Boogie Nights

I got to Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights through his third film, Magnolia, a few years after the Boogie Nights craze, which I mostly ignored.

I just didn't understand what Anderson was doing, and I wasn't listening to the right people. There were way too many late night talk show punchlines for me to take Boogie Nights seriously. My mistake.

So I missed Boogie Nights in theaters, but after I saw Magnolia in January of 2000, I decided to finally look at Boogie Nights. I had some help.

I was dating this girl when Magnolia came out. Sometime after we saw Magnolia — or maybe it was before — we watched Boogie Nights in her dorm room, in the top bunk, watching on a tiny television at the foot of the bed, atop some shelf thing. (This was the antithesis of a theatrical experience. Paul Thomas Anderson would be mortified.) Our relationship lasted about as long as Magnolia lasted in theaters, but I'll save that story for another time.

Boogie Nights is about porno culture and the mad, delusional dysfunction of it all, but beneath the madness there are these human needs. Just because they're porn stars doesn't mean Maslow's hierarchy doesn't apply to them. This film is to porno what Woodstock and Gimme Shelter are to hippie culture — bookends of success and failure, and rising again (pun intended).

In 1997, Boogie Nights was a punchline, a film not to be taken seriously, and certainly no self-respecting midwesterner would watch this film, this filthy thing, glorifying porn, blah blah blah.

Everyone was wrong. Watch Boogie Nights.