Boogie Nights

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🎙️ EPISODE 408: 02.24.22 This is an undeniably, relentlessly entertaining film. There is some (probably?) nonexistent B-movie version of this is almost as good, one would imagine. Its salacious subject matter (sex sells!) and soundtrack with hit after ubiquitous 70s hit (there's even a "God Only Knows" postscript montage) have as much to do with its broad success and sustained interest as anything the master PTA brings to the table. And that's no slight! Big fan over here! The question remains, AT END OF THE DAY/MOVIE, does the BMOC (Big Man of Cinema) elevate this can't-miss proposition to the next level? The answer to that is — and I'm sorry — is both yes and no. This film is jam-packed with outstanding scenes and even better moments inside those scenes. Anderson's dialogue and plotting, on both a micro and macro level, remain unparalleled and don't feel dated in the slightest. Boogie Nights is chock-full of famous one-liners uttered by characters big and small. At any juncture you might be having the most fun you ever had watching a movie.

But on the flip side of that, where it isn't nearly as successful, is how it functions as a whole. It is the proverbial though more rare LESS THAN the sum of its parts. And its thematic resonance is murky at best. Most interestingly (or at least most effectively) is its cultural commentary on the shift from the 70s into the 80s ("we're making film history on videotape!"). Making a big deal out of the transitional impact of a decade ending is a great American past time. And this is as good a lamenting about that as any.

Where this really fails is in treatment of women. (And listen: I did not want to harp on this. I didn't go into my most recent rewatch thinking about this angle at all. But it seems impossible not to mention now.) Certainly "times were different back then" and "this is a work of fiction" — I get that. I get all of that. My issue is not that the female characters are mistreated or presented as weak, hopelessly broken and sad. It's that they're only shown in that light. There's no balance and no arc. (And listen... closely: I don't think Paul Thomas Anderson is a misogynist — he was 26 when this came out and even younger when he began writing it, and there's nothing else in his filmography that even hints at this angle, but I also don't buy that any of this is done in service of the story; this simply feels like a major oversight if not some greater failing. I take no umbrage by it, personally, nor do I delight in pointing it out.)


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CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 407 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 409 ⫸

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Boogie Nights is a 1997 American period comedy-drama film written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. It is set in Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley and focuses on a young nightclub dishwasher who becomes a popular star of pornographic films, chronicling his rise in the Golden Age of Porn of the 1970s through to his fall during the excesses of the 1980s starring Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds, Don Cheadle, John C. Reilly, William H. Macy, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Heather Graham. It was released on October 10, 1997.