Inherent Vice is PT Anderson's Best Film

As an unrepentantly pretentious person, I nurture a love for capital-G, capital-A Great Art. I like movies and novels that reach unapologetically for the deepest and richest virtues that narrative art can achieve. And a corollary to that preference is a hunger for movies that are shamelessly slow, sad, ambiguous, unsatisfying, enervating, the kind of movies that get you accused of being a film bro if you like them, of being a snob. If I was put on the spot to name the greatest movie of the 21st century, I would probably say Michael Hanneke’s Amour, an achingly moving, relentlessly unpleasant portrait of an elderly couple sinking into illness and senescence, forced into making the grimmest decisions possible. Gun to my head, I might very well choose Akira Kurosawa’s Ran for the best film of the 20th. Ran is epic where Amour is intimate but just as dedicated to a bleak and unrelenting depiction of the nature of human existence. (The film’s final shot is of a blind man, lost and alone, about to fall off of a cliff.) I think nurturing this kind of taste is important in a world where the dictates of commerce will always point in the direction of pop pleasures, of light entertainment. It’s essential to intentionally seek out art about the second part of life, and anyway, I do believe human existence is fundamentally tragic.

It’s true, of course, that darker subject matter and slower, less superficially pleasurable movies aren’t inherently better. I think the notion that contemporary film critics are biased towards obscure arthouse fair is pretty obviously wrong - we’re living in a uniquely populist moment in the creative arts and the financial incentives, again, point squarely in the other direction, and meanwhile most critics are busy building The Great Middlebrow Canon - but it’s not entirely a straw man to say that some people mistake heaviness for depth, or difficulty for seriousness, or misery for insight. It is correct to say that much of mass culture is shallow, and it’s also obviously incorrect to say that the opposite of shallow must be slow, dour, and punishing. Again, this is all filtered through the middlebrow heuristic that dominates contemporary film criticism; the overt self-seriousness I’m talking about here is of the No Country For Old Men variety, not the Amour variety, the kind that’s cool, not the kind that quietly devastates.