Adam Nayman - Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks

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Table of Contents

Guide

Abrams , New York

CONTENTS

Foreword

Josh and Benny Safdie

Im really drunk... really, I am. Im out of my head. Im so

wastedIm really wasted.... Really Dirk, Im really just

wasted. Im crazy right now. Im really crazy. You know?

Dirk rushes back insidehoping to catch the clock strike

midnight as it marks the end of a year he ownedleaving

Scotty alone with his Dirk Digglerwannabe car still sticky

from a crummy paint job. Scotty gets inside (I dont believe

hes half as drunk as he claims to be) and sobs to himself,

Im a fuckin idiot! .. Im a fuckin idiot... Fuckin idiot!

Fuckin idiot! Fuckin idiot! Fuckin idiot! The Watts 103rd

Street Rhythm Band kicks in and its cool laissez-faire vibe

represses your own loneliness deep down to a place you

know will come back to haunt you.

I was fourteen or so when I saw

Boogie Nights

for the first

time. It was our first film by Paul Thomas Anderson. Our

introduction to his work coincided with the beginning of a

life-long journey and obsession with Al Goldstein and his late-

night public-access show

Midnight Blue

(which a few years

later would host Andersons subversive Frank T.J. Mackeys

900-number commercial).

Boogie Nights

is a movie that

wears its fascinations and obsessions on its sleeve. Suce it

to say: There was a lot of overlap on the Venn diagram.

Dont know what it says about us, but as much as we relate

to Dirks quest for real imported Italian leather, it was the

Scotty, the Rollergirl, the Buck Swope, or even the Kurt

Longjohn wanting to talk about lighting with Little Bill while

his wife has an ass in her cock that cut us deep. Anderson

fills his movies with peripheral

C

haracters that feel like the

center of their own films.

I remember being a young teen watching the Fuckin

idiot scene (as it would become dubbed) with Philip

Seymour Hoffman. I remember rewatching it... Rewinding

it... rewatching just that scene, trying to understand it.

Here we had a moment of cosmic humanity in the midst of a

film told in the "Hollywood-style". It was so lived-in. Bravura

filmmaking by a twenty-six-year-old.

When

Punch-Drunk Love

came out, I was eighteen. We had

grown up with Adam Sandler. In particular, we had grown

up with and obsessed over his first two comedy records. The

jewel cases were monuments. Then came his movies, which

were always perfect. As kids we loved comedies. Comedies

were the movies. The serious stuff that our dad showed

us to help us better understand life is simply that: Life.

They were not even called movies. They were the things that

werent out to make us laugh, but to rescue answers from

the wholly ambiguous. These films moved us, but Sandlers

were our first religion: Absurdist tales about pulling through

in your own weird way despite everyone and everything

conspiring against you.

As we grew older, the type of movies that our dad

obsessed over eventually became part of our own personal

wanderings. Some of those films were by Paul Thomas

Anderson. Movies like

Boogie Nights

unlocked a gateway to a

trove of other films by filmmakers of the seventies like Robert

Altman...

Boogie Nights

was a manhole to our own sewers, a

passageway for ourselves away from the ones our dad forged.

Of course, we still watched Sandler films, but they started

to mean something else. They were, and will always remain,

pure to us. Remember our dad was the one who turned

us onto Sandler to begin with. So you could imagine the

inner psychic whirlpool when

Punch-Drunk Love

came out.

It was a Sandler film, but through this realist formalist

lens. Happy learned how to putt.

Of course, everyone points to the explosive rage in the

scene where Barry smashes those panes of glass, but its

the first-date dinner scene that blew and continues to blow

our minds. Its the intricate yet loud micro-performing

like the way Hoffman put his hand on Wahlbergs back

when he leans forward to check his ride, Sandlers

instinctual wrist flick when Lena brings up the hammer story

from his youth... or the leg bouncing while the manager

confronts him about destroying the bathroom... or the

bathroom destruction itself!

Sandlers rage and inner madness was being filtered through

Andersons subtle microscope and, yes, it was still funny and

entertaining. But now it was also begging us to ask ourselves

about our own repressions.... It forced us to recall Sandlers

previous films through a new lens. The worlds were no longer

mutually exclusive... they could co-exist.

For that, we owe Anderson everything....

For his documentary-style blocking.... For his deft, warm

allegories of impossible people.... For his repertoire of actors

shuffling around playing different characters from film to

filmlike a big book of storieslike the films of Fassbinder,

Cassavetes, Altman, or Sandler.... For recording hundreds

of firecrackers hoping to find that one that CRACKS....

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