![]() ![]() ![]() Bleached-out anxiety slo-mo paranoia now dusted with cocaine. ![]() In place of Robert DeNiro’s exhausted Vietnam vet wired by debilitating insomnia, we get the tuned-in dropped-out headspace of Doc. But gradually the track darkens, melting into a reworking of Bernard Herrmann’s sensorial dirges for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), where orchestration relates less to situation and description and more to the body and its presence. If the architecture looks like exotica in concrete and steel, investment dentist Rudy Blatnoyd (Martin Short channelling British TV’s Jason King – Peter Wyngarde) looks like Les Baxter’s number one fan. Greenwood takes his cue from Les Baxter’s exotica arrangements (sketching violin passages then overlaying them with vibraphone and celeste). In the middle of a commercial dime store strip wasteland stands the ludicrous architectural folly. “The Golden Fang” saunters in mid-ground as we approach the corporate citadel of The Golden Fang, led there by Doc who interprets a cryptic note in a postcard recently arrived from the invisible Shasta. It’s more avant-garde dance theatre than neo-noir pulp fiction. The two drug-addled minds talk while the score disintegrates around them. It mimics Doc walking, scuttling, then crawling, finally on his knees as he converses with a heavily medicated Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts). Then, plucked bottom-end strings (echoing Herrmann’s ominous ECG death-gulps from Psycho’s score from 1960 when Janet Leigh expires on the bathroom floor) start to corrode the tinkling Glass-like patterns, changing the waltz into a strange limping 4/4 riff. The score swells while location sound recedes. It’s partially-pastoral – evoking the fluidly expanded spatial domain of the eponymous institute – but it also reflects how Doc navigates the Institute’s hall of mirrors. Loping, patterned overlays, serially generating harmonic moiré effects as sections lock into a gridlocked waltz-stanza. Think Bernard Herrmann meeting Philip Glass by way of Jon Brion’s Magnolia score (1999). The grandiose “The Chryskylodon Institute” unfurls when Doc follows a lead to the private-funded post-hippy loony-bin. ![]() “Shasta” inaugurates Inherent Vice’s score as a mirage. She’s neither here nor there telling the truth nor lying sad from having loved Doc (Joaquin Phoenix) nor yearning to start afresh with him. And that’s what she does throughout the film. It sounds like she’s coming in and out of focus. Clarinet, oboe and cor anglais outline the corporeal form of Shasta (rendered ghostly flesh by Katherine Waterston), then melt into her insouciant presence. Imagine Olivier Messiaen’s symphonic swathes (like a French forest lifted up and floating in the clouds) reinterpreted by Nelson Riddle’s teasing velvet string arrangements for sono-erotic voices like Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland. Standard musical portraiture in the film – but what a slithering sonorous mystery this theme is. Quite early in the PT Anderson’s Inherent Vice, we hear Johnny Greenwood’s theme “Shasta”. Reading The Film Score PT Anderson's Inherent Vice published in Real Time No., Sydney, 2017 The Score ![]()
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