“This
is not just something that happened,” the narrator says in voice over narration
during the prologue to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999). “This
cannot be ‘one of those things.’ This, please,
cannot be that… this was not just a matter of chance. These strange things
happen all the time.” In P.T. Anderson’s world, strange things do happen all
the time. Human life is seemingly accidental, suspended in a state of organized
chaos, but, try as we might, we have no bearing on that organization. Every
action has a consequence, unfortunately not always an equal and opposite
reaction. In Magnolia, Anderson’s
operatic, multi-stranded meditation on fate, coincidence, life, death, family,
loss, and love, over a dozen characters have their existence interrupted by the
hectic, arbitrary forces of the universe as they embark on a moral odyssey
through their past, present, and future. The writer/director interweaves the
stories of these disparate, desperate people over a twenty-four hour period in
the San Fernando Valley, creating a haunting mosaic of American life through a
series of interposed comic-tragic vignettes, each one a poignant portrait of
human and urban malaise.
***This is an in-depth analysis of Magnolia, and it contains spoilers.
