The Sound Of "Inherent Vice" (and other Paul Thomas Anderson pictures)

Today, for Wondering Sound, I speak with Paul Thomas Anderson about the music in his new film Inher­ent Vice, and in all of his oth­er films. I’m pretty happy with the piece and was hap­pi­er still to speak with Anderson, who’s all kinds of smart and enga­ging and also, in my estim­a­tion, a great film­maker. And Inherent Vice is, for this film crit­ic, the movie of the year. 

In the open­ing of my piece, I state that Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets “argu­ably pion­eered” the song-based soundtrack in Hollywood-affiliated nar­rat­ive film. Useful word, “argu­ably.” My piece had­n’t been up ten minutes when a friend reminded me on Twitter that The Graduate, Easy Rider, and American Graffiti all pre­ceded Mean Streets. And indeed they did. And while I can be legit­im­ately pegged as a Scorsese par­tis­an, I will still stand by my asser­tion while admit­ting that leapfrog­ging over Easy Rider was some­thing of a snub. 

Here is my reas­on­ing: The Graduate’s music soundtrack is largely song-based, but it’s all the work of one com­poser, Paul Simon. And, as the speeding-to-the-church scene test­i­fies, Simon repur­poses the “Mrs. Robinson” motif for riff­ing that actu­ally resembles a tra­di­tion­al score. Easy Rider uses rock and roll songs as both score and back­ground music; American Graffiti takes advant­age of the fact that all its cruis­ing chrac­ters are tuned in to the same radio sta­tion (the stu­dio and dee­jay Wolfman Jack act­ively fig­ure in the storyline, too) to make a score out of its nostalgia-inducing stream of ’50s and early ’60s songs. Graffiti only pre­ceded Mean Streets by a couple of months in 1973, and it was a much big­ger hit. But I’d still argue that Mean Streets was ulti­mately more influ­en­tial in terms of mak­ing the song-based “score” a con­ven­tion (well­spring­ing, among oth­er things, the still wild-and-wooly subindustry of song licens­ing for motion pic­tures and tele­vi­sion) than any of the oth­er films. With Graffiti, you have the pre­text of die­get­ic hap­pen­stance, and I think that obtains to a cer­tain extent with Easy Rider as well. Easy Rider being a film about the coun­ter­cul­ture from with­in the coun­ter­cul­ture, high­light­ing that cul­ture’s music made sense. Not to second-guess myself too much, but I prob­ably don’t give Dennis Hopper as much cred­it as I should in terms of orches­trat­ing sound and image; by the same token, “Born To Be Wild” IS a song about rid­ing a motor­cycle, so it’s not as if he was a kind of aes­thet­ic Vasco De Gama for pair­ing it with a mont­age of motorcycle-riding. My asser­tion stems from my belief that it was in the dis­tinct­ive way—related, again, to the Michael Powell idea of “com­posed film,” which like Scorpio Rising was a key influ­ence on Scorsese—the dir­ect­or matched music to movie that really gave trac­tion to the concept, and turned a prac­tice that had until that point been isol­ated and occa­sion­al into some­thing more standard. 

In any event, hope you dig the piece.