderson’s final
cut. On release, The Master proved even more unprofitable than Punch-Drunk Love,
grossing slightly more than $28 million against a reported budget of $32 million

16 on paul thomas anderson’s career to date

(a total on the high end for an Anderson project, though still meager by the stan-
dards of a release slate increasingly monopolized by blockbusters), and netting only
three Academy Award nominations, for Phoenix, Hoffman, and Amy Adams (who
played Dodd’s wife, Peggy).
Critics, whose tolerance for the unique and challenging had purportedly been a
boon to Anderson a decade earlier with Punch-Drunk Love, were left largely scratch-
ing their heads. Some were effusive—Peter Travers was willing to dub the film “a new
American classic,” a sentiment echoed by Xan Brooks, who called it “a ravishing,
unashamedly old-school American classic”; some were damning—Calum Marsh
claimed that this “aspiring epic” was doomed by “a lack of substance beneath its cool,
well-composed aesthetic,” and Deborah Ross found it “so enigmatic and under-
written [she] felt rather shut out” to the point that the film struck her as “rude”; but
virtually all were puzzled by what, exactly, they’d seen. “The Master is beautiful and
thought-provoking,” wrote Katey Rich, “but also frustratingly inaccessible.” Roger
Ebert, heretofore an advocate for Anderson, complained that “when I reach for it,
my hand closes on air.” Dana Stevens “left the theater not entirely sure what The
Master was about,” but hastened to add, “I can’t wait to get back and see it again.”
Remarkably for a film as peculiar as The Master, some did find it a tediously
familiar trip through Anderson’s worldview. In his review, Richard Corliss diagnosed
the film as failing to “extend or expand Anderson’s artistic journey,” and two years
later, David Thomson would echo Corliss in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film,
lamenting that whereas Anderson had once made “unique movies driven by their
own necessity,” with The Master, “for the first time . . . he was making a [Paul Thomas
Anderson] film.” This frustration serves, as much as anything, to mark the dividing
line between Anderson’s “antithesis” and “synthesis” phases. Now having made as
many repressed and oblique films as declarative and overt ones, he had moved away
from his prior stock-in-trade only to seemingly establish a new one. In his first phase,
Anderson had set out to prove his voice; in his second, he set out to prove that his
voice could modulate; now, perhaps, he could free himself of the pressure to prove
anything in particular.
During an era defined by his inverted cinematic voice, Anderson inverted his
public persona as well. The critic Steven Hyden later compared this retreat from
the spotlight to Bob Dylan’s sojourn in Woodstock, New York, after his mid-1960s
overexposure burnout. While there is a distinct difference in public prominence
between an epochal singer-songwriter and an auteur whose films lose money as often
as they turn a profit, the decision to protect one’s privacy seems similarly motivated
by a feeling that too much attention has proven more of a liability than a boon to
the art. And like the Dylanologists who spread conspiracy theories as to the true rea-
sons for his sabbatical from public life, some journalists chose to view Anderson’s
lowered profile as worthy of investigation. In a 2008 article for Esquire entitled “The
Secret History of Paul Thomas Anderson,” John H. Richardson put forth a narrative
that Anderson was “refusing to comment on his past” in order to manifest a deliber-
ately cultivated identity distinct from the truth of his upbringing (itself a trick pulled
by Dylan during his own emergence, though Richardson’s efforts to apply the same
model to Anderson yields less than captivating results).

on paul thomas anderson’s career to date 17

 Yet another writer to invoke Dylan in discussing Anderson was the Australian
writer Luke Buckmaster, who interviewed the director during The Master’s press jun-
ket. When his repeated redirection of the conversation toward Scientology elicited
prickly responses, Buckmaster was able to frame himself in opposition to a volatile
artist, “like one of those straight-as-a-dial journalists Bob Dylan played verbal ping-
pong with,” as seen in D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (1965). Yet aside from
this “tetchy” (as Buckmaster described it) interview, Anderson seems to have largely
suppressed the swagger and combativeness that characterized so many of his 1990s
press engagements. If journalists like Buckmaster hoped to bag a quote as incendiary
as Anderson’s onetime declaration that “film school is a complete con,” in this era
he seemed deliberately avoidant of such a temptation, often choosing his words with
stifling care. Promoting There Will Be Blood alongside Day-Lewis at New York’s 92nd
Street Y, Anderson was asked about his choice to drop out of NYU, and his answer
was halting and contrite. “It just wasn’t for me,” he said, but hurried to clarify, “it is
right for other people—it’s right for a lot of people.” In interviews like this one, the
impression is that of a man carefully avoiding any misstep; whereas in the 1990s he
had been as uninhibited personally as his work was stylistically, now he seemed just
as inhibited as his recent run of protagonists. After three films in each mode, though,
he seems to have finally managed to reconcile inhibition with disinhibition, relaxing
into a new mode in both his storytelling and his public presence.

Synthesis: Inherent Vice (2014), Phantom Thread (2017),

Licorice Pizza (2021)

Distinctions between what I have termed Anderson’s “thesis” and “antithesis” phases
are so overt as to be self-evident; George Toles’s book on Anderson covers only the
“antithesis” films because, as Toles writes, “Magnolia marks a significant transition,
[having taken] Anderson to the end of one way of dramatizing possibilities.” Iden-
tifying a second dividing line within this set of films has not yet become a common
exercise, but the release of Licorice Pizza presents a clarifying lens that now demon-
strates a distinct pattern: Anderson’s “synthesis” films represent a relaxation of the ten-
sion demonstrated in his previous three features, not only in a generalized sense but
in three specific pairings. With Inherent Vice, Joaquin Phoenix sloughs off the con-
torted, clench-jawed alcoholism of Freddie Quell in favor of the loose-limbed, slur-
ring, doper’s haze of Doc Sportello; with Phantom Thread, Daniel Day-Lewis trades
the brutal, hypermasculine capitalist Daniel Plainview for the refined, effete artist
Reynolds Woodcock; and with Licorice Pizza, Anderson swaps Barry Egan and Lena
Leonard for Gary Valentine and Alana Kane, and a surreally anxious San Fernando
Valley for an ecstatically liberated one. Rather than attempt to buck the conversation
surrounding what represents a “Paul Thomas Anderson movie,” these are films that
embrace their own existence within a canon, and (perhaps paradoxically) come to feel
relatively unconcerned with the extratextual stakes of their existence.
The wait between The Master and Inherent Vice was only two years, remarkably brief
by Anderson’s recent standards, a factor primarily attributable to the unexpectedly

18 on paul thomas anderson’s career to date

lengthy preproduction of The Master (for a period, it appeared that Inherent Vice
might even go into production first). From the moment of its announcement,
Inherent Vice proved a buzzworthy prospect, not only as Anderson’s first classically
“faithful” literary adaptation (as opposed to the fast-and-loose fidelity to source
material of There Will Be Blood ), but also as the first authorized adaptation of a work
by the literary titan and famed recluse Thomas Pynchon. Given the film’s initially
dismal reception, however, it may have struck some viewers and critics that this
ostensibly unadaptable author should have stayed that way.
Coherently detailing the plot of Inherent Vice is as impossible as it is unnecessary;
the central mystery is intentionally impenetrable and anticlimactic, leaving the film
best enjoyed as a mood piece. Far more significant than the intricacies of this comi-
cally byzantine noir are the emotions undergirding it. To wit: in 1970, perpetually
stoned detective Doc Sportello (Phoenix) is living in a fictional L.A. neighborhood,
Gordita Beach, where he is approached by his ex-girlfriend, Shasta Fay Hepworth
(Katherine Waterston). Shasta hopes that Doc might help track down her married
lover, real-estate mogul Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), whom she suspects has
been forcibly institutionalized by nefarious parties. Soon after, Doc is enlisted by a
reformed heroin addict, Hope Harlingen (Jena Malone), to find her husband, Coy
(Owen Wilson), whose purported lethal overdose Hope is unable to accept. These
two threads are soon entangled in an expansive conspiracy engineered by an entity
known as the Golden Fang, a term that refers variously to a schooner used for off-
shore brainwashing of suspected dissidents, an Indochinese heroin cartel, a syndicate
of dentists, and, by the end, potentially the full mechanism of global capitalism as
violently upheld by the CIA.
The case of Mickey’s disappearance is solved when Doc finds him at a private psy-
chiatric hospital undergoing treatment that seems more like reprogramming. Now
aware of a more irreconcilable web of wickedness, though, Doc decides to pour
his efforts into returning Coy—seemingly under the Golden Fang’s control after
having become a CIA asset in exchange for help kicking heroin—to his wife and
young daughter. Enlisting the aid of his longtime nemesis, LAPD detective Christian
“Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), Doc follows a lead to the office of a loan shark
and apparent Golden Fang enforcer, Adrian Prussia (Peter McRobbie). Prussia takes
Doc captive and attempts to execute him, but Doc gets the upper hand and shoots
Prussia, escaping with the help of Bigfoot, who is revealed to have manipulated Doc
into completing a task that he himself was incapable of: killing Prussia as revenge
for the murder of Bigfoot’s squad partner. As the final stroke in his betrayal, Bigfoot
plants several pounds of heroin in Doc’s car in hopes of neutralizing the bothersome
hippie, but Doc is able to use the drugs, stolen from the Golden Fang, as leverage to
negotiate Coy’s release. After reuniting the Harlingen family, Doc rides into a hazy
future with Shasta by his side, even as the tempestuous lovers repeatedly assert that
they are not back together.
“There are, of course, two ways to experience Inherent Vice,” Wesley Morris wrote
in his review, “with the brain on or the brain off. Both work.” However, the pre-
sumption that either mode worked, let alone that both might, proved a dicey proposi-
tion for both critics and audiences: Inherent Vice grossed less than $15 million against

on paul thomas anderson’s career to date 19

a reported budget of $20 million, the worst return on investment for any Anderson
film save Hard Eight. Critical responses were again divided, deepening an apparent
frustration among some that Anderson continued retreating into esoterica rather
than fulfilling There Will Be Blood ’s promise of populist prestige. “Anderson seems to
have lost all real pleasure in filmmaking,” wrote Dave Callahan, while Kyle Smith
labeled Inherent Vice “easily the worst of his movies.” Others were less frustrated
than baffled by a nebulous plot—“ultimately pointless,” Richard Lawson noted,
though “I realize that’s kind of the point”—and a tone that’s “Altman-esque one
minute, Austin Powers-esque the next,” according to Steven Rea.
Admiring critics tended to choose the latter of Morris’s viewing modes, appreciat-
ing the story as a collection of moods and moments rather than attempting to unify
the elements. “This is a movie Anderson wants you to inhale rather than watch,”
wrote Mark Kermode, while Allison Willmore advised, “you have to let yourself
sink into Inherent Vice. . . . It’s shaggy, eccentric, and sometimes hilarious, but it has
a tender heart.” In a mixed review, Katie Kilkenny argued that “there’s still a lot to
admire in the sheer, uninhibited folly of the whole thing, the gall to get groovy while
the Oscar-watchers are on high alert.” Indeed, Inherent Vice made little impact dur-
ing awards season, though the Academy did nominate Anderson’s adapted screenplay
and Mark Bridges’s costumes. The film’s sole win from a major awards body came
from the Independent Spirit Awards (the fact that this particular group rewarded
Anderson’s first studio feature should definitively attest to the status of indie as a
genre label more than an industry classification), with Inherent Vice winning for best
ensemble cast—an award named, appropriately enough, for Robert Altman.
Anderson’s eighth film, Phantom Thread, is distinct from the balance of his career
in many ways—his first set entirely outside the United States, his first with more
female principal characters than male—while also being among his most tonally
unambiguous and narratively streamlined, as stylistically approachable in its way as
Hard Eight. In Phantom Thread one can find a demonstration of Anderson’s expand-
ing range, as well as a return to a place of accessibility that some may have feared he
had abandoned altogether.
A Gothic romance set in 1954 London, Phantom Thread tells the story of Reynolds
Woodcock (Day-Lewis), a visionary dressmaker revered in the global haute couture
community even as his exacting standards and single-minded focus on his work
prove exasperating for those who might hope to establish an interpersonal connec-
tion (more than a few critics have read this characterization as thinly veiled self-
portraiture on Anderson’s part). Retreating to his country home to recuperate after
a particularly taxing project, Reynolds meets Alma (Vicky Krieps), a waitress at the
local hotel, and the two are immediately smitten despite the unusual form of their
flirtation: during their first date, Alma strips to her slip, but only so that she can be
coolly measured for a gown. Alma returns to London with Reynolds, becoming muse
to the House of Woodcock, but her efforts to carve out a secure place in Reynolds’s
life are stymied by his fixation on his craft, as well as the consistent reproach of his
sister and confidante, Cyril (Lesley Manville).
After realizing that illness causes Reynolds to become tender and appreciative in
a way he never musters while healthy, Alma secretly administers a small dose of toxic

20 on paul thomas anderson’s career to date

powdered mushrooms, sickening Reynolds just enough to make him dependent. The
gambit proves an unambiguous success, as Reynolds proposes marriage immediately
upon recovery, but this union fails to neutralize his frequent frustration with Alma’s
idiosyncrasies. Just when it seems they may be approaching a breaking point, Alma
proposes an arrangement: at regular intervals, she will dose Reynolds with toxic
mushrooms—enough to sicken but not substantially harm him—in order to break
his cycles of monomania and strengthen their bond. Reynolds agrees to this bargain,
and the film closes with the two giddy lovers canoodling in a newspaper-lined bath-
room as Reynolds prepares for the oncoming side effects of a mushroom omelet.
With Phantom Thread, Anderson netted consensus approval that he had not seen
since There Will Be Blood, and if box-office returns were milder (the film grossed
approximately $47.75 million on a reported budget of $35 million, a return on
investment closer to Magnolia than the heights of Boogie Nights or There Will Be
Blood ) and its awards impact lighter (it scored six Oscar nominations, including
Best Picture and Best Director, but only costume designer Mark Bridges took home
a trophy), critical response was stronger than any that Anderson had received since
Boogie Nights. It is virtually impossible to find an outright pan among major critics;
even the most negative notices—including those by Chris Nashawaty, who found
it “underwhelming . . . easier to admire than surrender to,” and Rex Reed, who
labeled it “a disappointment, as elusive as its meaningless title”—were laced with
enough admiration to keep their assessments above average (Nashawaty assigned a
B-grade and Reed awarded three stars out of four). Others struggled with elements
of the craft and story—including the ending, outrageous in a way that proved a
common sticking point, echoing prior Day-Lewis vehicle There Will Be Blood—yet
even they saw an improvement over Anderson’s previous work: “His strengths and
weaknesses are as apparent as ever,” wrote Mick LaSalle, “but here his strengths are
stronger and his weaknesses are obscured.”
The vast majority of critics were outright admirers and devoted their attention to
pondering the odd balance between Anderson’s newfound classicism and his enduring
idiosyncrasies. “Just defining what the film is presents a formidable set of obstacles,”
Scott Tobias wrote in his review, and Jason Bailey agreed: “[any] gestures towards con-
ventional critical form . . . are an obfuscation of the key takeaway of Phantom Thread,
which is that it’s such an exhilaratingly, unabashedly odd film.” In her review, Moira
Macdonald described overhearing one audience member commenting, “I did not get
that. At all.” While Macdonald agreed that the “undeniably weird places [the film goes
to] and its deliberate pace will be off-putting for some . . . I hung on every minute.”
Peter Travers, long one of Anderson’s most supportive critics, had felt his enthusiasm
dim with Inherent Vice, which he described on release as “a struggle . . . Anderson’s
first constricted film.” With Phantom Thread, though, his enthusiasm came roaring
back: “Taking full measure of Phantom Thread may require more than one viewing—a
challenge any genuine movie lover will be eager to accept.”
Anderson has suggested that the decision to return to the San Fernando Valley
to shoot his ninth film was a direct response to straying to London for his eighth,
and though he claimed to have tried to talk himself out of telling another story set
in 1970s California, he found himself compelled by the narrative material on his

on paul thomas anderson’s career to date 21

hands—largely a compendium of real-life anecdotes from the Hollywood producer
and former child actor turned teen entrepreneur Gary Goetzman, as well as material
culled from the household lore of family and friends. “Just about every single thing
has a touch to a factual story that I’ve heard,” Anderson said, but then refined his
phrasing to allow for a more ecstatic interpretation: “And by factual, I’d probably put
that in quotes as well.” Reteaming with Michael DeLuca (now the head of MGM,
with that studio being acquired by tech megalith Amazon during Licorice Pizza’s
postproduction) for the first time since 1999, the duo returned to the site of their
earliest collaboration: the Valley of the 1970s.
Licorice Pizza tells the episodic—and thus guided more by elliptical and affec-
tive narrative rhythms than conventional plot mechanics—story of a volatile twen-
tysomething, Alana Kane (Alana Haim), and her budding relationship with Gary
Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), a hypermotivated teenager who declares that fate has
put them on the path to changing one another’s destinies. Alana, underemployed
and longing for a ticket out of her parents’ restrictive Jewish household, surprises
herself first by accepting the dinner invitation of this unnaturally self-assured fifteen-
year-old and then by falling progressively under his spell as they become business
partners in a burgeoning waterbed business. The closer they grow, however, the more
fraught their connection becomes, edging ever closer to a full-blown transgressive
romance even as Alana seeks the attentions of a fading movie star, Jack Holden (Sean
Penn, in a role transparently based on William Holden), and a rising political star,
Joel Wachs (Benny Safdie, in a role openly modeled on the L.A. mayoral candidate
of the same name). Yet after a bevy of men, all of whom seem to emerge from the
Valley’s seams like obstacles along Alana’s existential training course, prove lacking in
Gary’s essential qualities—tenacity and kindness chief among them—she surrenders
to the inevitable, grants Gary the kiss he has longed for since their first meeting, and
runs off with him into the Valley’s gloaming horizon.
With Licorice Pizza, Anderson bucked a number of trends in the typical release
cycle for late-2010s/early-2020s indie features. He eschewed a festival premiere, even

In Licorice Pizza’s most oft-repeated visual motif, Gary and Alana sprint from one escapade to the next.
(Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer)

22 on paul thomas anderson’s career to date

as rumors swirled that the film—then going by the working title Soggy Bottom—
might premiere at Cannes, Venice, New York, or Toronto, keeping so tight a lid on
the project that as of three months before release, De Luca was joking that even he
knew nothing about his old collaborator’s new work. Once the film premiered—
at a Los Angeles Directors’ Guild screening three weeks before the Thanksgiving
limited release—it became clear that Anderson’s veil of secrecy had been motivated
largely by a desire to protect his young cast, the majority of whom had never before
appeared in a feature film. “Why [are you] trying to ruin this person’s life?” Anderson
jokingly recalled asking himself as he considered casting young unknowns, but this
concern was trumped by the production value of unstudied performances, which he
determined were essential to the film’s naturalism. “An audience isn’t bringing any
baggage,” he said, describing the function of novice performances.
Critical response to Licorice Pizza was generally governed by the joy that Anderson
aimed for, both in the discovery of emerging screen talent (Justin Chang described
the film as “the most ardent love letter from a filmmaker to an actor [Alana Haim]
in recent memory”) and the story and setting (Dana Stevens suggested “a sense
that the story is bubbling directly out of its creator’s brain” and concluded, “I’m
hard pressed to think of a recent movie whose world I would have liked to stay
in longer”). Nostalgia served as a common buzzword among reviews, with crit-
ics debating this emotion’s function within the story. “[Anderson] doesn’t want to
weaponize his nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake,” David Fear wrote, “so much as use it to
infuse a rush of youthful exuberance into what feels like an early-1970s movie made
today.” Richard Brody, meanwhile, suggested that the film was actually “without
nostalgia, because [it is] filled with the era’s cruelty and indifference, but clear-eyed
about the chances for experience that the time and place presented nonetheless.”
Taking an alternative track, Peter Bradshaw posited a more insidious raison d’être
behind Anderson’s period setting: “Backdate your story . . . and it’s easier to explore
issues of transgressive love and sex . . . without getting bogged down in 21st-century
gender politics.” Anderson, for his part, hastened to remind one interviewer, “it
wasn’t that long ago that nostalgia was considered kind of a medical condition.”
Critical dissent largely centered around the film’s perceived indulgence, whether
in the form of its love for Gary, which Manohla Dargis described as “lavish as that of
an indulgent parent . . . blunting the edges and limiting the film’s overall effect,” or
its lack of traditional narrative propulsion, which left Richard Lawson “wishing . . .
for some sense of purpose larger than yet another filmmaker journeying to the past
to poeticize the squirm, lust, and ambition of being a teenage boy.” Outside the
critical community, however, Licorice Pizza faced harsher condemnation from the
watchdog group Media Action Network for Asian Americans, who objected to two
scenes in which a minor character, Jerry Frick, earnestly adopts a cringingly stereo-
typical Japanese accent. “Asians and faux Asian accents are used as comic relief to
encourage audiences to laugh,” read the complaint, with the writers “strongly [urg-
ing] voting members of the Academy and other film critic associations not to reward
Anderson.” The director made some ambivalent efforts to mitigate this blowback
when pressed by Kyle Buchanan in the New York Times, arguing both “you have to
be honest to that time,” and “it [would] happen right now, by the way.” In a review

on paul thomas anderson’s career to date 23

for the New Republic, Jo Livingstone suggested—echoing Bradshaw—that the Frick
scene “starts to feel as if [Anderson is] taking delight in the deniability of the 1970s
setting . . . and it raises questions about [his] judgment.” Asked again to explain
his thinking three months after the film’s release, Anderson offered an evidently
exhausted “I don’t know. I’m lost when it comes to that . . . I guess I’m not sure how
to separate what my intentions were from how they landed.”
With Licorice Pizza, Anderson earned three more opportunities for an Academy
Award, netting nominations for Best Original Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Pic-
ture (the film’s only three nominations) but struck out on each count. Among critics’
groups, the film’s most decisive victory came from the National Board of Review,
which awarded Licorice Pizza Best Film, Best Director, and Best Breakthrough
Performance (shared by Hoffman and Haim). Speaking to IndieWire ahead of an
Oscar ceremony that would see him become an eleven-time runner-up, Anderson
conceded that he’d “spent many a long four-and-a-half hour ceremony sitting with
a fake smile,” but countered that while “it can be quite fashionable to complain,”
awards season is “always fun.”
Such a relaxed posture is in keeping with the public sea change he made during his
“synthesis” years, settling more comfortably into a mode of Hollywood elder states-
man. In recent years, Anderson has appeared increasingly often to present avuncular
tributes to directors he admires—late in 2013, he appeared with Jonathan Demme
at the Austin Film Festival to discuss Robert Downey Sr.; in 2018, he returned to
Austin to appear with Richard Linklater at the Texas Film Awards to discuss the now
deceased Demme—and moderate discussions with his peers—in August 2019, he
hosted a Directors Guild of America talkback with Quentin Tarantino to promote
the latter’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; that December, he played guest host
on the A24 podcast to interview Josh and Benny Safdie about their own upcoming
Uncut Gems. His increased productivity in the realm of music videos, a form he
had dabbled in around the turn of the millennium before abandoning for more than
a decade, suggests a renewed curiosity and vigor as well. Seemingly divested of the
feeling that he had anything to prove or disprove, Anderson came across as relaxed in
interviews during this time. Asked by Marc Maron in 2015 whether he had gone to
film school, he appeared primed to launch into a relitigation of his brief stint at NYU
(“Not really. I mean, I say ‘not really’ in that I went to—”), but then he changed tack,
cutting himself off and saying simply, “No, I didn’t go.”
Reviewing Licorice Pizza for Rolling Stone, David Fear suggested that where “Proust
had his madeleines and Sunday mornings at Combray . . . [Anderson] has his movie
cameras, production designers, and the Tail o’ the Cock.” There may be tangible
movie cameras in Anderson’s ninth film, wielded by young filmmakers reminiscent
of the director’s own onetime makeshift crews, but the more evocative ones may be
the invisible cameras that Rex Blau summons as he prepares to direct a late-night
motorcycle jump. All the world’s a soundstage for the born-and-bred auteur, and all
the men and women merely extras. Rex’s mythic cameras, tasked with reconfiguring
life into a simulacrum of a movie (itself a simulacrum of life), may as well stand in
for the director himself—a cinephilic, nostalgic, and ecstatic eye looking down upon
a snow-globe world in which the American experiment swirls and churns.

24 on paul thomas anderson’s career to date

t wo
On Places and Spaces

the opening moments of Punch-Drunk Love find Barry Egan hunched behind
a small desk in a barren corner of his warehouse, a tight cluster of visual inter-
est stashed in the upper left-hand corner of a frame otherwise comprised of bare
fluorescent-lit concrete. A strange noise—a reverb-heavy clanging that may in
retrospect seem uncannily quasi-diegetic given its tendency to recur, uncommented-
upon, throughout the remainder of the film—draws Barry outside into the predawn
light of Chatsworth, a neighborhood in the northwest corner of Los Angeles’s San
Fernando Valley. The vast industrial thoroughfare that Barry surveys is peaceful until
two shocking events occur simultaneously: first, a car cruises out of the vanishing
point only to abruptly hit the curb opposite Barry and flip, sending a screeching
mass of torn metal sliding across the concrete; second, this display of carnage is inter-
rupted by the van that pulls up in front of Barry, from which an unseen passenger
deposits a harmonium on the curb at his feet before disappearing without a word.
Here in microcosm is the vision of the San Fernando Valley (colloquially “the
Valley”) that Paul Thomas Anderson paints in his third consecutive feature to be set
in his native region: an eerie urban wasteland infused with the potential for shock-
ing horror and even more shocking grace. This rendering may be less traditionally
realistic than Anderson’s preceding efforts to capture the area on film, but it follows a
central ecstatic truth. In Punch-Drunk Love, the Andersonian Valley is heightened by
the artist’s emotion and interpretation, a portrait possessed of a distinctive flavor—
lonely and sterile, simultaneously overbright and gloomy—that his prior, more lit-
eral efforts lack.
When Tom Carson wrote in 2014 that Anderson is “a regional artist in a way
that doesn’t have many screen equivalents,” he was referring to Anderson’s perceived
status as an artist unusually focused on Southern California, the area in which six
of his nine features are predominantly set. This status is one that Anderson actively
cultivated around the release of Magnolia: in a 1999 essay for The New York Times
entitled “A Valley Boy Who Found a Home Not Far from Home,” he wrote that “the
pop imagination” typically associates the Valley with “stupid girls, malls, and bad
hair, but the Valley also has the closest thing to a ‘real life’ in the Los Angeles area. . . .
It’s pretty near normal, or as normal as a place can be when bordering Hollywood.”
The cultural shorthand surrounding the Valley that Anderson notes here was
largely cemented by the 1982 release of the novelty single “Valley Girl,” cowritten
by Frank Zappa and his teenage daughter Moon. With spoken-word lyrics culled
from Moon’s own conversations with friends—“I, like, love going into, like, clothing
stores and stuff. I, like, buy the neatest mini-skirts and stuff. It’s, like, so bitchin’ ”—
the song popularized a slang dialect dubbed “Valspeak,” one that was quickly stig-
matized, fostering an image of Valley culture as defined by (in the words of linguist
Reilly Nycum) “purposeless and annoying” habits. The swift release of unauthorized
cinematic cash-in Valley Girl (1983) only served to codify a widespread image of the
Valley as a consumerist cultural wasteland. As John Peterson wrote in a 2000 pro-
file of Anderson, “Angelenos feel duty bound to hate [the Valley] in the way other
Americans feel duty bound to loathe Los Angeles itself.”
Paul Thomas Anderson was born on June 26, 1970, in Studio City, one of thirty-
four neighborhoods that comprise the Valley, and one distinct even among nearby
tracts for the “air of glamour” it possessed in the early twentieth century (as described
in a 2016 capsule for the Los Angeles Times real estate section). The 2000 U.S. census
revealed that Studio City has one of the lowest population densities in Los Angeles, an
unusually high percentage of white citizens, an unusually low percentage of foreign-
born residents, and an unusually high median household income. Studio City is “an
entertainment pro’s dream,” according to the Los Angeles Times, “far from the mad-
ding crowd of other celeb enclaves on the other side of the hill.”
The Valley of Anderson’s childhood was largely defined by his father’s career in
the television industry. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1923, Ernie Anderson rose
to prominence in Cleveland as the late-night horror host Ghoulardi, whose penchant
for small-scale pyrotechnics and faux-conspiratorial slang amassed a significant cult
following that persists to this day (the Ohio native Jim Jarmusch included Ghoulardi
catchphrases in his 2019 feature The Dead Don’t Die). It was in Cleveland that Ernie
met his second wife, Edwina Gough, and in 1966 the couple followed the lead of
Ernie’s friend and creative partner, Tim Conway, in relocating to Los Angeles. There,
Edwina pursued a career as an actress—her resume consisted primarily of commer-
cials, in which she specialized in “wacky housewife types” (as she described her niche
in 1975), as well as assorted sitcom credits and a brief but prominent appearance in
the Howard Zieff crime caper Slither (1973)—while Ernie became a highly successful
voice-over performer. Traditional commercial pitchman gigs led Ernie to a steady
job as booth announcer for The Carol Burnett Show and eventually a position as the
official voice of ABC television.
Ernie’s work afforded the young Paul the opportunity to lurk in recording booths
and network control rooms, a milieu that would come to influence the backdrop
of Magnolia. “It was normal, workaday stuff,” he said of his father’s career in 2017,
“because it was such a behind-the-scenes kind of job, it wasn’t like your dad was
a famous actor or something like that.” Though Ernie’s friends included a vari-
ety of on-camera talent—notably Conway, Harvey Korman, and Carol Burnett—
Anderson’s memories of his father’s social circle are dominated by “all the engineers

26 on places and spaces

and directors, audio guys, sound guys . . . those were the guys I grew up with.” His
recollections of parties populated by these shop-talking technicians resonate with the
porn-industry pool parties that form several centerpiece sequences in Boogie Nights.
Anderson’s upbringing was highly financially comfortable (a 1975 magazine pro-
file on the family mentioned “a full-time maid, a gardener, two hunting dogs, a min-
iature poodle, two kittens . . . a rabbit and a laying hen”), and this status afforded
him a variety of significant advantages on the road to professional filmmaking—not
only access to the equipment (Ernie’s Betamax camera, two VCRs, a Betamax player,
and a personal computer) that would enable him to train as a budding auteur
while still in high school, but the leisure time that allowed him to see these projects
through to fruition. Yet by the time these early advantages and his network of well-
placed acquaintances brought him to the point of Hollywood ascendancy, Anderson
began discussing his own origin story with a distinct note of ambivalence.
“I was really embarrassed for the longest time that that’s where I lived and that’s
where I grew up,” Anderson says of the Valley on the Boogie Nights commentary
track. “I would look back at my favorite directors and think, OK, there’s Howard
Hawks, and boy, he served in the war, and there’s Ernst Lubitsch who escaped Germany
and all these wonderful things going on in their lives that you were supposed to bring
to a movie.” In his 1999 New York Times essay, he added to this list of more theoreti-
cally worthy perspectives: “I was ashamed of [growing up in the Valley], thinking
that if I was not from the big city of New York or the farm fields of Iowa I had
nothing to say. I have never been in a war, like John Ford. I am not from France, like
François Truffaut. I’m not even from Chicago, like David Mamet.” Having ruled
out the “wonderful” personal experiences of armed combat and flight from fascism,
Anderson expressed a resigned acceptance on the Boogie Nights commentary: “I’m
from the Valley . . . and I guess that’s what I have to make movies about.”
When Anderson was awarded the Best Director trophy for Punch-Drunk Love
at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, it came from a jury chaired by David Lynch, and
it’s not difficult to imagine what might have drawn Lynch to this particular vision
of the Valley. In his own breakthrough feature, Eraserhead (1977), Lynch created
an uncanny netherworld operating primarily on dream—or, more appropriately,
nightmare—logic that was heavily influenced by his emotionally charged memories
of living in Philadelphia. “It’s a world that’s neither here nor there,” Lynch said in
1993 of Eraserhead’s setting. “It came out of the air in Philadelphia. I always say it’s
my Philadelphia Story.”
Lynch here nods at his own version of Herzogian ecstatic truth. Though the film
technically takes place in an unnamed surrealist landscape, it is exactly this exag-
geration that makes it ultimately feel truthful to his experience of a specific place.
And this philosophy—along with the shared image of meek, besuited protagonists
shuffling past vast and vacant industrial backdrops—aligns the governing spirit of
Lynch’s sense of place in Eraserhead with Anderson’s own in Punch-Drunk Love. One
could scarcely call this vision of Chatsworth naturalistic; for an urban environment,
key sequences take place across broad geographic areas that are unnaturally devoid of
either foot or vehicle traffic. Lynch described the Philadelphia-inflected nether-city
of Eraserhead as one in which “there were very few cars—there might be one far away,

on places and spaces 27

Barry occupies an eerily depopulated Valley. (Columbia Pictures)

but in the shadows—and very few people . . . it was just like a mood.” It’s a descrip-
tion that is equally true of the uncanny mood of Punch-Drunk Love. Following his
abortive dinner date with Lena, Barry’s late-night odyssey of romance and horror
features scant evidence of life outside the primary characters. Elsewhere, as Barry
hunts for Healthy Choice savings, the gleaming grocery aisles he prowls are devoid
of other shoppers, with only brief out-of-focus glimpses of distant extras to confirm
that this Valley is not entirely depopulated.
Eraserhead and Punch-Drunk Love share a reliance on sound to create and sustain
their atmospheres of dread, with both directors making use of surging winds and
far-off railroad clangs to highlight the desolation surrounding their protagonists.
In a 2002 Q&A following a screening at the New York Film Festival, Anderson
discussed searching for “stock sound” in his locations: “[Barry’s warehouse is] kind
of an amazing place deep in the Valley. There’s a railroad nearby. There’s a mountain
nearby. Some of the sounds are just natural sounds of the environment.” This talk-
back was notable as one of the few occasions during that press cycle that Anderson
discussed his use of the Valley in Punch-Drunk Love. Even in a New York Times profile
built around his status as “the unofficial poet laureate of the San Fernando Valley,”
Anderson evaded the topic. While the writer Dave Kehr expounded on the balance
between the “sociologically accurate and poetically abstract” in Anderson’s Valley
films, the director himself offered only: “I was born in Studio City . . . and I’m still
here.” It’s not particularly challenging to understand why Anderson might eschew
centralizing the Valley in discussions of his fourth film given how heavily he had cen-
tralized it while promoting his second and third, and how loaded the topic became
by the time of Magnolia’s release, at which point critical attention turned to whether
he had faithfully represented the demographic cross-section he purported to survey
(a concern that would reemerge two decades later with Licorice Pizza). Boogie Nights
and Magnolia are films overwhelmed by Anderson’s opposing urges toward pride
and self-consciousness, a core tension embodied by his 2000 assertion that these two
films are “fuck-you celebrations of the Valley,” a mission statement too fraught with
implicit tension to qualify as truly celebratory.

28 on places and spaces

 “Anderson’s own sense of Boogie Nights,” Cynthia Fuchs wrote in a 1997 profile,
“is that it’s part ethnographic, part personal recollection, and part social inquiry.”
Anderson devoted significant effort to faithfully replicating the Valley of his child-
hood memory; crew members contributed yearbooks and family albums as they
attempted to evoke the reality of the era rather than the cheap and stereotyped disco
nostalgia that dominated the pop culture of the late 1990s (see That 70s Show, the
kitsch-perfect sendup of the era that premiered on Fox the year after Boogie Nights).
Anderson’s script lavishes attention on geographic specificity—key to any effective
Los Angeles movie, Thom Andersen argues in his landmark video essay Los Angeles
Plays Itself —with characters expressing frequent astonishment that Eddie Adams
(the man who will be Dirk Diggler) is willing to travel by bus between his home
in Torrance and his workplace in Reseda. Anderson would repeat this technique in
Licorice Pizza, as Alana interrogates Gary over his willingness to travel from Encino
to the unnamed location of Tail o’ the Cock, which Gary counters with the informa-
tion that he actually lives in Sherman Oaks; again, neither mileage nor travel time is
given. In either case, Valley natives would grasp the unspoken significance of the dis-
tance (likely somewhere in the vicinity of forty miles for Eddie), while to those out-
side L.A. County, the characters’ incredulity carries the necessary narrative weight.
Viewers familiar with the region further appreciated Boogie Nights’ focus on the
Valley’s unique subcultural qualities. “While Hollywood’s rich and famous live in
tony communities like Bel Air, Brentwood, and Malibu,” the Valley native Molly
Lambert wrote in a 2014 tour of Anderson’s shooting locations, “the Valley accom-
modates all kinds of entertainment fringe communities.” In interviews, Anderson
focused on his own memories of growing up alongside the porn industry: “There
were these industrial-looking buildings with no signage,” he told Cynthia Fuchs in
1997, “but you’d see people going in and out. You knew what they were doing.”
Yet in constructing his porno pastiche of the a-star-is-born archetype, Anderson
changed so many specifics that his story wandered away from verisimilitude toward
choices that would support his chosen theme of surrogate family. The anonymous
warehouses that so affected the young Anderson are nowhere to be found in Boogie
Nights, having been replaced by Jack Horner’s house, too rich a metaphor to pass
up (a cozy suburban ground floor hides a porn soundstage basement, an objective
correlative for the hidden-in-plain-sight business of sex work in the Valley). With
metaphor taking precedence over realism, the apparent sociological dimension of
Anderson’s ambitions struggled to find traction with industry professionals; one
1970s porn veteran derided the film to the San Francisco Chronicle as a “myth” that
“didn’t even resemble the truth.”
If Dirk Diggler’s neon-lit cocaine-addled odyssey conveys little of the workaday
images conjured by Anderson’s recollections, those images are, ironically enough,
present and potent in the fluorescent-lit tedium of The Dirk Diggler Story—which,
by virtue of its amateur production values, inadvertently captures the “real” San
Fernando Valley in a way the meticulously designed Boogie Nights could never do.
(For that matter, to Anderson’s likely chagrin, the image of the Valley conjured by
the short is by no means out of step with the “malls and bad hair” cultural consensus
he so chafed against.)

on places and spaces 29

 Realism was hardly Anderson’s sole aim with Boogie Nights. He boasted about his
bona fides at the time—“I grew up in the Valley,” he said in 1997 of his ease con-
structing the story, “so I knew what the truth was”—but he was equally compelled
to create a stylized epic. “I saw the Valley the way David Lean saw the desert in
Lawrence of Arabia,” he said in 1997, and if this goal seems somewhat incompat-
ible with conventional truthfulness, it does align the film with the memory-play
tradition—“Memory takes a lot of poetic license,” as Tennessee Williams wrote in
The Glass Menagerie, “for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.” Boogie
Nights was largely received as pop epic first, social realism second (if at all): “It’s about
America,” another SoCal porn veteran told the San Francisco Chronicle, brushing
off the notion that the film should be judged against industrial reality. “That’s the
whole trick.” And if this ambiguity surrounding the film’s ultimate goals indicates
a muddy message—though Anderson intended the film’s ending to be happy, focus
groups more often found it tragic, which he later tried to reconcile by declaring
it “the saddest happiest ending [possible]”—the film’s generally strong reception
left Anderson emboldened to double down with his next project, creating what he
pitched as “the all-time great San Fernando Valley movie.”
Magnolia is a film inevitably in conversation with a decade-spanning trend
of L.A. ensemble dramas, one encompassing such notable examples as Lawrence
Kasdan’s Grand Canyon (1991), Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), and Paul Haggis’s
Crash (2004). These films, though often dissimilar in story and tone, share a central
organizing structure that positions networks of unexpectedly interconnected solip-
sists, scattered across what David Fine has termed this “regional city-state” to form
mosaic-style portraits of modern alienation uniquely suited to Los Angeles. The L.A.
ensemble film, as Hsuan L. Hsu writes, is defined by “a fascination (at least at a
superficial level) with class stratification and racial tension, the mundane perils of
driving in L.A., and the unifying terror of the city’s natural disasters.”
A few key distinctions undercut the significance of the “L.A. ensemble” catego-
rization in discussing Magnolia. For one, Anderson sets his film within a radically
constricted area—the characters’ disparate journeys are united by their proximity
to the titular Valley boulevard, the ten-mile length of which would nearly connect
Earl Partridge’s Encino home to his Burbank studio—which neutralizes the story-
telling value of what Hsu describes as “LA’s unique brand of automobile-centered
(which is to say, fundamentally decentered) metropolitan sprawl.” Meanwhile, the
opportunity for coincidental storyline intersections offered by this constricted area is
neutralized by the relatively constrained bounds of the narrative, which leans heav-
ily on theatrical dialogue showpieces taking place within private spaces. Whereas
the surprising possibilities of chance encounters between disparate characters are
a key enlivening thread in Short Cuts and Crash, the most meaningful coincidental
encounter to be found in Magnolia is Dixon’s (Emmanuel L. Johnson) discovery of
an unconscious Linda. Because of this “highly fragmented” narrative, Lucy Fischer
writes, “it is only retrospectively that we realize [Magnolia] is meant to take place in
a single locale on a single day.”
This underutilization of the storytelling possibilities afforded by the L.A. ensem-
ble genre is symptomatic of Anderson’s approach to the Valley, which he paints

30 on places and spaces

with a brush that is simultaneously specific and generalized. Tom Carson describes
Anderson’s efforts as “turning everybody else’s Oz into [his own] Kansas,” a descrip-
tion resonant with his insistence that the Valley of the 1980s and ’90s was “pretty
near normal,” but in Magnolia, these efforts hinged on his downplaying of the
region’s particulars. The focus on television production is theoretically area-specific,
but Anderson’s key influence for this storyline was Sidney Lumet’s New York–set
Network (1976), and the remaining storylines—a police officer engaged in running
dialogue with God, a woman realizing too late that she loves her much-older hus-
band, a man driven to distraction by love for an unattainable bartender, a young
woman cultivating drug addiction to numb the pain of her childhood abuse—would
seem broadly urban rather than uniquely of the Valley. The climactic rain of frogs
constitutes a significant instance of the city’s anxiety surrounding cataclysmic natu-
ral disaster, but even this is so overtly surreal that it fails to generate the particularly
Californian dread of the climactic earthquake that draws together the dangling story
threads in Short Cuts.
If the “whole trick” of Boogie Nights comes down to promising a story about
porn only to tell the story of America, Anderson attempted a similar trick with
Magnolia—but, rather than a symbolically weighted subculture, his stand-in for
national concerns was a self-avowedly normal suburban environment. For want of a
more specifically delineated focus, Anderson’s “Mother of All San Fernando Valley
movies” (as he described it) was packaged with an intentional vagueness at its core.
This vagueness extends beyond its geographic area to encompass its moment in time;
as noted by Jesse Fox Mayshark, several elements of Magnolia’s cultural backdrop
seem either anachronistic (the “deliberately archaic” production design of What Do
Kids Know?, a stark contrast to the trendy aesthetics of the real game show, The Quiz
Kids Challenge, on which Anderson worked during its sixteen-week run in 1990)
or oddly ignorant of meaningful contemporary forces (“You would never guess from
[Magnolia] that California was in the throes of the dot-com gold rush”).
This selective approach to the ethnography of a region that he hoped to defini-
tively dramatize extends to the demographic makeup of Magnolia’s Valley—and,
later, Licorice Pizza’s. As Adam Nayman writes, Magnolia “seems determined to
deracinate its San Fernando Valley setting,” and Anderson has been roundly criti-
cized in the ensuing two decades for what Hsu describes as “a totalizing image of
L.A.’s community [that] deliberately [relegates] its black characters to the sidelines.”
With the film’s notoriously overstuffed roster of principal characters being almost
entirely white, the few nonwhite characters of note are afforded little shading of
character. Most troublesome is the outlandishly unstable Marcie (Cleo King), a
screeching caricature of disheveled instability met with hostility by Officer Jim and
afforded little dignity by either Anderson’s pen or his camera. Marcie’s status within
the story is a stark contrast to the sympathy extended to Claudia, who enters Jim’s
life via the similar circumstances of a noise complaint that suggests domestic vio-
lence. Anderson intended greater context for Marcie’s actions, as well as a resolution
for her storyline; the shooting script includes scenes featuring Marcie’s son, Worm
(to be played by Orlando Jones), and a climactic admission that Marcie has killed her
husband to prevent his abuse of Worm and her grandson, Dixon. But the truncation

on places and spaces 31

of Marcie’s storyline is no isolated instance; Anderson shot larger arcs for both Lance
(Luis Guzmán) and Becky (Nicole Ari Parker) in Boogie Nights but selected both as
acceptable trims (noting in supplemental DVD materials that Becky’s storyline was
“getting in the way”), and the shooting script for Inherent Vice includes an extended
romantic subplot for Khalil Tariq (Michael K. Williams), whose role was reduced to
one scene by the time of theatrical release. Though faring better than Marcie, two
additional nonwhite characters in Magnolia, Dixon and Gwenovier (April Grace),
are ciphers handled with cold disregard by their white scene partners. Black and
Puerto Rican quiz show contestants, meanwhile, exist only to be intellectually bested
by a panel of white children.
Anderson’s questionable treatment of race is less pronounced in Boogie Nights
and Punch-Drunk Love, though in neither case is that treatment strictly empathetic.
The most prominent nonwhite characters in Boogie Nights, Maurice Rodriguez and
Buck Swope, are both defined primarily by their failings: Maurice is constantly
begging Jack for a role in one of his porno films, a storyline paid off in the shoot-
ing script by the revelation that his penis is shockingly small (“It looks like a pea-
nut,” his brother notes of the scene Maurice is finally permitted to shoot with a
nonplussed Rollergirl). Meanwhile, Buck—whose very name nods to a sexually
charged racial slur—is repeatedly mocked over his preference for Old West culture.
(“I think Black cowboys are funny,” Anderson explained on the DVD commen-
tary.) Punch-Drunk Love boasts what is likely the highest proportion of nonwhite
roles within the Anderson canon thanks to Barry’s entirely Latinx staff, which
includes his incredulously dogged assistant, Lance (Guzmán). Even in this case,
however, these characters are used primarily to underscore Barry’s alienation, as in
the lunch-break sequence that finds him sitting uncomfortably within a crowd of
men who speak rapidly in Spanish, his blue suit and white skin rendering his very
existence a sight gag.
In Licorice Pizza, the Valley is even more deracinated than in Magnolia; in addi-
tion to the uncomfortable use of Japanese characters, which garnered condemnation
from the Media Action Network for Asian Americans, the sole Black character is a
sexualized young woman employed to seduce Gary into buying a waterbed—rather
than acting as the mark that he is presumed to be, Gary subverts her efforts by
becoming a competitor instead—and Latinx characters are limited to the largely
silent civilians accosted by a rampaging Jon Peters. As Tom Cendejas (a native of
the nearby San Gabriel Valley) wrote, “Its near-total whiteness makes the otherwise
authentic Licorice Pizza ring bafflingly false.”
In 2000, Anderson offered his explanation for Magnolia’s narrow demographic
spectrum, telling Cynthia Fuchs that his film was meant to be “a representation of
spending a couple of days in the Valley; that’s how much color would come into your
life.” This quote, as succinctly put by Jason Sperb, is “damning in its ignorance.”
The use of the second-person (your life) makes clear that Anderson viewed his
intended audience as demographically identical to himself, disregarding the notion
that any Valley resident, white or otherwise, might question the film’s verisimilitude.
In describing a film drawn so specifically from his own viewpoint—focused on TV
production, populated by white characters, aggressively eschewing the kitsch of the

32 on places and spaces

Valley Girl–adjacent stereotype—as “the mother of all San Fernando Valley movies,”
he elevated his experience as supreme, conflating subjectivity with absolute reality.
If Punch-Drunk Love managed to largely evade discussions of race in the postrelease
conversation, it would seem notable that Anderson shifted decisively from there into
the realm of period storytelling, removing the onus of sensitive representation by
selecting a backdrop more amenable to stories centering on predominantly white
characters (as in There Will Be Blood, The Master, and Phantom Thread ) or designed
to allow for broad racial stereotyping (as in the throwback farce elements of Inherent
Vice). When asked in 2022 about his “white-centric” worldview, Anderson replied
with a joking reference to his own biracial domestic partner, Maya Rudolph, and
an apparent running gag with family friend Chris Rock: “They’d say, ‘What are you
working on?’ And I’d say, ‘It’s this period piece,’ and they’d say, ‘Worst thing you can
say to a Black actor.’ ” Anderson then pivoted to the suggestion that it’s “endlessly
frustrating” to be unable tell every story he wants to tell, and concluded with an
ambiguous, “I’ll keep trying, I’ll keep attacking.”
With Licorice Pizza functioning as a relaxed revision of Anderson’s previous, more
anxious visions of the Valley, it also functions to implicitly revise his earlier desire
to “normalize” the region. Rather than neutralizing the area’s specifics, he centralizes
them: the lifestyles enjoyed by Gary and Alana contain elements of the recognizably
suburban (Gary’s stretched-thin working mother and lazy evenings in front of the
TV with his little brother; Alana’s dead-end odd jobs and tense relations with parents
and older siblings), but these everyday settings are strewn with the showbiz profes-
sionals in Gary’s acting circle and the fading Hollywood luminaries populating Tail
o’ the Cock. Describing his intent with Licorice Pizza, Anderson suggested a desire to
show the daily realities behind the Tinseltown machine: “I think there’s this impres-
sion that movies are made in Hollywood,” he said in 2021, “and it’s like, no, they’re
actually made in the Valley. And if they’re shot [in Hollywood], everybody that really
actually makes them, from the technicians to the craftsmen, drive there from the
Valley and then drive back home.” In finally demonstrating that the Valley is “as
normal as a place can be when bordering Hollywood,” he tacitly admitted that the
effect could be conjured only by invoking the specter of Hollywood, not eliding it.
By the time of Punch-Drunk Love’s premiere, Anderson was transparently uncom-
fortable with his “poet laureate of the Valley” reputation, and the unrest was evident
in both the work and its reception. Barry’s Valley is defined by the oppressive weight
of his depressive circumstances, and the wide, flat compositions depict a Chatsworth
seemingly being driven into the ground by an extraordinary force of gravity. Only
once Barry flees to Hawaii does the frame fill with color and motion, a joyful noise
that points toward the liberating possibilities of geographic exploration. Anderson’s
friend and mentor Jonathan Demme told the Chicago Tribune in 2002 that his great-
est desire on seeing Punch-Drunk Love was that “[Paul would] get the heck out of
the Valley now . . . I want the world to be his canvas.” This desire echoes an assess-
ment made by Tom McCarthy three years earlier: “Anderson appears to have his
roots planted so deeply in the irrigated soil of the [San Fernando] Valley,” McCarthy
wrote, “[that] it will be crucial to see what happens when he takes on . . . other loca-
tions, other eras.”

on places and spaces 33

 Responding to Demme’s comments in 2002, Anderson said, “I want to get out
of the Valley, too . . . I will next time.” The break he made following Punch-Drunk
Love was not necessarily a seismic one—while he would not make another film set
in the Valley until 2021, both There Will Be Blood and Inherent Vice are resolutely
Southern Californian stories—but the shift in focus is significant for Anderson’s
own approach to his chosen canvas. Though he stayed relatively close to home, his
storytelling shifted from a mode of declaration to one of inquisition. Rather than
attempting to convey essential facts about the world as he sees it, Anderson’s films
have come to feel motivated more by curiosity. With There Will Be Blood, he was
guided (as he said in 2007) by an interest in discovering the history of his native
region, while with Inherent Vice he filtered that region through the lens of another
storyteller’s sensibilities—one that, as in Punch-Drunk Love, prizes the stylized over
the traditionally realistic.
While Anderson avoided discussing the Valley during his Punch-Drunk Love press
engagements, his resistance has lessened with time, yielding comments that lend ret-
rospective context to his third Valley film. In 2015, Anderson described Los Angeles
as “a magical, dark place” containing “epicenters of [supernatural] energy,” and
while Punch-Drunk Love is not a story featuring any overtly supernatural events,
it does seem to take place in a version of the Valley where the laws of strict real-
ism are suspended, a mood described by Adam Nayman as “magic-realist” and by
cinematographer Robert Elswit as “mythical.” Even the film’s aggressively bland
color palette, according to Elswit, represents a counterintuitive approach to creating
a cohesive feeling that “you were in a fairytale . . . like the world of the movie is this
sort of unique, special place.”
The stylized reality of Punch-Drunk Love represents a key shift in Anderson’s treat-
ment of place, as he began using his stories’ exterior landscapes to evoke their pro-
tagonists’ interior ones. As George Toles suggests, this vision of Chatsworth seems
symbiotically linked with its protagonist’s moods and needs—Barry’s world, Toles
argues, “is tied to his subjectivity more fully and intimately than is ordinarily the case
for film protagonists. The geography is . . . in a consequential sense, a space inside
him.” In this film, then, the Valley and its inhabitants “can be usefully approached as
spaces and figures in an allegory . . . there to chart the stages of a soul’s exile and the
soul’s awakening to its need for a journey.”
A similar analogy could be made surrounding the highly episodic Licorice Pizza,
in which Alana proceeds through a Valley that seems to double as a spiritual obstacle
course, with impediments (most often in the form of various disappointing men,
from the blearily distracted Jack Holden to the volatile Jon Peters to the self-preser-
vationist Joel Wachs) that she must surmount or evade before emerging fully realized
as the credits roll. When Toles describes the Andersonian Valley as “a vast, medieval
tapestry” and Lena as “the daemonic agent . . . a guardian or intermediary who mir-
rors the hero’s single-mindedness, and indeed shares his ‘possession’ by the quest,”
he could just as easily have described Gary’s role within Alana’s own hero’s journey.
It’s Gary who is first possessed of the conviction that he and Alana are fated to meet,
and Gary whose existence within the film so often seems contingent on hers. This is
“not so insistent an allegory as to feel cumbersome,” as Toles insists of Punch-Drunk

34 on places and spaces

Love, but in helping to contextualize the affective logic of both fictional worlds, it
proves a durable interpretive key.
In her book Stanley Kubrick: Adapting the Sublime, Elisa Pezzotta argues for a reading
of Kubrick’s work that is analogous to Toles’s of Anderson’s, suggesting that Kubrick’s
films often indicate a “link between protagonists’ psychology and mise-en-scène.” The
sense of an outer world responsive to its protagonist’s inner world carries over to the
first Anderson film to be widely discussed as Kubrickian, There Will Be Blood, though
in this case the relationship between character and place is less allegorical than sym-
bolic. For as much as Anderson’s fifth feature centers on a rivalry between the forces
of capitalism and religion, the primary battle is waged between Daniel and the earth
itself. In his shooting script, Anderson centralizes the natural harshness of the south-
west desert, noting the “110-degree heat” of the opening scene in which Daniel
mines the New Mexico desert, and later denoting his Little Boston surveying trip
as a “SOUND SEQUENCE. Feel of the footsteps, crunch, etc.” From its earliest
conceptions, this is a film unusually attuned to the planet’s ambivalence toward the
people attempting to live upon—and take advantage of—it.
Jeffrey Overstreet has compared Anderson’s film to Peter Weir’s hazy waking
nightmare Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) through a shared “interest in landscape as
metaphor.” Daniel arrives in Little Boston with the stated goal of turning a blighted
terrain into a prosperous and habitable haven, and by the conclusion of the main
action, his ostensibly egalitarian mission has begun bearing fruit. His work upon the
natural world, however, has distinct connotations of sexual violence: in addition to
the phallic derricks and rhythmic thrusts of the pumping machinery, Toles argues for
a vaginal reading of the “moist, mutable” caverns in which the roughnecks submerge
themselves. If the film is distinctly lacking in female characters, in Toles’s view, this is
because “the mysteries of female power are displaced into the liquid earth.” Yet the
earth does not submit willingly to Daniel’s pseudo-sexual assaults. Anderson grants
the land the requisite energy to fight back via the burst of gas that deafens H.W., as
well as the ruin of Daniel’s leg (broken in his mineshaft fall in the opening sequence,
never to be properly healed) and the deaths of H.W.’s father and Joe Gundha. Rick
Warner, in his own Kubrickian reading of There Will Be Blood, describes “the pro-
test of the rocky terrain against human invasion” and the oil “creeping up from the
ground as though from a stab wound.”
Daniel, whose transformation of Little Boston presages the widespread effects
of the California oil boom, can be seen as metaphorical patriarch to the modern
American West, meaning that his assaultive mode of capitalist procreation can be
traced directly forward to the corrupted Los Angeles of Inherent Vice via the “long,
sad history of California land use” mourned by Sortilège (Joanna Newsom)—and,
in Licorice Pizza, protested by Joel Wachs. The area surrounding Gordita Beach has
been razed and rebuilt so often that it’s become hopelessly contaminated, yielding
unnatural outgrowths from the malevolent utopia of Channel View Estates to the
rotten tooth of a high-rise that sprouts from the site of Doc’s happiest memory.
Anderson has cited Chinatown as the essential Californian creation myth, one with
which he felt intimately familiar by virtue of having grown up so near its setting—
“I knew everything they were talking about, very directly,” he said in 2008—and

on places and spaces 35

his two California land-use films can be seen as respective prequel and sequel to the
story of Noah Cross, who forges a corrupt future for Southern California that is a
symbolic amplification of his own sexual misdeeds.
The startling installation of the Golden Fang’s hub on the site of Doc’s rainswept
idyll with Shasta links the pseudo-allegorical value of Gordita Beach (widely under-
stood to be a fictionalized version of Manhattan Beach, Pynchon’s onetime stomp-
ing grounds rendered here as a carnival of madcap paranoia) with that of Barry’s
Chatsworth. Toles’s argument that Barry’s milieu “reminds [Barry], by odd analogues
and literalizations, of dormant or forgotten aspects of his self ” applies similarly to
Doc’s own turf. And in much the same way that he characterizes the desert in There
Will Be Blood, Anderson lends the sea of Inherent Vice a faceless autonomy. The
Pacific Ocean serves as a multipurpose symbol throughout the film, most promi-
nently as a stand-in for the implacable forces of time and all the losses left in its
wake: “There is no avoiding time,” Sortilège muses toward the story’s conclusion,
“the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and
unrecoverable”—“promise” here referring to Doc’s failed romance with Shasta, and,
in microcosm, America’s abandonment of its professed ideals.
The ocean’s menace in this story is more overt than such nostalgic contemplations
might suggest, as heading west from Los Angeles in Inherent Vice tends to precipitate
disastrous transformation. Characters from Burke Stodger to Mickey Wolfmann to
Shasta, and even the schooner Golden Fang itself, all depart from Gordita Beach
only to return as body-snatched simulacra of their formerly independent selves, now
in thrall to the forces of global corruption. Meanwhile, the land that Doc treads
can be as consumptive as the sea: among the story’s multiple inciting incidents is
the disappearance of the Artesia Crips’ turf, which was recently and mysteriously
razed, leaving its citizens displaced and disoriented. The image of theoretically reli-
able structures vanished into dust resonates with the myth of the lost continent
Lemuria, central to Pynchon’s novel but left to implication in the film. The Southern
California of Inherent Vice is so thoroughly despoiled that its spirit is in the process
of being sacrificed to the sea of time. In a story with as chimeric a relationship to
reality as this one, being literally swallowed by the waves seems by no means outside
the realm of possibility.
Anderson closes his film with the epigraph of Pynchon’s novel: “Under the paving-
stones, the beach!” This quote, taken from a slogan coined during the French protest
movement of 1968, suggests the possibility that the land might still be reclaimed for
a better future, but given how much of Doc’s story is devoted to dispelling the last
vestiges of summer-of-love utopianism, the words take on an elegiac quality. Paradise
may have been paved—to paraphrase a song released just a few months before the
events of Inherent Vice—but it may yet be possessed of some symbolic power as long
as its memory lingers.
This mode—setting in service of characterization—is one that Anderson first
tapped with Hard Eight, in which the bland, sterile motel rooms and dim, anony-
mizing casino floors mirror the spiritual lostness of the characters. Anderson’s choice
of Reno as a setting was similarly intended to indirectly characterize his protago-
nist: “Sydney would feel more at home and more comfortable in Reno [than in

36 on places and spaces

Las Vegas],” Anderson said in 1997. “Reno’s made an effort to hold onto its past,
and he would appreciate that.” Several further Anderson protagonists function as
reflections of their environments, from Barry—whose milieu, according to Toles,
“[confirms], at every turn, his lostness”—to Freddie and Reynolds, two characters
whose respective unmoored and cloistered psychological states are mirrored by the
drifting Alethia and the forbidding House of Woodcock.
In the case of The Master and Phantom Thread, the claustrophobic effects can
be attributed to Anderson’s increasing canniness in making use of a long-standing
disinterest in establishing shots. In a 2015 interview, Anderson expressed a visceral
distaste for this ubiquitous film-grammar convention, particularly in period films.
“I was like, ‘Why are there so many establishing shots of streets?’ ” he recalls wonder-
ing while watching films in his childhood. “Nobody cares about anything but the
people anyway, that’s all they’re looking at. They’re not really looking at the store-
fronts or your gigantic city streets . . . unmotivated crane shots are a sin.” Anderson
has maintained this focus on character-forward imagery over conventional establish-
ing shots throughout his career. With a few notable exceptions (for example, the daz-
zling Boogie Nights opening shot that moves from the street into Hot Traxx, and the
more casual echo of the same as Gary arrives at the Teenage Fair in Licorice Pizza), his
films eschew a custom that is typically a key organizing structure in commercial film,
with these shots allowing viewers not just to orient themselves to a scene’s location
but also to segment the flow of the story into discrete sequences.
Thus, Magnolia, a film ostensibly intended to be the ultimate Valley story, fea-
tures scant glimpses of any distinctive landscape features—during Sydney Barringer’s
suicide preparations, the horizon features palm-dotted hills and a glimpse of the
Griffith Park Observatory, for all intents and purposes the film’s sole footage of
L.A.’s broader topography—a choice that operates against the apparent goals of the
story. In an interview included in the published Magnolia shooting script, Anderson
described an adolescent feeling of being “on the very far edge of the bleed where
Hollywood stops . . . there truly was a sense, living in the Valley, of going over the
hill.” Yet he avoids making any effort to visually signify this feeling, a trick achieved
in the opening of Valley Girl via a helicopter shot that quite literally takes the camera
over the hill and into the Valley.
Anderson characterizes his distaste for wide establishing shots as a budget con-
sideration, preferring to allocate his resources to character work, but in his thesis
films, the narrow focus robs his stories of just this sort of necessary context. For as
significant as Reno may have been in Anderson’s conception of Hard Eight, his lack
of attention to the city’s architecture and atmosphere is likely a significant factor
in the long-standing misconception that the film takes place in Las Vegas, an error
made by Terry Gross during a 1997 interview, and soon echoed by writers for the San
Diego Tribune, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and more. If, as Anderson told
the Seattle Times in 1997, “Sydney wouldn’t be caught dead in Vegas,” then some
greater effort to convey this essential fact might have been a worthwhile investment.
With time, Anderson became more judicious in choosing when to look away
from his characters, and what purpose could be served by looking directly at them.
Given the significance of landscape as pseudo-character in There Will Be Blood,

on places and spaces 37

Anderson leaves ample space for shots surveying the terrain. But in the three films
that followed, he returned to the sort of constrained focus that characterizes Hard
Eight, now with a seemingly greater awareness of how this focus might enhance
his storytelling rather than restrict it. Though The Master features sequences set in
San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, and London, Anderson includes precisely
zero cityscapes, preferring to drop his characters into new locations and allow the
viewer to catch up as Dodd’s hosts welcome him to town. The effect is disorient-
ing (as it is when repeated in Licorice Pizza, which features an intracontinental
sojourn depicted entirely without exteriors), but this suits the perpetually dazed
and disoriented character of Freddie Quell, who is prone to dozing off unexpectedly
and awakening in unexpected places. In the space typically taken by establishing
shots, Anderson instead uses a recurring image of a ship’s wake, signaling that it
is not the destination that matters in Freddie’s odyssey so much as the fact of his
flight—precisely the condition we find him in during two of the film’s most strik-
ing shots, one in which he flees across cabbage fields to escape the consequences of
his carelessness, and the other in which he speeds across the salt flats to escape his
entanglement with the Cause.
Anderson’s declarations on the sin of “unmotivated” establishing shots came in
reference to his shooting approach on Inherent Vice, and Howard Hampton later
expressed frustration at this “weirdly interiorized” rendering of the story, which left
him longing for “more sense of the jumbled archaeology of L.A.” found in Pynchon’s
“expansively outgoing” novel. This distinction is a useful one in approaching such
a dual-format story, but counting the interiorization of Anderson’s film as a fault
ignores key differences between literary and cinematic storytelling. Pynchon’s novel,
panoramic as it may be, relies on the disorienting effects of his prose, which clouds
the reader’s mental eye in accordance with Doc’s stoned perceptions. Reviewing the
novel for the New York Times, Walter Kirn claimed that Pynchon’s overriding goal is
the cultivation of a sense “that the purpose of the Creation was to make itself per-
fectly unmanageable and purely unintelligible.” It’s a trick not so easily achieved on
the screen; any director would be limited in the ability to manipulate viewer percep-
tion of Doc’s surroundings in accordance with his hazy viewpoint. Thus, Anderson’s
choice to constrict the world of the story to Doc’s immediate vicinity creates a shared
inability between character and viewers to discern anything but what is directly in
front of his—and their—face. The effect generated is a pleasurable paranoia suggest-
ing that the world beyond the camera’s lens might hold anything, from the baseball
bat that incapacitates Doc at Chick Planet—wielded as anonymously as the deliv-
ery of Barry’s harmonium in Punch-Drunk Love—or the “midsize wild animal” that
Bigfoot suggests could be the culprit of Rudy Blatnoyd’s murder.
Anderson treats London in Phantom Thread much the way he treats Los Angeles in
Inherent Vice. At no point is the viewer indulged with glimpses of Piccadilly Circus or St.
Paul’s Cathedral, and while this may be another effort by the frugal Anderson to avoid
“a waste of money, time, and feet of film,” the blinkered view of the world around
the House of Woodcock once again helpfully mirrors the characters’ state of mind. At
the outset, we are chained to Reynolds’s workspace alongside the workaholic artist,
and once Alma arrives, the close confines of the narrative world mirror her isolated

38 on places and spaces

An unusually vulnerable Reynolds strolls with Alma against an unusually exposed backdrop. (Focus Features)

condition as well—an appropriate choice for a story with Gothic fairy-tale inflections;
as suggested by Lee Marshall, Reynolds is the “sympathetic beast” jealously guarding
the attentions of his beauty. Only during the first blush of love, when Reynolds is at
his most available, does Anderson take him onto the windswept bluffs, all his fastidi-
ously maintained walls dropping away to allow for the intrusion of unruly emotion.
Anderson’s shift toward a string of distinctly claustrophobic films was counterin-
tuitively heralded by his use of 65mm film stock on The Master. This announcement,
on the heels of the prestige trappings of There Will Be Blood, likely led some viewers
to presume that his follow-up might be an epic befitting the format’s traditional use
in sweeping sagas like Lawrence of Arabia and Ben-Hur. Instead, Anderson delivered
a film predominantly devoted to close-ups within enclosed spaces, a choice that
might be read as iconoclastic, a director mischievously subverting viewer expecta-
tions. Yet, as Geoffrey O’Brien wrote, in The Master, “personalities are treated as
landscapes.” Anderson’s unexpected choice redirects the viewer’s search for wides-
creen spectacle toward the epic vistas of his characters’ inscrutable expressions. By the
time of Licorice Pizza, this focus on the face as psychological atlas would be present
again, if less fraught: “He makes unassuming scenes of conversation . . . feel majorly
stifling,” wrote Siddhant Adlakha, “magnifying the characters’ subtle self-doubts by
drowning their close ups in soft-focus, forcing them to peek out from behind their
self-assured façades.” Despite contrasting characters and milieux, the technique
remains sturdy: fill the frame with a conflicted face and wait to see what grace notes
the performer may have to offer.
Punch-Drunk Love can be considered an uncanny film, one taking place (to bor-
row David Lynch’s phrase) “in a world that’s neither here nor there.” That term is
credited to Sigmund Freud, but its English form is attributable to his translators;
Freud’s original German term was unheimlich, the more literal translation of which
would be unhomely, and it is this word that Dwayne Avery applies to Punch-Drunk

on places and spaces 39

Love in his 2014 book Unhomely Cinema: Home and Place in Global Cinema. In the
domestic spaces glimpsed in Anderson’s film, Avery sees a world in which “the home
is reduced to its most basic elementary functions” and its “status as the central
place of intimate human interaction is openly rejected.” Like so much of this ver-
sion of the Valley, Barry’s apartment is shot as a dim and drab “domestic void” (as
Avery puts it). But rather than wallow in the absence of creature comforts, Anderson
uses the anonymity of his locations for comedic value; when Barry is summoned
back upstairs to Lena’s apartment for a kiss, his hopeless sprint through the identi-
cal corridors of her labyrinthine complex evokes the social satire of Jacques Tati, in
which the humanity has been leeched out of human existence and the only way to
avoid crying is to laugh.
The concept of space-as-place—in the sense of the characters’ domestic spheres
offering more narrative and thematic value than the broader geographic area—emerges
in various forms throughout Anderson’s filmography. The cavernous Plainview man-
sion that plays host to the coda of There Will Be Blood serves as a rich, microcosmic
canvas for Daniel’s downfall, particularly in the eerie image of this world-devouring
tycoon play-acting the outdoorsman’s lifestyle that he has ostensibly evolved beyond,
as well as the subterranean gaming space in which the Plainview/Sunday grudge
match finally reaches its endgame. But the metaphoric value of home is most potent
in Boogie Nights and Phantom Thread, two stories in which domestic spaces blur the
line between work and play.
In both the Horner home and the House of Woodcock, groups of diligent crafts-
people work in stratified structures with certain levels devoted to labor and others
to leisure. And in both cases, those crews operate under the commanding eye of
a visionary artist—in the latter case, one onto whom critics have been happy to
project a potential stand-in for the director himself. As A. O. Scott argues in his
review of Phantom Thread, Anderson “almost offhandedly lays out intriguing analo-
gies between Reynolds’s métier” and his own; “There are times,” Scott Tobias wrote,
“when Phantom Thread feels like Anderson ruthlessly interrogating his worst self.”
If both Boogie Nights and Phantom Thread deal with artists either unable or unwilling
to create a work/life balance, the latter might be seen as a self-aware revision of the
former. After Phantom Thread’s release, Anderson expressed chagrin at the single-
minded focus he lavished on his own work at the expense of relationships early in his
career, and it is thus fitting that Jack’s quixotic devotion to his dream of creating a
narratively worthy skin flick is never significantly questioned; Phantom Thread, on
the other hand, is a feature-length inquisition into monomaniacal auteurism, and
the double meaning of “House” within the world of high fashion—representing
both “home” and “commercial operation”—serves as the ideal refinement of the
upstairs/downstairs Horner domicile.
As with any good gothic story, though, the structures of Phantom Thread are
weighted with significance far beyond their function as shelter. Like the mystically
alluring Manderley of Rebecca (1940), Anderson cultivates a sense that the Wood-
cock cottage may be infused with a spiritual force of its own as his camera explores
the space prior to Reynolds’s arrival, examining the empty corridors as though prod-
ding the viewer to search for some spectral presence. The twin poles of townhouse

40 on places and spaces

and cottage further serve the mercurial power dynamic between artist and muse.
Alma, though not a native of the English countryside, is aligned with the rural
sphere by virtue of being stationed there at the story’s outset, and it is there that
she maintains a power she can only grasp at in London. As Lee Marshall suggests,
the story’s fairy-tale connotations change depending on the location, with London’s
Beauty and the Beast reconfigured in the countryside as the Wicked Queen and
Snow White. Paul Franz similarly suggests that in the country, Alma is able to
“draw upon the darker powers of the earth” to exact her will upon Reynolds, only
deepening the Grimmsian undertones of the story’s pastoral passages. (The image
of home-as-workplace is one that Anderson would revisit with Licorice Pizza, as
the Valentine home doubles as the hub of Gary’s various schemes; this blend of the
domestic and professional proves so alluring that Alana’s first physical reciproca-
tion of Gary’s affections—in the form of knee-to-knee contact—accompanies their
kitchen-set logistical discussions.)
When Anderson broke with stories set in the modern day, he left behind an intrigu-
ing developing trend within his work, one that dovetailed with a broader turn-of-
the-millennium pattern of stories depicting the modern city as a place of widespread
emotional dislocation that mounts in proportion to population density. The sterile
disconnect of Punch-Drunk Love proceeds from the more cluttered but no less alien-
ating Valley of Magnolia, a film (as Caitlin Sloat Dyckman has discussed) resonant
with the study of super-modernism. This late-twentieth-century school of thought
was devoted to “[forcing] a confrontation of space and place” as society shifted its
gathering places increasingly toward a digital sphere. In Magnolia, Dyckman sees
“the societal degradation of place” as alienated characters sequester themselves emo-
tionally and physically, rejecting the potential comforts of socialization offered by
an urban existence. This sort of loneliness can be simultaneously alleviated and
exacerbated by the cultivation of digital spaces, in which societies can “[exist] largely
outside of [a] physical form,” a theme that intersects intriguingly with Anderson’s
long-standing interest in spiritual detachment and community building.
Yet Anderson conspicuously steered away from contemporary plotting at the pre-
cise moment when digital technology would have become inescapable. “The inter-
net felt so optimistic initially,” he has said, justifying his antipathy toward stories
involving digital communication. “And then it only took a few years before it was all
completely fucking ruined . . . the phone is like a chain around young people and
they know it, but they are powerless to do anything against it.” Anderson finds the
modern world to be devoid of “mystery,” a significance he has loaded onto landline
telephones (items of totemic weight in both Punch-Drunk Love and Licorice Pizza)
and their implied opposition to cell phones. “We didn’t know where everybody was
[in the past],” he said in 2021, “[and so] we would think about them more.”
Given the crucial function of landlines in Punch-Drunk Love—objects that
become irrationally menacing as his extortionist’s voice is seemingly able to reach
Barry no matter his location—the story’s paranoia would be virtually nonsensical
only a year or two later given the proliferation of cell phones. As noted by Mayshark,
Anderson’s turn-of-the-millennium stories flirt with anachronism in their willful
ignorance of advances in technology and culture, and his films have long hewed

on places and spaces 41

more toward engaging with the world as it was than as it is, a trend—as I will con-
tinue to unpack across the remainder of this book—that serves as a deft workaround
to avoid any points of discomfort he may still carry about the worthiness of a Valley
boy’s perspective.
At the point of Barry’s greatest anguish—his extortionists closing in, his plan to
transcend his worries by quite literally amassing Healthy Choice(s) having hit an
insurmountable obstacle—he impulsively punches a wall in his office, inadvertently
crumpling a map of the United States. The hole left by his fist serves as an apt visual
metaphor that underlines a persistent theme across Anderson’s filmography: where
a character is from tends to be a source of great conflict, and only by barreling head-
long in the opposite direction may they find some hard-earned catharsis.
For all their agonized yearning for the comforts of childhood—a concept so sym-
bolically pure that it drives Freddie Quell into a psychiatrically worrying crying jag—
Anderson’s characters evince an ambivalence about their birthplaces that mirrors the
young director’s. Frank T. J. Mackey seems pathologically incapable of admitting the
truth even of where he was born, a blockage so significant that when confronted with
the truth by Gwenovier, he seems less caught in a lie than shaken out of a genuine
delusion. Similarly, in Licorice Pizza, Alana’s reported age shifts between scenes, as
though the character wishes so profoundly to disassociate from her upbringing that
she blurs the internal line between her projected self and her genuine one. This bias
for characters projecting their preferred personas is one that John H. Richardson has
suggested may represent Anderson’s own desire to draw a line between past and pres-
ent. “Although Anderson is one of the most autobiographical filmmakers of his gen-
eration, drawing heavily on his childhood in the San Fernando Valley,” Richardson
wrote, “he has stopped talking to most of his friends from [high school], and none of
them can say whether he just moved on naturally or broke with his past.”
Despite Mackey’s estrangement from his father, when summoned to the old man’s
deathbed, he’s no more than a quick car ride away. The past may be a perpetually raw
wound, but clearly not one painful enough to supersede the comforts of the familiar.
Though he may once have seen his Valley-centric perspective as unworthy, twenty
years after he told Dave Kehr “I’m still here,” Anderson still is—as of 2014, he had
moved as far as Tarzana, a community located approximately thirteen miles from
Studio City. When asked in 2021 where he was calling from, he asked rhetorically,
“Where else would I be?”
Even as his narrative eye turned away from the Valley between 2007 and 2017,
he continued to map its cultural contours via his collaborations with fellow Valley
natives Haim, first as director of music videos and then as feature director after cast-
ing all three Haim sisters in Licorice Pizza. These videos—particularly the ambula-
tory “Summer Girl” and the addled “Now I’m in It,” both released in 2019—cast a
lush and vivid eye on the Valley as Anderson follows the Haim sisters’ visits to bars
and boutiques, magic-hour light casting a nostalgic glow on bare-armed pedestri-
ans, a portrait of lived-in normalcy that nevertheless suggests a local’s awareness
of idiosyncrasy. This is the spirit with which Anderson spoke of wanting to infuse
Licorice Pizza; these videos, as Adam Nayman noted to Anderson, share a “roam-
ing aspect” with the feature. Anderson agreed: “We just had that movement and all

42 on places and spaces

their talent, and I just sort of filmed it. It was the greatest way to work, and after
doing that for a few years with Haim, I wanted to make a feature the same way.”
With the help of these new collaborators—ones who, according to Pitchfork’s Jen
Pelly, represent their own revision of the derided archetype by projecting an air of
“Valley Girl Intelligentsia”—he created a celebration of the Valley that dropped
the “fuck-you” aspect he had worked to append twenty years earlier, losing the
aggression and embracing the exaltation.
Tom Carson may view Anderson as a uniquely regional artist, but others broaden
the scope of his relevance to the national scale. In a 2017 article subtitled “Paul Thomas
Anderson as American Auteur,” Nick Pinkerton argued that Anderson’s filmography
comprises “a wide-angle narrative of the twentieth-century American experience, suf-
fused with popular indigenous themes such as lives of quiet desperation and beating
against the current ceaselessly into the past.” And as Anderson has retreated into
period stories, his mode of storytelling has become more concerned with symbol and
allegory than with ethnographic particulars; in There Will Be Blood, he eschews the
messy and wide-ranging implications of the oil trade in favor of the totemic value of
watching avatars of greed and pride come to blows. When asked to expound upon his
conception of America during a conversation with Lars von Trier, Anderson described
“a sense . . . that around the world everybody’s after the same thing, just some minor
piece of happiness each day.” It’s a worldview that could be considered simplistic—
sidestepping uniquely American biases that may complicate the struggle for happiness
in other parts of the world—or, more generously, elemental and humanist, contribut-
ing to the mythic feeling of many of his best stories.
The sense of place-as-theme can be traced directly to Punch-Drunk Love. In
conceiving Barry’s quasi-allegorical journey, Anderson adapted a true story—that
of so-called “Pudding Guy” David Phillips, a California civil engineer who abused
the selfsame marketing loophole to amass 1.25 million frequent flyer miles—and
stripped away any detail that did not serve his core metaphor: one man’s quest to
“redeem the mileage” and convert pent-up potential into long-awaited emotional
flight. Punch-Drunk Love may be a story of uncanny alienation, but it’s also one of
redemption and transportation, and the capacity for the former within the latter.
The more that Anderson has “[modified] facts in such a way that they resemble
truth more than reality”—to quote André Gide, seen by Werner Herzog as a patron
saint of ecstatic truth—the more truthful his geographic portraiture has come to
feel. Toles sees Anderson’s Valley as “a place of mythic consequence” akin to William
Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, a setting that recurs throughout Faulkner’s work
and is generally understood to be a thinly fictionalized version of the author’s own
native Mississippi region, one he referred to as “my apocryphal county.” Anderson,
for his part, has used another metaphor in describing his relationship to his apocry-
phal Valley. Inadvertently echoing Tom Carson’s invocation of The Wizard of Oz in
describing his approach to the Valley, Anderson summoned images of spaces some-
where over the rainbow, the worthier backgrounds that he once believed other direc-
tors had been blessed with. It was this angst that motivated his first three Valley films,
and only by coming to one realization could he finally make his fourth: “There is no
‘over the rainbow.’ The rainbow is right in your living room, idiot!”

on places and spaces 43

three
On Influences

the virtuosic opening shot of Boogie Nights—a three-minute Steadicam move

that tracks from a crane above Hot Traxx nightclub to ground level and through
the doors to roam the dance floor and introduce the film’s ensemble—is explicitly
described in Anderson’s screenplay. “This is one continuous shot,” Anderson wrote,
one of a bevy of technical instructions included in the opening three pages of his
script. “Anderson is in love with his camera,” Roger Ebert wrote in his review of Boogie
Nights, “and a bit of a show-off.” The Hot Traxx shot is mentioned in more than a
few contemporaneous reviews of Boogie Nights, and it’s not hard to see why; the scene
is a technical marvel that invites attention while serving the story, establishing a tone
of giddy sensory overload upon which Anderson will build during the remaining
two and a half hours of screen time. But it’s not merely the skill involved that invited
critical commentary; Ebert’s note on Anderson’s show-off qualities referred just as
much to the shot’s evident basis in the famed Copacabana shot in Martin Scorsese’s
Goodfellas (1990), another extended Steadicam move that introduces members of an
illicit community scattered throughout a nightclub. “Anderson has no qualms about
borrowing from the best,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review.
Maslin proceeded to note the resemblance between the film’s vision of the porn
industry and Robert Altman’s depiction of the country music scene in Nashville
(1975). The names Scorsese and Altman would recur frequently throughout the
film’s critical assessments: Peter Travers wrote that Boogie Nights aims for “the epic
sweep of a Nashville or a Goodfellas,” while Jay Boyar suggested that, “like Goodfellas
or Nashville, Boogie Nights can be seen as a collection of overlapping character stud-
ies that together comprise a scintillating cinematic mural.” While promoting Boo-
gie Nights, Anderson was frequently asked about the critical tendency to discuss
his opening shot in relation to Scorsese’s iconic one; rather than refute accusa-
tions of theft by claiming some unique vision, he argued that critics simply failed
to acknowledge his full repertoire of influences. “I wish people’s film vocabularies
would go back further than three or four years,” he lamented to a reporter for USA
Today in 1997, suggesting that fully appreciating his film would require as much
familiarity with Ophuls and Lubitsch as with Scorsese and Altman. Indeed, Boogie
Nights is densely packed with—some might say entirely composed of—references,
from those overt Scorsese nods (not only to Goodfellas but also to Raging Bull,
which provided the inspiration for Dirk’s closing dressing-room monologue) to
more arcane pilfering (one shot that follows a young woman below the surface of
a swimming pool references a similar shot in I Am Cuba [1964], though Anderson
boasts on the commentary track that “we came back up out of the pool for dialogue
[and] they didn’t”).
This wealth of references, so integral to the infrastructure of Boogie Nights and
similarly present in Hard Eight and Magnolia, quickly gave rise to a prevalent manner
of discussing Anderson’s voice: as a repository of influences rather than an innovator
of form or style. These first three works do not so much place themselves in conversa-
tion with their influences as echo them, if not quote them directly. Given this over-
riding interest in “showing off all the flashy movie references [Anderson] knows,”
Jason Sperb concluded in 2013, Boogie Nights is a film of “cinephiliac hollowness.”
If Anderson was relatively sanguine about this approach to his work while promoting
Boogie Nights, he grew frustrated over time and attempted to shirk the issue of influ-
ence while promoting Magnolia.
Reporters continued to dog him with comparisons to Short Cuts’ sprawling L.A.-
based ensemble and climactic cataclysm, culminating in Anderson’s outburst with a
reporter for the Austin American-Statesman: “I don’t know what you want me to say,”
he snapped when asked about the resemblance between his L.A. ensemble drama
and Altman’s. “I guess I ripped it all off.” The reporter attempted to equivocate,
but Anderson persisted: “I just fucking ripped it off . . . That’s what I do, that’s all
I do.” While it may not be all he does, it remains a significant element, and it thus
represents—for better or worse—one of the richer lenses through which to view not
just Boogie Nights, but his entire filmography: “as an allegory,” in Sperb’s words, “for
Anderson’s own cinephiliac life.”
Given the abundant tensions to be found within Anderson’s work—the staid for-
malism and bursts of absurdism in There Will Be Blood, the paranoid and the madcap
in Inherent Vice, the classical and the scatological in Phantom Thread—I find it most
productive to consider his influences not in isolation but in pairs, with balancing
forces accounting for broader swaths of the Andersonian worldview and unifying
stories that often appear disparate. Among these potential pairings, two stand out as
particularly productive: the looseness of Altman and the seemingly paradoxical for-
malism of Kubrick; and the humanism of Jonathan Demme against the provocation
of Robert Downey Sr.
Altman is certainly the most enduring of Anderson’s early comparison points,
with his name appearing prominently in coverage of Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Inher-
ent Vice, and Licorice Pizza. It is not, however, a resemblance that Anderson initially
courted; as he noted in 1998, The Dirk Diggler Story was primarily influenced by faux
documentaries Zelig (1983) and This Is Spinal Tap (1984), and was relatively modest in
scope (unsurprising given that the production team was largely still in high school).
The Nashville-adjacent sprawl of the ultimate product emerged only when “I fell in
love with so many actors that stories multiplied.” Despite his prickliness surround-
ing Magnolia, Anderson has been largely willing to embrace the comparison to such

on influences 45
a fêted (if uneven, Altman’s track record being marked by as many fiascos as master-
pieces) forebear. “If people want to call me Little Bobbie Altman,” he said in 2003,
“then I have no problem with that at all.”
In his 2005 foreword to Altman on Altman, Anderson admitted to having “stolen
from Bob as best I can,” but noted that his inspiration came less from plot and theme
than from a feeling that Altman “took away preciousness” from the craft of filmmak-
ing: “I could feel that the hands that made these films were not too polite.” Anderson
mentions admiring the way Altman’s work “could be dirty and smart at the same
time,” certainly a potential unifying thread in his own filmography.
It was Altman himself who solidified the suggestion that his heir apparent had
emerged when he selected the thirty-five-year-old Anderson to join him during pro-
duction on A Prairie Home Companion. The choice to entrust a director less than half
his own age with such an elegiac film served to bolster Anderson’s emergent reputa-
tion as an old-soul torchbearer of the New Hollywood spirit, elevating him in some
corners to the vaunted status of—as Adam Nayman puts it—“[keeper] of a wavering
flame . . . granted entry directly to the old canon.” Anderson closes his foreword to
Altman on Altman by claiming, “The old saying that ‘There’s nothing that hasn’t been
done’ is true—as long as we agree that Bob did it first.” Though this suggestion can
be taken in the spirit of tongue-in-cheek admiration, it does place Altman in a curi-
ously apocryphal light, positioning the New Hollywood era as the generative point
for what we now consider filmmaking.
Anderson’s own stated taste refutes this perspective—his Neon magazine list of
films influencing Boogie Nights features John Sturges, Akira Kurosawa, and François
Truffaut, among other examples that predate Altman’s career—but the statement
nonetheless represents a symbolic circling of the wagons around the 1970s white-
male-maverick ideal of directorial vision. Though some may see this admiration as
representing the maintenance of auteurist integrity amid increasing industrial homo-
geneity and risk aversion, others may just as easily see a perpetuation of that era’s
often narrow storytelling focus, preserving the notion that white male narcissism and
ennui are central to the soul of American cinephilia.
After the too-clear similarities between Short Cuts and Magnolia, the diversifica-
tion of Anderson’s style and subject matter meant a certain lull in comparisons to
Altman (with the exception of Punch-Drunk Love’s cheeky reappropriation of “He
Needs Me” from the ignominious Popeye [1980]). Still, Claire Perkins has argued for
a continuous strain of Altmanesque “teeming” in the “sensation of restless motion”
found even in the Anderson films that less overtly echo Altman’s ramshackle voice.
Perkins, however, sees a distinction between Altman’s “powerful condemnation of
the possibility of human connection” and Anderson’s own urge to drive his charac-
ters towards cathartic connection. This significant contrast casts doubt upon the
frequent comparison between Inherent Vice and Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973).
Though Anthony Lane refers to Altman’s film as “one of the fables on which Inherent
Vice ruminates,” and Noel Murray argues that Anderson’s film “could almost be a
sequel [to]—or a remake [of ]” Altman’s, the two diverge significantly within their
parallel worlds of woozy, sunbaked private investigation set against the countercul-
ture’s last gasps: Altman’s film comes to an acidic conclusion typical of Watergate-era

46 on influences
nihilist noir, while Anderson’s moves toward some form of redemption for his char-
acters even as the milieu itself may remain irredeemable.
With the release of There Will Be Blood, Stanley Kubrick emerged as a poten-
tial unifying thread in Anderson’s career, a comparison intriguing not only for the
clear aesthetic debt that There Will Be Blood owes to Kubrick’s bold-yet-austere com-
positional style, but for its help in contextualizing Anderson’s relatively sporadic
directorial output, seen by Jason Sperb as “a Kubrickian work ethic that emphasizes
patience, thorough research, and absolute focus in the pursuit of one’s own defini-
tion of cinematic perfection.” Though this in itself does not meaningfully separate
Anderson from others in the Indiewood cohort—the same could be said for the
assiduously curated oeuvres of Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson—Anderson’s
storytelling since There Will Be Blood has been guided by an elliptical internal logic
that eschews conventional cause/effect plotting, a style that can be significantly com-
pared to Kubrick’s.
As Elisa Pezzotta writes, “the audience [for a Kubrick film] cannot strictly follow
the development of the plot from the beginning until the end, but instead has to
find other complex stylistic paths that can link the episodes.” Pezzotta connects this
technique with Kubrick’s enduring interest in characters stranded within situations
they cannot fully comprehend, be it a haunted hotel (The Shining [1980]), a psyche-
delic dystopia (A Clockwork Orange [1971]), or the farthest reaches of the cosmos
(2001: A Space Odyssey [1968]). As Anderson’s antithesis and synthesis films shifted
further toward a concern with characters traumatized by epochal upheaval, his style
came to ride similar enigmatic emotional currents.
The Master—the Anderson film most reliant on this style of elliptical construction—is
consumed by, and embodies, the harrowing uncertainty of America in the imme-
diate aftermath of World War II. Pezzotta suggests that Kubrick’s deployment of
his fractured, enigmatic structuring system in Full Metal Jacket (1987) conveys “the
complexity of [the Vietnam War] and the inadequacy of the narrative techniques
of classical war films to represent such a new, complicated theme,” and the same
could just as easily be said of Anderson’s similar approach to the shattering spiritual
fallout of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. Similarly, Pezzotta argues that the
enigmas within 2001: A Space Odyssey mirror “the difficulty of thinking about the
universe and mankind’s role in it,” a technique that Anderson brings down to Earth
throughout his career via nods to Kubrick’s film, terrestrially restaging the earlier
work’s cosmic alienation.
While the lessons Anderson took from both Kubrick and Altman are holistic
enough to exceed any aesthetic and thematic resemblance to individual works, the
factors drawing Anderson toward these two directors would seem somewhat anti-
thetical. After Anderson met Kubrick on the set of Eyes Wide Shut (1999), to which he
had been invited by Tom Cruise as the two circled one another during the develop-
ment of Magnolia, he claims to have been “inspired . . . by seeing [Kubrick] control
every aspect” of his production. Yet what drew him to Altman was a willingness “to
be rough and spit-shine it.” And though it is intriguing to suggest that Anderson
fuses the looseness of Altman with the fastidiousness of Kubrick, these descriptions
seem too incompatible to position either director, or even a pairing of the two, as his

on influences 47
most significant overarching influence. Instead, it is another pairing—one Anderson
has long spoken of in terms that might seem similarly contradictory—that I would
argue serves precisely that uniting purpose.
Beginning with his Boogie Nights press tour, Anderson spoke often of both Robert
Downey Sr. and Jonathan Demme, referring to Downey as “my idol” in 2000, and
Demme as “my biggest influence” in 1998. On the surface, the two directors may
seem diametrically opposed. Downey’s sporadic directorial career was defined by
radical antiestablishment tendencies that left him with slim commercial prospects;
his most renowned feature, the Madison Avenue satire Putney Swope (1969), was
distributed with a “self-imposed X” rating and greeted by critic Wanda Hale in
the New York Daily News as “the most offensive picture I’ve ever seen.” Demme,
meanwhile, enjoyed a decades-long career that spanned virtually every genre and
budget level; likely his own most renowned feature, The Silence of the Lambs (1991),
was the fourth-highest-grossing film of its year and netted Demme a Best Director
Oscar alongside wins for Best Picture, Actor, Actress, and Adapted Screenplay. Yet
the two shared a mutual admiration—Demme wrote the liner notes for the Blu-ray
release of Downey’s acid western Greaser’s Palace (1972), which he described as “so
wildly original and massively effective . . . that it instantly exploded the boundaries
of cinematic possibility,” and Downey claimed in 2007 that Demme was on board
as a producer for his planned directorial comeback—and their seemingly divergent
sensibilities form a sort of dualist harmony as expressed in Anderson’s work.
The best term to describe this union of sensibilities might be a sort of selfless
selfishness (or perhaps selfish selflessness). Anderson has long described his favorite
directors—as he put it to Charlie Rose in 1997—as “incredibly selfish . . . in the
best possible way,” and that tendency is one that he sees as exceptionally present in
Downey’s work. In a conversation with Demme introducing a screening of Greaser’s
Palace—a film with a production design markedly similar to that of There Will Be
Blood, a shared aesthetic of rough-hewn wood outcroppings on a vast desert play-
ing stage to fits of religious fervor—Anderson expressed admiration for Downey’s
belief in “his own rhythm. And part of, I think, what excites other filmmakers the
most about him is just this incredible confidence . . . it takes to commit to what his
rhythm is. . . . He’s not aggressive about it, he just has instinctual feelings he follows
and he sticks to them, and they make him laugh, they engage him. . . . And so as
another filmmaker, seeing that is invigorating and it reminds you to have that confi-
dence to have that trust in yourself.”
In his discussions of Demme, meanwhile, Anderson tends to focus most on his
humanism. “He loves people so much,” Anderson said of Demme in 2002 (by which
point his admiration had evolved into a friendship). “He seems to give everyone
their due, their moment, their great spot—the actors and the people that he col-
laborates with.” The term humanist is one that is commonly invoked in discussions
of Demme—both Stephen Dalton in The Hollywood Reporter  and Peter Travers in
Rolling Stone  included it prominently in their obituaries—and his trademark shot
is a vivid expression of this empathetic tendency. In the so-called Demme close-up,
a character’s face fills the entire frame as they look directly into the camera lens in
place of their scene partner—“operating,” Demme told Anderson in 2015, “on the

48 on influences
Frank intimidates Gwenovier via the “Demme close-up.” (New Line Cinema)

premise that the more deeply into the character’s shoes the audience is, the more
they’re gonna care what’s going on.” It is a technique that Anderson has utilized
throughout his filmography, often when characters attempt to assert dominance
over or manipulate one another (to name just a few: Sydney over John and later
Jimmy over Sydney in Hard Eight, Frank over Gwenovier in Magnolia, members
of the Cause over Freddie throughout The Master, and the waterbed salesgirl’s siren
song to Gary in Licorice Pizza).
This combination of elements—a focus on amusing oneself first and foremost, and
a desire to provide a platform for talented collaborators—is evident to some degree in
every Anderson project, and could be considered a detriment in some. Boogie Nights
and Magnolia, in particular, owe their unwieldy runtimes and decentralized plotting
to the meaty material he felt compelled to provide each of his bevy of actors, while
his insistence on fidelity to his own vision manifested as an unwillingness to consider
outside perspectives. Yet those same qualities can be detected, in a more deliberately
calibrated form, in Inherent Vice. That film’s unusual tone—by turns nostalgic, para-
noid, and farcical—can be chalked up to Anderson’s Downey-esque willingness to
amuse himself even at the potential expense of audience comfort (“Bob doesn’t seem
to be that worried about confusing the audience,” he said of Greaser’s Palace, “and
that’s why it’s great”), and a celebration of his actors’ particular talents accounts for
such flourishes as the slapstick interlude in which Martin Short undoes his belt to let
his pants fall to his ankles as he chases his secretary. By maintaining a focus on one
protagonist—something that Magnolia openly eschews but of which he was similarly
incapable while composing the digressive Boogie Nights—Anderson’s selfish selfless-
ness coheres into a more compelling whole.
On the commentary track for Boogie Nights, Anderson spoke about his own
efforts to balance pleasing himself and pleasing the audience, suggesting that his duty
was to “write it for myself ” but direct with an eye toward “[relaying] all this stuff that
I felt six months ago . . . and [making] sure that I communicate it properly.” As he
went on to explain, he came to an epiphany upon realizing that he would be the film’s
most devoted audience member by virtue of the repeat viewings required during
editing and test screenings. “I gotta entertain myself first,” he recalls registering, “and

on influences 49
I hope that maybe, accidentally, some other people are gonna be entertained. . . . I’ve
only made two of these things, but I think that’s the way to do it.”
It would seem that Anderson largely maintained this approach across his ensuing
seven features, following a personal rhythm even at the risk of violating audience
expectations. If Inherent Vice was a film rejected by many initial viewers for its con-
founding blend of tones, elsewhere in his Boogie Nights commentary Anderson cites
Demme as inspiring his belief that the most rewarding films are those that “switch
gears” from “dead serious to side-splittingly funny.” Like Something Wild (1986),
which pivots unmistakably in its third act from a mode of screwball romance to one
of violent thriller, the gear shift within Boogie Nights is cleanly demarcated, in this
case at the halfway point, when the generally lighthearted story of Dirk’s rise slides
into the more bitter and eventually harrowing story of his downfall.
Later Anderson films would blur the line between the lighthearted (some might
say juvenile) and the solemn in a more holistic fashion, from the flatulence that
interrupts the dramatically taut “processing” sequence in The Master to the surname
of Phantom Thread ’s protagonist: Anderson had initially planned to name the film’s
central character Arthur Dapple Jr., but while developing the character, Daniel
Day-Lewis eventually suggested Reynolds Woodcock. “We both started laughing
so deeply and so hard that I suddenly had tears pouring down my face,” Anderson
said in 2017. “I thought, We can’t do that, right? Of course we can’t. But . . . we have to
do that! ”
Thus, the constant straight-faced utterance of the protagonist’s name functions as
a running yet never explicit gag; it may be recognizably shared with a shore bird, but
if the name immediately rang to its creators as a sexual double entendre, it would
inevitably have the same effect on a significant segment of the audience. When the
film was released, Oliver Lunn described such ambiguously crass elements as func-
tioning “like a grenade thrown towards the conformity of British cinema.” While
Phantom Thread was primarily greeted as Hitchcock pastiche, this vein of tonal
uncanniness—a blend of psychologically fraught drama and irreverent subversion
that complicates the process of generic classification—points directly back to the
qualities in Downey’s and Demme’s work that Anderson cited in his earliest inter-
views. It is the invisible and seemingly paradoxical thread of considerate self-interest
that draws his varied filmography into alignment.
As much as it may be a movie about the adult film industry, or about the mean-
ing of family, or about the twilight of the 1970s, Boogie Nights is a movie about
cocaine. The drug plays a key role in the downward spirals of Dirk, Amber, and their
associates, and most likely claims the life of one unlucky minor character during the
first pool-party sequence. Yet beyond this plot function, the drug’s effects infuse the
storytelling itself, with the kinetic zooms and pans and the rapid editing evoking
cocaine’s euphoric, adrenalized effects. This style, and its application to the story of
a wide-eyed young man’s entanglement with an illicit subculture, is what Anderson
adopted from Goodfellas—“that kind of cocaine energy,” as he later described it.
Thus, the appropriation of Scorsesean camerawork was not just a superficial stylis-
tic affectation; rather, it was an effort to absorb Scorsese’s method of externalizing
themes and apply it to Anderson’s own milieu.

50 on influences
 This reproduction of the thematic and stylistic qualities of films inspiring his own
is emblematic of Anderson’s approach to his influences during his first three films,
one I consider—and will hereafter refer to as—a parallel approach to influence. In
Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia, Anderson makes use of influential elements
in a manner that does not substantially alter their context and effects, and as much
as he defended this practice at the time (“Every song we hear now is a Beatles song,”
he said on the Boogie Nights commentary, “the job is just building on top of [the
Beatles’ template]”), it limits the interpretive value of the films; comparing Boogie
Nights to Goodfellas, or Magnolia to Short Cuts, provides few avenues of provoca-
tive comparison and reveals few new layers of effect or intent. Following this phase,
however—and quite likely in response, at least subconsciously, to his frustration with
comparisons to Altman in discussions of Magnolia—he began approaching his influ-
ences in a way that I classify as more of an oblique approach, in which the absorption
of influence reconfigures context, yielding films that often function as ironic coun-
terpoints to their ostensible inspirations, providing new interpretive lenses for both
the product and its sources. Though this is not an entirely clean break—several of
his ensuing films do have arguably parallel approaches to their influences—his films
would never again be so overtly reverent of their inspirations, nor so beholden to
their stylistic and thematic toolkits.
Returning first to Boogie Nights, the parallel approach to Goodfellas and Nashville
is so clear that it hardly bears further analysis beyond the preceding pages and
the additional quarter-century of cultural discussion. Somewhat more complex is
the inspiration that Anderson derived from Golden Age musicals—a perpetual and
rich vein of influence—which can be considered, if not an oblique influence, then
at least an ironic one. As Anderson noted, both at the time of release and in the
years after, Singin’ in the Rain (1952) formed a key reference point for Boogie Nights,
given that both deal with the tumultuous transition from one era of filmmaking to
another—from silent pictures to synced sound in the earlier film, and from celluloid
to video in Anderson’s. Yet despite their radical differences in tone and content, the
milieux and themes are similar enough that there is little subversion beyond the
surface-level swapping of mainstream cinema for pornography.
This trend of parallel influence is established in Hard Eight (and Cigarettes & Coffee
before it), which bears an obvious debt to both the writing and plotting of David
Mamet. As Anderson acknowledged in 1998, “My mission [while learning to write]
was to rip off David Mamet,” and his unquestioning reverence for Mamet even
provoked him to pass in a page from the screenplay of the then-unproduced Hoffa
(1992) under his own name during his two-day stint at NYU. The stunt was allegedly
a test to see whether the teacher would dare to inadvertently give a poor mark to the
work of a lauded writer; when the assignment was handed back with a C+, Anderson
felt secure in his conviction that the school had nothing to teach him, even as the
anecdote would seem to demonstrate little more than his own unwavering faith in
Mamet’s indisputable skill.
With its hyper-specific dialogue delivered by con artists of various stripes, all of
them lurking in the seedier corners of the gambling community, Mamet’s House of
Games was an inescapable comparison point for Hard Eight, and one that Anderson

on influences 51
openly invited. Other reference points include Bob le flambeur (1956), an influence
so parallel that Anderson suggests on the Hard Eight DVD commentary that he
probably owes Jean-Pierre Melville “a lot of money” for creating a story with such a
similar plot, and White Heat (1949), to which he conceived Hard Eight as a specula-
tive sequel: “Imagine if [James Cagney’s character] lived . . . and he’s gotta pay for
what he’s done.” Though this thought experiment hardly constitutes ripping off the
earlier film, it is nevertheless an undeniably parallel influence.
As I have mentioned, Anderson was reticent to acknowledge Short Cuts as a con-
scious influence on Magnolia, willing to recognize the similarity only in retrospect:
“I did it in spite of myself,” he told Sandra Benedetti in 2000. “Short Cuts is one of
the films written in my genes.” But the influences that he did consciously draw
from are no less parallel: in the behind-the-scenes feature That Moment, Anderson
is shown screening Network (1976) for the crew during preproduction and is later
heard mentioning that Ordinary People (1980) will be the next screening. Such
screenings are a common practice as directors attempt to convey a desired mood to
their collaborators—according to popular legend, Stanley Kubrick showed his crew
Eraserhead (1977) prior to shooting The Shining (1980) in order to convey the sense
of uncanny dread with which he hoped to infuse his foray into supernatural horror,
while prior to shooting Eraserhead, Lynch screened Sunset Boulevard (1950) for his
own crew in order to convey a hazily defined feeling of monochrome dreaminess—
but Anderson’s selections are notable for their clear parallels in both plot and theme
to his planned film. Network is a satire of television production featuring a broad-
caster coming apart at the seams, a description that could be similarly applied to the
What Do Kids Know? storyline, while Ordinary People is a melodrama concerning
a traumatized family wrestling with resentment over one another’s complicity in
their shared pain, a clear analog to the stories of the Gator and Partridge families.
Describing the Network parallel in her book on Magnolia, Christina Lane writes that
Anderson’s film “does not so much re-work or renovate as it reiterates the earlier
film’s concerns,” and the same is true of virtually every film that Anderson drew
from during his “thesis” phase.
Beginning with Punch-Drunk Love, Anderson shifted toward—to borrow Lane’s
terms—reworking and renovating the films that inspire his own, and this practice
has opened a richer avenue for analysis of his intentions and craft. Two of the most
often cited influences on Punch-Drunk Love are Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967) and
Fred Astaire’s MGM musicals, and while neither citation feels entirely counterintui-
tive, both take a certain creativity of interpretation to bring into focus. Tati’s film—
part of a series in which he played the largely silent, bumbling Monsieur Hulot as a
midcentury twist on Chaplin’s Little Tramp—is a plot-light social satire, and while
it shares a certain incredulity toward modern social and technological conventions,
Anderson uses this disconnect between protagonist and surroundings for agonizing
social discomfort that would be unthinkable for the sanguine Hulot.
In Astaire’s musicals—not just his legendary pairings with Ginger Rogers but
also the Technicolor spectacle The Band Wagon (1953), which Anderson cites as a
partial inspiration for Barry’s blue suit, telling Dave Kehr in 2002, “it’s an MGM
suit”—Anderson values what he has described as “a bouncing-ball kind of flavor,”

52 on influences
and he claimed to emulate this buoyancy in his own take on romantic comedy. The
classic Astaire-Rogers vehicles, he said, “were make-out movies . . . good movies to
kiss by,” and when asked whether he considered his own film a make-out movie, he
responded, “It was meant to be.” Yet while there are certainly memorable passages
of romantic bliss in Punch-Drunk Love, it’s a film that is just as often lonely and
violent, with a plot driven by sexual repression and shame. To locate the influence
of the virtuosic Astaire—outside the burst of joyful soft-shoe that Barry executes
while stockpiling pudding—one has to interpret Barry’s unnaturally balletic final
assault on the four blonde brothers as a brutal take on a production number. The
scene carries a certain bouncing-ball flavor, but it’s an uncomfortable one reflecting
Anderson’s revision of the source text—an oblique influence.
This urge to complicate genre classification continued with There Will Be Blood,
with Anderson’s nods to The Shining (which partially inspired Greenwood’s score,
and which Jason Sperb has suggested influenced the design of Plainview’s bowling
alley) pointing toward his eventual argument that the film was intended more as
horror than historical epic. Though his other primary touchstone, The Treasure of
the Sierra Madre (1948), is an arguably parallel influence, there is a clear patina of
Kubrickian otherworldliness; Anderson has denied any conscious influence, but crit-
ics and audiences have routinely argued for parallels with 2001: A Space Odyssey in
both the silent desert-set opening that sees Plainview in his most primordial form,
and in the framing of his eventual murder of Eli Sunday, which bears a conspicu-
ous resemblance to the ape’s murder of his rival that closes the first act of Kubrick’s
film. There Will Be Blood may be a classic “vinegar” tale (as Anderson described the
inspirational flavor of Treasure of the Sierra Madre), but it is infused with just as
much horror and science fiction, reconfiguring the meaning of each source through
proximity to the others.
With The Master and Inherent Vice, Anderson’s oblique approach broadened to
encompass not just genre but format, as he looked to nonfilmic resources in conceiv-
ing his projects. Key among the collage of influences that make up The Master is the
John Huston documentary Let There Be Light (1946), which details the treatment of
veterans recently returned from World War II and suffering what would eventually
be termed posttraumatic stress disorder. Anderson re-creates several scenes whole-
cloth in the opening act of The Master, adopting Huston’s technique of studying the
faces of these traumatized soldiers in order to infer their restrained distress and plac-
ing passages of unscripted dialogue in the mouths of his actors, including Joaquin
Phoenix, whose poignant description of an overwhelming attack of nostalgia comes
directly from a genuine testimonial. The result is a sequence with the feel of docu-
drama even as it is presented with a meticulous calibration of framing and lighting
that distinguishes it as fiction.
For Inherent Vice, meanwhile, Anderson drew a major visual influence from
Gilbert Shelton’s independent comic series The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, which
launched in 1971 with the ongoing misadventures of a trio of marijuana enthusiasts
traversing the margins of the counterculture in search of their next joint. During
preproduction, Anderson described The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers as a “research
bible,” and the eventual film mimicked not just the milieu of the strip but its

on influences 53
physical properties; Shelton’s square frames, Anderson said, were a major contribut-
ing factor to the use of the 1.85:1 aspect ratio. “If it had been [Cinemascope] it would
have been the wrong feeling for this,” he said. “Too big.”
Inherent Vice features another key oblique influence, in the form of the slapstick
comedies that Anderson emulated in creating a Pynchonesque world. During inter-
views, Anderson frequently mentioned the work of David and Jerry Zucker, particu-
larly the short-lived TV series Police Squad! (1982), as a key reference point; Pynchon’s
book is hardly filled with the pratfalls and sight gags associated with the Zucker
school of comedy, but Anderson utilized these tools by way of visualizing the internal
experience of reading the book. “The film [should] feel like the book feels,” he said
in 2014. “Just packed with stuff. And fun.” As convenient as it might have been to
take direct inspiration from Altman’s The Long Goodbye (as it’s so easy to imagine a
younger Anderson doing), the choice to draw inspiration from more unexpected
sources creates a film with far greater potential for revisitation and interpretation.
With Phantom Thread, Anderson returned to more overtly cinephilic reference
points, yet his parallel absorption of influence possesses qualities of obliqueness—a
synthesis of the two modes, with parallel influence now functioning as implicit com-
mentary on the self-evident forebear. As has been noted early and often, Phantom
Thread bears a strong similarity to Rebecca, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 adaptation of
Daphne du Maurier’s novel: in both stories, a young woman meets a melancholic yet
forbidding older man during his coastal retreat, returns to his lavish yet restrictive
home as mistress, and falls under the disapproving eye of his officious domestic aide-
de-camp while struggling to assert herself rather than lose her identity in an increas-
ingly distant and claustrophobic relationship. Yet where the analogous character in
Rebecca remains largely passive, credulously susceptible to influence and saved only
by dei ex machina, Alma is a restless, assertive character further radicalized by each
of Reynolds’s and Cyril’s successive attempts to subdue her.
Rather than limit himself to this single revision, however, Anderson pulls in a
bevy of Hitchcockian reference points, from re-creating iconic imagery (Reynolds’s
peephole observation of the House of Woodcock fashion show bears a distinct
resemblance to Norman Bates’s illicit observation of Marion Crane in Psycho [1960],
an evocation that creates an unseemly undertone in Reynolds’s wistfulness for his
departed mother) to a broader exploration of overarching themes. Reynolds’s efforts
to sculpt women’s figures, an ostensibly generous but covertly domineering practice,
calls to mind the psychotic and ultimately destructive refashioning of one woman
in another’s image in Vertigo (1958), a theme widely interpreted as an expression of
Hitchcock’s own controlling tendencies toward his actresses.
For as unabashed as these references may be, there is a distinct tonal difference
between Anderson’s repurposing of Hitchcockian material in Phantom Thread and
his prior repurposing of Scorsesean material in Boogie Nights. Where that earlier pas-
tiche was a dead-end avenue for analysis, pointing at a preexisting work while doing
no meaningful revision that might invite revealing comparisons between the two,
Anderson’s Hitchcock pastiche serves several intriguing functions. The nods to these
thrillers more openly concerned with male psychosis generate menacing undertones
to the characterization of Reynolds Woodcock without requiring any overt story

54 on influences
Reynolds observes the House of Woodcock fashion show in a precise re-creation of a shot from Psycho.
(Focus Features)

conceits, as well as inviting a suggestion of hauntedness into a film with no clear evi-
dence of ghostly presence. The fact that the film is so often read as Anderson’s effort
at self-reflection also intersects with his choice to prominently reference a director
known for mistreatment of his collaborators, deepening the argument that the film
may function on some level as confessional without requiring any visibly autobio-
graphical element (“The movie’s initials would be P.T.,” John Anderson points out,
“if that’s not overthinking it”). More than ever before, Anderson openly paired
Phantom Thread with a preexisting canon, amplifying the resonance of each rather
than simply echoing the earlier work.
Such an argument on Phantom Thread ’s richness is potentially hindered by
the requisite level of familiarity with both Hitchcock’s work and the decades of
critical discussion surrounding it. It is thus worth considering whether Anderson’s
increasingly complex permutations of cinephilic pastiche have yet transcended the
hollowness with which Jason Sperb pegged Boogie Nights. With Phantom Thread hav-
ing been so instantly recognized for its “clear dramatic model” in Rebecca (as Adam
Nayman wrote in his 2018 review for Sight & Sound ), it finds a convenient com-
parison point in the official remake—or at least readaptation of the novel—directed
by Ben Wheatley and released in 2020. If one of the two could be plausibly deemed
“hollow,” it would certainly not be Anderson’s technically accomplished and the-
matically knotty story, which stands in stark contrast to Wheatley’s dramatically list-
less and visually garish stroll through analogous plot points. This case study of two
Rebecca revisions lends some credence to comments that Anderson offered on the
notion of remakes in 1998: “Just rip it off. . . . Don’t call it a remake. . . . Just give it
another title. Isn’t recreating and rehashing and ripping off and riffing off patterns
that have already been created part of what we do?” (In an amusing instance of dra-
matic irony, Anderson facetiously reversed course at the end of his answer, saying that
on second thought, “maybe those Hitchcock movies can be done better.”)

on influences 55
 This quote would seem to offer a smoking gun to Anderson’s detractors, those
who see at least some of his films as little more than an assemblage of quotes and
thefts. Yet his comments are evocative of a tradition that far exceeds his own film-
ography, from his peers to their forebears. What are Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill
duology (2003, 2004) and Death Proof (2007)—overt pastiches of kung-fu and
exploitation fare, respectively—if not (to paraphrase Jason Sperb) allegories for
the director’s own cinephilic upbringing? What is Wes Anderson’s use of nested
aspect-ratio shifts across the timelines of The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) if not
an overtly cinephilic method of evoking theme? For that matter, what separates
these directors’ open revisions of their influences from Francis Ford Coppola’s
self-conscious reworking of classic musicals, One from the Heart (1981), Martin
Scorsese’s own New York, New York (1977), or Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of
Rochefort (1967)?
As an example of arguable cinephilic hollowness with a closer link to Anderson,
in 2002 Jonathan Demme remade Charade (1963) with The Truth About Charlie, a
film that Anderson aided in brainstorming. Rather than either mimic the specific
frothy charms of Stanley Donen’s original or strip away all stylization in favor of a
realistic approach, Demme made the more counterintuitive choice to densely pack
this Parisian story with references to French films made during the time of Donen’s
production. Saying later that he had conceived the film as a gesture of gratitude to
filmmakers who inspired his own formal idiosyncrasies, Demme cast several nou-
velle vague luminaries to appear briefly on screen and break the fourth wall by gazing
silently at the camera (as with director Agnès Varda) or incongruously interacting
with the milieu (as with Shoot the Piano Player [1960] star Charles Aznavour), while
contributing little of value to the story. The choice is nothing if not cinephilic, func-
tioning as a dog whistle to those with an awareness of midcentury European film
culture, and while the execution may have been judged unsatisfactory—in his review
for CNN, Paul Clinton declared these “nice little flourishes can’t make up for the
mind-numbing dullness of [Demme’s] exercise in futility”—it represents a grasp at
the sort of energetic interpolation of text, subtext, and context that Anderson would
achieve more effectively with Phantom Thread.
In promoting The Truth About Charlie, Demme discussed the influence of
Truffaut’s jolts of formal prankishness on his own development as a storyteller. Late
in Shoot the Piano Player, a gangster follows a deadly lie by inviting God to strike his
mother dead should he not be telling the truth; at this point, the film abruptly cuts to
an elderly woman collapsing, only for the narrative to resume without ever acknowl-
edging the split-second infusion of dark comedy. “That was a defining moment in
my moviegoing life,” Demme told the Chicago Tribune in 2002. “It was like, ‘You
can do that?! I thought this movie was kind of serious.’ ” The dead-mother gag had
a similar early impact on Anderson, who cites the moment as inspiring a cutaway in
Hard Eight that shows John’s pocket matchbook bursting into flames in the midst of
his recounting of the anecdote. Thus, if Anderson’s Demme influence is pronounced
and detectable, this allegiance is due in large part to a shared root in the artistic family
tree—the cinematic equivalent of the Beatles tunes in which he once argued that all
popular musicians found their roots.

56 on influences
 For as much as this thread of formal experimentation may serve to self-consciously
link Anderson’s work to the preceding decades, there is a more sentimental influence
at work between his films and Demme’s oeuvre. “Even Jonathan’s darkest movies are
hopeful,” Anderson said in 2017. “I take inspiration from that.” This quote comes
from an interview promoting Phantom Thread, a film dedicated to Demme (who
died while it was in production), and that sense of resilient optimism is palpable in
some form in virtually every Anderson film. The most significant exception would
have to be the utter annihilation of There Will Be Blood, which bears its own closing
dedication card, this time to then recently deceased Altman. Appropriately for his
association with the bitterest of Andersonian endings, Perkins sees Anderson’s nego-
tiation with Altman’s legacy as centering on his efforts to temper Altman’s “cynical
view of the capacity for human interaction.”
Licorice Pizza carries a dedication card, as well: “For Robert Downey Sr. (a
prince),” a winking reference to Downey’s preferred credit on his own work. Though
the film had been shot and edited prior to Downey’s death in 2021, it is appropriate
that this card be appended to a film that ends with the truest sexual transgression
of any Anderson feature: a legality-flouting kiss and a declaration of love between
an adult and a minor that leaves open the possibility that further taboos might be
broken soon enough. Yet as much nose-thumbing social satire as might be present in
Licorice Pizza—even the controversial faux-Japanese accents feel, if anything, like a
throwback to the sort of brazenly insensitive caricatures found in Putney Swope—the
abiding spirit is closer to Demme’s work, particularly the films he produced in the
1970s and early ’80s.
In such works as Crazy Mama (1975), Citizens Band (1977), and Melvin and Howard
(1980), Demme examined American strivers along the margins of society, often flirt-
ing with transgressive realignments of the social order. In these films, as Michael
Bliss and Christina Banks write in What Goes Around Comes Around: The Films of
Jonathan Demme, the director proposes an “ellipsis of karma, which . . . demonstrates
that battling the prevailing social system by mimicking or appropriating its excessive
behaviors . . . is, in the end, an exercise in futility.” Here is a collection of “comic
[films] with a serious democratic premise” concerning the inalienable right to pursue
happiness, even if it means transgressing the strictures of traditional monogamy
(as in the tri-partner arrangements arrived at in Crazy Mama and Citizens Band ) or
acceptable flirtation (as in Licorice Pizza). Demme’s aims were often more pointedly
social—these interrogations of the status quo would ultimately lead to a parallel path
in social justice as his documentary work took a turn toward the humanitarian—than
Anderson’s own apolitical ends. But in the largely referenceless Licorice Pizza (give or
take the occasional flourish, such as the opening cherry bomb that precisely restages
a beat from American Graffiti [1973]), this spiritual alignment with the Demme films
of his own adolescence would seem appropriate.
Christina Lane sees Anderson’s open emulation of his forebears as represent-
ing his persistent interest in the issue of paternity, both biological and surrogate,
and the grapple between children and the legacy of their fathers. “Anderson’s self-
construction as a ‘son’ of such surrogate fathers [as Altman and Demme] signals that
an auteur cannot transcend such factors as historical context or industry conditions,”

on influences 57
Lane writes; Anderson’s referential tendencies can be seen as “formalizing his own
sense of inheritance.” Julian Murphet takes up this notion of Anderson as heir, but
pivots to view him as implicit patriarch of his own productions, a comparison that
became explicit with Licorice Pizza. “My years as a dad came into play,” Anderson
said of his experience directing minors. “Just knowing the management of moods
and emotions.” He would echo this sentiment to Adam Nayman: “You’d be sur-
prised how much of directing is just sort of parenting.” In what might feel almost
like the fulfillment of some preordination, Anderson stepped into the role of a more
wholesome Jack Horner. By “striving to be nothing less than the filial amalgam of
all the dead fathers” who inspired him (in Murphet’s words), Anderson has at last
transcended the bounds of simple writer-director-producer and become “the daddy
of his world.”

58 on influences
four
On Domesticity

“i have an unsettled feeling,” Reynolds Woodcock tells his sister, Cyril, late
in the first act of Phantom Thread. The feeling is not caused by the termination of his
relationship with his most recent lover (or “live-in lady friend,” as she is described
in Anderson’s shooting script, an appropriately detached title befitting the emotion-
ally unavailable Reynolds), Johanna (Camilla Rutherford), whose ousting has been
outsourced to Cyril; nor is his ennui rooted in professional exhaustion following his
recent completion of a lavish gown for Countess Henrietta Harding (Gina McKee).
Instead, this unsettled feeling is the result of a recent and unusually acute awareness
of his late mother’s absence. “I’ve been having the strongest memories of Mama
lately,” Reynolds admits, shifting nervously in his customary booth at an upscale
London restaurant. “Coming to me in my dreams. Smelling her scent.”
Phantom Thread is most easily classified as a romance, and the relationship between
Reynolds and Alma—the woman who will soon be his new live-in lady friend, and
eventually his wife—is very much the film’s primary focus. Yet that classification
belies the complex network of domestic connections traced within Anderson’s eighth
feature. Running parallel to Reynolds’s relationship with Alma is his codependent
one with Cyril, Cyril’s contentious one with Alma, and the intrusive memory of
the deceased Woodcock matriarch, an absent but no less powerful force in motivat-
ing the story and its mercurial shifts of emotional temperature. When George Toles
asserted, in the interim between The Master and Inherent Vice, that Anderson’s films
deal covertly with the “perilous, irrational drama with the hidden mother,” he could
scarcely have predicted how thoroughly that thesis would be borne out in Anderson’s
later story of metaphorical haunting.
Thus, while Phantom Thread may be occasionally romantic, it is more significantly
Romantic in the manner of eighteenth-century philosophers and artists overwhelmed
by the ungovernable power of the human heart, an awe expressed through “the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” that characterized Romantic poetry (as
described by William Wordsworth). This sense of sublime yearning is common to
Anderson’s depiction of human connection; taken in aggregate, his career emerges as
a century-spanning study of alienated characters fumbling toward some interrelation
that might soothe their own unsettledness. Much as Reynolds might long to believe
that his mother is “near . . . and reaching out,” virtually every Anderson protago-
nist nurses a primal sense of some lost paradise—suffering the effects of nostalgia,
as Freddie Quell laughs awkwardly when questioned about his unexplained crying
jag—and they each assemble some flawed coping mechanism in hopes of salving the
eternal psychic wound. Surrogate families and father figures are two of the most dis-
cussed aspects of Anderson’s filmography, but this focus elides a more expansive vision
of connection. And the more this thematic cosmology is examined, the more contra-
dictions begin to emerge. What subtextual currents run beneath the alienated yearn-
ing of Anderson’s characters? And what does this longing suggest about his broader
storytelling philosophy?
Anderson’s choice of domestic themes fraught with highly specific psychological
anxieties—abandonment and rejection, abuse, and erotic transference, to name just
a few—combined with his general reluctance to discuss his personal life, has tempted
some viewers to trace implicit parallels. “In a lot of ways,” Mim Udovitch wrote in
2000, “Anderson’s life is like one of those foreign language books that have the origi-
nal text on one page and the English translation on the facing page. There is his actual
life, which remains largely opaque, and there is the cinematic translation that he puts
up there on the screen.” The last thing I wish to do is perpetuate a cycle of armchair
psychological profiling; however, a few salient facts do seem valuable in examining
the resonance of his recurrent interests.
Anderson’s relationship with his father, Ernie, was by all accounts a strong one.
Though some journalists presumed that the acrimony between fathers and children
in Magnolia may have had some basis in his feelings toward his own father, he
hastened to clarify that this is “not at all [true], not even close.” Indeed, in 2015,
Anderson claimed not to recall any period of significant conflict between himself and
his father; if any relationship in Magnolia is based in reality, Anderson said in 2000,
it is the tender sickbed vigil between Phil Parma and Earl, the grim details of whose
battle with cancer he modeled directly on observations of Ernie’s own fatal illness.
The film is so infused with Anderson’s feelings surrounding his father’s 1997 death
that even the initially baffling rain of frogs can be partially sourced to this trauma.
As he said in 2015, “Hearing that your dad is gonna die is as bizarre as hearing that
frogs are raining from the sky.”
Ernie was supportive of Paul’s burgeoning interest in film, providing not only the
necessary equipment but his professional voice-over talents as the narrator of The
Dirk Diggler Story. The two lived together during the period between Paul’s with-
drawal from NYU (a decision Ernie supported) and production on Cigarettes &
Coffee; the custom in that short film of prohibiting important discussion until “the
coffee is poured, and the tip of the cigarette is lit” was apparently taken directly from
Ernie’s own morning ritual. Anderson notes in the DVD commentary for Hard Eight
that those who knew Ernie have observed considerable overlap between the elder
Anderson and the stoic, exacting Sydney, while Ernie’s longtime friend, Tim Conway,
saw his influence in the “carefree, freewheeling” Jack Horner. John H. Richardson
characterizes Paul’s admiration of Ernie as closer to worship, and though neither
Sydney nor Jack is presented in an overtly hagiographic light, their plainspoken—if

60 on domesticity
not unconditional—devotion to the hangdog youths under their influence bespeaks
an implicit admiration.
Details of Anderson’s relationship with Edwina are somewhat murkier, as this
seemingly contentious bond has been sketched in only via brief comments and even
more telling silences. In a 1997 profile, Mim Udovitch asked about Anderson’s rela-
tionship with his father and received a lengthy and evidently relaxed response, but
when the topic turned to his mother, Anderson went quiet, saying that the only way
“[it] would feel healthy or okay” for him to address issues of motherhood would be to
discuss the maternal characters in Boogie Nights. For many years, his only comments
on his mother came in the form of such overt discussion-sans-discussion. He has
never said directly that Dirk Diggler’s hyperbolically cruel mother (Joanna Gleason)
was based on his own recollections of Edwina, but he has come as close as conceiv-
ably possible. Speaking to Creative Screenwriting in 1998, Anderson recalled viewers
criticizing the scene in which Dirk’s mother berates him—“You can’t do anything!
You’ll always be a loser! . . . You’re not going to be shit, because you’re too stupid!”—
for its outrageous and seemingly unmotivated venom. “I really wrote what made
sense,” is all the explanation Anderson could offer, “and I’ve sure been there.” In the
DVD commentary, he returned to audiences’ displeasure with the confrontational
scene, admitting, “it was coming from a personal place, and I was sort of blinded
and wasn’t doing the best job as a storyteller.” Yet the substance of that failure, he
went on to clarify, was one not of indulgence but restraint. “I wish it was ten minutes
longer . . . [I’d] try and figure out better where the hell she’s coming from. Maybe it
was just too easy to think that she’s nuts. ’Cause she is nuts! But why is she nuts?”
With time, Anderson has seemed increasingly willing to speak about his mother,
and with a more magnanimous tone than these prior indications might have pre-
dicted. This change in tenor seems largely motivated by his own experiences as a
parent; in a 2012 Q&A, he referenced Edwina’s internal struggle to support his early,
single-minded focus on filmmaking: “I probably guess [that] was quite a risk . . .
which I completely can see now as a parent.” In 2015, when Marc Maron asked after
his mother, Anderson casually responded, “She’s good,” and described a recent visit
in which she observed his efforts to parent his four small children: “I just got down
on my knees,” Anderson recalled, “and I said, ‘I’m so sorry for every single thing
I ever did to you.’ ”
Anderson has four siblings, as well as five half-siblings from Ernie’s first marriage,
none of whom are public figures. He professes to have positive relationships with all
of them, has cited one sister as a trusted early reader of his screenplays, and recalls
his half-siblings—all of them significantly older—as epitomizing cool to his young
sensibilities (Ernie was forty-seven when Paul was born; Edwina was thirty). In 1999,
the period of his most effortful cultivation of brand-name auteurism, Anderson
proclaimed, “the simplest, most direct way I can say it [is]: my movies are about
family.” With the benefit of two decades’ hindsight, the statement seems simultane-
ously apt and misleading. There are few stable families within the Anderson canon,
and fewer happy ones. More than anything, his films concern the fraught and tenu-
ous idea of family, and the emotional fallout that can result for want of traditional
domestic stability.

on domesticity 61
 Reynolds Woodcock is relatively lucky compared to other Anderson protago-
nists, being alienated from his mother only by death. The conventional nuclear
family tends to be irrevocably sullied in an Anderson film, a base from which the
protagonist is expelled, or at least eternally alienated. Dirk Diggler leaves home
following that controversial confrontation with his mother, never to see either
of his parents again, though the published screenplay does include a sequence of
Dickensian tragic coincidence: Dirk returns to his childhood home after the shoot-
out with Rahad Jackson only to find the house now occupied by his ex-girlfriend,
Sheryl Lynn, who informs him that his parents were killed in a collision with an
inebriated Johnny Doe, successor to Dirk’s stardom. Frank T. J. Mackey is aban-
doned, and Claudia Gator abused, resulting in bitter estrangement even once their
fathers attempt atonement. Barry Egan may attend family gatherings, but he seems
as emotionally repelled by them as a magnet meeting its like pole, while Alana
Kane seems constitutionally unable to keep from lashing out at her family over
the slightest perceived provocation. The emotionally inhibited Daniel Plainview
can only gesture at a similar repulsion, grunting “I couldn’t stay there” when asked
about his upbringing, and while Freddie Quell suggests a rosier past with a refer-
ence to a memory of his family in happy times, we soon learn that his father died
of alcoholism and his mother was institutionalized, casting the reliability of such a
comforting recollection into doubt.
As for Reynolds and Cyril, Anderson offers only enough details for the viewer to
form a hazy impression of their upbringing. Reynolds tells Alma that his father died
“many years before” his own sixteenth birthday, at which point his mother remarried,
and a handful of subsequent tossed-off lines invite potentially dark interpretation:
when Alma asks after the location of his mother’s wedding dress, he professes not
to know what became of his first work, suggesting only that it’s “probably ashes.”
For a man who takes such pride in his work and so cherishes his mother’s memory,
using language that evokes violent destruction is curious. Could there be more to
the story of Reynolds’s relationship with his stepfather—never again alluded to in
any form—than he lets on? We are offered even fewer details about Alma’s family.
Anderson intentionally leaves her background vague in the finished film, and though
the choice is appropriately evocative of Rebecca (in which the central character is
never even granted a first name), it certainly contributes to some viewers’ observa-
tion of Anderson’s frequent relative disinterest in the interiority of his female charac-
ters; Aleksandar Hemon sees Phantom Thread maintaining a trend that began with
Boogie Nights, as Anderson’s “obsessions and self-conception” are repeatedly expressed
through “masculinized landscapes in which power is flexed, challenged, then flexed
again.” Anderson’s screenplay offers a few excised lines of dialogue that do provide
significant explanation for behaviors that appear enigmatic in the final product: dur-
ing their first date, Alma tells Reynolds about her older sister, to whom she feels a sig-
nificant inferiority complex; soon after, she admits that her greatest ambition in life is
to be a wife and mother. The fact that these biographical details (definitively excised
in Alma’s case, purely speculative in Reynolds’s) are left as interpretive potential rather
than settled via explicit dialogue testifies to the lightness of touch that Anderson has
developed as a screenwriter; more valuable here is the film’s status as an intriguing

62 on domesticity
inflection of the Andersonian family, providing the sole depiction across his canon of
a central nuclear family’s formation rather than its unraveling.
In two cases, Anderson has offered nuclear Valley households that seem on the
verge of entropic collapse: the homes of the Kane and Adams families. As the Kanes
seem restrictive but hardly abusive, Alana’s rebellious outbursts come across as comi-
cal, and this dissonance between a protagonist’s hostility and familial incredulity
serves as a lighthearted echo of the darker forces at work in the Adams home in
Boogie Nights. We first encounter this domestic unit over what looks to be a picture-
perfect breakfast scene, the aproned mother preparing sausage and coffee for her
brood. Once her seemingly loving husband enters and attempts a kiss, however,
she lashes out, sending the chastened man to attempt morning small talk with their
teenage son, onto whom the mother’s virulent criticism then falls. Later, during her
verbal assault on the night of Dirk’s final departure, the camera cuts briefly to a shot
of his father in the master bedroom, hunched at the edge of his bed as he listens
ineffectually to the brawling pair. Anderson catches a family at the moment when
tenuous equilibrium finally gives way to dissolution, and the fact that the finished
product never casts a glance back toward the home front—nor offers any indication
of nostalgia or regret on Dirk’s part—cements the cynical take on this nuclear family
as barely worthy of regard, let alone redemption.
The passive neglect of Dirk’s father, hinted at via his pathetic inability to intervene
on his son’s behalf, stands in contrast to the far more active neglect and abuse com-
mitted by fathers in Hard Eight and Magnolia. Though the circumstances of Sydney’s
estrangement from his children are left vague, the scene in which he confesses that
estrangement to Clementine over diner coffee is punctuated when a nameless father
at a nearby table loses his temper with his own family and storms off alone. The
choice can be read as a symbolic flashback—or, at the very least, tacit echoing—of
Sydney’s own behavior, as though his calculated repression has been displaced into
a burst of analogous emotion. And to the extent that the deliberately disunified
Magnolia can be said to have any unifying plot thread, it is Earl’s abandonment of
Frank as well as Jimmy’s abuse of Claudia, two long-ago sins with reverberations felt
in every digression taken during the fateful day depicted on screen.
Anderson’s emergence as a filmmaker coincided with a moment of reckoning in
American culture that forced reassessments of many preestablished gender norms
and sexual taboos. In his 2001 article “After the Phallus,” Loren Glass positions the
Clinton impeachment (proceeding from the earlier taboo-breaking media coverage
of the Lorena Bobbitt case) as “an unprecedented unmasking” of long-guarded patri-
archal systems. “All this attention to the President’s penis reveals . . . that the tradi-
tional discourses of masculine symbolic authority are disintegrating,” Glass writes,
creating space for directors—not just Anderson but as stylistically diverse an array as
Alexander Payne, Sam Mendes, and Trey Parker and Matt Stone—to abandon tradi-
tional mores surrounding the treatment of the phallus and all its implicit significance,
“[inaugurating] an entirely new sex/gender system in American public culture.”
The revised role of the father—whether biological, surrogate, or symbolic—forms
a significant underpinning in Anderson’s first four features, with Magnolia serving as
something of a patriarchal apocalypse. The rain of frogs washes clean the sins of the

on domesticity 63
father and paves the way for Punch-Drunk Love’s blighted postpatriarchal landscape
in which parents—the conventional domestic center keeping the Andersonian uni-
verse in balance, even from the past—are narratively nonexistent. This leaves a void
to be filled by the dysfunctional surrogate presences of the teeming mass of siblings
and the bloviating would-be godfather. As conventional wisdom has long held—and
Anderson claimed to be “starting to decipher” himself in 2000—it is this sort of ad
hoc order assembled in the wake of parental rejection or abandonment that consti-
tutes his primary thematic interest. But the provocative implications of Barry’s post-
patriarchal wasteland, not to mention any other Andersonian nuclear-family fallout,
serve as a deft cover for Anderson’s ultimately patriarchal imaginative boundaries.
Hard Eight and Boogie Nights set a template for Anderson studies that persists to
this day: his films are predominantly focused on the seductive power of surrogate
family, in which a chosen father might divest the child of the failures of the inef-
fectual biological one. Yet if the chosen family is positioned as the road to liberation,
either as a new home base (for Dirk and the rest of Jack’s surrogate children in Boogie
Nights) or as a waystation en route to a potentially healthier future (for John and
Clementine in Hard Eight), Anderson’s reconception of the family hews to a patriar-
chal standard. Rather than offering a radical reevaluation of familial formations, the
Andersonian surrogate family maintains its basis in the authoritative paterfamilias
and the subjugated (most often gratefully) maternal and progenitive figures.
Jesse Fox Mayshark detects an “oddly retrograde morality” in Anderson’s films,
one in which the failures of conventional American domesticity are tempered by
“an almost Leave It to Beaver-ish ideal.” The composite world painted within at least
Anderson’s first three features is based in a “perspective [that] is not just white and
middle-class, it’s white and middle-class from another era.” Whereas David O.
Russell’s taboo-breaking Oedipal play Spanking the Monkey (1994) culminates in a
maelstrom of dysfunctional violence and self-harm, Anderson’s musings on analo-
gous Freudian themes always end with a reassertion of some form of traditional
values, as though his characters are drawn eternally back toward a midcentury moral
center of gravity. Rather than proposing a definitive divergence from the American
patriarchal standard, Anderson seems most interested in broadening the range of
acceptable behaviors within it—from light experimentation with something resem-
bling sadomasochism in Punch-Drunk Love and Phantom Thread to flirtations that
push the limit of legality in Licorice Pizza.
Except for the cozy denouement of Boogie Nights that sees order restored to Jack’s
house, one could hardly say that Anderson’s films endorse the benefits of nonbio-
logical families. The “regular family business” of Daniel Plainview and his ward,
H.W., in There Will Be Blood is built on a foundation of deceit and mercenary con-
venience—for the majority of the film, the only person who knows the boy is not
his biological son is Daniel himself, as he enjoys this falsehood’s capacity to generate
sympathy—which allows it to immediately collapse once the child begins to assert
his individuality. Meanwhile, though Lancaster Dodd’s Cause may offer a sense of
belonging, it comes at the expense of psychological autonomy.
The potential for the constructed family to mutate and corrode is illustrated most
clearly in Hard Eight. There has been some divergence of interpretation regarding

64 on domesticity
Sydney’s motivation in bringing Clementine into the sanctum that he has created for
himself and John. Brian Michael Goss sees Clementine as “a ‘gift’ bequeathed by the
guilt-laden father figure to the surrogate son,” but Sydney’s interest in Clementine
is so evidently protective, and his distress at her swift union with John so raw, that it
would strike me as more reasonable to assume that Sydney is assembling a replace-
ment for his own estranged son and daughter. By trying to counterfeit a family rather
than repair his broken bonds, Sydney seems to poison the roots of the prospective
unit, and within a day of welcoming Clementine into his inner circle, the newly
formed family has been subsumed by criminality, leading Sydney cyclically back to
the lonely and regretful place in which we found him in the opening scene, but at
an even lower moral ebb.
As befits the often-rhyming nature of Daniel Day-Lewis’s two Andersonian char-
acters, Daniel Plainview’s repressed nostalgia surrounding his own upbringing echoes
Reynolds’s unsettled feeling; when Henry emerges as a presumptive half-brother,
Daniel comes perilously close to discussing how his father’s infidelities might have
affected his mother, only to retreat with a grunted, “I don’t like to explain myself.”
Given Henry’s uncontested suggestion that there was conflict between Daniel and his
father, a hazy portrait emerges of a man who feels thoroughly alienated from his own
bloodline yet still longs for some form of connection. His overarching misanthropy
(“I hate most people,” he tells Henry with a casualness more befitting an expression
of distaste for a certain food) and his belief that he possesses some worthy qualities
utterly lacking in the rest of humanity leave him with precious few sources of poten-
tial companionship. And given his impotence—implied in the film and explicit in
the screenplay—he has little chance of generating another Plainview, leaving him
able only to try to mold H.W. in his own image and to look for potential genetic
overlap with his half-brother (his inquiries as to whether Henry is angry and competi-
tive have the ring of a job interview rather than more typical introductory small talk).
Yet both H.W. and Henry ultimately let him down, their worthiness as surrogates
proving unsustainable in soothing the raw wound at the core of Daniel Plainview.
The Cause would seem the most openly corrosive of any Andersonian surrogate
family; what, after all, could be more clearly corrupt than a cult? But Anderson
complicates this depiction by building that cult (a term, it should be said, that both
Lancaster Dodd and Anderson himself eschew in describing the organization)
around one of the few traditional family units to be found in his canon: the Dodds.
With their growing numbers and civil seated dinners, Lancaster and Peggy’s brood
are a distinct rarity for an Anderson film. Though there is an indication that Dodd
carries some paranoia thanks to an unspecified number of vindictive ex-wives, this
image of a garrulous man presiding over an intergenerational roost while hosting
regular celebratory gatherings alongside a younger wife bears a distinct resemblance
to the lifestyle that the young Anderson would have observed in Ernie. Yet by posi-
tioning this smiling nuclear family as the public face of an increasingly ominous
organization—Dodd’s daughter, Elizabeth, is missing from the London-set coda,
with Peggy cryptically explaining that she is “DCF,” suggesting either ostracization
or some form of reprogramming—Anderson again evinces a sly skepticism of the
archetypal wholesomeness typically attached to the midcentury family.

on domesticity 65
 This incongruity—corn-fed all-American exterior providing cover for diabolical
machinations—recurs to more outright comic effect in Inherent Vice, as the long-
awaited sighting of the nefarious Golden Fang’s representatives comes in the form
of a family that may as well have stepped out of a Brady Bunch–style sitcom. The
moment serves as simultaneous sight gag and horror beat: the ubiquitous crime ring
has not just infiltrated middle America, it is embodied by middle America, and the
counterculture’s tragic fate is sealed. Inherent Vice is further notable for its elision of
family material. In Pynchon’s novel, Doc’s extended family is a present and warm
force in his life, including his parents, who pop in periodically as gentle comic-relief
characters largely defined by their interest in mild sexual role play. Anderson’s choice
to remove these characters has the function of isolating Doc, who would other-
wise enjoy the most traditional support system of any Anderson protagonist. The
sole intact vestige of the Sportello clan is Aunt Reet (Jeannie Berlin), glimpsed briefly
in the first act as she offers Doc intel over the phone. It is not made explicit whether
Reet is a biological aunt or if the name could be a more casual term of endearment,
but this whiff of a familial connection casts into relief Doc’s isolation throughout the
remainder of the film.
Even as Anderson’s films repeatedly demonstrate skepticism—or outright
antipathy—toward traditional family units, they do tend to end with the formation
of new ones, a development that stands in as a signifier of hope. John and Clementine
ride out of Hard Eight as seemingly blissful newlyweds, promising one another that
they will leave behind their wayward behaviors; the fact that Anderson eliminated
a pair of bleak final scenes from his shooting script (one showing John assaulting a
Niagara Falls bellhop for flirting with Clementine, another showing the victim of
their Reno assault setting out after them in search of revenge) testifies to the deliber-
ateness of his ultimate choice to grant the couple’s new life a sense of potential. Boogie
Nights ends with a baby introduced into Jack’s entourage courtesy of Buck and Jessie,

Doc meets the unexpectedly wholesome agents of the nefarious Golden Fang. (Warner Bros.)

66 on domesticity
the young family splashing in the pool in a symbolic baptismal image that cements
the regenerative hope for this downtrodden group. H.W. and Mary escape the
destructive cyclone of the Plainview mansion just in time to avoid Daniel’s psychotic
collapse—even if H.W.’s continued pursuit of the oil trade is a less decisive break than
the socialist awakening of his counterpart in Upton Sinclair’s source novel—and if we
take the closing montage of Phantom Thread as a genuine flash-forward rather than
Alma’s fantasy, then the Woodcock family will soon be expanding as well.
Given the dearth of enduring happiness among Andersonian families, looking for
hope in the establishment of a new one seems a counterintuitive task. There is cer-
tainly a fatalist reading available, a suggestion that the human condition leaves few
options beyond a Sisyphean cycle of decay and rebirth. But with his seeming inability
to conceive of any way to thoroughly break cycles of toxicity beyond regenerating
the family unit on a fresh slate—as with H.W. and Mary, or (by implication) Barry
and Lena—Anderson cements his films as irrevocably patriarchal. There is no future
except one defined by the new and hopefully more successful paterfamilias, what Goss
describes as a recuperation of “core values” suggesting “distinct limits on where Ander-
son draws the boundaries” as he critiques traditional American values. Anderson
may not be conservative in his voting record (he classified himself in 2012 as “an
over-confident Democrat”), but this standard reassertion of the traditional family as
bedrock suggests an implicit bias toward social conservatism.
With the partial support of the Indiewood iconoclasts, the turn of the millen-
nium demystified Reaganite myths of the resilient Eisenhower-era ethos. As the hol-
low bluster of Dean Trumbell (a con man with feet of clay who cuts a distinctly
Trumpian figure) was loosed into the world, the archetype of the American pater-
familias came to be viewed with widespread skepticism. Continuing to trace that
figure’s significance with the mythic heft that so clearly appeals to Anderson would
require significant reimagining, a task he evades by turning his gaze backward,
avoiding “getting bogged down” (as Peter Bradshaw wrote of Licorice Pizza) in cur-
rent-day standards of social and cultural sensitivity. Yet one might infer a certain
defeated tone in Anderson’s authorial voice as he continually elevates the regenerated
American family as a source of apparent hope. When Coy Harlingen is returned
to his wife and child at the end of Inherent Vice—the closest thing this acidic story
can muster to a truly happy ending—the reunion is framed as a man being released
“back to the main herd.” Coy’s best hope (so to speak) is to carve out some individual
pocket of bovine happiness within a hopelessly corrupt system.
Reynolds and Alma’s child is glimpsed only briefly during the impressionistic
flash-forward sequence that closes Phantom Thread. First seen being pushed in a
pram by Cyril while Reynolds and Alma steal away for a moment together, and then
glimpsed taking tentative first steps toward Alma while Reynolds looks on with an
expression of bliss, the child is a symbol of restorative potential, and so complete is
the transformation of the family’s emotional ecosystem that it is tempting to read the
entire passage as an unattainable fantasy. This use of a child to emblematize the sto-
ry’s rawest heart is representative of the use of preadolescent characters throughout
Anderson’s filmography; the persistence of that usage is particularly striking given
how stridently Magnolia argues against the practice.

on domesticity 67
 Among the many significant rhetorical questions raised in Magnolia is the issue
of whether it might be “dangerous to confuse children with angels.” The words are
first uttered by the effete barfly (Henry Gibson) who taunts Donnie throughout his
agonized efforts to woo Brad the bartender (Craig Kvinsland), interrupting one of
Donnie’s soused speeches with words of caution: “Gently, son! . . . It’s a dangerous
thing to confuse children with angels.” The line has little clear connection to the
events of the scene—is the intent to cast Brad, a man clearly Donnie’s junior but
most certainly an adult, as a child, and Donnie as a potential ephebophile? While
Donnie can be accused of projecting unrealistic potential onto this unattainable
Adonis, the phrasing is unusually tin-eared even within this often unwieldy epic
screenplay. Shortly thereafter, Donnie roars a rebuttal—“No it is not dangerous to
confuse children with angels!”—and with that, the issue of the angelic is dropped.
The entire exchange seems almost extradiegetic, the characters pausing to comment
directly on the broader themes of the story.
This resonance is soon picked up by Stanley, the young quiz-kid champion who
functions as Donnie’s paired character within the film’s dualist framework. Having
been denied the opportunity to use the bathroom until he spontaneously urinated
on live television, Stanley now lashes out at Jimmy, who has tried to offer the stu-
dio audience some genial comment on Stanley’s shamefaced distraction. “This isn’t
funny,” Stanley snaps at Jimmy. “I’m not a toy. I’m not a doll.” During this righteous
speech—in which he goes on to decry Jimmy, and, by implication, the full produc-
tion team of the show as well as the home viewer, over making him feel “silly . . . like
a freak”—Stanley is framed directly in front of a caduceus (the winged and serpent-
entwined staff synonymous with the field of medicine) so that the painted wings are
positioned directly behind his shoulder blades. This symbolism—the angelic child
asserting his worth—may not be subtle, but its implications are complex. What
does it mean, in the context of this film, to confuse children with angels? Stanley’s
speech would seem to suggest that the relevant conception of the angelic is not so
much biblical as kitschy; comparing himself to a doll conjures images of cherubic
tchotchkes that comfort adults by representing children as avatars of divine purity.
This, we might conclude, is the relevant danger: such a confusion can dehumanize
children and toxify their relationship with their ostensible caretakers.
At least at the time of the film’s production, Stanley was a character with great
personal significance for Anderson. As he describes in the interview appended to the
published shooting script, Stanley’s storyline was inspired by an anecdote shared by
Anderson’s then girlfriend, Fiona Apple: “when she first started performing, there
was a situation where she really wanted to go to the bathroom, but her managers or
whoever made her go out on the stage.” Anderson projected all his defensiveness
toward a mistreated partner onto this prepubescent character, and Stanley became
the earliest prominent example of a recurrent Andersonian figure: the pure child
worthy of protection but denied it by the forces of the adult world. There could be
no greater sin in the Anderson filmography than mistreating a child, and the primacy
of this misdeed within his moral cosmology was one that he “wanted to make . . .
very clear” with his treatment of Jimmy Gator, the ultimate child abuser. Though
Jimmy might argue that his ambiguous transgressions fell into a moral gray zone

68 on domesticity
clouded by the his own and his daughter’s faulty memories, Anderson saw no such
middle ground. “There is truly a sense of moral judgment at work with this charac-
ter,” he said of his decision to prevent Jimmy’s suicide by sending a frog ex machina
to divert the bullet from his temple and trigger a house fire. “I can’t even let him kill
himself at the end—he’s got to burn. And that’s what he deserves.”
Whereas Earl, Jimmy’s own mirroring character, is granted absolution by virtue
of his regret, Anderson leaves Jimmy abandoned by his loved ones, damned by his
inability to reconcile having committed the most grievous offense possible (even
Daniel Plainview’s bludgeoning of a man of God is looked upon more kindly).
Perhaps ironically, this moral line in the sand is one that Anderson shares with
Daniel; though he evinces contempt for virtually every adult he encounters, Daniel
looks kindly upon children—first with the evidently unforced pleasure he takes
in letting the infant H.W. explore his face during a train ride, and later when he
implicitly threatens Abel with some vague retribution should he continue beating his
daughter, Mary. Indeed, it is during H.W.’s fireside report on Mary’s abuse that we
see Daniel’s only significant moment of moral disquiet; once again, any number of
transgressions may be overlooked, but cruelty to one’s child (at least in their youth;
Daniel’s beneficence to H.W. will curdle with time) is a bridge too far.
Like both the Woodcock and Swope babies, H.W. and Mary symbolize potential
in the blighted landscape of Little Boston. Their blossoming relationship is the sto-
ry’s sole connection motivated by something other than greed or spite, and though
they will go on to follow in Daniel’s footsteps, pillaging the Earth’s natural resources
for their own gain, they are granted space as children for joy and affection. In this,
they are linked with Inherent Vice’s Amethyst Harlingen, the young daughter of the
reformed heroin addicts Coy and Hope. Though she is seen only once, playing hap-
pily while Hope solicits Doc’s services in tracking down Coy, Amethyst is drawn
increasingly toward the story’s center of gravity. With the Mickey Wolfmann case
wrapped up and Shasta’s well-being secured, Doc is left unsettled by the thought
of Amethyst’s “little kid blues” and resolves to extract Coy from the Golden Fang’s
thrall and return him to the daughter who deserves his presence in her life.
While the story makes quite clear that there is no such thing as a morally pure
adult—even the most noble among us, Crocker Fenway sneers, “lose all claim to
respect the first time they pay anybody rent” and become complicit in the hope-
lessly corrupted chain of modern capitalism—Amethyst still has a few years of true
innocence left, and Doc spends his scant capital on ensuring that her brief Edenic
period is preserved. Given her longing for a parent held captive by addiction and
vice, Amethyst echoes Amber’s son, who exists just beyond the sphere of Boogie
Nights, attempting to pierce the bubble of the film’s cocaine bacchanal; he calls Jack’s
house during the film’s first pool party, but an incredulous Maurice does not recog-
nize Amber’s birth name and thus cannot summon her for the conversation that she
professes to desire.
The screenplay for Punch-Drunk Love includes several excised scenes that might
have united and clarified this recurrent thread. Throughout the script, Barry encoun-
ters various small children and seems to have an unusually intense emotional response
each time—“God damn, they’re so beautiful,” he remarks upon seeing a baby during

on domesticity 69
his pudding-gathering mission—a trend that culminates when he sees a crying tod-
dler on his flight to Hawaii. Observing the child being comforted by its father, Barry
“wells with tears and a smile . . . we see the buildup of emotion, his veins pop from
his face and then he smiles like crazy . . . bright red and painful.” Barry’s emotion-
ally mammoth experience of children seems to function as Anderson’s storytelling
sensibility in microcosm, and in Licorice Pizza, the Andersonian fondness for chil-
dren flourishes widely enough that the Valley can be reconfigured as a sort of child’s
garden of vices, one that Olivia Rutigliano sees as akin to Oliver Twist’s London, with
Gary as Artful Dodger to a gaggle of cherubic swindlers.
When Donnie Smith howls that it is not, in fact, dangerous to confuse children
with angels, it comes in the midst of a drunken meltdown that is both preceded by
and precedent to his own wrongheaded behaviors; Donnie has just made an appoint-
ment for cosmetic dental braces in an effort to appeal to Brad, and he will soon
attempt to rob his employer to pay for that procedure. Thus, it would be fair to
question the wisdom of anything that Donnie professes to believe, and perhaps it
is indeed dangerous to confuse children with angels. Yet Donnie, for all his errors
in judgment, is a character treated with implicit empathy by the story, selected in
the closing montage as worthy of forgiveness but emblematic of how fine the line
between the forgivable and the unforgivable can be. Donnie’s wrongness, then,
comes from a place of authentic emotion and can perhaps be seen as not so much
incorrect as misguided.
In the opening sequence that introduces the film’s ensemble, we see a televised
montage of Stanley’s virtuosic performance on What Do Kids Know? (a question,
Lucy Fischer argues, that can be implicitly answered: “children decidedly know that
they are likely to be mistreated”). Among a whirlwind round of correct answers to
obscure trivia questions, Stanley shouts the name Donald W. Winnicott. Though we
do not hear the question that triggered this response, a certain segment of viewers
will recognize Winnicott as a proponent of the “good-enough parent” theory, which
suggests that a child must naturally come to understand life’s failures and frustra-
tions, and that the caretaker’s role is “the provision of certain conditions [that] need
only be good enough.” Parents cannot, and should not, prevent their children from
experiencing painful and unruly emotions; it is essential that a child learn to prop-
erly navigate these emotions by being provided a home that “continues to function
in spite of the worst and because of the best.” This, Anderson’s filmography would
seem to tell us, is a responsibility worth treating with the utmost seriousness, and an
adult cannot be forgiven for allowing selfishness to lead them astray.
If Stanley has managed to develop effectively thus far, it would seem that his
inborn intelligence is more responsible than his father, who is certainly not good
enough; though he and Stanley express love to one another, he later brags to the other
stage parents of his knack for subtle psychological child abuse. It is only by taking his
education into his own hands that Stanley finds salvation: at his personal nadir, he
breaks into the library to continue accumulating knowledge, seemingly in hopes of
finding some answers to his personal anguish in archaic texts. His moment of grace
comes when frogs begin to fall from the sky; while every other character responds
with either horror or baffled awe, Stanley is able to smile and mutter to himself,

70 on domesticity
“This is something that happens” (having presumably accrued the requisite informa-
tion to explain this phenomenon over the course of his studies). Through force of
will, Stanley has carved out a method of accepting the world around him and tran-
scending the failure of his derelict protectors. As for the youngest Woodcock—and,
indeed, for so many Andersonian children—it is not hard to look into the future and
see clear potential for disillusionment. One can hardly imagine having to grow up
observing the arrangement that Reynolds and Alma strike in the film’s conclusion.
But in what little we can see of the future, the House of Woodcock seems to be a lov-
ing place for a child to grow up, and we can only hope that it will be good enough.
In a key turning point midway through Phantom Thread, Reynolds’s mother
crosses the veil via his feverish hallucination, appearing at the foot of his bed as the
physical embodiment of her wedding portrait, gazing beneficently at the son who has
so longed for her presence. The vision is pierced only when Alma enters the room and
crosses between Reynolds and his vision, causing his mother to vanish and be quite
literally replaced by his lover. The moment is striking not just for its yearning nos-
talgia and its tender vulnerability, but for its manifestation of a long-standing theme
within Anderson’s filmography: the conflation of familial affection and sexual desire.
There are two instances of overt incest within the Anderson canon. First and most
prominent is Jimmy’s long-ago sexual abuse of Claudia in Magnolia, the particulars
of which are left vague, suppressed by Claudia through drug abuse and promiscuity;
repressed by Jimmy so thoroughly that he cannot even utter the allegation aloud,
professing uncertainty as to the accuracy of Claudia’s claims. But, as mentioned previ-
ously, Anderson sees no ambiguity in the issue of whether Jimmy has sexually abused
his own daughter, nor any moral gray area in how heinous this abuse is. Given less
attention is Freddie’s sexual relationship with his aunt prior to the events of The Master.
Their tryst is tossed off in the finished film with Freddie’s grunted, “I was drunk, and
she looked good.” However, in the draft of the shooting script submitted to awards
voters (which diverges significantly from the finished product), Anderson sketches
in the relationship more fully with suggestions that Freddie was left in his aunt’s care
after his mother’s institutionalization and that she extorted him sexually using poten-
tial inheritance as leverage. This “Gothic backstory,” Adam Nayman writes, “hangs
over his behavior like a shroud,” but its significance is relatively understated, attest-
ing to Anderson’s growing confidence in his ability to convey plot and theme without
the textual cudgel of his earlier films. Nayman has similarly detected hints of “quasi-
incestuous subtext” in Licorice Pizza, suggesting that Alana sounds “distressingly like
Gary’s mother” at times, though the relationship could just as easily be read as akin
to a sibling bond. In either case, the analogous illegality of consummation seems only
to heighten the transgressive magnetism between the characters.
In her 2004 article, “Too Close for Comfort: American Beauty and the Incest
Motif,” Kathleen Rowe Karlyn positions themes of literal and symbolic incest in
1990s “smart cinema” as a reflection of the decade’s broader cultural revisionism—
the “crisis of masculinity” that leads to a “crisis in the family.” As Karlyn notes, a
sort of symbolic incest (such as the protagonist of American Beauty lusting after his
teenage daughter’s best friend) can be used to express the same psychological and cul-
tural imbalances without so overtly crossing the boundary of taboo. Jimmy’s assault

on domesticity 71
of Claudia can thus be seen as the evolution of a theme that Anderson developed
more obliquely with his first two “smart” features.
If Hard Eight can be read as the story of Sydney attempting to reassemble a simu-
lacrum of his fractured relationship with his own children, then he is punished for his
counterfeit atonement: his new children elope, codifying their symbolically incestu-
ous union. (The notion of lovers as symbolic siblings is also present in The Master,
in which Clark [Rami Malek] begins calling Dodd “Dad” after marrying Elizabeth,
calling attention to the odd Freudian dynamics at play in the term son-in-law).
This hint of symbolic incest is amplified in Boogie Nights via multivalent Oedipal
entanglements; Dirk’s confrontation with his mother is catalyzed by her fury over his
relationship with his girlfriend, as she fixates monomaniacally on evidence of their
trysts left on his sheets. In a Jungian reading of the film, John Beebe compared Dirk
to James Dean’s character in Rebel Without a Cause in the extent to which the “main-
stream American family has wrinkled his youth,” but the more apt comparison
might be to Dean’s costar in that film, Natalie Wood, whose character is treated with
inexplicable hostility by her father, behavior interpretable only as his repressed urges
surrounding her own emergent sexuality. Dirk’s mother is supplanted by Amber once
he is absorbed into Jack’s surrogate family, and Amber uses Dirk to replace the son
kept from her because of her profession and her addiction; Anderson calls direct
attention to this maternal urge, with Amber repeatedly referring to Dirk as “my new
baby,” even as their professional relationship requires frequent fornication.
The movie’s positioning of this libidinously freewheeling pseudo-family as the
more fulfilling alternative to the traditional one serves as a none-too-subtle provo-
cation aligned with the similar suburban upheavals found contemporaneously in
Happiness (1998) and American Beauty (1999), and as far back as Blue Velvet’s (1986)
own psychosexually knotted ersatz family. Yet as much as Anderson may fall in line
with his peers, Chuck Stephens saw another resonance in his review for Film Comment:
given Ernie Anderson’s habit of ending his Ghoulardi appearances with an entreaty
to “stay sick,” Stephens saw Boogie Nights’ conflation of symbolic incest with emo-
tional equilibrium (“staying sane by staying sick”) as expressing “one of the Anderson
family’s abiding concerns.”
Punch-Drunk Love may be free of parental interference, but Julian Murphet
argues that this absence only heightens the no-less-present Oedipal angst. Barry,
in Murphet’s view, is “stranded . . . in a backwater of psychological development
kept at a boiling point” by his overbearing (and “copiously breeding”) sisters, who
alternately torment and protect him (as when Elizabeth shifts from denigrating
Barry to defending him the moment that Lena tentatively agrees with Elizabeth’s
belittlement). This arrangement—sisters occupying a role that combines elements of
wife and mother—echoes the characterization of Cyril in Phantom Thread; in either
case, the Oedipal entanglement can be unraveled only by the presence of an adoring
woman free of any attachments of her own.
As Murphet suggests (in an article that predates Phantom Thread but remains
persistently insightful with regard to Anderson’s patriarchal themes), the immigrant
status of both Lena and Alma lends them tacit displacement from the systems plaguing
their partners, serving as human skeleton keys to unlock Freudian bondage—a plot

72 on domesticity
function that comes at the expense of their own fully realized characterization. Lena’s
status as Freudian balm is implicit in Punch-Drunk Love, befitting that film’s role in
shifting Anderson toward a more elliptical storytelling style that eschews the explicit
theme-stating of his prior work. But Knuckle Sandwich, an unproduced screenplay
that Anderson wrote in 1993, may provide a handy explication of Lena’s symbolic
role in Barry’s life.
Knuckle Sandwich is a hyperbolically violent revenge story set in 1967, but it con-
tains several ideas and passages that Anderson would reappropriate in the ensuing
decade. Its strongest link is to Punch-Drunk Love, as its lead characters are named
Barry Wurlitzer and Lena Leonard, and their relationship hinges on the same confla-
tion of amorous and violent urges that their 2002 counterparts navigate (an early
bedroom scene includes a much lengthier and more detailed version of the sadomas-
ochistic pillow talk from the Hawaii passage of Punch-Drunk Love). There is little
plot overlap, though, as Knuckle Sandwich uses the trappings of the gangster genre
in a manner aligned with Shoot the Piano Player ; this version of Barry is a crook
under the employ of mob boss Babaloo, who takes Lena captive in exchange for her
brother’s freedom, leading Barry on a crusade of vengeance powered by the “love in
[his] heart” that makes him “stronger than anything you can think up.” En route
to Lena’s rescue, Barry pauses for a monologue that functions as a Rosetta stone for
Anderson’s later exploration of the symbolic-incest theme. In the midst of pummel-
ing a thug who stands between him and Babaloo, Barry utters the following with
tears in his eyes:

[Lena’s] my mother. Do you know that? Do you? A long time ago I knew this lady who
called herself my mother . . . but she wasn’t. It’s what she said. She wasn’t nice. She was
mean and cruel and she never, ever loved me. She never held me or pet my head when
I was sad. She never smiled at me and she never kissed me . . . It’s as simple as this: I have
a mother now. I have a woman in my life who does the things that the other one never
did. Lena’s my mother. She pets my head and she runs her nails on my arm and it gives
me the tingles and it makes me go to sleep. She doesn’t make me scared and she doesn’t
make me shake.

With these words, the twenty-three-year-old Anderson provided a statement of

purpose that elucidates the relationships between so many of his later characters:
from Dirk’s rejection by his mother to Reynolds’s loss of his own, men who ache
from the deprivation of a mother’s love look to other women to provide an other-
wise inaccessible comfort, a transference between forms of desire that complicates
the sexual element of romance. Not content to leave this theme to his features,
Anderson imported the lover-as-mother concept for his 2000 contribution to
Saturday Night Live. Attempting to better understand the rhythms of conventional
comedy as he prepared his unconventional Adam Sandler movie, Anderson directed
a short film parodying FANatic (1998–2000), an MTV series that treated unsus-
pecting civilians to surprise encounters with their celebrity idols. In Anderson’s
pastiche, Ben Affleck portrays Jason, a teenager abandoned by his parents, who
credits Anna Nicole Smith for inspiring his resilience (“She didn’t kill herself, and

on domesticity 73
Jason woos Anna Nicole Smith in Anderson’s 2000 segment for Saturday Night Live. (NBC Studios)

she had every reason to—she probably should have”). When his best friend (Jimmy
Fallon) arranges a meeting with Smith (Molly Shannon), Jason plans to ask “Miss
Anna” to adopt him, conceiving the plan as equivalent to a proposal (“I’m gonna
look her right in the eyes . . . and then I’m gonna make her my mom, MTV-style!”).
But when the moment comes, he follows his proposal with an immediate sexual
advance, one rebuffed by Smith with an enraged spanking.
The sketch is a more explicit microcosm of the queasy boundaries traversed by Dirk
and Amber, and Mim Udovitch pressed Anderson to discuss Boogie Nights’ Oedipal
resonance in 1997. “The first time he fucks Julianne,” Udovitch suggested, “it’s like
an adoption—he gets reborn, renamed even.” Anderson, however, was reticent to
explore the topic at length, offering only, “I definitely think it all proceeds from, um,
personal things, things that are on my mind, things that are . . . interesting to me.”
Given the persistence of the theme, this would seem to be putting it mildly, and
though (as I mentioned in the opening to this chapter) it may be tempting to hunt for
clues as to Anderson’s feelings about his own upbringing, more relevant to his work
is the way these repeated Freudian provocations point toward two broader concerns.
For one thing, the incestuous motif reflects Anderson’s cinephilic absorption of
Robert Downey Sr.’s work. Downey’s Chafed Elbows (1966) is the picaresque tale of a
young man’s nervous breakdown, an event catalyzed—and eventually alleviated—by
a sexual affair with his mother. This sort of transgressive satire (an order of mag-
nitude more provocative in that era than it would be thirty years later) was pres-
ent in both the films Anderson watched and the company that his father kept: on

74 on domesticity
the Boogie Nights commentary, Anderson recalls Robert Ridgeley, who plays Jack
Horner’s financier, Colonel James (after having played Jack nine years earlier in The
Dirk Diggler Story), visiting the Anderson home during his childhood and “singing
me songs about Winnie the Pooh having sex with Eeyore and shitting on him.”
This allegiance with the outré, and its abutment with the aforementioned respect for
patriarchal standards, accounts for much of the odd chemical cocktail that is Boogie
Nights. Anderson’s breakout film is simultaneously subversive and conservative, a
tension that is maintained throughout his filmography, drawing most successfully
into alignment with the lightly transgressive conclusions of Phantom Thread and
Licorice Pizza.
The confusion of familial and sexual affection is just one strand in a broader
Andersonian concern with the heart’s confounding and unmanageable urges. This
Romantic turbulence manifests in another form of confusion—that between the
erotic and the sadistic. Phantom Thread derives much of its narrative momentum
from the conflict between Reynolds and Alma over what form their relationship
should take: Reynolds desires companionship and artistic inspiration, but he
demands complete independence; Alma desires a level of individualism that clashes
with Reynolds’s fastidiousness, but more problematically, she desires his depen-
dence. This urge of Alma’s goes unfulfilled for so long that it eventually mutates
into something darker: a desire to see Reynolds helpless, and to cause that helpless-
ness herself. The arrangement that finally balances their desires bears some traces of
the Hades/Persephone dynamic, another mythic inflection to be added to the film’s
constellation of gothic notes. Reynolds will be given free rein to indulge the obses-
sive, officious tendencies that he believes are necessary to achieve his lauded works,
and Alma will be waiting to administer that nonlethal dose of poison, allowing her
to fulfill her caretaker’s instincts.
Alma’s statement of intent in the film’s final sequence—“I want you flat on your
back, helpless, tender, open, with only me to help”—has some echo of the expres-
sions of desire exchanged by Barry and Lena as they consummate their romance
in Punch-Drunk Love. Lying nose to nose on a hotel bed, Barry—atop the prone
Lena—whispers tenderly, “I’m lookin’ at your face and I just wanna smash it. I just
wanna fuckin’ smash it with a sledgehammer and squeeze it.” Picking up effortlessly
on this cue, Lena replies, “I want to chew your face, and I want to scoop out your
eyes and I want to eat them and chew them and suck on them.” The significance of
this exchange is left somewhat to interpretation; it’s by no means the opening salvo
in a sadomasochistic arrangement, as Barry and Lena proceed in what appears to be a
fairly conventional romantic register from here. Unsurprisingly, then, interpretations
of Barry’s violent expressions of desire have varied in the years since the film’s release.
Walter C. Metz reads the scene as a reconfiguration of brutal impulses into playful
ones, causing “the abusive aspects of civilization [to be] drained away,” while George
Toles sees Barry as analogous to Lennie in John Steinbeck’s 1937 novella Of Mice and
Men—a man struggling to modulate the overwhelming strength of his affection, his
tenderness never more than a momentary lapse away from annihilation.
Anderson’s screenplay, however, includes several passages that elucidate the sig-
nificance of Barry’s unconventional pillow talk, suggesting that this is primarily the

on domesticity 75
result of a cognitively dissonant misfiring of the urges toward affection and violence.
In the scene as scripted, Barry explains himself with as much openness as he can
muster, telling Lena, “[I] don’t want to hurt anything ever, but . . . have you ever held
a little puppy or a little kitten and it’s just the cutest, softest, most precious thing in
the world and out of the blue you get this feeling in your gut and all you wanna do is
squeeze it . . . just so god damn wonderful and cute you wanna smack it and kick it
and love it. Fuck. I don’t know. I don’t know.” A deleted scene included on the DVD
further ties Barry’s sympathy with children to his tenderly aberrant feelings toward
Lena: during a meeting with potential buyers for his novelty “fungers,” Barry catches
sight of a small boy running in circles in the alley outside his warehouse and loses
focus on the meeting. “Fuck that kid!” Barry roars. “Fuck you, man, motherfucker!”
Raising a middle finger in the direction of the alley, he continues, “Fuck you, you’re
so fuckin’ cute.” To transcribe the full extent of this gleefully obscene tirade would
risk overkill, but one excerpt is clearly resonant with the pillow-talk scene: “Shit, I’d
like to crack his fuckin’ head open. You are fuckin’ beautiful, you dumb fucker!”
The scene is an obvious candidate for excision as it suggests that Barry may be a
truly dangerous individual, but Sandler’s intoxicated joy as he observes the child at
play suggests that his turbulent response to figures of innocence and beauty extends
beyond the entirely psychosexual evidence in the finished product. Barry’s response
to aesthetic bliss is something like sublime awe, triggering a torrent of emotion-
ally incoherent babbling. His experience seems to proceed from one that Edmund
Burke described in his 1757 treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our
Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful: “The passion caused by the great and sublime . . .
is astonishment: and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions
are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled
with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that
object which employs it.”
This sense of love as something eliciting awestruck distress is resonant with
Magnolia’s Donnie Smith, the emotionally stunted former child star, who, by his
own admission, confuses infatuation with illness, and repeatedly asserts his suffusion
of love—first defiantly in a drunken public meltdown before the object of his unre-
quited affection (“I’m Donnie Smith, and I have lots of love to give!”), and later in a
sobbing confession following a thwarted robbery (“I don’t know where to put things,
you know? I really do have love to give! I just don’t know where to put it!”). A clean
line can be drawn between Donnie and Barry, two characters consumed by the urge
to give love but unclear on the appropriate manifestation of that urge. This feeling,
it would seem, is one with which Anderson was familiar to the point that he took its
broad resonance for granted: when Nina Rehfeld described Barry and Lena’s uncon-
ventional pillow talk as “unnerving” in a 2003 interview for Der Spiegel, Anderson
was incredulous: “You don’t know that feeling? That feeling that you love someone
so much, that you would like to devour them or kill them?” Rehfeld sidestepped
his question with another of her own: “Do love and aggression go hand in hand for
you?” But Anderson demurred: “That question is too big for me.”
Despite the association between love and aggression being too big to discuss—or
perhaps because of its bigness—Anderson returned to the same thematic ground

76 on domesticity
with the combative romance of Alma and Reynolds. Gone is the sublime awe, but
present is the notion that a relationship struggling to find its footing (over a few days
of awkward half-truths and outright falsehoods for Barry and Lena; over a much
longer span of passive aggression and outright hostility for Alma and Reynolds) can
achieve fulfillment by embracing the urge to do harm and be harmed. The stymied
affectionate impulse is converted into a harmful one en route to being reconfigured
as a more fluent expression of love. Both films conveniently elide this negotiation’s
long-term effects, be it the havoc that sustained toxic exposure would presumably
wreak on Reynolds’s nervous system or the broader emotional fallout of a handshake
between holding and hurting.
There is obvious provocative value in advocating sadomasochism as the route to
romantic fulfillment, but like so many of Anderson’s flirtations with the outré, that
value is undercut by the ultimate endpoint of a reaffirmed patriarchal status quo (e.g.,
the prodigal son returned to the lap of the surrogate father in Boogie Nights, the sym-
bolic baptism by amphibian rain that prepares the young men of Magnolia to take up
the position vacated by the deceased patriarchs), rendering the transgressive material
a narrative framework rather than an expression of countercultural conviction. In his
review of Phantom Thread for the Columbia Daily Tribune, James Owen connects the
film back to Punch-Drunk Love via a shared belief in love as “a tool to unravel [the]
male protagonist, suggesting troubled men can be cured by a woman’s domineering
power,” a moral limited (in Owen’s eyes) by the fact that “Anderson doesn’t lavish that
much [attention] on his female characters.” By conceiving of both Lena and Alma
as characters divested of any inconvenient association—Lena, we learn intriguingly, is
divorced, but this factor is mentioned only in passing, and its effect on her motivations
left to implication—he positions them as all but dei ex machina, supremely conve-
nient characters fulfilling an essentially male fantasy of the angelically devoted partner.
Given its recency, Phantom Thread has not yet received the level of academic
scrutiny that Punch-Drunk Love has been allowed in the past two decades, but some
analytical frameworks established for the earlier film can be extrapolated to include
the latter, despite their radically different settings. Punch-Drunk Love has been
described by both Marco Abel and Glen Fuller as a post-romance, a film grasping
for new modes of connection in the fallout of 1990s gender revisionism. Having
grown up observing “the ‘success’ of the feminist intervention since the 1960s,” writes
Marco Abel, characters like Barry and Lena “share the post-1968 skepticism of the
traditional ‘ideal’ of lifelong, monogamous relationships,” while their postmillennial
milieu “induces a permanent state of . . . emotional, psychological, and physical
restlessness.” Whereas Abel focuses on the difficulty of establishing sensual con-
nection amid the mores of twenty-first-century Western culture, Fuller casts a more
optimistic eye on the notion of post-romance, seeing Punch-Drunk Love as a film
that employs the leitmotifs of wreckage, urgent embrace, and the “multiplicative res-
onance” of the harmonium to reconfigure the traditional love story as a celebration
of “the excess of potentiality, the excitement, the multiplicity” of love. In Licorice
Pizza, automotive collisions are replaced by interpersonal ones, with Gary and Alana
repeatedly reenacting Barry and Lena’s race toward violent embrace. This amorous
violence is foreshadowed by the opening cherry bomb detonated in a school toilet,

on domesticity 77
which restages in microcosm Punch-Drunk Love’s prefatory car crash, while the vola-
tility motif recurs with the tray of glasses dropped seemingly incongruously in the
vicinity of Gary and Alana’s first dinner together, as though the atmosphere around
the couple is freighted with unstable energy. In any case, the underlying concept
is the same: by grappling with the traditionalist underpinnings of screen romance,
Anderson forces a ground clearing upon which his characters renegotiate the terms
of the conventional relationship.
Given the rhyming status of Punch-Drunk Love and Phantom Thread, the latter
might be read as an anachronistic post-romance, applying millennial perspectives
on gender politics to a midcentury milieu. The unconventional union of Alma
and Reynolds (a committed yet seemingly asexual pairing in which marriage is a
midpoint narrative gear shift rather than a joyous conclusion) might be seen as an
allegory for the modern struggle to achieve the elusive work-life balance “symp-
tomatic of the age of neoliberal finance capitalism,” as Abel describes the plight of
post-romance romantic leads. Meanwhile, Fuller’s counterintuitive argument for
violence as a revisionist force on moribund romantic mores might be applied to
explosive excretions that form the basis of Reynolds and Alma’s union; like the car
crashes that illustrate the shocking effect of Lena’s entrance onto the stage of Barry’s
life, the toxic shocks that Alma causes to Reynolds’s system are their own expression
of Fuller’s “world arrayed by the event of love.” Phantom Thread is a film comfort-
able with convenient anachronism (as attested to by a conspicuous Rolling Stones
quotation found within Alma and Reynolds’ dinner table confrontation), and given
its open grapple with its creator’s twenty-first-century concerns, it can be viewed as
the rare pre-feminist post-romance.
The third significant romantic pairing in Anderson’s filmography—Doc Sportello
and his ex–old lady, Shasta Fay Hepworth—is not one that he originated, and it
is a pairing with unique parity of psychological complexity relative to the balance
of his filmography. Anderson’s adaptation of their dynamic intersects with several
of his recurrent concerns, and in one of the most textually dense and thematically
fraught sequences in Inherent Vice, the queasy intermingling of desire and brutality
is presented in a more nuanced and difficult-to-reconcile light than the relatively
simplistic approaches taken in Punch-Drunk Love and Phantom Thread. Identifying
the sequence in question is likely easiest by noting its bookending moments: at the
beginning of the scene, Doc sits on his couch, and Shasta enters the room fully nude
save for a long, beaded necklace. At the end, the two have sex. In the remainder of
the scene (which spans nearly six and a half minutes of unbroken screen time, hand-
ily the longest sustained shot in the film), Shasta delivers a confounding, elliptical
monologue that essentially constitutes baiting Doc into assaulting her, which their
ultimate coupling uncomfortably resembles. Shasta’s motivations for this approach
remain unclear; given her ex–old man’s devotion, she could certainly have seduced
him any way she chose, and if her desire was to engage in rough sex, she could have
asked. Yet she seems to require that Doc’s violent urge be genuine, so she builds a
stressful network of contradictory desires within him.
Shasta first suggests that Doc must want a submissive woman (“Maybe a thing for
those Manson chicks?”), then admonishes him for that presumed desire (“Brainwashed,

78 on domesticity
horny little teeners . . . your kind of chick, Doc?”), and finally admits that she allowed
herself to be that woman for another man (“Sometimes he could almost make you
feel invisible. Fast, brutal, not what you’d call a considerate lover”) and enjoyed doing
so (“It’s so nice to be made to feel invisible that way sometimes”). She triggers Doc’s
shame and then his jealousy (“Mickey could have taught all you swinging beach bums
a thing or two”), all the while generating sexual frustration (throughout the scene she
approaches him with deliberate slowness, finally draping herself across him as she
describes the erotic abuses that Mickey committed upon her) until he erupts, deliver-
ing exactly the genuine violence she seemingly requires. The scene is thick with con-
tradictory statements on consent and self-actualization. Shasta felt loved by Mickey
Wolfmann, a fact reasserted frequently throughout the film by those who knew them
as a couple; given that this love was expressed through consensual abuse, she now goes
looking for that same manifestation of love from a man she knows will unquestioningly
provide anything she wants. The scene may have been authored by two men, but prior
to the complicated woman at the heart of Licorice Pizza, no other scene in Anderson’s
filmography had granted a woman Shasta’s level of complexity in emotional urges.
Inherent Vice is unique among Anderson’s work for its depiction of sex within a
romantic context. The remainder of his films tend to delineate these two forms of
intimacy: Boogie Nights is an unusually sexually explicit film, but virtually every
encounter serves as some form of professional transaction (with the notable excep-
tion of the ostentatious philandering of Little Bill’s wife, which fulfills its own
uniquely aromantic purpose), while The Master is consumed by sexual urges but
seldom in a manner that could be described as amorous (the final coupling between
Freddie and Winn [Jennifer Neala Page] comes closest, while Peggy’s half-glimpsed
manual pleasuring of Dodd, the only explicit sexual interaction between a com-
mitted couple in any Anderson film, is so unromantic it approaches sexual gallows
humor). Meanwhile, the implied consummation of Barry and Lena’s relationship
is elided, and there is little direct indication of sexual intimacy between Alma and
Reynolds at any point within Phantom Thread. By and large, in the Andersonian
universe, sex is transactional—even a glimpse of Alana’s breasts and apparent hand
jobs from acquaintances are offered grudgingly to Gary in Licorice Pizza, as though
satisfying some unspoken quid pro quo—and love is chaste, another oddly conserva-
tive undercurrent within his work.
Further distinguishing Inherent Vice from the remainder of the Anderson canon
is its lack of a happy ending. In both Punch-Drunk Love and Phantom Thread, the
expression of violent desire provides liberation for inhibited characters, leading to
a greater level of emotional fulfillment. But, much as in the transgressive-cum-
conservative conclusion of Boogie Nights, the subversive element of light sadomas-
ochism in Phantom Thread serves only as a more efficient conduit back toward the
establishment of a conventional family unit. Similarly, the propriety-flouting clinch
that closes Licorice Pizza is framed as a revision of the typical marriage bond, taboo-
breaking but nonetheless recognizable. Both films, however, represent something of
an evolution in the Andersonian conservatively subversive ending, aligning them
with the taboo-breaking conclusions of his beloved counterculture satires of yore
(e.g., Downey’s Chafed Elbows and No More Excuses [1968], which respectively end

on domesticity 79
with a man’s failed murder and successful impregnation of his mother, and a simu-
lated bedroom dalliance between a woman and a chimpanzee).
The ending of Phantom Thread may not ascend to quite these heights of deviance,
but it tests the boundary between good and bad taste in its scatological glee (Reynolds
and Alma kiss like giggling teenagers in a bathroom coated with newsprint in antici-
pation of his forthcoming excretions) and its fatalist catharsis. Alma and Reynolds
may have found happiness at last, but the tone of the framing device—Alma explains
their arrangement in a firelit monologue delivered to a quietly unnerved Dr. Hardy,
who plays a sort of Harker to her Dracula—and the thundering tones of Jonny
Greenwood’s orchestral score conjure the image of a couple walking hand in hand
into some form of mutually assured destruction.
In another telling passage included in the shooting script but not present in
the film, Alma tells Reynolds during their first date, “You look like a bird to me
sometimes—or an alligator.” The pairing calls to mind the common cultural
image of a crocodile leaving its mouth agape while small birds clean food waste from
between its teeth, a mutually beneficial relationship that could nevertheless end at
any moment with the annihilation of one party at the whim of the other. Though
it is Alma who initially enters an environment of dubious safety, by the ending,
Reynolds is firmly established as the bird, and she the alligator, entrusted with his
safety and always in possession of that deadly leverage. The eerie implications of this
conclusion are only heightened by Alma’s serenity as she describes her belief in some
afterlife that will reunite her with Reynolds whenever their time together runs out.
Their arrangement may quite likely end with his destruction by her hand, and they
have chosen that consequence as a worthy price to pay for the fulfillment that they
will find in the meantime. Even more so than in Boogie Nights, with Phantom Thread,
Paul Thomas Anderson upheld his father’s credo: to stay happy, stay sick.

80 on domesticity
five
On Screenwriting

when sydney greets jimmy shortly after the time jump that bridges the prologue
of Hard Eight with the main action, he is seated with his back to the wall. The image
is weighted with double meaning: when encountering his rival, this inveterate hard-
ass is keeping his vulnerable flank protected, but he has also left himself nowhere
to run should things go bad. And when things do inevitably go bad between the
onetime hard-ass and the wannabe, Sydney finds himself once more with his back
against a metaphorical wall; by all appearances, the younger man has every form of
leverage, possessing both Sydney’s most closely guarded secret and a handgun that he
can use should Sydney refuse to pay the steep fee he demands in exchange for keep-
ing his silence. The preceding eighty minutes of screen time have shown Sydney to
be a shrewd pragmatist able to turn situations to his advantage, so the viewer may be
inclined to expect some show of persuasion that will allow him to gain the upper hand.
Sydney’s chosen approach, in the end, is to speak at length, offering not so much
a plea or an explanation as a barrage of staccato admissions:

I will give you all that I have. Maybe before you were going to kill me. Maybe. I don’t
know. I know John, and I love him like he was my own child. But I can tell you this:
I don’t want to die. I killed his father. I can tell you what it was. This is not an excuse. I’m
not begging for clemency. All that matters: I do not wish to sacrifice my life for John’s
wellbeing. But I will sacrifice this money for mine. Because you have asked me. Because
after this, I will have done all I can, for John and for myself. I’m going to ask you with all
the heart and sincerity that I have: please do not put a bullet in me, and please don’t tell
John what I’ve done. I trust that once I give you this money, you and I will take separate
paths, and that this negotiation will settle everything. That is my hope. I don’t want to die.

Sydney’s tactic is not deceit, but rather an overwhelming surfeit of truth, one
that deflects from his inner machinations by highlighting his vulnerability. With
only one overt falsehood—expressing his hope that after paying Jimmy, they will go
their separate ways, quite the opposite of his true plan—Sydney lulls his rival into
a false sense of complacency and sets the stage for his eventual strike. It’s a strategy
representative of Anderson’s core belief in scripting his debut feature: “Get two peo-
ple talking,” he declares on the DVD commentary track, “and if it’s engaging enough
and wonderful enough, it’ll free up the rest of the movie.” This tactic would become
a guiding star across his first three features, all of which hinge on characters attempt-
ing Sydney’s gambit: speak directly and voluminously and hope that verbal effusion
will clear the path to salvation.
In assessing Anderson’s development as a writer, George Toles delineates the shift
between what I have termed his thesis and antithesis films as the shift from “the huff-
ing and puffing of outward grapple” toward a style focused on “the harder truths of
the inner life [that] may well prove inexpressible.” In those first three features, his
characters seek a sort of “purified utterance,” while in the following three, they adopt
a tactic of “speech avoidance” in their self-expression. (Toles’s book was completed
before the release of Inherent Vice, so he was not afforded the opportunity to absorb
Anderson’s most recent three films into his schema.) Pursuing this course of thought,
I will term Anderson’s thesis films ones of overt expression, in which dialogue is
direct and forthright: characters say what they mean and mean what they say. His
antithesis films, on the other hand, employ primarily covert expression: the protago-
nists’ feelings and motivations are often best inferred from their nonverbal behaviors,
with their dialogue more often serving to obfuscate their true interiority. His syn-
thesis films, then, adopt a more complex intermingling of overt and covert expres-
sion: characters are largely explicit in expressing their needs, yet struggle to perceive
the intricacies of both their external circumstances and their unconscious motiva-
tions; for the central couples—Doc and Shasta, Reynolds and Alma, and Gary and
Alana—speaking clearly can often lead them tragically afield of full understanding.
At the outset of scripting Hard Eight (at least so he claims on the DVD com-
mentary), Anderson had no greater sense of the story’s trajectory than the viewer
does. With a clear vision of two characters—a down-on-his-luck young drifter, and a
steely older potential benefactor—but no guesses as to what their relationship might
be or what they might want from one another, he decided to “put [them] in a cof-
fee shop and have them start talking, and [trust that] it will eventually figure itself
out.” As he allowed the characters to describe their situations and perspectives, the
plot unspooled for Anderson at the same rate that it eventually would for his audi-
ence, and his suspicions of Sydney’s connection to John emerged at the same time
as those clues might begin to coalesce for anyone else. With Anderson possessing
no more information than the viewer, the story’s composition—which reportedly
took just two weeks—left little space for him to build any tantalizing implication or
inference into its framework. That sort of deliberate ambiguity has little place in his
thesis films, stories in which anything worth expressing is worth declaring, subtlety
and grace be damned.
While his first three films do make some sparing use of implication and subtext—
such as the moment in which the nearby outraged father seems to stand in for mem-
ories that Sydney is unable to express, or Dirk’s sphinxlike gaze during the furor
at Rahad Jackson’s house (a moment, significantly, that was neither scripted nor
planned for, but rather “just sort of happened”)—Anderson more often elects to
turn subtext into text. His characters operate from a place of verbal forthrightness

82 on screenwriting
Dirk experiences an unusually wordless epiphany. (New Line Cinema)

that risks dramatic monotony given how little is asked of the viewer in piecing story
and motivation together. In Boogie Nights, one stirring moment finds Amber sitting
inside during a pool party, watching Dirk through a cocaine haze while missing a
phone call from her son. Moore’s performance—all glazed eyes and lazy half-smile—
along with the arrangement of image and sound, conveys everything that needs to
be said about this burgeoning dynamic, and sets the stage for the complex emotions
that will soon flower. Yet Anderson chooses to render this moment of silent storytell-
ing moot in the later scene that sees Amber restate all of this subtext as text during a
confessionary bender—“I always felt like Dirk was my baby, my new baby. Don’t you
miss Dirk? He’s so fuckin’ talented, the bastard. You know, I just—I really love him,
Rollergirl. I really love the stupid jerk.” In his review, Mick LaSalle wrote, “there’s no
question that [Amber] connects with [Dirk] as though he were her lost child. In fact,
it’s a disappointment when the film later says as much in words. No need for words
here.” But in Anderson’s early work, wordlessness is often anathema.
This outpouring of emotional verbiage is appropriate to the role that cocaine
plays in Boogie Nights, eliminating the characters’ self-awareness and self-censorship.
Yet when Toles describes these films as defined by a “floundering compulsion to dis-
charge whatever leaps to mind,” that feeling extends not just to the characters but to
the authorial hand guiding them. When Dirk’s relationship with Jack hits its nadir
via a torrent of drug-addled abuse (“I want to fuck! It’s my big dick! So everybody
get ready fuckin’ now! I don’t need this shit! Fuck you! Fuck all of you! You’re not
my boss! You’re not the king of me!”), it would seem difficult to argue that this is the
sole form the emotional turning point could take, even given the verbal laxative of
cocaine. Anderson’s mode of storytelling demands expression at all costs, as though
emotional articulation is synonymous with emotional truth.
Even this implied values system becomes text in Magnolia, a film whose torrent of
overt expression is clarified when Claudia makes a proposal during her first date with
Officer Jim Kurring: “Let’s make a deal. I’ll tell you everything and you tell me every-
thing and maybe we can get through all the piss, shit, and lies that kill other people.”
Emotional articulation is thus presented as something like a bloodletting, removing
mental and spiritual blockages and allowing love and joy to flow. This concept may

on screenwriting 83
be of debatable therapeutic value, but it proves overwhelming as a storytelling credo.
Anderson has described the film as his effort to say “every embarrassing thing that
I wanted to say,” and this sense of anxious purging can be felt in every character,
from Donnie Smith’s drunken oratory of adoration for Brad the bartender to the
enraged bedside vigil of Frank T. J. Mackey, in which catharsis is reached through
free association that moves from spite to longing. Even Frank’s defense mechanism in
obscuring the truth of his past takes the form of voluminous expression, with his veil
of falsehoods serving as a virtually impenetrable curtain; if he prevents Gwenovier
from getting a word in edgewise, she can never reveal his fraudulence.
The deathbed speech of Earl Partridge serves as a climax to this phase of Anderson’s
career. Though it comes with nearly an hour left in the film, it is a clear turning
point, an operatic confession of guilt and regret that heralds a literal changing of
the weather (the torrential downpour clears as he slips into unconsciousness) and
a move into the film’s final movements. It also signals a change into a radically dif-
ferent form of expression, as though the supply of words has been exhausted, leav-
ing no recourse but the enigmatic sing-along sequence, a confounding moment of
expression that may be verbal but is by no means forthright. The scene in which the
disparate ensemble mystically unites to sing “Wise Up” in unison begs questions of
whether it should be read literally, and what significance Aimee Mann’s lyrics might
hold for each character, inviting a level of interpretive work that Anderson had rarely
demanded of his audience before.
Anderson’s antithesis films are focused on characters either unable or unwilling
to express themselves verbally, the inverse of the free expression in his thesis films;
as the prominent role played by plungers suggests, Punch-Drunk Love represents
Anderson introducing blockages into the emotional plumbing of his stories and
seeing what might result from the built-up pressures. Though his writerly instincts
continue to favor dialogue—likely a function of his delight in providing mate-
rial for his favorite actors to sink their teeth into—the verbiage in this unofficial
triptych serves a function closer to that described by Harold Pinter: “[dialogue can
be] an indication of that which we don’t hear . . . a violent, sly, and anguished or
mocking smoke screen.” Thus, these three films might best be described as utiliz-
ing covert expression relative to the overt expression of the prior three. Barry Egan,
Daniel Plainview, and Freddie Quell are all characters defined by some form of
repression, meaning their feelings and motivations must be interpreted by analyz-
ing the moments in which their behaviors run counter to their dialogue as much as
through the dialogue itself.
Barry is a character whose alienation is so absolute that his motivations seem
unclear to himself, let alone the viewer. His signature line, “I don’t know” (words
he utters approximately fifteen times over the course of the film), is employed in
situations ranging from why he has chosen his outfit to whether his penis is erect,
and the term is so emblematic of his interiority that it serves as the cap on the film’s
opening sequence, accompanying the surge of music that leads into the title card. As
demonstrated by its employment in describing his state of physical arousal (“I don’t
know what it’s doing right now,” he says of his penis with forced congeniality when
phone sex operator Georgia tries to engage him in dirty talk), the phrase represents

84 on screenwriting
less a genuine confusion than an overwhelming inability to explain his own urges
and desires, which thus emerge most powerfully in fits of explosive physical rage.
Only once Barry has properly aligned his emotional urges with their outward
expression can he express himself to Lena in an outpouring that feels more like
a spoken-word aria (“I have a lot of pudding and in six to eight weeks it can be
redeemed, so if you could just give me that much time I think I can get enough
mileage to go with you wherever you have to go if you have to travel for your work
because I don’t ever want to be anywhere without you”). As in Magnolia, open expres-
sion functions as transformative catharsis, but by virtue of coming at the end of nearly
ninety minutes of repression rather than the midst of twice that time spent drowning
in confession, the catharsis can be felt as much by the viewer as by the character.
Daniel Plainview is far less verbally repressed than either Barry or Freddie Quell,
as his powers of speech are key to his success as a businessman. After a lengthy pro-
logue that introduces him to the viewer solely through physical expression, Daniel
is reintroduced after a time jump as he attempts to sell his drilling services through
a masterful display of oration. Yet by virtue of the viewer’s awareness of Daniel’s
earlier—and, we might infer, “true”—bestial behavior, his speech appears more like
a mask, a suspicion supported by Daniel Day-Lewis’s ominous performance choices.
A frequent habit of pausing to suck his teeth during either negotiations or drunken
confessions suggests a well of feeling so dark it cannot be expressed in words (“I can’t
keep doing this on my own with these people,” he grumbles by firelight, with the
pause between the penultimate and final words conveying a venomous antipathy).
Daniel’s pronouncements are most often borne out—Little Boston thrives exactly
as he promised it would—but he seems to have recently and deliberately trained
himself in verbal expression, and only as a business necessity. After an early collabora-
tive drilling venture demonstrates that his needs can be conveyed entirely through
gesture, his speeches come across as effortful and grudging, a concession he is willing
to make in order to extract what he desires from people he cannot be bothered to
respect. Like Barry, Daniel’s moment of greatest transformation comes in the form
of explosive verbal release (the coerced baptism that requires his repeated, howling
public confession, “I’ve abandoned my child! I’ve abandoned my boy!”). But rather
than purging his toxins as with Barry, the outburst seems to amplify his spiritual
rot; reuniting with H.W. coincides with Daniel’s becoming evidently sickened and
delirious, culminating in the bizarre napkin-faced meltdown during their celebratory
steak lunch. While Punch-Drunk Love suggested that purging a repressed truth may
be the path to healing for a character who is pure of heart, here Anderson shows
that doing the same without coming to the urge organically might only cause an
impacted blockage, throwing the soul into a deadly state of shock.
Freddie Quell is built in the mode of Barry Egan, but his journey is more inscru-
table than Barry’s shift from repression to expression. Even more coiled than Barry—
Freddie is so clenched that he is often incapable of fully opening his mouth—he
functions best as half of a dyad, the Janus twin to Lancaster Dodd’s loquacious
dandy. If Barry and Daniel are physical representations of, respectively, repression
and ambition, Freddie is the id made manifest, capable of processing his desires and
frustrations only through behavior. When prison bars prevent him from attacking

on screenwriting 85
Dodd physically, he throws his body against a wall-mounted cot, seemingly unable
to conceive of any alternate method to purge his seething mind.
Dodd, on the other hand, is a preening fop who exerts his alpha status through
an advanced manipulation of language. Dodd speaks but expresses nothing, while
Freddie is quiet but expresses boundless torment. The two orbit one another
throughout the film, neither entirely able to penetrate the other’s protective shields (a
frustration with sexual implications that Anderson has often been happy to endorse
in interviews), and the intentionally unsatisfying ending sends the characters off
in opposite directions having rendered seemingly little change in one another. The
pairing of Freddie and Dodd, which so perfectly compartmentalizes overt and covert
expressiveness, serves as a culmination of the first two phases of Anderson’s career.
With his next three films, he reunites the two modes in order to demonstrate the
difficulty of making ourselves known through any form of conscious expression. His
synthesis screenplays find characters expressing themselves freely only to see their
efforts stymied, a darker shading on his utopian early suggestion that free expression
was the path to salvation.
As with many of Thomas Pynchon’s stories, Inherent Vice revels in the ways that
open communication can obfuscate rather than elucidate the facts of a story. The
perpetually stoned detective Doc Sportello continually encounters characters who
attempt to explain the significance of the story he has stumbled into, but each of
these explanations only adds to that story’s confusion as new details expand the net-
work of corruption and heighten the sense of paranoia by broadening the reach of the
villainous Golden Fang. In his review of the novel, Walter Kirn referred to Pynchon’s
works as “high nonsense,” calling to mind a Lewis Carroll-esque use of language to
subvert logic and conventional meaning. Thus, Anderson’s film is tasked with the
seemingly paradoxical task of using the illustrative tools of narrative filmmaking to
conjure a vision of explicit unintelligibility.
Phantom Thread, as Anderson’s first film to center exclusively on the intricacies
of traditional domestic partnership, devotes virtually its sole focus to the difficulty
of effective communication. Reynolds and Alma constantly announce their precise
feelings, intentions, and desires, only to find themselves growing continually more
frustrated and alienated; making themselves understood serves as a route away from
catharsis rather than toward it, a painful inversion of the comparatively optimis-
tic message of Punch-Drunk Love. Reynolds’s overt individualism is read by Alma
as covert repression, while her overt desire for intimacy is read by him as a covert
desire for control. This toxic passive aggression comes to a head during their heated
dinner-table argument, each accusing the other of harboring secret motivations to
the point that Reynolds declares her romantic gesture to be the work of a secret agent
conspiring to ruin his life. It is only by reaching a détente in the struggle for expres-
sive control that Alma and Reynolds can move forward into a sustainable domes-
tic arrangement. Characters must relinquish their efforts to control their destinies
through any form of expression; only by doing so may they find some type of peace,
no matter how tumultuous that peace may ultimately be.
Conversation again becomes a battleground in Licorice Pizza, as Gary and Alana
spend the entirety of the film’s runtime sparring over the terms of their ambiguous

86 on screenwriting
relationship. With Alana’s habit—pointed out by Gary during their first conversation—
of repeating herself, efficient communication is clearly a struggle, as the characters
continually establish and renegotiate the boundaries of their pseudo-romance. With
speech more often generating complications in their emotional passageways—“We’re
not boyfriend and girlfriend,” Alana insists while moving swiftly into a space resem-
bling exactly that, a cognitive dissonance that will lead both characters into errati-
cally jealous patterns of behavior—it is only through the physical expression of the
sprinting motif that they achieve uncomplicated bliss. Even Gary’s final declaration
of triumphant love (“Let me introduce to you Mrs. Alana Valentine”) is immediately
verbally undercut (“Idiot!”), with only yet another lapse into sprinting able to provide
true catharsis to this feature-length heated debate.
A key shift in Anderson’s own expressive tactics emerged as he moved from thesis
phase to antithesis. Beginning with Punch-Drunk Love, he shook off his compulsion
that the finished film resemble the screenplay as closely as possible, and began stra-
tegically excising scenes of overt expression from his shooting scripts, leaving the
significance of these facts to resonate as implication. Barry’s conflation of romance
with violence and Alma’s family history are both left to echo in a sort of dramatic
negative space, allowing the films to demonstrate a cinematic expression of Ernest
Hemingway’s “iceberg theory.” As he wrote in the early 1930s, Hemingway operated
on the belief that “if a writer . . . knows enough of what he is writing about, he may
omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will
have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The
dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one eighth of it being above water.”
The screenplay for every Anderson feature (and, of course, virtually any film)
features scenes either never filmed or left on the cutting-room floor. What is most
telling in Anderson’s work is the increasing intentionality with which scenes or sub-
plots are eliminated, and the intriguing effects these deletions can have on the scenes
that remain. In a prime example from Phantom Thread, the scene in which Reynolds
shows Alma the cloth that he will use to craft her a gown is substantially longer in
the shooting script, as Reynolds describes how the fabric was “rescued from the war
[during] my time in the service.” He saved the cloth after finding it in Lyon, presum-
ably in the midst of the liberation of France, and has waited for the right moment
to deploy it. “Each piece that you use in making a dress like this one will be a living
thing,” he tells her. “This one will feel sacred, hopeful.”
The notion of finicky Reynolds Woodcock performing wartime military service is
tantalizing in its implications, and his lines here reframe Alma as a healing presence
who may have salved a lingering wound. Yet the scene’s absence does not rob the
film of the subtextual value of Reynolds as a potentially traumatized veteran, which
might be inferred by viewers prone to thinking deeply about the story’s placement
within world history. (Anderson has mentioned in interviews that the selection of
London was deliberate because of the long tail of postwar austerity, a stark contrast
to the glamour of the House of Woodcock, a disparity that would not have been as
sharp had the film been set in that other preeminent global fashion hub, Paris.)
The inclusion of the fabric-selection scene might even have robbed the film of some
power, making subtext into text and denying the viewer this available inference.

on screenwriting 87
With its removal, Reynolds’s history and its impact on his perception of Alma
become a Kubrickian ellipsis—in Elisa Pezzotta’s description, a way of inviting the
viewer “to find different paths [to narrative cohesion] instead of strictly following the
development of the plot.”
The same principle is at play in There Will Be Blood, in which several scenes
involving Daniel’s sexual activities (and lack thereof ) disappeared between shooting
script and finished film. In one, Daniel meets a woman identified as “a local vixen” in
Little Boston’s tavern and takes her into an alleyway where he pays her for the privi-
lege of burying his head between her legs (whether this constitutes a performance of
cunnilingus is left unclear). Soon thereafter, Daniel drunkenly confesses to Henry
that H.W. is not his son; Daniel, as the script describes, “begins to break down [and]
holds his crotch,” telling Henry, “my cock doesn’t even work, how’m I gonna make a
kid?” Daniel’s impotence may be inferred through the absolute lack of sexual con-
tent in the finished film, as well as the symbolic channeling of sexual energy into his
erected derricks and pumping wells, but this significance is more intriguing for being
unspoken than it might be if woven explicitly into the story. By contrast, the few
significant scenes and sequences eliminated from Boogie Nights and Magnolia create
tangible deficits in the films, as full story arcs of various nonwhite ensemble members
are truncated as a concession to runtime even at the expense of narrative harmony.
Anderson’s quixotic insistence on preserving as much of his script as possible—as
well as a storytelling style of overt expression that left little atmospheric space for
poetic implication—seems to have prevented the possibility of using strategically
trimmed scenes to enhance the power of what remained.
Hard Eight does bear some traces of addition through subtraction: scenes included
in the screenplay but absent from the finished film include multiple flashbacks
detailing the relationship between Sydney and John’s father, and a scene in which
a drunken Sydney calls his estranged wife in an attempt to contact his children,
two threads that are more powerful for being unspoken in keeping with Sydney’s
pathological repression. This may well be chalked up to his contractual obligation
to play ball with his production company, an onus that he ensured was mitigated
in Boogie Nights and eliminated in Magnolia. During his thesis phase, Anderson
made a point of doing very little refinement of his stories after he had brainstormed
them. “Rewriting is for pussies,” he said in 1997, and as recently as 2012 he was
still advocating for limited proofreading as a way of granting freer access to instinc-
tive thought: “Don’t fix [typos],” he told an audience member at a talkback after
a screening of The Master. “Let them be, make sure that they exist, because there’s
a reason why they’re there.” Yet however many fertile concepts may have emerged
from the practice in his later films, the “zits-and-all” approach to scripting (as he put
it in 1997) lends a structural unwieldiness to his early work.
The defensive twenty-something Anderson was quick with his justifications for
the misshapen qualities of these films: in reference to the inexplicable mentions
of “the Worm” in Magnolia, he argued that the character was “better served as
something to truly think about as opposed to something to answer,” and that the
storyline “[functions] really well [as] something truncated and elliptical.” (The fact
that this latter quote is one element in a multipart defense of the lack of prominent

88 on screenwriting
Black characters further points to its status as an excuse rather than an explanation.)
Similarly, in the DVD commentary for Hard Eight, Anderson concedes that Sydney’s
motivations for mentoring John may be initially blurry given that he himself was
blurry on the details until they emerged organically. He defends the effect, however,
as bold and ultimately successful; rather than double back to better integrate the
eventual reveal and point toward it organically, he chose to believe that the audi-
ence would more fully identify with John if Sydney’s motivations were absolutely
inscrutable. “If I can pull it off, it’ll be really cool,” he recalls telling himself. “And if
I can’t—well, fuck it.”
According to Dylan Tichenor—editor on Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia,
There Will Be Blood, and Phantom Thread—Anderson’s style as a screenwriter is
defined by doing “all the things you’re told never to do.” Among the transgres-
sions alluded to by Tichenor, Anderson has long included detailed camera moves
in his scene descriptions, a practice referred to as directing on the page and gener-
ally frowned upon as representing a writer overstepping the bounds of their role.
Anderson—whose prolific work as an amateur filmmaker before arriving at film
school caused him to believe that such industry standards were of little value to
him—rejected this conventional wisdom beginning with the first page of Hard
Eight. In fact, the first word of the script—below the slugline “Ext. Coffee Shop/
Parking Lot—Dawn”—is “CAMERA.” He conjures not just the scene’s action but
its cinematography in the reader’s mind’s eye, but Anderson “can get away with it,”
Tichenor said. While he may have eventually attained this status, presuming that he
could get away with it at such an early stage represents a remarkable level of hubris.
This faith in the sturdiness of his mind’s eye extends in his thesis films to a rejec-
tion of the adage that a film is written three times: first on the page, second during
filming, and third in the editing room. On his first three features, Anderson believed
that his films needed to be written just once; as he progressively divested himself of
creative oversight between Hard Eight and Magnolia, his writing demonstrated a
purposeful devolution, with each successive film being intentionally less refined than
the one before.
In her 1999 New York Times profile, titled “His Way,” Lynn Hirschberg charac-
terized Tichenor’s role in his collaboration with Anderson as somewhere between
indulgent (while “Anderson jumps up and down and swears” in the Magnolia editing
room, “Tichenor smiles”) and long-suffering (while Anderson is “pacing the length
of the room” and “jumping about,” Tichenor “ignores [him] . . . he has seen all this
before”). In retrospect, both Tichenor and Anderson lay the blame for his uncom-
promising approach to Magnolia at the feet of the rushed postproduction process,
with the picture being locked as soon as the scripted vision was on screen. “We could
have used another couple of months,” Tichenor told Adam Nayman. “Had we had
that time, I’m convinced more would have come out.” Anderson echoed this senti-
ment in 2017: “There was a rush to finish it . . . when you’re in the thick of it, you
can’t really find your way out.”
Thus, another significant shift between thesis and antithesis phases can be found
in Anderson’s approach to his script once shooting commences. Beginning with
Punch-Drunk Love, Anderson adopted what he described as a “baton hand-off”

on screenwriting 89
mind-set between writing and shooting, in which “the writer gets left at the door”
in favor of opening the process up to on-set discoveries. On Punch-Drunk Love,
Anderson was so willing to abandon his usual playbook—an effort to “fuck myself
up” and divest the habits that had made Magnolia such a frustrating experience—
that he scrapped much of the footage shot during the first two weeks of production.
This choice, characterized by Anderson as “undecided” and Sharon Waxman as
“overindulgent,” led to Tichenor’s abandoning the project, severing what would
have been a four-film collaborative run.
Tichenor’s absence led to Anderson’s collaboration with Leslie Jones, whose edito-
rial hand on Punch-Drunk Love and The Master—a film so significantly discovered
on set and in editing that its circulated screenplay often bears no resemblance to
the film—bookends his antithesis phase. Jones came to Anderson’s project shortly
after working with Terrence Malick, a director whose preferred style of freewheel-
ing, dreamlike montage stands in marked contrast to Tichenor’s collaborator around
the same time, Wes Anderson, whose projects are cut with showy precision. Having
spent a matter of years editing Malick’s World War II epic, The Thin Red Line, Jones
was uniquely well suited to help Anderson channel his own experimental process
into a cohesive shape.
Despite any potential frustration with his abortive experience on Punch-Drunk
Love, Tichenor was present for every step of There Will Be Blood, assembling sequences
during production and taking an active hand in shaping the story by requesting
additional footage that might help build out emotional resonance. Tichenor has
claimed credit for increasing the presence of the often silent young H.W., requesting
insert shots of the child listening to Daniel’s various negotiations, thus implying that
on some level the film is being filtered through H.W.’s perspective. On the other
hand, when Jones worked on The Master, she arrived during postproduction (the
midproduction assembly edits were handled by Peter McNulty) to find a “still very
fluid situation,” she said later. “[Anderson] was still trying to figure out . . . whose
story he really wanted to tell and what the focus was going to be.”
In either case, this more collaborative process benefits the films relative to Anderson’s
earlier efforts to transmute his scripts directly onto celluloid. “That Moment,” the
feature-length Magnolia production diary, culminates in a harrowing sequence filmed
in January 2000, shortly after the film’s muted theatrical rollout. The scene finds
Anderson and Fiona Apple performing some sort of evidently improvised skit in
which she embodies Magnolia as a silent tap-dancing child, while he reconfigures him-
self as an abusive stage parent. As Apple attempts to dance, Anderson repeatedly inter-
rupts to violently grab and berate her: “What did I tell you? It’s too fucking long, OK?
There’s too many blowups, it’s all just too fucking too. Smarten up. Boogie Nights wasn’t
like this. . . . You’re the only child that’s too long. Smarten up.” The dramatic conceit
of the half-cocked sketch is too fraught with interlocking transferences to effectively
analyze, but it climaxes with Apple attempting to hide while Anderson sneers, “When
people say you’re too long, you’re too long. OK? Your friends tell you that the Jason
Robards monologue is not too long—they’re lying. They’re lying to you.”
The question of whether Magnolia could benefit from trimming will be eternally
open to debate; Anderson himself remains divided on the issue, saying in 2017 that

90 on screenwriting
while the film is too long, he would not change it if given the chance, preferring
that it remain “preserved [as a representation of ] that time.” Its status as the rare
example of a “blank check” being handed to such a young director distinguishes it as
metatextually significant regardless of its textual merits. What’s most revealing about
the Fiona Apple pantomime is Anderson’s clear anguish over the persona he had by
then cultivated, to which disinterest in outside perspectives was key. As Hirschberg
concludes in her profile (largely focused on Anderson’s battle with New Line over
the film’s marketing materials, which he preferred be as enigmatic as possible), “his
confidence and talent are admirable, [but] they may also be destructive.”
Adam Nayman’s study of Anderson concludes with a section of new interviews
between Nayman and seven of Anderson’s key collaborators, which Nayman charac-
terizes as an effort to puncture the implications of his “white knight” status, standing
alone at the forefront of modern auteurism. This reputation remains rooted in
Anderson’s behavior during the Magnolia era, which he described at the time as an
effort to jump-start a revolution. His retention of this status among preeminent
modern auteurs is affirmed by Jacqui Griffin’s choice to cite him in a 2017 Film
Inquiry discussion as the single most obvious exemplar of armchair-auteur theory, a
version of the term that she notes “suffers from a heavy air of elitism and exclusivity
as well as an over-general definition” relative to the term’s more specific (and often
political) nouvelle vague origins.
Having renounced his individualistic approach and opened himself to outside
influence—Punch-Drunk Love quite literally cedes the screen at multiple points in
favor of new work from visual artist Jeremy Blake—Anderson’s negotiations over
creative control turned rhetorical as he shifted to a newfound interest in adapting
existing stories. His approach to these works is no less revealing of his interests and
priorities as a writer. His two literary adaptations to date, There Will Be Blood and
Inherent Vice, serve as a case study in opposite approaches to adaptation, with the for-
mer taking a radically liberal approach to Upton Sinclair’s source text, and the second
hewing as closely as possible to Pynchon’s within the bounds of a feature runtime.
With There Will Be Blood drawing such frequent comparison to the works of
Kubrick (and with Anderson having arguably courted that comparison), it is per-
haps appropriate that his adaptive approach to Sinclair’s text is distinctly Kubrickian.
Having based eleven of his feature films on works of literature—beginning with The
Killing (1956), described by Haden Guest as his “first mature film,” and continuing
through his final feature, Eyes Wide Shut (1999)—Kubrick took an approach that
Thomas Leitch has described as “open warfare” against the authors he adapted,
using only the elements of the text that interested him and discarding or altering
anything he pleased in shaping his own interpretation of the story.
Anderson similarly oscillates between an intense fidelity to Sinclair’s work and
an iconoclastic disregard for its story and themes. He hews closely to the novel’s
story up to the point of the derrick fire, even taking some dialogue passages (notably
Daniel’s introductory monologue in which he pitches his services) directly from the
page. From there, however, he abandons the text, a choice more significant than
the typical effort to contain a sprawling novel to feature length; Anderson’s diver-
gence is marked by the deafening of H.W. Plainview, a fate not shared by his literary

on screenwriting 91
counterpart, Bunny Ross. Anderson severs H.W. from the voices that radicalize
Bunny to socialism and pivot the novel toward a global focus on the impact of oil
within every sphere of early-twentieth-century culture. Throughout promotion for
the film, Anderson stressed that it should not be considered a conventional adapta-
tion of Sinclair’s work, and he admitted a squeamishness about addressing the nov-
el’s sociopolitical themes too directly, preferring to reconfigure a sprawling epic into
a streamlined myth. Anderson saw the film as “a horror film and a boxing match”
between figures whose literary counterparts have comparatively little relationship.
(The characters of Paul and Eli are present in Sinclair’s novel, but where Anderson
quickly dispenses with Paul to focus entirely on Eli, the novel keeps Eli primarily in
the background while Paul is a key figure in Bunny’s socialist education.)
Gregory Alan Phipps argues for a more complex reading of the film’s adaptive
approach, suggesting that Anderson’s efforts to distill Sinclair’s story into a new and
radically different form mirrors Daniel’s own evolution as he continually refines his
performance of civility; There Will Be Blood is not only an adaptation, according to
Phipps, it is “dramatizing adaptation.” If Anderson’s strip-mining of a novel to
which he feels largely unbeholden might be said to mirror Daniel’s own excavation-
ist efforts, then his approach to Thomas Pynchon might accordingly be compared
to Doc’s tender maintenance of his love for Shasta. His adaptation of Inherent Vice is
so faithful to Pynchon’s prose that it is often closer to an act of transcription; rather
than being credited as a screenwriter, he claimed, “[my] credit should be like ‘secre-
tary to the author.’ ” His choices in condensing the novel’s sprawling story, how-
ever, do draw focus toward his clearest point of interest, as the relationship between
Doc and Shasta is brought to the fore rather than the more equalized weight that
she carries compared to other elements in Pynchon’s story. When asked in 2015 what
the film was about, Anderson answered, “It’s about the ex–old lady . . . who does it
for you, who still has you wrapped around her finger,” and one of his more radical
divergences from the text comes in the closing scene, which sees Shasta cuddled up
with Doc behind the wheel of his car, a marked divergence from the solo drive that
Pynchon’s Doc takes into the gathering mist of an uncertain future.
Yet one of Anderson’s most openly reverential choices—the inclusion of voice-
over passages that quote Pynchon’s omniscient narration directly—also signals a sub-
tle but significant shift in perspective: whereas the novel’s perspective most closely
follows Doc’s, Anderson assigns narratorial duty to Sortilège, a minor character in the
novel but here granted a pseudo-mystical status through her own ability to describe
Doc’s thoughts to the viewer. This preternatural understanding of Doc’s mind, paired
with a tendency to occasionally disappear in the midst of scenes from which she
should have no clear egress, invites interpretation as to her diegetic status—is she
purely a figment of Doc’s mind? A diegetic character with whom he occasionally
imagines conversations? Are we in fact observing Sortilège’s memory play, filtered
through her own perspective? This would square with the opening shot, in which she
sets the scene for an unseen listener before the story transitions to Doc’s apartment.
Regardless of how one chooses to answer the open question of Sortilège’s exis-
tence, Anderson makes a quietly bold choice in transferring words penned by a man
pushing seventy into the mouth of a woman in her thirties, reconfiguring nostalgia

92 on screenwriting
Sortilège narrates the story of Inherent Vice to an unseen listener. (Warner Bros.)

spoken from the rueful reserve of half a century into a more immediate elegy for a
way of life being lost in real time. The choice also unites Inherent Vice with Phantom
Thread as paired stories narrated from a female perspective, a key shift in Anderson’s
synthesis films that may not have entirely refuted earlier suggestions of a disinterest
in female perspectives—though they may exert storytelling power, both Sortilège
and Alma occupy a subjugated space within their respective films relative to the cen-
tral male figure—but certainly introduced a complicating wrinkle.
Anderson describes both There Will Be Blood and Inherent Vice as having helped
jolt him out of a rut. Floundering with a series of half-formed ideas that refused to
coalesce into a screenplay, he used Oil! as “a great stepping-stone” that lent conve-
nient form as he realigned his preexisting interest in a story of rivalrous families.
Assigning himself “secretarial duties” to Pynchon, meanwhile, allowed a respite dur-
ing a moment when he was, as he said, “sick of the sound of my own voice,” with the
project serving as “a shot in the arm for me to be excited about writing again.” In
Stanley Kubrick: Adapting the Sublime, Elisa Pezzotta addresses this issue of how liter-
ary adaptations might function as auteur works, certainly a question that might be
asked of the eminently faithful Inherent Vice. While acknowledging that directorial
through lines of theme and style can be established regardless of a screenplay’s origin,
Pezzotta argues for a more holistic approach to locating adaptations within an auteur
filmography: given Kubrick’s belief that adaptation yields a unique opportunity to
discover a fully formed work and cinematically transmute the intense sensations
associated with that first engagement, “adaptations can be rethought as a recreation
of the sublime experiences lived by the director while reading the source novels.”
Thus, Anderson’s choice with Inherent Vice to mimic the overstimulating qual-
ity of the Pynchonian world by creating a density of visual gags, and heightening
paranoia by limiting the field of vision, can be seen as an effort to adapt “what,
according to the fidelity approach, cannot be adapted because it should constitute
the untranslatable peculiarity of the written medium.” Along with the impact of

on screenwriting 93
Kubrick’s camerawork and elliptical storytelling on his own style, this theory of sub-
lime adaptation draws a productive line between Anderson and one of his primary
influences, another director for whom “faithfulness” is a particularly limiting lens
through which to assess the success of their literary adaptations.
When Jimmy takes Sydney at gunpoint, shifting Hard Eight into its endgame,
he snarls, “John doesn’t know you killed his father, but I will tell him. I’m threat-
ening you with the words. You understand?” In case the viewer does not properly
understand how threatening words can be, Jimmy’s command of this negotiation
is shattered a few moments later with Sydney’s utterance of a few snide words that
impugn Jimmy’s integrity, brazenly ignoring the gun in his face. From the time of
his earliest work, Anderson has demonstrated his belief that dialogue is not simply
an opportunity for actors to flex their talent; words, in the Andersonian worldview,
are a tool of transcendent and transformative power. It is a position he put forth even
before Hard Eight—the suggestion that one might “let go of all the crap and piss and
shit that kills other people,” achieving enduring happiness by speaking truthfully,
originated not in Claudia’s date with Officer Jim toward the end of Magnolia, but in
Barry’s date with Lena toward the beginning of the unproduced Knuckle Sandwich.
That belief in the immense power of communication encompasses the full scope of
Anderson’s filmography, even as the shape and impact of that power have shifted
with time. John Bruns has suggested that Anderson’s work is united by the “use of
addressive surplus, or the surplus of the good listener,” as his characters are continu-
ally positioned “face to face, determined as much to affirm another’s consciousness as
to assert their own.” Published in 2008, this assessment predates the complexities in
the listening process that Anderson introduced with The Master (through liquor and
demagoguery), Inherent Vice (through marijuana and conspiracy), Phantom Thread
(through the defensive skirmishes of domestic partnership), and Licorice Pizza
(through the dysfunctional urges inherent in a taboo flirtation). Yet even in dem-
onstrating the difficulties of listenership, Anderson continues asserting the power of
communication by examining all its multivalent malformations.

94 on screenwriting
six
On Gender Performance

approximately two and a half hours into Magnolia—and with just over
half an hour left—two men face each other in the foyer of the dying television mag-
nate Earl Partridge’s lavish home. One of these men, Phil Parma, is a soft-spoken and
soft-faced hospice nurse; the other, Frank T. J. Mackey, is a hard-hearted, hard-bod-
ied messiah of misogyny. One is a listener, the other an orator; one helps individuals
through caretaking, the other harms multitudes through proselytizing. And, for the
first time in what appears to be a very long while, the caustic Frank has lost control
of his domain. After hours of effort and evasion, he has stepped into the realm of the
gentle Phil.
Frank and Phil do not stand face to face for long. Frank (that name being an
alias, just one of many nested layers of protective performance) stares down the
hall, his gaze parallel to the camera and toward his father, the object of his ire; Phil
(a character so utterly available that he shares the name of his performer) shifts his
gaze perpendicular, toward the lens. Phil’s gesture is not one of deference or intimi-
dation; it is a courtesy to a man clearly struggling with years of repressed emotional-
ity. Having drawn the reluctant Frank toward this mutual desire for closure, Phil is
now in the position of power, but he does not assert dominance in the way we have
seen Frank do consistently throughout the film. He steps out of Frank’s way, and the
two men stand with identical hands-on-hips posture, heaving a sigh and waiting for
the foyer’s shifting air pressure to stabilize.
This brief scene ably represents one of the most prominent threads in Ander-
son’s maximalist opus: male gender performance, and the results of its evolution and
devolution across the second half of the twentieth century. The frequent contrasting
of normative and nonnormative masculinity—whether evenly distributed between
two characters, as with the aggressive Frank and gentle Phil; distributed unevenly
across another two, as with the physically imposing but ingenue-coded Brad and
nebbish but chivalrous Donnie; or contrasting within one character, as with the
paternalistic yet solicitous Officer Jim Kurring—suggests a debate between incom-
patible modes of embodying gender. Yet Anderson seldom positions one mode as
inherently superior to the other; rather, his filmography as a whole suggests that only
through complicating Western mores of gender performance—not just melding but
effectively balancing qualities of traditional masculinity and femininity—can one
unify the often chaotic and contradictory urges of conventional gender performance
(a term coined in the late 1980s by the gender theorist Judith Butler as a means of
discussing gender as a social construct distinct from biological sex).
For all its diffuse tangents and digressions, Magnolia is ultimately united by its
concern with the failures of the midcentury patriarchal standard and the decades of
rippling effects that culminated in the Clinton-era reassessment of gender norms.
From this seismic reckoning with the sins of the father (literally and figuratively)
emerges what Joanne Clarke Dillman describes as a tone of “male hysteria.” This
term, reappropriated from its long-standing use as a disparagement of female emo-
tionality, represents one primary way in which Magnolia circumvents typical modes
of discussing and experiencing American masculinity. As Dillman writes, the film’s
characters “expose the impossible contradictions of white male masculinity,” with
Anderson making use of classically feminized generic trappings—the emotional sur-
feits of melodrama and the prolonged, byzantine narrative of soap opera—to subvert
expectations for stories of (white, American) men struggling with what it means to
be (white, American) men.
Examination of gender identity, with all its restrictions and potential permeabil-
ity, was a frequent thread in 1990s “smart cinema”; to note two among Sconce’s cited
films, In the Company of Men (1997) takes male bonhomie to a hyperbolic extreme
that approaches a gender combustion point, while in Being John Malkovich (1999),
two women achieve self-actualization (including recognizing their same-sex attrac-
tion) only when granted the ability to inhabit a male body. Some among Anderson’s
cohort melded their reassessments of masculinity with genre revisionism, reconsider-
ing classically masculine narrative frameworks by inhabiting them with ironically
counterpointed male figures. In Reservoir Dogs (1992), Quentin Tarantino creates a
criminal ensemble out of his own class of hysterical men, consumed as much by anx-
iety and paranoia as they are by pop culture deconstruction; in Bottle Rocket (1996),
Wes Anderson tells a heist story through the eyes of hangdog wannabe-gangsters
who chase their dreams with all the conviction of children playing pretend. In his
own abortive crime pastiche, Knuckle Sandwich, Paul Thomas Anderson’s gender
revision takes the form of an outrageous surplus of emotionality, as Barry cuts a
swath of violence in pursuit of Lena, sobbing all the way. These 90s crime stories—a
framework encompassing, among others, Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and his script for
Tony Scott’s True Romance (1993)—comment on the decade’s shifting and contradic-
tory expectations for male gender performance by undermining the archetypal image
of the steely, stoic gangster, seeing how much they can destabilize the gun-toting
hard-ass before his ability to perform crumbles beneath him.
If Magnolia is a film defined by male hysteria, it is by no means an outlier in
Anderson’s filmography. Each of his “thesis” films features young men going to
hyperbolic lengths to demonstrate their clearly impotent bona fides; early in Hard
Eight, John cautions Sydney against any potential sexual advance by claiming to
know “three types of karate: jiu-jitsu, aikido, and regular karate,” a level of posturing
somewhat undercut by the scene shortly thereafter in which John pauses to adjust

96 on gender performance
his Velcro sneakers. John C. Reilly brings a similar macho swagger to Boogie Nights,
particularly the first meeting of Dirk and Reed, in which they affect nonchalance
while attempting to one-up one another’s weightlifting achievements. In either case,
Anderson presents his central characters as preening, overgrown boys attempting to
mask an overwhelming vulnerability.
With Magnolia, Anderson turned his interest increasingly toward dyads, charac-
ters who function best as half of an embodied rhetorical argument. I have discussed
the mirroring relationships between the repentant Earl and irredeemable Jimmy, as
well as Donnie’s faded star and Stanley’s rising one. As his scope has narrowed (the
ensembles of Boogie Nights and Magnolia later giving way to stories of single protago-
nists), Anderson has come to focus on more directly oppositional male pairings—
the confrontation between the nebbish Barry Egan and boorish Dean Trumbell; the
rivalry between rapacious Daniel Plainview and supercilious Eli Sunday; the passive-
aggressive dance between bestial Freddie Quell and cerebral Lancaster Dodd; and
the uneasy alliance between the free spirit Doc Sportello and the government opera-
tive Bigfoot Bjornsen. (Among the distinct breaks with precedent represented by his
first story set outside the United States, with Phantom Thread he shifts this dyadic
model to examine modes of femininity embodied by Alma and Cyril.) For the most
part, these battles of wills resolve not by upholding one mode of gender identity as
superior to the other, but rather by demonstrating either the futility of the battle
for dominance or the necessity of establishing new forms of gender performance.
(Notably, at no point do these considerations extend to a particular reassessment of
the gender binary).
Anderson’s first two stories of masculine dyads, Punch-Drunk Love and There
Will Be Blood, arrived at the dawn and the twilight, respectively, of the George
W. Bush presidency. In his book Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush, David
Greven argues for this type of storytelling as intrinsically linked to its era: following
the male hysteria of the 1990s, “Hollywood films [began to] suggest that manhood’s
center cannot hold, that manhood is split . . . and that the burden of male repre-
sentation must be carried by two stars rather than one.” Anderson’s work does not
feature in Greven’s analysis; examples roughly contemporaneous to Punch-Drunk
Love include Auto Focus (2002) and Collateral (2004), while those contemporane-
ous to There Will Be Blood include The Departed (2006) and The Prestige (2007).
However, this conception of paired male protagonists as “two warring halves of
one consciousness . . . that recalls Ingmar Bergman’s haunting, disturbing female-
centric Persona (1966)” resonates with much of Anderson’s postmillennial work
(indeed, George Toles posits that the Jonny Greenwood cue preceding the opening
titles of There Will Be Blood explicitly echoes Lars Johan Werle’s opening cue for
Bergman’s soundtrack).
Of these dyadic films, There Will Be Blood features both the most openly conten-
tious rivalry, and the one most central to the narrative (as opposed to the central yet
relatively sanguine Quell/Dodd relationship, and the contentious yet relatively second-
ary Sportello/Bjornsen one). Anderson has spoken of modeling the Plainview/Sunday
pairing on Spy vs. Spy, the long-running Mad magazine strip in which two nameless,
silent agents are locked in an eternal cycle of comically violent one-upmanship, as

on gender performance 97
well as Tom and Jerry, the cartoon adversaries who epitomize the archetypal cat-and-
mouse game. Much of the film’s narrative engine is derived from the tactical ground
game between Daniel and Eli for control of Little Boston’s resources, as Eli continu-
ally demands acknowledgment and support of his congregation, a concession that
Daniel is unwilling to make until faced with absolutely no other choice.
This rivalry comes to the least ambiguous conclusion of any Andersonian match-
up, as Eli is humiliated and then murdered by Daniel. Mirroring (coincidentally,
Anderson claims) the ape-on-ape murder of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Daniel is returned
to the bestial state in which we first found him, and triumphs over his opposite, who
has by now progressed to his own exaggerated form as a proto–celebrity preacher.
This grisly conclusion befits Anderson’s preference to classify the film as horror, but
rather than packing an emotional punch, it lands primarily as a bleak thought exper-
iment. Anderson throws two opposing avatars of pride against one another until a
victor emerges but demonstrates that this dead-end battle has left that victor a bleary
husk. Daniel has gone so far only to end up once more alone in a hole—albeit now
one with butler service.
The dynamic between Freddie and Dodd bears some similarity to that between
Daniel and Eli, as a brutish man is confronted by a more outwardly refined one.
This time, however, the animalistic figure subjects himself willingly to attempted
domestication by the outwardly elevated one. Appropriately for a film that centered
its marketing on ink blot tests, both the stakes of this relationship and the characters’
goals are far more opaque than those of Daniel and Eli. Freddie is evidently intrigued
by the sense of belonging afforded by the Cause, but he is either unwilling or unable
to fully abandon his individualism in service of Dodd’s gospel. Dodd, on the other
hand, is likely the victim of self-sabotage as he openly covets Freddie’s freedom. “You
can see in [Dodd’s] eyes,” Anderson said in 2015, “I want to be like you, I want to run
wild like you. Get me out of here. But because he can’t, it gets complicated.”

The dyadic Freddie and Dodd confront one another during a brief incarceration. (The Weinstein Company)

98 on gender performance
 The détente reached by Freddie and Dodd seems designed to frustrate expec-
tations of narrative unity. Freddie crosses the ocean to be once more face to face
with his would-be guru, who performs a seemingly hostile rendition of a pop stan-
dard rich with potential meaning—a love song reconfigured into something like a
threat—that is deliberately withheld from the viewer, and the two part with nothing
left to say. The shooting script includes the detail that Freddie has a pig and a rooster
tattooed on his feet, which he explains as a superstitious gesture, these being the two
animals that always survive a shipwreck. It may be that this is the most productive
way of reading the ambiguous rivalry between Freddie and Dodd—two resilient
animals, one base and filthy yet possessed of a surprising intelligence, the other vain
and noisy yet incapable of flight. Neither animal is among the other’s typical preda-
tors, nor are they particularly compatible, and they are ultimately best left to their
own devices.
There are shades of the implicit battle over the ideal male psyche in Hard Eight,
as the crass, cruel Jimmy and stoic, ethical Sydney each attempt to exert control over
the eminently impressionable John, with the credulous young man ultimately seem-
ing to absorb the worst of both men. Having attempted to meld Sydney’s behavioral
code with Jimmy’s violent reactionism, John is finally ejected from the story and, one
can only hope, set on the path to an independent future. As much as Sydney may
project an air of pragmatic serenity, his equilibrium is all too easily rocked by the
“flagrant” (as John apologetically describes Jimmy) younger generation. This philo-
sophical debate is best demonstrated in the enigmatic central scene that finds Sydney
going up against a crude gambler (Philip Seymour Hoffman) from opposite ends
of the craps table. As the younger man preens and brays in his direction, Sydney is
goaded into the eponymous bad bet (the odds of rolling a hard eight are only about
2.7 percent), evidently in the hopes of demonstrating a plainspoken confidence anti-
thetical to the younger man’s vulgarity. Yet Sydney succeeds only in proving his own
form of recklessness, and it is this barely concealed instability that leaves him ending
the film in the same place as he entered it, now with new blood on—or at least, in a
literal sense, adjacent to—his hands.
Boogie Nights has its own dyad in the form of Dirk and his video-era usurper,
Johnny Doe (Jonathan Quint), a character who embodies the lowered standards of
the shift in format. Whereas Dirk selected a name that conveys ostentatious pres-
ence, his rival’s is synonymous with anonymity; while Dirk’s personal code prohibits
depictions of gratuitous violence toward women, a brief glimpse at Johnny’s work
shows him pointing a gun at a woman’s head while she fellates him. Johnny’s fate
is left ambiguous in the finished film, but the fact that Anderson’s original script
included paired inebriated car accidents, one claiming Johnny’s life and the other
sparing Dirk’s (the damage to the Corvette visible in the Rahad Jackson sequence is
vestigial to this excised story beat) suggests an authorial handout of moral judgments
as explicit as the divergent fates afforded Earl and Jimmy.
The gendered dyads of Licorice Pizza are diffuse compared to others in the Ander-
son canon, but given the tendency for the story’s episodes to center around powerful
men who are ultimately exposed as flawed, each could be seen as an implicit compari-
son to the noble Gary Valentine. Meanwhile, as the two characters most prominently

on gender performance 99
modeled on real historical figures, Jon Peters and Joel Wachs form their own sort of
dyad (the degenerate hairdresser versus the upstanding public servant), with Alana’s
distress over her tempestuous night with Peters leading directly to her volunteering
for the Wachs campaign. Yet despite one character being debauched and the other
honorable, both fall short to the only good man in the Valley—who just happens
to be a boy.
Of the Andersonian masculine dyads, the two that wrestle most openly with
opposing modes of gender performance, and the two that come to the clearest (and
most similar) conclusion on the way forward for the bisected male soul, are those
found in Punch-Drunk Love and Inherent Vice—or, as Nick Pinkerton puts it in his
discussion of Anderson’s “diptych mode,” the tales of “the Victim and the Conman”
and “the Hippie and the Square.” Bigfoot Bjornsen and Doc Sportello are painted
as clearly as possible to be emblematic of the counterculture and the American
mainstream; everything, from their roles (government dick versus independent
sleuth) to their grooming (severe flat top versus permed mane), places Bigfoot and
Doc at cross-purposes, with each of these opposites pointing toward their differing
approaches to human interaction—Bigfoot’s bellowing violence versus Doc’s soft-
spoken inquisitiveness.
Yet Doc and Bigfoot are ultimately proven to be aligned in their outdated ideals:
if Doc’s hippie dream is on the verge of extinction, Bigfoot’s own self-perceived
nobility is no less endangered by their common enemy, Adrian Prussia, whose influ-
ence so profoundly shakes both men that they each succumb to an outcome they
have striven to avoid across the entire story—murder in Doc’s case, and marijuana
consumption in Bigfoot’s. Even before Prussia’s relatively late emergence onto the
Gordita Beach stage, his complicating influence on Doc’s and Bigfoot’s identities is
foreshadowed by Mickey Wolfmann, a character who straddles the counterculture
and the mainstream, contaminating both pools. Mickey is an establishment opera-
tive who dabbles in mind expansion and free love without subscribing to the under-
lying ideals, sliding seamlessly back into what Crocker Fenway might call the main
herd, demonstrating the illusory nature of the culture war’s ethical incompatibility.
Rather than uniting and liberating the two sides, though, Mickey’s base self-interest
suggests only the folly of believing in either form of righteousness.
By the story’s conclusion, both Doc and Bigfoot have seen their worldviews so
thoroughly shaken that they meet in the murky middle across Doc’s coffee table.
After Bigfoot breaks down the door and voraciously swallows Doc’s stash, the two
stare one another down and engage in a sort of psychic melding, briefly speaking in
sync as though through persona superimposition (not altogether dissimilar from the
effect achieved in Bergman’s film when the hemispheres of the two women’s faces
are joined in a split screen to form one visage). After briefly passing through one
another—perhaps a form of implicit consummation of the homoerotic undertones
of so many masculine rivalries within both Anderson’s films and Greven’s analysis—
the two men stumble off into the hazy future, each of their perspectives infected by
the other’s, and all of their certitudes about the world divested.
Barry Egan and Dean Trumbell, meanwhile, each represent their own form of
masculine hysteria: two arrested adolescents whose chaotic behaviors bespeak an

100 on gender performance

inability to master their impulses. While Barry’s dysregulated behaviors—inexplicable
weeping, attacks on inanimate objects—are the result of his psychological blockages,
Dean’s own antisocial impulses—incoherent rage when his authority is questioned,
compulsive projection of dominance even as he buckles at the slightest suggestion
of physical reprisal—are the result of his absolute disinhibition. Barry is cursed with
an abundance of self-awareness, while Dean leaves himself vulnerable by virtue of an
absolute lack thereof. The two characters do not cross paths until the film’s final act
(the posturing, ineffectual Dean having outsourced his efforts to strong-arm Barry),
but in their ultimate confrontation, Barry demonstrates the mastery of his warring
impulses that he has attained by virtue of loving and being loved. With the harmo-
nium functioning as something like the mysterious monolith that turns apes into
nascent men in 2001: A Space Odyssey, an evolutionary leap has been catalyzed for
Barry, allowing him the ability to wield a tool and defeat a less enlightened rival.
That tool, in this case, is a newfound focus and purpose to his emotional energy
(by this logic, two consecutive Andersonian rivalries end by invoking the prologue
of Kubrick’s film; as ever, echoes abound in his work). Crucially, Barry has neither
embraced nor disavowed his violent tendencies; rather, he has achieved the ability to
regulate his strength and, by so doing, returned himself to the confidence and self-
sufficiency that Greven suggests had become an anachronism in Hollywood mascu-
linity by the 2000s. Barry’s nonviolent confrontation with Dean is an extension of
what Christina Lane sees as the ultimate message of Magnolia: Anderson’s hysterical
men succeed neither by “eradicating the battle” for appropriate gender identity nor by
“[shifting] towards more coherence or unity,” but rather by embracing “an insecurity
intrinsic to any form of identity.” As demonstrated by the spectrum of Andersonian
dyads, the more rigidly defined the terms of this struggle, and the more entrenched
a character is in his mode of performance, the more likely the struggle will come to a
dead end, whether annihilative or stagnant. Only by embracing the inherent ephem-
erality of human nature—an effort that becomes more fluid across the century that
Anderson’s stories span, from the irremediable brutality of Daniel Plainview, to the
wary curiosities of Freddie Quell and Doc Sportello, to the ultimate ecstatic freedom
of Barry Egan—can manhood chart an effective path forward.
A conspicuous focus on the phallus is inherent to much of Anderson’s filmog-
raphy, in which the penis often functions as objective correlative for a vast array of
masculine preoccupations. Among the bellowed mantras of Seduce and Destroy—
Frank T. J. Mackey’s gospel of radical misogyny—is “Respect the cock!” The line is as
outrageously blunt as everything about Frank’s public persona; he demands respect
by virtue of his biological sex, lending the organ an inherent and absolute power, at
least in Frank’s personal cosmology. Boogie Nights, the film that introduced Anderson
to the mainstream moviegoing public, features a penis as narrative engine—Dirk’s
organ (obscured from the viewer until the final moments but so prodigious that any
character gazing upon it is briefly consumed by awe) is his “one special thing,” the
inherent gift that he believes everyone is born with. His ability to perform sexually is
inextricable from his ability to effectively exist in the world; once his virility is taken
from him by his drug addiction, he becomes, by turns, an ineffectual buffoon and
a tragic husk.

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 The eventual reveal of Dirk’s penis, which he hauls out of his pants to admire in
his dressing room before his intended triumphant return to porno prominence, was
a lightning rod during the film’s promotion. Anderson extended this media cycle by
refusing to admit that the appendage was a prosthetic, claiming in some interviews
that it was Wahlberg’s real penis and in others that he had (inexplicably) served as
the body double himself. He devoted significant thought to the issue of how and
when to deploy this thirteen-inch MacGuffin; he experimented with providing a
full-frontal shot early in the film to “get it out of the way, sort of normalize it,” but
ultimately decided to save it until the end, a choice he compared to the judicious-
ness with which Spielberg depicted the shark in Jaws. By the time of the final cut,
Anderson had come to believe that the delayed reveal was not so much a gathering of
power as a deflation. “It’s just this stupid piece of meat,” he recalled realizing when
seeing the version that held the figurative cards close to the vest. “What have we been
talking about the whole time?”
The linkage between sexual virility and mastery of one’s domain can be traced
back to the unproduced Knuckle Sandwich, in which the hulking mob boss Babaloo
can only achieve arousal during physical assault. Babaloo discovered this tendency
when bludgeoning a would-be bully with his lunch pail in second grade: “while
I struck blow after blow to this prick,” Babaloo tells an underling (the significance of
using a colloquial term for a penis within this form of beating is left unclear), “I had
a stiff little fire hydrant percolating in my pants for the very first time.” Along with
identifying the nexus of a man’s power as located in his pants, this conflation of vio-
lent urges with sexual ones points directly toward the more refined iteration of the
same ideas in Punch-Drunk Love.
If virility imbues a man with power in Anderson’s early films, then lack of sexual
prowess is just as impactful. In Boogie Nights, Little Bill is repeatedly confronted not
just by his own lack of sexual access to his wife but also by the free and open access
that she provides other men. Little Bill is defined by two qualities: his ineffectual
efforts to manage Jack’s porno shoots, and his repeated hangdog response to catching
his wife in flagrante delicto. Among the myriad indignities suffered by the characters
of Boogie Nights, this spiteful cuckolding is the most insurmountable; Little Bill is
among the film’s few fatalities, and the only one to die by his own hand (after first
killing his wife and a young stud mid-coitus, a moment that Anderson was dismayed
to find eliciting cheers from one college-aged audience, a miscommunication of
message very much in line with the film’s murky tonal calibrations).
Issues of virility take on a more symbolic function by the time of Anderson’s
antithesis films, with the derricks and wells that stand in for Daniel Plainview’s
implicit (at least in the finished film, though explicit in the screenplay) impotence,
and with The Split Saber—the title of a Lancaster Dodd treatise on the human con-
dition, and a handy distillation of the film’s fixation on emasculation. Upon return-
ing home, Freddie (a character so obsessed with reproductive organs that every
Rorschach blot he sees is either a penis, a vagina, or both) is counseled that he
should not be ashamed of his posttraumatic “affliction,” which generally manifests
as a variety of anxious symptoms. Freddie and his compatriots have engaged in one
of the most stereotypically masculine pursuits—enlisting in military service during

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wartime—and as a consequence have returned with a host of behaviors generally
antithetical to traditional male gender performance. Much of the film’s depiction of
a nation reeling from the effects of a world war proceed from this anxiety, a genera-
tion of men too traumatized to resume the role they have been trained to perform—
their sabers split. Freddie spends the entirety of the film in a state of heightened
sexual frustration, never able to achieve consummation, whether by virtue of his
own inebriation (as seen in his burgeoning relationship with a department-store col-
league, Martha [Amy Ferguson], early in the film, which a deleted scene available
on the DVD release suggests was intended as a pattern of drunken self-sabotage)
or inopportune potential couplings (once he is welcomed into the Cause, eligible
women rebuff him, with the only one to demonstrate interest being Dodd’s married
daughter). Only once Freddie has fled the Cause on a stolen motorcycle, and then
returned to confront Dodd face to face, is he able to achieve his goal of lucid, con-
sensual sex with Winn.
Freudian genital anxieties arise in multiple forms across Magnolia’s epic runtime.
In a twist on the Oedipal complex, Stanley’s stymied efforts to urinate can be read
as his father controlling his genitals, a form of emasculative dominance appropriate
to a prepubescent character. Phallic symbols do not come much more transparent,
however, than Officer Jim Kurring’s gun. Many critics have noted the impotence
metaphor in the loss of Jim’s service pistol prior to his date with Claudia—a derelic-
tion of duty that leaves him a weeping shell of his former self—and the rejuvenat-
ing significance of the gun’s being returned the following morning after the night’s
apocalyptic reckoning. But the journey toward the lost gun begins almost as soon
as the film does, with Jim seen in the opening montage toting a massive shotgun;
this phallic symbol shrinks first into a baton (which, like the pistol, he is incapable
of effectively sheathing, sending it clattering down a set of stairs) and then into the
smaller handgun before vanishing altogether.
Toles reads the gun as a symbol not just for Jim’s journey but for the film’s collec-
tive portrait of manhood; each of the story’s male characters is “returned, by differ-
ent routes, to a condition of childlike helplessness,” a presexualized state that must,
according to the Andersonian sexual cosmology, be one of absolute powerlessness.
The conspicuous and somewhat queasy choice to lend Claudia’s prospective lover the
same name as her abuser is also contextualized by Toles’s argument that the elimina-
tion of Jimmy, the irredeemable man, from the film’s universe redeems the potential
of the entire gender; the phallic burden that has incrementally evaporated can now
re-form in the hands of “a man-child bearing the same name as the one who could
find no path to restitution.” This lens is useful in clarifying, among other ambigui-
ties, the question of why the older man should bear the more diminutive form of
the name; though Jim is younger, he is the improved model by virtue of the progress
ideally made by any successive generation.
The suggestion of the groin as the hub of an Andersonian character’s power is
cemented by an image that recurs across his filmography: a character stands before
a seated one, their crotch positioned in the face of their intended inferior. This
dominance posture appears first in Hard Eight, when Sydney brings a downtrodden
Clementine back to his hotel suite with initially unclear intentions. After seating

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her on the bed, Sydney stands in front of her with his head out of frame, creating
a two-shot of woman and beheaded groin. Anderson cites this framing as originat-
ing in Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961), wherein George C. Scott adopts the same
pose before Piper Laurie. “It’s very scary,” Anderson says on the Hard Eight DVD
commentary, “the way the man was put over the woman, the way he was attacking
her . . . the threat of the male waist [as] a weapon.”
The threat of Sydney’s waist, as perceived by Clementine (and aided by another
cinematic quotation, as Anderson adopts a Jonathan Demme technique of subtly
dimming the background lighting while she waits for Sydney to return and poten-
tially proposition her), is defused when his magnanimous true intentions are
revealed. But the image clarifies an inherent power imbalance among the characters,
and Anderson employs the same tactic in Magnolia with Frank’s psychological games-
manship toward Gwenovier. At the outset of their interview, Frank feels so unambig-
uously in control of the situation that he adopts stances of exaggerated demureness,
crouching below her while dressed in nothing but white cotton briefs—a choice
of costume (or lack thereof ) that is simultaneously vulnerable and aggressive, with
Frank’s ostensible exposure being very close to a state of unrequited sexual readiness.
His exaggerated defenselessness mocks Gwenovier, a manipulative dominance-sans-
dominance. Yet when he does lose control of the situation after Gwenovier demon-
strates her full knowledge of his past, the now-clothed Frank adopts the Hustler pose,
thrusting his crotch in her face, demanding her respect now that he realizes he has
lost it—or that he never had it to begin with.
With Inherent Vice, Anderson began experimenting with reversing the genders
in the eye-to-groin frame. Here, a phone call between Doc and Bigfoot includes
paired images of their respective romantic partners. The otherwise domineering
Bigfoot sits, chastened, as his wife, Chastity, stands above, haranguing him for being
distracted by work rather than attending to his domestic duties. Meanwhile, Doc
sits as Shasta brings him a beer prior to her psychosexually charged monologue.
The images are unmistakably juxtaposed, with Chastity dressed in classic housewife
garb (knee-length skirt, button-up blouse) and Shasta in bikini bottom and faded
Country Joe & the Fish T-shirt, their cultural divide illustrated by norms of female
gender performance. If the Andersonian waist-to-eye shot typically connotes power,
it is an appropriate choice in demonstrating the sway that Chastity and Shasta hold
over their seated men (albeit a sway that takes dramatically different forms, a comic
illustration of the Freudian Madonna/whore bifurcation). Yet given that Chastity’s
face is never seen in focus at any point in the film, the choice has the effect of dehu-
manizing her, casting her domestic superiority as a form of otherness, while the
analogous framing of Shasta creates an air of alluring enigma befitting her erratic
presence within the story.
Seeing a woman made submissive to a man, even by a choice as simple as framing,
has an essentially different connotation of sexual threat than the equivalent shot of a
man made submissive to a woman, and to suggest that this could be read as simply
a coding of which character has control of the scene would be to ignore the full
implications of this semiotic choice. The complex network of associations conjured
by the placement of Chastity or Shasta in the groin-as-power frame is distinctly

104 on gender performance

more engaging than the relatively blunt placement of either Sydney or Frank, an
example of Anderson’s using his technical capabilities to create layers of meaning
for the female presence in his stories that may not exist entirely on the page. The
practice is intriguing, but it fails to significantly mitigate the dominance of men over
the plotting of the story, and may arguably come across as more smirking than truly
provocative—the locker room taunt of the “pussy-whipped” man would seem to
hang over the image of Bigfoot being happily dominated by his wife’s “weaponized”
(to revisit Anderson’s earliest conception of this framing) midsection.
If Frank’s placement before Gwenovier represents a demand that his sexual organs,
and thus his existence, be respected, the gesture feels desperate, in line with the male
hysteria that is Magnolia’s primary focus. And with Frank’s efforts to position himself
as the pied piper of masculinity, it’s easy to wonder: what keeps the other men in the
story from subscribing to his gospel, and how much would have to change in their
lives for any of them to end up there? For that matter, would any other Anderson
character respond to Frank’s theory of masculine performance? Jason Sperb claims
that one “can easily imagine Barry [Egan] sitting in the front row” for a Seduce and
Destroy seminar, a suggestion that all but damns Barry as a radical misogynist
in waiting, and casts his hesitancy to engage in dirty talk with phone-sex opera-
tor Georgia not so much as chivalric anxiety as pathologically repressed yearning.
I would look skeptically upon the assertion that Barry is ripe for radicalization, but
I could more easily see that fate for Little Bill, who succumbs to male hysteria by the
time of his violent exit from the Boogie Nights stage. Little Bill is a character constitu-
tionally incapable of commanding respect, and if simple psychological manipulation
might unlock a dormant domineer, he would seem a prime candidate.
The exercise of mentally pairing Anderson’s male characters with Frank’s ethos
serves as a rhetorical litmus test for their sympathetic worthiness. In Magnolia,
Anderson’s pseudo-biblical epic, Frank may not be Satan, but he is at least the snake
in the garden, tempting characters to surrender their decency in exchange for a short-
cut to respect and affection. What, then, keeps Officer Jim from popping in on a
Seduce and Destroy seminar on a day off? With his shrinking and then vanishing
phallic symbol, he is the character most openly emasculated over the course of the
story; how much lower would his ebb have to bring him before he steps through the
door? Is his religious faith enough to keep him off the path? Is this the source of inner
strength that sees him regroup and return in the face of Claudia’s evident rejection,
now armed with sincerity rather than manipulation?
Among the few lines in the Magnolia shooting script that did not make the fin-
ished film is one of Phil Parma’s, which reads as chillingly ambiguous without the
ability to hear how Hoffman might have interpreted the words: while welcoming
Frank to Earl’s home, Phil mentions having heard a great deal of Seduce and Destroy
messaging while waiting on hold. “It’s interesting,” Phil says of Frank’s sales pitch,
and the line can be interpreted as either magnanimous or genuinely curious. Phil is
among the film’s more noble characters (though some directing choices might play
on a late-1990s audience’s association between Hoffman and his sexually deviant
character in Happiness [1998], as Phil seems at one point entranced by a sexually
explicit film, and later orders pornographic magazines with initially ambiguous

on gender performance 105

intentions), and a suggestion that he might be reachable by Frank would say a great
deal about how destructively seductive Seduce and Destroy truly is.
A key element of Frank’s seminar is a lesson in “how to fake like you are nice and
caring.” There’s a certain comedy to how bluntly the term is introduced—in this and
so many elements of his program, from the bombastic music to the use of a cartoon
wolf as mascot, Frank is adopting a Clinton-era postmodern stance that Greven sees
as key to reestablishing the primacy of conventional gender dynamics: once men
internalized the social implications of traditional manhood, they could ironize that
awareness into a sort of “meta-manhood.” Thus, if a lesson in faking niceness and
caring might elicit a smirk, it should just as easily elicit a chill for how intentionally
that smirk was induced, and how easily irony can be used to obscure deeper violence.
Frank’s seminar is only the most overt example of a trend detectable throughout the
majority of the Anderson oeuvre, as men repeatedly perform empathy, and, more
often than not, use that performance as a smokescreen, allowing them to more effi-
ciently achieve damaging goals.
Frank’s manipulative tutorial is presented in openly bad faith, but many Ander-
sonian men are covert in their adoption of sympathetic attitudes and behaviors
toward self-serving ends. Within Magnolia, the most uncomfortable example is that
of Officer Jim, who is instantly smitten with Claudia upon being called to her home
for a domestic disturbance and soon abuses his position of authority to linger with
her after his professional duties are completed. Jim is positioned as something of a
moral center for Magnolia, with his habit of play-acting a role on the reality TV show
Cops allowing him to deliver several of the film’s salient morals and open questions.
Jim’s self-perception as a virtuous figure may allow him to believe that his choice to
pressure the unmistakably uncomfortable Claudia into offering him a cup of coffee
is fundamentally harmless (he later refers to himself as “a bit of a scum-bucket” for
asking her out while on a work call, a self-effacement that would not seem to reflect
genuine introspection), but the power imbalance in the scene is agonizing for the
viewer, all the more so because of the lack of clarity in the film’s perspective on Jim.
Anderson has said that he sees the character “as a kind of Jimmy Stewart” figure,
evidently referencing Stewart’s persona of genial integrity, and if Jim’s coercion of
Claudia is offered tacit pardon by the film’s authorial hand, the implications are
troubling. Jim’s amorous aggression is echoed, too, by Gary Valentine, and though
Gary’s relatively less powerful position (not just professionally but by virtue of the
discrepancy in the relevant characters’ ages) renders his advances more ineffectual,
the pattern of the Andersonian good man as a romantic pest now spans two decades.
The suggestion that Anderson could be endorsing abusive behaviors was made
often following the release of Phantom Thread, with multiple critics and commenta-
tors interpreting the film as an interrogation of toxic masculinity (a topic that was
central to the cultural climate into which the film was released, as the Me Too move-
ment triggered widespread discussion of sexual misconduct by powerful men). The
most damning of these analyses came in the form of a New Yorker essay in which
Aleksandar Hemon labeled the film “propaganda for patriarchy,” suggesting that the
story is devoid of meaningful critique of Reynolds’s persona as an artistic genius:
“the film’s spectacle of male power—its woodcockiness—was so embedded in its

106 on gender performance

every fibre that it was largely missed [by audiences].” In Variety, Owen Gleiberman
(a lapsed Anderson cultist) also viewed Phantom Thread ’s patriarchal bent with
skepticism but, rather than suggesting that the film fails to recognize its protagonist’s
toxicity, claimed that Anderson prescribes too simple a solution: “toxic masculin-
ity [subjected] to a toxic cure,” a conclusion he finds “both a good joke and a little
too PC easy-glib.” Guy Lodge adopted a more moderate perspective in his review,
arguing that Anderson’s film of “ravenous, even destructively toxic masculinity” is
“neither a story of subjugation nor one of empowerment,” but rather one in which
“all traditional notions of one-way control are out the window.”
A crucial and counterintuitive element of Reynolds’s characterization is his non-
normative gender performance, which runs at ironic cross-purpose to his tyrannical
treatment of his romantic partners. In this, he is the culmination of a trend that Lucy
Fischer has termed the “feminized male” in Anderson’s work, describing a pattern of
male characters defined by characteristics more often associated with women. Fischer
observed this characterization in Magnolia’s class of characters prone to “caring inter-
personal acts” that serve as implicit rebuke to Frank, who “completely demeans
any notion of the ‘feminized male,’ ” and she upholds Jim and Phil as the two ideal
examples, characters defined by their inclination to bear witness to other characters’
turmoil (Donnie in Jim’s case, Earl in Phil’s).
In the case of Reynolds Woodcock, “feminization” is most visible in his focus
on the stereotypically female spheres of grooming and fashion. Yet he bears wit-
ness to the women for whom he designs gowns, sitting for interviews in which he
affirms their consciousnesses (to use John Bruns’s term for the Andersonian good
listener), and then creates garments that externalize the qualities they most wish
to possess; when his client Henrietta Harding tells him in the opening sequence
that her new gown has granted her a feeling of courage, Reynolds is positioned as
a figure of transformative altruism. He is keenly aware of the power he thus wields
over these women’s appearance, and indeed their bodies; Alma is affronted when
he remarks that she “[has] no breasts,” but he explains with icy pragmatism that
“it’s my job to give you some—if I choose to.” In submitting herself to Reynolds’s
transformative power, Alma must surrender control of not just her will, but her
entire self.
Reynolds is preceded in the Anderson canon by another feminized male, Doc
Sportello. Positioned as the polar opposite of the outwardly hypermasculine Bigfoot
Bjornsen, Doc is defined by his gentleness and his generosity; he proudly refuses
payment for his services, a reiteration of Phil Parma’s willingness to go above and
beyond the call of duty in pursuing Frank on Earl’s behalf, a gesture that causes
Fischer to elevate Phil as “the most positive ‘feminized male’ ” in Magnolia. Yet
the second half of the film is largely focused on how Doc, like Reynolds, might use
this gentle demeanor to obscure his own deeper toxicity, perhaps even from himself.
As Shasta’s monologue-as-foreplay lays bare, Doc may have some deeply encoded
preference for “submissive, brainwashed, horny” women, a retrofitting of the hippie
dream as a convenient access point to on-demand pleasure (the element co-opted
and contaminated by Mickey Wolfmann). Though little overt attention is called to it
by the plot, Doc’s treatment of Penny, his ally in the DA’s office and sometime sexual

on gender performance 107

partner, veers close to callousness as her feelings for him are clearly more significant
than his for her; in a telling passage of scene description, Anderson’s screenplay notes
that Doc catches a glimpse of Penny’s emotional distress in their final on-screen
encounter, and “sees she’s human.” Given that he is more than willing to entertain
Penny for pot, pizza, and sex, such a late recognition of her humanity is alarming,
and suggests that he may be, in his own way, just as insensitive as any of the story’s
more outwardly abusive men.
With Doc and Bigfoot functioning as an explicit feminized/masculinized pairing,
they serve to illustrate a potential downside in the cinematic male dyad. As David
Greven writes, splitting the male consciousness into two leads embodying norma-
tive (masculine) and nonnormative (feminine) gender performance “enacts a kind
of misogynistic erasure of the cinematic feminine.” It’s a concern that Lucy Fischer
echoes when she questions whether the focus on feminized men within Magnolia
“eliminates this role for women,” leaving most of the (relatively few) female charac-
ters to be defined by their addiction, victimization, or both. Though there are (as
we will see) ways to argue that Anderson creates covert space for female perspective
within his films, there are necessary downsides to his interest in granular interroga-
tion of male gender performance.
The issue of male feminization and hysteria is intimately linked with stereotypes
of hetero- and homosexuality, with the latter identity being one that Anderson has
demonstrated significant difficulty representing in good faith. Boogie Nights and
Magnolia each feature a prominent gay character, and the two enact uncomfortably
similar and bizarrely retrograde arcs. Both the mincing Scotty and the obsequious
Donnie (two men so low in status that they both go by the diminutive form of their
first name) are defined entirely by their hopeless pining for patently unobtainable
objects of desire. In either case, these characters, who are equal parts tragic and farci-
cal, reach personal nadirs when they profess their love in grotesque drunken displays
only to collapse in self-loathing sobs upon their inevitable rejections. In both cases,
male feminization is equated with catastrophic emotional weakness.
To call Anderson’s work explicitly homophobic seems extreme (though Sperb
does note precedent and antecedent notes of retrograde adolescent posturing in the
form of John’s insistence, “played to excess,” that he will not tolerate sexual advances
from Sydney, and the emasculating power that Barry’s sisters derive from calling him
“gay boy”), but this repeated destruction of his openly gay characters’ self-worth
is a queasy thread—one that recurs, in its own way, in Licorice Pizza, wherein Joel
Wachs’s sexuality is positioned as an intractable obstacle to his emotional fulfilment,
a less aggressive but no less depressive treatment of same-sex attraction. The trend
even creeps in around the margins of Boogie Nights (Dirk’s willingness to perform
sexual services for men is the low ebb that he must escape at the film’s opening
and be punished with a return to in its endgame) and Inherent Vice (in which it is
heavily, and tragically, implied that Bigfoot’s feelings for his deceased squad partner
were more than fraternal). This generally piteous framing of homosexual affection
is particularly odd given that a primary story thread in The Dirk Diggler Story is the
love affair between Dirk and Reed, a notion never even hinted at in their boys-will-
be-boys characterization in the feature expansion.

108 on gender performance

 As with his difficulty in depicting nonwhite characters, Anderson has managed
to largely evade criticism over the issue of homosexuality by pivoting to stories set
in eras when publicly gay characters would be a relative rarity. Even in stories lack-
ing openly gay characters, Anderson has been happy to continue entertaining the
idea that his stories are built on a foundation of covert male desire, most notably
in the frustrated relationship between Freddie Quell and Lancaster Dodd (when
Marc Maron suggested that in the film’s final scene, “You just want them to kiss,”
Anderson responded with an ambiguously distressed, “I know, I know, I know”).
These period settings are convenient in either allowing Anderson a don’t-ask-don’t-
tell perspective or providing the opportunity for a rug-pulling surprise on screen (as
when Wachs is initially presented as a romantic prospect for Alana, with the revela-
tion of his sexuality serving primarily to spur her return to Gary’s embrace). The
counterculture-farce pastiche of Inherent Vice, meanwhile, allows him to indulge in
the retrograde snickering sight gag of Bigfoot fellating a chocolate-covered banana,
and the screwball veneer of Licorice Pizza allows for the stereotypically mincing
(and eminently feminized) behavior of the Peters/Streisand houseboy Steve (Ryan
Heffington). It would seem significant that the term cocksucker is a beloved insult
of both Earl Partridge and his son Frank; it would seem significant, too, that Ernie
Anderson had a fondness for the term, as evidenced by a widely circulated recording
that captures him losing his temper during a voice-over recording session, as well
as the fact that his own son used it to denigrate himself (“I felt like a Hollywood
cocksucker”) during a Q&A in 2002.
If there is one major difference between Scotty and Donnie, it is that while Scotty
is defined entirely by his romantic obsession with Dirk—once his advances have been
definitively rebuffed, Scotty fades into the background for a time before unceremo-
niously disappearing from the narrative—Donnie’s impossible love for Brad is but
one symptom of his traumatized inability to properly give and receive love. Early in
the film, while being denied a loan from his employer, Avi (Alfred Molina), Donnie
whimpers, “I don’t deserve this.” The line echoes a belief expressed by Frank just a
few minutes earlier: life, according to the Seduce and Destroy code, is not about

Having been physically and psychologically brutalized by the story, Donnie collapses in tears during its
dénouement. (New Line Cinema)

on gender performance 109

what you deserve (i.e., what you should be given), but rather about what you take.
Donnie’s ineffectual demand that he be given what he deserves might initially seem to
affirm Frank’s perspective. But Donnie’s eventual turn towards taking—attempting
to rob Avi’s home-electronics store to steal money that he feels he should have been
given—ends in disastrous failure, as Donnie is first implicated by breaking off his
employee key in the back room’s lock and then caught by Officer Jim as he attempts
to flee the scene.
The essential pivot in Donnie’s storyline is not from asking to taking, but rather
his next turn: toward attempting to give. Donnie has finally come to identify that
his pain comes from an inability to properly express what he sees as an overflowing
potential for love, and only by learning how to properly funnel that potential will
he be able to move forward. Given that this realization on Donnie’s part coincides
with Jim’s moment of truth—attempting to identify the line between what can and
cannot be forgiven, and determining that Donnie is worthy of another chance—this
shift from desiring fulfillment toward desiring the ability to fulfill would seem to be
the most transformatively positive one that he could make.
If Magnolia’s focus on male gender performance leaves little room for the female
perspective, the film is hardly devoid of prominent female characters. Claudia (whose
plotline Anderson has referenced being among the film’s first story buds), Rose, and
Linda are all defined by their relationships with either Jimmy or Earl. Where some
might see this narrow focus as evidence of myopia (if not, to borrow Greven’s term,
misogynistic erasure), others have argued for a more expansive perspective on
Anderson’s use of female influence and covert feminine perspective. Anderson has
described Magnolia as “an adaptation of [Aimee Mann’s] songs,” with Mann becom-
ing “the built-in voice of the movie.” Accordingly, writers including Joanne Clarke
Dillman and George Toles have positioned Mann (who contributed eight songs to
the film, seven preexisting compositions and one original, the Oscar-nominated
“Save Me”) as something of a coauthor whose feminine perspective infuses the film
on levels that transcend purely textual interpretation.
Dillman sees Mann’s presence in the film as “a strong female voice working against
and at times doubling the text . . . like a commentary on the action, pulling us in
to watch the film from a female viewing position.” Toles, meanwhile, sees Mann’s
presence as that of “an abiding spirit . . . assigned the monumental task of drawing a
musical line strong enough . . . to bring a single psyche, resembling Anderson’s, out
of its massive disarray.” In this way, he sees Anderson’s use of Mann’s music as the
first example of a long-running theme in the director’s work: a subtle, or even invis-
ible, “female counterforce” that emerges as “an attempt to subdue . . . and otherwise
contain out-of-control energy.”
As with many of Toles’s arguments on the female presence in Anderson’s work,
he predicts with eerie prescience the themes and techniques of Phantom Thread.
Alma represents an ideal example of Toles’s “emergence of the irrational,” a presence
“meant to disrupt or dissolve a chain of causality associated with the patriarchal
order—a masculine mode of logic based on gaining or preserving control.” The
fact that he wrote these words years before Phantom Thread was conceived only testi-
fies to the sturdiness of this analytical foundation, and lends credence to his efforts

110 on gender performance

to apply it to The Master. There, Toles draws a line from the use of Mann’s work
in Magnolia to the extradiegetic use of pop standards, including Ella Fitzgerald’s
“Get Thee Behind Me, Satan,” Jo Stafford’s “No Other Love,” and Helen Forrest’s
“Changing Partners,” as well as Doris’s (Madisen Beaty) serenade of “Don’t Sit Under
the Apple Tree” during her final encounter with Freddie. “Taken together,” Toles
writes, these songs “crystallize perhaps the one sure thing that Freddie can lay hold
of from the miasma of his past: a girl’s voice pledging her abiding love.” In a die-
gesis hostile to feminine expression, that expression intrudes extradiegetically, an
effect that Anderson employs similarly when the warbling voice of Shelly Duvall calls
Barry Egan to Hawaii, her performance of Harry Nilsson’s “He Needs Me” having
been knitted by Jon Brion into the score of Punch-Drunk Love.
There is a paradox at the heart of female representation in The Master. Given
Freddie’s sexual fixation, and the perpetual frustration of his efforts to connect
sexually and emotionally with women, female figures need to be eternally present
yet never entirely reachable. Thus, such initially baffling images as the spread-legged
sand woman (the bookending image that serves as coda to this resolutely enigmatic
film) and the hazy daydream reverie of Dodd’s female acolytes unclothed must be
seen as expressions of Freddie’s yearning toward the seemingly impossible goal of a
satisfying encounter with the divine feminine.
Women do loom large in the story, even quite literally larger than life, from
the gargantuan sand woman to the forced perspective in the “Don’t Sit Under the
Apple Tree” scene that makes Doris appear to tower over Freddie; even Winn looms
above him, all but enveloping him, during their coitus in the final scene. Pushing
these figures—potential sources of catharsis, or at least the organizing structure that
Peggy (herself a figure of vast divine femininity given her prenatal tumescence) offers
Dodd—to the margins of the story enhances the frenzy, or hysteria, of Freddie’s situ-
ation. As Toles links Mann’s voice to a sort of unseen mother attempting to soothe
the narrative through lullaby, so the female singers of The Master can be seen as
invisible figures emphasizing Freddie’s own alienation from his desired sources of
comfort, all of which proceed from his longing to return to the bosom of home.
To align The Master with Magnolia based on soundtrack choices takes significant
interpretive effort. More intuitive is the shift within Anderson’s first two synthesis
films that allows the stories to be told through an implicitly feminized lens by virtue
of being narrated by female characters. Inherent Vice may be the story of Doc, but
it could just as easily be described as Sortilège’s story, given her position at the nar-
rative wheel. Both Inherent Vice and Phantom Thread are stories about men told by
women, and Anderson uses that female gaze to cast into relief the masculine disorder
at these stories’ hearts. Sortilège is not only relating Doc’s story to the viewer; she is
effortfully reaching back from her retrospective position in an attempt to navigate
him toward salvation: “Doper’s ESP,” she whispers repeatedly as her narrative subject
puzzles over Bigfoot’s erratic behavior and moves toward the realization of the drugs
that his nemesis has stashed in his car.
Alma, meanwhile, tells both Dr. Hardy and the viewer the story of her husband’s
temperament in order to more fully explain it to herself. The story opens with a
half-rhetorical rumination—“Sometimes I think [Reynolds] is the most demanding

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man”—and the remainder of the story is framed as an interrogation of the validity
and significance of that claim. These two central female characters remain inten-
tionally thin (even, in the case of Sortilège, debatably diegetic), but their narrative
vantage reframes the stories into investigations of these men, at the very least com-
plicating the question of whether Anderson’s choice to sideline female interiority
should be taken as representing an inherent bias or a deliberate effect.
Though the central pairing in Phantom Thread is that of Alma and Reynolds, Alma
and Cyril can be read as their own Andersonian dyad, this time using the rivalry
framework to examine female gender performance. As they engage in a generally
cold war over control of the House of Woodcock, they adopt roles on opposing sides
of the feminine spectrum, with Cyril functioning as something of a masculinized
female (in contrast to her feminized brother), commanding the staff of both house-
hold and atelier with an officious, even military, air. She may be the matriarch of the
house, but her masculinized performance makes her unsuited to this role within the
Andersonian conservative worldview—which, as Brian Michael Goss wrote in 2002,
often suggests that a household “dominated by the [matriarch] is untenable”—
meaning that she can be usurped with relative ease by a suitably tenacious feminized
woman. Alma’s unwavering commitment to traditional domestic roles (her frus-
trated efforts to lay a dinner table, her successful ones at sickbed caretaking) and
absence of external attachments, make her qualified to stand her ground against the
undermining obstacle and assume the contested role of “Mrs. Woodcock” (a struggle
comically illustrated during Dr. Hardy’s first visit, when Cyril and Alma, neither of
whom at that time can technically claim the title, answer to it in unison).
By deliberately limiting Alma’s ties to the world beyond the House of Woodcock,
Anderson so thoroughly obscured her history that he chose not to specify her coun-
try of origin, even to himself. Speaking on a panel with his collaborators in 2017,
he said he conceived of Alma as “someone from over there”; though he referred to
casting a net for Eastern European actresses, the vagueness of the phrasing clarifies
that Alma is more valuable for her otherness than for any cultural specificity. (Vicky
Krieps is a native of Luxembourg, and she herself has identified Alma’s homeland as
“cold, windy Germany.”)
Some viewers have filled in a potential backstory for Alma as a Jewish refugee
from Belgium. David Hering has aggregated several seemingly unrelated moments
and choices—the conspicuous tangent concerning Rubio Gurrerro’s (Silas Carson)
history of selling visas to Jews; Alma’s outsize virulence toward the Belgian Princess
Mona (Lujza Richter); the proximity of Alma’s surname, Elsen, to Belsen, the
colloquial name for the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp—to position Alma as a
character traumatized by World War II and seeking belonging within the orbit of a
dictatorial fop, thus casting Phantom Thread as a companion piece to The Master.
Yet given how many interpretive leaps are required, and the relative paucity of
textual support for the theory (even given Anderson’s by now characteristic iceberg
approach to scripting), the essential truth of Alma’s character is that she is inten-
tionally low on biographical detail, which leaves her characterization thinner than
that of her male counterpart—though she at least has more evident interiority than
Cyril, whose vivid characterization can mostly be attributed to Lesley Manville’s

112 on gender performance

performance. By choosing to give such short shrift to the majority of his female
leads, Anderson continues a pattern that has dogged him across his career, one that
has even led Jason Sperb, from the vantage point of 2013, to describe him as a story-
teller with outright misogynistic tendencies.
Some of Sperb’s criticisms may be seen as a matter of interpretation. His read-
ing of Hard Eight as a misogynist text requires an agreement on two points: that
Clementine’s “bad professional decisions initiate the film’s narrative trouble,” and
that “she is ‘saved’ from herself in the end by marrying John” (a turn that he sees
echoed in Magnolia by Claudia’s own self-destructive impulses, from which she is
similarly redeemed by a relationship with a John C. Reilly character). Accepting
this evaluation of Clementine’s role in the story, however, requires seeing Sydney
and John as essentially heroic characters that the viewer would hope to see proceed
smoothly through the narrative were it not for the intrusion of Clementine—and,
for that matter, seeing Clementine’s choices as entirely her own and entirely destruc-
tive. One could just as easily say that Clementine’s trajectory is thrown into disarray
by Sydney’s intervention, a reading that more fully encompasses the story’s thematic
thrust: that Sydney is an agent of corruption, his efforts at counterfeit catharsis for
past sins sowing only more regret.
As in Hard Eight, Sperb sees “inherent misogyny” in Boogie Nights given por-
nography’s implicit catering to the male gaze. He grants that “some scholars have
noted that it’s impossible to universalize pornography’s many audiences or the source
of their voyeuristic satisfaction,” but then pivots his argument to the film’s implicit
discomfort with feminine agency. As discussed by Goss, Dirk’s overbearing mother
is emblematic of a pervasive distrust of matriarchal households; Sperb extends this
analysis to include Amber and Rollergirl, whom he believes Anderson intentionally
impedes by referring to them only by their porn names and allowing them no avenue
for success that does not include selling their bodies (a claim that ignores the closing
montage depicting Roller Girl enrolled in GED courses).
This argument would seem to rest on Sperb’s view of Boogie Nights as a moralistic
film intent on punishing its characters for their choices—a reading he largely derives
from Anderson’s expression of guilt surrounding his own pornography consump-
tion. From that vantage, referring to Amber and Rollergirl by their chosen names
could be seen as branding them with stigmatized labels, yet this perspective comes
across as somewhat retrograde. Amber and Rollergirl seem to be in full control
of their professional choices, and their referents reflect that autonomy. It could
be argued that viewing the depictions of these two characters as misogynistic says
more about the viewer’s biases than Anderson’s. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky has a more
concise rebuttal to Sperb’s claim: “Boogie Nights appears to flirt with misogyny if you
don’t take into account the fact that all of the characters are idiots.”
Sperb’s opinion of Boogie Nights is by no means unique. The former New Line mar-
keting executive Karen Hermelin described the script as “completely misogynistic,”
but added, “I loved it.” The argument is somewhat more easily supported by the
characterization of Dirk’s mother, whom Adam Nayman cites as “Exhibit A for any-
one looking to accuse [Anderson] of hardwired misogyny.” Hermelin would go on
to play one of Barry’s sisters in Punch-Drunk Love, a group of characters often seen

on gender performance 113

as another misogynistic construction—indeed, the ultimate expression of Anderson’s
supposed prejudice, according to Julian Murphet: “Anderson’s own misogyny is
nowhere better realized than in this ghoulish tribe of identical-looking, copiously
breeding, indelibly familial sisters.”
These characters do, like Cyril, represent a certain masculinized femininity: their
phone calls to Barry are outrageously crass (“You just fuckin’ said chat . . . you fuckin’
phony, chatty piece of shit”), and his long-standing family nickname “gay boy” is far
more evocative of stereotypically male locker-room talk than female. With Lena’s pre-
ternatural decency functioning as a counterweight to the overwhelming indecency of
this cabal, there is little room for nuanced characterization in any of the film’s female
characters—the better to maintain their value as symbols. The choice may well be
defensible on the scale of a single story, particularly given Anderson’s preference to
classify this one as a fairy tale, but it begins to chafe when taken alongside Anderson’s
full history of thinly sketched female characters.
Lena may serve as the starkest example of Anderson’s frequent failure in represent-
ing women. For the ostensible co-lead of the film, she is given virtually no depth of
characterization, save that she travels frequently for work, is an only child, and is
divorced. This last (as in the analogous case of Jim Kurring) is particularly striking
for its status as a missed opportunity; Anderson gestures at a door behind which is
a wealth of personal history, and then walks past it. Lena’s attraction to Barry can
be explained only through the viewer’s interpretive leaps: we know that Lena saw a
photo of Barry, and we are left to take it for granted that this generated an attraction
powerful enough to transcend all of his evident antisocial tendencies. Lena would
seem to be intentionally constructed as a fantasy for the overgrown adolescent Barry,
a lifeline that enables him to escape the bounds of his stunted development. That
she is almost entirely devoid of personal idiosyncrasy serves to underline her status
as the adolescent fantasy made manifest—a girl sweet enough to bring home to
mom (a figure seemingly absent from Barry’s life, making the need for a soothing
female presence all the more acute, at least according to Oedipal logic) but unin-
hibited enough to indulge taboo bedroom fantasies without a second’s hesitation.
Lena’s seemingly inexplicable motivation has led some viewers to theorize that she
may be quite literally an extraterrestrial being. When asked about this interpreta-
tion, Anderson offered a nonanswer: “Have you ever met anyone as lovely as Emily
Watson that WASN’T from outer space?”
The more likely explanation is that Anderson simply indulged in a habit common
among turn-of-the-millennium directors: for his flawed main character, he created a
redemptive romantic partner so singularly available that the onus of personal growth
was largely removed. Lena has been placed in conversation (by Kyle Buchanan at
Vulture  and Scott Tobias at the A.V. Club, among others) with a number of turn-
of-the-millennium characters under the umbrella term “manic pixie dream girl,” a
term coined by Nathan Rabin in 2007 to connote a class of character that “exists
solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly
soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” The
term has been criticized as glib and even emblematic of its own form of misogyny,
and Rabin has since expressed regret for his lack of nuance in establishing a trope

114 on gender performance

that soon metastasized beyond his intended scope. But its resonance signifies how
painful it can be for some viewers to repeatedly see female characters with signifi-
cantly less characterization than their male counterparts. In a 2013 essay entitled
“I Was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” Laurie Penny wrote of her late realization that
mass media had conditioned her to “expect to be [a] forgettable supporting [charac-
ter], or . . . [an] attainable [object] to be slung over the hero’s shoulder and carried
off the end of the final page.”
It is for precisely this reason that Lena strikes me as the most insidiously damn-
ing manifestation of Anderson’s narrative myopia. Whereas a character like Peggy
Dodd—akin to Dirk’s mother in her chilly, domineering position atop a debased
nuclear family—can be easily pointed to as one of The Master’s “two-faced harpies”
(as Vishnevetsky wrote of Anderson’s “exploration of masculine neuroses [that] flirts
with misogyny”), Lena’s narrative deficiencies are less evident. Whereas his depic-
tion of Peggy, or of Dirk’s mother before her, could be accused of teaching Anderson’s
core audience of young men to look skeptically upon assertive women, Lena per-
petuates the lowering of expectations for both male and female viewers.
In aggregate, Anderson’s pre–Licorice Pizza work forms such a monolithic com-
posite interrogation of manhood that explorations of femininity become secondary
at best, if not (as in the case of There Will Be Blood) elided entirely. Anderson’s cin-
ema is one of implicit erasure of the female perspective (Sperb notes that Anderson’s
attempts to assuage accusations of misogyny in There Will Be Blood by claiming there
could be no historically truthful primary female character “raises more questions
than answers”), and if that disinterest in parity is not representative of conscious
misogyny, the implicit bias is no less significant. After eight films focused claustro-
phobically on male protagonists, however, his ninth does represent a significant step
forward. Licorice Pizza “belongs to Alana Haim,” wrote Anthony Lane; no analo-
gous claim could be made for any other Anderson film.
Alana is afforded as much emotional shading as Gary, and arguably more so;
whereas Alma and Lena have no domestic spheres of their own, Alana’s is visited
frequently, and where Alma and Lena are limited in agency by the more powerful
desires of their male counterparts, Alana is afforded the freedom to chase her own
whims (pursuing a role in the Jack Holden vehicle Rainbow; volunteering for the
Wachs campaign) even as each apparent off-ramp turns out to be an avenue directly
back to her entanglement with Gary. Despite Anderson’s evident interest in her tur-
bulent inner life (“You’ve got to stop fighting with everyone all the time,” her sister
tells her, advice that Alana greets with a venomous “Fuck off!”), Manohla Dargis has
argued that Alana’s agency is nevertheless restricted by the story: “The movie doesn’t
always know what to do with Alana . . . She’s a woman who’s alive to the world and
aware of her own attraction. But she’s a blank libidinally, as virginal and safe as a
teen-comedy heroine. . . . Alana deserves better, dammit!”
Key among the thematic concerns of Magnolia is its focus on aging men, both the
degeneration of an elderly male body and the reckoning that comes with reaching
the end of a life filled with at least as many bad decisions as good ones. Both Earl and
Jimmy are dying of cancer, a force so powerful and integral to the film that its cel-
lular attacks are given their own closeup in the film’s dizzying introductory montage.

on gender performance 115

In the process, the two men are both robbed of their dignity, Jimmy collapsing in
front of a national audience for whom he has been a decade-spanning fixture, and
Earl so wholly emaciated by the disease that his wife cannot even bear look at him,
too difficult is it to reconcile the current reality of his body with her mental image
of the man she married.
From an early age, Anderson was unusually attuned to the interiority of older
men. Perhaps a function of his fascination with his father (he has spoken of the
shocking awareness in adolescence that Ernie was a figure of significant renown;
“stepping off the plane in [Cleveland] you’d think the Beatles just stepped off. . . .
And it was just sort of ‘Wow! My dad’s not a geek”), Anderson devoted much of his
focus in his thesis films to crafting roles for Philip Baker Hall, often lending them
Ernie’s own characteristics and creating a dynamic between them that Hall described
as “a kind of father-son relationship off the set.” Anderson’s early interest in regret-
ful older men can lend his first films a somewhat cerebral feel, as he writes from
the perspective of an outsider attempting to get under the skin of characters he will
not be able to fully identify with for decades to come. After first courting Hall with
Cigarettes & Coffee, a story built largely around an archetypal debate between youth-
ful impetuousness and aged sanguinity, he spun out Sydney’s feature-length story of
regrets over violence and dereliction. In Boogie Nights, Hall shifts into a new mode
of proud unrepentance as the crass capitalist Floyd Gondolli, leaving the position of
wistful agedness to be taken up by Jack Horner.
Though Anderson claims no intentional metatextual value in his decision to cast
Burt Reynolds, a man weighted with his own associations of both 1970s excess and
rueful nostalgia, the significance is nonetheless palpable. But the implication of Jack’s
characterization expands to other facets of ’70s Hollywood beyond Reynolds’s own
rise-and-fall cycles. As he looks back from a vantage beyond middle age and wres-
tles with not yet having achieved his dream of a narratively viable porn film, Jack
can be seen as something of a skin-flick iteration of the New Hollywood maverick
archetype; his role in the film revises that of figures like Altman who were forced
by the dawn of the 1980s to question what role they might fill in a changing media
landscape, and what legacy they might have established for themselves as the tec-
tonic plates of culture shifted them out of their period of greatest innovation and
relevance. This investigation of Jack’s arc can thus be seen as an effort by Anderson to
understand the inner workings of his idols, adopting the apprenticeship stance that
was key to his transition from promising upstart to established artist.
By the time of Magnolia, any cerebral quality in his explorations of aging men
was tempered by the outrageous emotionality imbued by Anderson’s personal expe-
riences watching his father succumb to the disease plaguing Earl and Jimmy. These
two characters function as a dyad of regret, with Jimmy being the prototypical man
incapable of admitting his mistakes, and Earl, by virtue of his enfeebled condition,
now adopting the nonnormative mode of emotional lability and constant need. With
this stripping away of traditional signifiers of strength, Earl becomes regret incarnate,
a thread that climaxes with his spoken-word aria, during which the film’s fever seems
to peak and then break. The substance of Earl’s agony is how his onetime fixation on
“being a man” via a single narrow definition put him on a road to this overpowering

116 on gender performance

regret. Earl’s monologue lasts a staggering nine minutes, but in its initial conception,
the speech was even longer and more densely packed with narrative detail. Earl was
to describe the full history of his relationship with Lily, Frank’s mother, whom he
met as a teenager. When Lily reached sexual maturity before he did, Earl’s insecurity
was triggered, causing him to verbally abuse her before their romantic relationship
had even been established. Because she lost her virginity before he did, “I wasn’t a
man . . . I was weak . . . a boy.” This interpretation of the significance of consum-
mation is a direct progenitor of the “seduce and destroy” ethos that Earl’s son would
one day espouse: sexual conquest is key to mature masculinity; without coitus, there
is no manhood.
Earl’s speech comes to rest on his belief that regret is valuable: “Don’t ever let
anyone ever say to you, you shouldn’t regret anything,” he stresses to Phil, who per-
forms the bedside task—so sacred in Magnolia’s moral cosmos—of affirming Earl’s
consciousness without being compelled to assert his own. “You regret what you fuck-
ing want. . . . Use that regret for anything, any way you want.” Both Earl and Jimmy
are guilty of sins that are, if not identical, then at least analogous: they have betrayed
their wives and harmed their children. Yet in a film that asks what merits forgiveness,
Earl is set apart by his ability to admit and atone.
Once the dyad of Earl and Jimmy has been neutralized, another dyad—Phil, who
affirmed Earl without asserting, and Frank, who arrived at Earl’s bedside with an
assertive surplus—is left to mourn the man formerly known as Big Earl Partridge.
Frank watches his father slip away while sobbing openly, even as he grits his teeth
and repeatedly asserts that he will not do exactly the thing that he is so visibly doing.
Phil watches Earl pass through the veil having achieved what he desired (and, the
film would seem to suggest, what he earned) with quiet stoicism. Only once this
most essential role of the hospice nurse—guiding the ill across the barrier between
life and death—has been completed does Phil allow himself a momentary expres-
sion of personal pain, weeping quietly as he removes the sheets from Earl’s deathbed.
In this exchange, notions of feminized and masculinized manhood are neutralized.
As both men shift into the morning sunlight, the battle over effective gender per-
formance, as Christina Lane suggests, has not been decided so much as eradicated.
Frank—the ultimate hysterical man—has been neutralized and invited to perform
the full spectrum of human existence.

on gender performance 117

seven
On Alienation Effects

across the nearly two-and-a-half-hour sprawl of Inherent Vice, Coy Harlingen,

surf rock saxophonist and heroin addict turned CIA asset, appears in two centerpiece
scenes. In the first, soon after Doc has been hired by Coy’s wife, Hope, to investigate
his whereabouts, Coy emerges on a fog-cloaked pier to ask that Doc keep an eye on
Hope and their daughter, Amethyst, and provides a minor clue as to the significance
of the words “Golden Fang.” In the second, Doc finds Coy at a house party, where
the anxious and paranoid Coy bemoans his self-imposed alienation from his family
and urges Doc to find Shasta before she is enmeshed in the same morass that he is. In
both cases, Coy’s appearance is contained within one sustained shot. In the first, he
enters the frame to join Doc, they speak for approximately two and a half minutes,
and then Coy exits again; in the second, Doc enters the frame to join Coy, they speak
for approximately four and a half minutes, and then Coy exits, leaving Doc alone.
Neither of Coy’s scenes is particularly dense with plot detail, but viewers may
nevertheless find themselves struggling to grasp precisely what has been discussed by
the time he has left the screen. These two encounters slip through one’s fingers like a
cloud of pot smoke. It’s not simply the fact that these scenes constitute two disparate
points in the vast constellation of incident and intrigue that comprise this para-
noid odyssey; rather, Anderson enhances the audience’s hazy reception of his story
through sabotaging—whether consciously or otherwise—several of the primary ways
in which viewers receive and process stories, including (but by no means limited
to) the counterintuitive task of processing dialogue delivered within relatively static
shots of extended duration. With Inherent Vice, Anderson makes his most intricate
and effective attempt at a goal that has spanned virtually his entire career: engaging
viewers in the act of receiving his stories by alienating them from the typically passive
experience of viewing a mainstream narrative film.
Amid anecdotal accounts of audience walkouts during the initial theatrical release
of Inherent Vice, Steve Rose published a column in the Guardian in February 2015
that analyzed what factors might have contributed to making Anderson’s seventh
film “this season’s mustn’t see experience.” Viewers, Rose suggested, were likely lured
in by Anderson’s reputation as a populist auteur, a trailer suggesting a light and comic
tone, and strong reviews from critics who may be inured to conventional film struc-
ture: “Unlike your average multiplex punter on a Friday night, they crave something
more challenging” (an echo of the claims made after critics and audiences were
divided on Punch-Drunk Love). With these tripartite expectations in mind, Rose
reasoned, viewers were likely shocked by what turned out to be an odd and often
incomprehensible film. “For most viewers,” he concluded, “the minimum require-
ment of a story is that it makes sense. Stories are supposed to create order out of the
chaos of reality, aren’t they? Inherent Vice is more the other way round.”
Indeed it is, and thus it is hard to fault any viewer who struggled to find pleasure in
the film. Yet it is also worth considering that Anderson may have intentionally made
the plot difficult to comprehend in order to more effectively convey his protagonist’s
addled perspective. Doc Sportello mounts a complex investigation while consistently
under the influence of marijuana, a drug known to impair the user’s ability to focus
and process information. By doing all he could to communicate Doc’s compromised
perception—including limiting the viewer’s perception of the film’s milieu and creat-
ing an unusual density of visual information—Anderson risked alienating his viewers
in order, paradoxically, to generate greater empathy with his perspective character.
The term “alienation effect” dates back to the work of midcentury experimen-
tal playwright Bertolt Brecht, who coined the term Verfremdungseffekt in his 1961
essay “On Chinese Acting.” The word has been translated from the original German
variously as “estrangement effect,” “distancing effect,” and “defamiliarization effect,”
with these effects—in Brechtian theater, most often a deliberate violation of the
“fourth wall” that typically separates the diegetic from the extradiegetic—meaning
the viewer is “prevented from feeling [their] way into the characters. Acceptance or
rejection of the characters’ words is thus placed in the conscious realm, not, as hith-
erto, in the spectator’s subconscious.” Narrative film is an inherently false medium.
By the time of adolescence, virtually any viewer will have become aware that the sto-
ries they see unfolding on screen are the result of a network of illusions created across
a great span of time with the effort of a great number of artists and technicians.
Conventional wisdom, however, might suggest that viewers will be most engaged
in a story if they are allowed to establish and maintain the illusion that the events
transpiring on screen are “real”—i.e., that they are receiving an omniscient view of
a genuine sequence of events. Decades of established film grammar and Hollywood
convention, as Nicholas Royle has put it, can be seen as “a palliative working to
repress” the viewer’s uncanny awareness that the story is, in fact, artificial, as this
awareness can trigger uncomfortable cognitive dissonance for viewers attempting to
maintain immersion in the story and its world.
The term Brechtian has taken on an elastic colloquial meaning that refers to virtu-
ally any violation of this palliative quality, and Anderson’s decades-spanning experi-
mentation with such effects has at times invited its usage: Lydia Storie described
Magnolia as a film “true to the Brechtian spirit . . . a unique piece of self-reflexive
cinema [that] reinvigorates the often-overlooked, but incredibly crucial, societal
component of Brecht’s philosophical program.” Yet it does a disservice to the spe-
cific integration of Brecht’s techniques with his Marxist agenda to dilute his name
through association with Anderson’s deliberately apolitical work, a practice that

on alienation effects 119

amounts to “regarding [Brecht’s beliefs] as fishbones that have to be removed,” as
Nenad Jovanovic says of those who attempt to apply the term to works made in the
context of “our era of unbridled liberalism.”
Notable among artists who admired Brecht and sought to apply his techniques
to the cinematic form in service of analogous political aims was Jean-Luc Godard,
an avowed influence on Anderson’s early work. Godard included several allusions to
the playwright throughout his prolific and influential 1960s output, either name-
checking or directly quoting Brecht in La Chinoise (1967), Two or Three Things I
Know About Her (1967), and Contempt (1963); meanwhile, two of the thirty-nine
points in his 1970 manifesto “What Is to Be Done?” are credited to Brecht. As Jan
Uhde has pointed out, these nods are apt given that “Godard, like Brecht, is a critical
moralist and, to a certain degree, a political activist. In his films, he often attacks the
capitalist society and ostentatiously declares his political involvement.”
When asked in 1999 whether his adoption of Godardian techniques (e.g., unex-
pected intrusions of on-screen text; a fondness for an attention-grabbing iris-in) rep-
resented a conscious influence, Anderson replied, “I love Godard in a very film school
way,” a description that suggests a formal admiration sans any particular engagement
with political underpinnings—indeed, Anderson has been vocal in his discomfort
over appearing to make any overtly political statements in his work. Thus, his con-
scious use of alienation effects—whether his initial “film school” Godardianisms or
his later, more sophisticated abuse of the viewer’s comfortable narrative immersion—
should be read as purely emotional experimentations: Anderson works to engage the
viewer’s mind en route to more fully engaging their heart, rather than circumventing
the heart in order to more fully engage the mind.
Hard Eight features few particularly alienating elements; in terms of adherence
to traditional film grammar, it is likely (though by no means inarguably) Anderson’s
most conventional feature to date. The sole striking formal choice is the brief flash-
back as John describes his aversion to matches during his first drive with Sydney;
as John relates the anecdote of a box of matches spontaneously combusting in his
pocket while he waited in line for a movie, the film cuts to this quite literally inflam-
matory scene for just a few seconds before returning to the main action. If Anderson
has claimed that this choice (which he describes as a winking reference to the explo-
sive opening salvos of 1990s big-budget actioners, here shrunk down to an indie-
scaled “puff of pant-fire”) was inspired by a scene late in Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano
Player, then this nouvelle vague approach to triggering an awareness of cinematic
form (and ruptures thereto) serves as the foreshock to the more full-scale experimen-
tations in the years to come.
At times, Boogie Nights can feel like a film composed entirely of alienation
effects, far closer to Godard’s assaults on form than the more emotionally attuned
experimentations of Truffaut. Here, Anderson experiments omnivorously with form
and technique, and that kitchen-sink approach surely accounts for much of the
attention-grabbing power of his breakthrough second feature. Within just one pool
party sequence, decades of film history collide as fluid roving Steadicam work abuts
a startling iris-in when Scotty first catches sight of Dirk. This effect is particularly
notable as it eschews traditional modes of conveying infatuation: where a viewer

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John is surprised by a “puff of pant-fire.”

might expect to learn of Scotty’s sudden attraction to Dirk through a shift to soft-
focus slow motion or a melodramatic soundtrack choice, Anderson instead evokes
silent film, a technique distinctly aligned with the French New Wave practice of
appropriating outmoded techniques that an audience might view with detachment
by virtue of their relative antiquity.
The mix-and-match quality of Boogie Nights’ hyperkinetic form provokes a sugar-
rush giddiness, but the chaotic overtaxing of the viewer’s processing power compli-
cates an effective reception of the story. The film concludes with a cathartic reunion
of the surrogate family, their grueling trials having resulted in personal growth and
newfound peace. Test audiences, though, tended to read the ending as tragic, and
this ambiguity, more baffling than pleasurably ambiguous, would seem to be largely
attributable to Anderson’s refusal to create enough breathing room for the viewer
to fully identify with the characters. His alienation effects here are thus provocative
rather than evocative (concepts to be discussed in the following pages), preventing
the audience from an empathetic experience of the film, a technique appropriate to
his “film school” aping of Godard (who liked to playfully suggest that he was out to
annihilate the art form—e.g., the choice to close Weekend [1967] with two consecu-
tive title cards: first, “end of story” and then, “end of cinema”) but more aggressive
than late-1990s multiplex audiences were prone to expect.
Magnolia reuses many of Boogie Nights’ formal tricks, notably a hypercranked
cinematographic vocabulary dense with whip pans and rapid camera pushes, as well
as adrenalized cross-cutting that can result in brutally brief shots. These techniques
contribute significantly to disrupting the viewer’s absorption in the story, as intense
formal qualities more appropriate to a heist film stand at cross-purposes with a
screenplay largely devoted to interpersonal encounters within private spaces. Yet here
these alienation effects are more unified than in Boogie Nights, allowing for a simpler
processing of Anderson’s intended emotional response (evidently a desire to utterly
engulf the viewer in melodramatic excess). By wielding these alienating techniques
with an increased focus on their relationship to theme and story, he manages to
adopt what Elena Gorfinkel describes as a “confrontational mode of address”—i.e.,

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a provocative complication of the viewer’s reception of the story. It may be that the
best way to unify Magnolia’s form and content into one cohesive viewing experience
is to argue that the protagonist is, in fact, Ricky Jay’s omniscient narrator (with Jay
perhaps portraying Anderson himself ), engaging in an a vigorous and highly pres-
sured effort to find some meaning in the universe’s seeming randomness.
In addition to a style of construction that arguably runs counter to the charac-
ters’ experience of their world, Anderson includes more overt breaches of conven-
tional realism—the synchronized sing-along and rain of frogs—as well as tangents
adopting cinematic conventions of earlier times varying from Pathé-era silent film to
the “telestrator” effect familiar from broadcasts of professional sports (and, perhaps
more appropriately to this film, weather forecasts). The latter technique in particular
creates an impression of experiencing the full spectrum of twentieth-century screen
media at once, an information overload that pummels the viewer through excessive
taxation of processing power. But the extent to which this addled exhaustion corre-
lates with the characters’ experience of their own stories varies significantly; the film
seems to speak the language of amphetamines, which generates empathy in scenes of
Claudia’s paranoia or Linda’s anguish, while at other times “[privileging] the direc-
tor’s voice over all others,” as Christina Lane describes the film’s self-reflexivity.
When Ryan Gilbey described Anderson’s early films as “movie movies,” he was refer-
ring to exactly this quality of intentional alienation from the characters’ experiences
of their world, yielding films “driven more by technical prowess than life.”
With Punch-Drunk Love, Anderson created a film in which alienation is not
merely an element of the form, it is the form. Barry’s story breaches virtually every
tenet of conventional film grammar, from a lighting scheme that favors extremes
of brightness and dimness (often simultaneously) to a soundscape that alternates
between assaultive percussion tapestries and pastiche of classic Parisian romantic
themes, as well as the startling intrusions of abstract color created by the visual artist
Jeremy Blake (whose contributions form something of a pairing with the use of
Aimee Mann’s work in Magnolia, as Anderson cedes some authorial influence to the
perspective of another artist working in another medium).
All of these factors and more contribute to a uniquely anxious viewing experience
that can easily provoke displeasure, particularly on first viewing. Yet once viewers
become attuned to the film’s individualistic voice, they might recognize that these
factors are intimately aligned with Barry’s own emotionally raw experience of life.
The film is most abrasive when Barry is under the greatest stress (e.g., the sequence
in which his sister, Elizabeth [Mary Lynn Rajskub], brings Lena to the warehouse,
wherein Anderson marshals his unconventional sonic and visual palettes, as well as a
return to Magnolia-esque adrenalized shooting and cutting, to create a virtual sym-
phony of distress). In Barry’s more relaxed moments (e.g., his first date with Lena),
the film settles into a far more conventional style, with familiar color saturation and
lighting temperatures as well as predictable rhythms of shooting and editing. Punch-
Drunk Love might best be described as (to borrow a term from musicology) an atonal
composition, one in which formal tradition is most often obscured, undermined, or
eschewed altogether. Yet this complication of the viewer’s ability to receive and pro-
cess the story draws the viewer closer to Barry’s mind-set; rather than the provocative

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alienation of his prior two features, Anderson now adopts an evocative usage of these
techniques, “[confining the viewer] in an uncertainty comparable to Barry’s own,” as
George Toles writes.
Much the same could be said of The Master, which trades the acutely stressful
formal qualities that evoke Barry’s headspace for the more woozy and addled qualities
that evoke Freddie’s. Jason Sperb frequently uses the term affective logic to describe
Anderson’s sensibility, suggesting that he strives to create emotional bonds between
viewer and film that hew increasingly close to “the language of pure cinema,” and
the construction of The Master (released after Sperb had completed the majority
of his manuscript) is likely Anderson’s most affective to date. Throughout Freddie’s
journey, brief reveries of either nostalgia or fantasy frequently intrude on the mise-en-
scène, creating connections that have little clear bearing on the plot and thus can only
be grasped through empathic inference of Freddie’s repressed mental state. During
an indoctrination exercise, Dodd’s son-in-law, Clark, snaps at Freddie, “you’re sick,
and you need to be alone, away from people,” at which point the scene cuts to find
Freddie alone by night during his naval service, contemplatively smoking a cigarette.
The scene disrupts the flow of the story in a way that is not immediately justified by
any concurrent plot development, and these enigmatic interruptions of the narrative
flow can easily alienate viewers struggling to reconcile the narrative. Yet once viewers
find their way onto Freddie’s wavelength, these juxtapositions convey volumes about
his interior world in a way that his limited expressive powers could never accomplish.
By contrast, There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread have relatively few alienat-
ing formal qualities. Both films adopt the technical mores of relatively traditional
prestige fare, with the former’s stoic Steadicam observations of men enacting their
will upon the land, and the latter’s swirling, euphoric tribute to the creation and dis-
play of finery. This is not to say that the films deviate from Anderson’s post-Magnolia
affective and elliptical approach to construction; while certainly less intrusive than
The Master, this style of narrative logic is present enough to render character motiva-
tion opaque in both films. In either case, then, alienation effects primarily take the
form of subverted genre expectations. Anderson’s screenplays for There Will Be Blood
and Phantom Thread are both streaked with moments of alarming comedy, particu-
larly scenes in which characters surrender the composure typical of staid costume
dramas—e.g., Daniel’s abuse of a shrieking Eli, which tilts toward grotesque farce, or
the incongruous profanity (“No one gives a tinker’s fucking curse!”) that Reynolds
lapses into when distressed. The two films also feature notable soundtracks from
Jonny Greenwood, known prior to his relationship with Anderson primarily as a
rock guitarist. Greenwood’s score for There Will Be Blood owes more to the nerve-
jangling compositions of contemporary classical composer György Ligeti than any
particular film soundtrack tradition, while his score for Phantom Thread approaches
hyperbolic bombast in the closing stretch. In both cases, these sonic choices push the
films toward a point of unease that aligns with the horror inflections that Anderson
invited by openly classifying There Will Be Blood under that genre, and evoking sto-
ries of gothic haunting with Phantom Thread.
This genre revisionism might be seen as provocative alienation, distancing the viewer
from a familiar reception stance on, respectively, frontier prestige and costume drama.

on alienation effects 123

Yet Walter C. Metz, who sees the ostensibly realistic Punch-Drunk Love as productively
comparable to science-fiction classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, argues that subverting pre-
scribed genre frameworks “allows them to come to life . . . [and] becomes a way of
intervening into the social practice of meaning making.” Thus, by interrupting the
audience’s viewing habits for these awards-bait genres, Anderson awakens them to a
greater involvement with the story—certainly an evocative alienation.
It is noteworthy, however, that Anderson’s use of alienation effects has not pro-
ceeded in a linear fashion. Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza are likely his least
formally alienating work since Hard Eight; after varied and vigorous experimentation
with alienation effects, he returned to a place of relative placidity, bookending the first
two decades of his career. Immediately prior to reaching that point, however, he pro-
duced a remarkably intricate case study in his particular school of alienation effects.
With Inherent Vice, Anderson reconfigures many of his now-hallmark techniques
to create effects that are often simultaneously provocative and evocative, all in the
service of adapting the worldview of an author long thought unadaptable. Anderson
again mixes the tropes of multiple genres, but where injecting spasms of comedy into
prestige drama is relatively easy to parse once the surprise has worn off, the hazier mix
of comedic and dramatic elements in Inherent Vice contributes to a far more ambigu-
ous tone that might best be described as madcap naturalism. Anderson (along with
Robert Elswit) adopts the most unusual visual palette that he has used since Punch-
Drunk Love, this time slightly desaturating the image in order to create a feeling of
fading nostalgia, as though the audience is watching an image that has been left in the
sun for years. The effect is considered and deliberate, yet, like much of Boogie Nights’
visual language, it runs counter to how the viewer is conditioned to receive nostalgic
imagery (which is often presented with some form of heightened visual language in
keeping with the power of memory, rather than aping the physical qualities of antique
objects), meaning that the effect is cerebral rather than immediately empathetic.
Some formal breaches are relatively logical: after Doc ingests amphetamines with
Dr. Rudy Blatnoyd, the sequence is speed-ramped to convey his now hyperactive
state. Other ruptures are so affective they are difficult to view through any con-
textual logic: the anthemic chorus to Minnie Riperton’s “Les Fleur” surges on the
soundtrack as Doc finishes his meeting with Clancy Charlock (Michelle Sinclair),
a soundtrack choice that bears no evident connection to the accompanying plot
development, the only relationship between sound and image being that the scene
features Riperton’s daughter and Anderson’s partner, Maya Rudolph—a privileging
of omniscient directorial perspective over character perspective as brazen as any in
his filmography. Individually, any of these formal alienation effects might have been
forgiven by theatrical audiences. Likely more difficult to surmount, however, was
seeing these effects applied to Anderson’s most impenetrable narrative to date—and,
indeed, a narrative far more complex than the vast majority of releases from major
Hollywood studios. The film’s defenders soon came to tout the intentionality of the
story’s impenetrability; by way of contextualizing the film’s goals, Chris McEwen
pointed to Anderson’s assertion that “I never remember plots in movies. I remember
how they make me feel,” meaning that plot should be taken as ultimately secondary
to the mood and tone of the film.

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 Anderson ensures that the reception of his plot will be further impaired through
his concentrated disruption of two key factors identified by Kaitlin L. Brunick and
her research partners as essential to processing cinematic storytelling. In their 2013
paper “Low-Level Features of Film: What They Are and Why We Would Be Lost
Without Them,” Brunick et al. establish a set of five factors—“physical, quantitative
[aspects] that [occur] regardless of the narrative”—that affect a viewer’s ability to
comprehend cinematic storytelling. With a significant disruption to these features,
the researchers conclude, “our ability to follow a story, understand where scenes begin
and end, and identify film structure would all be heavily impaired.” Two of these
factors, luminance and color, I have already discussed in this chapter; the unusual
lighting scheme of Punch-Drunk Love has a significant distracting effect, as does the
unusual saturation level in Inherent Vice. The remaining three factors—shot dura-
tion, visual activity, and temporal shot structure—are somewhat less self-evident in
their effect but have a significant impact on the ease of narrative processing in Inher-
ent Vice, and the viewer’s capacity for emotional engagement in Punch-Drunk Love.
Shot duration, as the term suggests, refers to the length of time between cuts, a
measurement often looked at in aggregate as the “average shot length” of a film. Visual
activity refers to how much motion occurs within the frame during a given shot (due
to the movement of either the camera or characters/scenic elements). Temporal shot
structure refers to the arrangement of shots of varying durations into a sequence, a
significant factor in gauging the tone of a scene (collections of short shots tend to be
associated with action, while collections of longer shots tend to be associated with
drama) and in keeping the viewer’s attention focused. Research by James Cutting et
al. suggests that, with time, conventions of cinematic editing have moved, presum-
ably unconsciously, toward a rhythm of shot lengths ideally suited to maintaining
viewer attention.
Anderson’s work is notable for an unusually long average shot length (ASL) by the
standards of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Hollywood. In 1930, the
average shot length in a typical film was in the range of ten seconds; in the ensuing
years, that average has decreased in a steady and linear fashion, until in 2010 the typi-
cal ASL was in the range of four seconds. Anderson’s average shot lengths (according
to an independent study by film editor Vashi Nedomansky) range from a minimum
of 11.1 seconds in Hard Eight to a maximum of 15.4 seconds in Punch-Drunk Love.
This average well exceeds that of many of his contemporaries—Nedomansky’s studies
have shown an ASL of 6.83 seconds across Wes Anderson’s first eight films, and of
3.86 seconds across eight of David Fincher’s first ten films—and brings him closer
to Billy Wilder (Nedomansky’s study of six Wilder films yielded an ASL of 16.75),
Ingmar Bergman (for whom Nedomansky identified an ASL of 16.7 seconds), and
François Truffaut (for whom Nedomansky identified an ASL of 13.5 seconds).
The ASL of Inherent Vice is on the low end of the Anderson spectrum, total-
ing 11.6 seconds. However, the film is notable for having five shots that exceed two
minutes; of further note is the fact that four of these five shots are exceptionally
low on visual interest, while being exceptionally high in narrative density. The film’s
single longest shot, which lasts more than six and a half minutes, is that of Shasta’s
passive-aggressive nude monologue. Next longest is Doc’s encounter with Coy at the

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Topanga Canyon party, and third is his encounter with Coy on the pier, the former
lasting more than four and a half minutes, and the latter more than two and a half.
Fourth longest is Doc’s first scene with Penny, discussing the Wolfmann case while
seated on a bench. Fifth and shortest of these excessively long shots is the tracking
shot underscoring the opening credits; as it is high on visual interest and low on nar-
rative density, it is not particularly relevant to this analysis.
Key to Brunick et al.’s conclusions surrounding shot duration is that extended
shots, particularly those low on visual activity, are less than ideal as vessels to convey
plot information. Cuts serve to reorient the viewer’s eye toward the center of the
screen, which usually contains the conveyor of those plot details; the longer a shot
extends, the more the viewer’s eye will tend to wander the frame, unconsciously
seeking further information that pulls focus away from relevant aural details.
When being served plot information through dialogue during a shot of extended
duration and low visual interest, remaining focused and oriented requires increased
unconscious effort. Thus, by adopting this technique continually during an already
complex noir narrative, Anderson hampers the viewer’s reception of that narrative to
a likely ruinous degree. Yet what could be more evocative of the experience of a per-
petually stoned private investigator than sabotaging the viewer’s focus and attention,
two of the abilities most impaired by the joints that are never far from Doc’s hand?
Anderson makes similarly counterintuitive use of shot lengths and their arrange-
ment in Punch-Drunk Love, which boasts his longest ASL despite containing fewer
shots of quite such extreme duration. In this earlier film, the shots of greatest dura-
tion are those in which Barry is most socially uncomfortable: his first call with the
phone-sex operator Georgia is comprised of two shots, each of which lasts more than
three minutes, and his follow-up call with Georgia the next morning lasts more than
two, while his agonized attempts to ask his brother-in-law (Robert Smigel) for psy-
chiatric counsel in his sister’s laundry room last more than a minute and a half. In
each of these cases, plot density is relatively low, allowing for an intense emotional
immersion in Barry’s discomfort, an alienating experience that nevertheless draws
the viewer into the story’s grip.
More complex in Punch-Drunk Love is Anderson’s (and editor Leslie Jones’s) cha-
otic temporal shot structure. Following Barry’s first extortive call from Georgia, his
workday sees him being visited by Elizabeth and Lena while receiving threatening
calls from Georgia and trying to downplay workplace mishaps that seem to com-
pound constantly in the background. Throughout, shot lengths run the gamut from
less than a second to nearly a minute. As discussed by Brunick et al., this sort of dense
variance tends to sabotage an audience’s ability to grasp the story’s mood and tone,
leaving viewers consistently on their toes, attempting to find an interpretive stance
on the sequence without experiencing overstimulated burnout. Again, Anderson
risks losing engagement through subversion of a comfortable reception stance, but
viewers who do remain engaged are more likely to be energetically involved with
processing this haywire sequence alongside a protagonist similarly struggling not to
spin off his mental axis.
In his paper “Hollywood Storytelling and Aesthetic Pleasure,” another effort to
identify the line between pleasurable and exasperating alienation, Todd Berliner

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theorized that viewers derive greatest enjoyment from films that “[strain] our efforts
to unify their features, intensifying aesthetic pleasure by making the story con-
struction process more energetic.” Abusing Brunick et al.’s low-level features in
Inherent Vice, Anderson pushes the viewer’s effortful unification of the narrative
beyond simply forming hypotheses and refining them with the absorption of new
clues. Instead, he asks that the viewer unite the film’s content with a form that seems
to run counter to the conventions of that content, producing a noir that not just
stresses but suppresses the viewer’s processing power.
But, as highlighted by McEwen, Anderson privileges feeling over plot. That
quote was drawn from a New York Film Festival event attached to the premiere
of Inherent Vice, during which Anderson highlighted five films that served as key
influences on his approach to his newest project. Rather than any traditional L.A.
noir, Anderson chose North by Northwest (1959), pointing to Hitchcock’s decision
to obscure plot-dense dialogue with aircraft sounds, which he called “a great way to
deal with exposition that no one cares about.” In a film like Hitchcock’s, he said, “I
remember emotions and I remember visual things that I’ve seen, but my brain can
never connect the dots of how things go together.” As for those memorable “visual
things,” he screened a selection from Journey Through the Past (1974), Neil Young’s
experimental pseudo-documentary. Following the clip, in which Young takes a coun-
try drive with his girlfriend, stopping by a stream to smoke a joint and eat strawber-
ries, Anderson explained that this scene was a key reference point to “the [feel] of the
whole movie.” This referential diptych points directly to Anderson’s intentions with
Inherent Vice: create an intricate thriller with the feel of a woozy sensory fantasia. By
making use of every facet of his film’s construction—from screenwriting to the dura-
tion and organization of shots—in creating this counterintuitive effect, Anderson
attempted to thread a perilously narrow needle, risking unsustainable levels of alien-
ation in service of an evocative effect for the subset of viewers not put off by his
unexpected techniques.
In 2015, Anderson described screening Inherent Vice for Robert Downey Sr.
“I was just trying to do it like you would do,” he told one of his greatest idols, only
for Downey to reply, “I wouldn’t have done it like that!” Much as he may have
emulated what he saw as Downey’s “compassionate but upside-down” worldview,
even this most openly political of his films is less righteously enraged than wistfully
romantic. His emulation of Downey is, like his resemblance to Brecht and Godard,
more a matter of technique than underlying philosophy.
For an apt philosophical underpinning to his intentional vexation of his audience,
a more significant source may be Anderson’s late-1990s patronage of Largo, then a
small performance venue on Fairfax Avenue. Regular performers included Aimee
Mann and Jon Brion, Anderson’s collaborators on Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love,
respectively. The club’s owner, Mark Flanagan, balanced these musical acts with such
comedians as Patton Oswalt and Paul F. Tompkins, both of whom Anderson went
on to recruit for small roles—Oswalt as the doomed scuba diver Delmer Darion
in the prologue to Magnolia, and Tompkins as the anxious town-meeting chair-
man Prescott in There Will Be Blood. Flanagan conceived of Largo’s comedic house
style as cerebral and experimental, taking the greatest pleasure in jokes that refused

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to immediately reveal their comic tone; deadpan standup Zach Galifianakis, whose
acidic work at the time often flirted with anti-comedy, recalls performing for stony
crowds while “Flanagan [was] dying laughing in the back of the room because no one
else [was] laughing.” While audiences might have come in search of comfortably
familiar comedic rhythms, Flanagan instead curated performances that subverted
their expectations, inviting them to reconsider their preconceptions of what comedy
should be, and could be, searching for meaning and pleasure as much in the absence
of laughter as the abundance.
In 2018, looking back on his years haunting Largo, Anderson recalled feeling
“inspired by my nights there . . . getting energized to wake up the next morning and
keep writing,” and this Largo spirit is most palpable in Punch-Drunk Love (costar
Mary Lynn Rajskub was a regular on the Largo stage) as Anderson upends the typi-
cal relationship between text and context in an Adam Sandler film. The film sacrifices
traditional comedy beats in favor of the thought experiment of dropping a typi-
cally volatile Sandler character into a world of emotional verisimilitude, “[treating]
it like a real-life situation [to ask] what does it really feel like?” This unusual lens
creates an eerie disconnect in typical comedy beats; when Barry boasts of his new
unbreakable plungers, his demonstration causes the handle to shatter in his hand,
a slapstick-perfect gag viewed with cold dispassion, challenging familiar reception
stances. Meanwhile, when shrill, familiar sounds of Sandlerian guttural panic are
applied to the visceral realism of the four blonde brothers’ assault, the film seems to
dare the viewer to laugh, and retroactively reconsider what made these sounds funny
in prior, more audience-friendly iterations.
Anderson’s curiosity about the mechanisms of comedy can be felt in even his most
austere works, from the spasms of obscenity and indecency in The Master (Dodd’s
bellowed “Pig fuck”; Freddie’s strategic flatulence during his first processing session)
to the anachronisms and absurdities in There Will Be Blood (Henry introduces him-
self to Daniel using the modern colloquialism “brother from another mother,” a
collision of text and context that ruptures the narrative immersion of any viewer
familiar with the term, while Daniel’s bellowed “I drink your milkshake!” reaches
such histrionics that it became the basis of a Saturday Night Live sketch airing the
night before the 2008 Academy Awards broadcast). These jolts serve as something
like a joy buzzer for viewers settled comfortably in their reception stance for prestige
pictures. It may not be an overt breach of the fourth wall, but any unexpected hic-
cup that causes one to question authorial intent calls attention to a film’s artificiality,
serving as its own palliative-dissolving alienation effect.
Meanwhile, Anderson applied a cerebral lens on comedy to ancillary material
shot during the production of Punch-Drunk Love. The short film “Couch,” a two-
minute monochrome collaboration with Sandler, finds a man testing out a sofa and
recliner in a furniture store only for both items to collapse, threatening to crush
him. Bearing traces of the exaggerated physicality of film clowns from Chaplin’s
Little Tramp to Tati’s Monsieur Hulot (one of Anderson’s primary cited influences
on Punch-Drunk Love), the short is defined by its use of exaggerated sound design—
everything from Sandler’s footsteps to his fingertips brushing leather is accompanied
with outrageously overstated foley work—and seems stranded somewhere between

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the spirit of the guerilla prankster shorts that Anderson created with his high school
friends and a studious deconstruction of the intersection between Sandler’s comic
voice and his precursors’.
Anderson’s comedic experimentation surrounding Punch-Drunk Love extended
to a bizarre faux-commercial for Dean Trumbell’s D&D mattress store. In the short,
Dean strolls the roof of his store, miming strumming an electric guitar, and delivers
stilted ad copy before jumping onto a pile of mattresses waiting below, bouncing off
immediately and being catapulted onto the pavement. “I was afraid that was gonna
happen!” a dazed Dean marvels as four familiar blonde brothers rush to his aid. The
short seems bizarrely out of step with the feature’s characterization of the preening,
perpetually enraged Dean, and can be contextualized only if the viewer is aware of
the actual local TV commercial that Anderson was precisely re-creating. It is unclear
whether the short was intended at any point for inclusion in Punch-Drunk Love, but
this marked contrast with what we know of Dean suggests that it was not. Instead,
like the Saturday Night Live residency that yielded the FANatic parody, Anderson was
more likely engaging with the phenomenon of underground tape trading and found-
footage festivals that yielded such pre-internet viral celebrities as the “Winnebago
Man” (whose own commercial outtakes became a sensation examined in the docu-
mentary of the same name). Taken together, “Couch,” “FANatic,” and “Mattress
Man Commercial” form a triptych of comedy deconstruction, experimental efforts
to understand the creation and reception of humor, all of it leading Anderson toward
work like Inherent Vice, which melds the madcap and the naturalistic in a way that
requires a deft understanding of both.
Largo is no longer located on Fairfax—Anderson worked with Flanagan to find a
new venue in the early 2000s—and its cultural cachet remains very much a product

Adam Sandler in “Couch.” (No production company listed)

on alienation effects 129

of its time, when the long hangover of the late-1980s/early-1990s stand-up comedy
boom allowed for an ironic “alternative” scene to exist as a viable comedic counter-
culture. Yet the impact that this institution had on Anderson is as distinct as that
of Downey—in either case, an idiosyncratic spirit looked to jolt an audience out of
its complacency, the classical ideal of alienation effects. If in Flanagan’s case those
effects operated without the explicit political goals so often associated with artistic
alienation, that only aligns him more closely with Anderson, an artist historically
most comfortable denying the political implications of his own work.
In his Guardian assessment of Inherent Vice’s alienating impact on theatrical
audiences, Steve Rose concluded by hearkening back to reports that more than
two hundred audience members walked out of the 1968 premiere of 2001: A Space
Odyssey. “Maybe walkouts are the stuff cult classics are made of,” Rose concluded,
and Inherent Vice, as of this writing, would seem to be the closest that Anderson has
come to producing a genuine grassroots phenomenon; between 2019 and 2020, the
podcast Increment Vice dissected the film scene by scene with a rotating panel of
admirers as high-profile as director Rian Johnson, a treatment certainly not extended
to any other work in the Anderson filmography.
Alongside this discussion of walkouts, Inherent Vice spurred debate over whether
critics are within their rights to suggest that viewers displeased with a film might
owe it a revisit. “A cinemagoer who has an allergic reaction to [Inherent Vice] can’t be
blamed for scoffing at the prospect of spending another 12, and a further two-and-
half-hours of her life, watching something that left her bored or bewildered the first
time,” Ryan Gilbey wrote in his article for the Guardian in January 2015. Yet that
same month, at Vanity Fair, Jordan Hoffman argued for the humility necessary to
acknowledge that the first viewing of a film cannot be expected to yield a full com-
prehension of its scope and effects: “In Inherent Vice, figuring out who put Mickey
Wolfmann in the looney bin, or what, exactly, a yacht named Golden Fang has to do
with a ring of high-strung dentists, is not what this movie is all about. I knew that
much on the first go. But it wasn’t until the second that I was able to recognize how
extraordinary Anderson’s movie really is.”
Perhaps surprisingly, Anderson himself has expressed a perspective closer to
Gilbey’s: a director should “never [make a film] feeling like it was obligatory to see
it twice,” he said while promoting The Master, likely tied with Inherent Vice for the
title of Anderson work most benefitting from repeat viewings. “You should attack
it feeling like it could work successfully whether it’s on a big screen or whether it’s
on a phone or whatever it is.” This quote, rather than making the baldly ridiculous
assertion that each of his works should be comprehensible on a plot level after only
one viewing, points instead to a particularly Andersonian reception category, one (as
he said in presenting North by Northwest) guided by the emotional response to visual
stimuli rather than the mental exertion of connecting plot points. If Inherent Vice is
a film that sabotages high-level narrative processing, its emotional and visual effects
are sharp and acute.
Anderson closes the film with a split-second shattering of the fourth wall as Doc’s
eye flicks toward the camera lens, making direct eye contact with the viewer. It’s a
jolting effect, one that echoes the closing image of Magnolia, in which Claudia does

130 on alienation effects

the same amid Officer Jim’s profession of love. In either case, Anderson chooses to
implicate the viewer as the final stroke in aggressive negotiations with their efforts
to engage. And then the experience is over, leaving a lingering feeling of a schism
in conventional film grammar that requires reconciliation. The effect is provocative,
distancing the viewer from the unbroken dream state that so many films aspire to.
But it’s evocative, too, inviting the viewer to linger in that dream state rather than
let it recede immediately. This is the inherent vice of cinema, the unavoidable risk:
viewers looking for familiar types of pleasure may be asked to reevaluate their pre-
conceptions. This type of risk cannot be insured against, nor should it be avoided—
those experiences are precious cargo.

on alienation effects 131

eight
On Faith and Belief

in the master’s first significant dialogue scene, a military officer debriefs Freddie
Quell and his fellow recently returned veterans of World War II. As he prepares these
men for the fact that their posttraumatic stress may be looked upon as “a rather shame-
ful condition” by the general public, he reminds them that these nervous disorders
are the natural and unavoidable result of the experiences they have withstood during
their service. This, Anderson posits, is the American postwar condition: an undeni-
able and most likely inescapable trauma borne of an unimaginable anguish. It is not
only Freddie and the other servicemen who feel the effects of this epochal upheaval;
any citizen cognizant of the inhuman horrors of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb
has almost certainly been disabused of their preexisting beliefs in the world’s organiz-
ing principles. Confronted with the loss of faith in all you held sacred, what response
could be more natural than catastrophic anxiety? What the officer debriefing Freddie
does not do is prescribe any cure for this postwar distress. This is a diagnosis with no
clear remedy. And any such widespread psychological breach, as Anderson goes on
to illustrate, is one that a sufficiently charismatic spiritual leader would be uniquely
primed to exploit. If you can offer clear-cut solutions for seemingly insurmountable
agony, you are likely to have a devoted customer base for as long as you want—and, in
the case of the eventually beleaguered Lancaster Dodd, perhaps even longer.
Among Dodd’s selling points is the promise that the Cause is compatible with
all belief systems: “You don’t have to change your faith or leave the congregation
you belong to,” Freddie intones, sage-like, during a radio broadcast promoting the
so-called Universal Congress of the Cause. This is a faith that purports a devotion
to freedom, so as much openness as possible must be promised, at least until the
potential congregant is through the door. While probing Freddie’s consciousness
during their first “processing” session—a rapid-fire series of questions ranging from
the quotidian to the cosmic, many of which must be answered while maintaining
unblinking eye contact—Dodd touches briefly on the issue of a Christian God. “Do
you believe,” he asks his newest recruit, “that God will save you from your own ridic-
ulousness?” Freddie answers a quick and thoughtless “No,” but the question points
toward Anderson’s own ruminations on the role that religion plays in modern society.
 “I think you get desperate,” he said while promoting The Master, “and I think you
get scared, and you think, Lord, if you’ll only just let me pass this test, I swear to you I’ll
follow you.” This is the core promise that he sees in scripture: something to “help get
[people] through their daily lives.” Everyday existential anxiety is exactly the sort of
ridiculousness from which Dodd suggests one might see God as potential savior. Not
every faith promises a specific paradisiacal end point; what unites all belief systems is
the offer of an alternative to viewing existence as an absurd condition. As interested
as he may be in what makes faith appealing, though, Anderson’s work is equally
concerned with its consequences, for both good and ill. In a world of churches, cults,
and coincidences that border on the divine, the problems that draw you into the fold
are less significant than the conclusions you might bring back out again.
Though Anderson was raised Catholic, he characterizes his family as “mid-grade
Catholics,” with his mother bringing the family to church primarily “when things
were not swinging her way.” He claims to have developed an interest in the Bible
only as he grew older and discovered the “blood and guts stories.” Pressed in 2019
to name a favorite Bible quote, he could answer only, “I like all the quotes in the
Bible,” admitting a moment later that he had virtually quoted Daniel Plainview’s
own tellingly vague answer to the same question. This generalized ambivalence likely
accounts for the lack of Catholic imagery and ideology in his films, a clear contrast to
a filmmaker like Martin Scorsese, whose career has been frequently devoted to earnest
and open inquiry into his own faith. Instead, Anderson’s career evinces a maintained
mid-grade religious status, as his work provides the opportunity for a more general-
ized interrogation into the costs and benefits of belief.
Profiling Anderson during the lead-up to Magnolia, Lynn Hirschberg asked when
he had last gone to confession. “It’s three hours long,” he replied. “Haven’t you seen
it?” And indeed, Magnolia features his most open efforts to date in grappling with
the religious faith he was raised within, including the sole traditionally Catholic
character in the Anderson canon, Officer Jim Kurring. Jim uses his faith as a moral
compass, viewing his daily life as a series of opportunities provided by Christ. “I wait
and I pray,” he tells the imaginary camera crew to whom he offers a running mono-
logue while on patrol, “and sometimes Jesus says, Jim, I got a surprise for you today . . .
Where it goes from there is up to you.”
Amid Magnolia’s Old Testament imagery, so chaotic that it’s often difficult to
reconcile into a broader cosmological viewpoint, it is Jim’s devout philosophy that
ultimately unites the disparate narrative strands: among the opportunities provided
by Christ (at least as Jim sees it) is the opportunity to determine the appropriate
response to another character’s transgression. His job, he explains, is one of judg-
ment calls, not of judgment passed: “I have to take everything and play it as it lays.
Sometimes people need a little help. Sometimes people need to be forgiven. And
sometimes they need to go to jail.” The toughest part of his job, he concludes, is
simultaneously the toughest part of human relationships: determining what can be
forgiven. Which of these characters, the film implicitly asks, are worthy of that level
of grace? The answer, it would seem, is that all of them are—with the exception of
Jimmy Gator, the one character defined by his inability to practice the very Catholic
art of confession.

on faith and belief 133

 Magnolia features what Christina Lane counts as more than fifty references to
Exodus 8:2 (which reads, “If you refuse to let them go, I will send a plague of frogs
across your entire land”), most of them the sort of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Easter
eggs that proliferated at the dawn of the DVD era to reward audiences willing to
keep a thumb on the pause button. Anderson has admitted that the choice to litter
his mise-en-scène with these signifiers was not made until preproduction, and that he
was not aware of the quote and its potential thematic resonance until a collaborator
alerted him. It is thus hard to argue that this visual motif represents a particularly
focused and purposeful religious perspective. But in a 2012 essay for the Journal of
Religion and Popular Culture, David Congdon argues for an interpretation of the
film that was quite likely unintentional on Anderson’s part: Magnolia represents an
unusually rich evocation of “the Pauline apocalyptic.”
This revisionist interpretation of apocalypticism centers on the invasion of an utterly
unprecedented yet unambiguously real force that significantly disrupts humanity’s
existential continuity and prompts the formation of new bonds and communities.
The rain of frogs is thus an ideal cinematic depiction of this apocalypse: an event
that is “simultaneously disruptive and rectifying.” In Congdon’s view, the Pauline
lens unites every ostensibly disunified element of the film, as the omniscient narrator,
the conspicuously repeated line “We may be through with the past, but the past is
not through with us,” and the surreal “Wise Up” sequence are all tracks laid toward
the ultimate apocalypse. Each of these odd narrative occurrences is simultaneously
literal and transcendent, a “bifocal” state of consciousness that is key to the Pauline
perspective. If I would argue that the narrator’s voice is perhaps best understood as
Anderson’s own, others have interpreted it as the voice of God, and the two interpre-
tations are by no means incompatible. In either case, Ricky Jay gives voice to an all-
seeing but little-knowing perspective, a creator who surveys the disorganized sprawl
of his creation and attempts to reckon with the contradictions by way of determining
whether or not humanity (at least as represented by affluent white Valley residents)
might be redeemable.
The inverse of this depiction of Christianity can be found in There Will Be Blood.
Through Eli Sunday’s hold over his misbegotten congregants, Anderson again shows
how God might function as a mechanism that contextualizes the painful occurrences
in human life. But whereas Officer Jim sees the Lord as nudging him toward oppor-
tune personal choices (and his faith is a distinctly individual one; Jim’s relationship
with Christ seems largely unmediated as he references no particular religious leader),
Eli uses his purported relationship with God as a method of urging his faithful
toward his own desired ends. Anderson’s screenplay includes the conspicuous discus-
sion of earthquakes and droughts plaguing Little Boston, which Eli credits as the
work of a Lord who’s grown “weary of drunkenness and lying.” Eli is a faith healer,
promising distinct and immediate benefits to his parishioners, and though they are a
devoted flock, they are presented as docile, compliant sheep.
While the heightened pitch of Eli’s fraudulent preaching might be read as an
implicit condemnation of faith on a broad scale, Jeffrey Overstreet argued in Chris-
tianity Today that, in fact, Anderson’s film fits in within a historic and documented
trend of “misguided, seduced congregations,” and that, “on a deeper level, [There

134 on faith and belief

Will Be Blood ] is consistent with Christ’s teaching about the nature of ego and
greed.” If any choice in Anderson’s screenplay constitutes a willful thumbed nose at
Christianity, it must be Daniel’s bellowed “I’m finished!” after murdering Eli, a bitter
reappropriation of Christ’s final words before expiring on the cross, though even this
Overstreet takes in the spirit of—as it were—good faith.
Daniel’s nihilism, it seems, grants him a unique clarity of purpose unavailable to
the community at large: only he is skeptical enough to see through Eli’s hypocrisy.
Among the major unanswered questions in There Will Be Blood is that of the source
behind Daniel’s distaste for Christianity. He is happy to use God’s name as a tool when
convenient—asked by Eli during their first meeting what might have brought him
to Little Boston, Daniel happily answers that it was “the good Lord’s guidance”—but
any time he is asked to earnestly participate in rites of faith, he struggles to disguise
his disgust, jerking his hand back violently when Eli attempts to take it in prayer.
At the midpoint, he expresses outright hostility toward Eli’s faith, asking why God
would allow for H.W.’s deafness; yet his revulsion is evident much earlier, and the
audience is offered no clear textual evidence for why Daniel may have developed
such an aversion. It could be that organized religion is simply too intimately linked
with community and culture, two systems of which Daniel is utterly incapable of
availing himself.
When verbally sparring with Eli outside the Church of the Third Revelation soon
after drilling has commenced, Daniel makes the case that religion is a distraction
from the important business of oil extraction. Rather than believe that worship might
grant his employees a sense of spiritual fulfillment that could increase their produc-
tivity, he focuses on less dogmatic means of appeasement, primarily by urging his
men to bring their wives and children with them to this desert encampment. This, to
Daniel’s mind, should be enough to pacify them, and after addressing the question of
whether church might help or hinder their work, their satisfaction is of little concern
to the narrative—a distinct break from Upton Sinclair’s source novel, which devotes
considerable focus to their unrest. If there is a God in the world of There Will Be
Blood, it is most certainly an Old Testament one, prone to judgment and reckoning,
leaving little room for grace. God, as Eli howls at his father (conspicuously named
Abel), “doesn’t save stupid people.” As it would seem that God saves precious few peo-
ple in this story, it could be that they are, on the whole, too stupid to be worth saving.
Somewhat complicating this bleak perspective on the effects of faith is Daniel’s
baptism, which does serve as a significant breakthrough that allows him the necessary
clarity to bring H.W. home. Despite his forced conversion seeming to leave Daniel
only more damned to bitterness and spite, the fact that the ceremony spurs him to
reunite his family—and, more significantly, reunite H.W. with his eventual wife,
Eli’s sister Mary—lends some form of credence to the Magnolia ethos: the suggestion
that religion can serve a distinct and useful purpose if applied to beneficent personal
choices. The same can be said of the one religious ceremony depicted in There Will
Be Blood apart from the proselytizing of Eli Sunday: the wedding of H.W. and Mary.
Though its significance has become increasingly secularized, the traditional Western
marriage ritual requires explicit declarations of faith, and the camera does seem to
look upon the rites performed in this ceremony with a sense of respect, specified in

on faith and belief 135

Anderson’s shooting script with an instruction that focus should be drawn to “details
[of the] sacrament.”
In a wedding, expressions of belief represent the individual choice to practice
interpersonal devotion, placing it under the Andersonian umbrella of worthy uses
of religion. Though he has never personally taken the vows (as of this writing, he
and longtime partner Maya Rudolph use the terms “husband” and “wife” casually
despite not being legally married), Anderson did become ordained through a non-
denominational religious organization in order to perform his sister’s marriage. As
much skepticism as his films may evince, in situations like a wedding, religion has
clear value to the extent that it can unite individuals in the bonds of love, an intrinsic
significance so weighty that even the tape of John and Clementine’s elopement is
looked upon with some grudging awe by Sydney.
A wedding, in addition to being a religious rite, is a convention of the Western
status quo toward which Anderson has long demonstrated such ambivalent feelings,
and he revisits this image of a traditional Christian wedding early in The Master. On
his first day aboard the Alethia—a Greek term referring to truths disclosed through
philosophy—Freddie witnesses the marriage of Dodd’s daughter, Elizabeth, to Clark,
about whom we know remarkably little, befitting his absorption into the Dodd clan
with all its implications of symbolic incest. Again, the ceremony is looked upon as a
ritual of communal joy, one so powerfully inviting that it serves as Freddie’s seduc-
tion into the Cause—a faith that has, Dodd assures those assembled, redeemed the
institution of marriage, which, “previous to the Cause, was awful.” Here, a familiar
ritual forms a deceptive front for something much darker that underlies this portrait
of all-American bliss. Dodd, a religious skeptic (we learn shortly thereafter that the
Catholic Church is among his greatest nemeses) makes use of the trappings of faith
to support belief in his own Cause.
If The Master is a story of postwar crisis salved through belief, Anderson’s follow-
up, Inherent Vice, is the story of a midwar crisis so absolute that every belief is subject
to doubt. Though less often grouped alongside Andersonian explorations of faith,
Inherent Vice is quite literally a story of Christian crisis via the upending of Christian
“Bigfoot” Bjornsen’s comfortable worldview. Even as he is happily ensconced in a
picture-perfect union with Chastity, Christian’s trusted values system seems to be
warping in the era’s psychedelic haze, as the officers who stop Doc and his addled
compatriots on the roadside reference new guidelines suggesting that cults can be
identified by reference to the Book of Revelation. Traditional faith has been cor-
rupted in the service of something darker, and Christian accordingly proceeds
through a sort of soul death until even Doc (a character whose visible tarot deck
aligns him more with occult traditions than biblical ones) is forced to invoke Old
Testament terminology to try to diagnose Bigfoot: “You could sure use a keeper,” he
tells this man who so vehemently refuses to count him as a brother.
The muddying of boundaries between previously demarcated schools of American
thought is further cemented by the photograph that Denis (Jordan Christian Hearn)
takes of Coy Harlingen reaching for a slice of pizza during the Topanga Canyon
house party, the flashbulb catching a tableau of dopers arranged to echo da Vinci’s
The Last Supper. To Christian Bjornsen, these characters would surely be counted as

136 on faith and belief

godless, yet the camera’s eye renders them divine, as though the flower children serve
as martyrs to the cause of world progress, destined to be looked back upon as the
tragically necessary sacrifice that allowed the modern world to be born, retroactively
assigning a significance far greater than their mortal lives might have suggested.
“God help us all,” Christian mutters when surveying a new fatality in the fathomless
horrors of Inherent Vice. But God offers no help, and the situation grows only more
dire from there. Given the limited utility of organized religion within Anderson’s
cinematic worldview, even the Cause’s willingness to tolerate Christianity among its
members might be considered an indictment. What good is this supposed higher
calling if it cannot even prevent one from being taken advantage of by so transparent
a huckster as Lancaster Dodd?
In Licorice Pizza, Anderson returns to themes of traditional religion, approaching
a non-Christian faith for the first time. The Kane family—like the Haims—are so
devoutly Jewish that a prospective boyfriend’s admission of atheism during Shabbat
dinner serves as a nonnegotiable severing of the relationship, much to Alana’s dis-
may. Though not explicitly called out as such, faith is thus positioned as more of an
obstacle to the protagonist’s self-fulfillment than an avenue to the same (as it is for
Jim Kurring). Judaism, however, serves as an asset during Alana’s meeting with Mary
Grady, who suggests that Jewish actresses have become newly fashionable, repeatedly
citing Alana’s “very Jewish nose” as a significant advantage. Alana, for her part, lists
the Israeli martial art of krav maga among her skills (apparently tutored by her father,
a veteran of the Israeli army), which points toward the unique dual status of Judaism
as both a religion and an ethnic identity. Though the film is not explicitly concerned
with themes of Jewish identity and belief systems, Alana’s religious identity is central
to her self-perception, a running undercurrent to her efforts to negotiate with her
responsibilities to her family and her own independent desires. When Jack Holden
suggests that Alana has already disappeared into her prospective film role, a drunk
Alana responds, “I’m Jewish.” The line’s significance is ambiguous, but by one inter-
pretation, Alana could be suggesting that her faith so entirely represents her selfhood
that I’m Jewish is synonymous with I’m me.
With their bond having been sealed by their shared fondness for unusually
intense inebriation, one of Dodd’s first questions for Freddie is whether he can make
more of the handcrafted “elixirs” that walk the fine line between liquor and poi-
son. Freddie answers with another question: “How do you like to feel?” Freddie
and Dodd are thus linked by a shared offer: a convenient shortcut to relief from
stress. Freddie is welcomed into the Cause for his ability to heal the healer, and this
equivalency between two characters so unlike in so many ways exposes the toxicity
of Dodd’s operation. For as soothing as the promise of quick relief might be, it can
turn to poison all too easily, a lesson that some among Dodd’s followers—beginning
with Helen Sullivan (Laura Dern), a character based on the early Scientology skeptic
Helen O’Brien—seem on the brink of learning as the story ends.
Given the clear parallels between the plot of The Master and the early days of
L. Ron Hubbard’s spiritual movement (parallels that are too numerous to cite and
rarely particularly hidden; even Dodd’s violent arrest outside Helen’s house bears a
striking similarity to an incident between U.S. Marshals and Hubbard’s followers on

on faith and belief 137

O’Brien’s own Philadelphia property), many imagined the film might serve as an
indictment of Scientology in its modern form. Yet Anderson’s treatment of Dodd is
ambiguous, and even magnanimous, claiming in interviews that Dodd is “absolutely
[acting] in good faith,” and preferring not to use the term cult in discussing the
Cause: “One person’s cult is another person’s movement is another person’s hockey
team,” he said in 2012.
As the film progresses, though, the Cause’s methods come increasingly to resem-
ble techniques used by cults to inhibit the individualism of their members. Freddie
is forced to perform mindless repetitive tasks, as well as unquestioningly withstand
demeaning criticism from other members, all under the ostensible guise of achieving
a higher state of consciousness. Even if Anderson is personally reluctant to use the
term cult, he put it persuasively into the mouth of John More (Christopher Evan
Welch), a party guest who witnesses Dodd assisting a New York socialite in accessing
supposed memories of past lives. Roping Dodd into a public debate over his theories
and practices, More argues that “good science by definition allows for more than one
opinion . . . otherwise you merely have the will of one man, which is the basis of a
cult.” This phrasing echoes the words of author Lawrence Wright, whose book Going
Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, was published four months
after The Master’s release. “I’ve studied Jonestown, radical Islam,” Wright says in the
documentary adaptation of his book. “They’re oftentimes good-hearted people, ide-
alistic, but full of a kind of crushing certainty that eliminates doubt.” By the film’s
closing stretch, the oppressive nature of this conviction seems to be on the verge
of breaking the self-proclaimed visionary Dodd, as Helen’s attempts to reconcile
his inconsistencies into a coherent and unimpeachable logic leaves him shrieking,
“What do you want?”
Another guest at the New York party, the Cause devotee Bill William (Kevin
J. O’Connor), has by the end of the film downgraded his assessment of Dodd to

Members of the Cause observe Dodd’s futile efforts to indoctrinate Freddie. (The Weinstein Company)

138 on faith and belief

“grade-A mystic of the highest order,” a classification that places Dodd on a distinctly
American continuum of spiritual swindlers. In reviewing The Master, Kent Jones iden-
tified Anderson’s intergenerational uber-narrative as something like an overview of the
two-hundred-year evolution of the American mystic, as sages and gurus of all stripes
have long promised access to transcendence (for a reasonable price). The model
established by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century great awakenings was co-opted to
increasingly crass effect in the twentieth, from the proto-celebrity evangelists who first
took advantage of emergent communications technology (Aimee Semple McPherson
being a key reference point for both Upton Sinclair’s Eli and Anderson’s) to that
prophet of mind control Dale Carnegie (whose techniques proved foundational for
would-be cult leaders like Dodd), to the Ouija boards that sold easy access to the far
side of the veil (as well as potential intel on where to score during a dope drought,
as attempted by Doc and Shasta), and Carnegie’s meta-masculine inheritor, Tony
Robbins (a frequent point of comparison in discussions of Frank T. J. Mackey).
Compared to his Andersonian cult-leader peers, Eli and Frank, Dodd is possessed
of relatively little focus and certainty. Though Anderson may have conceived Dodd
as a buyer of his own product, he is a somewhat tragic figure who seems increas-
ingly in over his head. Dodd’s greatest gift is not so much a genuine insight into the
universe’s mysteries as it is a showman’s insight into psychological manipulation, the
classically cultish ability to identify and amplify a potential acolyte’s ills and then
position himself as the sole purveyor of a cure. Having secured his position of leader-
ship, he now uses it to excuse his own Falstaffian merry drunkenness, while covertly
bilking wealthy postwar seekers; by the time he reaches Philadelphia, he even seems
to be mulling whether his doctrine could be expanded to allow polygamy. In the
film’s final act—a nakedly ominous sequence set in London that finds Dodd’s previ-
ously skeptical son, Val (Jesse Plemons), evidently reprogrammed into a cheerfully
vacant believer—Dodd sneers at Freddie across an oaken desk, arguing that no one
can live happily without serving a master. Yet Dodd seems to have cultivated a situa-
tion that allows him to do just that: serve no master but his own whims. In denying
that a life can be lived this way, he tacitly admits that he himself is crumbling.
“I’m not fascinated by the theme of faith,” Anderson said in 2013, clarifying what
would seem to be a clear personal focus. “What means something for me [is] the faith
in someone” (emphasis mine). Thus, he returns repeatedly to two questions: what
it means to follow a person who stands in for a belief system, and—perhaps more
significantly—what it means to be believed in to this extent. Like Dodd, Eli Sunday
offers his parishioners relief from unendurable pain in the form of his faith healing,
and the Church of the Third Revelation thus exists somewhere between Christian
denomination and cult; given his apparently divine ability to heal through the laying
on of hands, Eli positions himself as the one man whose will is worth following. Eli
and his followers might best be described as Holy Rollers, a term that emerged in the
nineteenth century to describe certain American spiritualists who purport to express
their possession by the holy spirit through seemingly uncontrollable physical move-
ment; in a line from Anderson’s screenplay, H.W. refers to the Sundays engaging in
“all that praying shivering Lord stuff.” But it is the healing that Eli performs on
the elderly Mrs. Hunter, purporting to cure her arthritis by violently exorcising the

on faith and belief 139

devil living in her hands, that connects Eli with Dodd and Frank, three characters
who promise direct and unambiguous solutions that just happen to be proprietary.
Thus, all three characters are salesmen, linking them in Jason Sperb’s overarch-
ing theory that Anderson’s primary concern is with commerce, be it Barry selling
his novelty plungers, the characters of Boogie Nights selling their bodies, Donnie
Smith selling his image to promote the sale of home electronics, Gary Valentine sell-
ing everything from public relations services to waterbeds to his own excellence, or
three charismatic purveyors of the most valuable good of all: spiritual relief. The
disgust with which Daniel regards Eli after he realizes the extent of the younger
man’s healing grift is a complicating factor in processing the narrative. Are we meant
to sympathize with Daniel in this moment? Does this constitute the film’s taking a
side in the battle between divergent forms of commerce? In the heated confrontation
that follows the curing of Mrs. Hunter’s arthritis, Daniel repeatedly stresses that he
and Eli share a common goal: that the well produce oil and “blow gold all over the
place.” His greatest frustration with Eli, then, seems to be the preacher’s hypocrisy.
Eli refuses to admit that they will benefit equally from a successful Plainview oil
extraction, but he never hides his desire for capital; when Daniel offers to buy the
Sunday ranch, it is Eli who knows the correct valuation while Abel stumbles, and the
church goes on to flourish in proportion to the well’s success. But he bedevils Daniel
by cloaking his greed in a supposed higher calling. He is a capitalist, but he posi-
tions himself as a morally superior capitalist, and this is the lie that the plainspoken
Plainview cannot abide.
One of Daniel’s primary journeys across the film is toward the acceptance that
Eli’s methods are effective. Though he initially presumes that cursory lip service
toward religion will appease the young preacher, he is forced to recognize that the
supposed Third Revelation creates the only obstacle his resources cannot surmount:
Bandy’s faith. The old man whose tract stands in the way of Daniel’s pipeline cannot
be bought for any price because his faith in Eli grants him a level of serenity that
transcends any concerns that money might alleviate. In order to achieve its absolutist
ends, Anderson seems to instruct, capitalism must make some concession to faith.
If Eli is to be seen as a huckster, then the opening statement of his sermon prior
to baptizing Daniel—“The doctrine of universal salvation is a lie”—should perhaps
be viewed with particular skepticism. Given Eli’s tendency to twist scripture toward
his own ends, it is likely best to believe the opposite of what he claims to be true—in
this case, that if salvation is to be believed in, it must be universal, and claiming
otherwise represents only corrupt self-interest. It is exactly this sort of prescriptivism
that Anderson apparently takes greatest issue with in organized religion. “I think the
danger,” he said in 2012, “becomes when [a movement] is providing answers, when
it’s not about asking questions or getting people to investigate.”
Third in this cultish chronology, Frank T. J. Mackey epitomizes the horrors that
can result when one man promises to have all the answers. Frank’s doctrine may
not be an explicitly cosmological one, but he is no less a cult leader; to the men
who attend Seduce and Destroy seminars, sex is as mysterious and unattainable as
the ability to access past lives. Not only is Frank all too happy to take advantage of
their confusion, he adopts an openly evangelical posture: his summoning of shouted

140 on faith and belief

responses from the crowd bears a distinct resemblance to requesting an “amen” or a
“testify” from a congregation. The linkage between these three mystics creates a chain
of corruption that flows both ways across the century, with Frank’s open misogyny
implicating Eli’s supposed benevolence. As Eli’s foresight in using radio to widely
disseminate his message will be taken up by the Cause and eventually evolve into
Frank’s use of television, the focus on the sale of answers rather than the bestowal
of productive uncertainty (the gift that Anderson grants his good man of faith, Jim
Kurring) is an umbrella of impiety that encompasses Eli as much as Frank.
Though there is some resemblance between the performative bonhomie of Dodd
and the preening arrogance of Frank, Seduce and Destroy offers answers even sim-
pler than those proffered by the Cause. Where Dodd enlists enterprising souls open
to breaking themselves down in hopes of being restored to humanity’s “inherent
state of perfect,” Frank’s congregants are eager to believe that their inherent perfec-
tion requires not restoration but recognition. As Frank affirms, there is no flaw in
a Seduce and Destroy attendee but timidity, and their ascension to a higher plane
requires not introspection but projection, a reorientation from a victimized world-
view to one allowing for victimization. Dodd provides access to the past in order
to generate vulnerabilities that he can exploit; Frank encourages the suppression
of the past in order to generate strength. Frank sees his acolytes not as marks but
as souls genuinely worth saving—so long as they make it worth his while. Where
Dodd’s style of cult requires keeping believers perpetually starved for satisfaction,
Frank’s relies on the belief that providing true satisfaction will only widen his reach.
Across their disparate narratives, each of Anderson’s three cult leaders is brought
to his knees in some form. Eli returns to Daniel a groveling man on the verge of ruin,
toppled by his own vanity and the temptations of modern life; Frank’s studiously
constructed barriers of repression are weakened by Gwenovier and then dissolved by
Phil’s work on behalf of Earl, allowing him to reaccess his vulnerability; and Dodd is
revealed (as initially claimed by Val) to be making it all up as he goes along. Each of
these men is caught doing the one thing to which he claims to be opposed, and so
each is exposed as a hypocrite. Only Frank, whose prior convictions were so openly
malicious, is able to turn his exposure into healing. The ambiguous moral universes
of There Will Be Blood and The Master allow for no such catharsis, and Eli’s vice leads
to his death, while Dodd’s uncertainty leads to his embitterment. In organizing these
three cults of personality into a chronological triptych, then, the story of Andersonian
twentieth-century spiritualism is a three-act story with a happy ending, a journey
from corrupt divinity to open hate that ends with an emergence into the light of grace.
Though Eli and Dodd may be irredeemable, their surface-level benevolence does
allow them to trigger legitimate transformation in those they attempt to dominate.
Just as Eli’s effort to embarrass him triggers Daniel’s cathartic reunion with H.W.,
so the Cause’s effort to dehumanize Freddie triggers a cathartic access to his mili-
tary trauma, the past life that he has so struggled to reconcile. Both Daniel and
Freddie, men of intense repression, are saved by their stubbornness, as they are able
to make productive use of these pseudo-religions. This, it would seem, is the silver
lining in Anderson’s philosophy of cults: as long as humanity is prone to existential
pain (which is to say, for as long as humanity exists), there will be those touting the

on faith and belief 141

healing properties of their theological snake oil. All we can do, then, is maintain
enough individual will to think critically, take what we can, and recognize the differ-
ence between hogwash and holiness.
After escaping the Cause, Freddie finds himself drifting aimlessly until he falls
asleep in a movie theater during a Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoon—quite literally
the story of a past life’s echo reverberating in the present. From here, the remainder
of the film unfolds as a chain of inexplicable and seemingly supernatural events:
Freddie dreams that an usher has brought him a phone (one with a seemingly infinite
cord) on which Dodd has called to summon him to London. When he awakens,
Freddie follows his dream’s instructions and finds Dodd, despite logic’s suggesting
that no such thing should be possible. The event seems to suggest psychic properties
akin to Inherent Vice’s doper’s ESP—call it a boozer’s psychic bond between Dodd
and Freddie—and the intrusion of the genuinely magical represents a third thread
in Anderson’s cosmological investigations: the matter of spirituality as something
broader than simple faith and belief, but a rather more mysterious and amorphous
force beyond the power of human comprehension.
As spotlighted by The Master, the issue of the past—whether on a grand scale or
a personal one—is frequently linked with spirituality in Anderson’s work, a way of
reckoning with the alienation caused by irreconcilable nostalgic pain. The Cause is
devoted to creating an accessible temporal continuum—doing “time hole work,”
as it is frequently and absurdly described—that links one to the past in order to
find solutions that can guide one closer to perfection and undo the ravages done by
Sortilège’s sea of time. Yet this sort of introspection may not be entirely healthy, as
Dodd’s time hole work can be used as a tool of brainwashing. The mitigating factor
might be shame: Freddie benefits from making contact with his suppressed pain,
but as he seemingly lacks the capacity for deep self-reflection, he is able to shrug
off Dodd’s attempts to trigger embarrassment. “Do your past failures bother you?”
Dodd asks repeatedly. And each time, Freddie tosses off a seemingly genuine “No,”
confounding the so-called master’s attempted mastery.
The philosophy espoused by Frank T. J. Mackey represents the precise inverse of
Dodd’s. Frank refuses to acknowledge the past, both guarding his personal history and
using his platform to reject the validity of retrospection. One chapter of the Seduce
and Destroy manual, we learn, centers on the assertion that “the most useless thing in
the world is that which is behind me,” and Frank’s aspirational mind-set—he teaches
his acolytes to focus on what they want rather than what they are—reframes personal
history as an obstacle to growth rather than a learning opportunity. In a major speech
cut from the final film, Frank describes to Gwenovier a practice that involves the
effortful psychological elimination of introspection: “There is no need for insight or
understanding. Things of the past!” Frank believes in the potential of language to nul-
lify inconvenient realities, and dishonesty thus becomes an avenue to transformative
mastery—a man can lull a “listener-patient” into a “conversationally induced state . . .
for the seducer and the seduced to live, vote, breathe, pay taxes, and party till dawn.”
There’s no need to understand our circumstances if we can instead transform them.
Yet in an Anderson film, the past is always something that must be reckoned with
before any true momentum can be achieved. As Magnolia’s refrain goes, “we may be

142 on faith and belief

through with the past, but the past is not through with us”; this line is no mere apho-
rism, but rather a truism with broad implications for the Andersonian metaphysical
struggle. Phantom Thread adopts The Master’s themes of past and future lives (though
in this case with a presumptive continuity of consciousness, a factor lacking in the
evident amnesiac rebirths of The Master), entirely divorcing the concept from any form
of spiritual leadership or any specific belief system. Appropriately to this second and
less overt of Anderson’s postwar stories, both Reynolds and Alma struggle intuitively
toward the sort of breakthrough that Dodd suggests, accessing the continuum of exis-
tence beyond one’s current life span in order to attain a sense of catharsis and serenity
(Reynolds by communing with his mother’s spirit, Alma by believing in a future plane
of existence in which Reynolds will wait for her after he inevitably expires first). Yet
neither Mr. nor Mrs. Woodcock comes to this relief through any spiritual counseling;
Phantom Thread is a film not of religion but of superstition and curses, both apparently
hanging thick in the production of wedding dresses and thus a cost of doing business
in the house of Woodcock (these occult inflections also sync with the overtones of
enchantment found in Alma’s homebrewed remedies and the broader gothic themes).
In this story, forces incomprehensible to the characters seem to be at work.
Anderson’s screenplay includes descriptive language that might suggest Reynolds’s
mother is supernaturally nudging him toward Alma; when he first glimpses the hotel
in which they will meet, “something takes over him” and leads him to the door.
In the finished film, after falling into a rapture while placing his breakfast order,
Reynolds seems shaken out of a trance once Alma leaves for the kitchen, Day-Lewis’s
consuming perturbation suggesting that he has just performed behaviors over which
he did not feel complete control. The conspicuous mention of the lock of his moth-
er’s hair sewn into his garment suggests that such a possession is entirely within the
realm of possibility, and if these strange forces cannot be understood, at least, it
would seem, they can be appeased.

After his first glimpse of Alma, Reynolds seems more alarmed than enamored. (Focus Features)

on faith and belief 143

 In keeping with the wide interpretive parameters of this ambiguous work, Josh
Larsen of Think Christian has argued that Phantom Thread can be read as an allegory
for a divine creator and blessed creation, with Reynolds returning Alma “to Eden,
or, more eschatologically, [dressing] her for the new creation, where all things will
be made right”—a reference to the apocalyptic Book of Revelation that hearkens
back to Congdon’s vision of a redemptive apocalypse in Magnolia. In a literal read-
ing, Phantom Thread lacks a coherent spirituality. Yet it is certainly a spiritualist story,
as the aberrant suggestion that Reynolds and Alma may be achieving some form of
transcendence through the abuse of his body unites a generalized fascination with
our corporeal selves, and all their malleability (Reynolds’s ability to revise a woman’s
figure seems to equate her garments with her physical form) and susceptibility to
decay (one adoring young admirer professes her desire to be buried in a Woodcock
gown, a morbid linkage of his work to the body’s impermanence).
The notion of hunger carries an amorphous and wide-ranging thematic signifi-
cance, as it seems to stand in for any form of spiritual and emotional insatiability. In
examining the body as an object distinct from the spirit, Anderson implicitly consid-
ers the so-called mind/body divide, the age-old question of what the relationship
might be between human consciousness and the physical housing of that conscious-
ness. This theme is not too far off from The Master’s focus on Freddie’s physicality:
“Silly animal,” Dodd says when Freddie loudly passes gas during a processing session;
“Dirty animal.” These urges are the ones that Dodd has transcended through his focus
on the cerebral and spiritual, and again, given the unimaginable scale of death so
recently witnessed by the characters of both The Master and Phantom Thread, inquiries
into the significance of bodies and their distinction from something more significant
represent exactly the sort of inquiry that a mystic like Dodd could purport to solve.
If a Hitchcockian pseudo-ghostly story may have seemed an unlikely fit for
Anderson, the theme of ghostliness in Phantom Thread is a significant iteration of
his long-standing fascination with the past. A ghost in Phantom Thread is both a
memory that has not been properly reckoned with and a presence that has not been
properly acknowledged; Cyril chides Reynolds for his seeming determination to
“make [Alma] a ghost” through neglect, as though a lack of love and validation could
cause one to recede to the point of losing physical form and become the sort of per-
sistently irreconcilable memory that Reynolds’s mother now represents. The question
of whether Phantom Thread’s haunting is literal or metaphorical may be ambiguous,
but it is distinct, and represents a thematic culmination of Anderson’s career to date.
Inherent Vice, too, contains themes of spirituality as a crutch for those who cannot
accept the pain of reality, here in the form of astrology. As Sortilège explains, young
dopers of the era believe themselves to have been born under “the unluckiest angle
possible,” and consequently reconcile this sense of cosmic bad luck by “[coming]
up with all kinds of alternative stories so [pain and loss] wouldn’t have to be true.”
Pynchon’s story is one concerned with opiates of the masses, and the conclusion
would seem to be that capitalism—the most beguiling cult of all—has gotten its
toxic tendrils into every sphere of both culture and counterculture, creating a loop
that thrives on dissatisfaction as much as Eli, Dodd, or Frank. The Golden Fang is
not unique in trafficking narcotics; what makes it most frightening is the suggestion

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that it has also gotten into the business of rehabilitation, rendering the idea of any
true liberation from their system moot. Charles Manson’s name is invoked periodi-
cally as representative of the most frightening type of cult leadership, yet there are no
cult leaders present among the varied cast of characters. Instead, there is an unset-
tling feeling that Manson’s insidious powers of persuasion have infused masculine
culture as a whole. If a cult is an engine of control, a manner of convincing the mis-
erable to hollow themselves out and escape the pain of existential ambivalence, then
Western culture has become one vast and variegated cult; even tuning in, turning on,
and dropping out will only lead you back to where you started.
Hard Eight might, on its surface, seem distant from mystical themes, but the
film looks with a certain spiritual awe upon the governing powers of chance and
fate, a thematic focus that links it with Magnolia. Both films leave open the pos-
sibility that the whims of fate could be the whims of God, an acknowledgment of
the universe as a frighteningly unknowable force. Questions of fate are expressed
subtly in Hard Eight, generally with regard to where the line falls between what one
can and cannot control. When Sydney continually reminds John, “You can’t win
six thousand dollars,” what he means is that John cannot win that sum on purpose.
There is a ceiling to what we can control, and it is wisest not to go looking for
where that ceiling sits.
Anderson’s star-making short film, Cigarettes & Coffee, functions as a spiritual pre-
cursor to Hard Eight, and in that brief vignette, Anderson focuses a bit more specifi-
cally on the vertiginous power of coincidence, as the telltale $20 bill is passed around,
creating a chain of cruel happenstance and consequent violence. The shooting script
for Hard Eight (or, as it was called then, Sydney) takes up this more overt focus on
coincidence in the form of a monologue intended for Sydney and John’s first drive
into Reno. After describing his uncle’s exceptionally unlucky death, Sydney con-
cludes that “in walking down the street to buy a cup of coffee, we relinquish con-
trol . . . it doesn’t matter to what or who or why, because that’s the way it is. We’ve got
nothing to do with any of it” (emphasis mine). This, in effect, is the wordier version
of the line that John delivers in the finished film as the conclusion to his own story of
shocking misfortune (the spontaneous combustion of his pocket matchbook): “Shit
happens. This happens, that happens. You just deal with it.”
Magnolia expands significantly upon the overwhelming power of fate, and the
difficulty of reconciling our existence with the universe’s serendipities. The film
opens with the story of Craig Hansen (Brad Hunt), who commits suicide rather
than grapple with the immeasurable coincidence in which he has found himself
complicit (the accidental and grotesque death of a blackjack dealer with whom he
had quarreled). The narrator—who, as previously stated, may be Anderson, God, or
both—follows this and two other stories of deadly coincidence with the somewhat
desperate admission that he is “trying to think” that these matters of chance might
be insignificant, but concludes, “I can’t.” If encountered with sufficient frequency,
coincidence becomes undeniably significant—how, exactly, the film seemingly can-
not determine, but it most certainly is not “something that happened” or “one of
those things.” Our interconnectedness, and the resulting weight of even our most
minor choices, merits consideration. “So much violence,” Jim’s captain says during

on faith and belief 145

his morning briefing, “but that’s the way of the world.” Yes, Magnolia seems to agree;
and just what are we supposed to do with that fact?
Jeffrey Sconce identified a focus on coincidence among the key tenets of 1990s
“smart cinema,” as he saw directors establish “a new realism of synchronicity, an over-
arching belief in the fundamentally random and yet strangely meaningful structure
of reality (even if that ‘meaning’ is total absurdity).” This interest in fate, particularly
its crueler manifestations, generates a form of suspense that Sconce argues “comes
from seeing just how much shit any one character can endure, and how clever the
universe (or the filmmaker) can be in meting out its interconnected twists of fate.”
Thus, issues of awe-inspiring coincidence are somewhat complicated in 1990s smart
films by the patent artificiality of their plotting, and to Anderson’s credit, he absorbs
this cognitive dissonance into Magnolia rather than attempting to obscure it. At the
conclusion of this epic compendium of unlikely incidents, the narrator admits, “We
generally say, ‘well if that was in a movie, I wouldn’t believe it.’ ” The line playfully
calls attention to the plot’s ridiculousness (while echoing the earlier line in which
Phil begs someone to assist him by comparing the moment to a film’s dramatic hinge
point—“This is the scene in the movie where you help me out”), but it simultane-
ously asks how much more ridiculous these events are than any the viewer may have
experienced, suggesting that what could seem like narrative convenience may in fact
reflect real life: if there is a God, then maybe that God is a filmmaker.
For all its ostensible focus on chance and coincidence, Magnolia is surprisingly
low on actual examples outside of the prologue. The characters’ choices have few
amusing or ironic rippling effects upon one another, a marked distinction from
clear precedent, Short Cuts, in which (to cite just one example among many) two
major characters accidentally swap their orders at a photo development stand, lead-
ing to an agonizing moment of things glimpsed that should not be. In the case
of Magnolia’s characters, the echoing repercussions of minor choices are generally
confined to family lines, with the wide-ranging implications (e.g., whatever violence
might be done against women by Seduce and Destroy true believers, the direct result
of one man abandoning his wife and son) left to the imagination. The few significant
coincidences are those in which characters prevent one another’s annihilation, as
Dixon does in interrupting Linda’s overdose, and as Jim does in intervening during
Donnie’s doomed criminal spiral. In either case, the unlucky coincidences glimpsed
in the prologue are relevant less for their delightful unlikelihood than for their rep-
resentation of how seriously we should take even the most minor of encounters lest
they have some impact that we cannot possibly predict.
Issues of fate play a prominent role in Licorice Pizza but carry distinctly more
positive connotations than the fatalistic tenor of Hard Eight and Magnolia. “I get
this feeling I was meant to know you,” Gary insists to Alana upon their first meeting.
“This is fate that brought us together!” For Gary, this belief in the universe’s benevo-
lent predestination serves as a form of faith no less significant than Jim Kurring’s
Catholicism. Though Alana is initially skeptical of Gary’s beaming trust in destiny,
she is gradually won over to his perspective across the course of the film. The universe
seems to reward Gary’s unwavering belief in its beneficence, and by the end, there
would seem to be little reason for Alana not to accept his initial presupposition: that

146 on faith and belief

their ambiguous relationship, and the transformative force it represents for both of
them, has been written in the stars.
With Punch-Drunk Love so often bearing the generic prefix post- (Anderson’s
post-millennium movie can be seen as a post-patriarchal post-romance), it might be
said to offer a vision of life in a post-religious world. Even Boogie Nights, the only
other film not yet discussed in this chapter, carries overtones of religious moralism
in the stigmas that deny members of Jack’s company the opportunities they might
otherwise be afforded, as well as the condemnatory eye of God implied by the cross
visible in the distance while Dirk accepts a late-night solicitation that leads to his vio-
lent assault. But in the blighted landscape of Punch-Drunk Love—the one Anderson
movie to take place post–Pauline apocalypse—God is as much a nonissue as the
Egan parents. The closest thing to a nod at religion (with the exception of Dean’s
receiving a haircut prior to his defeat by Barry, evoking images of Samson shorn)
is the centrality of Utah, stronghold of one of the more prominent homegrown
American sects of Christianity, as a location. But no saint, latter-day or otherwise,
is invoked. For as eerily empty as Anderson’s vision of twenty-first-century America
may be, it at least allows space for characters to connect and find fulfillment free of
any prescriptive spiritual strings.
During the Cause’s late-stage effort to indoctrinate Freddie—the master’s last
stand at domesticating this animalistic spirit amid his family’s mounting pressure
to disavow—Dodd argues for one “application” intended to “urge [Freddie] towards
existence within a group, society, a family.” This is an effective summation of every-
thing the Cause offers prospective converts—a sense of belonging that will ideally
lead to the abandonment of pesky individualism. But Freddie is unable to exist
within a group; his antisocial lifestyle renders him incapable of serving a master and
thus immune to control. Freddie seems to view his time with the Cause as a course
of self-examination akin to therapy (a practice to which Scientology vehemently
objects, as notoriously declared by Anderson’s former collaborator, Tom Cruise).
He is evidently surprised to find himself enjoying processing, protesting “This is
fun!” when Dodd attempts to curtail their first session. Like many seekers who find
their way onto the path of Scientology via “personality tests,” Freddie has become
engaged by thinking about himself in a way that he has not before, providing a more
immediately rewarding way of plumbing the unconscious than the inkblot tests to
which he has been subjected at the VA hospital. When Freddie walks away, he is
better for the experience, having derived the same benefit from the Cause that Jim
Kurring derives from his Catholic faith: an increased understanding of his choices
and his motivation in life. As a result of this newfound self-awareness, Freddie is
rewarded with the achievement he’s most desired: sexual intercourse. During his
tryst with Winn, Freddie puts her through a variation of Dodd’s processing, asking
her not to blink, and to repeat her name, playfully chiding her for infringements,
and finally asking whether she believes that she has lived a life prior to this one. The
moment may seem like a mocking desecration of Dodd’s methods, but it is also a
moment of genuine connection for the pathologically isolated Freddie; he is reach-
ing out to another person using the only methods through which he has ever felt
effectively reached out to, and in providing the same affirmation that Dodd provided

on faith and belief 147

him (“You’re the bravest [person] I’ve ever known”), he offers his addled version of
the same benefits he received.
Reviewing The Master for Christianity Today, Brett McCracken suggested that
Anderson’s ultimate message may be: “man will never find answers to his struggles
within himself, no matter how appealing and American the idea might be.” This
conclusion runs somewhat counter to my interpretation of Anderson’s essential
point concerning the positive transformative power of faith for those with suffi-
cient critical thinking skills, but McCracken also views Anderson’s perspective on the
Cause as somewhat more cynical than my own: “Anderson portrays a definite tension
here between human nature and religion, which he suggests is a fraud that merely
masks—or, at worst, plays to the baser parts of—man’s primordial instincts.” With
The Master being such a resolutely ambiguous work, Anderson’s cynicism seems less
pan-religious than focused on exploitative practitioners of fraudulent faith. Even
then—given his portrayal of Dodd’s spiritual struggle, which Anderson believes to
be genuine—his critique may be somewhat more sympathetic. McCracken views
The Master through the lens of self-help pseudo-mysticism: “When offered against
the stark reality of human evil and chronic waywardness—things we are confronted
with daily in the news and in our own lives—it’s no wonder such iterations of reli-
gious belief are looked down upon with derision.” Yet it is the more openly new-
age spiritualism perverted by Frank T. J. Mackey for which Anderson saves his most
open derision—and even then, he reserves the right to redeem the toxic guru. These
terms—cynical and derisive—may thus be too clean-cut for the fuzzy boundaries of
Anderson’s moral cosmology.
In fact, it is Anderson’s least ambiguous depiction of faith, in the form of the
goodness of Officer Jim Kurring, that has left him most open to skepticism. In a
2000 essay for the Journal of Religion and Film, Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare links
Magnolia’s uncritical treatment of Jim to its generalized blind spots surrounding
the social ills of modern urban life. “Kurring’s faith cannot actively respond to the
structures he himself protects,” DeGiglio-Bellemare writes. “Kurring believes that
sometimes people need to be forgiven and sometimes they need to go to jail, but he
never questions those structures which tend to privilege the sentencing of Black men
and the poor.” If the rain of frogs serves as a generalized condemnation of a patriar-
chal American culture at the close of the twentieth century, Jim’s participation in that
patriarchal system cannot be spared: DeGiglio-Bellemare views this unusual natural
disaster as an indictment of Jim’s faith, as no form of belief that is so implicitly tied
to upholding the status quo could survive the Pauline apocalypse.
This urge to focus on boldface statements of values rather than investigating their
implied details has hung with Anderson even as he has receded from the public eye
in the years-long gaps between films. When asked about the relationship between the
Cause and Dianetics in 2012, Anderson responded, “Isn’t George Lucas the founder
of a religion, too? Absolutely he is. Ideas can take you anywhere.” It is a point ably
demonstrated by his faithful characters, and even more powerfully by the ones who
abuse that faith.

148 on faith and belief

nine
On Music Videos

between the second and third songs in “Valentine,” which ostensibly documents
a 2016 studio rehearsal by rock trio Haim, a clapperboard overtakes the frame and Paul
Thomas Anderson’s voice can be heard reminding his unseen crew, “Simple for the
cameras, complicated for the girls, right?” Anderson’s cinematography in “Valentine”
may appear simple, but this short film—which, given its fourteen-minute runtime
and theatrical distribution in New York City and Los Angeles, would seem the most
appropriate classification—builds with a graceful confidence bespeaking greater fore-
thought and clarity of purpose than its “simple” form might suggest. Anderson begins
with an unbroken take that clocks in at nearly three minutes, and though the smooth,
roving camerawork lacks evident acrobatics, this portrait of Este, Danielle, and Alana
Haim—a family outfit whose San Fernando Valley roots are as integral to their public
profile as the director’s own—is no less considered and deliberate than any tracking
shot in an Anderson feature.
In her New Yorker review of Stop Making Sense—Jonathan Demme’s landmark
concert film that documented the 1983 tour of rock band Talking Heads—Pauline
Kael commended Demme’s “decision to keep the camerawork steady . . . and to
avoid hotsy-totsy, MTV-style editing.” That restraint, she concluded, “concentrates
our attention on the performers and the music.” It’s an ethos that would become a
defining feature of Demme’s career as musical performance took an increasingly cen-
tral role in his filmography, encompassing not just his concert documentaries but the
incorporation of diegetic performance in his narrative features. And that spirit epito-
mizes Anderson’s own approach as a director of music videos, a form he has worked
in sporadically but prolifically since 1997; his directorial eye is unobtrusive, a simple
gaze that supports the complicated work of the artists enlisting him as collaborator.
“Oftentimes, when you’re filming live music,” Anderson said in 2021, “there are
too many cuts or the music ends up not feeling live or something just feels processed
about it. I want to see [the musicians] play.” Accordingly, “Valentine” (to which
Gary’s surname in Licorice Pizza is likely a tribute) is a work of cinematic natural-
ism, with few conspicuous cuts to breach the illusion of observing a band at work.
According to a 2017 statement from Haim, the idea of a collaboration with Anderson
emerged (apparently the result of a mutual admiration, as well as some coincidental
hometown connections, including the sisters’ mother, a former and beloved art
teacher of Anderson’s), the band was ensconced in work on their second album,
Something to Tell You (2017), and Anderson in preproduction on Phantom Thread.
Thus, the decision was made to forgo a highly produced video and instead “film
where we were at that point in time—figuring out arrangements. Figuring out parts.
Getting in the room and wood shedding [musicians’ slang for the process of refining
complex work until it can be played with ease] these songs.”
Yet Anderson employs several notable formal tricks that lend the work a distinct
shape and form. The first song, “Right Now,” proceeds from the aforementioned
three-minute roving shot into a series of relatively briefer shots that function like
cinematic coverage, indicating that this is, in fact, a choreographed work of filmmak-
ing rather than the vérité document the first shot suggests. This tension between the
deliberate and the casual builds through the second song, “Something to Tell You,”
before paying off with an open breach of realism in the third, “Nothing’s Wrong.”
Here, Anderson maintains the pseudo-vérité style but intercuts footage of Danielle
Haim playing drums and footage of her playing lead guitar, creating the uncanny
illusion that two iterations of the same artist are sharing the studio. Rather than call-
ing attention to itself as a filmmaking trick, the effect only underlines the essential
message of the video: this trio of artists is responsible for every element of their work,
a message further emphasized by the choice to place the band’s frequent synthesizer
player, Dash Hutton, out of focus and bathed in shadow, present but beyond the
purview of the lens. The lighting design—heavy on shadows and contrast, deep blue
filters juxtaposed with the bold primary red of Danielle’s blouse—further signifies
its status as a deliberately cinematic work. Anderson straddles the line between the
improvised and the artificial, utilizing the synthetic components of filmmaking to
celebrate the artistic alchemy on display when musicians lose themselves in their own
creative process. “Valentine,” along with much of his work with Haim, thus serves as
the endpoint of a two-decade arc that began with works of ostentatious showman-
ship typical of his style at the time.
Music videos provided Anderson some of his earliest experiences in professional
film production: he worked as a production assistant, as he recalled in 2002, on
“kind of . . . bad” rap and hip-hop videos. Though interrupted by a lull lasting
from 2000 to 2013—corresponding with a broader lull in the distribution of music
videos between MTV’s shift toward more conventional broadcast programming and
the emergence of YouTube and other streaming platforms—Anderson’s video career
includes (as of this writing) more than fifteen short-form works, beginning with the
1997 video for Michael Penn’s “Try.” From there, he collaborated on five videos with
Fiona Apple—four between 1998 and 2000, the fifth in 2013. He followed this with
a pair of videos for Joanna Newsom in 2015—the same year that he released Junun,
an hour-long documentary on the recording sessions for a Jonny Greenwood side
project—and three for Radiohead in 2016. Between 2017 and 2022, he shot eight
videos for Haim, as well as “Valentine.” The release of “Anima,” a so-called one-
reeler collaboration with Thom Yorke in 2019, marked the first time that Anderson
has ever digressed in the midst of working with another artist (with the exception
of videos created to promote his films and their soundtracks, such as Aimee Mann’s

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“Save Me,” a work so inherently aligned with Magnolia that it merits little consid-
eration as a stand-alone work). For more than twenty years, he has been an almost
entirely monogamous collaborator.
The video for “Try” is most remarkable for being unmistakably the work of Paul
Thomas Anderson. As the camera moves with Penn (who composed or cocomposed
the scores for Anderson’s first three features) down a hallway of mind-boggling
length, scenic elements shift to create the impression of spaces as diverse as a depres-
sive office building, a high school gymnasium, and what might be Ellis Island. The
attention-grabbing formal tricks—primarily the lengthy, complex tracking shot—
instantly align “Try” with the cocksure camerawork of Boogie Nights, and the video
was shot with much of that film’s crew, as well as several cast members (notably
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Thomas Jane, and Melora Walters). Thus, despite not
actually re-creating any of the film’s imagery—the aforementioned performers all
portray new characters—the video feels like a tacit tie-in, so distinctly of a piece is it
with the visual language of Anderson’s breakout feature.
There is some continuity of style between the video for “Try” and Anderson’s
first collaboration with Apple, a cover of the Beatles’ “Across the Universe” commis-
sioned for Gary Ross’s Pleasantville (1998). Again, Anderson makes use of conspicu-
ously lengthy shots, though he does employ some cuts between angles that relieve
the viewer’s responsibility to marvel at the technical achievement of an unbroken
take. Depicting Apple, dressed in late-1990s chic, moving languorously through a
1950s-style diner as the establishment is ransacked by a gang of evidently psychotic
businessmen (including John C. Reilly, who does not appear in Ross’s film), “Across
the Universe” serves as a remarkable outlier among Anderson’s videos in that it is a
tie-in to another director’s film. Yet if Anderson was required to make use of Ross’s
monochrome Americana aesthetic, the video nonetheless serves as something of a
statement of purpose for what would become the primary theme throughout the
majority of Anderson’s work with Apple: the efforts of a world-weary young woman
to traverse the bothersome world of men.
The four videos that Anderson and Apple produced between 1998 and 2000
tend to operate very much within the typical language of MTV’s 1990s output, a
period in which the channel and its principal form both “matured” (as Roger Beebe
describes the decade’s shift towards aesthetically adventurous auteur-driven videos,
rather than the stock visual language that typified the network’s first era). The video
for “Limp” finds Apple exiting the bed of an unseen lover in a dingy contemporary
apartment and dressing in formal wear before slipping downstairs into an ornate,
firelit manse. The video’s disjointed imagery—described by Michael Tedder as “boil-
erplate alt-culture ‘weirdness’ ”—gestures at narrative without providing enough
concrete material for a distinct character or dilemma to emerge, aligning it with a
tradition described by Carol Vernallis as “trauma videos.” Vernallis here refers not
to depictions of literal trauma but rather a rupture in the traditional flow of image
and context; in these videos, “the elements needed for a story—active agents, a sense
of time and place, a knowledge of how actions unfold—are confusing or absent.”
In the video for “Paper Bag,” Apple lingers in a train station surrounded by travel-
ers and service workers, all played by preadolescent boys. The video is a pastiche of

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Old Hollywood musicals, complete with elaborate choreography and swooping cam-
erawork, and the casting gimmick calls to mind Alan Parker’s Bugsy Malone (1976),
which similarly placed children in adult roles in order to amusingly intermingle the
innocent with the lightly risqué. Thus, the video fits in comfortably with the pastiche
motif that Roger Beebe has noted among the era’s videos; in particular, “Paper Bag”
forms an intriguing counterpoint to Spike Jonze’s video for Bjork’s 1995 cover of “It’s
Oh So Quiet.” In Jonze’s video, golden-age musical tropes intrude on the real world,
as the singer enlists contemporary figures into choreographed routines with a jubi-
lance calling to mind Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967).
Compared to Jonze’s video, Anderson’s seems tame and staid, limited to one loca-
tion and a small cast of young performers, a disparity likely attributable to the fact
that Anderson was (and remains) primarily a feature director dabbling in the music-
video form, whereas Jonze emerged as a music-video auteur, helming more than three
dozen videos in the eight years preceding his debut feature, Being John Malkovich
(1999). Indeed, Jonze’s trajectory is fairly common among this generation of film-
makers, as David Fincher, Sofia Coppola, Michel Gondry, and Jonathan Glazer—to
name just a few—all honed their skills in music videos before transitioning to fea-
tures; Anderson’s trajectory, in which music videos become an increasingly promi-
nent element of his career as time goes on, is relatively rare.
It is somewhat confounding that a director whose feature work is as gleefully
referential as Anderson’s should have directed only one pastiche video. The ecstatic
“Paper Bag” is a highlight in an otherwise listless collaboration between Anderson
and Apple, with their work suggesting idiosyncratic artists struggling to find a
foothold in the form. Another in this early run, “Fast as You Can,” is most notable
for its lack of a cohesive style, as Anderson and Apple cycle through concepts and
techniques with distractible haphazardness, seemingly unwilling or unable to settle
on a vision for the project. It seems by no means incidental that their 2013 video
for “Hot Knife” best balances the coherent with the formally audacious (the video
is a split-screen panoply that repeatedly duplicates Apple’s form, at times with the
body-double assistance of her sister, Maude Maggart, in keeping with the song’s

Fiona Apple and Maude Maggart in “Hot Knife.” (No production company listed)

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multitracked vocals), given that it was made by two artists with more than a decade’s
additional experience and perspective.
Asked in 2003 whether he would make more videos, Anderson replied that while
these projects were “nice” and “fun,” he had no plans to make any more: “I really
don’t have any time for it, but maybe some day.” In the decade that elapsed before
his next video, the industrial landscape shifted significantly, from a world in which
videos were largely limited to corporate-backed, ad-supported cable networks to one
in which digital technology made it possible to share videos virtually instantly, virtu-
ally anywhere, with virtually no mediation between artist and audience. That shift
seems to have energized Anderson, whose twenty-first-century videos suggest a more
engaged artistic eye.
With the shift from highly produced work designed for television broadcast to
the freedom of digital production and distribution, one might imagine Anderson
giving himself permission to create loose, casual work in order to blow off steam
between features. While this could describe a handful of his videos, in other cases he
has chosen a high-minded approach to the form, pushing for cinematic distribution
(alongside “Valentine,” his video for Joanna Newsom’s “Divers” screened theatrically
across the United States and the United Kingdom, while “Anima” received large-
format projection in some IMAX theaters). Though Steven Shaviro argues that
the “illustrative and externally referential form” of the music video is antithetical
to “high-modernist theories of art,” Anderson has taken a stance that deliberately
reconfigures the audience’s relationship with and expectations for the form, one that
lends a significant hand to musicians cultivating star personas in an increasingly
diffuse industry as many conventional avenues to pop stardom become obsolete.
After the overwhelmingly clear auteurist voice in “Try,” Anderson’s early videos
with Apple were less distinctly of a piece with his features. In his twenty-first-century
work, some continuity of voice has reemerged, particularly between videos and fea-
tures shot contemporaneously. The lighting scheme for “Hot Knife” calls to mind
the flattening effect used to evoke midcentury portrait photography in The Master,
though one would be hard pressed to say that the video directly echoes the film. His
next video, for Joanna Newsom’s “Sapokanikan,” feels aligned with Inherent Vice,
as Anderson’s handheld camera follows Newsom on a nonlinear walking tour of
Greenwich Village, capturing a hazy, naturally lit idyll that tips toward the nostalgic.
Further alignment can be found in the overlap between Newsom’s lyrics, dense with
references to historical signifiers subsumed by avaricious progress, and Pynchon’s
own thematic concerns. (Adam Nayman, by contrast, compares the video to the
opening credits of Saturday Night Live —clearly, Anderson’s video work is just as
open to divergent interpretation as his features.)
Like “Valentine,” “Sapokanikan” is deceptively well constructed. Anderson builds
a tonal downward trajectory that climaxes with the background intrusion of emer-
gency vehicles, which cast ominous red light on Newsom’s face just as the instru-
mentation and lyrics shift decisively toward the dour. The video is further notable
as the first Anderson work since Punch-Drunk Love (more than a decade earlier) to
make use of a contemporary setting, lending a loose run-and-gun feeling by virtue
of being unrestricted by production design limitations. Having been shot during

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an East Coast winter, it is also the first Anderson work to feature snow, a minor but
nonetheless striking divergence for a director so generally focused on arid climates,
and one that aligns it more than anything with Phantom Thread. (Anderson’s second
collaboration with Newsom, “Divers,” resembles an animated version of the psy-
chedelic landscape art on the cover of her album of the same name, with the singer
looming mournfully over the Arcadian tableau; while Michael Tedder lauded the
work for demonstrating a “love of pure color as an aesthetic end in and of itself,” it
provides comparatively little material for consideration and analysis.)
Nearly a decade after he began collaborating with Jonny Greenwood, the guitarist
for Radiohead, Anderson finally worked with the band as a unit on the 2016 video
for “Daydreaming,” which joins those for “Try” and “Sapokanikan” in establishing a
motif that he would return to in his collaborations with Haim: a figure in constant
motion cycling through varied environments. Here, lead singer Thom Yorke steps
through a seemingly endless chain of doors that leads him, with spectral detachment,
through settings ranging from a suburban home to a seemingly abandoned parking
garage and finally to a snow-capped mountain. Tucked within this fairly traditional
promotional video for the band’s A Moon Shaped Pool LP, one might infer a variety
of winks and Easter eggs for the Anderson faithful. The opening shot, which finds
the camera placed at the end of a dim tunnel, observing a distant patch of overexpo-
sure from which various dark and out-of-focus forms emerge, bears a conspicuous
resemblance to a recurring image in Jonathan Demme’s Caged Heat (1974), as well as
the interplay of brightness and dimness in Punch-Drunk Love. Meanwhile, Nayman
suggests that a later image of Yorke on a beach is evocative of Freddie Quell “blinking
in the sunlight in a fugue state.”
“Daydreaming” is conventional in a way that hearkens back to Anderson’s early
Fiona Apple videos. More distinctive are his next two videos for Radiohead, which
share the title “Jonny, Thom & a CR78” and demonstrate a newfound interest in
laying bare the technical construction that goes into capturing these performances.
In each video—one shot at night by what appears to be firelight, the other during
daylight and backed by a mountainous expanse—Greenwood and Yorke perform a
song together for Anderson’s observing camera with nothing but their guitars and
a Roland CR-78 drum machine. In the daylight video, a performance of Yorke’s
climate-change anthem “The Numbers,” the lower half of the frame contains a con-
spicuous dolly track that the camera will traverse over the ensuing two minutes. In
both videos, brief preparatory and/or concluding chatter is included: in the noctur-
nal video, for “Present Tense,” an unseen voice (perhaps Anderson’s) can be faintly
heard saying “Go ahead,” prompting Greenwood to turn on the drum machine,
and “The Numbers” ends with Yorke offering Greenwood an ambiguous “Probably.”
Such naturalistic flourishes may be minor choices, but they distinguish these videos
as essentially internet-era works, their unguarded looseness running directly counter
to the typical high production value of MTV-era videos, not to mention the classical
formalism comprising so many of Anderson’s features. By calling attention to the
lack of artifice in the videos’ construction, Anderson elevates his subjects’ artistry,
inviting the viewer to notice the power that these musicians are capable of with all
production apparatus stripped away.

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 Here, Anderson again evokes the spirit of Demme’s approach to filming music:
“I like seeing the cameras,” Demme said of what would prove to be his final feature-
length project, Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids (2016), “because it helps visual-
ize how the music people and the movie people teamed up. There’s that rule: don’t
show any of the other cameras. Why? Do you think the viewer doesn’t think we
filmed this?” This breach of the fourth wall is similar to the alienation effects I dis-
cussed in chapter 7, but such a technique functions differently in documentary than
in narrative. Rather than call attention to the falseness of the diegesis in a narrative
feature, the choice to reveal the constructedness of nonfiction brings the viewer into
alignment with the director, allowing for a pleasurable sharing of perspectives—Are
you seeing what I’m seeing? the camera seems to eagerly ask the viewer.
This conceit of a glimpse through the director’s eye carries over to Junun (2015),
the hour-long documentary that Anderson shot in India during the recording of the
album of the same name, which brought together Greenwood, the Israeli composer
Shye Ben Tzur, and the Indian ensemble the Rajasthan Express. For as much as it
serves to document and celebrate the unique collaborative spirit of the project—
which was recorded live in Mehrangarh Fort, a fiftenth-century citadel in Northern
India—it also exists as an unusually present-tense glimpse into Anderson’s mind.
Handling much of the camerawork himself using consumer-grade, lightweight digi-
tal equipment, Anderson is able to capture imagery at the speed of his curiosity and
imagination, experimenting with composition and framing as he roams the fort and
its surroundings. Anderson compared the film to “a travel brochure,” but more
than anything it resembles the ecstatic home-video footage of an unusually inspired
vacationer. For an artist whose twenty-first-century work may strike some viewers as
deliberate to the point of oppressiveness, the opportunity for doodling seems to have
proved liberating.
Asked in 1999 whether he would keep doing music videos, Anderson replied,
“Just for Fiona,” before adding Michael Penn, Aimee Mann, and Jon Brion to the
list of prospective collaborators—in short, anyone with whom he had a preexisting
relationship. He maintained this practice through 2017, with his videos for Radio-
head being a consequence of his work with Greenwood, and his videos for Newsom
following her appearance in Inherent Vice. With Haim, he finally broke from this
late-1990s credo, working with a band with whom he had no prior relationship and
initiating his most prolific and sustained music-video collaboration to date (with the
exception of his technically fourteen-year collaboration with Apple, thirteen years of
which happen to have been fallow).
In some respects, these videos (three of them—“Valentine,” “Little of Your Love,”
and “Night So Long”—in support of Something to Tell You; five—“Summer Girl,”
“Now I’m in It,” “Hallelujah,” “The Steps,” and “Man from the Magazine”—in sup-
port of their third album, Women in Music Pt. III (2020); and one—“Lost Track”—
attached to screenings of Licorice Pizza beginning in February 2022) can be seen
as a culminating embrace of all that Anderson had learned in the preceding years
spent filming musicians. This set of videos celebrates spontaneous expression, natu-
ral light, and the cultural landscape of modern Los Angeles, functioning as a more
vivid reflection of his earlier Valley movies. As the Haim sisters stroll twilit streets in

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“Summer Girl,” removing layer after layer of constricting costume, or as Este and
Alana hurry to revive an exhausted Danielle in “Now I’m in It,” Anderson finally
achieves the goal that he established at the start of his career: to tangibly capture the
specific mood of Southern California without indulging the stereotypes that make
the area feel alien to much of the broader world.
This fruitful collaboration may seem counterintuitive—a prestige auteur known
for portraits of masculine angst spending more than four years working with
a group roughly half his age whose music, as indicated by the title of their third
album, openly negotiates cultural standards of femininity—but as with so much of
Anderson’s work, it is animated by a clear enthusiasm for the talents of his subjects;
he seems no less intrigued by the Haim sisters’ versatility than he was by Philip Sey-
mour Hoffman’s. If anything unites Anderson’s music videos with his feature work,
it is exactly this spirit of appreciative engagement with another artist’s process. But
liberated from the pressure to provide the material that will show off their talent, he
is left to focus on the optimal aesthetic framing of that talent. This is what shines
through in “Valentine”—a fan’s fascination with Este Haim’s trademark facial con-
tortions, Danielle’s intensity of focus, and Alana’s jubilance.
In 1984, discussing his approach to filming Talking Heads for Stop Making Sense,
Demme described his career-long interest in relationships between characters:
“That’s something I’m interested in every film I do . . . I love viewing a community of
people, and in this movie they happened to be playing music together.” In “Valen-
tine,” Anderson’s eye is similarly attuned to minor glances between the Haim sisters
as they request and provide nonverbal feedback during what is intentionally framed
as a workshopping (or “wood shedding”) session. Anderson’s camera holds after each
song for the breathless moment in which the performers, tense from creative exer-
tion, relax into a brief, hushed awe and then turn toward one another for an immedi-
ate check-in. If Demme viewed David Byrne’s ensemble as one in his constellation
of communities, then it would seem entirely fair to slot Haim in as a point along the
continuum of Andersonian family dynamics, particularly the cases in which those
dynamics intersect with the creative process.
Given that Anderson is so distinctly known for feature filmmaking, it’s tempt-
ing to search for traces of narrative in his music-video work. Yet traditional plotting
is often anathema to the short-format video, which must devote primary focus to
not just musical performance but an artist’s established persona, with their celebrity
often functioning as a distancing effect that prevents full immersion in a fictional
diegesis. Even beyond these self-evident inhibitions, Vernallis points out some sub-
tler conceits common to this unique form: given the influence of the extradiegetic
music, she notes, “people who appear in music videos can resemble automatons,”
an uncanny effect that distances the viewer from a world that operates on “another
phenomenology . . . where sound structures events.”
Thus, seeking storytelling pleasures in a video like Haim’s “Little of Your Love”
is a task that is unlikely to yield conventional satisfaction. The video has a central
figure in the form of Danielle Haim, whom the camera finds strolling through a
blue-tinged L.A. neighborhood with a look of distracted unease. Yet by the time
Danielle enters the dive bar that becomes the video’s primary location, the narrative

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has already crested, leaving the remaining runtime (depicting an ecstatic ensemble
line dance) to function as extended catharsis. The video is not unlike a classic MGM
production number—and bears a resemblance to the central disco set piece of Boogie
Nights—but without the scaffolding of a feature plot, it provides pure emotionality
without clear subject or object.
In order to make sense of the relationship between traditional cinematic story-
telling and the frequently antinarrative conventions of video, Kay Dickinson argues
that these short works should be viewed as something like a synesthetic transfor-
mation of sound into image. By interpreting a video as illustrative of the mind’s
experience of the music, Dickinson suggests, the viewer can unite the “murky,
unreconciled areas” that make up a video, including what Shaviro describes as
its “strictly speaking superfluous” nature as a promotional object meant to drive
album sales. With songwriting being liberated from the constraints of narrative
logic, operating more on a chain of poetic connections than A-to-B progression,
it is most fruitful to think of a video as a way of “seeing” this lyrical recursion and
discursion. Were a director to apply too conventional a narrative to anything but
the most traditional of balladry, it would likely fail in its task of illustrating the
unique qualities of the source text.
Vernallis argues that narratively robust music videos are most often viable when
the song’s lyrics command relatively little critical attention—in “moments of extreme
narrative interest,” she writes, lyrical content generally “becomes almost impossible
to follow,” meaning novelty of either image or lyric must take precedence for an
effective melding of the two. This factor would seem to account for a large part of
the acclaim that Anderson has found with Haim, whom Jesse Hassenger credited
with granting the director an “unlikely second career.” Previously, he gravitated to
songwriters such as Apple, Newsom, and Yorke, whose lyrics tend to be verbally and
thematically cerebral (“Sapokanikan” accrues a referential density comparable to a
T.S. Eliot poem), which demand a minimalist approach lest the video devolve into
meaninglessness. The Haim sisters, on the other hand, compose lyrics of elegant pop
simplicity, which allows for greater ambition in the pseudo-narrative conceits of their
videos without generating cognitive dissonance. The relatively plainspoken literalism
of the lyrics to “Now I’m in It” (“Looking in the mirror again and again / Wishing
the reflection would tell me something / I can’t get ahold of myself / Can’t get out of
this situation”) allows for a freedom of metaphoric imagery (in this case, Este and
Alana, dressed like characters out of The Matrix [1999], carrying a depleted Danielle
toward a rejuvenating trip through a car wash).
By the logic of Vernallis and Dickinson, music-video construction can be seen as
inherently affective, with editing motivated by feeling rather than strict cause and
effect; it would thus seem entirely appropriate that Anderson’s increased productiv-
ity in the form has coincided with his embrace of affective storytelling logic in his
feature work. When the closing stretch of Phantom Thread is abruptly interrupted
by a shot of Reynolds and Alma dancing during a New Year’s Eve ball, the inserted
image is difficult to reconcile with the literal reality of the storyline; we’ve earlier seen
Reynolds pull Alma away from this location hours before this shot would seem to
indicate, and in a far different emotional state, so when is it meant to have occurred?

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But surrendering the need for traditional narrative unity allows for a more intuitive,
emotional viewing experience that aligns more closely with music-video logic.
Key to Dickinson’s theory of the synesthetic potential of music videos is her belief
that videos can use poetic imagery to literalize the thematic content of the lyrics.
Her examples center on Black artists who make use of traditionally white milieux
in order to ironically comment on the racial politics of their songwriting—e.g., the
1998 video for Busta Rhymes’s “Gimme Some More,” in which “Rhymes’ presence
in [conventionally white contexts] is a simultaneous infiltration and a mockery” of
these contexts, matching the lyrics’ commentary on the market pressures imposed
upon Black artists. Anderson makes use of similar techniques, though his primary
collaboration with (exclusively white) female artists means that the imagery most
often comments ironically on these women’s efforts to navigate a patriarchal society.
In the case of “Paper Bag” (as discussed earlier), Apple is depicted as experiencing
a sort of romantic nostalgia while surrounded by young boys who embody men’s
roles, an apt metaphor for a woman who feels burdened by a culture that allows
for infantile emotionality among men. More than twenty years later, Anderson and
Haim attempted a similar trick with the video for “Man from the Magazine.” In an
unusually lyrically dense song, by this band’s standards, Danielle fires off a series of
righteously angry rhetorical questions in response to unheard crude or dismissive
interview questions (“What did you say? ‘Do you make the same faces in bed?’ Hey
man, what kind of question is that?”). The video’s counterintuitive gambit strains
the limits of visual and aural dissonance allowed for by Vernallis’s theory, depicting
Danielle working the counter at the L.A. institution Canter’s Deli, delivering her
questions ineffectually while fulfilling the orders of male customers who seem oblivi-
ous to her assertions of individualism. The video draws a line between the roles of
female musician and service worker, suggesting the band’s frustration with catering to
the gaze of the masculine-industrial complex. Attempting to make sense of the “Man
from the Magazine” video as literal narrative is impossible; on the level of metaphor,
however, it is among the most distinct and impactful that Anderson has conjured.
“Valentine” culminates in a blistering guitar solo that closes “Nothing’s Wrong,”
which Anderson shoots in virtual darkness, leaving Danielle Haim all but lost in a
sea of primary blue. As he shoots her performance, he slowly pushes toward her face.
While one might imagine the goal of capturing this virtuosic musicianship would
best be served by focusing on the player’s hands, Anderson is more interested in the
emotionality to be found in her expressions, a minor choice that contributes to this
short’s affective portrait of three individuals, a goal as important as the display of
their technical acumen, and perhaps more so.
If music videos can be called a natural fit for Anderson—not necessarily an
intuitive suggestion given the focus typically lavished on his screenwriting—then
it must be due to the form’s potential to indulge his interest in physicality as means
of expression. The exaggerated outlines of the slump-shouldered Barry Egan, the
clenched Freddie Quell, and the loose-limbed Doc Sportello all suggest a natural
inclination toward silent film expressionism, and music video practically demands
the surrender of any other mode of storytelling. It is this century-old tradition that
Anderson explores directly in what was marketed as his most significant example of

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music-video auteurism to date (at least by virtue of its being the rare music-video
work to receive a print campaign and a teaser trailer), “Anima” (2019).
Similar to “Valentine,” the fifteen-minute “Anima” strings together a suite of
three selections from Thom Yorke’s album of the same name. Unlike “Valentine,”
however, “Anima” represents an elaborate narrative that begs some sort of recon-
ciliation. Yorke portrays an alienated figure in a world of depressive automatons,
seemingly shaken out of his malaise by a chance encounter with an alluring woman
(Dajana Roncione). Yorke’s perpetually frustrated effort to escape the limitations of
this dystopian-inflected pan-European metropolis (the project was shot partly in
Prague and partly in Les Baux-de-Provence in the South of France) bears a distinct
resemblance to Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, while the ethereally ominous settings
call to mind the underworld of Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950).
Of any Anderson feature, “Anima” seems most aligned with Punch-Drunk Love,
as Yorke draws on a repertoire of physicality similar to Barry’s (one instance of Yorke’s
vaulting a malfunctioning subway turnstile is a precise echo of Barry’s flight from the
four blonde brothers) while the surreal cityscape echoes the more menacing corners
of that vision of the Valley. “Anima” represents the most elaborate choreography of
any Anderson video since “Paper Bag,” but whereas in Apple’s video he evoked clas-
sic Hollywood musicals with the assistance of choreographer Michael Rooney—who
would go on to create similarly infectious interludes for, among others, Clerks II
(2006) and (500) Days of Summer (2009)—the dance in “Anima” is more avant-garde,
having been choreographed by Damien Jalet, with whom Yorke had recently worked
on the balletic horror Suspiria (2018).
As technically accomplished as “Anima” may be, it is a cerebral object lacking the
raw emotionality of Anderson’s best videos. In his review, Peter Bradshaw described
it as “a sleek piece of luxury content designed to synergize with another piece of
content” and compared it to “an ad for cologne.” Each of Anderson’s collaborations
with Yorke could be described as similarly antiseptic, even as they range from the
diverting “Jonny, Thom, & a CR78” duology to the stultifying “Daydreaming” (an
assessment, I should I acknowledge, in which I diverge from a vast swath of viewers
and critics, including David Ehrlich, who argued that the “Daydreaming” video rep-
resents “the most palpable visualization [to that point] of the harrowing unreality—
and latent sense of hope—that’s baked into the grey matter of Yorke’s songwriting”).
The notion of female artists’ using videos as a platform to negotiate a commodi-
fied self-image was immediately urgent in Anderson’s work with Fiona Apple, an
artist whose persona was subject to controversy beginning at a perilously young
age. Most fraught among these points of contention was the video for her ubiqui-
tous 1997 single “Criminal,” shot when Apple was just nineteen. Directed by Mark
Romanek, the video openly traded in sexualized nymphet imagery, which Apple
later claimed was an effort to (as related by Chris Heath) “exploit herself on her own
terms, before anyone else had the chance to.” The video’s inflammatory content was
conflated with additional controversy when Apple was honored at that year’s MTV
Video Music Awards, and used her acceptance speech to declare, “Everybody out
there that’s watching, everybody that’s watching this world, this world is bullshit and
you shouldn’t model your life about what you think that we think is cool.”

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 These paired cultural lightning rods established a two-pronged celebrity persona,
with Apple viewed as either “a precocious, calculating prodigy or an unbalanced,
ungrateful freak,” according to a 1998 Rolling Stone profile. Most often, she was
viewed as both at once, as epitomized in a Janeane Garofalo audio sketch that por-
trayed Apple as an addled hypocrite: “You shouldn’t model your life about what
you think that we think is cool. Even though . . . I have somehow sold out to the
patriarchy in this culture that says that lean is better, even though I have done that,
and I have done a video wherein I wear underwear so that you young girls out there
can covet, and feel bad about what you have, and how thin you’re not. The point is,
I have done it, I am lean.”
Each of Apple’s videos with Anderson can thus be seen as some manner of grap-
pling with her status—and particularly her body’s status—as a hotly debated public
commodity. Both “Fast as You Can” and “Hot Knife” dismantle and reconfigure her
physical form; in the earlier video, the camera surveys her body parts individually,
beginning with close-up shots of her eye, her shoulders, and her neck, while Apple
later touches the lens, blurring and wiping it to distort the viewer’s image of her. Both
Apple’s performance and the camerawork are manic, cycling between aggression and
seduction, and the overall impression is of an artistic power couple collaborating
on a thorough scouring of Apple’s public image. The later video, meanwhile, has
comparatively fewer central conceits, but doubles down on surveying both Apple’s
component parts and those parts in aggregate, as the coiled, sweat-slicked artist is
quintupled within one frame, seeming to beg the question of how much visual inter-
est can be generated from one body without the support of any particular costuming
or set design (Apple appears before a spot-lit void in a black tank top that’s at times
layered with a black jacket).
The structure of “Limp” seems to imply that Apple is struggling to break out
of a pattern of entrapment within a relationship that may stand in for patriarchal
culture as a whole. From the bedroom of a lover whose identity is so insignificant
that he is never seen in full, she descends into a wonderland that allows her to enact
her frustrations, having donned explicitly desexualized formal wear (which Rachel
Hahn sees as a statement that “she’s got more range than those former midriff-baring
tops and baggy pants might imply”). Apple’s movements loop and stutter until the
closing moments descend into abstraction, suggesting an increasingly claustropho-
bic cycle of self-reflexivity (Apple lolls on a couch watching herself on a TV screen).
This theme of purgatorial angst is then restated—albeit with an increased sense of
whimsy—in “Paper Bag,” which chooses as its setting that most quotidian of liminal
spaces, the train station.
Anderson’s work with Haim is no less a statement on their ambivalence toward
the public eye, but whereas Apple’s videos ruminate on the pressures of her celebrity,
Haim’s videos more often seem to flout such self-aware pressures. In “Little of Your
Love,” “Now I’m in It,” and “Summer Girl,” the key visual motif is the Haim sisters’
bodies in motion, whether ecstatic or exhausted. This theme is shared by their non-
Andersonian videos for “Want You Back” (2017) and “Don’t Wanna” (2020), both
of which, like “Summer Girl,” track the trio on purposeful walks through Angeleno
environments. This recurring image was celebrated by Margaret Talbot as an example

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Danielle, Este, and Alana Haim in “Lost Track.” (No production company listed)

of “exhilarating” girl-group revisionism, in which feminine physicality is depicted

not as “crazy or sexy but . . . plausible.”
Bodies are once again in motion in “Lost Track,” though that motion is more
anxious than ecstatic. Opening with a deft voice-over brushstroke that establishes
the setting (the “annual Balboa gold rush and fashion bazaar”) and suggests narrative
without requiring the arduous work of developing story and character, Danielle is
once again isolated and experiencing evident ennui. Dressed in masculinized garb
among her classically feminized peers, Danielle moves restlessly through a space that
otherwise bustles happily, with the crowd including Este and Alana. Her alienation
seems to be explicitly tied to her inability to reconcile her gender expression with
the conventions surrounding her; the removal of evident male pressure does little to
alleviate the angst of womanhood in what appears to be a setting roughly contempo-
raneous with Licorice Pizza’s (save for Danielle’s anachronistic garb).
If one of Anderson’s collaborations with Haim seems most in line with his vid-
eos for Apple, it would be “The Steps,” which shows the trio awakening in a spare,
untidy Los Angeles home and enacting hazy, lazy grooming rituals made transgres-
sive through a vague animalism—Este applies lipstick and then takes a bite of the
wax; Alana brushes her teeth but allows foam to run down her face to the point
of appearing rabid. The video makes use of sexualized trappings—Danielle is seen
in sheer underclothes that leave little to the imagination—but rather than inviting
desire, the intent comes across as an assertive reclaiming of these women’s physical
autonomy. As they complete their ablutions, each of the Haims is seen in succession
spitting onto their own reflection, sullying the two-dimensional image for personal
amusement. And, in keeping with the theme of women taking control of their own
image, “The Steps” is the first instance of Anderson’s sharing directorial credit, in this
case with Danielle, who closes the video sitting in the house’s living room, pounding
with scorched-earth fierceness on a drum kit.
There is a certain queasy conspicuousness to Anderson’s virtual exclusivity in
documenting female musicians, particularly given the attention that I have now sug-
gested he lavishes on their bodies. For a director whose filmography sees sex as a
commodity, this recurring interest in deconstructing female sex appeal is difficult to

on music videos 161

reconcile. These collaborations might seem to alleviate suggestions that Anderson is
either indifferent or hostile to female interiority, but it is significant that his most
female-centric projects are those for which he bore no burden of creating character-
ization, let alone dialogue, and was thus free to largely draft off existing personas.
These videos do not suggest particular acuity with female narratives, suggesting only
that he remains intrigued by the symbolically feminine.
In a 2020 essay, Armond White argued that Anderson’s videos for Haim and Apple
are his most emotionally direct works. Liberated from the “cynical neo-Kubrick”
trappings of his features, Anderson uses “shrewd yet gentle female assertion” to tap
directly into an effusive tradition of pop art. Thus, these videos—particularly those
for Haim—might be seen as essentially symbiotic. Their association with Anderson
has lent the band legitimacy among a sphere of cinephiles who might otherwise
be prone to ignore them, and in exchange, they have lent him a feminist bona fide
unavailable based on his own well-worn storytelling playbook. The initial poster
image for Licorice Pizza prominently featured the slogan “You’ve come a long way,
baby” (seen on a T-shirt worn by a foregrounded Alana), words that originated in
an ad campaign that rode the coattails of the feminist movement; they could just
as easily, though, have nodded at the developmental aid that his collaboration with
the Haim family has represented for Anderson’s own narrative sphere. Promoting
Licorice Pizza, Anderson suggested that his ninth feature served as an extension of
the looseness and spontaneity guiding his Haim videos, which represent “some of
the most joyous experiences that I’ve had. We have no money, we have no time, we
have no idea what we’re doing, and you just go—you get a camera and two days later
you’re doing something and you kind of wing it. So in writing the film and planning
it out, I just wanted to keep that energy going.”
The female voice has always been most intriguing to Anderson when singing.
Dating back to Magnolia, the power of a musical femininity has been used to draw
out the buried emotional currents in his characters and narratives, and their voices
hover over his typical milieu, whether in the extradiegetic song of Aimee Mann and
Shelley Duvall or the narration of Sortilège and Alma. By devoting his music-video
work predominantly to the poetry of female singer-songwriters, Anderson further
establishes the typical female pole of his gender binary—for the most part, men are
beasts and fools, while women are angels and sages. Their powers of artistry are so
significant that they can even breach the walls of vérité, as in the closing stretch of
“Valentine” that finds Danielle slipping the bonds of realism to duet with herself on
drums and guitar.
“Valentine” closes with a coda: for almost exactly a minute, the Haims stand
around a drum kit and play a three-part solo, passing the beat back and forth before
hammering in unison, a thundering moment of primal rhythmic expression. The stu-
dio is dark save for two elevated lights that cast their forms in relief. The shot is openly
false, engineered for the benefit of the camera in a manner distinct from the balance
of the short, and seems to exist in the sort of pocket of uncanny unreality that Dylan
Tichenor has discussed Anderson’s searching for in his feature work—a place that
isn’t “beholden to walls of narrative [but instead] is about feelings and emotions.”

162 on music videos

 Tichenor did not work on “Valentine.” Instead, the project was edited by Andy
Jurgensen, a member of the editorial teams on Inherent Vice and Phantom Thread, and
lead editor on Licorice Pizza. It is via this type of collaboration that Anderson’s music-
video canon proves vital to his feature work; in a 2017 interview with Entertainment
Weekly, Anderson credited these “side projects” as creating a working rhythm among
his crew that was so comfortable, he could take the unusual step of having no formal
director of photography on Phantom Thread or Licorice Pizza. After years of work
with Haim, Thom Yorke, and Joanna Newsom, “it just became a situation where
[the camera crew] collaborated—really in the best sense of the word—as a team.”
In a 2012 interview, Jonathan Demme was asked why he believed music and
cinema were so powerfully connected. “Shooting live music is the most purely cin-
ematic thing you can do,” the director replied. “Ideally, the cinema is becoming one
with the music. There is little artifice involved. There’s no acting. I love it.” Much
like his protégé’s “Valentine” commandment—“Simple for the cameras, complicated
for the girls”—Demme’s comments fail to encompass the complexity of artistry that
goes into evocatively filming musical performance. But he effectively conveys what it
feels like to experience these performances as a viewer; as noted by Armond White,
little in Anderson’s pre–Licorice Pizza feature work compares to the feeling of direct
emotionality provided by the best of his videos.

on music videos 163

ten
On History

in the final scene of There Will Be Blood, after the roughly fifteen-year time jump
that bridges the main action (set in and around 1911) with this coda (set in 1927), Eli
Sunday returns to his old nemesis—the Tom to his Jerry, as Anderson would have
it—Daniel Plainview. Newly resplendent, the once-humble preacher wears a massive
jewel-encrusted cross around his neck as he relates the news of the world, and his
own spiritual conquering of it. As Eli describes his own achievements (spreading the
gospel of the Third Revelation via radio) and those of their acquaintances (Bandy’s
grandson has lit out for Hollywood to become a movie star), the viewer may be
struck by a vertiginous sense of context rushing in to fill a vacuum at the heart of this
story. Eli presents massive technological leaps made in the past decade and a half of
the young century, but these specific references to historical benchmarks call atten-
tion to how mythologically hermetic the world of Little Boston has been over the
preceding two hours. Anderson’s vision of the California oil boom—a development
that triggered a dizzying density of cultural change across the ensuing century and
beyond—is not so much apocryphal as openly ahistorical.
During the promotional tour for There Will Be Blood, Anderson was asked more
than once how cognizant he was of the historical implications of his story. “It’s a slip-
pery slope when you start thinking about something other than just a battle between
two guys,” he said in 2008. The film, he believed, might “get kinda murky” if too
much conscious attention was paid to its sociopolitical reverberations. Best to “work
from the characters first and foremost,” he concluded, “and let the rest take care of
itself.” This sentiment may seem noble in the abstract—attempt a sort of pure story-
telling and trust that any necessary shading will proceed from characterization—but
it suggests a willful ignorance as to the impact that a deliberately blinkered cinematic
history might have on the general public’s perception of the era. As Anderson has
turned his storyteller’s eye toward the past in the years since Punch-Drunk Love, he
has seen the twentieth century as a toolbox and a playset, raw materials that can
be reconfigured into a time-lapsed, mythic uber-narrative. While this focus on pure
cinematic pleasure sans pesky factual complexity has undoubtedly contributed to the
mass appeal of his idiosyncratic period pieces, among the contingent of critics and
scholars who take seriously the political responsibilities of even populist storytell-
ers, his lax approach to historical truth has been greeted as (to quote socialist critic
Joanne Laurier) a “stubborn social evasiveness [that] damagingly [holds] him back.”
Published in 1926, Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! tells the story of James Arnold Ross,
Jr., whose father, James Arnold Ross, Sr., is an oil magnate transparently modeled
upon Edward L. Doheny. This resemblance is comprehensive enough to include an
embroilment in the Teapot Dome scandal, an era-defining bribery case implicating
the Harding administration and private oil companies like Doheny’s Pan-American
Petroleum and Transport Company. Primarily, though, Sinclair’s novel is a bildung-
sroman; Ross Jr. (nicknamed Bunny) begins as a child who unquestioningly adores his
father, and the narrative traces his gradual socialist awakening. Workers’ rights are just
one of a variety of issues for which the novel serves as rhetorical debate, with another
significant thread being America’s ethical responsibilities surrounding World War I;
Bunny’s political guru, Paul, finds his military service bringing him to Siberia, where
he is enmeshed in the Bolshevik uprising and radicalized as a communist. “Although
Oil! is one of Sinclair’s better novels,” Anthony Arthur wrote in 2008, “it still suffers
from the author’s insistence that literature should lead to the solution of social prob-
lems . . . even his admirers wished that he had paid more attention to his art.”
The closing credits of There Will Be Blood list the film as “based on” Sinclair’s
novel, but, as Anderson said in interviews surrounding the film’s release, “there’s not
enough of the book [in the movie] to feel it’s a proper adaptation.” Anderson adapts
Sinclair’s novel fairly closely—and at times virtually verbatim—until he diverges
completely during the derrick fire set piece. Leading up to this schism, he swaps out
the groundwork Sinclair lays for the socialist themes in favor of the religious ones
that form the core pushback against his own fictionalized Doheny (while both Ross
and Plainview share elements of this real-life figure, Ross is an affable and empathetic
character during the overlapping story material, a characterization that Anderson all
but fully ignored in creating Daniel Plainview). Whereas in the novel Paul Watkins
(whose surname Anderson changed to the on-the-nose Sunday) is a prominent char-
acter and his brother, the fundamentalist preacher Eli, is largely unseen, Anderson
dispenses with Paul immediately (we learn in the closing scene that he has become
a successful oilman in his own right, a choice that may well have galled Sinclair had
he lived to see it) and elevates Eli to the vacated central narrative seat. With those
poles—the self-made man and the man of God—established, Anderson set about
shaving off anything that did not serve his core conflict.
Even when hewing closely to Sinclair’s words, Anderson pares away social context.
Daniel’s early speech (“I’m an oilman, ladies and gentlemen . . .”) is taken directly
from Oil!, but Sinclair precedes the speech with a chapter detailing the community
conflicts that have arisen surrounding the discovery of the local oil field. Issues that
are distinct and intricate in Sinclair’s conception are rendered as unintelligible noise
in Anderson’s; the substance of the townsfolk’s arguments falls secondary to the fact
of their conflict, and the irritation it represents for Daniel. Similarly, the derrick fire,
with the death of roughneck Joe Gundha that precedes it, is the last possible point of
egress for Anderson to maintain his goals, as Sinclair sees the obvious consequence of
these plot turns and has Ross’s workers strike over unsafe labor conditions. Anderson

on history 165
evinces little interest in this chain of logic, seeing only the sublime power of a flam-
ing derrick and the potential for Gundha’s death to catalyze the conflict between
Daniel and Eli.
Anderson has spoken of his “obsession” with John Steinbeck, and used the
same term to describe his feelings about Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden (1952). The
influence of that story—a multigenerational saga set in California during the early
twentieth century in which the rivalry between Cain and Abel is enacted by two
successive generations of headstrong men—is palpable in There Will Be Blood, with
its ample themes of symbolic fratricide (Paul betrays his twin brother, while Daniel
murders first the imposter posing as his own brother and then his adopted son’s
brother-in-law). Sinclair’s novel, on the other hand, bears far greater resemblance to
Steinbeck’s agitprop-adjacent The Grapes of Wrath (1939). It is thus no surprise that
Oil! should have sparked Anderson’s engagement, but the fact that he retrofitted the
content to suit his preferred, more mythic Steinbeck work speaks to his preference
for that mode of storytelling, and his discomfort with the openly political aspects of
Sinclair’s source.
Even the significance and utility of the oil extracted during the overlapping story
material (largely related to the drilling on and around the Watkins/Sunday ranch) is
of interest to Anderson only as an indicator of potential prosperity. Sinclair devotes
considerable focus to the ethics of oil’s various uses, a particularly acute issue when it
comes to the manufacturing of war materials. Anderson closes his main story a hand-
ful of years prior to the First World War, one of several narrative conveniences he
indulges to avoid the implications of his story—to cite another example, deafening
H.W. in the derrick explosion removes the organ that exposes Bunny Ross to labor
unrest, and thus sequesters Daniel from bothersome domestic dissent.
When Anderson declared that “it would be horrible to make a political film,”
he was evidently under the impression that rendering these themes explicit would
require “big, long speeches that would help in paralleling or allegoricalizing, if that’s
a word.” This position (which curiously glosses over what would appear to be the
film’s clear winks at modern oil culture, including the title’s implicit rebuttal to
the then-common protest slogan “No blood for oil,” and the ambiguous significance
of giving Daniel’s son a name matching the middle initials of the then-president’s
father) flies in the face of those who would argue that any attempt to make apolitical
art is itself a political statement. As Toni Morrison said in 2008 (though not explicitly
referring to Anderson’s film), artists “that try hard not to be political are political by
saying, ‘We love the status quo.’ ”
A number of critics, both at the time of release and in the years since, have taken
more pointed aim at Anderson’s avowedly apolitical and proudly ahistorical storytell-
ing style (in one 2007 interview, Anderson exulted in the fact that the scarcity of early-
twentieth-century voice recordings allowed him and Day-Lewis to invent Daniel’s
style of oration). Perhaps the most outright damning among these critics was the
socialist writer David Walsh, who decried the “disastrous artistic consequences” of
the film’s “social and political evasiveness, aided by historical ignorance,” arguing
that Anderson’s changes to the story unbalance the contextual framework so substan-
tially that the characters’ behavior becomes irrational. Slightly less condemnatory

166 on history
In There Will Be Blood, “oil has a greater life-value than the human.” (Paramount Vantage)

was the American Conservative critic Steven Sailer, who shrugged the film off as “just
another movie about movies,” with its attention-grabbing formalism and echoes of
Kubrick and Huston sabotaging the film’s potential for incisiveness worthy of the
Chinatown comparisons that Anderson entertained during press.
Stephanie LeMenager has mounted the more magnanimous argument that
Anderson’s formal choices imply some level of commentary on Daniel and his moti-
vations; by positioning Daniel below the flaming derrick, too awestruck by potential
wealth to consider the personal injury it has caused, Anderson makes clear that “oil
has a greater life-value than the human.” LeMenager also points out that Anderson’s
reluctance to relinquish celluloid, an oil-intensive production method relative to
the digital technology embraced by many of his peers, would render any significant
condemnation of the industry somewhat hollow (in Licorice Pizza, Alana’s mockery
of Gary’s ignorance as to the centrality of oil to his own professional materials could
be read as a moment of belated self-awareness).
Walsh concluded his review of the film by arguing that Anderson cedes any claim
to thought-provoking storytelling by “systematically declawing” his source material.
This perspective implies that there is only one valid form of thought to be provoked
by this story (one wonders whether Walsh might have been happier had the film
been adapted by prior rights-holder, journalist Eric Schlosser, whose own work of
socio-industrial investigation, Fast Food Nation [2001], was adapted to dramatically
inert result by Richard Linklater in 2006) as well as positing a polemical mode of
messaging as inherently superior to an allusive and implicit one.
While Anderson claimed that he wanted to avoid overtly “allegoricalizing” the
story of Daniel and Eli, that is exactly the method he chose, reducing the complex-
ity of Sinclair’s work in order to (as Nayman describes this adaptive process) “inflate
[it] to the arena of moral transcendence.” In choosing to tell the story of a larger-
than-life figure, Anderson seems to have determined that wrestling with too many
tangible twentieth-century complexities would compromise the character’s totemic
quality. Daniel Plainview is less a fallible human than he is brutal ambition made
manifest, and by removing excess shading within the film’s moral universe, Anderson
allows him to stand in for any number of American greeds rather than serving as an

on history 167
object lesson in early-twentieth-century history. Anderson has mentioned being
particularly struck by one line early in Sinclair’s novel: “Their frail human nature was
subjected to a strain greater than it was made for; the fires of greed had been lighted
in their hearts, and fanned to a white heat that melted every principle and every
law.” Rather than the roots of American capitalism, he was intrigued by greed in its
basest form, and his preference for the generic label of horror rather than historical
epic might best be viewed as a way to skirt Walsh’s breed of criticism. The worthiness
of Anderson’s goal may be up for debate, but Walsh’s argument that he lacked “the
commitment or seriousness” to tell his chosen story requires a number of presump-
tions as to the particulars of his narrative aims.
Likely the most charitable interpretation of There Will Be Blood’s paucity of his-
torical nuance came from Robert Lifset and Brian C. Black, who argued that by pre-
suming the audience’s prior awareness of the significance of oil extraction, Anderson
was able to implicate that audience in the gruesome particulars of the story. The
elision of sociopolitical rumination “speaks volumes about how oil’s role in American
life [has] changed. . . . The clear suggestion is that every consumer embodies a bit of
Plainview.” This interpretation is echoed by Gregory Alan Phipps in his own study
of Anderson’s adaptive techniques; Phipps believes that Anderson’s adaptation mim-
ics oil refinement, condensing and amplifying only the most elemental impacts of
the story. Thus, “by omitting socialism,” the film does not “depoliticize the oil boom,
but [instead magnifies] the implications of capitalistic triumph.”
The intense scrutiny of There Will Be Blood can likely be chalked up to a release
date less than a year before a presidential election that would represent a tacit referen-
dum on the Middle East interventionism so directly descended from Sinclair’s con-
cerns. Yet an ambivalent approach to historical fact is a uniting thread in Anderson’s
period pictures, which are far less concerned with corroborated details than with
boldface themes—or, in the case of Licorice Pizza, a use of the verifiable that sup-
presses inconvenient detail in order to amplify theme. “Anderson is interested in a
cinematic vision of the past,” Jason Sperb writes, one that “keeps the viewer con-
stantly focused on cinematic representations of history that are defined by the sur-
faces, and not the depths.” By no means is he unique in this, as directors across the
past century—and storytellers across the past millennia—have tended to confabulate
more often than they report; as Nayman puts it, Anderson and his cohort “have no
true responsibility to history.” This is a debatable point, subject to individual per-
spectives on the meaning of responsibility in fiction, and as Anderson has shifted so
decisively into the field of mythic recent histories, the question has become more
acute. What is the value of a thematic point made on an unsound foundation?
It is a topic that has dogged Anderson since his emergence onto the Indiewood
stage, as Boogie Nights was quickly noted for its fast and loose approach to late-
1970s cultural signifiers. These anachronisms range from the relatively minor (the
model of camera favored by Jack Horner’s productions would have been outdated by
1977) to the fairly crucial and self-evident fact that Jack’s avowed dream of creating
a pornographic film with a robust narrative and mainstream appeal had been accom-
plished toward the beginning of the decade with the buzz-worthy release of Deep
Throat (1972), straining the credulity of Jack’s rhapsodic waxing. Given the story’s

168 on history
implicit support of Jack’s market analysis, Boogie Nights must be read as taking place
in an alternate timeline in which the history of porn production and distribution is
entirely divergent from our own. As Thomas Doherty notes, this hazy milieu leads to
a jarring effect when portraits of President Ronald Reagan and California governor
Jerry Brown are glimpsed in the background of Amber’s custody hearing: “they are
referents to an off-camera, not a filmic, reality,” a distinct breach of the hermetic
narrative surrounding them.
Some with experience in the era’s porn industry noted a host of minor inconsisten-
cies and anachronisms, including the choice to have Dirk climax during unprotected
intercourse with Amber; as ever, in an Andersonian history, the symbolic value of an
anachronism (in this case, the incest-by-proxy rebirth proposed by Mim Udovitch)
easily trumps its falseness. While the choice to blur the specifics of industrial mile-
stones is a relatively neutral one, more loaded is the willful ignorance of AIDS—the
disease that would claim the life of John Holmes, on whom Anderson modeled the
character of Dirk—alongside the vast majority of other risk factors involved in porn
production. With the exception of drug use and the somewhat contrived violent epi-
sodes that Rollergirl and Dirk experience during the crosscutting montage of despair,
the story is free of significant trauma.
Yet the era’s pornography culture was intimately linked with broader cultural
forces: “The ’70s, obviously, followed the ’60s,” porno pioneer Al Goldstein notes in
Wadd: The Life & Times of John C. Holmes (1999), a documentary in which Anderson
himself participated. “The hippies, the war in Vietnam—there was a real belief that
making a fuck film was a political statement.” Boogie Nights, however, offers no
indication of how the Vietnam War, only a handful years in the past at the story’s
outset, could have affected these characters. This sort of blissful ignorance leaves
the film sequestered in a bubble that uses its era as an aesthetic backdrop, most use-
ful for the symbolic value of a decade turning over and an accompanying shift in
technology—one that, like the business of oil extraction, Anderson implicitly criti-
cizes despite having directly benefited from it, given that his early filmmaking experi-
mentations, including The Dirk Diggler Story, were made possible by the convenience
and affordability of videotape.
On the Boogie Nights DVD commentary, Anderson mentions having been criti-
cized for his decision to turn a blind eye to the specter of AIDS. “It’s more inter-
esting to not even acknowledge it at all,” he reasons. “That makes a point right
there.” Though his meaning is left vague, one natural interpretation might be that
he intended to comment on the industry’s own ignorance of and/or disregard for the
oncoming crisis. More than anything, though, this odd, unsubstantiated claim testi-
fies to his tendency during this era to justify any potential shortcoming as a feature
of his narrative rather than a bug (see the claim that the “totalizing” whiteness of
Magnolia represented social realism).
It is telling that Anderson received very little criticism for his casual repurpos-
ing of L. Ron Hubbard’s life and work in The Master, despite his fictionalization of
Doheny having been so recently litigated. This could be attributed to the more eso-
teric tone of The Master, which caused the film to be received as more arthouse curio
than There Will Be Blood–esque prestige play and thus absolved Anderson of any

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responsibility to approach the task of representation with particular gravity. It could
be, too, that in the five years that elapsed between the two films, which have come in
retrospect to be treated as something of a duology, Anderson’s audience had become
familiar with the appropriate reception stance on his work; it is to The Master’s credit,
Nayman suggests, that it “trusts—or perhaps challenges—its audience to be cog-
nizant of a social, historical, and political context that exists in the margins of its
judiciously chosen images.”
Most likely responsible for that lack of pointed critique, though, is the relatively
low cultural standing of Hubbard, now largely viewed by anyone outside the imme-
diate blast radius of Scientology as a charlatan with limited cultural impact. Yet
the tabloid intrigue of that pseudo-religion meant that while Anderson was under
little pressure to relate Hubbard’s story with seriousness of purpose, the name arose
in virtually every interview and often comprised the primary focus of press coverage.
This journalistic myopia caused a flare of irritation in Anderson that hearkened back
to his 1990s interviews rather than his newly sanguine public persona. After Luke
Buckmaster brought up Hubbard in 2012, Anderson snapped, “When I made There
Will Be Blood, nobody wanted to talk about Edward Doheny. How come? How
come you didn’t want to find out the details about Edward Doheny that were simi-
lar or dissimilar? Nobody fucking cared.” Yet, as detailed previously, a number of
critics cared a great deal about those details, which speaks to the divide between the
reception stance favored by general-interest coverage and academic analysis.
Based on Boogie Nights, Elena Gorfinkel posited a lens on Anderson’s deliber-
ate historical casualness that remains useful in surveying the four additional period
pieces he has produced to date. By speaking in generalizations (e.g., the decision
to drape Dirk’s home in outrageously tacky accoutrements that universally signify
faddishness), according to Gorfinkel, Anderson establishes a covenant of falsehood
with his viewer that allows him to “directly [address] the audience’s and the author’s
historical knowledge.” Rather than attempt a total immersion in verisimilitude,
Boogie Nights “complicates the audience’s desire to seamlessly enter the diegesis,”
using open falsification to “[force] the 1990s viewer to reconsider their own histori-
cal position to film history and popular cultural memory.” This theory is likely of
diminishing applicability the more distant the filmic world is from the viewer’s own
memory—based solely on personal history, a higher proportion of viewers will rec-
ognize anachronism in Licorice Pizza than in There Will Be Blood, meaning that the
latter is more likely to be accepted as fact—but it lends a veneer of deliberateness
to Anderson’s ahistorical tendencies: in his aesthetic worldview, truth is less valuable
than truthiness.
That term, later codified as “a truthful or seemingly truthful quality that is claimed
for something not because of supporting facts or evidence but because of a feeling
that it is true” (emphasis mine), was introduced into the American vernacular in
2005, just over halfway between Anderson’s Bush-era bookends, Punch-Drunk Love
and There Will Be Blood. Popularized by late-night comedian Stephen Colbert, who
used it (with mock earnestness while in his long-running persona of a bloviating
conservative pundit) to defend George W. Bush’s own lax relationship with facts,
the word gave form to a significant but as yet amorphous concept at work in the

170 on history
cultural atmosphere of the century’s first decade; in 2006, Merriam-Webster awarded
it the title of “word of the year,” acknowledging the devaluation of expertise that
allowed verifiable falsehoods (e.g., the existence of nuclear weapons in Iraq) to be
widely accepted. “Truthiness is a truth larger than the facts that would comprise it,”
Colbert said later, an incidental echo of Werner Herzog’s theory of ecstatic truth. As
America entered a truthy era, it seems appropriate that a truthy auteur should be
handed what Nick Pinkerton termed “the mantle of national bard, singing sad tid-
ings of our destiny.”
As I have discussed periodically throughout the preceding chapters, Anderson’s
retreat into historical myth does serve a secondary function in absolving him of the
responsibility to sensitively represent marginalized groups. Given his long-standing
reputation for making “cinephiliac” works (to use Sperb’s term), or “movie movies”
(to use Ryan Gilbey’s more colloquial one), his historical work has been granted tacit
permission to play by the outdated rules of his progenitors: Inherent Vice is allowed
to have the representational standards of an Altman film, Phantom Thread to have
those of a Hitchcock film, and The Master and There Will Be Blood to have those of
a John Huston film. Thus, the marginalization of any perspective that is not white,
male, and heterosexual can be hand-waved as representing the era of their setting,
regardless of the historical validity of that claim.
When Anderson suggested that there was no room for prominent female char-
acters within the storytelling scope of There Will Be Blood, he may well have been
debated on historical grounds. Yet viewers have been trained to expect exactly this
representational myopia in cinematic depictions of the era, so his claim carries a
veneer of truth. His assertions of veracity in Magnolia’s deracinated L.A. were
rightly decried, but the similar choice to make the only prominent Black character
in Inherent Vice an ex-con militant revolutionary, and the only prominent Asian
American a sex worker, have been more readily forgiven, likely due to their embodi-
ment of the era’s media representations. Thus, the centrality of Anderson’s influences
in discussion of his work serves as something of a shield: retrograde choices count as
tribute, and any contemporary touch, as with the feminist implications of Phantom
Thread, can be celebrated as subversion. Whether this has been a conscious or uncon-
scious choice can only be speculated upon; all that can be said with assurance is that
Anderson made the choice after 2002 to walk away from settings that would chal-
lenge him to broaden the scope of his innate skill (or lack thereof ) with representa-
tion, and though he has since claimed that he ends every design-heavy period piece
planning to embrace the relative ease of present-day storytelling, there has not yet
been so much as a rumor of an Anderson film set more recently than the mid-1970s.
How long this track record might be sustained is one of the most tantalizing ques-
tions as he moves into the third decade of his career.
Turning his eye to the past has also allowed Anderson a relatively safe outlet for
cynical commentary on Americanism. The core message of Inherent Vice—that every
citizen is complicit in the most craven ripple effects of capitalism by virtue of accept-
ing the currently unavoidable social contract of employment—is unrelentingly bleak.
But placing that moral in a context at least half a century removed from the view-
er’s own gives viewers the option to distance themselves and avoid uncomfortable

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self-reflection. Criticisms of the Nixon-era GOP are also unlikely to ruffle the feath-
ers of modern-day conservative pundits (though the generally low ceiling for box
office returns on Anderson’s features also plays a role in keeping his work out of the
eye of conservative media’s outrage storms), while the consensus liberal perspective
on Nixonian America means that Anderson could limit his political commentary
during interviews to the platitudinous. Discussing the specter of Nixon in his 2015
interview with Marc Maron, he largely outsourced his own analysis, quoting a 1967
interview with Robert Downey Sr. (and seemingly misrepresenting Downey’s com-
ments on Lyndon Johnson as referring to Nixon).
The subject matter of There Will Be Blood all but demanded that he comment
on then-president Bush’s policies, but Anderson took the staunchly apolitical stance
that the film’s relationship to current events was strictly allegorical. His most direct
comments on current elected officials have tended to come during the press cycles
for his least politically minded films: promoting Phantom Thread, he offered light
condemnation of Donald Trump only after asking Catherine Shoard, “Do we have
to?” Promoting Punch-Drunk Love fifteen years earlier—and perhaps still experi-
encing the long half-life of the more brazen public profile he had availed himself of
in the 1990s—he told Nina Rehfeld that George W. Bush was “the most exemplary
American that we have,” comparing him to “bullies in a school who don’t know their
own power,” and then concluding that “Bush is like an elephant in a porcelain shop.”
In either case, these answers were tangential enough to the films in question that they
would have little impact on the interpretation of the work.
Anderson’s films veil themselves in cynical trappings. Characters riding out an
epoch shift may arrive at conclusions varying along the hope/despair spectrum, but
there tends to be an overriding sense that the shift in question has carried culture
away from some theoretical better past. It is a tendency that Claire Perkins sees
as directly tied to his admiration for Altman, with Anderson sharing his mentor’s
“enlightened false consciousness [that] diagnoses the problems of society but is not
able to cure them.” Much as this may rankle viewers who desire more open engage-
ment with the political implications of their art—including David Walsh, who has
continually criticized Anderson at the World Socialist Web Site, describing him in
2015 as “incapable to this point of reaching or communicating any important con-
clusions about American social life as a whole,” and in 2017 as willfully deciding
“the great struggles and traumas of the twentieth century . . . are ‘not for [him],’ so
to speak, and that art is about something else entirely”—this center-left perspec-
tive is easily the safest one to take in ensuring the widest possible approval among
arthouse audiences. “You’ll never go broke among the intelligentsia,” as Pinkerton
wrote of Anderson in 2017, “suggesting that our national life is a hellscape getting
hotter all the time.”
In 2014, Wesley Morris suggested that Anderson’s filmography is united by
“postlapsarian” concerns, referring to the Judeo-Christian concept of the fall from
grace that occurred when Adam and Eve succumbed to temptation and were pun-
ished with expulsion from paradise. The majority of Anderson’s films, in Morris’s
view, take place in a similar state of defiled potential, populated by characters who
have given in to yes: “Yes to crime, yes to pornography, yes to irrational love, yes to

172 on history
the charlatan who has invented his own religion.” To this, we might add, yes to the
companionship of the mercurial genius—a distinctly mixed blessing for Alma—and
yes to virtually any opportunity that might provide an offramp from a stultifying
lifestyle, which engenders productive chaos for Alana.
Though efforts to fit Punch-Drunk Love into this metric may strain the compari-
son with original sin, Morris’s overarching point is sound: Anderson’s histories often
trace a downward trajectory, focused on the consequences of past sin or complicity
therein. Just as his characters tend to long for a personal lost paradise, that loss often
stands in for a broader national trauma. His stories generally stand either astride or
just beyond some Rubicon as characters try to reassemble some simulacrum of a
bygone sense of peace and safety. “Any shift is good,” Anderson said in 2015, sum-
ming up his evident primary storytelling principle. “A loss of a certain type of inno-
cence, that just seems to be good, fertile ground for a story . . . when everything just
sort of starts to get dark.”
As with so many of the abiding modes of discussion for Anderson’s work (sur-
rogate families, mercurial father figures, the sociological landscape of Los Angeles),
the postlapsarian theme emerged fully formed—and perhaps overdetermined—in
Boogie Nights. The film is cleft cleanly in two, with the halfway point of the runtime
coming during the ominous New Year’s Eve party that starts off the 1980s with a
gruesome bang. Coming on the heels of a five-minute musical montage of deca-
dence and delight that serves as the culmination of Dirk’s star-is-born narrative,
Little Bill’s double murder/suicide becomes a fulfillment, Anderson claims on the
DVD commentary, of the film’s unspoken subtitle: “It’s all fun and games until
someone gets hurt” (an implicit tone of authorial judgment that nudges the film
away from narrative neutrality and toward the status of morality play—emblematic,
in Sperb’s view, of Anderson’s conflicted perspective on pornography). The shift
between decades coincides with Dirk’s embrace of cocaine, the drug that will quickly
lead to his fall from personal and professional grace, as well as the shift from celluloid
to video as the preferred medium of porn production. Thus, the decade shift serves,
with thudding lack of subtlety, to embody the shift from idealism to all manner of
diminished standards—this flat depressiveness, rather than outright despair, being
signaled by a title card that overtakes the screen just following Little Bill’s suicide,
which reads simply “80s” in small sans serif type.
The condemnation of video technology is facile in multiple ways. For one, Ander-
son benefited tremendously from exactly that shift; moreover, while the capabilities
of digital photography were in their infancy at the time of Anderson’s breakout,
it would not be long before steady technological advancement would allow digital
video to all but equal the picture quality of celluloid. While Anderson could not be
expected to predict exactly this trajectory, his steadfast attachment to physical film
places him in an ever-shrinking minority, a signifier of his evangelical devotion to
film history. While plenty of adherents decry the inferior imagery of digital photog-
raphy, just as many would laud the democratization potential of that technology,
with a moral condemnation of video like the one found in Boogie Nights seeming
more like a gatekeeping effort that benefits the masculine establishment represented
by the ostensibly idealistic Jack Horner.

on history 173
 There is some poetic irony in the fact that while Anderson has dug in his heels
as one of the last remaining holdouts to the digital revolution, Robert Altman
and Jonathan Demme—two of the voices most significant in activating his own
idealism—were early adopters of digital video. Demme rolled the particular aesthetic
qualities of the medium’s nascent form into his conception of Rachel Getting Married
(2008), which evokes home-movie footage of a disastrous family gathering (Demme
initially hoped for Anderson to play a key on-screen supporting role, a tantalizing
road-not-taken for a director who has not, as yet, performed in a narrative project,
save for a brief voice-over role as a director modeled on Demme in a 2016 episode of
the comedy series Documentary Now! ). Altman, meanwhile, used digital cameras on
A Prairie Home Companion while being shadowed by Anderson, a notably forward-
thinking choice, particularly given the story’s function as a distinctly Andersonian
elegy to the bygone medium of radio drama.
If the turnover from 1979 to 1980 carries relatively little broad cultural signifi-
cance, the same cannot be said for two major era shifts that Anderson has detailed:
the aftermath of World War II in The Master and the post-Manson paranoia of
the early 1970s in Inherent Vice. With these consecutive films, Anderson examined
moments when the foundation of American culture felt irrevocably shaken, leaving
every citizen reeling as they assessed what had been lost and what the future might
look like. The Master is another example of Anderson’s relative disinterest in socio-
cultural specifics, which fall a distant second to his mythological focus on pastness.
“There’s death and destruction right behind you,” Anderson said in 2015, describing
the American psyche in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. “Every-
one’s looking around thinking, Give me anything, yoga, diet, past lives, I’ll take it.”
Much like the allegorical function of oil in There Will Be Blood, the unimaginable
tragedy and brutality of the preceding six years is most useful to The Master as fodder
for psychological alienation; Freddie’s mention of having killed “Japs in the war” is
as close as the script comes to engaging with the intricacies of the conflict. This is a
symbological history, one that adopts a numb and hazy formal ambiguity to evoke
the flattening effect of trauma on a shell-shocked American consciousness (the shock
to the Japanese consciousness inflicted by America is never so much as alluded to).
Whereas The Master’s production design—and its symbolic significance—are
largely classical and straightforward, Inherent Vice is cluttered with unexpected
cultural signifiers. Among Anderson’s key influences was the unconventional
documentary Mondo Hollywood (1967), a fragmentary collage of L.A. culture that
encompassed, as Anderson put it, “weirdos, straight-laced people, humane people,
[all] varieties of people.” Rather than default to a stock handful of recognizable
visual tropes, Anderson hoped to capture a fragmenting cultural landscape in which
counterculture iconography abutted the hangers-on of a bygone generation, the past
and the present colliding into “this weird mash of all these different things.”
This uniquely prismatic viewpoint on the era may partially account for audience
ambivalence, particularly in comparison to the more recognizable iconography to
be found in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). Tarantino’s
film is set only a year earlier than Anderson’s, but he draws on totemic imagery to
evoke a stark clash between hippies and squares; Anderson, meanwhile, folds in more

174 on history
outré imagery (Aunt Reet’s beehive and pancake makeup, Rudy Blatnoyd’s crushed-
velvet office wear, the mesh tops on hulking neo-Nazi Puck Beaverton) that runs
counter to viewer preconceptions of the era. The result is an unusual level of cogni-
tive dissonance, evoking one of the film’s primary epoch shifts: from the intoxicating
effects of marijuana to heroin. The mellow transcendence of the prior decade is being
traded for jittery jonesing, leaving Doc to conclude (as Anderson understated for
comic effect in 2015), “This is not gonna end good.”
Perhaps aware of a burgeoning reputation as the ends-of-eras auteur, Anderson
underplays the status of Phantom Thread as a postwar narrative. But, as I have dis-
cussed in previous chapters, conspicuous references to World War II abound. As
with the so-called death of the ’60s in Inherent Vice, though, Anderson again chooses
unusual signifiers that do not immediately call attention to the looming shadow of
the recent global conflict. Among the film’s most charged sequences is the revela-
tion that Barbara Rose’s fiancé, Rubio, evidently profited from the sale of visas to
Jews, causing Alma visible revulsion. If Anderson sketched only a thin backstory for
Alma, Vicky Krieps has referenced a more detailed personal history for the character:
“Alma has seen people die. She has seen what it means to lose your home and
country. . . . People who live through the war cannot think about themselves. . . .
They just have to get up and be brave.”
This apparently intimate familiarity with the war’s human cost accounts for her
absolute antipathy toward Rubio and Barbara Rose, as well as her evangelical attach-
ment to Reynolds’s creative efforts. It would seem no small choice that the three
primary customers that Anderson creates for the House of Woodcock are a British
duchess, an American heiress (specifically a “tragic” one, as Anderson specifies in the
shooting script), and a Belgian princess. Reynolds has developed a fantastical cure
for postwar trauma in the form of glamorous garments that imbue the wearer with
their most coveted personal qualities. And rather than hoard this gift with nationalist
pride, he spreads it globally to heal a world ravaged by war.
Though never explicitly called out as such, Licorice Pizza stands just beyond its
own seismic shift, as the 1973 setting places it directly after the end of the Vietnam
War. “If the cultural reformation of 1965–72 was a bomb,” Andrew Grant Jackson
writes in his book 1973: Rock at the Crossroads, “1973 was the aftermath. The debris
rained down. The sun streaked through the smoke onto the road ahead.” Left only
to implication, the impact of this cultural sea change upon Gary and his friends
would be massive, lending an air of possibility to their youth that would be anath-
ema were the military draft an ongoing concern. Here Anderson returns, too, to
the uncanny abutment of Hollywood generations nodded at in Inherent Vice (and
Mondo Hollywood before it); Alana’s dinner summit with Jack Holden and Rex Blau
serves as a microcosm of the shift from Old Hollywood to New, as does Gary’s
association with a character modeled on Lucille Ball. This overlapping of eras was
a personal issue for Anderson: promoting Licorice Pizza, he spoke of his childhood
neighbor, the silent film actress Mary Brian. Accepting cookies from this avatar of
another era, he said, lent him a feeling of having “touched the deep past.”
Licorice Pizza’s most significant epoch shift, however, is personal: Gary Valentine
is experiencing the forcible end of one way of life (his days as a precocious child actor)

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and the ambiguous possibilities of oncoming adulthood. Gary’s various schemes and
dreams thus each represent some effort to mitigate the existential anxiety—not that
such a Pollyannaish character would ever admit it—of his ejection from the path that
his life seemed to be on. When Gary crows, “It’s the end of the world,” he may be
overstating the case, but only on an exterior level.
Even Magnolia functions in its way as an epoch-shifting film, one simply posi-
tioned in the year preceding a potentially cataclysmic turning point rather than its
aftermath. Though the idea may seem quaint from a twenty-first-century vantage,
swaths of late-’90s America were gripped by fears that the turnover from 1999 to
2000 might, in fact, herald some sort of apocalyptic event, whether on the basis
of fringe religious prophecy  or the more widespread and tangible anxiety over a
potential global technological collapse caused by the Y2K bug. Thus, the film’s fren-
zied reckoning with the impacts of a midcentury patriarchal standard can be contex-
tualized via a sense that this could prove an end-of-days narrative; opening weekend
viewers in December 1999 may well have recognized their own existential anxiety in
Anderson’s hyperbolic emotionality and Pauline apocalyptic imagery.
Brian Rafferty devotes the final chapter of his book, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How
1999 Blew Up the Big Screen (2019), to Magnolia, not solely for its late release date
but for the way it “captured the mood that had taken hold by the end of 1999—a
feeling that some grand, impossible-to-explain epoch might arrive at any moment.”
Though Anderson said in 1999 that he “had no interest in making a millennium
movie,” he admitted to Lynn Hirschberg that the present film culture constituted
“the first time I’ve felt any millennium thing . . . filmmakers seem to be thinking,
What do we have to say? [and] trying to do their magnum opuses.” Magnolia, as
predetermined an opus as any young filmmaker has produced, is no exception.
Straddling that millennial boundary, Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love are some-
thing of an epoch-shifting duology, as much an excessive/depressive pairing as the
decade-spanning halves of Boogie Nights. His unconventional romantic comedy may
not be as overtly a postlapsarian film as Morris’s other examples, but with its eerie
sterility, Punch-Drunk Love certainly seems conscious of its status as a film set after
some cleansing event, perhaps even the selective rapture that some prophesied the
new millennium would herald. Or it could be that the film’s stark blandness sim-
ply represents Anderson’s disinterest in seeking evocative potential in the modern
world, presaging his abandonment of the present day in search of lost time.
Despite signaling a long-term shift into historical territory, There Will Be Blood
carries little trace of the epochal concerns of Anderson’s other period work. The
time jump handily elides World War I, absolving Daniel of the need to account for
his own potential war profiteering in amassing the fortune that brought him from
a Little Boston shack to the lavish mansion that serves as stage for Eli’s annihila-
tion (Anderson filmed the sequence in Greystone Mansion, a location recognizable
from countless uses in film and TV but originally built by Daniel’s progenitor, oil
tycoon Edward L. Doheny, for his own son, Ned). Eli’s unexpected arrival provides
an opportunity to take stock of exactly the cultural shifts that Anderson so often
contemplates, but Daniel shows open contempt for the invitation. One might infer
a certain internal debate between Anderson’s urges toward the socially relevant and

176 on history
the mythic as a vain prophet arrives to grace the story with his ruminations on the
shifting sands of time. This effort is worthless, the judgment of the bestial character
powerful enough to draw the narrative scope back into alignment with his interests.
There is no value in extrapolating on the story’s cultural repercussions, so the pri-
mal force eliminates the one representing the meddlesome concerns of the modern
world. This story is nothing more than a folkloric brawl, and it is finished.
In crafting his own study of Anderson’s work to date, Adam Nayman chose to
organize the American-set films by narrative chronology (he reserves Phantom Thread
for the last chapter given its status as an outlier in so many ways), with There Will
Be Blood as the focus of his first chapter. “What emerges” from this arrangement,
Nayman writes, “is a largely localized yet hugely allusive and expansive cinematic
century . . . in which Los Angeles comes of age, one era at a time.” The brutal-
ist creation myth of There Will Be Blood gives way to the depressive miasma of The
Master, which leads swiftly to the deranged paranoia of Inherent Vice; the joyous
potential of a post-Vietnam adolescence in Licorice Pizza serves as a handoff to the
Bacchanalian bliss of Boogie Nights’ first half before the second half ’s violent colli-
sion with consequences, at which point the uber-story jumps ahead to the intimate
cyclical regrets of Hard Eight and the epic traumatic reckonings of Magnolia, with
the twentieth-century fever finally breaking into the aseptic anxiety and unexpected
amorousness of Punch-Drunk Love.
The clearest conclusion to be drawn from this particular slice of American chro-
nology, according to Kent Jones, is that “America is a story of forgetting and eliding,
cherry-picking and remolding the past, conflating ideas and notions and isolated
gestures and grand movements swirling through the informational ether and rewrit-
ing history according to desires and projected outcomes, powered by the dream of
breaking through to the other side of neurosis, reality, life, inhibition, or the space-
time continuum.” Ever since America gained a national identity, its citizens began
grasping for any quick-fix salve to soothe the persistent problems of psychological
and spiritual alienation, and at the core of each of Anderson’s films to date, one finds
a charismatic figure peddling exactly that cure in one form or another.
As Jones identifies, Lancaster Dodd is likely the clearest expression of this idea,
but the need for answers has been similarly met by Jack Horner’s egalitarian offer of
meaning through sexual release, as well as Dean Trumbell’s more predatory offer of the
same. Reynolds Woodcock offers implicit spiritual reinvention, as does Gary Valentine
through his efforts to help Alana find her life’s purpose, while Daniel Plainview tries to
invalidate the need for personal reinvention by circumventing the church and molding
the world in his own capitalist image. On the grandest scale, the Golden Fang covertly
propagates the disease in order to push the cure, while on the most intimate, Sydney
teaches John how to gamble just enough to sate his needs and reach equilibrium,
knowing that too much success will only create the howling need for more.
The impact of mass media on humanity’s ability to sell satisfaction has been a
frequent concern for Anderson (it forms the core of Sperb’s analytical lens on his
first five films). The focus on salesmanship, which begins with Daniel’s soothing
snake-oil pitch, evolves to the twenty-first-century war of the distributors, with the
plunger salesman pitted against the mattress salesman for implicit control of the

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male psyche; Barry’s and Dean’s respective wares are rich with potential pseudo-
Freudian resonance, as a tool to aid excretion battles the site of fornication, the
eliminator of blockages facing off against the conduit to another form of release.
In either case, relief is for sale, and the battle is between the honest purveyor and
the iniquitous one; no third, noncapitalist fighter is conceivable in the Andersonian
cosmos. As Doc Sportello would learn later in release chronology, and decades earlier
in narrative chronology, only the most cockeyed optimist could believe that any one
of us might be anything less than an unwitting capitalist stooge anyway.
Dean’s use of landline phones to bring his mediated intimacy—and resultant
threats—into his customers’ homes represents the chronological endpoint of Ander-
son’s fixation on the power and peril of mass communication (a concern that echoes
in Inherent Vice via the use of Burke Stodger’s jingoistic Hays Code–era projects to
brainwash patients at Chryskylodon). The fact that Anderson closed off his chronol-
ogy just prior to the mainstream adoption of internet technology is all the more
notable for how many opportunities it might have provided to explore these parasiti-
cal tactics. Today, exactly his brand of alienated American increasingly gravitates to
the digital sphere in search of the answers with which these films are so concerned.
Yet diagnosing self-evident modern-day ills is clearly not where the heart of his inter-
est lies. Instead, he continually glances backward in order to sift through and identify
the roots of modern dislocation, creating his personal history of American (or, with
the introduction of the global perspective in Phantom Thread, Western) spiritual ills
and proprietary cures.
Given how bittersweet—if not outright caustic—the endings of Anderson’s films
can be, aligning them in order of narrative chronology is rewarding for how hope-
ful this cycle thus becomes. The Andersonian uber-narrative begins with a demonic
figure inciting a century-long spiral of greed and corruption, one that culminates in
a millenarian apocalypse, a revelatory judgment that cleanses the narrative realm and
offers a void onto which a pair of bashful naïfs can begin building something new.
This perspective lends a heft to Punch-Drunk Love that the “bouncing-ball” tone of
his “Friday night movie” might not initially seem to invite. Yet what happier ending

Lena embraces Barry in the final image of the Andersonian narrative chronology. (Columbia Pictures)

178 on history
could there be to a story so full of sound and fury than a coda so seemingly minor
key? If Punch-Drunk Love is indeed a post-Pauline-apocalyptic post-patriarchal
post-romance, then perhaps we could add one more post- to the list: it is his post-
Andersonian work, a story blissfully liberated from the twentieth century and all the
postlapsarian alienation that continues to bear him back ceaselessly into the past.
In the shooting script for The Master, Anderson provides the opening lines of
Dodd’s pseudo-scientific gospel, The Cause: The Scientific Study of Human Though
& Emotion: “Shall a man be master of his memories? Or shall his memories be the
master?” In large part, Anderson’s filmography is an exploration of the same ques-
tion, as he continually examines sites of era-defining trauma to assess the measures
that might be necessary—if even possible—to eradicate that trauma. Dodd’s inter-
est is not necessarily in personal trauma, but in whether (as he says—or shouts—
at John More) our perceptions of the past have been “reshaped [and] perverted,
and [if ] perhaps what we think we know of this world is false information.” It’s a
provocatively ambiguous choice to put these words in the mouth of a shameless
charlatan, given how this snake-oil pitch aligns with Anderson’s own deliberate and
open reshaping of fact—vampiric and sharklike, as he himself has put it—in order
to craft a satisfying narrative.
Even more telling in aligning Anderson with Dodd is the substance of the revi-
sion that leads to his confrontation with Helen Sullivan: whereas Dodd’s tome ini-
tially provided instruction on how to “induce memory” by asking believers to recall
the past, the revised edition invites them to imagine it. This, Helen reasons, changes
everything; Dodd, though, justifies his evident belief in the terms’ interchangeability
with the assertion that imagination “allows for a more creative pathway” to the same
goal. Watching a self-proclaimed visionary crack under the pressure of justifying his
belief that imagining the past is as valid as accurately recalling it, one might imagine
the director channeling his own frustration with the scrutiny applied to There Will Be
Blood, or any of his other efforts to faithfully represent his perception of the world.
Dodd’s wail of “What do you want?” when asked to explain his own choices is by no
means out of step with Anderson’s own exasperated “I don’t know what you want me
to say” in one particularly strained 2000 interview.
If Anderson has felt it necessary to imagine the past rather than recall it, that
may be due to what he sees as a rapid distancing between present and history in the
twenty-first century. “It’s getting harder and harder to find the past,” he said while
promoting Inherent Vice, referring to how much more reconstruction was necessary
to evoke the ’70s in 2014 than in 1997, when he made the same effort for Boogie
Nights. In keeping with the theme of Inherent Vice, vital collective memory can be
easily lost to the sea of time if not preserved. As Joan Didion so famously wrote in
her own 1978 effort to survey California’s entropic recent history, The White Album,
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Paul Thomas Anderson’s continual back-
ward glancing testifies to his belief in a similar principle: that assessing what has
been—or at least some ecstaticized version thereof—is a vital task that might help us
prepare for what is still to come.

on history 179
NOTES

epigraph

The Sinclair epigraph is from Oil! (1926–1927; reprint, London: Penguin, 2007).
The Anderson epigraph is from “Flashback Friday: PT Anderson Talks with Lars Von Trier,” Ciga-
rettes & Red Vines, April 22, 2011, http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2011/04/flashback-friday-pt
-anderson-talks-with.html.

introduction

1. Rucksack76, “Boogie Nights—Siskel & Ebert,” YouTube (video), March 4, 2010, https://www.youtube
.com/watch?v=5_2dKTxpH7o.
2. Alison Willmore, “Licorice Pizza’s Unlikely Romance Is the Least Interesting Thing About It,”
Vulture, November 26, 2021, https://www.vulture.com/article/paul-thomas-andersons-licorice-pizza
-movie-review.html.
3. Siddhant Adlakha, “ ‘Licorice Pizza’ Is a Radiant, Thorny Nostalgia Trip,” Observer, November 24,
2021, https://observer.com/2021/11/licorice-pizza-review-paul-thomas-anderson-nostalgia/.
4. Aurora Amidon, “Licorice Pizza Is a Romantic, Summery Reminder of Just How Good Movies Can
Be,” Paste, December 1, 2021, https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/licorice-pizza-review/.
5. Brent Lang, “Paul Thomas Anderson on ‘Licorice Pizza’ and Moviemaking: ‘Anyone Who’s Done
This Knows That Confidence Is an Illusion,” Variety, November 10, 2021, https://variety.com/2021
/film/features/paul-thomas-anderson-licorice-pizza-alana-haim-cooper-hoffman-1235107853/.
6. Travis Woods, “Epilogue: ‘It’s About Love, Baby!,’ ” Increment Vice (podcast), December 24, 2021,
https://incrementvice.com/episode-46.
7. Werner Herzog, “Werner Herzog Reads His Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary
Cinema,” Crosscuts, June 19, 2017, https://walkerart.org/magazine/minnesota-declaration-truth
-documentary-cinema-1999.
8. Justin Chang, “Review: Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Licorice Pizza’ Is a Valentine to the Valley. And
Alana Haim,” Los Angeles Times, November 17, 2021.
9. David Ansen, “Paul Thomas Anderson’s Film Tour of L.A.,” Entertainment Weekly, December 18,
2014, https://ew.com/article/2014/12/18/paul-thomas-andersons-film-tour-la/.
10. Keith Phipps, “Benny Safdie Talks with Joel Wachs, Whom He Plays in Licorice Pizza, About Life
in the Closet in ’70s LA,” GQ, December 27, 2021, https://www.gq.com/story/benny-safdie-joel
-wachs-licorice-pizza-interview.
11. Glenn Whipp, “Paul Thomas Anderson’s Hilarious and Intimate ‘Licorice Pizza’ Tour of the
Valley,” Los Angeles Times, November 26, 2021, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies
/story/2021-11-26/paul-thomas-anderson-licorice-pizza-san-fernando-valley.
12. Herzog, “Werner Herzog Reads His Minnesota Declaration.”
13. Brad Prager, The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London: Wallflower, 2007), 12.
14. Prager, The Cinema of Werner Herzog, 12.
15. George Toles, Contemporary Film Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2016), 57.
16. Prager, The Cinema of Werner Herzog, 14.
17. Kim Wilkins, American Eccentric Cinema (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 15.
18. Jason Sperb, Blossoms and Blood: Postmodern Media Culture and the Films of Paul Thomas Anderson
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 83.
19. Elena Gorfinkel, “The Future of Anachronism: Todd Haynes and the Magnificent Andersons,”
in Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, ed. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 162.
20. Michael Z. Newman, Indie: An American Film Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 2.
21. Newman, Indie, 11.
22. Newman, Indie, 8.
23. The earliest usage of the term currently accessible through Google can be found in an unattributed
1998 IndieWire dispatch on that year’s Toronto International Film Festival: “For indiewood, Toronto
turned like the turbine.” “Toronto’s Turbine: A Whirligig of Deals, Films, and Winners,” IndieWire,
September 21, 1998, https://www.indiewire.com/1998/09/torontos-turbine-a-whirligig-of-deals-films
-and-winners-82588/.
24. Newman, Indie, 3.
25. Sharon Waxman, Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hol-
lywood Studio System (New York: HarperCollins, 2005); James Mottram, The Sundance Kids: How
the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood (New York: Faber and Faber, 2006), xx.
26. Mottram, The Sundance Kids, xv, 317.
27. Jeffrey Sconce, “Irony, Nihilism, and the New American ‘Smart’ Film,” Screen 43, no. 4 (Winter
2002): 350.
28. Sconce, “Irony, Nihilism, and the New American ‘Smart’ Film,” 352.
29. David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Review of Contemporary
Fiction 1, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 183.
30. Wallace happens to have been a professor of Anderson’s during the latter’s brief enrollment at Emerson
College. Anderson discussed Wallace in detail during his 2015 appearance on the podcast WTF with
Marc Maron, recalling a late-night phone call with his professor to talk through Don DeLillo’s 1985
novel, White Noise. Wallace, for his part, abandoned work on a project involving the worlds of pornog-
raphy after seeing Boogie Nights, saying that it was “exactly the story” he would have written; it’s unclear
whether Wallace was aware of their prior connection. (Marc Maron, “Episode 565: Paul Thomas
Anderson,” WTF with Marc Maron (podcast), January 5, 2015, http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episodes
/episode_565_-_paul_thomas_anderson); David Foster Wallace, quoted in Dan Piepenbring, “When
David Foster Wallace Taught Paul Thomas Anderson,” Paris Review, January 6, 2015.)
31. Jesse Fox Mayshark, Post-Pop Cinema: The Search for Meaning in New American Film (Westport, CT:
Praeger, 2007), 5.
32. Mayshark, Post-Pop Cinema, 2.
33. Mayshark, Post-Pop Cinema, 5, 7.
34. Claire Perkins, American Smart Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 14.
35. Prager, The Cinema of Werner Herzog, 12.
36. Perkins, American Smart Cinema, 14–15.
37. Wilkins, American Eccentric Cinema, 2.
38. Wilkins, American Eccentric Cinema, 6.
39. Wilkins, American Eccentric Cinema, 4.
40. Woods, “Epilogue: ‘It’s About Love, Baby!’ ”

182 introduction
41. Sconce, “Irony, Nihilism and the New American ‘Smart’ Film,” 352.
42. Edward Douglas, “P. T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood,” Coming Soon.net, December 19, 2007,
https://www.comingsoon.net/movies/features/40210-p-t-andersons-there-will-be-blood.
43. David Walsh, “Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread: Art for the Artist’s Sake,” World Socialist
Web Site, March 28, 2018, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/03/28/phan-m28.html.
44. Wilkins, American Eccentric Cinema, 16.
45. “Domestic Yearly Box Office,” Box Office Mojo, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/?ref_=bo_nb
_hm_secondarytab.
46. Patrick Goldstein, “The New New Wave,” Los Angeles Times, December 12, 1999, https://www.latimes
.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-dec-12-ca-42968-story.html.
47. Kim Masters, “Warner Bros. Eyes Slimmer-Down Movie Budgets Under Toby Emmerich,” Hollywood
Reporter, June 21, 2017, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/warner-bros
-eyes-slimmed-down-movie-budgets-under-toby-emmerich-1015390/.
48. Elizabeth Aubrey, “Christopher Nolan Unlikely to Work with Warner Bros. on Next Project According
to Reports,” NME, January 23, 2021, https://www.nme.com/news/film/christopher-nolan-unlikely
-to-work-with-warner-bros-on-next-project-according-to-reports-2863356.
49. Bill Simmons, “Paul Thomas Anderson on ‘Phantom Thread,’ Loving Adam Sandler, and ‘Boogie
Nights,” Ringer, December 27, 2017, https://www.theringer.com/the-bill-simmons-podcast/2017/12/27
/16803838/paul-thomas-anderson-on-pursuing-filmmaking-loving-adam-sandler-and-making-boogie
-nights.
50. Jonathan Dean, “Paul Thomas Anderson on the Story Behind Licorice Pizza—and Why He Loves
Marvel Films,” Sunday Times (London), January 2, 2022, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/paul
-thomas-anderson-on-the-story-behind-licorice-pizza-and-why-he-loves-marvel-films-tbm7kc6r2.
51. Adam Nayman, Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks (New York: Abrams, 2020), 22–23.
52. Wesley Morris, “IV Drip: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Postlapsarian Comedy ‘Inherent Vice,’ ” Hol-
lywood Prospectus, December 12, 2014, https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/paul-thomas
-anderson-inherent-vice-review/.

1. on paul thomas anderson’s career to date

1. Lynn Hirschberg, “His Way,” New York Times, December 19, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999
/12/19/magazine/his-way.html.
2. John H. Richardson, “The Secret History of Paul Thomas Anderson,” Esquire, September 22, 2008,
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a4973/paul-thomas-anderson-1008/.
3. Richardson, “The Secret History of Paul Thomas Anderson.”
4. David Konow, “ ‘Movies Do Cause Violence!’ Paul Thomas Anderson,” Creative Screenwriting, July 8,
2016, https://creativescreenwriting.com/boogie-nights/.
5. Patrick Goldstein, “The New New Wave,” Los Angeles Times, December 12, 1999, https://www.latimes
.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-dec-12-ca-42968-story.html.
6. Goldstein, “The New New Wave.”
7. Marc Maron, “Episode 565: Paul Thomas Anderson,” WTF with Marc Maron (podcast), January 5,
2015, http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episodes/episode_565_-_paul_thomas_anderson.
8. Additional gaps in the traditional narrative identified by Sperb include the persistent support offered
by the producer John Lyons and attempts at peacekeeping on the part of the Rysher executive Keith
Samples. But in creating a collective narrative of this type of production skirmish, Sperb concludes, “no
one wants to take the side of money when art is involved.” Jason Sperb, Blossoms and Blood: Postmodern
Media Culture and the Films of Paul Thomas Anderson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 42–43.
9. “Hard Eight (1996),” Box Office Mojo, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0119256/?ref_=bo
_se_r_1.
10. Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Review: Hard Eight,” Chicago Reader, February 27, 1997, https://www
.chicagoreader.com/chicago/hard-eight/Content?oid=892800.

1. on paul thomas anderson’s career to date 183

11. Roger Ebert, “Review: Hard Eight,” RogerEbert.com, February 27, 1997, https://www.rogerebert.com
/reviews/hard-eight-1997.
12. John Anderson, “Mesmerizing Performances, Story Keep ‘Eight’ Rolling,” Los Angeles Times,
February 28, 1997, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-02-28-ca-33126-story.html.
13. “Hard Eight (1996): Awards,” IMDb, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119256/awards.
14. Maitland McDonagh, “Hard Eight Reviews,” TV Guide, https://www.tvguide.com/movies/hard
-eight/review/2030120759/.
15. Ruthe Stein, “ ‘Hard Eight’ Craps Out,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 28, 1997, https://www
.sfgate.com/movies/article/Hard-Eight-Craps-Out-Leading-roles-eclipsed-2852624.php.
16. Sperb, Blossoms and Blood, 69.
17. “De Luca didn’t tell his superiors that he was quietly nursing a dream of building a stable of vision-
ary filmmakers who would make New Line the address of young, hip talent, like Paramount had
become in the 1970s.” Sharon Waxman, Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They
Conquered the Hollywood Studio System (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 119.
18. Waxman, Rebels on the Backlot, 121; John Urbancich, “The Son of Ghoulardi Lives!,” Cleveland Sun,
October 23, 1997, at Cigarettes & Red Vines, http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/1997/10/interview
-son-of-ghoulardi-lives.html.
19. Owen Gleiberman, “Movie Review: ‘Boogie Nights,’ ” Entertainment Weekly, October 17, 1997,
https://ew.com/article/1997/10/17/movie-review-boogie-nights-2/.
20. Mick LaSalle, “ ‘Boogie’ Man Does the ’70s,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 17, 1997, https://
www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Boogie-Man-Does-the-70s-Mark-Wahlberg-is-a-2825519.php.
21. Martyn Glanville, “Review: Boogie Nights,” BBC (London), June 22, 2001 (updated), http://www
.bbc.co.uk/films/2001/06/22/boogie_nights_1997_review.shtml.
22. Charles Taylor, “Review: Boogie Nights,” Salon, October 17, 1997, https://www.salon.com/1997/10/17
/boogie/.
23. Waxman, Rebels on the Backlot, 70.
24. In 2015, Anderson described his mindset going into Boogie Nights as: “be paranoid, be protective,
and don’t trust anyone.” Quoted in Maron, “Episode 565: Paul Thomas Anderson.”
25. “New Line release will need strong critical support to score commercially with mainstream viewers
and become the event movie it deserves to be, though risqué subject matter and epic running time
might divide audiences and tarnish box office results.” Emanuel Levy, “Review: ‘Boogie Nights,’ ”
Variety, September 21, 1997, https://variety.com/1997/film/reviews/boogie-nights-1117329514/.
26. “I thought that with a great [soundtrack], the era of the seventies, I could sell it that way, as a worst-
case scenario.” Mitch Goldman, quoted in Waxman, Rebels on the Backlot, 121.
27. “Boogie Nights (1997),” Box Office Mojo, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0118749/?ref_=bo
_se_r_1.
28. “Pulp Fiction (1994),” IMDbPro, https://pro.imdb.com/title/tt0110912/?ref_=search_search_search
_result_1.
29. “Boogie Nights (1997): Awards,” IMDb, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118749/awards/?ref_=tt
_awd.
30. Kristine McKenna, “He Knows It When He Sees It,” Los Angeles Times, October 12, 1997, latimes
.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-oct-12-ca-41788-story.html.
31. “Given Boogie Nights’ modest success, Anderson’s emergent reputation, De Luca’s continued faith at
New Line in [Anderson’s] potential, and the highly desirable Cruise as the star attraction, the studio
signed off on the relatively low-risk gamble giving Anderson final cut.” Sperb, Blossoms and Blood, 122.
32. “Being a ‘new, hot young director’ usually means that, for once, you can get away with not cutting
anything. . . . I set out to write a great movie. In the most honest and unashamed way, I truly set
myself up to write a great movie.” Paul Thomas Anderson, “Introduction,” in Magnolia: The Shoot-
ing Script (New York: Newmarket, 2000), ix.
33. Chuck Stephens, “Paul Thomas Anderson Lets It All Hang Out,” Village Voice, December 14, 1999,
https://www.villagevoice.com/1999/12/14/paul-thomas-anderson-lets-it-all-hang-out/.
34. “That Moment: Magnolia Diary,” Magnolia (DVD), dir. Paul Thomas Anderson (Burbank, CA:
New Line Home Entertainment, 2000).

184 1. on paul thomas anderson’s career to date

35. David Denby, “San Fernando Aria,” New Yorker, December 12, 1999, https://www.newyorker.com
/magazine/1999/12/20/san-fernando-aria.
36. Peter Travers, “Review: Magnolia,” Rolling Stone, February 27, 2001, https://www.rollingstone.com
/movies/movie-reviews/magnolia-120044/.
37. Charles Taylor, “Review: Magnolia,” Salon, December 17, 1999, https://www.salon.com/1999/12/17
/magnolia/.
38. Andrew Sarris, “A Day in the Life of L.A.: Where’s the Rough Stuff?,” Observer, January 24, 2000,
https://observer.com/2000/01/a-day-in-the-life-of-la-wheres-the-rough-stuff/.
39. Janet Maslin, “Film Review: Entangled Lives on the Cusp of the Millennium,” New York Times,
December 17, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/17/movies/film-review-entangled-lives-on
-the-cusp-of-the-millennium.html.
40. David Edelstein, “The Masked and the Unmasked,” Slate, December 31, 1999, https://slate.com
/culture/1999/12/the-masked-and-the-unmasked.html.
41. Kenneth Turan, “Random Lives, Bound by Chance,” Los Angeles Times, December 17, 1999, https://
www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-dec-17-ca-44701-story.html.
42. Anderson, “That Moment: Magnolia Diary.”
43. “Magnolia (1999),” Box Office Mojo, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0175880/?ref_=bo_se_r_1.
44. Anderson, “That Moment: Magnolia Diary.”
45. Hirschberg, “His Way.”
46. Goldstein, “The New New Wave.”
47. Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in Mike Figgis, “Hollywood Conversations—Paul Thomas Anderson,”
Vimeo (video), https://vimeo.com/31744725.
48. Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in Mim Udovitch, “The Epic Obsessions of P. T. Anderson,” Rolling
Stone, February 3, 2000, at Cigarettes & Red Vines, http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2000/02
/interview-rolling-stone.html.
49. Kayleigh Donaldson, “Hey Hollywood, Don’t Forget David O. Russell Is an Abusive Jerk,” Pajiba,
October 17, 2017, https://www.pajiba.com/film_reviews/hey-hollywood-dont-forget-david-o-russell
-is-an-abusive-jerk.php.
50. Goldstein, “The New New Wave.”
51. Todd McCarthy, “The Next Scorsese: Paul Thomas Anderson,” Esquire 133, no. 3 (March 2000): 221.
52. Maron, “Episode 565: Paul Thomas Anderson.”
53. “I saw this ‘Best of Adam Sandler’ DVD . . . an amazing thing happened . . . Adam goes into this
fit of rage, screaming at his father, and honest to God I saw this moment where it appears as if the
whites of his eyes turn black and they roll back in his head. It was like, he just lost his mind. I would
play it back, over and over again.” Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in Roger Ebert, “ ‘Love’ at First
Sight,” RogerEbert.com, October 13, 2002, https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/love-at-first-sight.
54. “Punch-Drunk Love (2002),” Box Office Mojo, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0272338/?ref
_=bo_se_r_1.
55. A. O. Scott, “Film Festival Review: Love and the Single Misfit in a Topsy-Turvy World,” New York
Times, October 5, 2002, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/05/movies/film-festival-review-love-and
-the-single-misfit-in-a-topsy-turvy-world.html.
56. Moira Macdonald, “Sandler, Watson Make Beautiful Music in ‘Punch-Drunk Love,’ ” Seattle Times,
October 18, 2002, https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=20021018&slug=punch18.
57. David Ansen, “Call Him Unhappy Gilmore,” Newsweek, October 13, 2002, https://www.newsweek
.com/call-him-unhappy-gilmore-146867.
58. Peter Rainer, “Revenge of the Nerd,” New York, October 2, 2002, https://nymag.com/nymetro/movies
/reviews/n_7790/.
59. Ann Hornaday, “Taking the Plunge,” Washington Post, October 18, 2002, https://www.washingtonpost
.com/archive/lifestyle/2002/10/18/taking-the-plunge/8779488c-b68e-4789-8b2e-153cd1eed69c/.
60. Barbara Brotman, “ ‘Drunk’ Is an Odd Kind of Film Classic: Critics Adore, Fans Abhor,” Chicago Tribune,
November 26, 2002, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2002-11-26-0211260015-story.html.
61. Peter Bradshaw, “Review: Punch-Drunk Love,” Guardian (London), February 6, 2003, https://www
.theguardian.com/culture/2003/feb/07/artsfeatures1.

1. on paul thomas anderson’s career to date 185

62. J. Hoberman, “Collision Courses,” Village Voice, October 1, 2002, https://www.villagevoice.com/2002
/10/01/collision-courses-2/.
63. Sperb, Blossoms and Blood, 200.
64. “I can remember the way that my desk looked, with so many different scraps of paper and books
about the oil industry in the early 20th century, mixed in with pieces of other scripts that I’d
written . . . the book was a great stepping-stone.” Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in Josh
Modell, “Interview: Paul Thomas Anderson,” AV Club, January 2, 2008, https://film.avclub.com
/paul-thomas-anderson-1798213013.
65. Day-Lewis and Anderson “corresponded between Ireland and the United States on brainstorming
every aspect of Plainview.” Sperb, Blossoms and Blood, 189.
66. David Denby, “Hard Life,” New Yorker, December 9, 2007, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine
/2007/12/17/hard-life-2-2.
67. “The dialogue-free opening echoes the wordless prologue of 2001: A Space Odyssey . . . the final
sequence [is] also bounding with visual references to the sci-fi classic.” Sperb, Blossoms & Blood, 205.
68. David Denby described the scene as “a mistake” even as he interpreted it as “a blast of defiance”
against prestige expectations. David Denby, “Hard Life,” New Yorker, December 9, 2007, https://
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/17/hard-life-2-2.
69. “Film Critic Top Ten Lists: 2007 Critics’ Picks,” MetaCritic, https://web.archive.org/web/20080102102034
/http://www.metacritic.com/film/awards/2007/toptens.shtml.
70. “There Will Be Blood (2007),” Box Office Mojo, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0469494/?ref
_=bo_se_r_1.
71. Richard Schickel, “There Will Be Blood: An American Tragedy,” Time, December 24, 2007, http://
content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1698168,00.html.
72. Peter Bradshaw, “There Will Be Blood—Review,” Guardian (London), February 8, 2008, https://
www.theguardian.com/film/2008/feb/08/paulthomasanderson.drama.
73. Kenneth Turan, “Review: There Will Be Blood,” Los Angeles Times, December 26, 2007, https://www
.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-blood26dec26-story.html.
74. Manohla Dargis, “An American Primitive, Forged in a Crucible of Blood and Oil,” New York Times,
December 26, 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/movies/26bloo.html.
75. Wesley Morris, “Striking Oil,” Boston Globe, January 4, 2008, http://archive.boston.com/news/globe
/living/articles/2008/01/04/striking_oil/.
76. Christy Lemire, “ ‘There Will Be Blood’ Delivers on Its Promise,” Orange County Register, January 3,
2008, https://www.ocregister.com/2008/01/03/there-will-be-blood-delivers-on-its-promise/.
77. Mick LaSalle, “Conquering the West, and Getting His Hands Dirty in the Process,” San Francisco
Chronicle, January 4, 2008, https://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Conquering-the-West-and-getting
-his-hands-dirty-3233876.phpphoto-2376801.
78. Stephanie Zacharek, “Review: There Will Be Blood,” Salon, December 26, 2007, https://www.salon
.com/2007/12/26/blood/.
79. Ed Gonzalez, “Review: There Will Be Blood,” Slant, December 12, 2007, https://www.slantmagazine
.com/film/there-will-be-blood/.
80. Peter Bradshaw, “Why the Best Film of the 21st Century Is There Will Be Blood,” Guardian (London),
September 13, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/13/best-film-21st-century-there-will
-be-blood-paul-thomas-anderson-daniel-day-lewis-oil.
81. “The 25 Best Films of the 21st Century So Far,” New York Times, June 9, 2017, https://www.nytimes
.com/interactive/2017/06/09/movies/the-25-best-films-of-the-21st-century.html.
82. “It was dry as a bone . . . there were no real takers.” Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in Scott Foun-
das, “Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master’s Master,” Village Voice, September 5, 2012, https://www
.villagevoice.com/2012/09/05/paul-thomas-anderson-the-masters-master/.
83. When Anderson eventually screened the film for Cruise, Sharon Waxman speculated that the
Master team hoped to “[head] off a conflict with the group.” Sharon Waxman, “ ‘The Master’:
Paul Thomas Anderson Reaches Out to Scientologist Tom Cruise,” The Wrap, May 22, 2012,
https://www.thewrap.com/master-paul-thomas-anderson-reaches-out-scientologist-tom-cruise
-exclusive-41111/.

186 1. on paul thomas anderson’s career to date

84. “It did seem like there was a cashing out, pushing the chips across the table and saying, ‘That’s
enough of that horseshit.’ ” Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in Foundas, “Paul Thomas Anderson,
The Master’s Master.”
85. See Sean O’Neal, “Paul Thomas Anderson’s Scientology Movie Is Really Happening,” AV Club,
May 9, 2011, https://www.avclub.com/paul-thomas-andersons-scientology-movie-is-really-happe
-1798225464; Lane Brown, “P. T. Anderson’s Scientology Movie Gets a Pass,” Vulture, March 17,
2010, https://www.vulture.com/2010/03/why_does_paul_thomas_andersons.html.
86. Ash Sanders, “Children of Scientology: Life After Growing Up in an Alleged Cult,” Rolling Stone,
June 24, 2019, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/scientology-children-second
-generation-846732/.
87. Lucas Kavner, “Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘The Master’ on 70mm Harkens Back to Hollywood
Epics,” HuffPost, September 7, 2012, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/paul-thomas-anderson-the
-master_n_1862890.
88. Ella Taylor, “ ‘Master’ Actors Deliver Glimpse Into Cult Life,” NPR, September 13, 2012, https://
www.npr.org/2012/09/13/160942878/master-actors-deliver-glimpse-into-cult-life.
89. “The Master (2012),” Box Office Mojo, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt1560747/?ref_=bo_se_r_1.
90. Peter Travers, “Review: The Master,” Rolling Stone, September 10, 2012, https://www.rollingstone
.com/movies/movie-reviews/the-master-96954/.
91. Xan Brooks, “The Master—Review,” Guardian (London), September 1, 2012, https://www.theguardian
.com/film/2012/sep/01/the-master-review.
92. Calum Marsh, “Review: The Master,” Slant, September 10, 2012, https://www.slantmagazine.com
/film/the-master/.
93. Deborah Ross, “What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor?,” Spectator, November 3, 2012, https://
www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-shall-we-do-with-the-drunken-sailor-.
94. Katey Rich, “Review: The Master,” CinemaBlend, September 12, 2012, https://www.cinemablend
.com/reviews/Master-6016.html.
95. Roger Ebert, “A Magnificent Puzzlement,” RogerEbert.com, September 19, 2012, https://www
.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-master-2012.
96. Dana Stevens, “Cult Classic,” Slate, September 14, 2012, https://slate.com/culture/2012/09/the-master
-reviewed-paul-thomas-andersons-latest-is-a-cult-classic.html.
97. Richard Corliss, “Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master: There Will Be Boredom,” Time, September 1,
2012, https://entertainment.time.com/2012/09/01/paul-thomas-andersons-the-master-there-will-be
-boredom/.
98. David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 6th ed. (New York: Knopf, 2014), 22.
99. Steven Hyden, “Extraordinary Machines,” Grantland, September 11, 2012, https://grantland.com
/features/looking-back-paul-thomas-anderson-fiona-apple-relationship-release-master/.
100. Michael Hill, “50 Years Later, Bob Dylan’s Motorcycle Crash Remains Mysterious,” Seattle Times,
July 27, 2016, https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/50-years-later-dylans-motorcycle-crash
-remains-mysterious/.
101. Richardson, “The Secret History of Paul Thomas Anderson.”
102. Luke Buckmaster, “Good Film, Just Don’t Mention the ‘War,’ ” Crikey, November 6, 2012, https://
blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/2012/11/06/good-film-just-dont-mention-the-war-interview-with
-paul-thomas-anderson/.
103. Goldstein, “The New New Wave.”
104. 92nd Street Y, “Daniel Day Lewis and Paul Thomas Anderson on There Will Be Blood: Reel Pieces with
Annette Insdorf,” YouTube (video), July 26, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bcUQhWmVRo.
105. George Toles, Contemporary Film Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2016), 3.
106. In early 2011, it seemed that both projects might be financed by Annapurna, and Vulture speculated
that Inherent Vice might shoot first given the availability of then-attached star Robert Downey Jr.
Claude Brodesser-Akner, “Paul Thomas Anderson’s Scientology Movie and Inherent Vice Adaptation
Close to Finding Financing,” Vulture, February 10, 2011, https://www.vulture.com/2011/02/paul
_thomas_anderson.html.

1. on paul thomas anderson’s career to date 187

107. “A famously unadaptable postmodern novelist and one of Hollywood’s preeminent neo-auteurs.
The circuit loop between Thomas Pynchon and Paul Thomas Anderson seemed charged with pos-
sibility.” Charles Thaxton, “Anderson’s Pynchon Adaptation ‘Inherent Vice’: A Stylish, Slow Burn,”
WBUR, January 9, 2015, https://www.wbur.org/artery/2015/01/09/inherent-vice.
108. Wesley Morris, “IV Drip: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Postlapsarian Comedy ‘Inherent Vice,’ ”
Grantland, December 12, 2014, https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/paul-thomas-anderson
-inherent-vice-review/.
109. “Inherent Vice (2014),” Box Office Mojo, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt1791528/?ref_=bo_se_r_1.
110. Dan Callahan, “ ‘Inherent Vice’ Review: Lots of Sex and Drugs, But Where Are the Believable Peo-
ple?,” The Wrap, October 4, 2014, https://www.thewrap.com/inherent-vice-review-lots-of-sex-and
-drugs-but-where-are-the-believable-people/.
111. Kyle Smith, “ ‘Inherent Vice’ Is a Two-and-a-Half-Hour Endurance Test,” New York Post, December 10,
2014, https://nypost.com/2014/12/10/inherent-vice-is-a-two-and-a-half-hour-endurance-test/.
112. Richard Lawson, “Inherent Vice Is a Drug-Addled, Disorienting Trip to Paul Thomas Anderson’s
America,” Vanity Fair, October 4, 2014, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2014/10/inherent
-vice-review.
113. Steven Rea, “ ‘Inherent Vice’: Bummer, Man—Stoned Noir Tale Is a Muddled Mess,” Philadel-
phia Inquirer, January 9, 2015, https://www.inquirer.com/philly/entertainment/20150109__Inherent
_Vice___Bummer__man_-_stoned_noir_tale_is_a_muddled_mess.html.
114. Mark Kermode, “Inherent Vice Review—Thomas Pynchon’s Stoner Mystery Runs Out of Puff,”
Guardian (London), February 1, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/feb/01/inherent
-vice-review-mark-kermode.
115. Alison Willmore, “ ‘Inherent Vice’ Is the Stoner Noir You Didn’t Know You Needed,” BuzzFeed,
October 4, 2014, https://www.buzzfeed.com/alisonwillmore/inherent-vice-is-paul-thomas-andersons
-big-lebowski.
116. Kate Kilkenny, “Inherent Vice: Thomas Pynchon’s Stoner Comedy,” Atlantic, January 9, 2015, https://
www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/01/inherent-vice-dont-overanalyze-it/384368/.
117. More examples of this critical tendency will follow, but in the meantime: “Forgive me for delving into
a director’s personal life, but Phantom Thread . . . kind of feels like an invitation for some gentle scru-
tiny . . . Phantom Thread is the second movie this season [after Darren Aronofsky’s mother! ] that finds
a lauded writer-director processing how he, as an artist, has functioned in his personal relationships.”
Richard Lawson, “Phantom Thread Review: The Most Surprising Love Story of the Year,” Vanity Fair,
December 19, 2017, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/12/phantom-thread-review.
118. “Phantom Thread (2017),” Box Office Mojo, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt5776858/?ref
_=bo_se_r_1.
119. Chris Nashawaty, “Daniel Day-Lewis Is Impeccable in the Too-Tame Phantom Thread,” Entertain-
ment Weekly, December 7, 2017, https://ew.com/movies/2017/12/07/phantom-thread-review/.
120. Rex Reed, “ ‘Phantom Thread’ Is as Elusive as Its Meaningless Title,” Observer, January 15, 2018,
https://observer.com/2018/01/review-daniel-day-lewis-in-paul-thomas-andersons-phantom-thread/.
121. Mick LaSalle, “ ‘Phantom Thread’ Close to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Career Best,” San Francisco
Chronicle, January 11, 2018. https://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Phantom-Menace-close-to-Paul
-Thomas-12485806.php.
122. Jason Bailey, “ ‘Phantom Thread’ Is Weird, Wonderful, and Peak Paul Thomas Anderson,” Vice,
December 29, 2017, https://www.vice.com/en/article/j5vg8d/phantom-thread-is-weird-wonderful
-and-peak-paul-thomas-anderson.
123. Moira Macdonald, “ ‘Phantom Thread,’ with a Silky Daniel Day-Lewis, Casts a Remarkable Spell,”
Seattle Times, January 11, 2018, https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/movies/phantom-thread
-with-a-silky-daniel-day-lewis-casts-a-remarkable-spell/.
124. Peter Travers, “Review: Inherent Vice,” Rolling Stone, December 11, 2014, https://www.rollingstone
.com/movies/movie-reviews/inherent-vice-86692/.
125. Peter Travers, “Review: Phantom Thread,” Rolling Stone, December 21, 2017, https://www.rollingstone
.com/movies/movie-reviews/phantom-thread-review-paul-thomas-andersons-ode-to-obsession-is
-spellbinding-127549/.

188 1. on paul thomas anderson’s career to date

126. Kyle Buchanan, “Paul Thomas Anderson Goes Back to the Valley with ‘Licorice Pizza,’ ” New York
Times, November 22, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/22/movies/paul-thomas-anderson
-licorice-pizza.html.
127. “Of course there’s a moment where you go, ‘Are you really going to make another film in Los
Angeles in the ’70s again? Don’t you think you’ve done that?’ ” Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in
Brent Lang, “Paul Thomas Anderson on ‘Licorice Pizza’ and Moviemaking: ‘Anyone Who’s Done
This Knows That Confidence Is an Illusion,” Variety, November 10, 2021, https://variety.com/2021
/film/features/paul-thomas-anderson-licorice-pizza-alana-haim-cooper-hoffman-1235107853/.
128. Esther Zuckerman, “Why Paul Thomas Anderson Chose to Film Part of ‘Licorice Pizza’ at My
Childhood Home,” Thrillist, November 24, 2021, https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation
/paul-thomas-anderson-interview-licorice-pizza.
129. “And how does [Anderson] feel about MGM being sold to Amazon? ‘Who?’ he responded.” Nicole
Sperling, “They Resurrected MGM. Amazon Bought the Studio. Now What?” New York Times,
July 6, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/06/business/media/mgm-amazon-michael-deluca
-pamela-abdy.html.
130. Eric Eisenberg, “What’s Up with Paul Thomas Anderson’s New Movie? Even the Studio Doesn’t
Seem to Know,” Cinema Blend, August 24, 2021, https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2572496
/whats-up-paul-thomas-anderson-new-movie-even-studio-doesnt-seem-know.
131. Buchanan, “Paul Thomas Anderson Goes Back to the Valley with ‘Licorice Pizza.’ ”
132. Matthew Jacobs, “How Waterbeds, Teen Love, and an Unhinged Bradley Cooper Led to Licorice
Pizza,” Time, November 23, 2021, https://time.com/6122812/licorice-pizza-paul-thomas-anderson
-alana-haim/.
133. Justin Chang, “Review: Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Licorice Pizza’ Is a Valentine to the Valley. And
Alana Haim,” Los Angeles Times, November 17, 2021.
134. Dana Stevens, “Paul Thomas Anderson’s New Movie Is About an Age-Gap Romance. It’s Also
a Blast,” Slate, November 23, 2021, https://slate.com/culture/2021/11/licorice-pizza-movie-bradley
-cooper-paul-thomas-anderson.html.
135. David Fear, “ ‘Licorice Pizza’ Is Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1970s Power Ballad—and the Funkiest
Love Story of the Year,” Rolling Stone, November 24, 2021, https://www.rollingstone.com/movies
/movie-reviews/licorice-pizza-movie-review-paul-thomas-anderson-1260170/.
136. Richard Brody, “ ‘Licorice Pizza,’ Reviewed: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Thrilling Coming-of-Age
Story,” New Yorker, December 1, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/licorice
-pizza-reviewed-paul-thomas-andersons-thrilling-coming-of-age-story.
137. Peter Bradshaw, “Licorice Pizza Review—Paul Thomas Anderson’s Funniest and Most Relaxed
Film Yet,” Guardian (London), November 15, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/nov/15
/licorice-pizza-review-paul-thomas-anderson.
138. Glenn Whipp, “Paul Thomas Anderson’s Hilarious and Intimate ‘Licorice Pizza’ Tour of the Valley,”
Los Angeles Times, November 26, 2021, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story
/2021-11-26/paul-thomas-anderson-licorice-pizza-san-fernando-valley.
139. Manohla Dargis, “ ‘Licorice Pizza’ Review: California Dreaming and Scheming,” New York Times,
November 25, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/25/movies/licorice-pizza-review.html.
140. Richard Lawson, “Licorice Pizza Is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Kindest, Gentlest Movie Yet,” Vanity
Fair, November 15, 2021, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/11/11/licorice-pizza-is-paul
-thomas-andersons-kindest-gentlest-movie-yet.
141. “MANAA to the Academy: ‘Licorice Pizza’s’ Racism Doesn’t Deserve Awards,” Rafu Shimpo, December 17,
2021, https://rafu.com/2021/12/manaa-to-the-academy-licorice-pizzas-racism-doesnt-deserve-awards/.
142. Buchanan, “Paul Thomas Anderson Goes Back to the Valley with ‘Licorice Pizza.”
143. Jo Livingstone, “Licorice Pizza Is a Meandering Nostalgia Trip,” New Republic, December 3, 2021,
https://newrepublic.com/article/164585/licorice-pizza-meandering-nostalgia-trip-paul-thomas
-anderson-movie.
144. Eric Kohn, “Paul Thomas Anderson on ‘Licorice Pizza’ Release, Backlash, and His Secret Internet
Accounts,” IndieWire, February 18, 2022, https://www.indiewire.com/2022/02/paul-thomas-anderson
-interview-licorice-pizza-theaters-1234700592/.

1. on paul thomas anderson’s career to date 189

145. Kohn, “Paul Thomas Anderson on ‘Licorice Pizza’ Release, Backlash, and His Secret Internet
Accounts.”
146. Austin Film Festival, “On Story: 413 Greaser’s Palace: A Conversation with Jonathan Demme and
Paul Thomas Anderson,” YouTube (video), March 23, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=QAyGwxSRsFE&t=550s.
147. Austin Film Society, “Paul Thomas Anderson & Richard Linklater in Conversation | 2018 Texas Film
Awards,” YouTube (video), March 26, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy9UwJafRxk&t=2s.
148. Jordan Raup, “Listen: Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson Discuss ‘Once Upon a Time
in Hollywood,” Film Stage, August 23, 2019, https://thefilmstage.com/listen-quentin-tarantino-and
-paul-thomas-anderson-discuss-once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood/.
149. “Seduce and Destroy with Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie, and Paul Thomas Anderson,” A24 (podcast),
December 23, 2019, https://a24films.com/notes/2019/12/seduce-and-destroy-with-josh-safdie-benny
-safdie-and-paul-thomas-anderson.
150. Maron, “Episode 565: Paul Thomas Anderson.”
151. Fear, “ ‘Licorice Pizza’ Is Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1970s Power Ballad.”

2. on pl aces and spaces

1. Tom Carson, “A Golden State: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Secret, Sprawling, Multi-Film History of
California,” Grantland, October 9, 2014, https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/paul-thomas
-anderson-inherant-vice-magnolia-boogie-nights-california-history/.
2. Paul Thomas Anderson, “Paul Thomas Anderson: A Valley Boy Who Found a Home Not Far
from Home,” New York Times, November 14, 1999, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com
/library/film/111499anderson-film.html?scp=71&sq=252522Boogie252520Nights252522&st=cse.
3. Reilly Nycum, “In Defense of Valley Girl English,” Compass 1, no. 5 (2018): 28, https://scholarworks
.arcadia.edu/thecompass/vol1/iss5/4.
4. John Patterson, “Magnolia Maniac,” Guardian (London), March 10, 2000, https://www.theguardian
.com/film/2000/mar/10/culture.features.
5. Scott Garner, “An Industry Town That Walks on the Mild Side,” Los Angeles Times, June 3, 2016,
https://www.latimes.com/business/realestate/hot-property/la-fi-hp-neighborhood-spotlight-studio
-city-20160604-snap-story.html.
6. “Mapping L.A.: Studio City,” Los Angeles Times, n.d., http://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods
/neighborhood/studio-city/.
7. Garner, “An Industry Town That Walks on the Mild Side.”
8. Sarah Larson, “Jim Jarmusch Is Afraid of Cherubs and Abe Lincoln,” New Yorker, July 1, 2019, https://
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/08/jim-jarmusch-is-afraid-of-cherubs-and-abe-lincoln.
9. Joe Walders, “Is There Life After Ghoulardi?,” Cleveland Magazine, December 1, 1975, https://
clevelandmagazine.com/in-the-cle/the-read/articles/is-there-life-after-ghoulardi-.
10. “Ernie Anderson,” in Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve Uni-
versity, 2022), https://case.edu/ech/articles/a/anderson-ernie.
11. Bill Simmons, “Paul Thomas Anderson on ‘Phantom Thread,’ Loving Adam Sandler, and ‘Boogie
Nights,’ ” Ringer, December 27, 2017, https://www.theringer.com/the-bill-simmons-podcast/2017
/12/27/16803838/paul-thomas-anderson-on-pursuing-filmmaking-loving-adam-sandler-and-making
-boogie-nights.
12. Simmons, “Paul Thomas Anderson on ‘Phantom Thread,’ Loving Adam Sandler, and ‘Boogie Nights.”
13. Walders, “Is There Life After Ghoulardi?”
14. Jason Sperb, Blossoms and Blood: Postmodern Media Culture and the Films of Paul Thomas Anderson
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 19.
15. Anderson, “Paul Thomas Anderson: A Valley Boy Who Found a Home Not Far from Home.”
16. Paul Thomas Anderson, “Feature Commentary by Filmmaker P. T. Anderson,” Boogie Nights, dir.
Paul Thomas Anderson (Burbank, CA: New Line Home Video, 2000).

190 1. on paul thomas anderson’s career to date

17. Chris Rodley, Lynch on Lynch (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 56.
18. Rodley, Lynch on Lynch, 56.
19. “Interview: New York Film Festival Q&A,” Cigarettes & Red Vines, October 5, 2002, http://
cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2002/10/interview-new-york-film-festival-q.html.
20. Dave Kehr, “A Poet of Love and Chaos in the Valley,” New York Times, October 6, 2002, https://
www.nytimes.com/2002/10/06/movies/film-a-poet-of-love-and-chaos-in-the-valley.html.
21. Patterson, “Magnolia Maniac.”
22. Cindy Fuchs, “The Porn Next Door,” Philadelphia City Paper, October 22, 1997, https://mycitypaper
.com/articles/102397/crtmsld.mov.boogie1.shtml.
23. “I don’t like geographic license. It’s hard to make a theoretical argument against it. After all, in a fic-
tion film, a real space becomes fictional. Why shouldn’t a car chase jump from the Venice canals to
the Los Angeles harbor thirty miles away? Why shouldn’t the exit from a skating rink in Westwood
open directly onto Fletcher Bowron Square in downtown Los Angeles, fifteen miles east? But one
fiction is not always as good as another, and like dramatic license, geographic license is usually an
alibi for laziness. Silly geography makes for silly movies.” Los Angeles Plays Itself (video), dir. Thom
Anderson (New York: Submarine Entertainment, 2003).
24. Molly Lambert, “The Valley Plays Itself,” Grantland, December 8, 2014, https://grantland.com
/features/paul-thomas-anderson-los-angeles-movies-the-valley/.
25. Fuchs, “The Porn Next Door.”
26. Edward Guthmann, “The Truth Behind Porn: Former Adult Film Star Says ‘Boogie Nights’ Is Filled
with Myths,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 23, 1997, https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment
/article/the-truth-behind-porn-former-adult-film-star-2799975.php.
27. Jeff Simon, “Naked Talent,” Buffalo News, October 26, 1997, https://buffalonews.com/news/naked
-talent-with-boogie-nights——a-movie-about-the-porn-industry-/article_1bef728a-b9be-5b09
-80ba-40934c1cb6d2.html.
28. John Hartl, “A 27-Year-Old Director Tackles ’70s Sensibilities—Paul Thomas Anderson Defends
His Vision,” Seattle Times, October 17, 1997, https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=199710
17&slug=2566571.
29. Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie (New York: New Directions, 1945), 3.
30. Guthmann, “The Truth Behind Porn.”
31. Mim Udovitch, “Lights . . . Camera . . . Hold It, Hold It; Would Someone Please Reattach Mark’s
Member, Please . . . And Action!,” Esquire, October 1, 1997, at Cigarettes & Red Vines, http://
cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/1997/10/interview-lightscamerahold-it-hold-it.html.
32. Sharon Waxman, Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood
Studio System (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 168.
33. Interview: “15 Minutes with the Prodigy,” Girls On—Claire Magazine, Fall 1997, at Cigarettes & Red
Vines, http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/1997/07/interview-15-minutes-with-prodigy.html.
34. Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in Lambert, “The Valley Plays Itself.”
35. David Fine, Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2000), 5.
36. Hsuan L. Hsu, “Racial Privacy, the L.A. Ensemble Film, and Paul Haggis’s Crash,” Film Criticism 31,
no. 1–2 (2006): 135.
37. Hsu, “Racial Privacy, the L.A. Ensemble Film, and Paul Haggis’s Crash,” 136.
38. Lucy Fischer, “Theory Into Practice: En-Gendering Narrative in Magnolia,” in Screening Genders,
ed. Krin Gabbard and William Luhr (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 40.
39. Carson, “A Golden State.”
40. Anderson, “Paul Thomas Anderson: A Valley Boy Who Found a Home Not Far from Home.”
41. “Interview: Fresh Air Transcript,” Cigarettes & Red Vines, October 31, 1997, http://cigsandredvines
.blogspot.com/1997/10/interview-fresh-air-transcript.html.
42. Jesse Fox Mayshark, Post-Pop Cinema: The Search for Meaning in New American Film (Westport, CT:
Praeger, 2007), 84.
43. Adam Nayman, Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks (New York: Abrams, 2020), 155.
44. Hsu, “Racial Privacy, the L.A. Ensemble Film, and Paul Haggis’s Crash,” 142.
45. Anderson, “Feature Commentary by Filmmaker P. T. Anderson.”

2. on places and spaces 191

46. Paul Thomas Anderson, Boogie Nights (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), unpaginated.
47. Anderson, “Feature Commentary by Filmmaker P. T. Anderson.”
48. Tom Cendejas, “A View from the Other Valley,” Bright Wall/Dark Room, January 13, 2022, https://
www.brightwalldarkroom.com/2022/01/13/licorice-pizza-the-other-valley/.
49. Cynthia Fuchs, “It’s a Weeping Movie,” Nitrate Online, January 7, 2000, https://nitrateonline.com
/2000/fmagnolia.html.
50. Sperb, Blossoms and Blood, 141.
51. Hannah Flint, “Licorice Pizza with Paul Thomas Anderson,” The Love of Cinema (podcast), January 1,
2022, https://picturehouse.podbean.com/e/paul-thomas-anderson-on-licorice-pizza-picturehouse/.
52. ZippZapps, “Licorice Pizza /w Paul Thomas Anderson and Alana Haim—11/6,” YouTube (video),
November 7, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKrZfBix-Ns.
53. Anderson, “Paul Thomas Anderson: A Valley Boy Who Found a Home Not Far from Home.”
54. Mark Caro, “Anderson Casts Wider Net with ‘Punch-Drunk,’ ” Chicago Tribune, October 13, 2002,
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2002-10-13-0210120406-story.html.
55. Todd McCarthy, “The Next Scorsese: Paul Thomas Anderson,” Esquire 133, no. 3 (March 2000).
56. Caro, “Anderson Casts Wider Net with ‘Punch-Drunk.’ ”
57. “I grew up in California and there’s a lot of oil out there. . . . I suppose I’ve always wondered what
the stuff is, how we get it out of the ground.” Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in Edward Douglas,
“P. T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood,” ComingSoon.net, December 19, 2007, https://www.comingsoon
.net/movies/features/40210-p-t-andersons-there-will-be-blood.
58. Marc Maron, “Episode 565: Paul Thomas Anderson,” WTF with Marc Maron (podcast), January 5,
2015, http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episodes/episode_565_-_paul_thomas_anderson.
59. Nayman, Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks, 188.
60. Nayman, Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks, 251.
61. Nayman, Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks, 251–252.
62. George Toles, Contemporary Film Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2016), 57.
63. Toles, Contemporary Film Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, 57.
64. Toles, Contemporary Film Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, 64.
65. Toles, Contemporary Film Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, 57.
66. Elisa Pezzotta, Stanley Kubrick: Adapting the Sublime (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 157.
67. Paul Thomas Anderson, “There Will Be Blood: Final Shooting Script,” at ScriptSlug, https://www
.scriptslug.com/assets/uploads/scripts/there-will-be-blood-2007.pdf.
68. Anderson, “There Will Be Blood: Final Shooting Script,” 25.
69. Jeffrey Overstreet, “Review: There Will Be Blood,” Christianity Today, December 26, 2007, https://
www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/decemberweb-only/therewillbeblood.html.
70. Toles, Contemporary Film Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, 76.
71. Rick Warner, “Kubrickian Dread: Echoes of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining in Works by
Jonathan Glazer, Paul Thomas Anderson, and David Lynch,” in After Kubrick (New York: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2020), 133.
72. Ben Walters, “Interview: Paul Thomas Anderson,” Sight & Sound 18, no. 2 (February 2008): 33.
73. Carman Tse, “Photos: Thomas Pynchon’s Apartment in Manhattan Beach, the City That Inspired
‘Inherent Vice,’ ” LAist, December 14, 2014, https://laist.com/news/entertainment/photos-thomas
-pynchons-apartment-in.
74. Toles, Contemporary Film Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, 57.
75. Edwin Heathcote, “The Beach Beneath the Street,” Financial Times (London), August 12, 2011,
https://www.ft.com/content/9b6d3ec4-c358-11e0-9109-00144feabdc0.
76. Richard LeComte, “The Dark Side of Reno,” Reno Gazette-Journal, May 11, 1997.
77. David Ehrlich, “Paul Thomas Anderson: Still Smokin,’ ” Little White Lies, January 29, 2015, https://
lwlies.com/interviews/paul-thomas-anderson-inherent-vice/.
78. Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in Chuck Stephens, “Interview with Paul Thomas Anderson,” in
Magnolia: The Shooting Script (New York: Newmarket, 2000), 198.

192 2. on places and spaces

79. Rene Rodriguez, “Nights Shines Human Light on Porn,” San Diego Tribune, October 19, 1997, at
Cigarettes & Red Vines, https://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/1997/10/interview-nights-shines-human
-light-on.html.
80. Bob Longino, “Life After ‘Boogie Nights,’ ” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 2, 2000, at Cigarettes &
Red Vines, http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2000/01/interview-atlanta-journal-constitution.html.
81. James Hartl, “Interview: Writer Created from Sundance Project,” Seattle Times, March 3, 1997,
at Cigarettes & Red Vines, https://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/1997/03/interview-writer-created
-from-sundance.html?m=0.
82. Howard Hampton, “Everybody Must Get Stoned,” Film Comment, November–December 2014, https://
www.filmcomment.com/article/everybody-must-get-stoned/.
83. Walter Kirn, “Drugs to Do, Cases to Solve,” New York Times, August 20, 2009, https://www.nytimes
.com/2009/08/23/books/review/Kirn-t.html.
84. Jonathan Romney, “ ‘It’s Funny. Why Are You Sad?,’ ” Sight & Sound, February 2015, 23.
85. Lee Marshall, “Gorgeous Gothic,” Queen’s Quarterly 125, no. 2 (Summer 2018): 236.
86. Geoffrey O’Brien, “An Intimate Epic of Irrational Need,” New York Review of Books, September 22,
2012, https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2012/09/22/intimate-epic-irrational-need/.
87. Siddhant Adlakha, “ ‘Licorice Pizza’ is a Radiant, Thorny Nostalgia Trip,” Observer, November 24,
2021, https://observer.com/2021/11/licorice-pizza-review-paul-thomas-anderson-nostalgia/.
88. Dwayne Avery, Unhomely Cinema: Home and Place in Global Cinema (London: Anthem, 2014), 79.
89. A. O. Scott, “Review: Daniel Day-Lewis Sews Up Another Great Performance in ‘Phantom Thread,’ ”
New York Times, December 24, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/24/movies/phantom
-thread-review-daniel-day-lewis.html.
90. Scott Tobias, “Impeccable ‘Phantom Thread’ Doesn’t Drop a Stitch,” NPR, December 22, 2017,
https://www.npr.org/2017/12/22/571966088/impeccable-phantom-thread-doesn-t-drop-a-stitch.
91. Adam Buxton, “Ep.64A—Paul Thomas Anderson,” Adam Buxton Podcast, February 2018, https://
www.adam-buxton.co.uk/podcasts/65.
92. Paul Franz, “Springs to Catch Woodcocks,” Yale Review 106, no. 3 (2018): 185.
93. Karina Wolf added another to the list of legend and lore echoed by Phantom Thread: “Alma takes
in [Reynolds] self-mythology with merry eyes, a youthful disregard. Given the ghostly sheaths of
women’s garments at hand, there is the sense of trespassing in Bluebeard’s lair.” Karina Wolf, “A
Lover’s Discourse,” Bright Wall/Dark Room, January 17, 2018, https://www.brightwalldarkroom.com
/2018/01/17/a-lovers-discourse/.
94. Caitlin Sloat Dyckman, “The Marginalized American City: Spatial and Social Realities in a Cinematic
Form,” Built Environment 26, no. 4 (2000): 329.
95. Dyckman, “The Marginalized American City,” 316.
96. Lina Lecaro, “Licorice Pizza: A Conversation with P. T. Anderson About His New Slice of Nostalgia,”
L.A.Weekly December 3, 2021, https://www.laweekly.com/licorice-pizza-a-conversation-with-p-t
-anderson-about-his-new-slice-of-nostalgia/.
97. Amy Ta, “Filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson on ‘Licorice Pizza,’ Growing Up in L.A. at a Time of
Innocence and Mystery,” KCRW, November 24, 2021, https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/greater
-la/licorice-pizza-la-city-council/paul-thomas-anderson.
98. John H. Richardson, “The Secret History of Paul Thomas Anderson,” Esquire, September 22, 2008,
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a4973/paul-thomas-anderson-1008/.
99. David Ansen, “Paul Thomas Anderson’s Film Tour of L.A.,” Entertainment Weekly, December 18,
2014, https://ew.com/article/2014/12/18/paul-thomas-andersons-film-tour-la/.
100. Adam Nayman, “Show Biz Kids: Paul Thomas Anderson on Licorice Pizza,” Cinema Scope, December
2021, https://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-online/show-biz-kids-paul-thomas-anderson-on-licorice
-pizza/.
101. Jen Pelly, “Review: Something to Tell You,” Pitchfork, July 7, 2017, https://pitchfork.com/reviews
/albums/Haim-something-to-tell-you/.
102. Nick Pinkerton, “The Master? Paul Thomas Anderson as American Auteur,” The Point, no. 15
(December 15, 2017), https://thepointmag.com/criticism/the-master-paul-thomas-anderson/.

2. on places and spaces 193

103. “Flashback Friday: P. T. Anderson Talks with Lars Von Trier,” Cigarettes & Red Vines, April 22, 2011,
http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2011/04/flashback-friday-pt-anderson-talks-with.html.
104. Kathleen Holder, “Engineer Finds Sweet Travel Deal in Cups of Pudding,” Dateline UC Davis,
February 4, 2000, https://web.archive.org/web/20070618115627/http://www-dateline.ucdavis.edu
/020400/DL_pudding.html.
105. Werner Herzog, “Werner Herzog Makes a Trump-Era Addition to His Minnesota Declaration,” Crosscuts,
June 19, 2017, https://walkerart.org/magazine/werner-herzog-minnesota-declaration-2017-addendum.
106. James B. Meriwether, “The Novel Faulkner Never Wrote: His Golden Book or Doomsday Book,”
American Literature 42, no. 1 (March 1970): 94.
107. Yohana Desta, “Paul Thomas Anderson on Inspiration: ‘The Rainbow Is Right in Your Living Room,
Idiot!,’ ” Vanity Fair, November 23, 2021, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/11/paul-thomas
-anderson-licorice-pizza-interview.

3. on influences

1. Roger Ebert, “Review: Boogie Nights,” RogerEbert.com, October 17, 1997, https://www.rogerebert
.com/reviews/boogie-nights-1997.
2. Janet Maslin, “Film Festival Review: An Actor Whose Talents Are the Sum of His Parts,” New York
Times, October 8, 1997, https://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/08/movies/film-festival-review-an-actor
-whose-talents-are-the-sum-of-his-parts.html.
3. Peter Travers, “Review: Boogie Nights,” Rolling Stone, October 10, 1997, https://www.rollingstone
.com/movies/movie-reviews/boogie-nights-97563/.
4. Jay Boyar, “ ‘Boogie Nights’ Lays Bare the Human Heart,” Orlando Sentinel, January 23, 2000, https://
www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-2000-01-23-0001200360-story.html.
5. Clifford Rothman, “Interview: ‘Director Anderson Finds He’s Rising Star of Nights,” USA Today,
October 24, 1997, at Cigarettes & Red Vines, http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/1997/10/interview
-director-anderson-finds-hes.html.
6. Paul Thomas Anderson, “Feature Commentary by Filmmaker P. T. Anderson,” Boogie Nights, dir.
Paul Thomas Anderson (Burbank, CA: New Line Home Video, 2000).
7. Jason Sperb, Blossoms and Blood: Postmodern Media Culture and the Films of Paul Thomas Anderson
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 70.
8. Chris Garcia, “All Paul Thomas Anderson Does,” Austin American Statesman, January 6, 2000, at
Cigarettes & Red Vines, https://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2000/01/interview-austin-american
-statesman.html.
9. Sperb, Blossoms and Blood, 71.
10. Dom Kornits, “Interview: “Down with the PTA,” FilmInk, March 1998, at Cigarettes & Red Vines,
http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/1998/03/.
11. Xan Brooks, “ ‘I Can Be a Real Arrogant Brat,’ ” Guardian (London), January 27, 2003, https://www
.theguardian.com/film/2003/jan/27/artsfeatures1.
12. Paul Thomas Anderson, “Foreword,” in Altman on Altman, ed. David Thompson (London: Faber
and Faber, 2011), xvi.
13. Adam Nayman, Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks (New York: Abrams, 2020), 18.
14. Anderson, “Foreword.”
15. Paul Thomas Anderson, “Ten Films That Influenced Boogie Nights,” Neon, August 1998, at Cigarettes
& Red Vines, http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/1998/08/interview-neons-10-films-that.html.
16. Claire Perkins, “Kicking and Screaming: Altmanesque Cynicism and Energy in the Work of Paul
Thomas Anderson and Noah Baumbach,” in A Companion to Robert Altman, ed. Adrian Danks
(Chichester: Wiley, 2015), 498.
17. Anthony Lane, “Swinging Seventies,” New Yorker, December 8, 2014, https://www.newyorker.com
/magazine/2014/12/15/swinging-seventies-3.

194 2. on places and spaces

18. Noel Murray, “The Long Goodbye,” Dissolve, December 15, 2014, https://thedissolve.com/reviews
/1271-the-long-goodbye/.
19. Sperb, Blossoms and Blood, 207.
20. Elisa Pezzotta, Stanley Kubrick: Adapting the Sublime (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2013), 46.
21. Pezzotta, Stanley Kubrick: Adapting the Sublime, 41.
22. Bob Longino, “Life After ‘Boogie Nights,’ ” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 2, 2000, at Cigarettes &
Red Vines, http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2000/01/interview-atlanta-journal-constitution.html.
23. Anderson, “Foreword,” xvi.
24. Anderson, quoted in Mike Figgis, “Hollywood Conversations—Paul Thomas Anderson,” Vimeo (video),
https://vimeo.com/31744725.
25. Matt Grainger, “Interview: Cinemattractions Q&A with Paul Thomas Anderson,” Cinemattractions,
February 1998, at Cigarettes & Red Vines, http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/1998/02/interview
-cinemattractions-q-with-paul.html.
26. “Putney Swope (1969),” AFI Catalog, https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/18863.
27. “Putney Swope (1969), AFI Catalog.
28. “Silence of the Lambs (1991): Awards,” IMDb, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102926/awards/?ref
_=tt_awd.
29. Jonathan Demme, “Liner Notes,” Greaser’s Palace (Blu-Ray), dir. Robert Downey Sr., 1972 (reissue,
Los Angeles: Shout! Factory, 2018).
30. Wheeler Winston Dixon, Film Talk: Directors at Work (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
2007), 134.
31. Paul Thomas Anderson, in “Filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson Talks About His Film, ‘Boogie
Nights’ ” (video), Charlie Rose, October 30, 1997, https://charlierose.com/videos/6299.
32. Austin Film Festival, “On Story: 413 Greaser’s Palace: A Conversation with Jonathan Demme and
Paul Thomas Anderson,” YouTube (video), March 23, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=QAyGwxSRsFE.
33. Mark Caro, “Demme Plays New ‘Charade,’ ” Chicago Tribune, October 20, 2002, https://www
.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2002-10-20-0210200236-story.html.
34. Stephen Dalton, “Critics Notebook: Jonathan Demme Enriched Movies with Diversity, Humanism
and Great Music,” Hollywood Reporter, April 26, 2017, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news
/general-news/critic-s-notebook-jonathan-demme-enriched-movie-mainstream-diversity-humanism
-great-music-99783-997834/.
35. Peter Travers, “Peter Travers on Jonathan Demme: The Movies’ Great Humanist,” Rolling Stone,
April 26, 2017, https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/peter-travers-on-jonathan-demme-the
-movies-great-humanist-117538/.
36. Forrest Wickman, “What Wes Anderson and P. T. Anderson Have Taken from Jonathan Demme,”
Slate, April 14, 2015, https://slate.com/culture/2015/04/jonathan-demme-close-up-supercut-shows
-what-pt-anderson-and-wes-anderson-have-taken-from-the-director-video.html.
37. Austin Film Festival, “On Story: 414 Jonathan Demme and Paul Thomas Anderson: A Conversa-
tion,” YouTube (video), March 23, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXT0WOUceak.
38. Austin Film Festival, “On Story: 413 Greaser’s Palace: A Conversation with Jonathan Demme and
Paul Thomas Anderson.”
39. The film includes multiple overt references to Downey; the peripheral use of firecrackers in the
Rahad Jackson sequence was taken whole cloth from Putney Swope, which also provided a surname
for the character Buck Swope. Additionally, the name of Philip Baker Hall’s character, Floyd
Gondolli, was lifted from an unseen character in Downey’s Chafed Elbows (1966).
40. Anderson, “Feature Commentary by Filmmaker P. T. Anderson.”
41. Anderson, “Feature Commentary by Filmmaker P. T. Anderson.”
42. Kyle Buchanan, “Love, Death, and Control: Paul Thomas Anderson on Making Phantom Thread,”
Vulture, December 13, 2017, https://www.vulture.com/2017/12/director-paul-thomas-anderson-on
-phantom-thread-mortality.html.

3. on influences 195
43. Oliver Lunn, “Paul Thomas Anderson on Perfectionism and Making ‘Phantom Thread,’ ” Vice,
February 1, 2018, https://www.vice.com/en/article/a34wza/paul-thomas-anderson-on-perfectionism
-and-making-phantom-thread.
44. Marc Maron, “Episode 565: Paul Thomas Anderson,” WTF with Marc Maron (podcast), January 5,
2015, http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episodes/episode_565_-_paul_thomas_anderson.
45. Anderson, “Feature Commentary by Filmmaker P. T. Anderson.”
46. Anderson, “Ten Films That Influenced Boogie Nights.”
47. Maron, “Episode 565: Paul Thomas Anderson.”
48. David Konow, “ ‘Movies Do Cause Violence!’ Paul Thomas Anderson,” Creative Screenwriting, July 8,
2016, https://creativescreenwriting.com/boogie-nights/.
49. filmschoolsecrets, “Paul Thomas Anderson on Why He Dropped Out of Film School,” YouTube
(video), April 25, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZGrW7tHJTQ&t=1s.
50. Paul Thomas Anderson, “Director and Talent Commentary,” Hard Eight (DVD), dir. Paul Thomas
Anderson (Culver City, CA: Columbia TriStar Home Video, 1999).
51. Sandra Benedetti, “Interview,” Cinelive, March 2000, at Cigarettes & Red Vines, http://cigsandredvines
.blogspot.com/2000/03/interview-cinelive-magazine.html.
52. Danny Leigh, “Eraserhead: The True Story Behind David Lynch’s Surreal Shocker,” Guardian
(London), March 22, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/mar/22/david-lynch-eraserhead.
53. Chris Rodley, Lynch on Lynch (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 71.
54. Christina Lane, Magnolia (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 76.
55. Dave Kehr, “A Poet of Love and Chaos in the Valley,” New York Times, October 6, 2002, https://www
.nytimes.com/2002/10/06/movies/film-a-poet-of-love-and-chaos-in-the-valley.html.
56. Mark Caro, “Anderson Casts Wider Net with ‘Punch-Drunk,’ ” Chicago Tribune, October 13, 2002,
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2002-10-13-0210120406-story.html.
57. Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in “Interview: BAM Q&A,” Cigarettes & Red Vines, June 23, 2003,
http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2003/06/interview-bam-q.html.
58. Sperb, Blossoms and Blood, 206.
59. Lynn Hirschberg, “The New Frontier’s Man,” New York Times, November 11, 2007, https://www
.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/magazine/11daylewis-t2.html.
60. 92nd Street Y, “Daniel Day Lewis and Paul Thomas Anderson on There Will Be Blood: Reel Pieces with
Annette Insdorf,” YouTube (video), July 26, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bcUQhWmVRo.
61. Dennis Lim, “A Director Continues His Quest,” New York Times, December 27, 2012, https://
www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/movies/awardsseason/paul-thomas-anderson-on-preparing-for-and
-following-up-the-master.html.
62. Jim Hemphill, “ ‘The Only Thing I Ever Really Look at in Movies Is the Actors’: Paul Thomas
Anderson on Inherent Vice,” Filmmaker, December 11, 2014, https://filmmakermagazine.com/88626
-the-only-thing-i-ever-really-look-at-in-movies-is-the-actors-paul-thomas-anderson-on-inherent-vice/.
63. Logan Hill, “Pynchon’s Cameo, and Other Surrealities,” New York Times, September 26, 2014, https://
www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/movies/paul-thomas-anderson-films-inherent-vice.html.
64. Roger Ebert, “Great Movies: Vertigo,” RogerEbert.com, October 13, 1996, https://www.rogerebert
.com/reviews/great-movie-vertigo-1958.
65. Edward White, “The Dark Side of an Auteur: On Alfred Hitchcock’s Treatment of Women,” LItHub,
April 26, 2021, https://lithub.com/the-dark-side-of-an-auteur-on-alfred-hitchcocks-treatment
-of-women/.
66. John Anderson, “Review: ‘The Phantom Thread’ Confronts the Mystery of Other People,” America,
January 3, 2018, https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2018/01/03/review-phantom-thread
-confronts-mystery-other-people.
67. Adam Nayman, “Film of the Week: Phantom Thread Unravels the Relationship Between an Artist
and His Muse,” Sight & Sound, December 12, 2018, https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight
-sound-magazine/reviews-recommendations/phantom-thread-paul-thomas-anderson-daniel-day
-lewis-artist-muse.
68. David Resin, “Interview: “Twenty Questions,” Playboy, February 1998, at Cigarettes & Red Vines,
http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/1998/02/interview-20-questions.html.

196 3. on influences
69. “The Truth About Charlie,” Entertainment Weekly, August 17, 2002, https://ew.com/article/2002
/08/17/truth-about-charlie/.
70. “[The Truth About Charlie] was the chance to do kind of a thank-you [to Truffaut].” Jonathan Demme,
quoted in Caro, “Demme Plays New ‘Charade.’ ”
71. Paul Clinton, “Review: ‘The Truth About Charlie’ Is: It’s Bad,” CNN, October 25, 2002, https://
www.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/Movies/10/25/review.charlie/index.html.
72. Caro, “Demme plays new ‘Charade.’ ”
73. David Fear, “Paul Thomas Anderson: Why I Needed to Make ‘Phantom Thread,’ ” Rolling Stone,
December 19, 2017, https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-features/paul-thomas-anderson-why-i
-needed-to-make-phantom-thread-127368/.
74. Perkins, “Kicking and Screaming: Altmanesque Cynicism and Energy in the Work of Paul Thomas
Anderson and Noah Baumbach,” 487.
75. Michael Bliss and Christina Banks, What Goes Around Comes Around: The Films of Jonathan Demme
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1996), 27.
76. Bliss and Banks, What Goes Around Comes Around: The Films of Jonathan Demme, 32.
77. Lane, Magnolia, 47.
78. Bill Simmons, “Paul Thomas Anderson on ‘Licorice Pizza’ and the Bearles Doc, Plus Million-
Dollar Picks Week 14,” Ringer, December 10, 2021, https://www.theringer.com/the-bill-simmons
-podcast/2021/12/10/22827348/paul-thomas-anderson-on-licorice-pizza-and-the-beatles-doc-plus
-million-dollar-picks-week-14.
79. Adam Nayman, “Show Biz Kids: Paul Thomas Anderson on Licorice Pizza, ” Cinema Scope, December
2021, https://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-online/show-biz-kids-paul-thomas-anderson-on-licorice
-pizza/.
80. Julian Murphet, “P. T. Anderson’s Dilemma: The Limits of Surrogate Paternity,” Sydney Studies 34
(2008): 71.

4. on domesticit y

1. Paul Thomas Anderson, “Phantom Thread—For Your Consideration: Best Original Screenplay,” 2.
2. George Toles, Contemporary Film Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2016), 5.
3. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013), 98.
4. Mim Udovitch, “The Epic Obsessions of P. T. Anderson,” Rolling Stone, February 3, 2000, at Cigarettes &
Red Vines, http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2000/02/interview-rolling-stone.html.
5. Chris Borrelli, “Son of Ghoulardi—Hot Hollywood Director,” Toledo Blade, January 24, 2000, at
Cigarettes & Red Vines, http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2000/01/interview-toledo-blade.html.
6. Marc Maron, “Episode 565: Paul Thomas Anderson,” WTF with Marc Maron (podcast), January 5,
2015, http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episodes/episode_565_-_paul_thomas_anderson.
7. 92nd Street Y, “Daniel Day Lewis and Paul Thomas Anderson on There Will be Blood: Reel Pieces with
Annette Insdorf,” YouTube (video), July 26, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bcUQhWmVRo.
8. Though his divorce from Edwina, second of his three wives and mother to Paul, is not listed as final-
ized until 1995, Anderson’s description of this period evokes a bachelor’s lifestyle (c.f. Paul Thomas
Anderson, “Director & Talent Commentary,” Hard Eight [DVD], dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, Culver
City, CA: Columbia TriStar Home Video, 1999).
9. Anderson, “Director & Talent Commentary.”
10. John H. Richardson, “The Secret History of Paul Thomas Anderson,” Esquire, September 22, 2008,
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a4973/paul-thomas-anderson-1008/.
11. Mim Udovitch, “The Epic Obsessions of P. T. Anderson,” Rolling Stone, February 3, 2000, at
Cigarettes & Red Vines, http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2000/02/interview-rolling-stone.html.
12. David Konow, “ ‘Movies Do Cause Violence!’ Paul Thomas Anderson,” Creative Screenwriting,
July 8, 2016, https://creativescreenwriting.com/boogie-nights/.

4. on domesticity 197
13. Paul Thomas Anderson, “Feature Commentary by Filmmaker P. T. Anderson,” Boogie Nights, dir.
Paul Thomas Anderson (Burbank, CA: New Line Home Video, 2000).
14. Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in “Interview: Astor Theatre Q&A,” Cigarettes & Red Vines,
October 25, 2012, http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2012/10/interview-astor-theatre-q.html.
15. Maron, “Episode 565: Paul Thomas Anderson.”
16. Maron, “Episode 565: Paul Thomas Anderson.”
17. Chuck Stephens, “Paul Thomas Anderson Lets It All Hang Out,” Village Voice, December 14, 1999,
https://www.villagevoice.com/1999/12/14/paul-thomas-anderson-lets-it-all-hang-out/.
18. Anderson, Boogie Nights (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), unpaginated.
19. Aleksandar Hemon, “Why ‘Phantom Thread’ Is Propaganda for Toxic Masculinity,” New Yorker,
April 8, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/why-phantom-thread-is-propaganda
-for-toxic-masculinity.
20. Loren Glass, “After the Phallus,” American Imago 58, no. 2 (2001): 545.
21. David Konow, “ ‘Remember the power is yours. The power is in the writer.’ Paul Thomas Anderson,”
Creative Screenwriting, July 15, 2016, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/magnolia/.
22. Jesse Fox Mayshark, Post-Pop Cinema: The Search for Meaning in New American Film (Westport, CT:
Praeger, 2007), 83–84.
23. Brian Michael Goss, “ ‘Things Like This Don’t Just Happen’: Ideology and Paul Thomas Anderson’s
Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 26, no. 2 (2002): 180.
24. Paul Thomas Anderson, “There Will Be Blood: Final Shooting Script,” at ScriptSlug, https://www
.scriptslug.com/assets/uploads/scripts/there-will-be-blood-2007.pdf, 80.
25. Rodrigo Perez, “ ‘I Don’t Consider That We’re Dealing with a Cult’—Paul Thomas Anderson Talks
About ‘The Master’ at TIFF,” IndieWire, September 9, 2012, https://www.indiewire.com/2012/09/i-dont
-consider-that-were-dealing-with-a-cult-paul-thomas-anderson-talks-about-the-master-at-tiff-106295/.
26. Brian Michael Goss, “ ‘Things Like This Don’t Just Happen’: Ideology and Paul Thomas Anderson’s
Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 26, no. 2 (2002): 190.
27. Garry Maddox, “It’s Not About Hubbard, Says Master Filmmaker,” Sydney Morning Herald, October
26, 2012.
28. Peter Bradshaw, “Licorice Pizza Review—Paul Thomas Anderson’s Funniest and Most Relaxed
Film Yet,” Guardian (London), November 15, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/nov/15
/licorice-pizza-review-paul-thomas-anderson.
29. Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in Chuck Stephens, “Interview with Paul Thomas Anderson,” in
Magnolia: The Shooting Script (New York: Newmarket, 2000), 198.
30. Konow, “ ‘Movies Do Cause Violence!’ Paul Thomas Anderson.”
31. Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in Stephens, “Interview with Paul Thomas Anderson,” 201.
32. Paul Thomas Anderson, Punch-Drunk Love: The Shooting Script (New York: Newmarket Press, 2002), 67.
33. Anderson, Punch-Drunk Love: The Shooting Script, 70.
34. Olivia Rutigliano, “In Licorice Pizza, Everyone Is Pretending to Be a Grown-Up. Especially the
Grown-Ups,” Literary Hub, December 17, 2021, https://lithub.com/in-licorice-pizza-everyone-is
-pretending-to-be-a-grown-up-especially-the-grown-ups/.
35. Lucy Fischer, “Theory Into Practice: En-Gendering Narrative in Magnolia,” in Screening Genders,
ed. Krin Gabbard and William Luhr (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 35.
36. D. W. Winnicott, The Child and the Outside World: Studies in Developing Relationships (London:
Routledge, 1957), 3.
37. Winnicott, The Child and the Outside World, 4.
38. Adam Nayman, Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks (New York: Abrams, 2020), 65.
39. Adam Nayman, “Paul Thomas Anderson Lets Go with ‘Licorice Pizza,’ Ringer, November 26,
2021, https://www.theringer.com/movies/2021/11/26/22801227/licorice-pizza-review-paul-thomas
-anderson.
40. Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, “ ‘Too Close for Comfort’: ‘American Beauty’ and the Incest Motif,” Cinema
Journal 44, no. 1 (Autumn 2004): 71.
41. John Beebe, “At the Movies: Boogie Nights. Written and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson,” San
Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal 16, no. 3 (1997): 82.

198 4. on domesticity
42. Chuck Stephens, “The Swollen Boy: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights and Diggler Days,”
Film Comment 33, no. 5 (1997): 12.
43. Julian Murphet, “P. T. Anderson’s Dilemma: The Limits of Surrogate Paternity,” Sydney Studies 34
(2008): 71.
44. Paul Thomas Anderson, “Knuckle Sandwich, First Draft,” September/October 1993, 7, at Bill Hicks,
“Knuckle Sandwich by Paul Thomas Anderson PDF,” Scribd, https://www.scribd.com/document
/405854734/Knuckle-Sandwich-by-Paul-Thomas-Anderson-pdf.
45. Anderson, “Knuckle Sandwich, First Draft,” 86.
46. Anderson, “Knuckle Sandwich, First Draft,” 86–87.
47. Saturday Night Live, “Ben Affleck/Fiona Apple,” February 19, 2000.
48. Mim Udovitch, “Lights . . . Camera . . . Hold It, Hold It; Would Someone Please Reattach Mark’s
Member, Please . . . And Action!,” Esquire, October 1, 1997, at Cigarettes & Red Vines, http://
cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/1997/10/interview-lightscamerahold-it-hold-it.html.
49. Anderson, “Feature Commentary by Filmmaker P. T. Anderson.”
50. Walter C. Metz, “The Mechanics of the Tectonic Man: Comedy and the Ludic Function of A
Serious Man and Punch-Drunk Love,” Americana 10, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 1.
51. Toles, Contemporary Film Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, 43.
52. Anderson, Punch-Drunk Love: The Shooting Script, 76.
53. “Deleted Scenes,” Punch-Drunk Love, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson (New York: Criterion, 2016).
54. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; reprint, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015), 47.
55. Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in Toles, Contemporary Film Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, 186.
56. James Owen, “Tough Love: ‘Phantom Thread’ Evokes Director’s Earlier Attempt at Romance,” Colum-
bia Daily Tribune, January 31, 2018, https://www.columbiatribune.com/entertainmentlife/20180131
/tough-love-phantom-thread-evokes-directors-earlier-attempt-at-romance.
57. Marco Abel, “Failing to Connect: Itinerations of Desire in Oskar Roehler’s Postromance Films,”
New German Critique, no. 109 (2010): 77.
58. Glen Fuller, “Punch-Drunk Love: A Post-Romance Romance,” M/C Journal 10, no. 3 (2007). https://
journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/2660.
59. Abel, “Failing to Connect,” 77.
60. Fuller, “Punch-Drunk Love: A Post-Romance Romance.”
61. “At one point, Reynolds confronts Alma by asking, “What precisely is the nature of my game?”—
a line that is both menacing and a deliciously anachronistic reference to a Rolling Stones song
[Sympathy for the Devil].” Sean P. Means, “ ‘Phantom Thread,’ with Daniel Day-Lewis’ Last Great
Role, Is a Beautiful Movie Woven with Menace,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 17, 2018, https://www
.sltrib.com/artsliving/movies/2018/01/17/phantom-thread-with-daniel-day-lewis-last-great-role-is
-a-beautiful-movie-woven-with-menace/.
62. There Will Be Blood forms an interesting outlier, as it features almost no female characters of any
significance, with any potential sensual energy being redirected into the oil extraction process; as
Stephanie LeMenager points out, for a film without any sexual situations, it is nonetheless obsessed
with “the resistance of bodies, their heft, the friction of their interaction.” Stephanie LeMenager,
“The Aesthetics of Petroleum, After Oil!,” American Literary History 24, no. 1 (2012): 79.
63. Anderson “Phantom Thread—For Your Consideration: Best Original Screenplay,” 13.

5. on screenwriting

1. Paul Thomas Anderson, “Director & Talent Commentary,” Hard Eight [DVD], dir. Paul Thomas
Anderson, Culver City, CA: Columbia TriStar Home Video, 1999).
2. George Toles, Contemporary Film Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2016), 25.
3. Toles, Contemporary Film Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, 25.
4. Anderson, “Director & Talent Commentary.”

5. on screenwriting 199
5. Anderson, “Director & Talent Commentary.”
6. Paul Thomas Anderson, “Feature Commentary by Filmmaker P. T. Anderson,” Boogie Nights, dir.
Paul Thomas Anderson (Burbank, CA: New Line Home Video, 2000).
7. Mick LaSalle, “ ‘Boogie’ Man Does the ’70s,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 17, 1997, https://
www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Boogie-Man-Does-the-70s-Mark-Wahlberg-is-a-2825519.php.
8. Toles, Contemporary Film Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, 25.
9. Lynn Hirschberg, “His Way,” New York Times, December 19, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999
/12/19/magazine/his-way.html.
10. Anderson has spoken of his early films as being shaped by “[realizing] I had so many actors I wanted
to write for that the form started to come more from them.” Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in
Sharon Waxman, Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood
Studio System (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 192.
11. Harold Pinter, Complete Works (New York: Grove, 1976), 1:14.
12. Marc Maron, “Episode 565: Paul Thomas Anderson,” WTF with Marc Maron (podcast), January 5,
2015, http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episodes/episode_565_-_paul_thomas_anderson.
13. Walter Kirn, “Drugs to Do, Cases to Solve,” New York Times, August 20, 2009, https://www
.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/books/review/Kirn-t.html.
14. Ernest Hemingway, quoted in Charles M. Oliver, Ernest Hemingway A to Z: The Essential Reference
to the Life and Work (New York: Checkmark, 1999), 322.
15. Paul Thomas Anderson, “Phantom Thread—For Your Consideration: Best Original Screenplay,” 25.
16. “Paris was really excelling . . . in London there was a little bit of a stutter-start after the war . . . we
decided to set our story in ’55, which was just after rationing, just sort of far enough away from the
war that you could kind of have the hangover of it a little bit still.” Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted
in Oscars, “Academy Conversations: Phantom Thread,” YouTube (video), April 2, 2018, https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B8Tf3Tvs1k.
17. Elisa Pezzotta, Stanley Kubrick: Adapting the Sublime (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 35.
18. Paul Thomas Anderson, “There Will Be Blood: Final Shooting Script,” at ScriptSlug, https://www
.scriptslug.com/assets/uploads/scripts/there-will-be-blood-2007.pdf, 80.
19. David Konow, “ ‘Movies Do Cause Violence!’ Paul Thomas Anderson,” Creative Screenwriting, July
8, 2016, https://creativescreenwriting.com/boogie-nights/.
20. One notable example of a typo that made it all the way to the final cut: in Punch-Drunk Love,
Barry initially tells his brother-in-law that “business is very food” rather than “very good.” Instead
of fixing the mistake, Anderson rolled it into the dialogue, with characters commenting on the odd
transposition, reinforcing Barry’s absolute alienation. Jason Sperb, Blossoms and Blood: Postmodern
Media Culture and the Films of Paul Thomas Anderson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 151.
21. BY&ME, “Paul Thomas Anderson Q&A—The Master,” YouTube (video), November 15, 2012,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_A4pqo5WE8.
22. Konow, “ ‘Movies Do Cause Violence!’ Paul Thomas Anderson.”
23. Greg Mariotti, “Interview: Cigarettes & Coffee Exclusive,” Cigarettes & Coffee, December 11, 1999,
at Cigarettes & Red Vines, http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/1999/12/interview-cigarettes-coffee
-exclusive.html.
24. Cynthia Fuchs, “It’s a Weeping Movie,” Nitrate Online, January 7, 2000, https://nitrateonline.com
/2000/fmagnolia.html.
25. Anderson, “Director & Talent Commentary.”
26. Justin Morrow, “Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Editor Reveals Secrets from the Cut-
ting Room,” No Film School, June 13, 2017, https://nofilmschool.com/2017/06/dylan-tichenor-editor
-there-will-be-blood-magnolia.
27. Hirschberg, “His Way.”
28. Adam Nayman, Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks (New York: Abrams, 2020), 248.
29. Bill Simmons, “Paul Thomas Anderson on ‘Phantom Thread,’ Loving Adam Sandler, and ‘Boogie
Nights,” Ringer, December 27, 2017, https://www.theringer.com/the-bill-simmons-podcast/2017/12
/27/16803838/paul-thomas-anderson-on-pursuing-filmmaking-loving-adam-sandler-and-making
-boogie-nights.

200 5. on screenwriting
30. 92nd Street Y, “Daniel Day Lewis and Paul Thomas Anderson on There Will be Blood: Reel
Pieces with Annette Insdorf,” YouTube (video), July 26, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=9bcUQhWmVRo.
31. Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in “Interview: BAM Q&A,” Cigarettes & Red Vines, June 23, 2003,
http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2003/06/interview-bam-q.html.
32. Anderson, quoted in: “Interview: BAM Q&A.”
33. Waxman, Rebels on the Backlot, 336.
34. Manhattan Edit Workshop, “Editor Dylan Tichenor, ACE on Shaping a Quiet Scene in “There Will
Be Blood,” YouTube (video), June 29, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh-Iut4dKLU.
35. Leslie Jones, quoted in “Interview: Making ‘The Master’ with Editor Leslie Jones,” Cigarettes & Red
Vines, February 18, 2013, http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2013/02/interview-making-master-with
-editor.html.
36. Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in “That Moment: Magnolia Diary,” Magnolia (DVD), dir. Paul
Thomas Anderson (Burbank, CA: New Line Home Entertainment, 2000).
37. Simmons, “Paul Thomas Anderson on ‘Phantom Thread,’ Loving Adam Sandler, and ‘Boogie Nights.’ ”
38. Hirschberg, “His Way.”
39. Nayman, Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks, 22.
40. Hirschberg, “His Way.”
41. Jacqui Griffin, “A Quick Guide to Auteur Theory,” Film Inquiry, February 28, 2017, https://www
.filminquiry.com/quick-guide-auteur-theory/.
42. Haden Guest, “The Killing: Kubrick’s Clockwork,” Criterion, August 15, 2011, https://www.criterion
.com/current/posts/1956-the-killing-kubrick-s-clockwork.
43. Thomas Leitch, quoted in Pezzotta, Stanley Kubrick: Adapting the Sublime, 11.
44. Julian Roman, “Paul Thomas Anderson Discusses Greed and Treachery in There Will Be Blood,”
MovieWeb, December 26, 2007, https://movieweb.com/paul-thomas-anderson-discusses-greed-and
-treachery-in-there-will-be-blood/.
45. Josh Modell, “Interview: Paul Thomas Anderson,” AV Club, January 2, 2008, https://film.avclub
.com/paul-thomas-anderson-1798213013.
46. Gregory Alan Phipps, Making the Milk Into a Milkshake: Adapting Upton Sinclair’s ‘Oil!’ Into P. T.
Anderson’s ‘There Will Be Blood,’ ” Literature/Film Quarterly 43, no. 1 (2015): 34.
47. Dennis Lim, “A Director Continues His Quest,” New York Times, December 27, 2012, https://
www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/movies/awardsseason/paul-thomas-anderson-on-preparing-for-and
-following-up-the-master.html.
48. Maron, “Episode 565: Paul Thomas Anderson.”
49. Modell, “Interview: Paul Thomas Anderson.”
50. Oscars, “Academy Conversations: Inherent Vice,” YouTube (video), December 19, 2014. https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=M95Yz1DwAOI.
51. “You have this tremendous advantage of reading something for the first time. You never have this
experience again with the story. You have a reaction to it: a kind of falling-in-love reaction . . . as long
as you possibly can, you retain your emotional attitude, whatever it was that made you fall in love in
the first place.” Stanley Kubrick, quoted in Pezzotta, Stanley Kubrick: Adapting the Sublime, 18.
52. Pezzotta, Stanley Kubrick: Adapting the Sublime, 13.
53. Pezzotta, Stanley Kubrick: Adapting the Sublime, 185.
54. John Bruns, “The Polyphonic Film,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 6, no. 2 (2008): 207.

6. on gender per formance

1. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and
Gender Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988).
2. Joanne Clarke Dillman, “Twelve Characters in Search of a Televisual Text: Magnolia Masquerading
as Soap Opera,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 33, no. 3 (2005): 145.

6. on gender performance 201

3. Maria Cohut, “The Controversy of ‘Female Hysteria,’ ” Medical News Today, October 13, 2020,
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/the-controversy-of-female-hysteria.
4. Dillman, “Twelve Characters in Search of a Televisual Text,” 145.
5. David Greven, Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 125.
6. Greven, Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush, 128.
7. Greven, Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush, 129.
8. George Toles, Contemporary Film Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2016), 66.
9. Marc Maron, “Episode 565: Paul Thomas Anderson,” WTF with Marc Maron (podcast), January 5,
2015, http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episodes/episode_565_-_paul_thomas_anderson.
10. 92nd Street Y, “Daniel Day Lewis and Paul Thomas Anderson on There Will be Blood: Reel
Pieces with Annette Insdorf,” YouTube (video), July 26, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=9bcUQhWmVRo.
11. Maron, “Episode 565: Paul Thomas Anderson.”
12. Nick Pinkerton, “The Master? Paul Thomas Anderson as American Auteur,” The Point, no. 15
(December 15, 2017), https://thepointmag.com/criticism/the-master-paul-thomas-anderson/.
13. Walter C. Metz has also viewed the harmonium as analogous to the monolith but interprets its
function as a playful reversal of Kubrick’s film: while 2001 “[traces] the destruction of mankind’s
humanity,” Anderson’s story traces the opposite on a personal scale. Walter C. Metz, “The Mechan-
ics of the Tectonic Man: Comedy and the Ludic Function of A Serious Man and Punch-Drunk Love,”
Americana 10, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 4.
14. Christina Lane, Magnolia (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 34.
15. Mim Udovitch, “Lights . . . Camera . . . Hold It, Hold It; Would Someone Please Reattach Mark’s
Member, Please . . . And Action!,” Esquire, October 1, 1997, at Cigarettes & Red Vines, http://
cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/1997/10/interview-lightscamerahold-it-hold-it.html.
16. “[Wahlberg] started telling people that it was my penis. . . . People said, ‘So that’s your penis at
the end of the movie?’ A couple of times I said, ‘Yeah, it is.’ ” Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in
“Interview: Roger Ebert Q&A,” Cigarettes & Red Vines, February 12, 1999, http://cigsandredvines.
blogspot.com/1999/02/interview-roger-ebert-q.html.
17. Matt Grainger, “Interview: Cinemattractions Q&A with Paul Thomas Anderson,” Cinemattractions,
February 1998, at Cigarettes & Red Vines, http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/1998/02/interview
-cinemattractions-q-with-paul.html.
18. Grainger, “Interview: Cinemattractions Q&A with Paul Thomas Anderson.”
19. Grainger, “Interview: Cinemattractions Q&A with Paul Thomas Anderson.”
20. Paul Thomas Anderson, “Knuckle Sandwich, First Draft,” September/October 1993, 7, at Bill
Hicks, “Knuckle Sandwich by Paul Thomas Anderson PDF,” Scribd, https://www.scribd.com
/document/405854734/Knuckle-Sandwich-by-Paul-Thomas-Anderson-pdf, 68.
21. Paul Thomas Anderson, “Feature Commentary by Filmmaker P. T. Anderson,” Boogie Nights, dir.
Paul Thomas Anderson (Burbank, CA: New Line Home Video, 2000).
22. George Toles describes “the missing phallic gun” as “implicitly a collective experience for Anderson’s
group of broken, fearful, and vulnerable men” (Toles, Contemporary Film Directors: Paul Thomas
Anderson, 13); Joanne Clarke Dillman describes the lost gun as “the phallic signifier par excellence”
(Dillman, “Twelve Characters in Search of a Televisual Text, 145).
23. Toles, Contemporary Film Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, 13.
24. Toles, Contemporary Film Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, 23.
25. Paul Thomas Anderson, “Director and Talent Commentary,” Hard Eight (DVD), dir. Paul Thomas
Anderson (Culver City, CA: Columbia TriStar Home Video, 1999).
26. Anderson, “Director & Talent Commentary.”
27. Jason Sperb, Blossoms and Blood: Postmodern Media Culture and the Films of Paul Thomas Anderson
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 8.
28. Greven, Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush, 16.
29. Chuck Stephens, “Interview with Paul Thomas Anderson,” in Magnolia: The Shooting Script (New
York: Newmarket, 2000), 202.

202 6. on gender performance

30. Aleksandar Hemon, “Why ‘Phantom Thread’ Is Propaganda for Toxic Masculinity,” New Yorker,
April 8, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/why-phantom-thread-is-propaganda
-for-toxic-masculinity.
31. Owen Gleiberman, “Why I Fell Out of Love with the Films of Paul Thomas Anderson,” Entertainment
Weekly, October 3, 2012, https://ew.com/article/2012/10/03/my-problem-with-p-t-andersons-films/.
32. Owen Gleiberman, The Twisted Fascination of ‘Phantom Thread’: If This Isn’t Toxic Masculinity,
What Is?,” Variety, January 6, 2018, https://variety.com/2018/film/columns/phantom-thread-is-about
-toxic-masculinity-daniel-day-lewis-1202654772/
33. Guy Lodge, “How Phantom Thread Undresses Our Ideas About Toxic Masculinity,” Guardian
(London), January 2, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jan/02/how-phantom-thread
-undresses-our-ideas-about-toxic-masculinity.
34. Lucy Fischer, “Theory Into Practice: En-Gendering Narrative in Magnolia,” in Screening Genders,
ed. Krin Gabbard and William Luhr (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 32.
35. Fischer, “Theory Into Practice: En-Gendering Narrative in Magnolia,” 33.
36. Fischer, “Theory Into Practice: En-Gendering Narrative in Magnolia,” 33.
37. Paul Thomas Anderson, “Inherent Vice: Final Shooting Script.”
38. Greven, Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush, 139.
39. Fischer, “Theory Into Practice: En-Gendering Narrative in Magnolia,” 33.
40. Sperb, Blossoms and Blood, 52.
41. By the time he depicted the closeted Joel Wachs in Licorice Pizza, Anderson demonstrated a strange
disbelief that homophobia could be a clear and present fact in American life: “Let’s not forget that
it was recent history where you could not reveal your personal life without fear of retribution,” he
said in 2021, a quote that is, to borrow Jason Sperb’s assessment of Anderson’s comments on race,
damning in its ignorance. Yohana Desta, “Paul Thomas Anderson on Inspiration: ‘The Rainbow Is
Right in Your Living Room, Idiot!,’ Vanity Fair, November 23, 2021, https://www.vanityfair.com
/hollywood/2021/11/paul-thomas-anderson-licorice-pizza-interview).
42. Maron, “Episode 565: Paul Thomas Anderson.”
43. “Flashback Friday: Ernie Anderson Vs The Copy,” Cigarettes & Red Vines, April 29, 2011, http://
cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2011/04/flashback-friday-ernie-anderson-vs-copy.html.
44. Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in “Interview: Exclusive Advance Seattle Screening Q&A Tran-
scription,” Cigarettes & Red Vines, October 3, 2002, http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2002/10
/interview-exclusive-advance-seattle.html.
45. “I had this song Aimee Mann was working on at the time called “Save Me,” and I listened to little
parts of it and got this image in my head of Melora, which is now the last shot of the movie. That
led to the thought of Philip Baker Hall walking up these steps to her apartment, knocking on her
door. And then it just started writing itself.” Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in Lisa Y. C. Garibay,
“Anderson’s Valley,” Independent Feature Project, December 1999, at Cigarettes & Red Vines, https://
cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/1999/12/interview-independent-feature-project.html.
46. Patrick Goldstein, “The New New Wave,” Los Angeles Times, December 12, 1999, https://www
.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-dec-12-ca-42968-story.html.
47. Dillman, “Twelve Characters in Search of a Televisual Text,” 144.
48. Toles, Contemporary Film Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, 10–14.
49. Toles, Contemporary Film Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, 21.
50. Toles, Contemporary Film Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, 21.
51. Toles, Contemporary Film Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, 147.
52. The “Wise Up” sequence functions as “a sort of nursery hush, with a maternal voice (Aimee Mann’s)
making the world over, as one does when crooning a lullaby late at night.” Toles, Contemporary Film
Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, 18.
53. Michael Goss, “ ‘Things Like This Don’t Just Happen’: Ideology and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Hard
Eight, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 26, no. 2 (2002): 181.
54. This point is subtler but still present in Licorice Pizza: Gary’s single mother (Mary Elizabeth Ellis)
is rendered compassionately, but her frequent absence from the Valentine home leaves a parental
vacuum that Gary must fill for his younger brother. Again, a matriarchal household can hardly

6. on gender performance 203

 be described as classically stable, and the conflation of son and father figure contributes another
note of symbolic incest to the Anderson canon. Anderson has pushed back against this charac-
terization: “There’s . . . a mistake that movies make, where if you have a mom who’s working
and not around, somehow it’s portrayed as a dysfunctional relationship, or as if she’s somehow an
absentee. And that’s fucking horseshit.” Adam Nayman, “Show Biz Kids: Paul Thomas Anderson
on Licorice Pizza,” Cinema Scope, December 2021, https://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-online
/show-biz-kids-paul-thomas-anderson-on-licorice-pizza/.
55. Oscars, “Academy Conversations: Phantom Thread,” YouTube (video), April 2, 2018, https://www
.youtube.com/watch?v=0B8Tf3Tvs1k
56. Kate Kellaway, “Actor Vicky Krieps: ‘I Spent a Whole Day Staring into Greenery to Avoid Daniel
Day-Lewis,” Guardian (London), January 21, 2018.
57. David Hering, “Old Clothes, New Europe: Phantom Thread’s Hidden Histories,” Quietus, February 10,
2018, https://thequietus.com/articles/23989-phantom-thread-review.
58. Sperb, Blossoms and Blood, 45.
59. Sperb, Blossoms and Blood, 7.
60. Sperb, Blossoms and Blood, 91.
61. Sperb, Blossoms and Blood, 103.
62. “Boogie Nights would reflect Anderson’s own personal ambivalence toward porn. ‘I love pornog-
raphy,’ he said in 1999, ‘just as much as it completely disgusts me and completely depresses me.”
Sperb, Blossoms and Blood, 74.
63. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, “Review: Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master,” Mubi Notebook, September
17, 2012, https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/notebook-reviews-paul-thomas-andersons-the-master.
64. Sharon Waxman, Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood
Studio System (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 122.
65. Adam Nayman, Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks (New York: Abrams, 2020), 216.
66. Julain Murphet, “P. T. Anderson’s Dilemma: The Limits of Surrogate Paternity,” Sydney Studies 34
(2008): 72.
67. Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in “Interview: Exclusive Fan-Submitted Q&A,” Cigarettes & Red
Vines, November 17, 2003, http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2003/11/interview-exclusive-fan
-submitted-q.html.
68. Kyle Buchanan, “Sad-Sack Comedians + Manic Pixie Dream Girls: A Rom-Com Template,” Vulture,
June 19, 2012, https://www.vulture.com/2012/06/sad-comedians-pixie-girls-a-rom-com-template.html.
69. Scott Tobias, “The New Cult Canon: Punch-Drunk Love,” AV Club, June 25, 2008, https://film
.avclub.com/the-new-cult-canon-punch-drunk-love-1798214280.
70. Nathan Rabin, “The Bataan Death March of Whimsy Case File 1: Elizabethtown,” AV Club, January 25,
2007, https://film.avclub.com/the-bataan-death-march-of-whimsy-case-file-1-elizabet-1798210595.
71. “It’s a way of describing female characters that’s reductive and diminutive, and I think basically misog-
ynist. I’m not saying that some of those characters that have been referred to as that don’t deserve it;
I think sometimes filmmakers have not used their imagination in imbuing their female charac-
ters with real life. . . . But I just think the term really means nothing; it’s just a way of reducing
people’s individuality down to a type, and I think that’s always a bad thing.” Zoe Kazan, quoted in
Patti Greco, “Zoe Kazan on Writing Ruby Sparks and Why You Should Never Call Her a ‘Manic
Pixie Dream Girl,’ ” Vulture, July 23, 2012, https://www.vulture.com/2012/07/zoe-kazan-ruby-sparks
-interview.html.
72. Nathan Rabin, “I’m Sorry for Coining the Phrase ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl,’ ” Salon, July 15, 2014,
https://www.salon.com/2014/07/15/im_sorry_for_coining_the_phrase_manic_pixie_dream_girl/.
73. Laurie Penny, “Laurie Penny on Sexism in Storytelling: I was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” New States-
man, June 30, 2013, https://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2013/06/i-was-manic-pixie-dream-girl.
74. Vishnevetsky, “Review: Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master.”
75. Sperb, Blossoms and Blood, 222.
76. Anthony Lane, “ ‘Licorice Pizza’ Is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Seventies Show,” New Yorker, November
26, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/licorice-pizza-is-paul-thomas-andersons
-seventies-show.

204 6. on gender performance

77. Manohla Dargis, “ ‘Licorice Pizza’ Review: California Dreaming and Scheming,” New York Times,
November 25, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/25/movies/licorice-pizza-review.html.
78. John Urbancich, “The Son of Ghoulardi Lives!,” Cleveland Sun, October 23, 1997, at Cigarettes &
Red Vines, http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/1997/10/interview-son-of-ghoulardi-lives.html.
79. Mim Udovitch, “The Epic Obsessions of P. T. Anderson,” Rolling Stone, February 3, 2000, at
Cigarettes & Red Vines, http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2000/02/interview-rolling-stone.html.
80. Anderson, Magnolia: The Shooting Script, 148.

7. on alienation effects

1. Steve Rose, “Inherent Vice Walkouts: How to Make a Film Your Audience Will Be Dying to Leave,”
Guardian (London), February 3, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/film/shortcuts/2015/feb/03
/inherent-vice-walk-outs-paul-thomas-anderson-movie.
2. Bertolt Brecht, trans. Eric Bentley, “On Chinese Acting,” Tulane Drama Review 6, no. 5 (1961): 130.
3. Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003), 75.
4. Lydie Storie, “Magnolia: Where Brecht Meets Celluloid?” Cinemattraction, June 25, 2007, https://
web.archive.org/web/20200926083140/http://www.cinemattraction.com/?p=461.
5. Nenad Jovanovic, Brechtian Cinemas: Montage and Theatricality in Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet,
Peter Watkins, and Lars von Trier (Albany: University of New York Press, 2017), 3–4.
6. Jean-Luc Godard, “What Is to Be Done? (France, 1970),” in Film Manifestos and Global Cinema
Cultures: A Critical Anthology, ed. Scott MacKenzie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014),
169–70.
7. Jan Uhde, “The Influence of Bertolt Brecht’s Theory of Distanciation on the Contemporary Cin-
ema, Particularly on Jean-Luc Godard,” Journal of the University Film Association 26, no. 3 (1974): 29.
8. Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in “Interview: Time/Yahoo! Chat Transcript,” Cigarettes & Red
Vines, December 16, 1999, https://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/1999/12/interview-timeyahoo-chat
-transcript.html.
9. Paul Thomas Anderson, “Director and Talent Commentary,” Hard Eight (DVD), dir. Paul Thomas
Anderson (Culver City, CA: Columbia TriStar Home Video, 1999).
10. Sharon Waxman, Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood
Studio System (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 169.
11. Elena Gorfinkel, “The Future of Anachronism: Todd Haynes and the Magnificent Andersons,”
in Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, ed. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 162.
12. Christina Lane, Magnolia (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 9.
13. Ryan Gilbey, “Interview: Paul Thomas Anderson,” Sunday Times (London), February 2, 2003, https://
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/interview-paul-thomas-anderson-8sct68xsfrk.
14. George Toles, Contemporary Film Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2016), 31.
15. Jason Sperb, Blossoms and Blood: Postmodern Media Culture and the Films of Paul Thomas Anderson
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 155.
16. Walter C. Metz, “The Mechanics of the Tectonic Man: Comedy and the Ludic Function of A Serious
Man and Punch-Drunk Love,” Americana 10, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 4.
17. Chris McEwen, “ ‘Inherent Vice’ and the Complicated Protagonists of Paul Thomas Anderson,”
Vice, November 27, 2014, https://www.vice.com/da/article/av49z8/inherent-vice-paul-thomas
-anderson-125.
18. Kaitlin L. Brunick, James E. Cutting, and Jordan E. DeLong, “Low-Level Features of Film: What
They Are and Why We Would Be Lost Without Them,” in Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at
the Movies, ed. Arthur P. Shimamura (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 133.
19. James E. Cutting, Jordan E. DeLong, and Christine E. Nothelfer, “Attention and the Evolution of
Hollywood Film,” Psychological Science 21, no. 3 (March 2010): 432–39.

7. on alienation effects 205

20. Cutting et al., “Attention and the Evolution of Hollywood Film.”
21. Vashi Nedomansky, “Paul Thomas Anderson: Shot Lengths of Seven Masterpieces,” VashiVisuals,
December 4, 2018, https://vashivisuals.com/tag/paul-thomas-anderson/.
22. Brunick et al., “Low-Level Features of Film,” 135.
23. Brunick et al., “Low-Level Features of Film,” 137.
24. Todd Berliner, “Hollywood Storytelling and Aesthetic Pleasure,” in Psychocinematics, ed. Shimamura, 195.
25. Rodrigo Perez, “Paul Thomas Anderson at NYFF: Five Influences of ‘Inherent Vice’ Plus Curated
Clips and Films You Should Know,” IndieWire, October 5, 2014, https://www.indiewire.com/2014/10
/paul-thomas-anderson-at-nyff-5-influences-of-inherent-vice-plus-curated-clips-films-you-should
-know-271616/.
26. Marc Maron, “Episode 565: Paul Thomas Anderson,” WTF with Marc Maron (podcast), January 5,
2015, http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episodes/episode_565_-_paul_thomas_anderson.
27. Maron, “Episode 565: Paul Thomas Anderson.”
28. Dana Goodyear, “Largo Nights,” New Yorker, May 12, 2008, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine
/2008/05/19/largo-nights.
29. Chris Hardwick, “Paul Thomas Anderson,” Id1iot with Chris Hardwick (podcast), January 11, 2018.
30. Carrie Brownstein, “An Interview with Mary Lynn Rajskub,” Believer, September 1, 2004, https://
believermag.com/an-interview-with-mary-lynn-rajskub/.
31. Maron, “Episode 565: Paul Thomas Anderson.”
32. “Daniel Plainview’s I Drink Your Milkshake,” Saturday Night Live, YouTube (video), September 23,
2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qajb3Y4tjuA.
33. Winnebago Man (video), dir. Ben Steinbauer (New York: Kino International, 2009).
34. Ken McAlpine, “Stand-Up Takes a Tumble: The Comedy Club Boom of the ’80s Has Gone Bust
in the ’90s, and Some Blame TV for Offering Top-Quality Humor at Low Cost,” Los Angeles Times,
May 25, 1995, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-05-25-vl-5693-story.html.
35. In the interest of full disclosure, Travis Woods, host of Increment Vice, is a friend and colleague, and
I appeared on the show’s July 10, 2020 episode.
36. Ryan Gilbey, “Should Critics See Films More Than Once?,” Guardian (London), January 29, 2015,
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/jan/29/should-critics-see-films-more-than-once
-inherent-vice.
37. Jordan Hoffman, “Inherent Twice: Are Some Movies Allowed to Require a Second Viewing?,”
Vanity Fair, January 9, 2015, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/01/inherent-vice-second
-viewing.
38. Writers Guild Foundation, “Writers on Writing: Paul Thomas Anderson,” YouTube (video), September 8,
2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9aBe0FB3d0.

8. on faith and belief

1. Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in “Interview: CBC,” Cigarettes & Red Vines, October 1, 2012,
http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2012/10/interview-cbc.html.
2. Anderson, quoted in “Interview: CBC.”
3. Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in Sharon Waxman, Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors
and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 85.
4. Anderson, quoted in “Interview: CBC.”
5. Catherine Shoard, “ ‘An Account of How Insane We Once Were’—Paul Thomas Anderson on There
Will Be Blood,” Guardian (London), September 13, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019
/sep/13/how-insane-we-once-were-paul-thomas-anderson-there-will-be-blood.
6. Lynn Hirschberg, “His Way,” New York Times, December 19, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999
/12/19/magazine/his-way.html.
7. Christina Lane, Magnolia (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 19.

206 7. on alienation effects

8. For another representative example, see David Fincher’s assertion that every scene in Fight Club
contains a Starbucks logo. “A Movie Easter Egg Hunt: The Best Hidden Messages and Inside Jokes
in Film,” Telegraph (London), April 17, 2017, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/movie-easter
-eggs-hunt-best-hidden-messages-inside-jokes-film/starbucks-cup-visible-every-scene-fight
-club/).
9. David Congdon, “Reconsidering Apocalyptic Cinema: Pauline Apocalyptic and Paul Thomas
Anderson,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 24, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 413.
10. In Licorice Pizza, Gary’s somewhat incongruous and pseudo-joyful declaration that “it’s the end of
the world” during the onset of the oil crisis points to its own potential Pauline interpretation: Alana’s
interest in Gary represents the intrusive and transformative force necessary for existential realign-
ment. It may be the end of the world, but more significantly, it’s the start of the new one.
11. Anderson, “There Will Be Blood: Final Shooting Script,” 24.
12. Jeffrey Overstreet, “Review: There Will Be Blood,” Christianity Today, December 26, 2007. https://
www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/decemberweb-only/therewillbeblood.html
13. Paul Thomas Anderson, “There Will Be Blood: Final Shooting Script,” at ScriptSlug, https://www
.scriptslug.com/assets/uploads/scripts/there-will-be-blood-2007.pdf, 112B.
14. Caity Weaver, “How Maya Rudolph Became the Master of Impressions,” New York Times, September 14,
2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/magazine/maya-rudolph-snl-amazon-forever.html.
15. Scott Foundas, “Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master’s Master,” Village Voice, September 5, 2012,
https://www.villagevoice.com/2012/09/05/paul-thomas-anderson-the-masters-master/.
16. “Haim: We Want to Perform in Israel,” Jewish Chronicle, January 11, 2013, https://www.thejc.com
/news/uk-news/haim-we-want-to-perform-in-israel-1.40425.
17. Marc Maron, “Episode 565: Paul Thomas Anderson,” WTF with Marc Maron (podcast), January 5,
2015, http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episodes/episode_565_-_paul_thomas_anderson.
18. “Two U.S. Marshals Beaten While Serving Warrant,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 17, 1952.
19. Antonio Monda, “I’ll Tell You About the Cult Success in America,” Repubblica, August 23, 2012,
trans. Stefano Cattaneo, at Cigarettes & Red Vines, http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2012/08
/interview-la-repubblica.html.
20. Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, dir. Alex Gibney (Santa Monica, CA: HBO Docu-
mentary Films, 2015).
21. Kent Jones, “Battlefield Mankind,” Film Comment 48, no. 5 (September/October 2012): 26.
22. “Robbins is to motivational speakers what Tom Cruise is to actors, a correspondence Cruise laid
bare by essentially playing Robbins in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.” Alan Scherstuhl, “Fire-
Walk with Him: Tony Robbins Can Talk You Into Anything,” Village Voice, July 12, 2016.
23. “Interview: Le Point (French Translation),” Cigarettes & Red Vines, January 7, 2013.
24. Anderson, “There Will Be Blood: Final Shooting Script,” 38.
25. Stephen Fitzpatrick, “Out to Sea with the Master and a Mangled Young Man,” Australian, October 31,
2012, at Cigarettes & Red Vines, http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2012/10/.
26. Paul Thomas Anderson, Magnolia: The Shooting Script (New York: Newmarket, 2000), 109.
27. Paul Thomas Anderson, “Phantom Thread—For Your Consideration: Best Original Screenplay,” 6.
28. Josh Larsen, “Phantom Tread and God as Dressmaker,” Think Christian, January 30, 2018, https://
thinkchristian.net/phantom-thread-and-god-as-dressmaker.
29. Paul Thomas Anderson, “Sydney: Final Shooting Script,” January 24, 1995, 7A, at Matt Jenkins,
“Hard Eight,” Scribd, https://www.scribd.com/document/218023114/Hard-Eight.
30. Jeffrey Sconce, “Irony, Nihilism and the New American ‘Smart’ Film,” Screen 43, no. 4 (Winter
2002): 364.
31. Ken Hausman, “Cruise Finds Himself at Sea After Antipsychiatry Tirade,” Psychiatric News, August 5,
2005, https://web.archive.org/web/20060323232129/http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full
/40/15/7.
32. Brett McCracken, “Review: The Master,” Christianity Today, September 17, 2012, https://www
.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/september-web-only/master.html.
33. McCracken, “Review: The Master.”

8. on faith and belief 207

34. Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, “Magnolia and the Signs of the Times: A Theological Reflection,”
Journal of Religion and Film 4, no. 2 (October 2000), https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/cgi
/viewcontent.cgi?article=1810&context=jrf.
35. Xan Brooks, “Paul Thomas Anderson: The Master, Scientology and Flawed Fathers,” Guardian
(London), October 25, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/oct/25/paul-thomas-anderson
-master-scientology.

9. on music videos

1. “My sisters and I live and breathe the Valley,” Alana Haim said in 2021, going on to echo many of
Anderson’s own quotes on his early Valley films: “In the ’80s, it got a really bad rap, with Valley
girls and all that. I grew up loving it because everyone hated it, and that weirdly made me feel
proud of it.” John C. Reilly, “Alana Haim Talks to John C. Reilly About Her Life-Changing Act-
ing Debut,” Interview, October 25, 2021, https://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/alana-haim
-talks-to-john-c-reilly-about-her-life-changing-acting-debut.
2. Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema: Three Cheers,” New Yorker, November 26, 1984, 113–14.
3. Matthew Jacobs, “How Waterbeds, Teen Love and an Unhinged Bradley Cooper Led to Licorice
Pizza,” Time, November 23, 2021, https://time.com/6122812/licorice-pizza-paul-thomas-anderson
-alana-haim/.
4. “Paul saw one of our videos around the time we released our Forever EP, and he was talking about it
at a party. Someone gave him our email address, and he invited us to his house for dinner. We were
like, “Let’s not tell Paul Thomas Anderson that mom taught him art. Everyone hates their teach-
ers growing up. . . . We showed up for dinner and weren’t going to tell him, but then word-vomit
Este told him. He disappeared for a bit and came back with a painting of the mountain from Close
Encounters of the Third Kind that he’d made in her class.” Alana Haim, quoted in Reilly, “Alana
Haim Talks to John C. Reilly About Her Life-Changing Acting Debut.”
5. Alana Haim, Twitter post, September 25, 2017, 8:18 a.m., https://twitter.com/Haimtheband/status
/912290263556530183/photo/2.
6. Nadine Kam, “Practical Insanity,” Honolulu Star, November 7, 2002, at Cigarettes & Red Vines, http://
cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2002/11/interview-practical-insanity.html.
7. Roger Beebe, “Paradoxes of Pastiche: Spike Jonze, Hype Williams, and the Race of the Postmodern
Auteur,” in Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones, ed. Roger Beebe and Jason
Middleton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 308.
8. Michael Tedder, “How Paul Thomas Anderson Selectively Defined Two Decades of Music Videos,”
Esquire, July 12, 2016, https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a46639/paul-thomas-andersons
-music-video-career/.
9. Carol Vernallis, “Strange People, Weird Objects: The Nature of Narrativity, Character, and Editing
in Music Videos,” in Medium Cool, 117.
10. Beebe, “Paradoxes of Pastiche,” in Medium Cool.
11. Aurora Amidon, “Every Paul Thomas Anderson Music Video, Ranked,” Paste, December 20, 2021,
https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/paul-thomas-anderson/music-videos-ranked/11-thom
-yorke-anima-.
12. Mitja Okorn, “Seeing Things from Different Angles,” July 31, 2003, at Cigarettes & Red Vines, http://
cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2003/07/interview-seeing-things-from-different.html.
13. Jon Blistein, “Joanna Newsom, Paul Thomas Anderson Video Set for Theatrical Release,” Rolling Stone,
October 7, 2015, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/joanna-newsom-paul-thomas
-anderson-video-set-for-theatrical-release-47765/.
14. Steven Shaviro, Digital Music Videos (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 8.
15. “Thanks in part to the pluralizing forces of the Internet, pop—like so many other things—has
splintered. . . . The kind of huge album sales which once served as the benchmark for pop stardom
have been steadily disintegrating since the explosion of MP3s in the early 2000s. Additionally the
public, as opposed to record labels, now has an unprecedented ability to choose hits by simply

208 8. on faith and belief

 streaming them or creating a viral meme. And radio play, while still a huge factor in chart position,
is just a piece of a bigger pie that includes downloads, social-media buzz, and, increasingly, stream-
ing numbers.” DJ Louie XIV, “Has 2018 Killed the Pop Star?,” Vanity Fair, June 22, 2018, https://
www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/06/2018-year-the-pop-star-died.
16. Adam Nayman, Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks (New York: Abrams, 2020), 238.
17. Tedder, “How Paul Thomas Anderson Selectively Defined Two Decades of Music Videos.”
18. Nayman, Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks, 239.
19. Charles Bramesco, “Jonathan Demme on Prince, Bowie, and His Justin Timberlake Concert Doc,”
Rolling Stone, September 15, 2016, https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-features/jonathan
-demme-on-prince-bowie-and-his-justin-timberlake-concert-doc-107880/.
20. Bindu Manchanda, Forts and Palaces of India: Sentinels of History (New Delhi: Roli, 2006), 76–77.
21. David Ehrlich, “Paul Thomas Anderson and Jonny Greenwood on ‘Junun’ and the Possibility of
Making a Radiohead Documentary,” IndieWire, July 10, 2018, https://www.indiewire.com/2018
/07/paul-thomas-anderson-jonny-greenwood-junun-interview-radiohead-documentary
-1201982622/2/.
22. Greg Mariotti, “Interview: Cigarettes & Coffee Exclusive,” Cigarettes & Coffee, December 11, 1999,
at Cigarettes & Red Vines, http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/1999/12/interview-cigarettes-coffee
-exclusive.html.
23. Anderson did direct a pilot presentation for The Jon Brion Show, which was pitched to, and rejected
by, VH1 sometime around the turn of the millennium. Featuring Elliott Smith as a guest performer,
the forty-five-minute episode was shot before a live studio audience with a traditional multicamera
setup; it generally yields too little material worthy of analysis (beyond returning Anderson to the
world of TV production that he observed as a child and replicated in Magnolia) to merit consider-
ation in this chapter.
24. Will Richards, “New Haim Video Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson to Play Before ‘Licorice Pizza’
Screenings,” February 12, 2022, https://www.nme.com/news/music/new-haim-video-directed-by-paul
-thomas-anderson-to-play-before-licorice-pizza-screenings-3160091.
25. Michael Sragow, “Jonathan Demme’s First Talking Heads Interview,” SF Weekly, March 21, 1999,
https://www.sfweekly.com/film/jonathan-demmes-first-talking-heads-interview/.
26. Vernallis, “Strange People, Weird Objects,” 143–44.
27. Kay Dickinson, “Music Video and Synaesthetic Possibility,” in Medium Cool, 27.
28. Shaviro, Digital Music Videos, 8.
29. Vernallis, “Strange People, Weird Objects,” 116.
30. Jesse Hassenger, “HAIM Has Given Paul Thomas Anderson an Unlikely Second Career,” AV Club,
September 22, 2020, https://music.avclub.com/Haim-has-given-paul-thomas-anderson-an-unlikely
-second-1844993788.
31. Alana Haim, “Now I’m In It,” Women in Music Pt. III, Columbia Records, 2017.
32. Dickinson, “Music Video and Synaesthetic Possibility,” 21.
33. Peter Bradshaw, “Anima Review—Thom Yorke Glimpses Romance on the Morning Train,”
Guardian (London), June 26, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jun/26/anima-review
-thom-yorke-paul-thomas-anderson-netflix.
34. David Ehrlich, “ ‘ANIMA’ Review: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Netflix One-Reeler Is a Breathtaking
Dream Ballet,” IndieWire, June 26, 2019, https://www.indiewire.com/2019/06/anima-review-paul
-thomas-anderson-netflix-thom-yorke-radiohead-1202153237/.
35. Jessica Hopper, “Fiona Apple’s Bad, Bad Girl Moments,” Rolling Stone, April 24, 2012, https://www
.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/fiona-apples-bad-bad-girl-moments-22292/criminal-video
-217326/.
36. MTV, “Fiona Apple’s Acceptance Speech at the 1997 Video Music Awards,” YouTube (video),
August 12, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42gNkySFycA.
37. Chris Heath, “Fiona: The Caged Bird Sings,” Rolling Stone, January 22, 1998, https://www.rollingstone
.com/feature/fiona-the-caged-bird-sings-244221/.
38. Denis Leary, “A Reading from the Book of Apple,” YouTube (video), November 25, 2018, https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P4v7LAfD3U.

9. on music videos 209

39. Rachel Hahn, “An Ode to Fiona Apple’s Music Video Style,” Vogue, April 17, 2020, https://www
.vogue.com/article/fiona-apple-style-best-music-videos-new-album-fetch-the-bolt-cutters.
40. Margaret Talbot, “Dancing with HAIM,” New Yorker, December 26, 2019, https://www.newyorker
.com/culture/cultural-comment/dancing-with-haim.
41. Armond White, “Paul Thomas Anderson’s Best Work—on Video,” National Review, April 1, 2020, https://
www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/video-review-paul-thomas-anderson-music-videos-Haim-best-work/.
42. Catherine Maddux, “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby. But It’s Still a Man’s Game,” Voice of America,
June 17, 2016, https://www.voanews.com/a/youve-come-along-way-baby-but-its-still-a-mans-game
/3380920.html.
43. Travis Woods, “Epilogue: ‘It’s About Love, Baby!,’ ” Increment Vice (podcast), December 24, 2021,
https://incrementvice.com/episode-46.
44. Nayman, Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks, 248.
45. Kevin P. Sullivan, “Paul Thomas Anderson Opens Up About Phantom Thread for the First Time,”
Entertainment Weekly, November 2, 2017, https://ew.com/movies/2017/11/02/phantom-thread-paul
-thomas-anderson-interview/.
46. Steve Appleford, “Q&A: Jonathan Demme on the Making of ‘Neil Young Journeys,’ ” Rolling Stone,
June 27, 2012, https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/qa-jonathan-demme-on-the-making
-of-neil-young-journeys-63086/.

10. on histor y

1. Edward Douglas, “P. T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood,” Coming Soon.net, December 19, 2007,
https://www.comingsoon.net/movies/features/40210-p-t-andersons-there-will-be-blood.
2. Joanne Laurier, “Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza: The Doubts and Questions the Filmmaker
Should Not ‘Swat Away,’ ” World Socialist Web Site, February 16, 2022, https://www.wsws.org/en
/articles/2022/02/16/lico-f16.html.
3. Anthony Arthur, “Blood and ‘Oil!,’ ” New York Times, February 24, 2008, https://www.nytimes
.com/2008/02/24/books/review/Essay-t.html?pagewanted=all.
4. Douglas, “P. T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.”
5. “Flashback Friday: P. T. Anderson Talks with Lars Von Trier,” Cigarettes & Red Vines, April 22, 2011,
http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2011/04/flashback-friday-pt-anderson-talks-with.html.
6. Douglas, “P. T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.”
7. Douglas, “P. T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.”
8. Josh Modell, “Interview: Paul Thomas Anderson,” AV Club, January 2, 2008, https://film.avclub
.com/paul-thomas-anderson-1798213013.
9. Kevin Nance, “The Spirit and the Strength: A Profile of Toni Morrison,” Poets & Writers, November 1,
2008, https://www.pw.org/content/the_spirit_and_the_strength_a_profile_of_toni_morrison.
10. Modell, “Interview: Paul Thomas Anderson.”
11. David Walsh, “There Will Be Blood: A Promising Subject, but Terribly Weak Results,” World
Socialist Web Site, February 6, 2008, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/02/ther-f06.html.
12. Steve Sailer, quoted in Jason Sperb, Blossoms and Blood: Postmodern Media Culture and the Films of
Paul Thomas Anderson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 213.
13. Ben Walters, “Interview: Paul Thomas Anderson,” Sight & Sound 18, no. 2 (February 2008).
14. Stephanie LeMenager, “The Aesthetics of Petroleum, After Oil!,” American Literary History 24,
no. 1 (2012).
15. Walsh, “There Will Be Blood: A Promising Subject, but Terribly Weak Results.”
16. “ ‘Oil!’ and the History of Southern California,” New York Times, February 22, 2008, https://www
.nytimes.com/2008/02/22/timestopics/topics_uptonsinclair_oil.html.
17. Adam Nayman, Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks (New York: Abrams, 2020), 32.
18. Douglas, “P. T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.”
19. Sinclair, Oil!, 33.

210 9. on music videos

20. Walsh, “There Will Be Blood: A Promising Subject, but Terribly Weak Results.”
21. Robert Lifset and Brian C. Black, “Imaging the ‘Devil’s Excrement’: Big Oil in Petroleum Cinema,
1940–2007,” Journal of American History 99, no. 1 (2012): 143–44.
22. Gregory Alan Phipps, “Making the Milk Into a Milkshake: Adapting Upton Sinclair’s ‘Oil!’ Into
P. T. Anderson’s ‘There Will Be Blood,’ ” Literature/Film Quarterly 43, no. 1 (2015).
23. Sperb, Blossoms and Blood, 72.
24. Nayman, Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks, 40.
25. Sperb, Blossoms and Blood, 92.
26. Thomas Doherty, “Review: Boogie Nights,” Cineaste 23, no. 3 (1998): 41.
27. Mim Udovitch, “Lights . . . Camera . . . Hold It, Hold It; Would Someone Please Reattach Mark’s
Member, Please . . . And Action!,” Esquire, October 1, 1997, at Cigarettes & Red Vines, http://
cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/1997/10/interview-lightscamerahold-it-hold-it.html.
28. Al Goldstein, quoted in Wadd: The Life & Times of John C. Holmes (video), dir. Cass Paley (Santa
Monica, CA: Lions Gate Films, 1999).
29. Paul Thomas Anderson, “Feature Commentary by Filmmaker P. T. Anderson,” Boogie Nights, dir.
Paul Thomas Anderson (Burbank, CA: New Line Home Video, 2000).
30. Hsuan L. Hsu, “Racial Privacy, the L.A. Ensemble Film, and Paul Haggis’s Crash,” Film Criticism 31,
no. 1–2 (2006): 142.
31. “The magisterial style, eerie mood and forbidding central characters echo Anderson’s previous film,
There Will Be Blood, a kinship furthered by another bold and discordant score by Jonny Greenwood.”
Todd McCarthy, “The Master: Venice Review,” Hollywood Reporter, September 1, 2012, https://www
.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/master-venice-review-367129/. “Few modern films have
been as crowded as ‘Boogie Nights’ and ‘Magnolia,’ and few have been more lonely than ‘There
Will Be Blood.’ The new work sways toward the latter.” Anthony Lane, “Sail Away,” New Yorker,
September 17, 2012, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/09/17/sail-away-2.
32. Nayman, Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks, 61.
33. Luke Buckmaster, “Good Film, Just Don’t Mention the ‘War,’ ” Crikey, November 6, 2012, https://
blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/2012/11/06/good-film-just-dont-mention-the-war-interview-with
-paul-thomas-anderson/.
34. Elena Gorfinkel, “The Future of Anachronism: Todd Haynes and the Magnificent Andersons,”
in Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, ed. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 162.
35. “Definition of truthiness,” Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/truthiness.
36. Monica Davey, “2005: In a Word,” New York Times, December 25, 2005, https://www.nytimes.com
/2005/12/25/weekinreview/2005-in-a-word.html.
37. Nick Pinkerton, “The Master? Paul Thomas Anderson as American Auteur,” The Point, no. 15
(December 15, 2017), https://thepointmag.com/criticism/the-master-paul-thomas-anderson/.
38. Bill Simmons, “Paul Thomas Anderson on ‘Phantom Thread,’ Loving Adam Sandler, and ‘Boogie
Nights,’ ” Ringer, December 27, 2017, https://www.theringer.com/the-bill-simmons-podcast/2017/12
/27/16803838/paul-thomas-anderson-on-pursuing-filmmaking-loving-adam-sandler-and-making
-boogie-nights.
39. “I saw this interview with Downey Sr. the other day from the first Toronto Film Festival . . . he said
‘Eisenhower’s the best president we ever had, because he didn’t do anything . . . and he’s talking about
Nixon, he says ‘We’ve got a real problem coming because this guy doesn’t have a sense of humor.’ ”
Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in Marc Maron, “Episode 565: Paul Thomas Anderson,” WTF
with Marc Maron (podcast), January 5, 2015, http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episodes/episode
_565_-_paul_thomas_anderson.
40. In the clip, Downey comments, “I feel Eisenhower was our best president. He didn’t do anything. It
was fantastic . . . but this guy’s death on wheels.” The interviewer clarifies, “Johnson?” and Downey
replies, “Forget it man, nothing. His sense of humor is nowhere . . . and that’s what’s wrong.” CBC,
“Robert Downey Sr. on Eisenhower & JFK, 1967, CBC Archives,” YouTube (video), May 29, 2013,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ckjc-b3MbMs.

10. on history 211

41. Catherine Shoard, “ ‘An Account of How Insane We Once Were’—Paul Thomas Anderson on There
Will Be Blood,” Guardian (London), September 13, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019
/sep/13/how-insane-we-once-were-paul-thomas-anderson-there-will-be-blood.
42. Nina Rehfeld, “I Wanted to Make Myself Scared,” Spiegel, April 13, 2003, at Cigarettes & Red Vines,
http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2003/04/interview-i-wanted-to-make-myself.html.
43. Claire Perkins, “Kicking and Screaming: Altmanesque Cynicism and Energy in the Work of Paul
Thomas Anderson and Noah Baumbach,” in A Companion to Robert Altman, ed. Adrian Danks
(Chichester: Wiley, 2015), 482.
44. David Walsh, “Inherent Vice: Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Adapted for the Screen,” World Socialist Web
Site, January 28, 2015, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/01/28/vice-j28.html.
45. David Walsh, “Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread: Art for the Artist’s Sake, World Socialist
Web Site, March 28, 2018, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/03/28/phan-m28.html.”
46. Pinkerton, “The Master?”
47. Wesley Morris, “IV Drip: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Postlapsarian Comedy ‘Inherent Vice,’ ” Hollywood
Prospectus, December 12, 2014, https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/paul-thomas-anderson
-inherent-vice-review/.
48. Maron, “Episode 565: Paul Thomas Anderson.”
49. Anderson, “Feature Commentary by Filmmaker P. T. Anderson.”
50. Sperb, Blossoms and Blood, 74.
51. Zach Hollwedel, “Paul Thomas Anderson Nearly Starred in ‘Rachel Getting Marries’ with Anne Hath-
away,” IndieWire, November 19, 2014, https://www.indiewire.com/2014/11/paul-thomas-anderson
-nearly-starred-in-rachel-getting-married-with-anne-hathaway-269942/.
52. Maron, “Episode 565: Paul Thomas Anderson.”
53. Charlie Schmidlin, “AFI Fest: Paul Thomas Anderson Talks ‘Inherent Vice’ Influence ‘Mondo Hol-
lywood’ with Director Robert Carl Cohen,” IndieWire, November 10, 2014, https://www.indiewire
.com/2014/11/afi-fest-paul-thomas-anderson-talks-inherent-vice-influence-mondo-hollywood
-with-director-robert-carl-cohen-270470/.
54. Jonathan Romney, “ ‘It’s Funny. Why Are You Sad?,’ ” Sight & Sound, February 2015.
55. Maron, “Episode 565: Paul Thomas Anderson.”
56. Kate Kellaway, “Actor Vicky Krieps: ‘I Spent a Whole Day Staring into Greenery to Avoid Daniel
Day-Lewis,” Guardian (London), January 21, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jan/21
/vicky-krieps-daniel-day-lewis-interview-phantom-thread.
57. Paul Thomas Anderson “Phantom Thread—For Your Consideration: Best Original Screenplay,” 31.
58. Andrew Grant Jackson, 1973: Rock at the Crossroads (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2019), 1.
59. Esther Zuckerman, “Why Paul Thomas Anderson Chose to Film Part of ‘Licorice Pizza’ at My Child-
hood Home,” Thrillist, November 24, 2021, https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/paul
-thomas-anderson-interview-licorice-pizza.
60. John Rivera, “Apocalypse Now? Y2K Spurs Fears; Alarm: Some Evangelical Christians Are Predict-
ing Doom and Gloom for Year’s End,” Baltimore Sun, February 17, 1999, https://www.baltimoresun
.com/news/bs-xpm-1999-02-17-9902170152-story.html.
61. Francine Uenuma, “20 Years Later, the Y2K Bug Seems Like a Joke—Because Those Behind the
Scenes Took It Seriously,” Time, December 30, 2019, https://time.com/5752129/y2k-bug-history/.
62. Brian Rafferty, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen (New York: Simon & Schuster,
2019), 303.
63. David Jay Lasky, “Director-Writer Anderson Worked Hard on Film,” USC-Daily Trojan, November 6,
1999, at Cigarettes & Red Vines, http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/1999/11/interview-usc-daily
-trojan.html.
64. Lynn Hirschberg, “His Way,” New York Times, December 19, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999
/12/19/magazine/his-way.html.
65. Hanna Rosin, “As Jan. 1 Draws Near, Doomsayers Reconsider,” Washington Post, December 27,
1999, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/1999-12/27/069r-122799-idx.html.
66. “What if I wanted to make a film that’s a contemporary [version of Licorice Pizza], save myself all the
trouble of recreating a period, just go take a camera, run down to the street right now? OK, what’s

212 10. on history

 the equivalent of a waterbed? You draw blanks, there’s nothing, there’s nothing as good as a water-
bed. OK, well how would he sell himself to the world? He’d have a YouTube channel . . . that’s not
sexy, I’m not doing that.” Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in Travis Woods, “Epilogue: ‘It’s About
Love, Baby!,’ ” Increment Vice (podcast), December 24, 2021, https://incrementvice.com/episode-46.
67. Tess Barker, “Money, Murder, and Mystery: One Afternoon Inside Beverly Hills’s Beautifully Creepy
Greystone Mansion,” Curbed Los Angeles, December 8, 2015, https://la.curbed.com/2015/12/8/9894146
/greystone-mansion-beverly-hills-interior.
68. Nayman, Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks, 23.
69. Kent Jones, “Battlefield Mankind,” Film Comment 48, no. 5 (September/October 2012), 24–28.
70. Mark Caro, “Anderson Casts Wider Net with ‘Punch-Drunk,’ ” Chicago Tribune, October 13, 2002,
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2002-10-13-0210120406-story.html.
71. Paul Thomas Anderson, quoted in “Interview: BAM Q&A,” Cigarettes & Red Vines, June 23, 2003.
http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2003/06/interview-bam-q.html
72. Paul Thomas Anderson, “The Master—For Your Consideration: Best Screenplay,” (The Weinstein
Company, 2012), 27.
73. Chris Garcia, “All Paul Thomas Anderson Does,” Austin American Statesman, January 6, 2000, at
Cigarettes & Red Vines, https://cigsandredvines.blogspot.com/2000/01/interview-austin-american
-statesman.html.
74. James Rocchi, “Inherent Vice’s L.A. Locations: The Ultimate Guide,” L.A. Weekly, December 10,
2014, https://www.laweekly.com/inherent-vices-l-a-locations-the-ultimate-guide/.
75. One clear argument for the analog film production Anderson holds so dear: as susceptible as cel-
luloid may be to decay, the relatively untested process of archiving and storing digital files puts early
digital projects in a precarious position analogous to that faced by early-twentieth-century film,
a stunning proportion of which has been lost due to incautious storage and handling. See Marty
Perlmutter, “The Lost Picture Show: Hollywood Archivists Can’t Outpace Obsolescence,” IEEE
Spectrum, April 28, 2017, https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/it/the-lost-picture-show-hollywood
-archivists-cant-outpace-obsolescence.
76. Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 11.

10. on history 213

INDEX

A24, xxii Avery, Dwayne, 39–40

Abel, Marco, 77 Avi (fictional character), 109, 110
“Across the Universe,” 151 Aznavour, Charles, 56
Adams, Amy, 17
Adlakha, Siddhant, 39 Babaloo (fictional character), 73, 102
affective logic, 123 Bad Day at Black Rock, 4
Affleck, Ben, 73–74 Bailey, Jason, 21
alienation effects, 117–131 Ball, Lucille, 175
Altman, Robert, xiv, 20, 30, 44–48, 54, 57, 172; Band Wagon, The, 52
The Long Goodbye, 46, 54; Nashville of, 44, 45, Banks, Christina, 57
51; A Prairie Home Companion of, 13, 46, 174 Barringer, Sydney (fictional character), 37
Altman on Altman (Anderson, P.), 46 Bates, Norman (fictional character), 54
American Beauty, 71, 72 Beatty, Warren, 10
American Conservative, 167 Beaty, Madisen, 111
American Graffiti, 57 Becky (fictional character), 32
American Hustle, 16 Beebe, John, 72
American Smart Cinema (Perkins), xxiii–xxiv Beebe, Roger, 151, 152
Amidon, Aurora, xix Being John Malkovich, 96, 152
Andersen, Thom, 29 Benedetti, Sandra, 51
Anderson, Edwina, 61, 197n197 Ben-Hur, 39
Anderson, Ernie, 26, 60–61, 72, 116, 197n197 Ben Tzur, Shye, 155
Anderson, Paul Thomas. See specific topics Bergman, Ingmar, 97, 100, 125
Anderson, Wes, xxiii, 56 Berlin, Jeannie, 66
“Anima,” 150, 153, 159 Berliner, Todd, 126–127
Annapurna Pictures, 16 Best. Movie. Year. Ever (Rafferty), 176
Ansen, David, xx, 12 Bill, Little (fictional character), 79, 102, 105, 173
apocrypha, xiii–xiv Billy Madison, 11
Apple, Fiona, xvi, 68, 90, 151–154, 152, 157–160, 162 Bjork, 152
Aronofsky, Darren, 188n117 Bjornsen, Bigfoot (fictional character), 19, 38, 97,
Arthur, Anthony, 165 100, 104, 108, 111, 136–137
ASL. See average shot length Bjornsen, Chastity (fictional character), 104–105, 136
Astaire, Fred, 51–52 Black, Brian C., 168
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 37 Blackman, Jeremy, 8
Austin American-Statesman, 45 Blake, Jeremy, 91
Auto Focus, 97 Blatnoyd, Dr. Rudy (fictional character), 124
A.V. Club, 14, 114 Blatnoyd, Rudy (fictional character), 38, 175
average shot length (ASL), 125–126 Blau, Rex, 24
Blau, Rex (fictional character), 1, 175 Cheadle, Don, 6
Bliss, Michael, 57 Chicago Tribune, 12–13, 34, 56
Blossoms & Blood (Sperb), xxv Chinatown, 35, 167
Bobbitt, Lorena, 63 Christianity Today, 134–135, 148
Bob le flambeur, 51 Cigarettes & Coffee, 2–3, 4; domesticity in, 60;
Boogie Nights, xiv, xix, xxii, xxvi, 2, 6–8, 7, 9, 21, gender performance in, 116; influences for, 51;
151, 157, 182n30, 202n16; alienation effects in, religion in, 145
120–121, 124; domesticity in, 61–64, 66, 69, 72, Citizens Band, 57
74, 75, 77, 79, 80; gender performance in, 97, Clark (fictional character), 72, 123, 136
99, 101, 102, 105, 108, 113, 116; history in, 168–169, Clementine (fictional character), 4–5, 63, 65, 66,
170, 173, 176, 177; influences for, 44–46, 48–51, 103–104, 113, 136
54, 55; place and space of, 27–32, 37, 40; religion Clerks II, 159
in, 140, 147; screenwriting for, 83, 88, 89, 90 Clinton, Bill, 63, 106
Bottle Rocket, 96 Clinton, Paul, 56
Brad (fictional character), 68, 70, 95 Clockwork Orange, A, 47
Bradshaw, Peter, 13, 15, 67, 70, 159 CNN, 56
Brady Bunch, 66 Cocteau, Jean, 159
Brecht, Bertolt, 119–120, 127 Collateral, 97
Brian, Mary, 175 Columbia Daily Tribune, 77
Bridges, Mark, 20, 21 Congdon, David, 134, 144
Brion, Jon, 11, 111, 127, 155, 209n23 Contemporary Film Directors (Toles), xxv
Brody, Richard, 23 Contempt, 120
Brolin, Josh, 19 Conway, Tim, 26
Brooks, Xan, 17 Cooper, Bradley, xix
Brotman, Barbara, 12–13 Coppola, Francis Ford, 10, 56
Brown, Jerry, 169 Coppola, Sofia, xxiii, 152
Brunick, Kaitlin L., 125, 126, 127 Corliss, Richard, 17
Bruns, John, 94, 107 “Couch,” 128, 129, 129
Buchanan, Kyle, 23, 114 Crane, Marion (fictional character), 54
Buckmaster, Luke, 18, 170 Crash, 30
Bugsy Malone, 152 Crazy Mama, 57
Burke, Edmund, 76 Creative Screenwriting, 61
Burnett, Carol, 26 Criterion Collection, 13
Bush, George W., 97, 170–171, 172 Cross, Noah (fictional character), 36
Byrne, David, 156 Cruise, Tom, 184n31, 186n83, 207n22; in Eyes Wide
Shut, 47, 147; in Magnolia, xiv, 8, 10
Caged Heat, 154 Cutting, James, 125
Cagney, James, 51
Cahiers du Cinema, xv Dalton, Stephen, 48
Callahan, Dave, 20 Dano, Paul, 14
Cannes Film Festival, 5, 27 Dargis, Manohla, 15, 23, 115
Carnegie, Dale, 139 Darion, Delmer (fictional character), 127
Carol Burnett Show, The, 26 da Vinci, Leonardo, 136
Carroll, Lewis, 86 “Daydreaming,” 154, 159
Carson, Silas, 112 Day-Lewis, Daniel, 65, 85, 143, 166; in Phantom
Carson, Tom, 25, 31, 43 Thread, 18, 20; in Punch-Drunk Love, 11; in
Casper the Friendly Ghost, 142 There Will Be Blood, 13, 14, 15, 21, 50
Cendejas, Tom, 32 DC, xxv
Chafed Elbows, 74, 79, 195n39 Dead Don’t Die, The, 26
Chang, Justin, xx, 23 Dean, James, 72
“Changing Partners,” 111 Death Proof, 56
Chaplin, Charlie, 51, 128, 159 Deep Throat, 168
Charade, 56 DeGiglio-Bellemare, Mario, 148
Charlock, Clancy (fictional character), 124 DeLillo, Don, 182n30

216 index
De Luca, Michael, 6, 7, 8, 22, 23, 184n31 Eisenhower, Dwight, 211nn39–40
Demme, Jonathan, xiv, 24, 34, 45, 48–50, 56–57, Eliot, T. S., 157
149, 154–156, 163, 174; Caged Heat of, 154; “close- Ellis, Mary Elizabeth, 203n54
up” of, 48–49, 49; The Silence of the Lambs of, 48 Ellison, Megan, 16
Demy, Jacques, 56, 152 Elson, Alma (fictional character), xiv, 20–21, 54, 59,
Denby, David, 9, 14 62, 67, 71, 72, 75, 77, 78, 80, 82, 86–88, 97, 107,
Denis (fictional character), 136 111–112, 115, 143, 143, 157–158, 175, 193n93, 199n61
Departed, The, 97 Elswit, Robert, 15, 34, 124
Dern, Laura, 137 Entertainment Weekly, 14
Dickinson, Kay, 157, 158 Eraserhead, 27–28, 51
Didion, Joan, 179 Esquire, 17
Diggler, Dirk (fictional character), xiv, xix, xx, 1, Eyes Wide Shut, 47, 91
2, 3, 6, 29, 50, 61–63, 72–74, 82, 83, 83, 97, 99,
101–102, 108, 113, 115, 120–121, 169, 170, 173 Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, The, 53–54
Dillman, Joanne Clarke, 96, 110 Fallon, Jimmy, 74
Directors’ Cuts, xxv FANatic, 73–74, 129
Dirk Diggler Story, The, 2, 3, 6, 108; domesticity “Fast as You Can,” 152, 160
in, 60, 75; history in, 169; influences for, 45; Fast Food Nation, 167
place and space of, 29 Faulkner, William, 43
Disney, xxv Fear, David, 23, 24
“Divers,” 153, 154 Fenway, Crocker (fictional character), 69
Dixon (fictional character), 30, 31 Ferguson, Amy, 103
Documentary Now!, 174 Ferrer, Miguel, 3
Dodd, Elizabeth (fictional character), 65, 72, 122, 136 Fight Club, 10
Dodd, Lancaster (fictional character), xiv, xx, 16, Film4, 10
38, 64, 65, 86, 97–99, 98, 102, 103, 109, 111, 123, Film Comment, 72
132–133, 136–142, 138, 144, 147–148, 177, 179 Film Inquiry, 91
Dodd, Peggy (fictional character), 17, 65, 111, 115 final cut, 8
Dodger, Artful (fictional character), 70 Fincher, David, xxiii, 10, 125, 152
Doe, Johnny (fictional character), 62, 99 Fine, David, 30
Doheny, Edward L., xiv, xx, 165, 170, 176 Fischer, Lucy, 70, 107, 108
Doherty, Thomas, 169 Fitzgerald, Ella, 111
Donen, Stanley, 56 (500) Days of Summer, 158
Don’t Look Back, 18 Flanagan, Mark, 127, 128, 129–130
“Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” 111 “Fleur, Les,” 124
“Don’t Wanna,” 160 Focus Features, xxii
Doris (fictional character), 111 Ford, John, 27
Downey, Robert, Jr., 187n106 Forever, 208n4
Downey, Robert, Sr., 24, 45, 48–50, 74, 79, 127, Forrest, Helen, 111
130, 172, 211nn39–40; Greaser’s Palace of, 48, fourth wall, 119
49; Putney Swope of, 48, 57, 195n39 Franz, Paul, 41
Duvall, Shelley, 162 Freasier, Dillon, 14
Dyckman, Caitlin Sloat, 41 French New Wave, 121
Dylan, Bob, 17, 18 Freud, Sigmund, 39, 64, 72–73, 74, 103
Frick, Jerry (fictional character), xx
East of Eden (Steinbeck), 166 Fuchs, Cynthia, 29, 32
Eastwood, Clint, xxv Fuller, Glen, 77, 78
Ebert, Roger, xix, 17, 44, 185n53 Full Metal Jacket, 47
Edelstein, David, 9
Egan, Barry (fictional character), 11–12, 18, 25, Galifianakis, Zach, 128
28, 28, 34, 36, 40–43, 53, 62, 67, 69–70, 72, Garofalo, Janeane, 160
75–77, 84–85, 87, 97, 100–101, 105, 111, 114, Gator, Claudia (fictional character), 8, 9, 31, 62,
122–123, 126, 128, 147, 159, 178, 178, 200n20 63, 71–72, 83–84, 94, 103, 105, 106, 113, 122,
Ehrlich, David, 159 130–131

index 217
Gator, Jimmy (fictional character), 5, 8, 49, 63, Hall, Philip Baker, 3, 4, 4, 8, 116, 195n39, 203n45
68–69, 71–72, 81, 94, 99, 110, 115–117, 133 “Hallelujah,” 155
gender performance, 95–117 Hampton, Howard, 38
Georgia (fictional character), 84–85, 126 Hansen, Craig (fictional character), 145
“Get Thee Behind Me, Satan,” 111 Happiness, 72, 105
Ghoulardi (fictional character), 26, 72 Hard Eight, xiv, xxii, xxvi, 3, 4–6, 12, 20, 60,
Gibson, Henry, 68 63, 64–65, 66, 72, 177; alienation effects in,
Gide, André, 43 120, 124; gender performance in, 96–97, 99,
Gilbey, Ryan, 122, 130, 171 103–104, 113; influences for, 45, 49, 51–52, 56;
“Gimme Some More,” 158 place and space of, 36–37, 38; religion in, 145;
Glanville, Martyn, 7 screenwriting for, 81, 82, 88, 89, 94
Glass Menagerie (Williams, T.), The, 30 Harding, Henrietta (fictional character), 59, 107
Glazer, Jonathan, 152 Hardy, Dr. (fictional character), 80, 111, 112
Gleason, Joanna, 61 Harlingen, Amethyst (fictional character), 69, 118
Gleiberman, Owen, 7, 107 Harlingen, Coy (fictional character), 19, 67, 69,
Godard, Jean-Luc, xiv, xv, 120, 121, 127 118, 125–126, 136
Goetzman, Gary, 22 Harlingen, Hope (fictional character), 19, 69, 118
Going Clear (Wright), 138 Harris, Harriet Samson, xx
Goldstein, Al, 169 Hartley, Hal, xxiii
Gondolli, Floyd (fictional character), 116, Harvard, Russell, 14
195n39 Hassenger, Jesse, 157
Gondry, Michel, 152 Haynes, Todd, xxiii
Gonzalez, Ed, 15 Hays Code, 178
Goodfellas, 44, 45, 50, 51 Hearn, Jordan Christian, 136
Gorfinkel, Elena, xxi, 121–122, 170 Heath, Chris, 159
Goss, Brian Michael, 65, 67, 112, 113 Heffington, Ryan, 109
Gough, Edwina, 26 Hemingway, Ernest, 87
Grace, April, 32 Hemon, Aleksandar, 62, 106–107
Grady, Mary (fictional character), xx, 67, 137 “He Needs Me,” 111
Graham, Heather, 6 Henry (fictional character), 88
Grand Budapest Hotel, The, 56 Hepworth, Shasta Fay (fictional character), 19, 36,
Grand Canyon, 30 69, 78, 82, 92, 104–105, 107, 118, 125, 139
Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck), 166 Her, 16
Greaser’s Palace, 48, 49 Hering, David, 112
Greenwood, Jonny, 11, 80, 97, 154, 155, 211n31 Hermelin, Karen, 113–114
Greven, David, 97, 100, 101, 106, 108, 110 Herzog, Werner, xiv, xx–xxi, 43, 171
Griffin, Jacqui, 91 Higgins, John Michael, xx
Gross, Terry, 37 Hirschberg, Lynn, 10, 89, 91, 133, 176
Guardian, 15, 118, 130 history, 164–179
Guest, Haden, 91 Hitchcock, Alfred, 50, 54–55, 127, 144, 171
Gundha, Joe (fictional character), 35, 165–166 Hoffa, 51
Gurrerro, Rubio (fictional character), 112, 175 Hoffman, Cooper, xix, 22, 24
Guzmán, Luis, 32 Hoffman, Philip Seymour, 8, 12, 16, 17, 105, 151, 156
Gwenovier (fictional character), 32, 42, 49, 49, Holden, Jack (fictional character), 1, 22, 115, 137, 175
104, 105, 142 Holden, William, 22
Hollywood Reporter, The, xxv, 48
Haggis, Paul, 30 “Hollywood Storytelling and Aesthetic Pleasure”
Haim (musical group), xv, xxvi, 42–43, 149–150, (Berliner), 126–127
154–158, 160–163, 161, 208n4 Holmes, John, xiv, xx, 169
Haim, Alana, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xix, 22, 23, 24, 115, Hornaday, Ann, 12
156, 161, 161, 208n1 Horner, Jack (fictional character), 2, 6, 40, 58, 60,
Haim, Danielle, 150, 156–157, 158, 161, 161, 162 64, 75, 116, 147, 168–169, 173, 177
Haim, Este, 156, 161, 161 “Hot Knife,” 152, 152, 160
Hale, Wanda, 48 Hot Traxx, 44

218 index
House of Games, 5, 51–52 Junun, 150
Hsu, Hsuan L., 30 Jurgensen, Andy, 163
Hubbard, L. Ron, xiv, xx, 16, 137–138, 169–170 Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids, 155
Hulot, Monsieur (fictional character), 51, 128
Hunt, Brad, 145 Kael, Pauline, 149
Hustler, The, 104 Kane, Alana (fictional character), xiv, xix, 18, 22,
Huston, John, xiv, 14, 53, 167, 171 22, 29, 34, 41–42, 71, 77–79, 82, 86–87, 109,
Hutton, Dash, 150 137, 146–147, 175
Hyden, Steven, 17 Karlyn, Kathleen Rowe, 71
Kasdan, Lawrence, 30
I Am Cuba, 45 Kaufman, Charlie, xxiii
Increment Vice, 130 Kehr, Dave, 42, 52
IndieWire, 24, 92, 182n23 Kenny, Glenn, 14
Indiewood, xxi, xxii–xxiii Kermode, Mark, 20
Inherent Vice, xx, xxvi, 12, 18–20, 153, 155, 163, Kilkenny, Katie, 20
187n106; alienation effects in, 118–119, Kill Bill, 56
124–127, 129, 130; domesticity in, 59, 66, 69, Killing, The, 91
78, 79; gender performance in, 100, 104–105, Kim, Walter, 86
108, 109, 111; history in, 171–172, 174, 175, King, Cleo, 31
177–179; influences for, 45, 46, 49, 50, 53–54; Kirn, Walter, 38
place and space of, 32, 34, 36, 38; religion in, Knuckle Sandwich, 73, 94, 96, 102
136, 137, 142, 144–145; screenwriting for, 82, Korman, Harvey, 26
86, 91, 93, 93–94 Krieps, Vicky, xiv, 20, 112, 175
Inside Out, xxv Kubrick, Stanley, 10, 14, 35, 45, 47–48, 88, 91,
In the Company of Men, 96 93–94, 101, 167, 202n13; A Clockwork Orange
“Irony, Nihilism, and the New American ‘Smart’ of, 47; The Shining of, 47, 51, 53
Film” (Sconce), xxiii Kurosawa, Akira, 46
“It’s Oh So Quiet,” 152 Kurring, Jim (fictional character), 8, 83–84, 94,
“I Was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl” (Penny, L.), 115 95, 103, 106, 107, 110, 114, 131, 133, 134, 137, 141,
146, 148
Jackson, Andrew Grant, 175 Kurring, Officer Jim (fictional character), 8,
Jackson, Rahad (fictional character), xix, 6, 62, 83–84, 94, 95, 103, 106, 107, 110, 114, 131, 133,
82, 99 134, 137, 141, 146, 148
Jackson, Samuel L., 5 Kvinsland, Craig, 68
Jalet, Damien, 159
James, Colonel (fictional character), 75 LaBute, Neil, xxiii
Jane, Thomas, 151 La Chinoise, 120
Jason (fictional character), 64, 73–74 Lance (fictional character), 32
Jaws, 102 Lane, Anthony, 115
Jay, Ricky, 121, 134 Lane, Christina, 57–58, 101, 117, 122, 134
John (fictional character), 4–5, 49, 56, 65, 66, 82, Largo, 127–128, 129–130
88, 89, 94, 99, 120, 121, 136, 145 Larsen, Josh, 144
Johnson, Emmanuel L., 30 LaSalle, Mick, 7, 15, 21, 83
Johnson, Lyndon, 172 Last Supper, The (da Vinci), 136
Johnson, Rian, 130 Laurie, Piper, 104
Jon Brion Show, The, 209n23 Laurier, Joanne, 165
Jones, Kent, 139, 177 Lawrence of Arabia, 30, 39
Jones, Leslie, 11, 90, 126 Lawson, Richard, 23
Jones, Orlando, 31 Lean, David, 30
Jonze, Spike, xxiii, 16, 152 Leave It to Beaver, 64
Journal of Religion and Film, 148 Lego, xxv
Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, 134 LeMenager, Stephanie, 167, 199n62
Journey Through the Past, 127 LeMire, Christy, 15
Jovanovic, Nenad, 120 Lennie (fictional character), 75

index 219
Leonard, Lena (fictional character), 12, 18, 28, Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush
40, 67, 72, 73, 75–77, 94, 96, 114, 115, (Greven), 97
122, 178 Mann, Aimee, 10, 84, 110, 111, 127, 150–151, 155,
Let There Be Light, 53 162, 203n45
Licorice Pizza, xiii, xvi, xix, xx, xx, xxv, xxvi, 1, Man Shaped Pool, A, 154
18, 21–24, 22, 124, 149, 155, 161–163, 203n41, Manson, Charles, 145, 174
203n54, 212n66; alienation effects in, 124; Manville, Lesley, xiv, 20, 112–113
domesticity in, 64, 67, 70, 71, 75, 77–79; Marcie (fictional character), 31–32
gender performance in, 109, 115; history in, Maron, Marc, 24, 61, 109, 172, 182n30
167, 168, 170, 175–177; influences for, 45, 49, Marsh, Calum, 17
57, 58; place and space of, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34, 37, Marshall, Lee, 39, 41
41–43; religion in, 137, 146–147; screenwriting Martha (fictional character), 103
for, 86–87, 94 Marvel Cinematic Universe, xxv
Lifset, Robert, 168 Maslin, Janet, 9, 44
Ligeti, György, 123 Master, The, xiv, xv, xxvi, 15–17, 18–19, 115, 153,
Lighthouse, The, xxii 186n83; alienation effects in, 123, 128, 130;
Lily (fictional character), 117 domesticity in, 59, 72, 79; gender performance
“Limp,” 151, 160 in, 111, 112; history in, 169–170, 171, 174, 177,
Linda (fictional character), 8, 122 179; influences for, 47, 49, 50, 53; place and
Linklater, Richard, xxiii, 24, 167 space of, 34, 37, 38, 39; religion in, 132–133,
“Little of Your Love,” 155, 156–157 137–144, 138, 148; screenwriting for, 88, 90, 94
Livingstone, Jo, 24 Matrix, The, 157
Lodge, Guy, 107 “Mattress Man,” 129
Long Goodbye, The, 46, 54 Maurier, Daphne du, 54
Los Angeles Plays Itself, 29 Mayshark, Jesse Fox, xxiii, 31, 41, 64
Los Angeles Times, xxv, 5, 26 McCarthy, Todd, 10
“Lost Track,” 155, 161, 161 McCarthy, Tom, 34
“Low-Level Features of Film” (Brunick et al.), 125 McCracken, Brett, 148
Lucas, George, 148 McDonagh, Maitland, 5
Lumet, Sidney, 31 McEwen, Chris, 124, 127
Lunn, Oliver, 50 McKee, Gina, 59
Lynch, David, 27, 39 McKenna, Kristine, 8
Lyons, John, 183n8 McNulty, Peter, 90
McPherson, Aimee Semple, 139
Macdonald, Moira, 21 McRobbie, Peter, 19
Mackey, Frank T. J. (fictional character), xiv, 8, Melville, Jean-Pierre, 51
42, 49, 49, 62, 63, 84, 95, 101, 104–107, 109, Melvin and Howard, 57
110, 117, 139–142, 144, 148 Mendes, Sam, 63
Macy, William H., 8 men’s rights movement, xiv
Mad, 97 Me Too, 106
Maggart, Maude, 152, 152–153 Metz, Walter C., 75, 124, 202n13
Magnolia, xiv, xvii, xxii, xxvi, 3, 8–10, 21, 151, 162, MGM, xxii, 12, 22, 51, 157
207n22; alienation effects in, 119–121, 127, Midsommar, xxii
130–131; domesticity in, 60, 63, 67–68, 71, Miramax, xxii
76, 77; gender performance in, 95–97, 101, Molina, Alfred, 109
103–108, 110, 113, 115–116; history in, 171, 176; Mona, Princess (fictional character), 112
influences for, 45–47, 49, 51; place and space Mondo Hollywood, 174
of, 25, 28, 30–33, 37, 41; religion in, 133–135, Moore, Julianne, 6, 7–8
142–143, 145–146, 148; screenwriting for, More, John (fictional character), 138, 179
83–85, 88–91, 94 Morris, Wesley, xxvi, 19, 20, 172–173
Malick, Terrence, 90 Mottram, James, xxiii, 5
Malone, Jena, 19 Mr. Deeds, 11
Mamet, David, xiv, 3, 5–6, 27, 51–52 Murphet, Julian, 58, 72–73, 114
“Man from the Magazine,” 155, 158 music videos, 149–163

220 index
Nash, Eddie, xix Partridge, Earl (fictional character), 8, 9, 69, 84,
Nashawaty, Chris, 21 99, 107, 109, 110, 115–116, 116–117
Nashville, 44, 45, 51 Payne, Alexander, xxiii, 63
Nayman, Adam, xxv, 31, 34, 42–43, 46, 55, 58, 71, Pelly, Jen, 43
89, 91, 113, 168, 170, 177 Penn, Michael, xvi, 22, 150, 151, 155
Nedomansky, Vashi, 125 Penn, Sean, 1
Neon, 46 Pennebaker, D. A., 18
Network, 31, 51 Penny (fictional character), 107–108, 126
New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Thomson), 17 Penny, Laurie, 115
New Line Cinema, xxii, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 91, 113, 184n31 Perkins, Claire, xxiii–xxiv, 46, 172
Newman, Michael Z., xxi–xxii Peters, Jon, xix, xx, xx, 32, 109
New Republic, 24 Peters, Jon (fictional character), xix, xx, xx, 32, 109
Newsom, Joanna, xvi, 35, 150, 153–154, 155, 163 Peterson, John, 26, 100
New York, New York, 56 Pezzotta, Elisa, 35, 47, 93
New York Daily News, 48 Phantom Thread, xiv, xv, xxii, xxvi, 20–21, 150, 154,
New Yorker, 106–107, 149 157, 163, 188n117, 193n93, 199n61; alienation
New York Times, 15, 23, 25–26, 27, 28, 38, 89 effects in, 123, 124; domesticity in, 59–62, 64,
“Night So Long,” 155 67, 71–73, 75, 77–80; gender performance in,
Nilsson, Harry, 111 97, 106–107, 110–112; history in, 172, 175, 177,
1973: Rock at the Crossroads, 175 178; influences for, 45, 50, 54–57; place and
92nd Street Y, 18 space of, 34, 37, 38, 40; religion in, 143, 144;
Nixon, Richard, 172, 211n39 screenwriting for, 86, 87, 89, 93, 94
Nolan, Christopher, xxv Pharma, Phil (fictional character), 8, 95, 105–107,
No More Excuses, 79 117, 146
“No Other Love,” 111 Phillips, David “Pudding Guy,” 43
North by Northwest, 127, 130 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of
Nostalgia, 23 the Sublime and Beautiful, A. (Burke, E.), 76
“Nothing’s Wrong,” 150 Phipps, Gregory Alan, 92, 168
“Now I’m in It,” xvi, 42, 155, 157, 160 Phipps, Keith, 14
“Numbers, The,” 154 Phoenix, Joaquin, xiii, 11, 16, 17, 19, 53
Picnic at Hanging Rock, 35
O’Brien, Geoffrey, 39 Pierce, Kimberly, xxiii
O’Brien, Helen, 137–138 Pinkerton, Nick, 43, 100, 171
O’Connor, Kevin J., 14 Pinter, Harold, 84
Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck), 75 Pitchfork, 43
Oil! (Sinclair, U.), 13, 93, 165, 166 Plainview, Daniel (fictional character), xv, xx, 1,
Oliver Twist, 70 14, 15, 18, 35, 40, 62, 64, 65, 69, 84, 85, 88,
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, 24, 174–175 90–92, 97, 98, 101, 102, 123, 128, 133, 135, 140,
“On Chinese Acting” (Brecht), 119 141, 164–168, 176, 177
One from the Heart, 56 Plainview, H. W. (fictional character), 14,
Ordinary People, 51 35, 64, 65, 67, 69, 85, 88, 90–92, 135, 139,
Orpheus, 159 141–142, 166
Oswalt, Patton, 127 Plainview, Mary (fictional character), 69, 135
Out of Sight, 10 Playtime, 51
Overstreet, Jeffrey, 35, 134–135 Pleasantville, 151
Owen, James, 77 Plemons, Jesse, 139
Police Squad!, 54
Page, Jennifer Neala, 79 Popeye, 46
Paltrow, Gwyneth, 4 Portland Oregonian, 14
“Paper Bag,” 151–152, 158, 159 Post-Pop Cinema (Mayshark), xxiii
Paramount, xxii Potter, Harry (fictional character), xxv
Parker, Alan, 152 Prager, Brad, xxi
Parker, Nicole Ari, 32 Prairie Home Companion, A, 13, 46, 174
Parker, Trey, 63 Premiere, 14

index 221
“Present Tense,” 154 Rock, Chris, 34
Prestige, The, 97 Rodriguez, Maurice (fictional character), 32
Prussia,Adrian (fictional character), 19, 100 Rogers, Ginger, 52, 53
Psycho, 54, 55 Rollergirl (fictional character), 6, 32, 83, 113, 169
Pulp Fiction, xxii, 6, 7, 96 Rolling Stone, xix, 24, 48, 160
Punch-Drunk Love, xxii, xxvi, 11–13, 16, 17, 153, Rolling Stones, 199n61
159, 200n20; alienation effects in, 118, 122–129; Romanek, Mark, 159
domesticity in, 64, 69–70, 72, 73, 75–78; Romanticism, xxi
gender performance in, 97, 100, 102, 111; Roncione, Dajana, 159
history in, 164, 170, 172, 173, 176, 177, 178–179; Rooney, Michael, 159
influences for, 46, 51, 53; place and space of, 25, Rose, Barbara (fictional character), 175
27–28, 28, 32, 34–35, 38, 39–40, 41–42; religion Rose, Charles, 48
in, 147; screenwriting for, 84–85, 86, 87, 89–91 Rose, Steve, 118–119, 130
Putney Swope, 48, 57, 195n39 Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 5
Pynchon, Thomas, 19, 36, 38, 54, 86, 92, 93, Ross, Bunny (fictional character), 92, 165, 166
153, 188n107 Ross, Deborah, 17
Ross, Gary, 151
Quell, Freddie (fictional character), xv, 16, 36, 38, Ross, James Arnold (fictional character), xiv, 165
42, 60, 79, 84–86, 97–99, 98, 101, 102, 109, 111, Rossen, Robert, 104
123, 132–133, 136, 137, 138, 142, 147, 154, 158, 174 Rothchild, Reed (fictional character), xix, 2, 97, 108
Quint, Jonathan, 99 Royle, Nicholas, 119
Quiz Kids Challenge, The, 31 Rudolph, Maya, 34, 124, 136
Rushmore, 6
Rabin, Nathan, 114–115 Russell, David O., xxiii, 10, 16, 64
Rachel Getting Married, 174 Russell, Mike, 14
Radiohead, xvi, 150, 154 Rutigliano, Olivia, 70
Rafferty, Brian, 176 Rysher Entertainment, xxii, 5, 7
Raging Bull, 45
Rainer, Peter, 12 Safdie, Benny, xx, 22, 24
Rajskub, Mary Lynn, 122, 128 Sailer, Steven, 167
Rea, Steven, 20 San Diego Tribune, 37
Reagan, Ronald, 169 Sandler, Adam, 11, 12, 128–129, 129, 185n53
Rebecca, 40, 54, 55, 62 San Francisco Chronicle, 29
Rebels on the Backlot (Waxman), xxii–xxiii “Sapokanikan,” 153–154, 157
Rebel Without a Cause, 72 Sarris, Andrew, 9
reception stance, xxii Saturday Night Live, 64, 73–74, 128, 129, 153
Reed, Rex, 21 “Save Me,” 110, 151, 203n45
Reet, Aunt (fictional character), 66, 175 Schapiro, Steven, xx
Rehfeld, Nina, 76 Schickel, Richard, 15
Reilly, John C., xix, 4, 6, 8, 97, 113, 151, 208n1 Schlosser, Eric, 167
religion, 132–148 Schwarzbaum, Lisa, 14
Reservoir Dogs, 96 Sconce, Jeffrey, xxiii, xxiv, 96, 146
Revolution Studios, xxii Scorsese, Martin, 7, 44, 45, 50, 56, 133
Reynolds, Burt, 6, 7–8, 116 Scott, A. O., 12, 40
Rhymes, Busta, 158 Scott, George C., 104
Rich, Katey, 17 Scott, Tony, 96
Richardson, John H., 17, 42, 60 Scotty (fictional character), 109, 120–121
Richter, Lujza, 112 Seattle Times, 37
Ridgeley, Robert, 2, 75 Secret Life of Pets, The, xxv
“Right Now,” 150 selfless selfishness, 48
Riperton, Minnie, 124 Sex, Lies, and Videotape, xxii
Robbins (fictional character), 207n22 Shannon, Molly, 74
Robbins, Tony, 139 Shelton, Gilbert, 53–54
Roberts, Eric, 19 Sher, Stacey, xxv

222 index
Shining, The, 47, 51, 53 Storie, Lydia, 119
Shoard, Catherine, 172 Sturges, John, 46
Shoot the Piano Player, 56, 73, 120 Sullivan, Helen (fictional character), 137–138, 179
Short, Martin, 49 “Summer Girl,” 42, 155, 156, 160
Short Cuts, 30, 31, 45, 46, 51, 146 Sundance Kids, The, xxiii
shot duration, 125 Sunday, Abel (fictional character), 135
Sight & Sound, 55 Sunday, Eli (fictional character), 14, 92, 97, 98,
Silence of the Lambs, The, 48 134–135, 139–142, 144, 164–168, 176
Sinclair, Michelle, 124 Sunday, Paul (fictional character), 14, 92
Sinclair, Upton, xiv, 13, 67, 91, 93, 135, 165, 166 Sunset Boulevard, 52
Singer, Bryan, xxiii Suspiria, 159
Singin’ in the Rain, 51 Swope, Buck (fictional character), 6, 32, 66–67
Siskel, Gene, xix Sydney, 5, 145
Slither, 26 Sydney (fictional character), 4, 4–5, 36–37, 49, 65,
Smigel, Robert, 126 81–82, 88, 89, 94, 99, 103–104, 105, 108, 113,
Smith, Anna Nicole, 64, 73–74 116, 120, 145, 177
Smith, Donnie (fictional character), 8, 68, 70, 76, “Sympathy for the Devil,” 199n61
84, 95, 97, 107, 109, 109–110, 140, 146
Smith, Kyle, 20 Talbot, Margaret, 160–161
Soderbergh, Steven, xxiii, 10 Talking Heads, 149, 156
Soggy Bottom, 23 Tarantino, Quentin, xxii, xxiii, 7, 47, 56, 96; Once
Solondz, Todd, xxiii Upon a Time in Hollywood of, 24, 174–175
Something to Tell You, 150, 155 Tariq, Khalil (fictional character), 32
Something Wild, 50 Tati, Jacques, 40, 51, 128
Sortilège (fictional character), 35, 36, 92–93, 93, Taylor, Charles, 9
111, 144 Taylor, Ella, 16
space-as-place, 40 Tedder, Michael, 151, 154
Spanking the Monkey, 64 temporal shot structure, 125
Spector, Stanley (fictional character), 8, 68, 70–71, 97 Terminator 2, 4
Sperb, Jason, xiv, xxi, xxv, 5, 33, 45, 47, 55, 56, 108, That 70s Show, 29
113, 115, 123, 173, 177, 183n8, 203n41 “That Moment,” 8, 9, 51
Spielberg, Steven, 102 There Will Be Blood, xv, xxii, xxiii, xxvi, 11–15, 15,
Split Saber, The, 102 16, 20, 21, 199n62, 211n31; alienation effects
Sportello, Doc (fictional character), 18, 19, 35–36, in, 123, 127–128; domesticity in, 64; gender
38, 66, 66, 69, 78–79, 82, 92, 97, 100, 101, 104, performance in, 97–98, 115; history in, 164–168,
107–108, 111, 118, 119, 124–126, 130, 136, 139, 167, 170, 171, 176–177, 179; influences for, 45,
158, 175, 178 47, 48, 53, 57; place and space of, 34–40, 43;
Spy vs. Spy, 97 religion in, 134–135, 139–142; screenwriting for,
Stafford, Jo, 111 88, 89, 90, 91, 92–93
Stanley Kubrick (Pezzotta), 35, 93 Think Christian, 144
Star Wars, xxv Thin Red Line, The, 90
Stein, Michael, 3 This Is Spinal Tap, 45
Stein, Ruthe, 6 Thomson, David, 17
Steinbeck, John, 75, 166 Tichenor, Dylan, 11, 89, 90, 162–163
Stephens, Chuck, 72 Time Warner, xxii
“Steps, The,” 155, 161 Tobias, Scott, 114
Steve (fictional character), 109 Toles, George, xxi, xxv, 18, 34–36, 59, 75, 82, 97,
Stevens, Dana, 17, 23 103, 110, 123, 202n22
Stevens, George, 14 Tompkins, Paul F., 127
Stewart, Jimmy, 106 “Too Close for Comfort” (Karlyn), 71
Stodger, Burke, 178 Tramp, Little (fictional character), 51, 128, 159
Stodger, Burke (fictional character), 36 Travers, Peter, 9, 17, 48
Stone, Matt, 63 Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The, 53
Stop Making Sense, 149, 156 True Romance, 96

index 223
Truffaut, François, xiv, xv, 27, 46, 120, 125 Welch, Christopher Evan, 138
Trumbell, Dean (fictional character), 12, 67, 97, Welles, Orson, 8
100–101, 129, 177, 178 Werle, Lars Johan, 97
Trump, Donald, 172 What Do Kids Know?, 8, 9, 31, 51, 70
Truth About Charlie, The, 56 What Goes Around Comes Around (Bliss and
“Try,” xvi, 150, 151, 153, 154 Banks), 57
Turan, Kenneth, 9, 15 “What Is to Be Done?” (Godard), 120
Turner, Ted, xxii Wheatley, Ben, 55
Twilight, xxii White, Armond, 162, 163
2001: A Space Odyssey, 14, 47, 53, 98, 101, 124, 130 White Album (Didion), The, 179
Two or Three Things I Know About Her, 120 White Heat, 51
White Noise (DeLillo), 182n30
Udovitch, Mim, 60, 61, 74, 169 Wilder, Billy, 125
Uhde, Jan, 120 Wilkins, Kim, xxi, xxiv
Uncut Gems, xxii, 24 Williams, Bill (fictional character), 138–139
Unhomely Cinema (Avery), 40 Williams, Michael K., 32
Universal, xxii Williams, Tennessee, 30
USA Today, 44 Willmore, Allison, 20
Wilmore, Allison, xix
Val (fictional character), 139 Wilson, Owen, 19
Valentine, Gary (fictional character), xix, 1, 18, 22, 22, Winn (fictional character), 79
29, 32, 34, 37, 41, 49, 70, 71, 77–79, 82, 86–87, Winnicott, Donald W. (fictional character), 70
106, 115, 140, 146–147, 149, 167, 175–177, 203n54 “Wise Up,” 84, 203n52
“Valentine,” xv, xxvi, 149, 150, 153, 155, 156, 159, Wizard of Oz, The, 43
162, 163 Wolf, Karina, 193n93
Valley Girl (film), 26, 34, 37 Wolfmann, Mickey (fictional character), 19, 36,
“Valley Girl” (song), 26 69, 79, 100, 107, 126, 130
Vanity Fair, 130 Women in Music Pt. III, 155
Varda, Agnès, 56 Wood, Natalie, 72
Variety, 107 Woodcock, Cyril (fictional character), xiv, 20, 54,
Vernallis, Carol, 151, 156, 157 59, 62, 67, 72, 97, 112–114, 144
Vertigo, 54 Woodcock, Reynolds (fictional character), xxvi,
Vishnevetsky, Ignatiy, 113, 115 20–21, 37–41, 39, 50, 54–55, 55, 59–62, 65, 67, 71,
Vulture, 114, 187n106 73, 75, 77, 78, 80, 82, 86–88, 107–108, 111–112,
143, 143, 144, 157–158, 175, 193n93, 199n61
Wachs, Joel, xx, 22, 35, 100, 115, 203n41 Wordsworth, William, 59
Wadd, 169 World Socialist Web Site, 172
Wahlberg, Mark, xix, 102, 202n16 Worm (fictional character), 31, 88
Waits, Tom, 1 Wright, Lawrence, 138
Wallace, David Foster, xxiii, 182n30 WTF with Marc Maron, 182n30
Wallflower, xxv Wurlitzer, Barry (fictional character), 73, 94, 96
Walsh, David, xxiv, 166, 167, 168, 172
Walters, Melora, 8, 151 Yorke, Thom, 150, 154, 159, 163
Warner, Rick, 35 Young, Neil, 127
Warner Bros., xxii, xxv Young Girls of Rochefort, The, 56, 152
Warren, Ethan, xiii–xiv
Waterston, Katherine, 19 Zacharek, Stephanie, 15
Watson, Emily, 12, 114 Zappa, Frank, 26
Waves, Amber (fictional character), 6, 50, 69, 72, Zappa, Moon, 26
74, 113 Zelig, 45
Waxman, Sharon, xxii–xxiii, 5, 90, 186n83 Zieff, Howard, 26
Weekend, 121 Zootopia, xxv
Weinstein, Bob, xxii Zucker, David, 54
Weinstein, Harry, xxii Zucker, Jerry, 54
Weir, Peter, 35 Zwigoff, Terry, xxiii

224 index
Titles in the Directors’ Cuts series

The Cinema of K E N L O A C H : Art in the Service of the People

JACOB LEIGH

The Cinema of K AT H R Y N B I G E L O W: Hollywood Transgressor

DEBORAH JERMYN and SEAN REDMOND

The Cinema of W I M W E N D E R S : The Celluloid Highway

ALEXANDER GRAF

The Cinema of R O B E R T L E P A G E : The Poetics of Memory

ALEKSANDAR DUNDJEROVICH

The Cinema of A N D R Z E J WA J D A
e d i t e d b y J O H N O R R a n d E L Z B I E TA O S T ROW S K A

The Cinema of K R Z Y S Z T O F K I E S L O W S K I : Variations on Destiny and Chance

M A R E K H A LT O F

The Cinema of D AV I D LY N C H : American Dreams, Nightmare Visions

e d i t e d b y E R I C A S H E E N a n d A N N E T T E D AV I S O N

The Cinema of N A N N I M O R E T T I : Dreams and Diaries

E WA M A Z I E R S K A a n d L A U R A R A S C A R O L I

The Cinema of M I K E L E I G H : A Sense of the Real

G A R RY WAT S O N

The Cinema of J O H N C A R P E N T E R : The Technique of Terror

I A N C O N R I C H a n d D AV I D W O O D S

The Cinema of R O M A N P O L A N S K I : Dark Spaces of the World

J O H N O R R a n d E L Z B I E TA O S T ROW S K A

The Cinema of S T E V E N S P I E L B E R G : Empire of Light

NIGEL MORRIS

The Cinema of T O D D H A Y N E S : All That Heaven Allows

JAMES MORRISON

The Cinema of W E R N E R H E R Z O G : Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth

BRAD PRAGER

The Cinema of T E R R E N C E M A L I C K : Poetic Visions of America

e d i t e d b y H A N N A H PAT T E R S O N

The Cinema of L A R S V O N T R I E R : Authenticity and Artifice

CAROLINE BAINBRIDGE

The Cinema of N E I L J O R D A N : Dark Carnival

CAROLE ZUCKER

The Cinema of J A N S VA N K M A J E R : Dark Alchemy

edited by PETER HAMES
The Cinema of D AV I D C R O N E N B E R G : From Baron of Blood to Cultural Hero
E R N E S T M AT H I J S

The Cinema of J O H N S A Y L E S : Lone Star

MARK BOULD

The Cinema of S A L LY P O T T E R : A Politics of Love

S O P H I E M AY E R

The Cinema of M I C H A E L H A N E K E : Europe Utopia

e d i t e d b y B E N M C C A N N a n d D AV I D S O R F A

The Cinema of TA K E S H I K I TA N O : Flowering Blood

SEAN REDMOND

The Cinema of the D A R D E N N E B R O T H E R S : Responsible Realism

PHILIP MOSLEY

The Cinema of T E R R Y G I L L I A M : It’s a Mad World

edited by JEFF BIRKENSTEIN, ANNA FROULA, and KAREN RANDELL

The Cinema of S T E V E N S O D E R B E R G H : Indie Sex, Corporate Lies,

and Digital Videotape
A N D R E W D E WA A R D a n d R . C O L I N TA I T

The Cinema of B É L A TA R R : The Circle Closes

A N D R Á S B Á L I N T K O VÁ C S

The Cinema of A K I K A U R I S M Ä K I : Contrarian Stories

ANDREW NESTINGEN

The Cinema of M I C H A E L M A N N : Vice and Vindication

J O N AT H A N R AY N E R

The Cinema of R A Ú L R U I Z : Impossible Cartographies

MICHAEL GODDARD

The Cinema of M I C H A E L W I N T E R B O T T O M : Borders, Intimacy, Terror

BRUCE BENNETT

The Cinema of A L E X A N D E R S O K U R O V : Figures of Paradox

J E R E M I S Z A N I AW S K I

The Cinema of A G N È S VA R D A : Resistance and Eclecticism

DELPHINE BENEZET

The Cinema of J A M E S C A M E R O N : Bodies in Heroic Motion

JAMES CLARKE

The Cinema of I S T VÁ N S Z A B Ó : Visions of Europe

JOHN CUNNINGHAM

The Cinema of C L I N T E A S T W O O D : Chronicles of America

D AV I D S T E R R I T T

The Cinema of A N G L E E : The Other Side of the Screen, second edition

WHITNEY CROTHERS DILLEY
The Cinema of G E O R G E A . R O M E R O : Knight of the Living Dead, second edition
TONY WILLIAMS

The Cinema of the C O E N B R O T H E R S : Hard-Boiled Entertainments

JEFFREY ADAMS

The Cinema of C H R I S T O P H E R N O L A N : Imagining the Impossible

edited by JACQUELINE FURBY and STUART JOY

The Cinema of S E A N P E N N : In and Out of Place

DEANE WILLIAMS

The Cinema of R O B E R T A LT M A N : Hollywood Maverick

ROBERT NIEMI

The Cinema of H A L H A R T L E Y: Flirting with Formalism

edited by STEVEN RYBIN

The Cinema of W E S A N D E R S O N : Bringing Nostalgia to Life

WHITNEY CROTHERS DILLEY

The Cinema of T O M D I C I L L O : Include Me Out

WAY N E B Y R N E

The Cinema of R I C H A R D L I N K L AT E R : Walk, Don’t Run, second edition

ROB STONE

The Cinema of L O U I S M A L L E : Transatlantic Auteur

edited by PHILIPPE MET

The Cinema of P A O L O S O R R E N T I N O : Commitment to Style

RUSSELL J. A. KILBOURN