FIRST THING
In the December 12th edition of the Los Angeles Daily News, in the year 1999, director Paul Thomas Anderson attempted to explain the myriad reasons he’d titled his third theatrical feature, Magnolia.
There’s the fact that this film is set in the San Fernando Valley where Magnolia Blvd. is a major artery, connecting disparate communities. There’s also the idea that some believe magnolia bark holds the ability to cure cancer. In a film as cancer-haunted as Magnolia, that aspect is actually quite relevant. But it’s his third reason that is the most attention grabbing.
"On top of that, there was this this thing that I discovered called the Magonia," he continues. "Of course, there's a recognizable similarity to the word magnolia, and the Magonia is this mythical place above the firmament where stuff just goes and hangs out before it falls from the sky. In other words, when you hear those stories about an anchor suddenly dropping on a farmer's barn, they explain that it came from the Magonia.”
While the geographical location most synonymous with Anderson’s Cinema is The Southland (on account of most of his films being set in and around the greater Los Angeles area) there is one location that truly unites his whole filmography, and that is the liminal space Paul identified in that Daily News interview as, The Magonia.
* * *
In myth, The Magonia is a realm of sky pirates (who UFOlogists think could’ve been stand-ins for ancient aliens) who make storms in order to steal crops. But as Paul uses it in that interview, it’s simply a sort of liminal/in-between state, “…where stuff just goes and hangs out.”
While the concept of liminality has taken on a sinister undercurrent in recent years (thanks in large part to the viral internet images of, “The Backrooms” which depict an expanse of nondescript, fluorescent lit office space where you could potentially end up after “no clipping” out of reality) it’s actually quite common to both Cinema and narrative in general.
Anthropologically, the term, “liminal” is used to describe the transitional period in a rite of passage. A period Britney Spears succinctly described as, “not a girl, not yet a woman.” A period in-between what was and what is to come. Act Two. That big middle chunk of Joseph Campbell’s Hero's Journey after the, “call to adventure” has been accepted and before the hero returns home, forever changed.
But if this state of liminality is common to most narrative storytelling since the beginning of time, what is it that makes Paul Thomas Anderson’s work different from that of your average children’s story?
What sets Anderson’s Cinema apart is that since the very beginning, that liminal/in-between state of The Magonia has been front and center. His films are about that middle state. His films are about change.
Initially, they are films about people who avoid change, people who desire change, and people who cannot change. Eventually, they are films about people who begrudgingly accept change and people who have learned to accept the things they cannot change.
Over the course of three decades of making movies, The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson has changed a lot, but his fascination with how people and things do or do not change, has remained amazingly consistent.
“I guess what I like in my movies is where you see a character change by maybe two degrees as opposed to the traditional movie change of maybe ninety degrees. I guess that always feels false to me in movies because that doesn't truly happen. Around me, at least in the life I live, I guess I don’t see people change ninety or a hundred degrees. I see them change in very small increments.”
Creative Screenwriting (2000)
ONE: Maintaining Your Magonia
SYDNEY
Though not as visually flashy as his other features of the 90’s, and set hundreds of miles away from The Valley, Paul Thomas Anderson’s debut, Sydney (his preferred title for the film many refer to as Hard Eight) lays bare many of his core concerns from the very start.
This tale of a veteran gambler (Philip Baker Hall, in the titular role) who takes on an apprentice (John C. Reilly) for mysterious reasons, features all the requisite daddy issues and surrogate families one would later come to expect from a P.T. Anderson picture. And of course all of this is handled with the expected, Jonathan Demme-esque, compassion Anderson is wont to grant his characters. But even before we have seen a single frame of film, The Magonia is already present.
As the opening title cards go by over black, an odd, funerary musical motif of tolling bells and what sounds like a slow-moving train(?) plays on an endless loop.
Composed by Michael Penn, the cue known as “Clementine’s Loop” went on to feature heavily in Paul’s next two films as well. In Boogie Nights and Magnolia it is deployed at particularly low points for various characters. In this film, it opens the picture. We are already trapped in an unending cycle. And then there is the matter of the film’s setting.
In most casinos, you will traditionally not find any windows or clocks. The casino owners do not want you to be aware of how long you’ve been gambling. Time does not exist on a casino floor. It’s always the same time as when you entered. This film has the added kick of ending with a Christmas song. How long was I in there? Has it been Christmas this whole time?
It’s a milieu that is quite semiotically suited to our protagonist, Sydney who is in many senses a man out of time, floating along the casino floor, being taunted by the riffraff.
On one of the two audio commentary tracks of the DVD, Anderson describes the conception of the character with the hypothetical, “What if Cagney lived?” referring to the legacy of old gangster films. As such, this is a sequel without a first film.
And since Philip Baker Hall is no longer with us, there will also never be a completion to the trilogy. All we will ever have is this middle chapter. For eternity Sydney will be living with the weight of his past and the weight of the things he has done to prevent reckoning with that past. He may cover up that little fleck of blood with his coat cuff, but it’s still there and really hard to wash away.
BOOGIE NIGHTS
There’s an old aphorism that you have your whole life to make your first album/film and only a few months to make your second. The implication is that you blew everything you had to say in that first work and the follow-up suffers as a consequence. That is not true for Boogie Nights.
Conceived when Paul was a horny teenager, filming stuff on the home video camera, this tale of a well-endowed kid (Mark Wahlberg) from the South Bay who rises and falls in the San Fernando Valley porn scene of the 70’s and 80’s, is bursting with so many ideas and images that it stretches to nearly three hours. But it still opens with what Anderson describes on the commentary track as, “Broken circus funeral music.” An omen of things to come.
The windowless casinos of Reno have been traded for the nightclubs and ranch houses of Reseda, but it’s a lateral move. We may be seeing way more sun on this outing, but the world is no less cloistered. The outside world is not welcome in the home of Porno Auteur, Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds)…at least until it beats down the door on New Years Eve, 1980 via a murder-suicide and the arrival of home video. The Magonia bubble has burst.
The remaining runtime is split between increasingly desperate attempts by the film’s expansive cast to either get back to the good times or to simply play as if nothing has changed. Both approaches are equally delusional and harrowing. The vibe has shifted and there is no going back home.
Yet somehow that is where this film ends, back at Jack’s. But from the Norma Desmond-esque soliloquy that ends the picture, it is clear that this is not a triumphant ending. Our POV character has given himself over completely to the realm of Magonian delusion. We aren’t even looking at him directly. Like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, we are seeing a reflection. Nothing has been learned, or perhaps the wrong things have been learned. But hey, at least he’s convinced himself that he’s a big, bright shining star.
THERE WILL BE BLOOD
After a brief, two film foray into the world of escaping The Magonia (which will be addressed later) There Will Be Blood finds Paul back in maintaining mode and at easily his most cynical. He was a happily married man by now, but this project was conceived and produced in George W. Bush’s post-9/11 America after all. No Jonathan Demme compassion to be found in this tale of an oil man (Daniel Day-Lewis) with a single-minded thirst for wealth.
Perhaps some viewers hold out hope for Daniel Plainview because the film’s ten-minute, dialogue-free opening (wherein we learn what this man is willing to endure for a few flakes of silver) ends with him taking in a coworker’s orphaned son (Dillon Freasier). But, the title drop and accompanying horror film score that preceded that stretch of film, has already promised us that there WILL be blood. As with Sydney and Boogie Nights before it, the die has been cast before we have even begun.
Whereas Philip Baker Hall’s Sydney commits heinous acts to preserve stasis in the the one human relationship he’s managed to eke out in the twilight of his life, Daniel Plainview ruthlessly cuts out those with whom he’s managed to form a bond.
When his adopted son’s hearing impairment becomes a hindrance to the business, he is sent away. When the man Daniel thought to be a half-brother (Kevin J. O’Conner) is revealed to be a liar, he is murdered. Both excisions are aided by alcohol as a means of numbing the pesky humanity that would typically keep someone from doing such things. Nothing will get in his way. Not even God (through the personage of huckster preacher, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano)) will get in his way.
As Daniel declares, “I’m finished!” over Eli’s corpse, and the title treatment returns, it is no longer accompanied by discordant, horror film music. This time it is accompanied by a triumphant symphony, recalling the end of A Clockwork Orange and indicating a promise fulfilled. Stasis maintained. And since Daniel’s quest has been such a resounding success, there will certainly be more blood to follow!
PHANTOM THREAD
Despite sharing a leading man, Phantom Thread and There Will Be Blood have almost nothing in common.
This tale of a persnickety fashion designer (Daniel Day-Lewis) whose life is upended by a relationship with a waitress named Alma (Vicky Krieps) who has the audacity to stand up to him, is easily the least cynical and most compassionate of Anderson’s maintenance focused films. A compassion arises from the fact that it is a film about the maintenance necessary to be in a long-term relationship.
When we first meet Day-Lewis as Reynolds Woodcock, he’s literally in the act of maintenance. Maintaining himself. Shaving, polishing his shoes, trimming his nose and ear hair, applying cream, brushing his hair, etc. He is a particular man, set in his ways and enabled by his sister, Cyril (Lesley Manville) who manages his day to day. Right down to dismissing his paramours.
Reynolds is so set in his ways that something as simple as Alma’s desire to make him an unexpected dinner is perceived as an, “ambush!” Only once she has brought him low with mushroom poisoned tea do the scales begin to even out. That is the reset. In the twilight of this poisoning is when he asks her to marry him. And so begins their delicate dance. A pas de deux.
It’s fitting that Reynolds and Alma’s climactic reunion occurs on New Year’s Eve, a night suspended between the old and the new. The consensual, Munchausen by proxy system they work out with each other is a joint effort to forever remain in that limbo status for the sake of their relationship. They are doing the work. It’s perhaps a bit extreme, but it seems to work for them.
TWO: Escaping the Magonia
MAGNOLIA & PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE
Between Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Cinema reached an inflection point.
While aesthetically similar to the audacious style of Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love stand apart from what came before in their radically different approach The Magonia.
Rather than being additional tales of characters desperate to cling to the stasis they’ve grown accustomed to, Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love identify that stasis as a prison that needs to be broken out of.
The key phrase in Magnolia is that quote from the never outright named book that states, “We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.” This perfectly encapsulates all this film’s myriad characters and their collective inability (or refusal) to heal old wounds.
And in case there was any ambiguity as to this reading, just before the film’s climax, all of these characters join together and literally sing Aimee Mann’s 1996 song, “Wise Up” with its refrain of, “It’s not going to stop, ‘til you wise up.” Of course the song does also conclude with, “So just, give up.” Which is when an external force has to step in.
To Paul Thomas Anderson, the siren call of The Magonia is something so strong that it requires a literal act of God to break the cycle. As Dixon (Emmanuel Johnson) declares in his rap, “When the sunshine don’t work, the Good Lord bring the rain in”. And so, a literal rain of frogs occurs to snap everyone out of it. To give some a moment of introspection, to bring others together, and in the case of Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall) to make sure they burn to death.
Tabula rasa. All debts are settled. And after three hours of screaming and tears, we end on a smile and the possibility of good things to come.
* * *
Though they are not sequels in any way, Punch-Drunk Love picks up from right where Magnolia left off. Rather than ending with an act of God sent to shake someone out of their complacency, this film begins with the act of God.
When we meet Barry Eagan (Adam Sandler) as he sits at his little desk in the unadorned warehouse of his novelty plunger company, his first line is literally, “Yes, I’m still on hold.”
It’s an odd metallic twanging sound we never find the source of that gets him to put down the phone and venture out into the dawn of a new day, so that he may experience this film’s incarnation of a rain of frogs — a horrific car accident and the delivery of a broken harmonium.
Over the course of the film, the harmonium is repaired (with tape) and Barry begins to teach himself how to make beautiful music with it. Has he always known how? This occurs in tandem with him meeting and falling for Lena (Emily Watson), a coworker of Barry’s sister (Mary Lynn Rajskub) who, rather inexplicably, fancies him too.
After a trip out of his comfort zone to Hawaii (a literal island apart from his sparse warehouse and apartment, purely for the purpose of spending more time with Lena) and a trip to Utah (to confront the mattress salesman (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who has been extorting him) Barry is able to put aside his childish rages and commit himself to loving Lena.
In an interview on the Criterion edition of the film, composer Jon Brion describes the film as, “A musical where nobody ever breaks into song.”
In the final moments of the film, as Lena and Barry begin to play the harmonium together, Lena intones, “Here we go.” Maybe now it is time to sing.
THREE: Mournful Magonia
THE MASTER & INHERENT VICE
Though he’s certainly made returns to the realm of Magonia Maintenance (as evidenced by the second two films covered in that section) the “Escape” films seem to have truly marked an inflection point in Paul’s career, both thematically and aesthetically.
Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love burned all the whip-pans, speed-ramps, and abrupt cutaways out of his system. Aside from two notable exceptions (There Will Be Blood and Licorice Pizza), he now tends to favor the boxier, 1.85:1 ratio to the wide, scope framing of those first few films.
While each new release is still an event to cinephiles, you get the sense that he is no longer needing to prove himself on every outing. Perhaps parenthood has mellowed him. Or perhaps it was the time he spent shadowing his idol, Robert Altman on his swan song, A Prairie Home Companion. Perhaps a combination of the two? That beautiful film about joyful art making while gracefully accepting the end of an era does also co-star Paul’s wife, Maya Rudolph, pregnant with their first child.
Whatever the cause, from The Master onward, Anderson’s films have been much more acceptingly zen about the way things change.
The Master and Inherent Vice each take place during famous Refractory Periods of the 20th Century (post-World War II and after the 1960’s, respectively) where, for a few years, the world was suspended in a liminal holding pattern whilst resetting itself after great tumult. Against such backdrops, both films grapple with the personal aspects of change. Can a person change? And how do they handle change?
The Master wrestles (literally) with the desire for personal change via its tale of a troubled man, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) who seeks answers and transformation through devotion to a religious cult, led by a charismatic charlatan (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who sees in Freddie the ultimate challenge. Much sound and fury is put towards taming Freddie, but in the end, Freddie himself comes to accept that there is no taming him.
The mournful closing image of Freddie spooning a woman made of sand (destined to get washed away by the tides) as Helen Forest’s rendition of, “Changing Partners” plays in the background, is a perfect encapsulation of both the loss and genetic predisposition at the heart of Quell’s neurosis. No bloviating father figure could ever hope to fix this.
So I’ll keep changing partners/Till you’re in my arms and then/Oh, my darlin’ I will never change partners again.
* * *
Thomas Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice begins with an epigraph:
Under the paving-stones, the beach!
Graffito, Paris, May 1968
The epigraph doesn’t quite do justice to this particular revolutionary slogan. “Sous les pavés, la plage!” was more than mere graffiti. It was a poetic reference to the sand discovered by protesters underneath the paving stones they were lifting up to hurl at police. They felt their uprising had the potential to expose the natural state underneath things, back before paradise was paved to put up a parking lot.
Paul Thomas Anderson seems to have given a lot of thought to this slogan as well. Not only is it used to name a cue on the film’s score, but the film’s opening shot is of the fictional Gordita Beach of Southern California, faintly visible between two beach shacks.
As a film, Inherent Vice is a record of the period where the paving stones are beginning to be put back into place by the true masters of the universe. What is one person to do against forces so mighty? In the detective film Chinatown (with which this film shares much Film Noir DNA) the answer is: Nothing. Why bother? Inherent Vice takes a much more optimistic and micro approach to the question.
Facing down a powerful syndicate with its fingers in the pies of all things not good, stoner detective, Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) opts to do a small, good thing. Doc uses the tiny bit of leverage he has (in the form of bushels of heroin) to exfiltrate saxophonist, Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson) from his indentured servitude to a counter revolutionary organization, purely so that Coy can go home to his wife and daughter.
Notably Doc doesn’t try to use that leverage to bring back his beloved, Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston) because deep down he knows that ship has sailed.
He recognizes that she (like the historical anomaly of the 60’s which she represents) has passed into the rearview of history. The Summer of Love is not coming back and neither is Shasta Fay. But she will, nonetheless, be with him forever, riding shotgun in his memories.
LICORICE PIZZA
Licorice Pizza is Anderson’s most anthropologically liminal film, in that it is actually about the transition from adolescence to adulthood, but it is told through negative space, through the hole in the center of a vinyl record, around which everything spins.
Set during the hangover of the 1960’s, centered on two leads caught between childhood and adulthood, living next door to Hollywood in the San Fernando Valley, Licorice Pizza is very much a film about the middle.
Gary (Cooper Hoffman) is an ambitious teenager who seems to have the world figured out, and Alana (Alana Haim) is a twentysomething who has nothing figured out. While the years between them are relatively few, seeing them interact, you become acutely aware of how fast the world conquering confidence of adolescence dissipates once you are an adult and have to actually put in the work of making your life happen.
Seeing Gary dive headfirst into various ventures ranging from a waterbed company to pinball parlor proprietor, one begins to think of the bravado of Paul’s early films where the camera was constantly in motion and not a care was given to run time. Seeing Gary through the eyes of Alana, you get a sense of Paul’s wistful admiration for the cocky young man he once was.
The film is realistic about the stupid decisions one makes while young and the danger that could result (particularly in the tense sequence with Bradley Cooper as an unhinged John Peters) but like Alana, it comes down on the side of embracing at least a little bit of that youthful joie de vivre over the monotony of grownup work.
Did it make Paul feel young again shooting wide for the first time in over a decade?
LAST THING
Of the many truisms Roger Ebert famously coined, one of the more frequently cited is his statement that, “It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.”
Though he said this as a means of comparing and contrasting films within a genre, it can also be applied to the recurrent images, ideas, motifs, and themes found within the body of work of a single filmmaker.
* * *
Regardless of quality, all filmmakers have recurrent images, ideas, motifs, and themes. They might not be to your liking or they might not be particularly novel/deep, but even the most crass Hollywood product has at least some small touch of its maker buried under the cliches and dross.
The next step up the ladder are good filmmakers. These are the filmmakers who have images, ideas, motifs, and themes that are novel and interesting. These are also the filmmakers who hit it big with one or two films and then either fade away or spend a career endlessly making the same film over and over again to diminishing returns.
Great filmmakers also make the same film over and over again. But unlike good filmmakers, they are able to do so with increasing rather than diminishing results. The distinction between the two is nuance, because what matters is, “...not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.”
* * *
In online discourse, assertions like, “Martin Scorsese only makes gangster movies.” are legion. Of course this is a patently false statement about the director of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, The Age of Innocence, Hugo, etc. but it also ignores the nuances of his gangster films.
The distance between Mean Streets and The Irishman is a marathon. Even the most closely aligned of the grouping (Goodfellas and Casino) have distinctions reflecting the life the artist has lived since the last work. A great director is not content to just repeat themselves.
* * *
Uncharitable critics could choose to refer to Paul Thomas Anderson’s preoccupation with liminal states and time periods as a rut in which he is either trapped or lazily content to remain in. But just as Scorsese’s approach to gangsters has evolved over a career, so has Paul’s approach to The Magonia.
As he has grown, both as an artist and as a human being, Paul’s approach to change has…well…changed.
It is no longer something to be forestalled at any cost. Change is something that happens. It cannot be stopped. And rather than kicking against the pricks, we can make the best of the time we have, and once we have moved on, we can remember fondly what we have left behind and who we once were.
* * *
Despite the trailer and the source material for One Battle After Another strongly indicating Paul’s next film will have an Inherent Vice-esque preoccupation with a lost past, there’s no reason to be afraid of a retread.
A decade has elapsed between the two films. The world has changed and so has Paul.
And assuredly so has his Cinema.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Paul Thomas Anderson by George Toles
- Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks by Adam Nayman
- Hard Eight commentaries
- Hard Eight letterboxd review by Devon Torrey Bryant dated 3/12/25
- Boogie Nights commentaries
- Creative Screenwriting interview with Paul by David Konow
- Redditor “mikedash” comment on Magonia question from r/AskHistorians
- That Moment: Magnolia Diary documentary
- Interview with Paul accompanying the published shooting script of Magnolia
- LA Daily News interview cited directly in the intro
- Jon Brion interview on Criterion disc of Punch-Drunk Love cited in that section
- There Will Be Blood interview with Kenneth Turan for The Los Angeles Times
- There Will Be Blood interview with Daniel Day Lewis & Paul for The Museum of the Moving Image
- “Does It Ever End?: The Sweet Heartbreak of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice” by Travis Woods for Bright Wall/Dark Room
No comments:
Post a Comment