Do Good Intentions Even Matter? A Study in the Licorice Pizza Controversy
When Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza debuted in theaters, it set off a few wildfires on social media. The biggest beef involved the film's questionable use of a racist impersonation by a white male character towards Japanese women. The second was about the "age gap" between the films two protagonists, 25-year-old Alana Kane (Alana Haim) and 15-year-old Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), whose quasi-romantic friendship is built on undefined ground. The outrage came from a mix of those who saw the film and felt blindsided by how tone deaf it was, those who hadn't seen the film but already made up their minds base on the premise, and those who dismissively shrugged all of it off as overreaction. Anderson was eventually pulled in himself to explain, or at least elaborate, on his choices. Perhaps predictably, his response didn’t seem amount to much more than ‘Huh? What’s not to get?’
Ironically, as the film’s reception started to spin out, what seemed to get lost in the crossfire was its own thematic focus on well-intentioned characters losing control of their narratives. It's certainly not a new focus for Anderson, whose work largely fixates on lost characters unwittingly in search of themselves. It’s downright rare for one of his characters to act selflessly, they tend to instead be the types that dwell in frustration – perceiving themselves as the eternal victims of an uncaring universe. Pushed to the edge by forces out of their control, they feel they have no choice but to lash out at those around them.
Stated bluntly, the main theme that strings together most all of Paul Thomas Anderson's films is cruelty. Whether he's navigating the porn industry, the oil trade, the fashion world, religious racketeers, relationships, or even just confronting loneliness, there's always a heavy strain of cruelty that runs throughout his films. Sometimes it's portrayed in an ironic light, other times it's shown as horrifying, but it's always fairly indulgent on Anderson’s part. He doesn’t just show us acts of cruelty, he forces his audience to stew in them – lures you in with a nice omelette and then after you’ve had a few bites, mentions the secret ingredient, if you will.
Licorice Pizza, for all of its disjointed structure and unfocused narrative, concentrates chiefly on how cruel the 1970s were. Cruel for girls who didn’t know what they want to be when they grow up. Sardonically cruel for young boys who are desperate to reap all of the “free” T and A they’ve been promised by pop culture. Cruel for women who dared to expect something more for themselves beyond “girlfriend” and “mom.” Cruel, on whole, for people who didn’t know how to navigate in a time of social upheaval and cocaine. Jointly cruel for anybody who wasn’t white, straight and Christian.
It’s through Alana we see the hypocrisy of these times amplified. Desperate for meaning, friendship and warmth, she finds herself damned by the limitations of a society that claims to welcome female participation, but only if your if your skirt is short enough to warrant it. She tries to game the system by shacking up with an older man but finds they’re just as trapped, albeit in a toxic prison of booze and Rat Pack-style nostalgia. She has no pull with men her own age, they’re too self involved to view her as anything but an object or an obstacle. Which is why hanging out with becomes Gary so appealing to her. Confronted by the disappointingly narrow and punishing chasm of forced adulthood, Alana’s desperate to cling onto whatever’s left of her youth – that insular teen world so ignored by adult society that things like ‘optimism’ and ‘spirit’ are still able to thrive. Gary becomes her golden ticket, the only one who looks up to her as a person he can actually learn from instead of just use. In return, Alana recognizes and encourages his own powers; his precocious posturing, his confidence in the face of failure, his radiant optimism and his youthful potential.
Yet, the two of them never actually seem to cohere. For all of his genuine interest in her, Gary does not understand what Alana needs because he will never know what it’s like to live in a world that’s not his oyster. His intentions towards her may be pure but his actions are anything but, all too eager to mimic the contemporary male gatekeepers who don’t mind giving others a little slack as long as they get double in return. As the film’s focus flips between the two of them using each other as inspiration to act in their own self interests, it becomes clear that what Gary and Alana have isn’t love – it’s just a mutual jealousy. The contradiction of their relationship, the clashing of their personalities and the uneasiness in their age difference is in itself a more complete character than the two of them are individually.
This push and pull of intentions to actions is reflected in everything and everyone around them: the compounded dreams of naïve high schoolers perpetuating casual sexism in the name of a get-rich-quick business opportunity. The progressively minded politicians who don’t mind lying, scheming and trodding all over others as long as they don’t tarnish their public image. And of course, clueless men who carelessly use women’s bodies as collateral as long as it affords them more social power. The Mikado restaurant owner and his wives are introduced as an even blunter version of this same theme, showing just how far the gap between one’s intentions and their actions can become. On whole, Licorice Pizza is a reflection of a punishingly indifferent 1970s Southern California, the sort of town you can only navigate backwards down a hill without gasoline. It’s an era of glitzy facades, good intentions and oppressed minorities suffering under the weight of it all.
For Paul Thomas Anderson to then set a film about underlying cruelty like this to ecstatic scenes of collaborative accomplishments, energetic running, coke-fueled ranting, slapstick humor and celebrated David Bowie music, well, it’s no surprise it pissed people off. The nuanced duality of the decade gets lost under its own infectious enthusiasm. The two bizarrely long scenes portraying casual racism in a ridiculous light quickly loses focus, egging the most clueless in the audience to laugh. Already primed by the film to feel as if they should be enjoying what’s on the screen, at best they’re falling into the same trap that the 1970s’ flaunted as “progressive”: the idea that merely acknowledging taboos and boundaries is somehow the same as actually breaking them down. At worst, the giggling audience is just being casually racist themselves.
Which of course brings us to the age old question of: what’s more important, the intentions of the characters, the intentions of the director, or the audience’s reaction to it all? Truthfully, there really isn’t a clear cut answer – it’s essentially the reason film critics exist. Certainly, the criticism from Asian American critics is valid here. That the film is a reflection of a specific time and place might explain the inclusion of certain themes, but it doesn’t fully excuse poor dialogue, editing or pacing choices. Never mind that a white man desiring to be seen as an expert on a foreign culture or cuisine but refusing to actually learn the language is the sort of cliché that doesn’t even need to be set in the past to ring true today. The “age gap” stuff seems a lot less cut and dry. Beyond it having a specific purpose within the film’s narrative, at the end of the day they’re not real people – even if some are upset that Anderson admitted to using a crush on one of his teachers (Alana Haim’s actual mother!) as inspiration for the script.
Love it, hate it or shrug at it, you have to admit there is something kinda amusing about a filmmaker focusing so hard on presenting a cruel societal duality that the wheels come off the film and he finds himself the target of an amorphous outrage. Also surprising it hasn’t happened sooner – aren’t these blurred lines the entire appeal of a Paul Thomas Anderson flick?
