"Licorice Pizza" Goes Down As Badly As Its Title

Paul Thomas Anderson's ode to predation and Hollywood's troubling affair with illegal age gaps.

May 1, 2022

In the final episode of HBO’s Emmy Award-winning miniseries, Mare of Easttown, the titular detective sits in an interrogation room with her best friend’s husband, John. Along with her murder, he admits to having a sexual relationship with teenager Erin McMenamin and fathering her child.

In admitting the crime, he must describe the statutory rape and the means through which it began. It was in a cabin late one night during the weekend family reunion. He was vulnerable; Erin was available. In between his confessions are droplets of rationale, from his inebriation to omitting who initiated the first kiss.

Mare’s face tells the story better than John ever could. She has been in that room with men like him a thousand times. She knows his words before he speaks and the emptiness of his justifications. Despite this, she is shocked John wants to explain this away. His reasoning holds just as little weight in the interrogation room as it will in a court of law, public opinion, or in the home he has built with his wife. John gives the same excuse as countless predators: they had “a connection.”

The contempt is obvious, the refusal to acknowledge even more so. Mare has no intention of dignifying that with a response. A man sexually violating his underage kin will not do.

The silver screen is a different story. In 2017, the world fell for a film depicting the "romance" between a 24-year-old man and a 17-year-old boy. Resistance to depiction as a homosexual winter-summer romance whose thematic merit outweighed its pederastic relationship got met with indignance. Instead of admitting fault with the film and refusing to adopt it as a staple, LGBT publications pointed out such examples in past heterosexual movies. Between Call Me By Your Name and now, with Licorice Pizza, the message is clear: we love statutory rape.

Defenders will decry this as an overstatement, some fake moral outcry that avoids objective evaluation of art by masquerading as a social justice warrior. Unfortunately, this is the art: a story of a 25-year-old woman's “friendship” with a 15-year-old boy, where sexual overtures are mutually acceptable and acting on them heartwarming.

It is impossible to say what happened to make us praise such movies. Arguably, millennia of child sex abuse has softened our sensibilities more than we care to admit, that so long as we can pass it off as art and not predation, such relationships have merit. No matter the argument, the reality is plain. If we want to defend something, we will.

Inside Licorice Pizza is a film about kinship. It is about understanding commonality and recognizing that sometimes it can take two people, at different stages in life, and bring them together. Parents find it in their children, spiritual reflections of their younger years. It is why we have them, after all; to further the line, correct the mistakes made with us, and create something in our image.

Teachers find it in a young student with an old soul who references things their classmates do not understand and tells jokes above their intellectual paygrade. Uncles and Aunts discover it in their nephews and nieces who connect with them over shared interests. An older fan of classic cars or aviation looks forward to watching a child with those same interests grow up. and anticipates a career path that pursues those interests. Perhaps they will race or fly themselves. The possibilities are endless.

As they grow and come more into their own, we act as guides. We can help them work out the chinks in the armor, soothe the bruised egos, navigate the heartache, and resolve the questions they pose themselves as adolescence slaps them in the face. In their struggle, we remember the all-consuming sentiments that dictated our lives, and in helping to focus them, recall the joy of giving into them and realize we never had to lose that joy. In return, our younger counterparts get help and someone to respect, an ally whose ambition is not getting into their pants.

But these are ideas and concepts, abstractions from which we must individually draw specific value. A movie cannot convince us that a 25-year-old and a 15-year-old evolve them for each other, especially not when the minor does all the heavy lifting. Licorice Pizza believes 70s nostalgia can force us to embrace a simpler time, where teachers openly dated students and the idea of young love extended itself to the hippies still ruminating on Woodstock and the teenagers galvanized by 60s counterculture.

On paper, its aims are not too high. It does feel like a summer escape, a young man blinded by that irrational confidence we had in our youth. It builds itself on how these two people accidentally understand what the other needs. Alana is validating Gary without realizing it, just as Gary secures Alana’s self-esteem with similar ignorance. When the movie knows that both younger and older people fail to see or have long lost sight of life's value and that these two people recognize something in each other that is just as useful as it is platonic, it soars.

Unfortunately, it cares more for muddying the narrative by throwing in random events. It needs to realize its many ideas instead of working them through a sieve and letting the necessary ones funnel into the movie. It becomes a sad attempt to live out a teenage male fantasy: the young woman, awkward and lost, unattainable in age but accessible in virtue, who caters to our false notions of maturity by engaging us despite the convention of age. In return, we flower her with inhibition, empower her with our cavalier approach to life, and ultimately prove manly enough to evolve beyond a boy, capturing her heart and, in turn, her vagina.

The movie wants to sell us on this but acts as John in that interrogation room, evading the damning details to legitimize a warped perspective. It owns up to Gary’s adolescence to a degree. He often plays like many teenage boys do, showering one girl with attention in the chase for her charms before dropping her when the pursuit becomes tiring and the well of a new belle reveals itself. Sadly, this honesty is rare. Despite the flirtations, just as readily initiated by Gary as returned by Alana, it is not until the end that the two kiss, as though their union is just a warmly-lit dose of innocence. We are adults: flighty, emotional, self-destructive, reactive, calculated, sharp, intuitive, impulsive, sexual, and needy. We are everything under the sun in a million different moments. We are lovers.

We know that Gary and Alana, now 16 and 25, will have sex. The story does not end with a quick smooch and a bolt into the Valley night. It goes on. It is a sweaty, fumbling, insecure teenager with raging hormones constantly seeking release penetrating an adult who has outgrown those impulses. It is an emotionally stunted adolescent "dating" someone who will damage his adulthood.

A movie is self-contained only in the sense that it ends. We know it goes on in that world and thus cannot ignore it because it is inconvenient for the film to acknowledge it. If the movie wants us to condone this relationship and believe the age difference and power dynamic are moot, it cannot behave as though relationships are innocent.

After all, it pedals reality when convenient. When it needs Alana to get jealous, stoking the flames of that teenage fantasy where the girl of our dreams secretly craves our affections, it has her spy on Gary as he leads a girl into the backroom of their waterbed business. Even here, the film refuses to own up to its ambitions. It wants to legitimize the relationship it sells us but cannot bring itself to acknowledge Gary as a sexual being. We hear sounds coming from the room, but they could indicate either innocent kissing or a more explicit act. We never see what Alana sees.

If we did, it would be damning. If Gary is having sex, it stands to reason that he will be sexual with Alana. It would confirm that her jealousy is not just frustration at his wandering attention. It would not be that she is a lost soul attaching to someone who keeps her from confronting life’s difficulties. It would be that she desires a 15-year-old boy sexually, and the movie cannot have that.

If Gary is only kissing, the movie must admit Gary is a child. As adults, we watch two people sneak off into a backroom, hear noises from within, and assume sex. Teenagers are never quite as ready for such action as they want to believe. How often did we converge on the road to intercourse only to turn around and drive home? How often do we reflect on our past experiences, wish we had done them differently, and feel a slight pang of envy for those who kept their impulses in check and had more fulfilling experiences?

Licorice Pizza is a used car salesman without oil in his veins. It evades what it knows it cannot show but without that slick veneer that ropes you in regardless. It is a shame. At its best, it feels like a classic. It has a knack for that 70s nostalgia that feels sincere instead of curated. We see our younger selves in Gary, even when it hurts. He is ambitious but lacks drive. He has ideas but no plans. He has beliefs but no principles. He articulates well but can never mask his desperation. He thinks the world revolves around him but cannot imagine it without the girl of his dreams.

The way he and Alana bond says something powerful about how we relate to each other, something far from the boyhood fantasy the movie purports. It is looking beyond age and accrediting people appropriately. It is not condescending to teenagers, accepting their limitations without defining them by those limitations. It is in remembering that youthful ambition, that perspective we once had before we got jaded by adulthood. It is in recognizing that the real world is not just taxes, bills, and car payments, but also pursuing your passions, allowing them to change, and running free down a busy summer street because life says you can.

It is in admiring people older than us without worshipping them. It is in knowing that everything we want is not necessarily ours to attain, and sometimes not getting what we want is the treasure. It is accepting that everything in life has its time and place, and even if it hurts to let go, we must.

When Alana sits alone on a street curb at the crack of dawn following another crazy night with Gary, she sees the boys she has spent her summer with as silhouettes masturbating gas cans and mimicking oral sex on the nozzles. She realizes how far she has fled from life, hiding in an escapist fort with people who cannot genuinely understand her. Licorice Pizza believes the ways that count are visceral, but a traditional idea of success is not always a construct of society. Everyone must find what matters to them, but also why. If we set out on our own, leaping from place to place and working on cattle ranches or ski slopes, it must be because our heart guides us there, not because we failed to realize our ambitions. If we rise halfway up the ivory tower, settle into the lap of luxury, and spend our lives in limousines and private jets, it cannot be because we got pressured into believing the nomad life was wrong.

At long last, Alana understands herself. She knows that Gary has meant and shown her something, and by being there to receive meaning and get shown, she has played a crucial role in his young life. However, it is time to move on. It is time for her to be, do, and strive for more. She needs that, but the movie does not allow her to want anything but the fantasy it purveys.

Unfortunately, you cannot have it every which way. Alana cannot resolve to improve her life based on Gary’s youth, then ignore it for the sake of what fleeting affection he gives her. You cannot have Alana lean in to kiss a suitor before dropping him for a closeted politician whose double life drives her back to Gary’s adolescent embrace. You cannot place the responsibility for a predatory relationship on the victim. After all, Alana ends the film by expressing her "love" as though Gary has liberated her.

Licorice Pizza forces itself to choose, and it chooses wrong. For all the moments this bond toed the line or stepped an inch over, the movie still had a path to salvation. It could have been Mare, sitting in an interrogation room, knowing the reality of an inappropriate relationship and refusing to lend it credence. Instead, it was a movie that disavowed every insight it could have provided by fulfilling a teenage boy’s fantasy and excusing an illegal age gap in the process. Despite accepting Gary's youth, Alana uses the same excuse as John Ross: they have a connection. They do, but not the kind that justifies what happens after the screen fades to black or some of the things that occur before it does. That is just as true for a man lusting after a teenager as it is for a woman.

Defenders will write off contempt as a pretense from those who pollute art with grandstanding, self-serving complaints from naysayers who simply do not understand. In reality, they do not understand. A great movie can tell its story on the power of the story and turn everything around it into supplements instead of facades. Alas, Licorice Pizza is not a great movie.