Downey on Inherent Vice

[Joseph Tracy]

Of course I disagree on this one. Part of the point of digressions with P is that they aren't disconnected  side trips but the only way to understand the world. In IV all the digressions circle around the interconnected power relations that led to the killing  of Glenn Charlock. I see no dead ends but an accumulation of clues that clearly point beyond  the hired killers Puck and Adrian Prussia, just as Taguba's report  pointed far beyond the low level torturers in Abu Graibh. The point is partly that  getting away with murder is just a matter of  leverage and connections.  I think another point that IV makes  is that America's  intolerance for complexity makes understanding or reforming the spread of criminal behavior impossible.  This is terrain the Shakespeare explored in his better tragedies.  I seem to be among the few who thought IV was a kick -ass  post modern detective story and left reasonably intact, will make a long wacky kick-ass movie. I wish it was the Coens, which is what I have always argued P had in mind, but hey, there's a lot to work with here, let's hope they don't fuck it up. Still it will be hard to compress into a movie. It should be a TV maxi-series, with commentary by p-listers, Lisa Simpson, police investigators and college professors  all wearing paper bags.



On Dec 9, 2011, at 10:55 AM, David Morris wrote:

> There are so many mini-journeys that dead-end and have no connections
> with anything else in the book.  Diversions are one thing, but it
> seems the book's trajectory starts with a PI's quest for a dead man
> and ends with a climactic attempted murder and self-defense killing.
> Nearly everything in between seems extraneous dead-ends.
> 
> On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM, jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:
>> David, some suggestions, editing-wise? (For the book, I mean; if you
>> make a script out of a novel, say Moby Dick, you don't call it
>> editing. But perhaps you would have edited that book as well.)
>> 
>> J
>> 
>> 2011/12/9 David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>:
>>> Filmable if the source is heavily edited, as the source should have
>>> been before publishing.
>>> 
>>> On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 8:34 AM, Joe Allonby <joeallonby at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> One of my first reactions to IV was that this was filmable.