Not that they're all that similar in tone, but the Lebowkski script has a sense of wordplay and a fondness for the absurd that marks it, at the very least, as a spiritual associate of both Pynchon and Anderson. The Big Lebowski (1998, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen)įor most modern audiences brought up on movies released after the '80s, the Coen Bros.' wild yarn is going to be the most obvious point of comparison for Inherent Vice. And Top Secret's occasional musical numbers aren't far at all from Pynchon's characters' tendency to break out in song.Ĩ. On film, Anderson doesn't pitch the humor of Inherent Vice to the cartoonish extreme of the ZAZ team, but the awareness of the absurd is always lurking nearby. (He uses ten pages of Gravity's Rainbow just to set up a pretty ridiculous pun, for example.) In that way, he and Paul Thomas Anderson are fairly similar, as Inherent Vice makes abundantly clear.Īnderson talked about having Top Secret in mind when writing the film, and the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker follow-up to Police Squad! and Airplane! - in which Val Kilmer plays an Elvis Presley type who becomes involved in cold war intrigue during a trip to Berlin - has comic setups that would be right at home in Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow. Yet Pynchon is also a guy with a nutty, even lowbrow sense of humor - he just writes his goofball jokes in a more intricate manner than most anyone else. Top Secret! (1984, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker) Inherent Vice author Thomas Pynchon has an outsized reputation as a literary luminary and his novels have an equally imposing reputation for being challenging to get through.
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