“It was a reverse floor plan, with bedrooms on the entrance level and then upstairs the kitchen, maybe more than one, and various entertainment areas. The house should have been full of law enforcement. Instead, the boys from Protect and Serve had set up a command post at the pool cabana, somewhere out in back. Like getting in some last-minute free catering before their federal overlords showed up. Sounds of distant splashing, rock n roll radio, eating between means. Some kidnapping.

”…In the time it took [Sloane] to lead him through a dim sunken interior full of taupe carpeting, suede upholstery, and teak, which seemed to extend indefinitely in the direction of Pasadena, Doc learned that she had a degree from the London School of economics, had recently begun studying tantric yoga, and had met Mickey Wolfmann originally in Las Vegas.”

There’s a reason why our buddy Thomas Pynchon describes the House of Wolfmann as a descent into Hell—for Doc, it kinda is. Having just met a salt-of-the-earth gal like Hope Harlingen (heroin and heaving and hardons aside), who with a quiet and modest dignity refuses to accept the death of her husband despite no support from the cops or the banks, it must be a shock to the system for our knockabout dick to find a woman outright celebrating the non-death of her missing husband with the cops and the banks and everyone else on the wrong side of karma in 1970.

And that’s this scene in a nut, isn’t it? It’s a dichotomous portrait of lives on either side of the Golden Fang—the good lives the fangs chew to pieces…and the gaudy lives those fangs feed…

About the Guest

COURTNEY HOWARD

With bylines in VARIETY and FRESH FICTION TV, film critic Courtney Howard is a member of the LA Film Critics Association, the Critics Choice Association, the Online Film Critics Society, and the Alliance of Women Film Journalists. Additionally, she's been stanning INHERENT VICE from day one, and at some point plans on having Roger Deakins do the lighting in the her house, Sloane Wolfmann-style.

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5-19-10 Wednesday