• Michelle Sinclair (left) with Maya Rudolph and Joaquin Phoenix in Inherent Vice

An unexpected standout among the star-studded cast of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice is Michelle Sinclair, who until 2012 performed in adult videos under the name Belladonna. Sinclair plays Clancy Charlock, sister of the neo-Nazi biker whose mysterious death kicks the plot into gear. She appears sometime in the middle of the film to provide stoner private eye Doc Sportello with some inside information and share a canister of laughing gas. Anderson makes good use of Sinclair’s relative inexperience with literate dialogue. Her disaffected line readings—competent, but not as professional-sounding as those of the other players—go a long way in making the film’s mannered language, most of which comes directly from the Thomas Pynchon novel on which it’s based, sound like everyday speech. (Yes, in this alternate-universe Los Angeles, everyone talks like that.) Moreover Sinclair really does sound blase when talking about things like drugs and murder, adding to the film’s atmosphere of moral decay. Tough, coy, and vaguely alien, Clancy seems to have seen and done more than we might care to know.

  • Julianne Moore and Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights

Anderson clearly regards his two male types as mirror images. The Master is all but constructed around this idea, and Inherent Vice revisits it in the friendship that develops between Phoenix’s flower child and Josh Brolin’s authoritarian cop. These movies take place in a world designed by and for emotionally stunted straight men, but that’s not to say Anderson views this world optimistically. I’d argue that he’s yet to create a genuinely heroic male protagonist (Philip Baker Hall’s rueful gambler in Hard Eight does good only after a lifetime of doing wrong), and that his protagonists’ undoing is often tied to their adolescent notions of sex and power. The tycoons of Magnolia, Blood, and Master might succeed in their professional ambitions, but all three abandon their humanity in the process, assuming they were at all humane at the start.