How Music Punches Up Thomas Pynchon's 'Inherent Vice'
This weekend, the world premiere of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice will screen at the 52nd New York Film Festival. The film is an adaption of Thomas Pynchon's 2009 novel of the same name, about a shaggy dog pothead private investigator (played Joaquin Phoenix) as he finds himself embroiled in a bizarre case involving some even more bizarre characters. The kinetic comedy also stars an impressively deep cast -- including Josh Brolin, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro, Owen Wilson, and even songwriter Joanna Newsom -- who all inhabit Pynchon's seedy and psychedelic 1970's Los Angeles.
And like many of Pynchon’s books, Inherent Vice is absolutely riddled with near-constant music references -- everything from Chopin to The Beach Boys and pretty much everything in between.
Author and contributing editor at Rolling Stone Rob Sheffield first reviewed the novel when it came out in 2009 and says that the songs mentioned had a way of illustrating each character.
"The way that in an old time noir you'd have a scene in the night club where someone's singing the bluesy torch song, the same kind of thing happens here," Sheffield says in a conversation with Soundcheck host John Schaefer. "Except it's this psychedelic soundtrack to all the characters' adventures. Sometimes it's ominous and sometimes it's melodious, but everyone's constantly weaving music references into everything they say."
Sheffield dives headfirst into the the hundreds of songs from the book, and makes his picks for which ones should make it into the final cut of the film.
Watch the brand new trailer for Inherent Vice below:
