Paul Thomas Anderson and Thomas Pynchon’s California

Thomas Pynchon’s books have on Paul Thomas Anderson the effect of Proustian madeleines. When asked about his fascination with the notoriously reclusive writer, the director defers to childhood memories. Speaking with Kent Jones during the press tour for his first Pynchon adaptation, Inherent Vice (2014), Anderson recalled reading the novel and luxuriating in its myriad references to the sounds and visuals of his early years in 1970s Southern California: the now-defunct Zody’s retail stores dotting the San Fernando Valley, the Police Squad! (1982) episodes beaming on ABC, Mike Curb crooning on the radio. To read Pynchon, for Anderson, is to rekindle impressions of his old stomping grounds and indulge a desire to return to them—among the chief concerns of his cinema and the source of its charms.