One Heat Minute Productions INCREMENT VICE - EPISODE #1: "She came along the alley and up the back stairs the way she always used to..."
Nov 1, 2019
Blake Howard, writer and co-founder of Graffiti With Punctuation, discusses Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice with infectious enthusiasm. He explores the film’s melancholic take on endings and nostalgia. They analyze the opening scene, Shasta’s unreliable narration, the movie’s sunlit noir aesthetics, and the blend of goofy comedy with heartfelt melancholy.
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Detective Genre As End Of Era Meditation
- Inherent Vice uses detective genre tropes to probe endings and the melancholy of a fading era.
- Travis links Joan Didion's idea "we tell ourselves stories in order to live" to the film's focus on loss after the 1960s.
Blake's Immediate Obsession With The Film
- Blake Howard first saw Inherent Vice in early 2015 and immediately adored it, watching multiple times the day he bought it on home video.
- He laughed, rewatched with a friend twice in one night, and found each rewatch increasingly rewarding.
Shasta As Unreliable Narrator Shift
- PTA reframes the novel by giving Shasta (Sortilège) the film's narrative voice, subverting the typical hardboiled detective narration.
- That choice makes the story feel subjective, nostalgic, and unexpectedly mysterious from a female perspective.
