The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha, by Ethan Warren

Abstract

When the actor Phillip Baker Hall was approached by a twenty-two-year-old Paul Thomas Anderson with the script for his first short film, Cigarettes & Coffee (1993), he claims to have wondered to himself, “Who was the first actor in the seventeenth century to see a Shakespeare script, and did he know what he was reading? I certainly knew what I had in my hand” (qtd. in Warren 3). As Anderson is known for having a deep self-certainty about exactly what he was capable of, and moreover, a keen self-awareness too of how he is placed as an auteur figure within the arena of post-New Hollywood cinema, it can be very hard to divorce his work from his personality. This popular imagination of Anderson and his oeuvre, which I in no way wish to suggest is inherently misleading or facetious, is extensively considered by film critic Ethan Warren through a critical reading of not just his films, but also the discourse surrounding Anderson as well. Through a theory of an American apocrypha in Anderson’s work, Warren finds a fascinating way to not just think through Anderson’s own dynamicity as a filmmaker, but also to provide us with an intellectual manoeuvre that makes the reader ask what an auteur even means within commercial Hollywood today, a question we must approach within the terms of commerce.

Keywords

• apocrypha
• auteur
• indiewood
• hollywood