The black-and-white separation of the civil rights era was nowhere to be found in a post-Manson world, with bad and good split across a proverbial Mason-Dixon line. “Good guys” are a P.I. (the anarchist’s cop), a lieutenant detective (the bureaucratization of legitimized violence), and an informant (a transactional relationship that seeks to undermine the sacred in-group): after all, c’est la vie. Insurgents, lovers, cops and junkies all wash up when the tide of revolution ebbs, pulled by the great moon of capital.

Everybody operates within the frame of institutions and hierarchies of power, despite the “peace, love and drugs” of the hippie era. Doc Sportello, perhaps the freest in the movie, only must contend with being a minor part of the medical establishment, but most have a position and occupy it too. Subversive interests became subverted by moneyed interests, and the paradigm shifted ever so slightly, but real change was never truly accomplished. The defining moment of the 1970s was the realization that the whole movement had been swallowed whole, turning their karmic character from the Ahab of the ‘60s to Pinocchio of the ‘70s.

The whale here is the Golden Fang. It is a vertically organized international crime syndicate. Everybody falls somewhere in its hierarchy of power, and Doc Sportello, Coy and Bigfoot sit at the bottom. They squirrel away every missing person Doc hunts for, killed Bigfoot’s partner, entrap Coy, and as for the drugs that seem to motivate the whole movie, they “finance it, grow it, process it, bring it in, step on it, move it, run Stateside networks of local street dealers, take a separate percentage off of each operation”. They are a cancer, representing nothing short of the total derailment of the hippie movement, the subversion of horizontal to vertical, establishing structures of domination and lending the power created to hippies at the high, high carrying cost of yuppie-dom.

This new “fully fuckin' weird outfit” subsumes preestablished hierarchies, including the functionaries of the fading state, the police. The boys in blue kill Bigfoot’s partner when he discovers the police are merely another agent of the Golden Fang, part of the hierarchy that stretches right to the top. The death of his partner seems to radicalize Bigfoot, leaving him with an air of “possessed melancholy”, but far from partnerless. The partner role is supplemented by Doc Sportello who, despite their power games, are on equal footing, a key trait of partnership, and of horizontal organizations more generally. These horizontal organizations were a central part of the hippie movement, and as Sortilege says, “this bond between partners was nearly the only thing Doc had ever found… to admire about the L.A.P.D.” Perhaps the “greedy little hippie” is right after all: maybe the only thing to be admired about vertical organizations is the small pockets of horizontality that form.

Bigfoot does not command respect, despite his position (lieutenant) in a hierarchical organization. It is a deep undercurrent that flows beneath the formal organization of power, robbing those that do not conform to dignity. So, Bigfoot goes to the Japanese Coffee Shop to find respect, and yell “MOTTO PANNUKEIKU!” to replace the respect he Freudianly does not win from both his wife and his mother. Both the matriarchy and patriarchy have disowned his sordid desires, and he is thus reduced to a hero, forcing our protagonist to tear at the lowest dregs of the institution which ruined him so many years ago.

In the end, Inherent Vice is a mourning of the past. Of a time when we really had it going, when “the man” was really scared, and we lost it. Whether it was our own greediness or the evil designs of capital itself, we failed. The ‘60s might have had some real change, but the central tenets of the hippie movement went unfulfilled. It was their war to win, but unfortunately, they made love not war. Ironically, the love they chose over war is not even free anymore: it can be bought for 24.95 at Chick Planet Massage, itself a part of the vertical hierarchy that is the Golden Fang.

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