HOST: TRAVIS WOODS
Travis Woods is a Contributing Editor at Bright Wall/Dark Room, as well as a writer for The New Beverly Cinema and Cinephilia & Beyond.
He lives and writes in Los Angeles. He has a dog and a tattoo of Elliott Gould smoking. Bob Dylan once clapped him on the back and whispered something incomprehensible. These are the only interesting things about him.
NARRATOR: KAT CORBETT
Kat Corbett is a screenwriter and radio personality who can be heard on-air at SiriusXM and KROQ. Raised in Boston, Kat somehow managed to lose her thick accent to become the voice of the FIFA World Cup. She resides in Los Angeles where most days she’s just hoping to score space on the couch between three sleeping dogs.
“SHE CAME ALONG THE ALLEY AND UP THE BACK STAIRS THE WAY SHE ALWAYS USED TO...”
Together with guest Blake Howard, host Travis Woods dives deep into the film’s opening scene, zigzagging from such topics as Joan Didion to End Of The ‘60s movies to romantic breakups, from the (maybe?) illusory nature of Vice character Sortilège all the way to the wry, smirking warmth at the heart of Paul Thomas Anderson’s heartbreaking, hilarious film.
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EPISODE #1
WITH:
BLAKE HOWARD
(ONE HEAT MINUTE)
“…I NEED YOUR HELP, DOC...”
Together with guest Blake Howard, host Travis Woods dives deep into the film’s opening scene, zigzagging from such topics as Joan Didion to End Of The ‘60s movies to romantic breakups, from the (maybe?) illusory nature of Vice character Sortilège all the way to the wry, smirking warmth at the heart of Paul Thomas Anderson’s heartbreaking, hilarious film.
listen now
EPISODE #2
WITH:
KIM MORGAN
(SCREENWRITER / ESSAYIST)
“…LIKE GODZILLA SAYS TO MOTHRA, MAN: LET’S GO EAT SOME PLACE...”
Within the expanse of a single scene, Travis and guest Kayleigh Donaldson find Inherent Vice’s two very different tonal extremes—potfogged melancholy and zany comic tableaus—cat’s-cradled together with some heavy heartache, a few slices of of pizza, “Vitamin C,” and a hair-changing intuition, all into a vast lattice of meaning that only grows deeper with every viewing, and every conversation.
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EPISODE #3
WITH:
KAYLEIGH DONALDSON
(FILM CRITIC)
“…TOMORROW’S ANOTHER DAY—WHICH WOULD BE TODAY, RIGHT?...”
Apocalypse is very much in the air with this episode—as Doc and Denis are whipped by newspaper-munching Santa Ana winds while learning more and more about Mickey Wolfmann, our host is surrounded by the same winds nearly 50 years later during a particularly fiery and windswept day in Los Angeles in 2019. Further, he’s sitting down with Fran Hoepfner—a brilliant writer, an insightful critic, and…someone for whom Inherent Vice simply doesn’t do much.
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EPISODE #4
WITH:
FRAN HOEPFNER
(WRITER / EDITOR)
“…PARANOIA ALERT...”
The mystery of Los Angeles is just one of the topics touched upon between our host and today’s guest, Jordan Harper, whose epic, feature-length conversation rumbles from such topic’s as L.A. crime, race-based prison gangs, the history of Los Angeles land use and abuse, noir’s unique relationship to this sunbaked city, the works of James Ellroy, adapting difficult novels, Jordan’s wrestling with the PTA oeuvre, and much, much more (including where to find the best BBQ in Missouri).
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EPISODE #5
WITH:
JORDAN HARPER
(AUTHOR / SCREENWRITER)
“…NOT YOU, BONG BRAIN...”
When the bitter doom of a dying era takes hold, that’s when the little decencies matter most, according to today’s guest, Drew McWeeny. It’s an idea we explore with Drew as our wayward hero Doc is finally drawn into the mystery plot of Inherent Vice, where he becomes lost among its purple-shagged walls, missing real estate magnates, chatty (and canny) counter girls, and a certain hypocritical and heartbroken LAPD detective with a thing for frozen chocolate-covered bananas.
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EPISODE #6
WITH:
DREW MCWEENY
(AUTHOR / FILM CRITIC)
“…WELCOME TO A WORLD OF INCONVENIENCE…”
Well, at long last, we’re finally here. Put on a suit and tie, take the #2 clippers to your hair, and bite into the lightning-blast-to-the-teeth cold of a frozen chocolate-covered banana, because today is the day we tackle the unstoppable force (or is it immovable object?) of Lt. Detective Christian F. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen.
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EPISODE #7
WITH:
JEDIDIAH AYERS
(CRIME NOVELIST)
“…THAT’S BIGFOOT BJORNSEN, RENAISSANCE COP…”
Today we follow “Bigfoot” Bjornsen’s as his appetite for yellow frozen crescents sneaks nightward across the borderline of simple hunger and into the lawless landscape of horny-melancholy obsession…which, when you think about it, isn’t that—a preoccupation both depressed and thirsty—the mood of Inherent Vice as a whole?
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“…SHE’S GONE, MAN…”
Near the end of Douglas Sirk’s 1954 Technicolor melodrama, Magnificent Obsession, Otto Kruger makes a pretty heavy declaration:
“Once you find the way, you'll be bound. It will obsess you. But believe me, it will be a magnificent obsession.”
Obsessions can be magnificent. Whether focused on a person or a time or maybe just a screen flickering at 24 frames per second, to passionately dedicate yourself to something you love can unlock doors you never even knew where there, sending you tumbling into worlds you never knew existed…
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“…ALONG COMES LITTLE AMETHYST…”
Sortilege tells us that in this the post-Manson era of 1970, “Doc had known it to happen...that those left behind would refuse to believe that people they loved...or even took the same classes with, were really dead. They came up with all kinds of alternate stories so it wouldn't have to be true.”
The Harlingens are a family in need of such a story, one that will allow them to live in the Mansonoid, post-60s drop-out drag known as the Age of Nixon. If only someone could tell them that story, could put together the pieces so we could all see it a little more clearly…
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“…NOT SO MUCH ENGLISH ROSE AS ENGLISH DAFFODIL…”
There’s a reason why our buddy Thomas Pynchon describes the House of Wolfmann as a descent into Hell—for Doc, it kinda is. Having just met a salt-of-the-earth gal like Hope Harlingen (heroin and heaving and hardons aside), who with a quiet and modest dignity refuses to accept the death of her husband despite no support from the cops or the banks, it must be a shock to the system for our knockabout dick to find a woman outright celebrating the non-death of her missing husband with the cops and the banks and everyone else on the wrong side of karma in 1970.
And that’s this scene in a nut, isn’t it? It’s a dichotomous portrait of lives on either side of the Golden Fang—the good lives the fangs chew to pieces…and the gaudy lives those fangs feed…
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“…SHASTA’S MISSING, WOLFMAN’S GONE, UH, GLEN CHARLOCK’S DEAD…”
Connections abound in the paranoiac and conspiracy-laden world of Thomas Pynchon, connections vast and connections minute, connections real and perceived and imagined and hoped for and dreaded and undiscovered. The same could be said of the city, the megalopolis, Los Angeles, with its never ending cascade of connections falling upon its concrete sprawl and tangling up its dazed denizens like fish in the net of a certain schooner sailing the seven seas. Connections that bind this person to that movie, or that movie to that song, or that song to that memory, or that missing person to that booby hatch, or that ex-old to that supposedly dead junkie sax player, and so on and so on and so on, world without end, hallelujah…
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EPISODE #8
WITH:
MARYA E. GATES
(NOIRVEMBER CREATOR)
EPISODE #9
WITH:
ALICIA MALONE
(AUTHOR / TCM HOST)
EPISODE #10
WITH:
LINDSEY ROMAIN
(FILM CRITIC / CULTURE WRITER)
EPISODE #11
WITH:
COURTNEY HOWARD
(FILM CRITIC)
EPISODE #12
WITH:
JIM HEMPHILL
(WRITER / DIRECTOR / FILM HISTORIAN)
“…HE’S REAL INTELLIGENT ABOUT THIS KINDA SHIT…”
“Was it possible that at every gathering, concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in and freak-in, here, up North, back East, wherever, some dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire, from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?”
Well, today’s guest certainly thinks so, as he walks us through the lattice of beastly beneficiaries to the betrayal of a generation, a movement, a decade, a country—COINTELPRO informants, conspiranoid CIA ops, mismanaged and malevolent FBI agents, rogue LAPD officers, and that strange sick fuck Charlie Manson himself—and just how easily they can swing you to their side, with a simple conversation in a room a lot like the one Doc finds himself in today…
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EPISODE #13
WITH:
JACOB KNIGHT
(WRITER / FILM CRITIC)
“…THIS IS GOLDEN FANG TERRITORY…”
The novels of Thomas Pynchon are littered and latticed with all manner of songs and bands and movies and TV shows and cartoons either real or imagined, a paranoid prism of pop culture through which you see his characters, their lives, and the conspiratorial entanglements that enmesh them. So it’s all rather appropriate that today’s guest comes armed with movie marathons and mixtapes and double and triple features all centered around Inherent Vice—through her incredible array of popsterpieces, we can see through the fog of the Fang and recognize a few folks we know, like a certain heartbusted detective, his maybe-real/maybe-not surfergal Jiminy Crickett, a mysterious ex-old of some repute, and a fast-talking Chick Planet countergirl who maybe just maybe knows more than anyone else in this misty night-world we find ourselves returning to….
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EPISODE #14
WITH:
MILLIE DE CHIRICO
(TCM UNDERGROUND)
“…I DON’T KNOW WHAT I JUST SAW…”
Ol’ Raymond Chandler once wrote the following about the kind of hero who shows up in detective fiction:
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”
“The best man in his world and a good enough man for any world,” huh? Gee, that sounds a little like a buddy of ours out in Gordita Beach, has an office now, it’s like a day job and everything. Not quite a do-gooder, but somebody who does good…
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EPISODE #15
WITH:
JASON BAILEY
(AUTHOR OF IT’S OK WITH ME: HOLLYWOOD, THE 1970S, AND THE RETURN OF THE PRIVATE EYE)
“…IT’S A HORROR STORY…”
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: The book and the movie version of the same story walk into a bar and order a couple Tequila Zombies.
The book says, “she’s not just a boat, Doc.”
…Get it? Boat? Dock? Like…where a boat docks?
Hello? Anything?
Well, if thematically appropriate Dad Jokes aren’t your thing, stick to the episode: Steely Dan, Donald Trump, nautical puns, movie references, PTA vs. Pynchon, food jokes…if ever there was an episode of INCREMENT VICE that matched the sheer metric tonnage of its scene’s atomic density, it’s this one.
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EPISODE #16
WITH:
DC PIERSON
(AUTHOR / COMEDIAN)
“…OUT AT SEA SOMEPLACE…”
In his classic novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey wrote “McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top, spreading his laugh across the water…laughing at all of it. Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. He knows there’s a painful side…but he won’t let the pain blot out the humor no more’n he’ll let the humor blot out the pain.”
If ever there was an author we suspect our ol pal Doc Sportello would enjoy (other than a certain reclusive fellow hiding on the other side of Gravity’s Rainbow), it’d be that acid-fried humanist Kesey, who also wrote something more than just a little pertinent to Inherent Vice in general and today’s scene in specific:
“You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself.”
Goddamn, Ken…
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EPISODE #17
WITH:
PETER AVELLINO
(WRITER)
“…AWFUL NICE NIGHT OUT HERE AT THE BEACH…”
Bogart and Bacall…
Tracy and Hepburn…
Sinatra and Gardner…
Burton and Taylor…
Phoenix and Witherspoon?!?
“Well, maybe,” our host thinks, as he drifts pastward into the secret history of Hollywood with today’s very special guest….
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EPISODE #18
WITH:
KARINA LONGWORTH
(HOST OF YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS / AUTHOR)
“…WHAT YOU WOULD CALL AN ATMOSPHERE…”
”Inherent vice” in a maritime insurance policy is anything that you can’t avoid…eggs break…chocolate melts…glass shatters…and our host—hermetically sealed inside a dark screening room and kinda-sorta ruminating on the End Times when he’d much rather be watching movies—wonders what that means when applied to global contagions…
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EPISODE #19
WITH:
FILM CRIT HULK
(FILM ESSAYIST)
“…LITTLE KID BLUES…”
“…and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn’t find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness…”
That’s a line from Inherent Vice the novel… and here’s our wayward host, thinking a lot about it lot these days, as the little parenthesis of light left in 2020 America seems slimmer and slimmer and slimmer. It’s also a line that ol’ PTA lamented leaving out of the film adaptation in an interview with today’s guest…which is as good a place to start the conversation as any other, or our host thinks as the dark shadow of the Golden Fang seems to loom taller and darker over all with every passing day…
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EPISODE #20
WITH:
MARK OLSEN
(LA TIMES FILM CRITIC)
“…THEY’RE AN INDOCHINESE HEROIN CARTEL…”
If the first hour of Inherent Vice is a hazily mysterious stretch of world-building in which we—and Doc—realize that something has gone wrong, then the second hour of the film is reveal after reveal of what is wrong with the world, and the people in it. And resting between those two hours is this one-scene, in which the film simultaneously exhales after an hour of introductions and inhales before diving deep into the world of the Golden Fang, and exponentially expanding the scope of Inherent Vice.
And who better to join us to celebrate cracking Inherent Vice’s first hour with a one-minute scene than the host of One Heat Minute himself?
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EPISODE #21
WITH:
BLAKE HOWARD
(ONE HEAT MINUTE)
“…SOMETIMES, IT’S JUST ABOUT DOING THE RIGHT THING…”
“What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now.”
That’s a line from Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and it’s one that Doc is surely on a handshake basis with, or would at least nod kinda knowingly to before returning to his cloud of Asian indica. “When you’re dead, you’re dead,” as Bigfoot Bjornsen says…but what if…what if even that was one of the certainties that the Golden Fang could take from us? Who could you turn to? Who else could Doc take this to, besides our old flat-topped pal?
As Chandler wrote in The Long Goodbye, “I never saw any of them again — except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.”
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EPISODE #22
WITH:
BRENDAN HODGES
(FILM CRITIC/ ESSAYIST)
“…YOU CAN ONLY CRUISE THE BOULEVARDS OF REGRET SO FAR…”
Odd, isn’t it, here in Los Angeles, capital of eternal youth, endless summer and all, that fear and loneliness should be running the town again as in days of old, like the Hollywood blacklist you don’t remember and the Watts rioting you do.
But that’s where our host sits, deep in his studio bunker, Stuck Inside of LA with the Quarantine Blues Again…
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EPISODE #23
WITH:
WILLIAM BOYLE
(CRIME NOVELIST)
“…NOTHING WAS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN THIS WAY, DOC…”
Polish author Olga Tokarczuk—when not busy receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature—wrote in her 1998 novel House of Day, House of Night:
“Your memory creates postcard images, but it doesn't really comprehend the world at all. That's why a landscape is so affected by the mood of the person looking at it. In it a person sees his own inner, transitory moments. Wherever he looks, he sees nothing but himself.”
Wellllll, jeez Louise. Doc, meet Olga. Olga, meet our pal Doc…
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EPISODE #24
WITH:
JON ABRAMS
(EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OF DAILY GRINDHOUSE)
“…THAT ONE DAY IN THE RAIN…”
What’s real, and what is simple hope?
What is a true memory, and what is the fictional story we tell ourselves to survive it?
That’s a question our host wrestles with today, while talking to someone who’s no stranger to tales of mystery and love and time and space…
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EPISODE #25
WITH:
RIAN JOHNSON
(WRITER/DIRECTOR)
“…MOST OF US HAPPEN TO BE DENTISTS…”
For all of Thomas Pynchon’s tracing of the souring and the downfall of the American fate, from pre-revolution secret doom waiting to devour the 60s and 70s and how that leads to our current tainted now, forever, probably the one thing he didn’t predict coming to pass by this nightmare year of our dark lord 2020 was that, eventually, every single movie obsessive would have their own podcast, including one about his only film adaptation.
That said, there is one film podcast out there that reigns supreme: the New Beverly-presented Pure Cinema Podcast.
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EPISODE #26
WITH:
ELRIC KANE & BRIAN SAUR
(PURE CINEMA PODCAST)
“…IT’S NOT GROOVY TO BE INSANE…”
Bob Dylan once sang, “it’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there,” and gee whiz if that ain’t ever the tone of the times these days—that sense of encroaching darkness and regret and a growing nostalgia for all that’s been lost…And guiding us through that not-quite-dark-but-sure-as-shit-not-light-at-all tunnel is a guest whose words are like a lantern in the fog, here to see us to shore and safety…
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EPISODE #27
WITH:
WALTER CHAW
(AUTHOR / FILM CRITIC)
“…ANY GATHERING OF THREE OR MORE CIVILIANS IS NOW CONSIDERED A POSSIBLE CULT…”
Much like our ol pal Doc, on principle we try to spend as little time around the LAPD as is possible. And yet here we are, unswerving and unavoidable, careening with a scene into the lightless dark that pulses siren-red and siren-blue. All this strange alternate cop history and cop politics—cop dynasties, cop heroes and evildoers, saintly cops and psycho cops, cops too stupid to live and cops too smart for their own good—insulated by secret loyalties and codes of silence from the world they’d all been given to control.…
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EPISODE #28
WITH:
ANNA SWANSON
(FILM CRITIC)
“…MOTTO PANUKEIKU…”
Well, mornin’, Sam. It’s finally here, it’s final time—we’re gonna sit down with that hippie-hating mad dog himself, Christian F. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen and have ourselves some motto panukeiku.
And sure it’s something to laugh at, Bigfoot chowing down on pancakes with the same ravenous intensity that he deep throats a chocolate covered frozen banana or a platter full of Doc’s best Asian Indica, but at the same time, this is mourning all right, and it is deep. Bigfoot’s air of possessed melancholy—where does it come from? What’s been lost? If the term “inherent vice” refers to all that is lost irrevocably due to time, what’s the shape of the hole in Bigfoot’s heart…?
…or maybe it’s his stomach?
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EPISODE #29
WITH:
MATT ZOLLER SEITZ
(AUTHOR / FILM CRITIC)
“…ANIMAL TOOTH MADE OUT OF GOLD…”
Sortilege: A noun, meaning the practice of foretelling the future from a card or other item drawn at random from a collection. Origins in late Middle English, via old French from the medieval Latin Sortilegium meaning sorcery…
Bet you can guess who we’re talking about today…
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EPISODE #30
WITH:
BRIANNA ZIGLER
(FILM CRITIC)
“…PERHAPS YOU SHOULD PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT MAN…”
You know what that means. Grab your comfy hotel robe and an Uzi, because we're headed to Chryskylodon, the place where all lines of plot-related force within Inherent Vice converge--from Mickey's kidnapping to Mickey's millions, from Golden Fang the boat to Golden Fang the fully fucking weird outfit that kills people, from the reprogramming of Burke Stodger to the flight of Japonica Fenway, all of Inherent Vice's many plot threads tie in a nice little bow, right here, where up is down and "straight is hip.”
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EPISODE #31
WITH:
CORY EVERETT
(CINEPHILE: A CARD GAME)
“…HELLO, LITTLE HIPPIE…”
A billionaire land developer who’s technically Jewish but wants to be a Nazi…
A man who dreams of giving away his billions to build free housing for hippies, all while his properties act as money-laundering fronts for the arm of the vaaaaaaast conspiranoid body that’s a heroin cartel infecting the heart of that same hippie populace with a soul-breaking heroin addiction (and dentures).
The man who treats his ladies as trophies and painted neckties, dragging them into dark Beverly Hills bars to share with his fellow elites, yet seems to be genuinely haunted by the absence of one Shasta Fay Hepworth…
Just who the fuck is Mickey Wolfmann? What is the mystery that surrounds him? Is there even any mystery at all?
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EPISODE #32
WITH:
ETHAN WARREN
(WRITER/DIRECTOR)
“…WORD IS YOUR GIRL’S BACK IN TOWN…”
So this is it: The Beginning of the End.
We begin the strange and hazylazy final third of INHERENT VICE today.
Speaking of threes, today’s is the only scene in which the film’s three principles come together in real time—Doc Sportello, Bigfoot Bijornsen, and one not-so-missing Shasta Fay Hepworth—to kick off the film’s most difficult and inscrutable scene, one which we’ll explore in today’s episode AND the next (hey, give us a break, it’s a heavy sequence, ok?)…
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EPISODE #33
WITH:
BILGE EBIRI
(FILM CRITIC / FILMMAKER)
“…WHAT KIND OF GIRL DO YOU NEED, DOC?…”
Well, hello there.
And just like that, Shasta Fay Hepworth is back, bringing with her Inherent Vice’s most complex, and erotic, and disturbing, and confounding scene…one in which mystery begets mystery, and both she and ol’ Doc Sportello are laid completely bare…and yet are somehow all the more mysterious…
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EPISODE #34
WITH:
ANGELICA JADE BASTIEN
(WRITER)
“…ANYTHING YOU CAN’T AVOID…”
Raymond Chandler once wrote:
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world…
“The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”
Or, as Doc might put it:
“Who, me?”
listen now
EPISODE #35
WITH:
MEGAN ABBOTT
(NOVELIST / SCREENWRITER)
“…THE BOND BETWEEN PARTNERS…”
Well, here it comes: the big P-L-O-T. The sea of story that so many seem to get lost within while watching Inherent Vice. The rush of strange names: Adrian, Puck, Vincent...and, of course, our ol pal Bigfoot...Like one of Adrian's baseball bats to the head, it's a scene that fires one massive chunk of exposition right at our brains...The only question, then, is the same that afflicts Doc: Can we catch it?
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EPISODE #36
WITH:
DAVID FEAR
(ROLLING STONE SENIOR EDITOR & FILM/TV CRITIC)
“…A BLIND CANNONBALL DOWN INTO OLD KARMA…”
“A blind cannonball down into ol Karma” is how Sortilege describes today’s scene, and she sure ain’t kidding. All of the forces kicked up by Doc’s action and inaction, his heroism and his complicity…well, let’s just say they all come back to visit him today, with more than a few baseball bats and cosmic debts, all demanding to be paid and signed for on the dotted line or else…
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EPISODE #37
WITH:
S.A. COSBY
(CRIME NOVELIST)
“…DID I HIT YOU?…”
As we return once more to the craggy, cauliflower-eared and swastika’d face of Puck Beaverton, so too are we paid a visit by an old INCREMENT VICE pal just one more time. And when two chatty Kathys like Travis and Jordan get together…well…let’s just not expect a whole heck of a lot of structure to this episode, ok gang?
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EPISODE #38
WITH:
JORDAN HARPER
(AUTHOR / SCREENWRITER)
“…DOPER’S ESP, DOC…”
For all the talk of Inherent Vice’s hazylazy and sunshine-y avoidance of dark and gritty neo-noir, the movie doesn’t get much more harrowing than our favorite gumshoe (or gumsandal, I guess) getting tied to a pipe and shot full of PCP in last week’s scene…or maybe it does? Maybe Doc wandering into the film’s true heart of darkness happens here, tonight, in a hitman’s garage, where he learns who his true partner has been all along…
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EPISODE #39
WITH:
JORDAN RAUP
(THE FILM STAGE FOUNDER / EDITOR-IN-CHIEF)
“…BEEN A LONG TIME…”
We come now to the point in which Doc finally meets his maker, in a manner of speaking—the crown prince of Palos Verdes, one Crocker Fenway. A wealthy elitist who lives a life of unusually high density and incoherence, raping and pillaging the American Fate for his own nefarious ends, Crocker is as close as we get to a Big Bad in Inherent Vice, and he’s the man who paid Doc his first buck on his first case… So what’s it mean to meet your god, and find out he’s a devil? Well… gosh…
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EPISODE #40
WITH:
DAMON HOUX
(WRITER)
“…SO YOU GUYS BEEN WORKIN’ FOR THE GOLDEN FANG LONG?…”
A peace sign that transforms into a middle finger—it’s Doc’s signature gesture, and a sign of the times. A symbol of hope and love that curdles into anger and entropy…and if that doesn’t sum up so much of Inherent Vice and what it’s about—hell what so much of today is about—well, after 41 episodes of doing this, I’m not quite sure what does….
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EPISODE #41
WITH:
CJ WALLIS
(CO-CREATOR OF CIGARETTES & RED VINES: THE DEFINITIVE PT ANDERSON RESOURCE)
“…YOU SAVED YOUR OWN LIFE. NOW YOU GET TO LIVE IT…”
For a villainous organization with a name as bright and shiny-sounding as the Golden Fang, boy, the forces of evil sure do make life as dark as possible, for Doc, for Bigfoot, for the Harlingens… hell, everybody, including your humble narrator. Things are as dark as I’ve ever seen them… which is why today’s scene is such a shot of hope in a weary world, a portrait of kindness in a time when that word seems to have lost all meaning…
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EPISODE #42
WITH:
CHAD PERMAN
(FOUNDER & EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OF BRIGHT WALL/DARK ROOM)
“…WHERE THE AMERICAN FATE MERCIFULLY FAILED TO TRANSPIRE…”
42 episodes down, four more to go…we’re at the end now, friends. Staring at the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, waiting for what happens to everything to happen to us too: An ending.
And so it’s endings we’re thinking about today, for the show, for the movie, for the American fate we’re all held hostage too... Jeez, remember when we used to have fun on this thing?
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EPISODE #43
WITH:
SEAN BURNS
(WRITER / FILM CRITIC)
“…BUT YOU COULD USE A KEEPER…”
Raymond Chandler once wrote, “the French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.”
As we begin to make our long goodbyes, that’s something to think about, isn’t it? Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to let go of what’s lost—it feels like dying a little. Just ask our ol pal, Bigfoot Bjornsen…
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EPISODE #44
WITH:
ADAM NAYMAN
(AUTHOR OF PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON: MASTERWORKS)
“…THIS DON’T MEAN THAT WE’RE BACK TOGETHER.”
And just like that, here we are, at the end. One year. 45 episodes. A whole LOT of talking.
At the end of the Thomas Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice, Doc finds himself alone in his car, no Shasta Fay to be found, driving along PCH and lost in a fog of the kind of density that only comes with lungs full of THC and a heart full of sorrow. Doc’s been here before, and he’s wondering if there’s any more to be found on what Clancy Charlock once called “the boulevards of regret.”
In that ending, Pynchon wrote, “Maybe then it would stay this way for days, maybe he'd have to just keep driving, down past Long Beach, down through Orange County, and San Diego and across a border where nobody could tell anymore in the fog who was Mexican, who was Anglo, who was anybody. Then again, he might run out of gas before that happened, and have to leave the caravan, and pull over on the shoulder, and wait. For whatever would happen. For a forgotten joint to materialize in his pocket. For the CHP to come by and choose not to hassle him. For a restless blonde in a Stingray to stop and offer him a ride. For the fog to burn off, and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead.”
Whew. Don’t say the guy can’t write a great bummer of an ending.
But as for us…what will we see tonight, on the show, as the fog clears one last time?
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EPISODE #45
WITH:
BLAKE HOWARD
(ONE HEAT MINUTE)
EPILOGUE: “IT’S ABOUT LOVE, BABY!”
The show came along and went online the way it always used to. Listeners hadn't heard it for over a year. Nobody had. Back then it was always a hazy narrator introduction, followed by the host's own rambling hello, before talking to a guest about this movie neither of them could stop thinking about.
Tonight, the show was making a surprise re-appearance, a little older than listeners remembered, featuring a guest the show figured it'd never feature...
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EPISODE #46
WITH:
PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON
(WRITER / DIRECTOR OF INHERENT VICE)