So, looks like Paul Thomas Anderson finally got his Oscar. Good! He deserved it – for Magnolia!
But it’s not for Magnolia. Instead, they gave him a little gold-plated mannequin for turning Thomas Pynchon’s dense, paranoid 1990s novel Vineland into a star-studded, chaotic clusterfuck that allowed wealthy Hollywood centrists to keep sitting on the fence until their balls hurt worse than Jim Morrison’s.
Here is the basic premise: Leonardo DiCaprio is playing the Dude, trying to protect his teenage daughter, Lucy Skywalker, from Darth Vader. Lucy’s mom is Perfidia, who looked like she would’ve had a much bigger role in this movie, and it would’ve been better for it.
The movie, I think, wants to be… kinda funny? It plays an enlightened both-sideism where the leftists (the “French 75”) are portrayed as either woke SJW’s, ideologically misguided terrorists relying on crime to fund their “revolution” or entirely over-the-top tropes where Blaxploitation meets Nunsploitation to sploit the tation out of each other.
The fascists (Vader and his merry Gentlemen the Saint Nick Fan Club) are portrayed as bumbling, chanting clowns, casually competent assassins or hyper-armed, organised and dangerous enforcement troops. The banality of evil was apparently too… banal.
So, because evil is boring, we get excitement! Shooty guns, screechy cars and boomy splosions! What we don’t get, though, are actual characters, because that would’ve required spending some time developing them, and who’s got time when there’s splosions to splode? So instead we get empty avatars shuffling through set pieces of video-store nostalgia. It’s the Lego Star Wars version.
The movie knows this, and it desperately tried to gloss over the emptiness by dialling everything up to MAX. The fascists aren’t just fascists, they’re a bunch of weirdos who seem to perpetually be caught in an even weirder version of the Black Lodge. The leftists seem to have given up on Revolution and instead spend their entire time upholding a set of codes and riddles, just to create Dispatches from Elsewhere for the Dude alone.
And Lucy Skywalker – well, she’s just a regular old teenager, what with teenage friends, doing teenage things. Except she’s permanently locked at home, not allowed to have a phone or, indeed, a mother and gets a paranoid, perma-stoned parent instead. So instead of a childhood, she gets a kidnapping, attempted murder and to shoot a guy in self-defense. And because that’s awesome and how she wants to live her life, she answers the call of the DNA of her dead-beat mother by becoming a revolutionary herself. For the satire, you see.
And so, they ride into the sunset, Lucy and the Dude, leaving a trail of corpses in their wake that would be impossible to ignore even under a liberal government, and even more so considering that the Empire that’s been in the background the entire time is still there.
Anderson used to know how to write about trauma. He doesn’t know how to write about politics or, indeed, satire.