On Punch-Drunk Love
by Tom Smith

In this essay I shall explore certain psychological underpinnings - primarily those relating to family, its dysfunctions, and variants on the near-universal desire for acceptance within society - central to an appreciation of the seriocomic oeuvre of writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, and his unheralded 2002 romantic ode Punch-Drunk Love. Employing Russian post-formalist philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnival (with its inherent, roiling galleries of grotesques) as a locus of “dialogical” imagination, and with a respectful nod to French psycholinguist Jacques Lacan and his “split-subject” formulations, clues to divining Anderson’s diligently non-