The mystery of Shasta Fay Hepworth bookends Inherent Vice. Despite a few brief memories and cameos, she primarily anchors either end of the story, suffusing the long stretch of two hours and 30 minutes in between with the dusting of her starstuff, as if she is this universe’s Big Bang and Big Crunch—the story cannot begin, nor end, without her; but even further, the story is her, a strange supercosmos of Shasta Fay. Sprinkled throughout this long tale is the history of Doc and Shasta, the two once-young lovers who, in the words of their narrator, “each gradually located a different karmic thermal.”

And at the exact moment of the film’s halfway point, Shasta reappears as a postcarded memory, in the film’s—and Paul Thomas Anderson’s—most heartrending moment, soaked in sweet melancholy like only PTA can orchestrate it, a memory that sends Doc hurtling towards the dark heart of Golden Fang, but how?

Was the postcard a secret message from Shasta, coded in lovetalk, to help him locate the Fang? Was it simply a note of lovesick regret, and his flash to return to the scene simply a moment of coincidental luck? Is the appearance of the Fang’s headquarters here, where Doc and Shasta once kissed, some brutal metaphor for time sweeping away their love? Or was the postcard simply a hallucination sent forth from some blood-kinked, cell-deprived fold of Doc’s overtaxed cerebellum?

What’s real, and what is simple hope?

What is a true memory, and what is the fictional story we tell ourselves to survive it?

That’s a question our host wrestles with today, while talking to someone who’s no stranger to tales of mystery and love and time and space…

About the Guest - RIAN JOHNSON

Rian Johnson is the writer-director behind BRICK, THE BROTHERS BLOOM, LOOPER, STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI (the best STAR WARS, if you're keeping track of that kind of thing), and KNIVES OUT. He also directed your favorite episodes of BREAKING BAD. Beginning with episode 26, he will be the new host of INCREMENT VICE, and is looking forward to interviewing KNIVES OUT 2: KNIVES HARDER scribe Travis Woods.