A Disturbing Link Between PTA's "Licorice Pizza" and PTA's "Boogie Nights"

Me, I'm fine with the love story in "Licorice Pizza." (NO SPOILERS on how it turns out.) She's not a predatory woman "grooming" a little boy. He's 16 at the end of the movie, age of consent in some states, maybe has to wait two years to be 18 in California. And they are very CLOSE in "real age" -- standing together, they make a couple. He's older than his years(the family breadwinner, runs his own businesses), she's younger than her years(lives at home under daddy's thumb, dead end jobs). Its fine by me.

And its fine by Paul Thomas Anderson, but I can't help thinking that he KNOWS he nonetheless was doing something controversial by putting this particular pair of platonic lovers on the screen. Its a bit subversive.

And the VERY subversive -- not right at all -- predecessor to all of this can be found in PTA's second film and breakout classic...Boogie Nights.

In Boogie Nights, Mark Wahlberg plays a young man -- I think past high school years -- with a terrible home life who is "seduced" (not sexually, perhaps "recruited" is the better word) by porn director Burt Reynolds into becoming a porn actor.

Once Mark is installed as part of the porn team, he attracts the attention of an older woman -- Julianne Moore as porn veteran "Amber Waves". And the thing of it is this: Amber coos and pampers Mark as "my little baby boy" -- a surrogate SON -- even as she professionally has sex with him in porn scenes.

Plenty disturbing, and I think PTA meant it that way, but in a weird way: "Look," he's saying, " a woman can have sweet maternal urges towards a boy with who she is paid to have sex on screen." Yikes. Its an incest angle, and it plays out a bit that way with the YOUNG porn actress "Rollergirl" (played by Heather Graham) who is presented as a "sister" type to Wahlberg even as he has professional sex with HER.

But then, Boogie Nights was about the very strange world and very strange people in the porn industry, and PTA was out to "make his mark" exploring them -- with a certain sympathy for them (the movie posited that all of them came from horrible families and made a new family amongst themselves.)

I find the romance in "Licorice Pizza" to be appropriate and sweet -- and amusingly combative -- but I can't deny that coming from the man who gave us mama-lover Amber Waves in Boogie Nights. there is reason to be somewhat suspicious of PTA's worldview here.

Not that he would cop to it.