O PTA, Where Art Thou?
What has Paul Thomas Anderson been doing been since 2017? What have his movies been doing? Punch-Drunk Love resurfaced at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco in January, bubbling and booming on thirty-five-millimeter print. Phantom Thread played as part of the Metrograph’s holiday slate last December, and I missed the screening, but I suppose I had seen the film for the first time eleven months before, which was recently enough.
Anderson seems to fill his breaks from Hollywood with musical endeavors. In the three years between Inherent Vice and Phantom Thread, we received projects for Joanna Newsom, Fiona Apple and Radiohead; the Jonny Greenwood connection conjures images of poker games over which Greenwood and Anderson gamble their talent. We waited longer for The Master after There Will Be Blood (five years), and now, nearly two years on from sartorial politics and British froideur, with little news about what’s next—Anderson told The Ringer he’s currently cutting down a six-hundred-page script—we have HAIM.
HAIM is a trio of Valley girls (in the originalist sense) whose debut album “Days Are Gone” paired harmonizing and tongue-twisters with jubilant hooks, and stormed Urban Outfitters vinyl shelves and Williamsburg coffee shops in 2013; the group’s sophomore effort, “Something To Tell You,” was met with some resistance. I listened to both on repeat. Anderson’s first collaboration with HAIM was a live recording of “Right Now,” a single from “Something To Tell You,” but apart from nice tracking he doesn’t leave a mark. It’s “Now I’m In It,” the single released last week, which feels like a reward, for the gradual convergence of Anderson’s inclinations and HAIM’s sound and personality.
The video opens on Danielle Haim, the band’s de facto frontwoman, at a bar. She’s wearing red and she’s distressed. Is she reeling from a less-than-satisfying romantic rendezvous? A drunk blunder? In any case, Danielle has stayed indoors too long. After toying with last night’s drink and downing a recuperative shot—both to the song’s jittering bassline—Danielle emerges on the streets of Los Angeles, tinged golden as they were in Boogie Nights, and she’s got a day job, apparently, as a waitress at a diner (it’s Brite Spot, on Sunset). Here, Danielle spills coffee on the counter, shifting between looks as she passes customers, in a glum imitation of backstage warm-ups.
Then we’re careening via Steadicam past secondhand racks to sunglasses. We watch Danielle in the mirror as she tries to hide her shabbiness; she grabs a rotary phone from a shelf and successfully makes a call, despite the handset’s practical shortcomings. The storytelling here is irresistible. Danielle’s conduct communicates her need for help, and also her casual musicality: she thrusts her shoulders forward upon entering the diner, and collapses outside the thrift store only when the song has reached its second verse. This is the presentation of a character, conflicted but not lacking intent, and the balance of heaviness and hope that Danielle works into glossy performance almost resembles Emma Stone in La La Land. Who knew a Haim sister could act?
The entire video possesses the attention to choreographic detail that’s on display throughout the best Hollywood musicals. It’s a craft HAIM has been honing with their last three releases, all set in L.A. 2017’s “Want You Back” closed a long thoroughfare so HAIM could march down it, a gimmick that yielded a tingle of charm, quickly fading as the landscape remained static. “Little Of Your Love,” which Anderson directed (he has helmed each video since), also suffered from redundancy, but the set piece, a disco-lite dance studio, showed evolution.
“Summer Girl,” HAIM’s precursor to “Now I’m In It,” contains many of the same elements as the latter single; Danielle swaps comfort food for ticket stubs behind the window of Tarantino’s New Beverly cinema, and though her love interest works his way conspicuously into the narrative, the video is focused on her and her sisters’ manifestations of discomfort and unwinding. Over the course of the song, HAIM removes layers and layers of clothing, from parkas to turtlenecks to polos, until, matching the season, they stride along the sidewalk in bikini tops.
When Este and Alana rescue Danielle in “Now I’m In It,” they do so wearing Matrix goggles and matching blazers. They have no problem playing sidekick, because sidekicks are cooler. And here comes the best part—the cleansing ritual. Este and Alana send Danielle through a car wash, where the rubber streamers dance around and upstage her, and where she sings about rain while she’s soaked by jets. Este and Alana watch from the adjacent windowed waiting room, Este lounging in a leather recliner, Alana hitting the keys of an arcade game.
What, precisely, marks the strength of this construction? I think it’s the way HAIM and Anderson take advantage of an environment, extracting its kinetic potential, representing emotional rehab in a way that inspires new approaches to it. Should we help ourselves in laundromats or repair shops, rather than therapists’ offices?
Three Rolling Stone articles promoting new HAIM content note that Anderson came into contact with the band through their mother, from whom he took art classes. This was the only public information I found regarding the origins of the partnership, though I hope that Anderson was drawn to HAIM’s music, which could have scored one of Jack Horner’s pool parties. When Daniel Plainview runs with his son from a gas blowout in There Will Be Blood, the camera follows the two with rhythmic ease, and if an evangelical nineteenth-century incarnation of HAIM existed, they might have provided accompaniment for the sequence.
The truth is that many of Anderson’s best scenes involve highly motivated instances of human movement. Whether Little Bill’s Boogie Nights gun bonanza or Reynolds and Alma’s post-dress-retrieval embrace, we derive the purest enjoyment from the physical push-and-pull of Anderson characters, the way they walk, skip and run, either independently or together, away from or toward each other.
The music that HAIM produces holds the same strengths. The band’s critics typically point to their lyrics as a weakness, the way words evaporate quickly, without leaving meaning behind, but for me HAIM’s linguistic specificity has always resided in dense verb arrangements, the intense recounting of actions, and the corresponding universality that results from a dearth of proper nouns. HAIM’s songs are at their core about movement, about getting somewhere with purpose, and the band’s collaborations with Anderson—who I suspect has acted categorically as his own director of photography—reflect shared ecstasy over a journey as it relates to our swinging arms, our legs, our paces.
On every walk to campus since the release of “Now I’m In It,” I have pictured Danielle’s side-eye, in the final seconds of the video, when she and Este and Alana make it back to the bar where we started out. Danielle is anticipating the inseparability, I presume, of the visual and sonic components of the single, their streamlined encouragement of speed and swagger and self-confidence. I’ve been thrusting my shoulders and shifting my looks to the jittering bassline, too.
Fergus Campbell is a Culture writer and sophomore in Columbia College.
