Ordered Chaos: Three Films by Paul Thomas Anderson

A.G. Harmon

AT THE end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, Magnolia, a mistreated child prodigy sits in a library he has broken into; a hailstorm rages outside. The boy, Stanley, is fresh from an experience of epic suffering; his stage father and other handlers have driven him to perform on a game show that pits children against adults, pushing him so far that he has not been allowed to go to the bathroom throughout the program. Withering under television lights, his face is as anguished as Maria Falconetti’s in the classic silent The Passion of St. Joan—here is the anguish of an unspeakable sorrow.

Once he has disgraced himself on the air, the boy runs from the set. In the library—the place where perhaps he is most at home, surrounded by the tomes that chronicle human history—he finds, to his great surprise, stories similar to his own. In fact, unbeknownst to Stanley, another character in the film, Quiz Kid Donnie Smith (William H. Macy), has shown us the residue of a life lived long after the quiz show star has faded. Like Stanley, Donnie’s story line leads to wretched loneliness, a desperate attempt to have someone believe, as he says “that I have so much love to give.” While reading histories like Donnie’s and his own, Stanley’s face is transfigured from anguish to serenity. With a look of recognition he says: “This has all happened before.”

Shining through Stanley’s face at this moment is the relief he feels as he discovers his own story in narratives about other people’s lives. In achieving this sense of solidarity with others through the vicarious experience of reading, Stanley finds some balm for his suffering. The understanding not only of shared anguish, but also of a shared desire for love, is the key to this and other films of the young writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson. He has been described by Roger Ebert as self-confident, rejecting the timid postmodernism of the 1990s. Anderson’s three films to date—Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia—have captured Hollywood’s attention, but not much of its understanding. Comparisons to Robert Altman and Quentin Tarrantino are common, mostly because of Anderson’s use of multiple story lines and characters. Critics, as quick to chastise as to admire, have dealt with him as a talented but undisciplined enfant terrible, lumping Anderson in the same category as Arthur Miller, reducing his stories to those that teach us that “we have to be better to each other.” But Anderson’s films cannot be explained so simply, or reduced so far. There is much more to Anderson than the braided plotlines, rapid-fire camera work, and tutorials in tolerance that have been so stylish of late. The bratty ennui of that genre is nothing like Anderson’s work, which brings to film a refreshingly assured and mature artistry. For the story lines in Magnolia, which seem Dickensian in size and complexity, prove to be related to one another after all. Events are not left at the level of a perverse joke, but hint at the possibility of deeper significance. The shared quest that is so startling to Stanley—and to us—provokes questions. Does the boy have the answers? Not yet. But he suspects a strange secret that may lead somewhere. There is value in realizing that chaos might coexist with harmony, that symmetry and misrule might, after all, be allies. All three of Anderson’s works tease out this conundrum, never losing the opportunity to show human beings—mistaken, befuddled, foolish—thrashing through the mysteries of dishonored existences in hope of finding higher things.

In the first film, Hard Eight, an immaculately dressed Vegas gambler, Sydney (Philip Baker Hall), takes charge of a young man named John (John C. Reilly). John is so down on his luck that he crouches beside a coffee shop door, like Lazarus at the door of Dives. John is wary of Sydney’s offer of coffee and a cigarette; indeed, the first thing he does is ask Sydney if he thinks he’s St. Francis. But John finally accepts his hospitality, and during their conversation reveals that he needs some money for a good reason: he has to bury his mother. Wisely, Anderson does not elaborate on this; John’s words are sufficient to tell us he is basically a decent young man, and Sydney a decent older one for wanting to help him. A lesser film would pause to develop long stories exemplifying John’s virtue, hammering home the point until we tire of it. But Anderson knows better.

Sydney promises John fifty dollars and a ride back to the city. As they travel, John grows more relaxed, and relates what appears to be a time-filling anecdote. But it is the kind of story whose significance the viewer of Anderson’s films learns to recognize. John never uses matches to light his cigarettes, he tells Sydney earnestly, because once, while carrying a big book of matches in his pocket, the whole thing spontaneously burst into flames. While John relates the story, Anderson cuts away to depict the scene; as a result, the commonplace immediately becomes the curious. Sydney does not scoff at such a preposterous story, even though it is a tale of wild coincidence not unlike the countless stories we have all heard and disbelieved. For some reason most of us still listen to—and even repeat—these stories because they just might be true.

This theme of shocking coincidence is revisited to great effect in the opening scenes of the fast-paced Magnolia. It confounds the bored, catalog-thumbing way that modern viewers have come to relate to art. We know the story too well; we have seen all this before; it’s only a matter of whether the hero dies or laughs at the end. But without feeling compelled to overemphasize, Anderson gives us strange happenings, not fully explained. We are not wrong to laugh at them, because they really are funny. But neither are we wrong to listen to them as intently as we do, because—once again—they just might be true. Maybe things are not, after all, as predictable as we thought—a fact that is much better and much worse for us. Some of the “believe-it-or-not” moments in Magnolia are happy circumstances: a gun being knocked away from a suicidal man’s hand by...well, by something extraordinary; and some are not—a gun killing a suicidal man as he falls past the window of a building he has just jumped from, the gun fired by his mother, no less. Anderson does not explain, but these stories shake us up. They make us squint at the teller; they linger in our minds as we drive home. How much a part do we play in this world, in fulfilling our best-laid plans? How much are we its victims, how much its beneficiaries? (That is another refreshing thing about Anderson: he is not bashful about showing us the beneficiaries). Whatever the answers, these stories are not part of the world of the Enlightenment man, nor of the Modernist wretch, nor even of the Postmodernist clown. They belong to something older, less stylish, more important—a humanist’s interest in man’s nature and place in the world.

As Hard Eight progresses, Sydney teaches John how to live in Vegas, how to gamble, dress, behave. And John devotedly mimics his every posture, although it is clear he has neither Sydney’s intelligence nor his innate sense of style. But neither has he Sydney’s melancholy, which we come to understand later in the film. Before that revelation, Sydney sets about saving another bewildered soul, Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow), a cocktail waitress. Clementine, who calls Sydney “Captain” because he reminds her of a ship’s captain, has watched John’s devotion to Sydney. She has grown to love the young man for it.

As Sydney discovers, Clementine has become a prostitute on the side. She reveals her embarrassment like a stunned child who has found herself dropped into a terribly grown-up world. And we learn that she has adjusted to that world as a child would. When Sydney brings her back to his apartment, trying to stop her from sliding into a rotten life, he leaves her sitting on his bed, alone. The camera lingers over Clementine as she waits, having every reason to suspect that what is about to occur is what all of us expect will occur when Sydney returns. Staring sideways, like an eight year-old who cannot face her scolder, Clementine clutches at her clothes with her small hands, gripping the fabric as though she might slip away from herself at any moment. But again, the unexpected happens: when Sydney returns with clothes for her to sleep in, Clementine asks if he wants sex, and seems ready to comply.

Sydney: Do you think that?
Clementine: You brought me here.
Sydney: And you think that?
Clementine (sitting up straight): I don’t know.
Sydney: You should know before you ask a question like that.
Clementine: Well, it seems like you’re being nice to me.
Sydney: So you’d think that I would want that.
Clementine: Well, if you wanted to fuck me—
Sydney: Stop saying that.
Clementine: It just seems like—
Sydney: Well don’t let it seem that way. This is a comfortable bed for you—[I wanted] to give you something—a place to have a nice shower. A bed.
Clementine (looking down): Don’t get angry.
Sydney: No. I’m not. Because I could understand how you could ask a question like that.
Clementine (turning to the wall): Now you really look at me like a piece of shit.
Sydney: No.
Clementine (resigned): All right.

We are as shocked as she is; we may have heard of stories like this, but we didn’t believe them. When Sydney tells her that John won’t be back until late, so he won’t disturb her sleep, Clementine shows how much easier it is for us to disbelieve in good intentions. “So this is John’s room?” she asks, as though now she knows what has been arranged for her. But Sydney merely turns to close the door: “Not tonight,” he answers. The next morning, Sydney encourages the couple to spend the day together.

The other side of the existential inquiry inserts itself here. We have just viewed the providential care of one man for another—a father-figure who finds his surrogate son a girl as sincere and abashed as he is. Sydney gives John good advice and noble motivations: “Never ignore a man’s courtesy”; “My reasons for [helping] are not selfish; I would hope you would do the same for me”; he praises John’s virtuous instincts as “admirable”; and he insists that John shave and clean himself up. John listens, and follows.

But the young man is mimicking all that Sydney is, and that includes unforeseen consequences. For Sydney has gambled away everything before, hence the title (referring to a risky crap table bet), and has lived a hard life. John, following in that life, comes up against the kind of people and activities that are natural to it—including Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson).

Jimmy is a loud, flashy gambler who also aspires to be like Sydney, but only in terms of his gambling prowess. In short, Jimmy is coarse. Sydney takes exception to Jimmy, but he cannot convince John to take exception to him as well. Jimmy’s influence on John creates the complication that Sydney must deal with in the rest of the story—one that involves Sydney’s past, and threatens to undo all the good he has orchestrated. That part of Sydney’s life that overlaps with John’s proves potentially fatal to their relationship. For all that has transpired—the older man’s tutelage and paternal care for the younger—is valid, but it is not the product of accident. Sydney’s stumbling upon John back at that coffeehouse is part of a plan, built on a dark confidence.

John and Clementine end their day together by getting married. But afterward, while at a casino, Clementine unaccountably leaves with another man. When he won’t pay for her services, she calls John, who beats the man and holds him hostage until his wife can come up with the money. When the situation becomes too big for them to handle, they call Sydney. But to the older man’s amazement, the couple has called Jimmy first. Quickly, Sydney tends to matters: he handcuffs the man, wipes the fingerprints from the room, ditches the gun Jimmy had given them, and finances the young couple’s honeymoon trip to Niagara Falls. But the damage has been done: as part of Jimmy’s blackmail threat, we learn that Sydney’s past has been more vicious than we knew. During part of his life as an “old hood,” as Jimmy calls it, Sydney has murdered a man—John’s father.

Just as John has imitated Sydney’s late-blooming goodness, so Jimmy has imitated a brutishness from an earlier time in Sydney’s life, a past with consequences that persist in the present. It is the uglier part of Sydney’s life, the history he has meant to escape. In words truer than perhaps he means, Jimmy asks: “You think you can walk through this life without being punished for it?” Both John and Jimmy mimic real things in Sydney’s history, and Sydney must excise the part of himself that Jimmy manifests, before it infects John. He is confronted with a part of the world he has made, one which seeks to destroy the happiness he has wrought.

As in Hard Eight, döppelgangers are alive and well in Anderson’s other films. In Magnolia, Frank T. Mackey (Tom Cruise) is a sexual entrepreneur, with a male self-help program—“Search and Destroy”—that he sells via infomercials. All swagger and boast, he agrees to do an interview as part of his self-promotion. Mackey diverts questions about his past with a series of vague lies. Then, calculatedly, the journalist confronts him with the facts about his miserable childhood. Mackey silently judges the woman for setting him up, and then proceeds to expose her feigned interest for the sensationalistic journalism it really is. But she is confronting Mackey with his own past, after all, one revealed after the scab of his lies is taken off. A similar confrontation is met by Mackey’s own father in the film, and by the failed father and legendary game-show host, Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall), who seeks to re-establish a relationship with his estranged daughter. These self-revelations (often, but not exclusively, involving fathers) are striking because the characters stare at a part of themselves they have made manifest, a part they have sculpted out of a lifetime of error, until it springs forth and faces them down. What is more terrifying in life than staring at our selves, as our selves stare back? The theme is as old as the sixteenth-century Mirror for Magistrates, a cautionary looking-glass that made rulers confront the sin-ridden lives of their forbears. The acknowledgment wears them down; it is hard to carry the weight of self-recognition, as Sydney’s experience demonstrates.

Right before he receives John’s call about his predicament, Sydney plays “the Hard Eight” once again. A profane, straggly-haired vulgarian rolls the dice against him, taunting the old gambler with threats of ruining him. And as the dice roll, Anderson devotes a split second of film to Sydney’s face, to the sound of a little puff of breath. The dice fall flat, the vulgarian loses; Sydney wins, and walks silently away with his cash. But what has that breath meant? What has it cost him? Is it a trick? One that a seasoned gambler can use to turn the roll of the dice (that old metaphor of fate)? Is what seems like pure chance—the rolling of dice—actually somehow influenced by the puff of breath from above? Games figure heavily into both this film and Magnolia. In the latter, the game-show becomes a type of televised torture for both Stanley and Jimmy Gator. The old host, stricken with a deadly disease, has spent his life asking questions, yet forgets his lines while on the air. The questions themselves—the right questions and the ability to ask them—suddenly become more important than whatever scripted answers might be given. In these cases, chance may bestow its benisons, but it also extracts its price. Whatever Sydney’s breath is or means in Hard Eight, the act of exhaling takes its toll, a body blow that leaves him on his bed, fully suited, lost in an exhausted sleep. As though there is no lull in his tragedy, a nerve-shattering phone rings beside Sydney: John and his self-made dilemma.

We learn, through background carols and the occasional tinsel (almost outshone by the brilliance of Vegas lights) that Hard Eight occurs at Christmas time. John and Clementine are given another chance, a new start, by Sydney’s intercession—a honeymoon trip and the promise of all the money Sydney has, and all that John will ever need. Over the phone, the two men exchange a profession of love, and Sydney confesses his devotion is that of a father for his son (earlier, Jimmy had warned the older man that he will never be able to replace John’s father). But the extent to which John has complicated his life, and out of which Sydney must save him, is extreme and grisly. This rebirth is brought about by the very act that causes the greatest rip in civilization’s fabric. Sydney breaks into Jimmy’s apartment, waiting silently for his return. He then empties his gun into the man—confronting his own evil, dispatching it. In this story, a very human father murders for his son. The second chance here takes a strange shape.

Sydney, having freed both John and himself from Jimmy’s extortion, drives back to the diner where he first met his foster son, finishing his coffee and cigarette alone. A darker part of himself, his own history, is dead, but only by virtue of an act which is of a piece with that very past. On one level there is an eradication of evil, on another, the perpetuation of it. To atone for taking the life of John’s father, he becomes the father, but at a monumental cost. It is the awful price extracted when flawed beings attempt to love one another. There is a distortion in all that we do, even in the way we love.

The people in these films are noticeably irrational, falling into habitual mistakes as if they were on a patterned path, too worn to notice they are following. For example, Clementine is married to a man she loves, and saved by a man she respects. But for no understandable reason, she goes off with a man while on her honeymoon. She demands payment for the sex she has rendered him, indignant at his welching on their deal, and also at her own betrayal of self. “I don’t do anything I don’t want to do,” she had told Sydney earlier, with reference to her prostitution. But later, after she has “humbled” herself, as Sydney calls it, she is shattered, unable to explain why she has done what she has. She is so disgraced she must hide her face. The original expression of her willfulness, her entire life as a matter of choice, is reduced to a sobbing admission that she does not know why she does what she does.

Regrets are a major theme in Anderson’s films. As the dying television magnate, Earl Partridge (Jason Robards), says in Magnolia, regrets are what we must hang onto. His last advice, which acts as a voice-over as the film revisits each story line, refers to his abandonment of the woman he first loved and the son they had together. But his words implicate all of the characters in the film because all of them have cost someone something. Wising up to regrets is what makes us human, regretting the fully-intended decisions we make. It is a fresh thing for a movie to say, at least to my ears.

As the characters in Boogie Nights learn, they must hang on to each other, because the mistakes of their histories are too fathomless for there to be any alternative. The film is brave enough to take on what seems the most unappealing slice of life, the pornographic film industry of the 1970s. But Anderson’s boldness here is rewarding. He does not present a saccharinized version of this hard existence, but neither does he render harsh judgment. Rather, Anderson gives us a group of earnest people in a film company that is on the cusp of becoming obsolete, both financially and culturally. Video will soon replace triple X theaters, as the director, Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), is warned by his colleagues. And on a larger level, it will soon become increasingly hard for pornography to define its niche, as the latter part of the twentieth century will sexualize so much of its culture that the boundaries of the characters’ world will eventually erode. But, oddly enough, the members of the film group have formed a small family; they possess hard-seeking loves that leave them together in the end, their greatest accomplishment of all. A young porn queen, known simply as “Rollergirl” (Heather Graham) calls the older porn queen, Amber Waves (Julianne Moore) her “Mom”; Amber, for her part, fosters the younger cast members. The two young male porn stars Dirk (Mark Wahlberg) and Reid (John C. Reilly) become brothers, and make a “dynamic duo” out of the plots of their porn films. The producer and director of the films, Jack Horner, fathers the clan with a sanguine, remote providence.

But theirs is not a harmless world that we just have to “look at in a different way.” For example, Amber has lost custody of her young son to an ex-husband, which should come as no surprise, considering what she does for a living; the film does not imply that she would show her son a “unique” kind of life and give him a more tolerant perspective than his father. She has lost the boy for compelling reasons. But as we watch her throughout the film—her attempts to reach the child by phone, her musings over what his life is like, and her anguish outside his custody hearing when she loses him forever—we know her loss is nearly deep enough to kill her. Another character, known as “Little Bill” (William H. Macy), is humiliated by his wife again and again, forced to view her engaged in sex with three different men, in public places. Unable to bear his shame any longer, he commits suicide. Theirs is a rough world and they must make it work in an ersatz fashion. The family they form is the best thing they do, if not the best thing they could do. There are no great revelations of lives ill-spent, or of futures yet-to-be, but the present the characters make in their fumbling efforts at love are genuine. To be elliptical about these people and their predicament is certainly all right, as Anderson has said (in a Charlie Rose interview). Even if we cannot always admire the characters, we can always sympathize with them.

But then again, none of the characters in Boogie Nights is convinced he is a failure. They suspect their own dignity, and expect others to recognize it as well. This is so even when they have chosen lives that are the most undignified. The director, Jack Horner, sees himself as an artist, a filmmaker. The audience may come for the sex, he says, but they’ll sit and watch for the story. Jack has his standards and his talents. His young discovery, Dirk, explains that every man is given a blessing in life; Dirk’s gift just happens to be the size of his member and his talent for sex. One of the most memorable scenes in Boogie Nights takes place in Dirk’s room, decorated in 70s kitsch. As Dirk strips down to admire himself, the camera pans around the walls: posters of Cheryl Teigs, Corvettes, Bruce Lee, all to the sounds of rather plaintive music that—when the camera comes around to Dirk again, staring at his reflection as he performs karate moves—segues into a synthesized version of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. The boy suddenly appears noble in his aspirations. Throughout the film he takes confidence in the mirror, and in the “blessing” that makes him a star. He may be misguided in the way he views himself. But before we rush to judgment, we should pause and reflect. Dirk sees his endowment as a gift. And it is a gift—misused, perhaps, but that’s what we do with our gifts. They are gifts, nonetheless, and there is beauty in recognizing them as such. Dirk is humble and respectful towards his.

At the lowest point in the story for him and one of his porn stars, Jack and Rollergirl ride around town in a limousine, hoping to pick up a young man off the street so as to tape her having sex in the back seat. They have fallen on hard times, and the family has largely dispersed. Coincidentally (or not?), they pick up a guy that Rollergirl knew—to her anguish—in high school. When they begin filming he is rough with her, just as rough and abusive as he was during their school days. He does not even try to be “sexy,” as Jack admonishes during the filming (we learn that, to Jack, “sexy” is an artistic term). “Show some respect,” he says to the boy, mystified at his boorish behavior, “this is Rollergirl.”

That the characters are surprised when they are not recognized, not respected, is less a comment on how forgettable they are and more an insight into how we forget each other—how mystified we are that our dignity, however ill-conceived and ill-manifested, can be overlooked. “How can you forget me?” is a question we all ask when we are forgotten. It prompts more than anger in us; it provokes revenge, and Anderson is right to show it. His awareness of the need for balance is keen; lest we sympathize and romanticize the characters to death, he shows us their ugly sides. In Boogie Nights, just as Dirk—estranged from his film-making “family” and trying to make a living on the streets—is being kicked and beaten by a group of bashers, his “family” members, Rollergirl and Jack, are kicking and beating the boy who has disrespected them. Having lost their own ideals, they are reduced to the lowest common denominator. They may live in a doomed world, but when they reunite and return to their own befuddled standards at the film’s end, a sense of order, and even a little satisfaction, reenters their lives.

Order seems the last thing possible for the protagonists in Magnolia, despite the opening sequence that hints at Anderson’s leitmotif of strange chance. The film speeds along with a passel of tales: a devoted but lonely police officer (John C. Reilly) stumbles upon, and attempts to woo—to her great alarm—the scarred, coke-addicted daughter (Melora Walters) of Jimmy Gator. For his part, Gator, estranged from his daughter and bound to die, hosts the game-show that Stanley labors upon in his present, and Donnie Smith labors from in his past. Other characters, such as Gator’s wife, Stanley’s father, and Donnie’s love interest, weave through the mix. And circling about the periphery of this complex tale, waiting to swoop in upon it, is the story of mogul Earl Partridge, languishing on his deathbed, desperate to find his lost son; of Earl’s trophy wife (Julianne Moore), languishing in Los Angeles, driven to assuage the guilt of her many infidelities; and Earl’s nurse, Phil Parma (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who by unexpected means secures the satisfaction of Earl’s requests with the help of an unlikely source.

At a dizzying pace, the stories converge, diverge, and re-converge; they appear as random in their overlap as the heat and sunlight and violence of America’s icon city. But in the midst of a cataclysm that shakes each of the characters to his core, their stories come together, thematically. And when they do, we gain the larger perspective that tells us they have never truly been apart. In fact, Anderson does the classical theater proud: the unities of time (one day), place (one location), and action (one central plot) are all observed. At the last moment, to our surprise and benefit, the circle does not fall apart; the gyre holds.

As Magnolia suggests, it can all be put down to coincidence, but that would be to ignore many things. The duplications and repetitions in our lives are too noticeable to do so honestly. From an artistic standpoint, meta-drama is a way to express this. Anderson surprises his audience with the games life plays—on us and with us, in our spite and on our behalf—thereby drawing us closer in, and giving us pause about the stories we’ve heard, and even been a part of ourselves. The method itself is old: Shakespeare knew it; Stoppard knows it. The theatrus mundi is a great awakener. Good artists, including Anderson, take advantage of the similarities between life and drama, and draw our attention to the strange things that appear in the sky of the silver screen. Work of this caliber achieves a prophetic vision.

If you watch closely during the game-show sequence in Magnolia, you will see a shot of the audience, and a placard being ripped from the hands of somebody waving it towards the cameras. The placard bears a passage from Exodus which foretells an event to come, both frightening and salutary. In addition, early in the film, a ghetto child chants a cryptic rap message containing a warning that we cannot understand, but are wise not to dismiss. The whole cast is playing at something, the magnitude of which we can only suspect. They are part of some narrative line, as are we, all of us struggling to know exactly what our part is, and what our next line should be. Disaster and catastrophe and a Greek sense of story are necessary to awaken us, to wise us up, to help us save each other and ourselves. Anderson’s films do more than show prayers being said and graces being glimpsed. Those acts point to the objects we seek in life. What is brave here is the portrayal of those objects themselves—human dignity, respect, love, and beauty—and finding them in a desperate swim to an island where we will live and not be forgotten, where we will find others seeking the same.

This has all happened before.

Visit A.G. Harmon as Image Artist of the Month for September '02

Issue #27 • Summer 2000