I watched (nearly) all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films and this is what I learned

This week a new PT Anderson film comes out. To celebrate a local cinema programmed his entire backlog. I had nothing better to do, so I went along. Here are some ordered notes I collected, mostly after midnight. They are raw and unsophisticated and I think pretty good. At least they capture something of the initial rush of seeing new films with new cinematic voices.

1. Your characters should be alone in frames. If you can’t manage this then characters in the same frame can’t look at each other. This materialises (I can’t think of a better word) the essential loneliness of the American experience. Some good examples:

a. Sydney, with his aged and grizzled face stares directly at John Finnegan in Hard Eight. Sydney’s face fills the frame with an aged concern. When the camera pans to John, he’s looking at the floor. When they get together in a motel after John has assaulted a perp, they don’t look at each other; instead, they look offscreen.

b. Or the opening shot of Punch Drunk Love. Barry is pushed to the edge of the frame, which is mostly empty like his life.

2.Have long shots, long scenes. Have fewer cuts. PTA likes a gynmastic camera. In Boogie Nights there are a lot of shots which float between characters as they sit around a pool and party. We see each characters story, but it’s all one big thing. But more generally, he doesn’t cut that much. There’s no quick fire dialogue between cahracters in the normal shot-reverse shot mode we’ve been tought to become accustomed to. The camera lingers. This has the effect on the body of being slightly medatative, slightly relaxing. But we also can’t look away. We’re forced to look, really look, at the underbelly of American society (in Hard Eight and Boogie Nights especially).

1. Everyone wants money. They don’t know what to do without it, but when they get it they don’t know what to do with it. “Youv’e got money’ is a constant refrain in Hard Eight. In Boogie Nights everyone has so much money they don’t know what to do with it. It all gets spent on drugs.

2. At the end of Boogie nights we’re now in the 80s and we find Dirk (originally Eddie) in the same room talking to the same mirror he talked at when he started his porn career in the 70s. He’s about to film his big comeback after a period of drug use. It’s implied that we’ll see all of this again, sometime in the 90s when Dirk has completed another cycle of sex, money, and drugs.

3. There’s a real movement between Hard Eight, where people are mean and look only for themsevles and Boogie Nights. Here the consequences of their actions are allowed to follow characters.

a. Dirk enters a world of hard partying, starts on soft drugs, ends up taking meth, and in one tight scene his meth-fuelled paranoia tanks his career.

b. Maggie (played by Julianne Moore) has a son offscreen. She never sees him, since her ex-husband has sole custody. When the custody agreement is renewed, she can’t find a lawyer to represent her, or can’t afford one, so she represents herself. But her lifestyle cathces up with her, and her ex gets sole custody. We get to see the aftermath, her crying outside the courthouse, and then snorting a mound of cocaine to numb her distress.

c. Most notoriously The Colnel ends brutalised in prison. He was the main financier (in the 70s) of Jack Horner’s movies, and every time he appears with another precocious girl (none of whom he cares for). Everntually he’s tried and locked up for peadophillia, and everyone who depended on him abandons him to his ignomy.

1. Money ruins everything, even Jack Horner’s ‘art.’ He starts Boogie Nights looking to elevate porn to the level of art—to make a real film where people ‘stay for the story.’ But time marches on, and video replaces film. To remain solvent Jack has to just push one out one after the other. ‘It is what it is,’ his cameraman and editor tells him. ‘Your films have gotten shit,’ one fan tells Jack. There is nothing that the pursuit of money, no matter how small, will not destroy. We have to live for something else.

2. Boogie Nights tries to imply that all the porn stars and starlets form some kind of extended Found Family. Everyone has been, in some way, failed and abandoned by their biological, real, parents, and all they have each other. But they cannot really function as a real family: there are no bonds of love and mutual respect and dependency, only an uncesaing appetite to use each other. Late in the film, Jack and Rollergirl head out in a limo looking to entice a college boy into having sex on videotape. The whole episode is horrible and tawdry.

3. Punch Drunk Love is a satire of sorts. It’s a satire of an Adam Sandler film, starring Adam Sandler. Just that this time Sandler isn’t some puppy looking for love, but a deeply lonely agressive man who’s unable to reach for love, even when it comes literally right up to him. Ultimately, the love interest, Lena, is just a fantasy, becuase all these films are just fantasies, and she’s only there as a catalyst for a small kind of change on the part of Barry. I mean, he doens’t really love her, int he end he leaves her in a hospital after a car accident to go and settle a feud that his own desperation had set in motion. The soundtrack is matches the camerawork; a sort of percussive undertone of anxiety present in every frame.

4. Sandler is the best part of Punch Drunk Love (I mean a deconstructed Adam Sandler movie wouldn’t work without Adam Sandler), but I think he was in on the joke. You really feel the (passive) agression towards his sisters and the subliminal hatred in Barry. His sisters call him gaylord, and his brothers in law think he’s a failure. And you know what, he is. Barry’s isolation is completely self created, and he festers in it. No wonder he calls a phone sex line instead of going to a shirnk. We can see where Howard Ratner or Danny Meyerowitz came from.

5. Punch Drunk Love doesn’t really spell out it’s meaning, preferring instead to work through a network of symbols:

a. Colour (red and blue). The very first shot in the film is of Barry Egan in his office. The office is blue, Barry is blue, and he dissappears into the background (helpd by the framing of the shot, where he’s pushed to one corner of the screen). Then there’s Lena and her colour: red. One touch I liked was Barry in the supermarket saying ‘what am I looking for’ whilst a splash of red follows him, out of focus, in the background.

b. The moving van/travel. Love arrives in Barry’s world via a removal van. It’s seen right at the beginning, just after the harmonium is dropped off in his life; it’s seen again after Barry and Lena’s date,

c. The Harmonium. This is the least subtle thing in the film. Initially, Barry can’t play the ‘instrument of harmony.’ At the end he takes it to Lena and plays it.

1. What’s there to say about There Will Be Blood that hasn’t already been said? It’s just really, really, fucking good. All of PT Anderson’s films have been concerned with how people (reall, how men) live. What was the animated ethos of their life, and how it both drove the forward into glory and then ruin. Boogie Nights had Dirk and his desire for fame, Hard Eight ahd Jon and his desire for money, Punch Drunk Love had Barry and his desire to fade away. There Will Be Blood has Daniel Plainview and his desire to win. This is a fully amoral man, driven by greed. There’s a moment about halfway through the film, the oil well has exploded and Plainview’s son lost his hearing. Plainview has a rictous grin as he stares at the flaming well: he is rich. Richer than his wildest imagination. A colleague asks him if his son will be okay, and Plainview says, plainly, ‘no he won’t.’

2. The long shots get longer. In this film you really get a sense of the camera purposefully lingering on Daniel Plainview, forcing us to stare, to not flinch and look away. Daniel Day Lewis gives an all time career performance (maybe even the best performance on film). At the end, after he has banished the preacher Eli Sunday, God truly speaks through him.