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“Things Like This Don't Just Happen”: Ideology and Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia

This article examines the first three films directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. One of the rising auteurs in the U.S. film industry, Anderson's films have generated passionate and mostly favorable responses from audiences and critics. In their narratives and visual style, Anderson's films are striking for their sympathetic portrayals of marginal figures and their audacious use of the film medium to tell stories. In examining the ideology that is inscribed within the three films, I will argue that they strain against the core ideologies of the market and patriarchal family. Although the strain is considerable, the films affirm the ideology of the patriarchal family in part by transposing it to the surrogate family. Similarly, the films present relations of dominance and submission within market relations; nonetheless, slippage occurs and market relations are recuperated as the optimal steering mechanism for society. In this manner, Anderson's films demonstrate how far a liberal critique may extend before closing ideological ruptures that it has opened.