The following is the preface/acknowledgments to my book on the films of Paul Thomas Anderson, Blossoms & Blood. I am fond, upon reflection, of its historical narrative, which is also perhaps an account of my own ambivalence towards cinephilia. js.
I suppose it all began one wintery day in early 1997. In my youthful cinephilia, an upper-middle-class teenager flush with the luxury of time and money, I went to the cinema constantly, devouring every movie I could on the big screen. Living in Indianapolis then, I would often drive up to the arts theatre in Castleton. Once there, I would sometimes view two or three films at a time—coming for one film in particular, and then, if possible, staying for another. Often, I knew little, to nothing, about the second film beforehand, other than its poster, or the critic’s review sitting out on the table, clipped from the local paper.
One such movie was an unrecognized neo-noir that starred Samuel Jackson from Pulp Fiction and Gwyneth Paltrow from Se7en. That cast was enough to keep me around for an extra show, though it did not really prepare me for the film itself. I do not claim to remember much about that viewing experience itself, but I do remember clearly what happened afterwards. I headed over to Michigan Ave. and 71st St. for a prearranged meeting with my friend and fellow cinephile at his job at Taco Bell. I knew him because we were one of several film buffs who worked part-time at the same movie theatre on the West Side (he was the first one who told me about this new “DVD” thing). We hung out in a booth during his break and I was still on a high from the neo-noir I’d just seen. I told him, “you have to see this movie.” He excitedly pulled out a piece of scrap paper and jotted down the words, “Hard Eight.”
Years later, after Boogie Nights and then Magnolia, I realized that I was probably one of only a few people in the world who could honestly claim that they had seen Paul Thomas Anderson’s very first film in theatres during its initial, very brief and financially disastrous, theatrical run (I discovered only recently that the film had literally made slightly north of $200,000 in domestic receipts total). It was purely a coincidence that I was in a position to discover this movie, of course, but then again what are Anderson’s narratives if not stories built on the after-effects of random chance? I often wonder if I was so impressed with Hard Eight, in retrospect, because I knew nothing about it going in. I had no auteurist expectations and, moreover, it’s a narrative built around the actions and choices of a truly ambiguous character.
In any case, I suppose one could say that I was there at the beginning of it all, and that I thus always had a stake, a certain cinephiliac investment, in the long-term trajectory of Anderson’s career. Every film I clearly remember seeing in the theatres when they first appeared. But this is not to suggest I was, or am, a die-hard fan—quite the opposite. By the end of the 1990s, for example, I was far more personally interested in the films of Wes Anderson, Alexander Payne and, especially, David Fincher. As for the other Anderson, my interest had momentarily waned.
With Boogie Nights, I came out amused, but also slightly underwhelmed, especially after all the hype, while Magnolia was thrilling for about forty minutes and then quickly descended into a self-absorbed dullness from which it never recovered. By 2000, I was, if anything, nostalgic for the tight narrative construction and deeper character development of Hard Eight. But that’s assuming I was giving the whole body of work much more thought than I probably was as a typically self-absorbed 22 year-old film student with a whole world of movies still to discover.
Of course, the films themselves did eventually win me over, as the argument throughout the course of this book should make clear. By the end of the next decade, Anderson had become to me the most interesting of those same, now-older “maverick” American directors. Otherwise, there would have been no point in writing this. In particular, Punch-Drunk Love was a turning point, but the change was not immediate. I don’t remember much about the first time I saw it at a Tulsa cineplex in the fall of 2002—other than a pair of college-age white guys, wearing backwards baseball hats, walking out after 20 or 30 minutes. Clearly, they were devastated Happy Gilmore fans. For my own reaction, I thought, as most did, that it wasn’t the kind of film I had expected from Paul Thomas Anderson, but I wouldn’t say it was love at first sight.
Rather, during a long hot Oklahoma summer the following year, I discovered the film again on DVD. I found myself watching it again, and then again, and then again. Its weird visual beauty, its mad sound design, its deceptively simple story—all rewarded repeated viewings in a way that the others hadn’t. Additionally, Sandler’s performance got me thinking more carefully about the use of actors in Anderson’s other films—namely, his work with Tom Cruise, Mark Wahlberg and Burt Reynolds. Suddenly, Anderson’s films were interesting to me again. I had an idea back then for a Master’s thesis on his work with star personas—but alas I was already 100 pages into another one on Stanley Kubrick, so this idea would have to wait. I’m glad it did.
Looking back, my ambivalence about Anderson’s films may have ultimately made me better suited to write this book. In a way, I still feel the same essential way about each respective film personally. But with time, I’ve matured as a person and as a scholar—I see in, through and beyond what someone else might call my own cinephilia. Each one of his films is more complex than I initially gave it credit for. I understand much more thoroughly now the narrative, thematic and stylistic ambitions of both Boogie Nights and Magnolia, their strengths as well as their weaknesses. Thus, the following pages will not be a cultish, uncritical, glorification of his body of work, nor a simplistic hagiography of the filmmaker once known as “P.T.” Rather, it will be an honest intellectual attempt to understand the highs and lows—the many different contexts—in Anderson’s rhizomatic claim to a certain level of deserved admiration from fans, cinephiles, critics and scholars, from someone who hesitantly but conscientiously followed the journey the whole way.
More importantly, I’ve spent so much time thinking about every aspect of every one of his first five feature-length films over the last four years in particular that my own personal evaluation of each feels completely irrelevant in the end. Thus, in the final analysis, I gave the overrated (in my mind) Boogie Nights every bit as much care, thought and attention as Punch-Drunk Love, which remains not only my personal favorite Anderson film, but also quite possibly one of my two or three favorite American films from the whole decade.
If there is a cinephiliac bias here, one could say, with slight exaggeration, that I wrote a whole book about Anderson’s movies just so I could write one chapter in defense of Punch-Drunk Love. And yet, by that same measure, I did not write everything about that film that, once perhaps, I would have liked. By the time I actually got to brainstorming and mapping out this book in the summer of 2010, much of my personal, private reactions to Punch-Drunk Love would simply not have fit with the larger goal of the project (and perhaps I’ve arrived at that point in my career where I prefer to keep my private reactions to films private). Not that my fondness for his fourth film doesn’t still give the book the obligatory polemical edge that every auteur study must have.
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