Explain Licorice Pizza to me?
April 12, 2022 12:16 PM Subscribe
What I saw was a movie about a 25 year old in a predatory relationship with a 15 year old where she repeated gaslights, physically assaults and is psychologically abusive to a child...
Yet...
95% of reviews are glowing and basically none mention this fact. Did I completely invent something that is not there? Are we really to believe these reviews would be the same if the genders were reversed?
Yet...
95% of reviews are glowing and basically none mention this fact. Did I completely invent something that is not there? Are we really to believe these reviews would be the same if the genders were reversed?
The male main character is based on an actual person, who is now a successful Hollywood guy and is friends with PTA. Presumably the film depicts these events more positively because the man whose experiences inspired them remembers them positively.
posted by kickingtheground at 1:06 PM on April 12, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by kickingtheground at 1:06 PM on April 12, 2022 [6 favorites]
I feel like you got a very different message from the movie than I did, which I understood more as a subversion of the romantic comedy (in the vein of Harold & Maude or Ghost World or Lost in Translation) rather than a straightforward example of it. Gary is presented as the aggressor when he hits on Alana on class photo day. Out of boredom, Alana basically calls his bluff by meeting him at the restaurant and she ends up getting caught up in his weird kid-actor-turned-teen-grifter world. If anything, he's the one stringing her along with one sketchy business opportunity or fly-by-night scheme after another.
The relationship never really turns romantic, and the movie takes the opportunity multiple times to point out that Alana is kind of a loser for hanging out with this kid and his dumb gang of friends. The ending does not endorse what Alana is doing at all, and treats her kissing Gary as another in the line of dumb, immature mistakes (many centering on grown men) that she's made over the course of the film.
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:07 PM on April 12, 2022 [7 favorites]
The relationship never really turns romantic, and the movie takes the opportunity multiple times to point out that Alana is kind of a loser for hanging out with this kid and his dumb gang of friends. The ending does not endorse what Alana is doing at all, and treats her kissing Gary as another in the line of dumb, immature mistakes (many centering on grown men) that she's made over the course of the film.
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:07 PM on April 12, 2022 [7 favorites]
I have a feeling this question is going to get some flags because, we usually don't do a back and forth debate about a topic in AskMe.
But my two cents are: I don't care to see this particular movie, and I also object to our cultural obsession with adults fucking teenagers (which was shown explicitly in older movies and is now usually hinted at less overtly). The reason I object is these pairings involve a power difference that can lead to harm. This is especially pronounced when the adult is a man and the teen is a young woman because gender is an additional power difference on top of age - hence why swtiching the genders actually does reduce the amount of potential harm.
Having said all that, these are cultural norms that change over time. In reality, there are people who look fondly, or look back with complexity, on relationships they had with adults when they were teens. Doesn't mean this particular movie is good, just means it may reflect a perspective that real people have.
posted by latkes at 1:14 PM on April 12, 2022 [12 favorites]
But my two cents are: I don't care to see this particular movie, and I also object to our cultural obsession with adults fucking teenagers (which was shown explicitly in older movies and is now usually hinted at less overtly). The reason I object is these pairings involve a power difference that can lead to harm. This is especially pronounced when the adult is a man and the teen is a young woman because gender is an additional power difference on top of age - hence why swtiching the genders actually does reduce the amount of potential harm.
Having said all that, these are cultural norms that change over time. In reality, there are people who look fondly, or look back with complexity, on relationships they had with adults when they were teens. Doesn't mean this particular movie is good, just means it may reflect a perspective that real people have.
posted by latkes at 1:14 PM on April 12, 2022 [12 favorites]
I'm not sure what you want from this conversation? People don't think movies themselves are bad because they depict bad things. We can perfectly reasonably believe both that the relationship in the movie is not a good or healthy one but that Licorice Pizza is itself a good movie about a troubling relationship.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:17 PM on April 12, 2022 [48 favorites]
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:17 PM on April 12, 2022 [48 favorites]
A good movie can have disturbing subject matter. A movie about completely fucked up things can be extremely critically acclaimed. Recognition does not function as a moral barometer, or sanctioning, of the characters.
A movie doesn't have to scream "this person is a bad person" to draw the viewer to certain conclusions and value judgments about the characters and their decisions. It can just skillfully depict a fucked up situation and trust the audience to apply their own lens.
posted by hepta at 1:25 PM on April 12, 2022 [19 favorites]
A movie doesn't have to scream "this person is a bad person" to draw the viewer to certain conclusions and value judgments about the characters and their decisions. It can just skillfully depict a fucked up situation and trust the audience to apply their own lens.
posted by hepta at 1:25 PM on April 12, 2022 [19 favorites]
To be 100% clear, the two main characters never have sex and his pursuit of her is pretty one-sided throughout the film. It barely endorses them being friends, let alone lovers. When they kiss in the final shot, it's presented as a symbol of Alana fully backsliding into immaturity, after trying and failing to act like a responsible adult in the last of the film's many episodes. Everything before that moment is the movie telling us that what these young people (I just turned 45, so both of them are basically children in my eyes) are doing is a mistake. It's an ambiguous, uncomfortable ending, in the same way as the ending of The Graduate.
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:33 PM on April 12, 2022 [13 favorites]
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:33 PM on April 12, 2022 [13 favorites]
Depicting abusive or otherwise unsettling relationships in an ambiguous light is one of PTA’s things. I haven’t seen Liquorice Pizza yet, but his previous films have often left me with a troubling uncertainty as to the film’s point of view and a sense that if I could pin down what the film was trying to say, I’d fundamentally disagree with it. PTA’s films are so skilfully constructed, however, that I have to assume this is the intended effect—to make you see something in a different way, even if, after consideration, you still find that perspective abhorrent or unconvincing. I don’t enjoy this feeling—and as a result I don’t receive much enjoyment from his films—but it’s a worthwhile artistic achievement.
posted by EXISTENZ IS PAUSED at 2:04 PM on April 12, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by EXISTENZ IS PAUSED at 2:04 PM on April 12, 2022 [4 favorites]
You weren't the only one who was uneasy about that, fret not.
As for the reviews being glowing praise: who knows, I've learned to take all reviews with a grain of salt. Even if they're all universally in favor of something I hate. I mean, half the film scholar world holds Jerry Lewis up as a comic genius and I couldn't for the life of me tell you why. So don't worry about the reviews all loving something, they're just people with opinions and they may be wrong.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 2:05 PM on April 12, 2022 [2 favorites]
As for the reviews being glowing praise: who knows, I've learned to take all reviews with a grain of salt. Even if they're all universally in favor of something I hate. I mean, half the film scholar world holds Jerry Lewis up as a comic genius and I couldn't for the life of me tell you why. So don't worry about the reviews all loving something, they're just people with opinions and they may be wrong.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 2:05 PM on April 12, 2022 [2 favorites]
I haven’t seen Liquorice Pizza yet, but his previous films have often left me with a troubling uncertainty as to the film’s point of view and a sense that if I could pin down what the film was trying to say, I’d fundamentally disagree with it.
With Phantom Thread, for example, PTA said he was inspired by his wife (Maya Rudolph) jokingly wishing he could stay sick (with a cold) because he becomes so docile/less of a workaholic when he's sick. This rather mild inspiration in his domestic life led to the grotesque characters in Phantom Thread, where he really dialed up the unsettling/abusive behaviour and bizarre dynamic between the two. I don't know if there was really point to the movie other than to tell an exaggerated story inspired by this experience. This is why I like his movies and many movies like it. They tend to be just well-constructed stories with interesting, if not often disturbing characters. I also appreciate PTA's dedication to cinematography and find his films visually pleasant to watch as well.
(Also, whether his inclusion of characters/dynamics like these reflects on PTA as a person, I don't think we can really know. PTA was kind of famously awful in his youth, but are the characters in his movies reflections of that necessarily? Nabokov for example once said: "Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don't care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral facade - demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out.")
posted by thebots at 3:33 PM on April 12, 2022 [7 favorites]
With Phantom Thread, for example, PTA said he was inspired by his wife (Maya Rudolph) jokingly wishing he could stay sick (with a cold) because he becomes so docile/less of a workaholic when he's sick. This rather mild inspiration in his domestic life led to the grotesque characters in Phantom Thread, where he really dialed up the unsettling/abusive behaviour and bizarre dynamic between the two. I don't know if there was really point to the movie other than to tell an exaggerated story inspired by this experience. This is why I like his movies and many movies like it. They tend to be just well-constructed stories with interesting, if not often disturbing characters. I also appreciate PTA's dedication to cinematography and find his films visually pleasant to watch as well.
(Also, whether his inclusion of characters/dynamics like these reflects on PTA as a person, I don't think we can really know. PTA was kind of famously awful in his youth, but are the characters in his movies reflections of that necessarily? Nabokov for example once said: "Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don't care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral facade - demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out.")
posted by thebots at 3:33 PM on April 12, 2022 [7 favorites]
Presentation and framing matter. If nearly all the reviewers fail to notice or care about the power imbalance that stems from the age difference between these two characters, it means either that Anderson didn't think it was an issue (hence it wasn't presented as an issue) or that critics have ignored Anderson's qualms en masse.
I read through a few reviews from fairly well regarded and high profile critics, and no one seems very troubled by it. Here is an excerpt from Christy Lemire at rogerebert.com that features some eyebrow-raising justifications:
"In the simplest terms, “Licorice Pizza” finds Haim’s Alana and Hoffman’s Gary running around the Valley, starting various businesses, flirting, pretending they don’t care about each other, and potentially falling for other people to avoid falling for each other. One thing: She’s 25 and he’s 15, and they meet cute at his high school where’s she’s helping the photographers on picture day. What makes this amorphous romance make sense is that a) it’s extremely chaste, b) she’s sort of stunted at the film’s start, and c) Anderson wisely establishes early on that Gary has a swagger and intelligence beyond his years. In a way that’s reminiscent of Max Fischer in “Rushmore,” all the adults Gary encounters take him seriously and treat him as an equal. The fact that he’s a longtime child star has a lot to do with his maturity (and the character of Gary is inspired by Gary Goetzman, Tom Hanks’ longtime producing partner, who was an actor in his youth). So when he meets Alana and is instantly smitten by her, he carries himself with such confidence and addresses her so directly that she can’t help but get drawn into his world."
Richard Roeper says this:
"We meet 15-year-old, strawberry-coiffed, pimply faced charmer Gary Valentine as he tries to hustle a date with the photographer’s assistant, the 25-year-old Alana Kane, and yes, this would probably never be a plot point in a major motion picture if the genders were reversed, but in Anderson’s hands the potential romance never feels creepy or exploitative."
To Roeper's point: why are people generally unbothered by the age disparity when, if it were a 25 year old man kissing a 15 year old girl, the movie would never have been made? Part of it is that Anderson simply does not seem to be framing it as icky, or problematic, or abusive. But the other part, the deeper issue at play, the one that has probably informed Anderson's directorial framing, is our societal set of assumptions about gender, which are deeply tied to patriarchy and toxic masculinity: the assumption that boys are not very vulnerable to psychological trauma, especially sexual trauma; the assumption that boys and men don't feel as much or as deeply in general; the assumption that men are sex-starved pursuers and women are passive objects of lust, that boys are naturally more interested in sex -- and that therefore a teenage boy must be ready for a sexual relationship, if not an emotionally mature relationship, in a way that a teenage girl of the same age isn't.
The reason I object is these pairings involve a power difference that can lead to harm. This is especially pronounced when the adult is a man and the teen is a young woman because gender is an additional power difference on top of age - hence why swtiching the genders actually does reduce the amount of potential harm.
I don't want to turn an AskMe into an argument,
and I know that this issue is immensely fraught and difficult, but I do feel that this is a challenging statement to make. With regard to what I wrote just above, if it is reasonable to say that patriarchy really does reduce the harm done to male victims of age-inappropriate sexual relationships (and I think in certain ways this is true!), then it is also reasonable to posit that patriarchy might condition us to be more willing to assume that boys will be unharmed by it.
posted by cubeb at 3:38 PM on April 12, 2022 [5 favorites]
I read through a few reviews from fairly well regarded and high profile critics, and no one seems very troubled by it. Here is an excerpt from Christy Lemire at rogerebert.com that features some eyebrow-raising justifications:
"In the simplest terms, “Licorice Pizza” finds Haim’s Alana and Hoffman’s Gary running around the Valley, starting various businesses, flirting, pretending they don’t care about each other, and potentially falling for other people to avoid falling for each other. One thing: She’s 25 and he’s 15, and they meet cute at his high school where’s she’s helping the photographers on picture day. What makes this amorphous romance make sense is that a) it’s extremely chaste, b) she’s sort of stunted at the film’s start, and c) Anderson wisely establishes early on that Gary has a swagger and intelligence beyond his years. In a way that’s reminiscent of Max Fischer in “Rushmore,” all the adults Gary encounters take him seriously and treat him as an equal. The fact that he’s a longtime child star has a lot to do with his maturity (and the character of Gary is inspired by Gary Goetzman, Tom Hanks’ longtime producing partner, who was an actor in his youth). So when he meets Alana and is instantly smitten by her, he carries himself with such confidence and addresses her so directly that she can’t help but get drawn into his world."
Richard Roeper says this:
"We meet 15-year-old, strawberry-coiffed, pimply faced charmer Gary Valentine as he tries to hustle a date with the photographer’s assistant, the 25-year-old Alana Kane, and yes, this would probably never be a plot point in a major motion picture if the genders were reversed, but in Anderson’s hands the potential romance never feels creepy or exploitative."
To Roeper's point: why are people generally unbothered by the age disparity when, if it were a 25 year old man kissing a 15 year old girl, the movie would never have been made? Part of it is that Anderson simply does not seem to be framing it as icky, or problematic, or abusive. But the other part, the deeper issue at play, the one that has probably informed Anderson's directorial framing, is our societal set of assumptions about gender, which are deeply tied to patriarchy and toxic masculinity: the assumption that boys are not very vulnerable to psychological trauma, especially sexual trauma; the assumption that boys and men don't feel as much or as deeply in general; the assumption that men are sex-starved pursuers and women are passive objects of lust, that boys are naturally more interested in sex -- and that therefore a teenage boy must be ready for a sexual relationship, if not an emotionally mature relationship, in a way that a teenage girl of the same age isn't.
The reason I object is these pairings involve a power difference that can lead to harm. This is especially pronounced when the adult is a man and the teen is a young woman because gender is an additional power difference on top of age - hence why swtiching the genders actually does reduce the amount of potential harm.
I don't want to turn an AskMe into an argument,
and I know that this issue is immensely fraught and difficult, but I do feel that this is a challenging statement to make. With regard to what I wrote just above, if it is reasonable to say that patriarchy really does reduce the harm done to male victims of age-inappropriate sexual relationships (and I think in certain ways this is true!), then it is also reasonable to posit that patriarchy might condition us to be more willing to assume that boys will be unharmed by it.
posted by cubeb at 3:38 PM on April 12, 2022 [5 favorites]
The movie isn't aspirational. It isn't about choosing sides or picking heroes to cheer on (which is an activity I find very common among Mefites and MF posts in general). It's a story about a time and place that can be simultaneously glorious, mystifying, and horrible. Unlike our modern day world...
posted by 2N2222 at 9:28 PM on April 12, 2022 [12 favorites]
posted by 2N2222 at 9:28 PM on April 12, 2022 [12 favorites]
Hey Cosine, seems like we saw the same film! After I saw it, I tried to find well-know reviewers who underlined the age difference but I did not find one. I did find a male blogger who was horrified by the age difference and who pointed out that the film could have been made exactly as it was, only with the male lead 18 and the female lead 27 or whatever. I agree! Different folks clearly have different responses. I have enjoyed films from Paul Thomas Anderson generally, although I haven't seen all of them. I enjoyed parts of Licorice Pizza (the Jon Peters part, especially) but as a whole, it felt creepy to me. I am not a fan.
posted by Bella Donna at 5:50 AM on April 13, 2022
posted by Bella Donna at 5:50 AM on April 13, 2022
It seems this AskMe is rapidly turning into a discussion of the film, and I actually am all for that since Adam Savage once said that talking about movies with people is the best way to learn more about film. So we are still answering this question... (smile)
In a way that’s reminiscent of Max Fischer in “Rushmore,” all the adults Gary encounters take him seriously and treat him as an equal.
I also felt like this film was a lot like Rushmore for precisely that reason. However, in Rushmore Max ultimately got rejected by his older crush precisely because of the age difference - he had a more mature manner and aspirations, but was in many ways still kind of immature - consider the scene where Max crashes Miss Cross' dinner with her fiance and makes immature jokes about his job (Why are you wearing pajamas to dinner?" "These are O.R. scrubs." "Oh, R they?") I was reminded of that during that moment after they've successfully backed the truck down the hill, and Alana is sitting on the side of the road decompressing and then watches Gary and his friends make immature dick joke pantomimes with the gas cans; and in the next scene she is signing up to work for the mayor's campaign and actually starts a flirtation with a co-worker her own age.
I would have been much happier with the film if it ended up more like Rushmore at the end as well, with Alana going on to a full-on relationship with that co-worker instead of going back to Gary; after that scene with the truck and the gas cans I totally didn't buy that last-minute return to Gary.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:50 AM on April 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
In a way that’s reminiscent of Max Fischer in “Rushmore,” all the adults Gary encounters take him seriously and treat him as an equal.
I also felt like this film was a lot like Rushmore for precisely that reason. However, in Rushmore Max ultimately got rejected by his older crush precisely because of the age difference - he had a more mature manner and aspirations, but was in many ways still kind of immature - consider the scene where Max crashes Miss Cross' dinner with her fiance and makes immature jokes about his job (Why are you wearing pajamas to dinner?" "These are O.R. scrubs." "Oh, R they?") I was reminded of that during that moment after they've successfully backed the truck down the hill, and Alana is sitting on the side of the road decompressing and then watches Gary and his friends make immature dick joke pantomimes with the gas cans; and in the next scene she is signing up to work for the mayor's campaign and actually starts a flirtation with a co-worker her own age.
I would have been much happier with the film if it ended up more like Rushmore at the end as well, with Alana going on to a full-on relationship with that co-worker instead of going back to Gary; after that scene with the truck and the gas cans I totally didn't buy that last-minute return to Gary.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:50 AM on April 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
Honestly I sorta took it as a lowkey cautionary tale even though it probably wasn't meant as such.
The female lead is sort of a sad, pathetic creature who is perpetually thwarted in her quest to find an age-appropriate mate. Basically every time it seems she's getting somewhere, something awful happens and she's back to square one.
Ultimately this happens enough times that she just kinda gives up and hooks up with the default friend™️. He's her last resort and he makes her feel wanted even though she had hoped for something better.
From his perspective he Gets the Girl, but we know this is actually really because ultimately she's settling for him and he deserves someone who doesn't feel that way about him.
Of course I don't think any of this was the intended message. I think it's supposed to be a "sweet" coming of age story, as evidenced by the fact that PTA nepotistically cast his son and a whole bunch of other folk he has close connections with. And they're all actually pretty good actors, which I guess is why this was kinda enjoyable despite not actually being a really great movie.
So no, I don't really get what the big deal was. I think all the period details are probably correct, and it really does transport you back to a certain place and time.
Also, what is abundantly clear is that absolutely nobody looked good in those clothes. Even the really attractive people.
The Jon Peters parts were pretty funny.
posted by panama joe at 11:31 PM on April 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
The female lead is sort of a sad, pathetic creature who is perpetually thwarted in her quest to find an age-appropriate mate. Basically every time it seems she's getting somewhere, something awful happens and she's back to square one.
Ultimately this happens enough times that she just kinda gives up and hooks up with the default friend™️. He's her last resort and he makes her feel wanted even though she had hoped for something better.
From his perspective he Gets the Girl, but we know this is actually really because ultimately she's settling for him and he deserves someone who doesn't feel that way about him.
Of course I don't think any of this was the intended message. I think it's supposed to be a "sweet" coming of age story, as evidenced by the fact that PTA nepotistically cast his son and a whole bunch of other folk he has close connections with. And they're all actually pretty good actors, which I guess is why this was kinda enjoyable despite not actually being a really great movie.
So no, I don't really get what the big deal was. I think all the period details are probably correct, and it really does transport you back to a certain place and time.
Also, what is abundantly clear is that absolutely nobody looked good in those clothes. Even the really attractive people.
The Jon Peters parts were pretty funny.
posted by panama joe at 11:31 PM on April 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
PTA nepotistically cast his son
Cooper Hoffman isn't PTA's son, he's the son of frequent Anderson actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. Even so, I don't think of his casting as nepotism so much as Anderson drawing from the network of his past collaborators; Lots of directors have a stable of actors that they work with again and again, because they know that they can pull a certain performance out of that person. I think with Hoffman (junior), it was a case of both having a family-friend connection to Anderson as well as being in the right age range and general vibe called for by the character. I'll be curious to see if he ends up in more things.
posted by Strange Interlude at 6:02 AM on April 14, 2022 [2 favorites]
Cooper Hoffman isn't PTA's son, he's the son of frequent Anderson actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. Even so, I don't think of his casting as nepotism so much as Anderson drawing from the network of his past collaborators; Lots of directors have a stable of actors that they work with again and again, because they know that they can pull a certain performance out of that person. I think with Hoffman (junior), it was a case of both having a family-friend connection to Anderson as well as being in the right age range and general vibe called for by the character. I'll be curious to see if he ends up in more things.
posted by Strange Interlude at 6:02 AM on April 14, 2022 [2 favorites]
Cooper Hoffman isn't PTA's son, he's the son of frequent Anderson actor Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Thank you — I stand corrected.
posted by panama joe at 7:06 AM on April 14, 2022
Thank you — I stand corrected.
posted by panama joe at 7:06 AM on April 14, 2022
This thread is closed to new comments.
There's films that glorify and celebrate violence, murder and war. This film is semi-celebrating a different kind of bad thing. The 25 year old woman in the film is kind of adrift, and finds herself falling into doing these things. Agreed that if the genders were reversed, this would have been an extremely controversial film in 2022. I have not much to say about that.
posted by SoberHighland at 12:47 PM on April 12, 2022 [2 favorites]