So why is Inherent Vice the first to be filmed? ![]() As John Dugdale pointed out in a recent article for The Guardian, Pynchon’s books seem to offer themselves up directly for film adaptation, so steeped are they in film and media references. Think of The Lord of the Rings (2001-3) or Game of Thrones (2011-present), or the new BBC version of Wolf Hall (2015). The increasing convergence between film and prestige television production now means that novels that use vast canvases can be adapted for screen with no significant loss of detail or complexity. The complexity of Pynchon’s stories is not, in itself, a particular problem for contemporary screen adaptations. All Pynchon novels have a very large cast of characters – some named in outlandish fashion, as with Trillium Fortnight – and take in elements from science and history and paranoid conspiracy stories, presenting an America that imagines itself in the mirror of cinema and television screens. His other works, including his most well-known novel, the vast Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), have proved too stern a task for potential screenwriters to take on. Inherent Vice is the first of Pynchon’s novels to be filmed. It’s not surprising, then, that Pynchon’s novels haven’t been coveted by the film business before. His freewheeling and complicated plots (and plots within plots) are held together as a kind of musical whole, in part by what we hear as the novel’s “voice”. This “symphony” of sounds can be taken as a figure for Pynchon’s novels themselves. ![]() Like parts in a musical piece? Kenworth and Econoline van, plus a street hemi, a Harley, and some miscellaneous clunkers. It was the way the voices combined… Not ‘voices’ voices. ![]() “It sounded like they were out on the road, a pay phone on a frontage road off some interstate,” she says: In a revealing moment from Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 “nostalgia-noir” novel, hippy private eye Doc Sportello speaks to a client, Trillium Fortnight, who is able to diagnose the whereabouts of mutual acquaintances through sound alone.
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