What Can You Expect When You’re On Top?
by Rax King
Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, One Battle After Another, is set to open next month. Inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Vineland, it’s a sumptuous production with a budget of $140 million and starring Leo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, and Benicio del Toro. “When their evil enemy resurfaces after 16 years,” according to the film’s official logline, “a group of ex-revolutionaries reunites to rescue one of their own’s daughter.”
Anderson was just 27 in 1997 when his breakout hit was released, likewise about a group of defiant revolutionaries under siege: Boogie Nights, a story about the porn industry at the threshold of the video revolution, which I recently enjoyed revisiting.
For several of the characters in Boogie Nights, porn is their first real job. Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg), for example, is a nightclub dishwasher on the verge of transforming himself into porn star Dirk Diggler. At 17, Eddie still lives with his parents, his bedroom wallpapered with boyish posters—Bruce Lee, Farrah Fawcett, a muscle car unsubtly captioned AMERICAN DREAM. He practices karate moves in the mirror while idly rubbing his bulge. He has sex with a soft-voiced stoner named Sheryl Lynn who resembles his mother. Later, with a shy smile, he asks men for ten dollars to watch him jerk off. His relationship to sex before he starts working in porn is fundamentally a boy’s. It’s his newest toy, nothing more—yet.
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