Anatomy of a Scene's Anatomy: Get High on Katherine Waterston's Full Frontal Debut in 'Inherent Vice'

In our weekly seriesAnatomy of a Scene's Anatomy, we're going to be taking a look at (in)famous sexscenes and nude scenes throughout cinema history and examining their construction, their relationship to the film around it, and their legacy. This week, PT Anderson adapts Thomas Pynchon's novel Inherent Vice for the screen and brings us one of the longest full frontal scenes in mainstream movie history, courtesy of Katherine Waterston!

It's not easy for a film to mimic the feeling of being high. Very few films have attempted this feat and even fewer have succeeded, but one of the best films to mimic the fog-induced haze of smoking a joint is Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice. This laconic, ramshackle detective story features frequent detours into seemingly meaningless minutiae, emblematic of the constant mental state of our protagonist Larry "Doc" Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix). 1970 was a bad time to identify or be identified as a "hippie," what with the summer of love coming to a crashing halt the year priorwith the Manson Family murders.

Doc's permanent embrace of the hippie lifestyle no longer sees him being thought of as a free-spirited wanderer, but rather a lazy roustabout whose entire peace and love movement had gone up in a puff of smoke. Doc is a man out of time in more than one sense of the term, and were his methodology not ultimately successful, it might give him the clarity to see that this new world needs a new kind of detective. As it's virtually impossible to sum up the film's plot in a succinct enough manner for this column, let's deal with the main crux of the film, which is the relationship between Doc and his"ex-old lady" Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston).

While wasting away in a beachfront bungalow in the fictional Gordita Beach, California, Doc is paid a visit by Shasta Fay at the opening of the film, hoping to enlist his services to track down her new lover Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), a wealthy business developer who has disappeared. As Doc discovers, Mickey was committed by his wife—in concert with several members of the Aryan Brotherhood and a mysterious organization known as The Golden Fang—to theChryskylodon Institute, a hospital run by a new age cult, because he had grown a conscience and wanted to give away his entire fortune.

Doc's devotion to Shasta Fay, and helping her avoid this precarious situation she's now in the middle of, keeps him cold on the trail of all the various leads being thrown his way by a variety of people. Other than a single flashback scene to the halcyon days of their relationship, however, it's unclear what kind of relationship it was that the two of them had. Doc seems tied to a single place and time while Shasta Fay is clearly the true free-spirit Doc wishes he could be, but other than being aspirational to Doc, what exactly is it that brought the two of them together and keeps them coming back to one another?

The answer comes late in the film's second act, 104 minutes into the film's sprawling 149 minute running time. After unraveling the mystery of what happened to Mickey Wolfmann, but still uncertain of what happened to Shasta Fay herself—detective "Bigfoot" Bjornsen (a never-better Josh Brolin) has informed her that she's disappeared—Doc retires to his home. Shasta Fay drops by unexpectedly, seemingly apathetic towardDoc's plight over the last few days, one which was started by her first unexpected visit to his home.

Doc wants answers, but he's clueless to the fact that Shasta Fay has none. She's as much a pawn in this whole scheme as several others who have already ended up dead, and rather than address his concerns, she strips completely nude and returns to the living room where he's rolling a joint. She begins grilling Doc, asking him what kind of woman he desires. She wants to know if he'd prefer "one of those Manson girls," i.e. a woman willing to do whatever he requests of her, no questions asked, and does so while erotically circling her right nipple with her finger...

She moves to the couch where Doc's sitting and begins to talk to him about the way he used to treat her and the way he used to ask her to dress, all while fondling his crotch with her foot...

It's clear that she knows how to push Doc's buttons in a way no one else does. Earlier in the flick, we see him and Reese Witherspoon's character enjoyinga post-coital joint, and know immediately that there's nothing to their relationship beyond sex and weed, and all of it seems to be on her terms. Shasta Fay, on the other hand, offers Doc exactly what he wants. She willingly flips over to let Doc spank her, and though he might know in the back of her mind that she's bating him, she is ultimately offering up his desires to him on a silver platter...

It could seem, on the surface at least, as thoughShasta Fay knows she has to submit to Doc's will in order to get what she ultimately wants from him, but Anderson is savvy enough to show that she wants Doc as much as he wants her. Yes, their relationship is self-destructive, and even though the film ends with the two of them seemingly happily reunited, it's clear that there's too much destruction in the wake of their relationship to carve out anything meaningful.

Waterston spends nearly seven minutes of screen time completely nude, and though she had done a topless scene earlier in her career—in 2007's The Babysitters—it was still somewhat shocking to see quite so much of her for so long. It was a real breakthrough for Waterston, who landed in some huge franchises like Fantastic Beasts and Alien following her work in this film, and pretty conclusively proves that this level of sexual content and nudity isn't the career-ender that some actresses once feared.

Hopefully this can serve asa lesson to actresses reticent to do nudity because they fear what will become of their careers. Katherine Waterston landed a role in the family-friendly Wizarding World after she appeared fully nude on screen. Let your freak flags fly, ladies, it did nothing to stall her career...

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