When we meet Punch-Drunk Love’s Barry Egan (Adam Sandler), he’s a simultaneously bullied and sheltered younger brother to seven domineering sisters, whose loneliness and furious desire for respect get him into financial trouble with a call girl and a psychotic mattress salesman.
When we meet Magnolia’s Frank T.J. Mackey (Tom Cruise), he’s a muscular silhouette on stage, the house lights reflecting his sweat-soaked hair, both hands directed firmly to his crotch as he primes himself to teach a room of testosterone and entitlement how to “Seduce and Destroy.”
And when we meet Phantom Thread’s Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), he’s about fifty-five going on eight, an irritable dressmaker constantly on the verge of a tantrum who, fundamentally, needs to be laid out flat on his back, helpless and tender.
These are a handful of Paul Thomas Anderson’s protagonists. They’re men that have managed to navigate their way to adulthood, less because they’re emotionally mature and world weary, and more because they’ve managed to stay alive long enough. They have firm ideas of what it means to be a man and they’ll do everything in their power to defend and maintain those ideas, from donning cheap suits, to sleeping around, to disposing of girlfriends that butter their toast too loudly.
This leads us to Licorice Pizza.
When we meet Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), he seems, somewhat, to have it all figured out, especially when compared to the other PTA protagonists. He’s an accomplished businessman, an old-school, Hollywood smooth talker having honed his charm during his acting days, and, most importantly, he’s kind. He has a knack that none of the aforementioned PTA blokes have, which is that he can make the people he’s around feel good and noticed.
Oh yeah, and he’s only 15.
Gary makes for a fascinating addition to the line of PTA protagonists, a boy that slots in comfortably amongst the men. At first glance, he feels more mature and adult than all of these actual adults combined. But he’s still got his own precarious ideas of manhood that he’s attempting to live by, a facade made all the more obvious by his age.
But what lies in store for Gary when he hits “real” adulthood? How will he cope with life beyond the credits? Is he destined to stray down this familiar PTA path, already trodden by Barry, Frank, and Reynolds, or is there yet hope for him, the potential to be better?
Gary plays at being an adult like other kids his age play pinball, this performative manhood showing face most obviously in three places.
Firstly, there’s his career. Throughout the film, Gary starts and concludes multiple business ventures, a few of which are actually moderately successful. He’s an actor, a PR rep, an agent, a waterbed salesman, a cameraman, and a pinball wizard. It’s an impressive resumé for a 15-year-old, at least initially.
But the majority of his clientele, Hollywood producer Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper) and a couple of creeps aside, are barely past puberty. His opening nights feel less like the first day on the job and more like marijuana-scented primary school discos. In Gary’s mind, using weed to sell water beds is an intelligent business decision, and the name “Soggy Bottom” reeks of sex appeal.
When his businesses do inevitably, and quite literally, run out of gas, it’s almost always down to his naivety. He’s the last person to see that the actors he’s competing with for roles are all about half his size, and needs Alana (Alana Haim) to explain to him why the oil embargo will affect their vinyl stock. He thought the water beds were made of some sort of “scientific fabric, like rubber,” which is, of course, also made of oil.
To give Gary his due, he is a natural salesman; a young Gary was probably shifting cheap watches whilst the other kids were still on lemonade. But he hasn’t developed real common sense yet, and without Alana Kane (his business partner/crush/“lady friend”) it’s hard to imagine his entrepreneurial endeavours ever leaving the sidewalk.
Secondly, there’s the way he carries himself: his gumption. He addresses adults as equals, is a regular at the Tail o’ the Cock, and orders Coca Colas like they’re gins. Adults tend to respond to his gusto, either charmed by the novelty that is Gary Valentine or genuinely taken aback by his supposed maturity.
But Gary is a showman by trade, and his performance often falls apart when he comes up against older men that exude a more aggressive masculinity. Toward the end of the film, he’s donned a freshly tailored suit, Barry Egan-style, and is patrolling his pinball palace. He tries to kick out an old guy that’s being rough with the machines, but his age gets in the way. So instead of admitting defeat, he turns on younger, more innocent clientele. He can’t assert his manhood in one place, so he has to assert it somewhere else.
It’s a performance, and an insecure one at that. He’ll smoke a cigarette to prove a point to Alana before he’ll admit he’s young. It makes you wonder if Gary’s personality is less an authentic reflection of a self-assured guy, and more a kid that uses a persona like a fake ID. If Gary acts enough like an adult, then the world will hopefully see him as one.
Finally, there’s Gary’s relationship with women, most notably Alana. Her age — she’s 25 in quote marks — is less of an obstacle for Gary and more of an incentive. He’s a serial charmer in general, flirting fairly successfully with air hostesses, waitresses, agents, and even a handful of girls that are actually his own age. He’s easily capable of out-seducing Frank T.J. Mackey, albeit he’s nowhere near as keen on destroying — not necessarily a bad thing.
But again, there are more than a few caveats. His pursuit of Alana at times borders on a conquest. Marriage is the unwavering goal. He views almost every woman in his life, bar his mother, through this slightly flirtatious lens, peppering his conversations with compliments and charm, unable to cut straight to the point. It’s enough to earn Gary the nickname “the Handyman” amongst the waitresses of Mikado.
This gives Gary a streak of childish hypocrisy, for when men show similar interests in Alana he becomes jealous and territorial. This surfaces most obviously in a Woodcock-style tantrum after she says she’d do on-screen nudity but refuses to show him her boobs in private. A simple respect for Alana’s choice is out of Gary’s reach, and in the space of a scene, he goes from her show-biz savvy agent to a petty, horny 15-year-old. This becomes clearer still after Alana is assaulted by Jon Peters, and sits with her head in her hands on the sidewalk, alone. She’s blatantly upset and uncomfortable, but Gary is too busy giving his friend’s petrol canister a sloppy blow job to notice.
It’s in these cracks in Gary’s performative masculinity that he is most like Barry, Frank, and Reynolds. He has the knee-jerk business naivety of Egan, some of the misogyny of Mackey, and he shares more than a love of military metaphors with Woodcock, both capable of embarrassing, childish tantrums.
But despite these crossovers, something does feel different about Gary. And it’s not as simple as the audience falling for his charming act. Even in his ugliest moments, in which he can be mean and solipsistic, it’s still hard to picture him ever starting a business akin to the likes of “Seduce and Destroy.”
“You may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with you.”
To understand why the PTA men are the way they are, you have to look backward. Anderson often explores the childhoods of his characters and pinpoints their upbringing as having stunted or poisoned their growth.
You can picture young Barry as simply a version of himself that hasn’t bought a suit yet, anxious and quiet, wincing every time one of his sisters may utter the phrase “gay boy.” His sisters recall that as an angry child, Barry once smashed the sliding glass doors of their home with a hammer, an act adult Barry repeats at the start of Punch-Drunk Love as if to emphasise that he’s barely changed.
Meanwhile, Frank had to care for his dying mother, the responsibilities of adulthood forced upon him far too early. The only masculine presence in his life, Earl Partridge, set an unhealthy example, abandoning his family and cheating on his wife because he “wanted to be a man.”
And the upper-class upbringing of Reynolds was enough to leave him with what can kindly be described as serious mummy issues. He’d follow his mother like a shadow and has attempted to continue following her even long after her death. His own fragile performative masculinity is an attempt to mask how much he misses her, not as a person but as a maternal figure to sit by his bedside and place a warm flannel upon his sickly forehead.
When we meet Gary, he’s at this defining point in his life. He tells Alana he’s going to be an actor. “It’s all I know how to do,” he says, before dropping that dream 25 minutes into the film in favour of becoming a mattress salesman. He’s naive, but only because he’s still being shaped and moulded. Licorice Pizza isn’t about an adult having their worldview challenged, but rather a child having their worldview formed.
In the general absence of Gary’s mother, who’s away travelling and is largely sidelined by the film, Alana steps in as his concierge, adopting the role of a strange maternal figure. Their peculiar relationship is what’ll shape Gary into a man. And whilst it’s certainly not idyllic or completely healthy, it does teach him something that the rest of the PTA protagonists are unable to learn until they’re well into adulthood.
People are important. As Gary abandons his pinball business to run the streets in search of Alana, it’s clear that his priorities have shifted. Gary’s world no longer revolves around Gary, around success, power, or the facade of manhood. It revolves around this strange, half-romantic, half-codependent love that he’s fallen into, in which you’re willing to forgo any ideas of being adult or mature in favour of naively and hopelessly running the streets of the San Fernando Valley.
For to love and be loved is what life is about, the great tragedies of Anderson films occurring where love is misplaced or rejected. Gary learns to open himself up emotionally to the world and to embrace the world in return.
This doesn’t mean his learning is done, or that by the end of Licorice Pizza he’s guaranteed to grow into a healthy, emotionally mature adult. His relationship with Alana is unsustainable, and the loss of that could twist his path. He hasn’t overcome all of his faults or prejudices yet either, announcing Alana as “Mrs. Alana Valentine” to the pinball palace, playing adult in a loud, proud, childish way.
And, in all honesty, it’s rare for an adult to ever completely lose their inner child. But Gary is only 15. He has time to keep growing. And he certainly has a head start on the likes of Barry, Frank, and Reynolds. As much as he would love to already be an adult, there’s hope for him, not in spite of his immaturity or youth, but because of it.
