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Boogie
Nights
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I was hard on this film back in early 1998 (i.e., its Australian release). Too hard, according to one of my kind Patreon supporters, who has accordingly beseeched me to re-see and revise. So, here we go – up from 2-star rating to 3. But no higher! As is well-known by now, the plot of Boogie Nights is loosely conjured from the depressing real-life tales of such porn stars as John Holmes and Marilyn Chambers. Young Eddie (Mark Wahlberg) leaves home and – rebaptised as Dirk Diggler – quickly rises to fame in the porn trade (annual Adult Industry Awards Night and all). Eddie's almost superhuman sexual prowess (in both size and stamina) proves a godsend to filmmaker Jack (Burt Reynolds) and his entourage of wannabe actors, shady financiers and hedonistic hangers-on. That is, until things start to go awry – a messy disintegration marked by the transition between the 1970s and the ‘80s (disco reaches and then passes its peak, alas!) and the switchover between celluloid and video technology, as well as the inevitable tensions and lack of loyalty building within Jack’s volatile community. (Let me add that, if you’re ever looking for a handy illustration of Kristin Thompson’s proposal of a 4-part structure underlying Hollywood’s model storytelling form, the scenario of Boogie Nights fits the bill perfectly: exposition of many characters in their various frustrated or static situations (Part 1); Eddie’s entry into the porn world and the rising success he brings to his entire group (Part 2); violent mid-point downturn of murder & suicide [by William H. Macy’s sad-sack, perpetually cheated-on character of Little Bill]; extended period of decline and misery, culminating in the great catastrophe scene of the bungled drug transaction at the mansion of Rahad [Alfred Molina] (Part 3); and the final upswing into a somewhat happy resolution (Part 4), with everybody’s porn career back on track as before, if not exactly at the ecstatic/destructive heights of previous success.) I confess that I came away from the glitzy premiere for this film in ‘98 with a bad impression. And that was partly prompted by the in-the-flesh presence of Paul Thomas Anderson himself (long before filmmakers started unfussily beaming in their welcome messages over Zoom), whose very brief and not terribly helpful introduction for the fully-primed crowd consisted of not much more (in my memory) than: “Hey, the world’s going to hell, so let’s boogie ’til we drop!” And that motto seemed to sum up – unfavourably, in my head – the baleful state of a certain ‘contemporary American cinema’ in that moment: highly spectacular, but essentially apolitical and pretty mindless. Yet Boogie Nights does deserve better than the treatment I initially gave it. It helps that, beginning at Punch-Drunk Love (2003), I became much more intrigued by his work, especially its most experimental side. (I have yet to revisit the in-between step of Magnolia [1999], which I also heavily criticised at the time, even more sourly than its predecessor.) I was instantly won over by Phantom Thread (2017) and One Battle After Another (2025). Inherent Vice (2014), which didn’t grab me much on first viewing, gets better with each re-run. And I’ve just this week embarked on a chronological tour through the entire career on my domestic screen – hence this re-think piece. There Will be Blood (2007) and The Master (2012) – both of which troubled me with their assertive, near-sadistic spectacularity (that baton now taken by Brady Corbet) – await my renewed attention, especially with George Toles’ superb study Paul Thomas Anderson (Illinois University Press, 2016) under my belt. Maybe even Licorice Pizza (2021) will rise in my estimation, who knows? In my initial account of Boogie Nights, I slammed it for embodying the cinema of allusion (American-style) gone mad – essentially accepting (and recycling) Noël Carroll’s 1982 critique of this trend (a critique about which I have more reservations these days). A film which is all movie-love (homage, pastiche, parody) and no real world problems! It was the critical formula trotted out by many (me included) in the face of (especially) the ‘90s Tarantino wave. I’m less prone to spouting it in 2026; but this is a portion of what I wrote at the time.
There can be no doubt whatsoever that the combined œuvres of Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese loom mightily over what Anderson crafts here – with, I now realise, a pinch of John Cassavetes in there as well (particularly in the child custody hearing which genuflects before similar scenes in Love Streams [1984] – but doesn’t stage it half as well). These borrowings should now occasion further thought – especially in light of the fact that we see so many seeds of the thematic universe that Anderson was to carve out as his own turf in subsequent works. In particular, the Altman/Anderson connection (cemented when the latter did his duty as stand-by directorial assistant on the former’s marvellous swan-song, A Prairie Home Companion [2006]) is richer than it first seemed to me. I have suggested elsewhere that Altman gravitated toward three types of situation as his premise for scene action: bluff, boast and bluster – as practiced, above all, by men (women exist in a somewhat dreamier, spaced-out, masochistic sphere). The plot moves in his work often literally spring from a dare taken too far or misjudged. Altman’s world-view mixes an all-pervasive conception of everyday behaviour as somehow ‘inappropriate’ or alienated, with a master-metaphor of life as an eternal and infernal round at the gambling table. Anderson borrows from this overall picture and its micro-dramatic procedures – just look at Boogie Nights’ character of Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly). More pointedly, the protégé takes something that is not completely realised in a consistent fashion in the work of the master, and fulfils it. A loose group or motley community of characters forms around some kind of shared endeavour: trying to run a business, plan a crime, or put on a show. Altman introduces the double-focus that Anderson sharpens: these individuals run on fantastic self-delusions (that they are brilliant, talented, incapable of ever being caught, etc.), and very often face devastating situations, both private and public, of embarrassment or humiliation that they largely bring upon themselves (think of the gay Scotty J [Philip Seymour Hoffman] in Boogie Nights and his drunken advance foisted on Eddie, instantly followed by agonised self-recrimination). At the same time, these characters are, in a certain way and to a certain extent (which shifts from film to film), blessed innocents: their combined fantasies cocoon them (at least for a time) from the harsh world (look at the hippie musical Utopia of Altman’s A Perfect Couple [1979]), and together they form a randomly and spontaneously ‘chosen’ family (the rejection or failure of biological, nuclear family ties is ubiquitous in Anderson, and fairly constant in Altman). The matter of fantasy delusion is thus a very delicate matter – for the filmmaker as for spectators. It’s very easy to elicit laughs of superiority over figures who can’t sing, can’t act, can’t successfully carry out a simple scam, or whatever; it’s harder to, simultaneously, create sympathy for them when this aspect is required. In Boogie Nights, Eddie’s upwardly-mobile (in every sense) fantasy is expressed in a two-fold identity projection: he renames himself Dirk Diggler, and then Dirk metamorphoses into the dashing screen action hero Brock Landers – recapturing Eddie’s initial Bruce Lee adoration. I didn’t notice this at the time, but there’s an intriguing (and no doubt inadvertent) resonance between Eddie here and Maggie Cheung at the centre of Irma Vep (1996): writer-director Olivier Assayas described her role as sort of blank screen onto which various members of the film crew project their diverse fantasies (artistic, sexual, economic, etc.); the same goes for Eddie. He becomes the surrogate son (in an explicitly Oedipal way!) for Maggie/Amber (Julianne Moore), a lover for Brandy/Rollergirl (Heather Graham), impossible love object for Scotty, success token for Jack, and so on. In fact, it’s literally Eddie’s penis, obediently unveiled for anybody who asks to see it – but kept below- or off-screen until the final shot – that invites this plethora of amazed, pensive gazes. Talk about a material, physical idea in cinema! So, where does the sympathy factor enter? For Maggie and for Buck (Don Cheadle) alike, their attempts to get things done in the normal, social world – whether renewing child custody rights or receiving a bank loan – run up against the enduring stigma of being labelled as ‘pornographers’ (“I’m an actor!”, Buck keeps feebly protesting). In the case of Jack, there’s the tag of his supposed ‘creative integrity’ as the guy who resists the coming of video to his industry, but disastrously capitulates to it in the scene of “making film history … on videotape” with a guy plucked off the street and into his cab to have sex with Rollergirl. (This film-to-video idea/myth of porn history will be taken up even more grandiloquently in the TV series The Deuce [2017-2019] – in which a Candida Royalle figure played by Maggie Gyllenhaal is ultimately, triumphantly assimilated to the independent-cinema legend of Barbara Loden!) Boogie Nights is a still-not-entirely-convincing film for me, in several respects; in this second feature, Anderson is still finding his feet on various types of ground as a filmmaker. The balance of elements is skewed: too many scenes of porn pastiche (with its ‘bad’ acting, flat framing, wandering sound recording & sloppy noise effects, etc.) and disco-dancing kitsch (although the group-formation choreography is an anthological treat); too heavy on the pedal of Buck’s tasteless fashion adoptions (among the film’s weakest threads); too much smirking, self-conscious irony granted to Burt Reynolds’ performance (a recurring problem in his later roles); too much milking of ‘one disaster after another’ (death, drug addiction, sex with minors … ); too many of those Scorsese-style camera moves either in a wide tracking circle or jumping in (calligraphically) for a close-up cocaine snort. The overarching ‘twilight of porn’ concept is dubious at best; and the final, redemptive ‘chosen family reunion’ sequence is forced. But there are inklings of where Anderson will go stylistically. Much has been made of the eclectic (and at times too pointed) choice by the director and his collaborators of pre-existing popular (and sub-popular) songs; more striking is the upfront re-use across three consecutive films (!) of the Stephen Dwoskin/Gavin Bryars-style drone-tone “Clementine’s Loop” credited to Jon Brion & Michael Penn. Or take a scene that (like many in Punch-Drunk Love) is completely modelled on a bold sound design concept: Jack speaks to the disgraced Colonel (Robert Ridgely) across a glass panel and through the prison intercom – with the balance between direct voice recording and transmitted sound shifting abruptly with each reverse-shot change, building to the moment where the Colonel’s incoming voice will be silenced altogether by Jack on his side. On this point, it’s a good idea to reorient your experience of Anderson’s films around the compact but incisive entries in Philip Brophy’s 100 Modern Soundtracks (BFI, 2004). © Adrian Martin 4 March 2026 |
