Reframe: Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Boogie Nights’

When Boogie Nights hit theaters with no small amount of pre-release fanfare, Paul Thomas Anderson was a relative neophyte director with just one previous feature to his name—the brilliant low-budget noir, Hard Eight (Anderson still refers to the film as Sydney, the name of the lead character played by Phillip Baker Hall). As terrific as Hard Eight is, Boogie Nights was a step-up statement on nearly every level. 

Anderson’s career can be effectively split between Boogie Nights and the films he made afterward. While the most continuous theme in Anderson’s films, that of the outsider creating a family to replace the broken one they came from, is evident from Magnolia to One Battle After Another (as well as in Boogie Nights), Anderson has since embraced a more experimental aesthetic. The scores of his films (all by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, starting with There Will Be Blood) have become more dissonant. The cinematography is hazier at the edges. Greater flights of fancy/inspiration are in play (see the frogs in Magnolia and the mushrooms in Phantom Thread). 

For many, Anderson’s films after Boogie Nights are his truest artistic statements. Without a doubt, a number of these films are truly brilliant. Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, and Phantom Thread are three of my favorite films over the last quarter-century. Anderson’s post-Boogie output is more esoteric and eccentric than his late ‘70s/early ‘80s epic on the pornography industry, but they aren’t more purely entertaining.

I liken Anderson’s post-Boogie run of features to that of Greenwood’s albums with his band Radiohead, which came after The Bends (their second full-length record): They are genuine works of art, but harder to sing along to. As Moby once said of Thom Yorke and Greenwood’s music after Ok Computer came out, “I liked it when they wrote nice songs like High and Dry.” Boogie Nights is Anderson’s The Bends. Brilliant, comparatively conventional, and damn easy to sing along with.

Starting with the opening one-shot, with its blast of ‘70s discofied funk courtesy of The Emotions’ Best of My Love, that rolls through a restaurant and introduces us to many of the key players in the film (reminiscent of Scorsese’s restaurant oner in GoodFellas), Boogie Nights is sheer cinematic ecstasy. The use of late ‘70s and early ‘80s needle drops are perfectly chosen. Wahlberg hitting the dance floor to the Commodores’ “Machine Gun” is an exhilarating blast. Anderson’s camera glides throughout scenes, sometimes settling on an intimate close-up of a character. For two hours and thirty-five minutes, Anderson never takes a wrong step. Not even during the film’s back half, when the costs of drugs, ego, and overspending come together in a common narrative. 

The first eighty-four minutes of Boogie Nights detail the rise of a lower-middle-class boy from Torrance named Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg) to the peak of the porn industry as Dirk Diggler. The structure of the film is familiar in the rise-fall-recovery sense, but it’s all in the doing, and Boogie Nights is a film that really, and profoundly, does. 

At the time of its release, the film was highly controversial due to its subject matter. Yes, the film depicts the porn industry, and often graphically. But it would be brutally reductive to call Boogie Nights “that porn movie.” Paul Thomas Anderson’s second film takes us from the “me decade” of the ‘70s to the “greed decade” of the ‘80s, and defines the cultural split between the two eras. The term “me decade” was coined by author Tom Wolfe as a criticism of society’s move away from the activist ‘60s and into a self-obsessed era. The characters in Boogie Nights are certainly not, and likely have never been, activists, but they do retain some of the sunniness of the hippies. One could say that porn in that era represented the last vestiges of “free love,” not that it was truly free.

Boogie Nights perfectly captures the moment when soft rock moved aside for new wave, when the quick, cheap dollar overcame the hard-won buck. The key inflection point of this change is the porn industry’s transition from theaters to videotape. Reynolds’ Jack Horner might be easy to laugh at as he speaks of his films as if they are art, but as in all things, there are levels to what one does. Shooting on film and putting those pictures in a movie house was a point of pride for Horner. The industry’s move to home video made the product more ubiquitous, of a lower visual value, and much cheaper than one might have already thought. Pornography on film went from a cottage industry to a mass-marketed product. 

That’s not to say that pre-videotape pornography was high-class, but it was comparatively classier. Of course, “dirty movies” have always had a grimier underside, but when married to a cheaper, faster assembly line, the underside became the overside. We have all seen good ideas become perverted by excessive accessibility. Cable news, social media, and, more to the point, streaming services are all examples of new media platforms that have been diluted by their expansion. Whether one thinks pornography is a good idea or not is beside the point. It was an idea made worse by the ‘80s, by the hippies becoming yuppies, by everything becoming a commodity. 

The fall of Dirk Diggler may follow a familiar path: excessive behavior that leads to a bottoming out, then to a moment of survival that doesn’t necessarily lead to a better place than where he began. The scene in the film that best represents this inflection point is when Diggler is taken on a drug deal with a friend named Todd (a feverish Thomas Jane), whom no one needs in their life. They enter a den of debauchery owned by Rahad (a terrifying Alfred Molina). The dope Todd and Dirk bring to Rahad is baby powder, and Rahad is a dangerous, unhinged man. Unable to drop the fake dope and leave, the moment becomes unbearably intense. Rahad’s massive bodyguard is packing heat, and a young Asian man is popping firecrackers against the floor. Diggler knows that if anyone tests their “dope,” they will not leave Rahad’s house alive.

As the realization comes over Diggler, Wahlberg’s face goes from fearful to surreal amusement, to numbness, and then finally, to self-preservation. Anderson’s camera closes in tight on Wahlberg’s face. Despite earning an Oscar nomination for The Departed, Mark Wahlberg is seldom regarded as a great actor, and sometimes not even as a good one. There is a belief that Wahlberg can be stiff, inexpressive, and generally lacking in dynamism. That is not the case in Boogie Nights. Wahlberg will likely never again touch the sort of greatness that Anderson pulled out of him through Dirk Diggler, but it did happen, and that sequence where Diggler’s life passes before his eyes on that couch, with Rick Springfield’s Jessie’s Girl playing at ear bleed volume, while flinching with every crack of a firework is one of the most transfixing moments I’ve seen on screen. Ironically, Reynolds and Wahlberg would both go on to disown Boogie Nights due to its content, which is a shame, because it is both actors’ finest hour.

The large ensemble is full of actors giving extraordinary performances. Heather Graham hit her career peak as the winsome but scarred Roller Girl. Philip Seymour Hoffman as the sweet, simple, and confused Scotty J is heartbreaking. John C. Reilly is pitch-perfect as Dirk’s lunkheaded partner in porn and misguided business ventures. William H. Macy and (real-life porn actress) Nina Hartley are well-matched as an emasculated husband and a far too free wife whose succession of infidelities leads to the film’s first tragedy. And finally, Julianne Moore is extraordinary as an aging porn star who can’t see her son due to her profession and history of drug abuse. Watching Moore, an outstanding actor, play a woman who is a bad actress on film and a broken woman off-screen is absolutely fascinating. I can’t think of a more difficult direction than asking a skilled actor to play an unskilled one. Moore does so with great aplomb. She is one of those greatly respected, well-feted performers who still seem somehow underrated. 

Much has been made of the film’s conclusion, which reunites most of the characters we meet at the beginning after a period of estrangement. Diggler returns to Jack Horner after his narrow escape from his drug deal gone wrong. Horner allows him back into the fold and back into the industry. Some see the movie’s final moments as upbeat, happy even. I know many people who think the ending is irresponsibly positive. That’s a strange read to me. Wahlberg’s last scene finds Diggler staring into a mirror, reciting his lines before his next scene. In a film where the size of Diggler’s member is given a great deal of discussion, we finally get the money shot when Diggler pulls out his massive penis at the end of his solo, reflective rehearsal. In that moment, it seems impossible to me not to realize that all Dirk Diggler has is what he’s holding in his hand. 

The shelf-life of a porn star isn’t so different from that of a professional athlete. Both are only useful as long as they are physically able to perform. Once they are no longer able to do so, they will be pushed aside and forgotten. The close of Boogie Nights is remarkably sad. The music playing over the scene may be counterintuitively hopeful (the Beach Boys God Only Knows is one hell of a contradictory needle drop), but the fact is, Diggler and all of his friends are stuck in a disposable world. One they are likely to never escape, and if they do, it probably won’t be of their own choice. Sure, at the end of Boogie Nights, Dirk Diggler gets to go home again, but home will never be the same. 

Diggler’s story of hope and optimism dashed by harsh reality is a microcosm of the narcissism and nihilism of the ‘80s. More than the two digits changed when ‘79 became ‘80. Our whole world did. Even if we didn’t notice until later. Boogie Nights is a 1997 film that understands what we didn’t know then. Our lives were about to become cheaper and shallower. Just like everything around us. 

Every film Paul Thomas Anderson has made since Boogie Nights has received rapturous reviews. Some, like Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, The Master, Phantom Thread, and One Battle After Another, have been hailed as masterpieces. While I agree with those assessments as they apply to There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread, even in their cases, I find myself longing for the less avant-garde, more (relatively) straightforward work of Boogie Nights and Hard Eight. Neither of those two films is simple, but they are, for my money, easier to engage with and land closer to the heart. Anderson is a remarkable filmmaker. Even when his work doesn’t resonate with me, I always know I’m viewing a film by a gifted artist. But as great as he is now, I think he was better then.