What the World Needs Now

 

This is the first post I'm doing on a blog I'm calling Incredibly Stupid Bliss, and there's really no better way to get started than by blissing out on Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza, a movie so stupidly wonderful and brilliantly executed that as I watched it I kept welling up with tears.  I do that a lot with movies and books and paintings and songs (that's why I've created this blog so I can go on and on about all that stuff), so my reaction is not really that revealing.  But somehow this time the tears felt so joyful and earned I just kept turning around to Bill in the theater and whispering, "Jesus Christ.  This is a movie."

It is.  A movie.  Not a film, not a motion picture, not a spectacle, not a dramedy, or even an auteur turn (like a lot of PTA's portfolio).  It simply is just a good movie, and in a world where meaning and absurdity and truth and facts and bull-shit and showing off all get tossed together daily in an ongoing conversation nobody listens to but everybody participates in, a "good movie" is a lifesaving event, a signal from God or whoever that there is life still left in culture and therefore the world.  Beyond COVID, beyond insurrections and "Let's Go Brandon" and woke finger-pointing and Kardashian chic.  There is hope here today, the day after Christmas, because PTA does something in Licorice Pizza that can't be done in any other way:  he tells a weird little love-story with a huge and gorgeous scope.  He uses film (and not digital apparatus) to get at life, but life not as we have to experience it, but the way he feels it for us.  And through that translation we actually acquire a gigantic taste of magic, nostalgia, love.  

What the world needs now, right?

Southern California in this thing is Spielbergian, deftly and spiritually lit, photographed with such tenderness it almost feels like PTA is writing in a journal and not making a movie.  There's a cursiveness to his style so to speak:  that lost art of handwritten flow gets folded into the way the camera moves around the two principles from the get-go, Alana Haim as Alana, and Cooper Hoffman as Gary, as they walk into a gymnasium on a sunny day.  Gary is about ready to get his school picture taken, and Alana is a photographer's assistant.  From that instant, the movie doesn't really stop running/flowing toward the final moment at the end, and you feel breathlessly taken in by all the set-pieces and silly asides, the guest starring roles (Bradley Cooper as Jon Peters is straight out of a Mel Brooks movie in the best way possible, and Sean Penn kills it as a William Holden avatar).  

But what matters most as you soak in the movie's So-Cal grit and glitter are the way Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman truly find out how to love each other, how to understand what that means, how to get over the obstacles both internal and external.  The screenplay is a gem.  It doesn't really offer any explanations; "all show and no tell" gives every scene momentum and a Robert-Altman cadence, but also a sort of mysterious core.  You really don't understand some of the shit that goes on, but you actually do because you don't.  That's the secret of all great movies:  they become themselves by not paying attention to you but to what is happening on-screen.  PTA's Licorice Pizza is a shared little trance, cryptic and constantly making self-involved references to early-70s Hollywood ephemera, but also somehow wide open and celebratory and so real you get, well, teary-eyed.

Hilarious too.  The scene in which Gary and Alana and a bunch of ragtag kids unload a waterbed at Barbara Streisand's house is classic, especially the drive home.  And the final shimmery sequence pulling together a pinball store and an awkward dinner with a gay politician and so on -- it's just too much to be believed and yet just right, just what it needs to be.

Over the next few days and weeks, guess what's gonna happen?  Tweeters are gonna tweet about the age difference between Alana and Gary, probably about Asian stereotyping (there's a peripheral bit with John Michael Higgins playing the creepy owner of a Japanese restaurant), and maybe some other stuff I'm missing.  Here's what:  just fucking ignore it.  Licorice Pizza is PTA's glam-rock scrapbook, a paean to all that went on and all that turned mythic, to love and creepiness, to a Hollywood and an America that was losing its mind in the best of ways.  Like Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it's kind of geeky wish-fulfillment pushed into greatness by a stone-cold awareness of what movies need to be to be movies:  a dedication to getting everything right, channeled through one person's vision, given over to us not as truth or remedy or reality, but as art.  This thing is art, and while I doubt it a lot, I still believe art might save us.  

Fingers crossed.