making it up
by Douglas Messerli
Paul
Thomas Anderson (writer and director) The
Master / 2012
In some respects, Paul Thomas
Anderson’s The Master, like his other
films before it—in particular Bogie
Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be
Blood—is, affectionately speaking, an overstated, overacted mess of a
movie, stuffed with often disconnected events. Part of the problem is that
Anderson’s script, once it establishes its central character, Freddie Quell
(Joaquin Phoenix)—an unpredictable, over-testosteroned ex-sailor, who, through
the vicissitudes of war, his unhappy childhood, and his young
girlfriend-back-home’s rejection, behaves like a time-bomb ready to
explode—doesn’t quite know what to do with him. After mixing up a few drinks in
the bowels of the department store in which he serves as a portrait
photographer, Freddie harasses an overweight customer, beating him up and
tearing apart some of the store furniture. His next job, that of a migrant-like
worker in the cabbage fields ends, similarly, when one of the Mexican workers
drinks too much of his moonshine concoction and goes into a coma; when his
family accuses Freddie of poisoning him, the ex-sailor is again on the run,
winding up this time on a yacht headed from San Francisco to New York. On board
is the pompous “Master,” Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who has
created a new religion, The Cause, outlined in the first volume of his
overweight opus that is a mish-mash of Freudian psychology, Jungian archetypes,
science-fiction creatures from outer space, and a belief in a trillion-year
history of mankind in which each of us has been housed temporarily in different
bodies.* Like scientology, Dodd’s cult contains little real science, and a lot
of bunkum centered on therapeutic encounters (similar to Scientology's
"auditing") with church leaders, which supposedly frees them of their
former selves, allowing them to become fuller beings in their present lives.
Through the link of Freddie’s potent elixir of liquor, paint-thinner,
and anything else he thinks might add a quick high, Dodd and he immediately
bond, the “master” offering up private sessions with Freddie, after which he
praises the young man’s bravery. Having seldom encountered such an assuring and
friendly father-like figure, the young Freddie is hooked, and before he even
comprehends why, becomes inculcated in the cult.
So far, the story, accompanied by a kind of kitsch recreation of
Schoenberg-like soundings (by composer Jonny Greenwood) which are repeated with
portentous earnestness, and a sound-mixing in which the characters shout at one
another instead of speaking (Phoenix, on the other hand, generally mumbling his
lines), is interesting if only because it puts its audience vaguely on edge.
What is going to happen to Freddie or, we might equally ask, to Dodd, as these
two polar opposites are brought into long-time contact? Obviously, something is
going to ignite them—along, perhaps, with the film itself.
The problem is that Anderson seems to have no idea what he wants to say
through the accident of their meeting. For a long spell, accordingly, the film
merely repeats the two encountering and reencountering one another, circling
round each other in moody suspicion. When Dodd is heckled at a New York party
by a skeptical journalist, Freddie, with Dodd’s young son-in-law tagging along,
makes a late night-visit to the inquisitor, assuring, through a beating or perhaps
even a murder, that the man will never attack Dodd or his church again.
Similarly, when Dodd is arrested in Philadelphia for absconding with a wealthy
contributor’s money, Freddie explodes, attacking the police and, after being
arrested, beating his own head against the bedposts and boxsprings before
tearing out his toilet—a scene presented with cinematic brilliance by having
Dodd, in the very next cell, stand in utter quietude before summarizing the
obvious: Freddie has a horror of any cage.
Family members and cult followers question Freddie’s participation in
their group; is he a spy? someone sent to destroy their "Cause"? a
potential robber? (he has, after all, asked how much the “master’s” unpublished
papers are worth). If Freddie is to stay with them, he must certainly face a
long re-indoctrination. Dodd determines to retain Freddie and personally
oversees what we recognize as a slow, repetitive brainwashing. Family members,
in particular Dodd’s wife, Peggy (a marvelous Amy Adams) and Dodd’s son-in-law,
Clark (Rami Malek) spend hours in name-calling and tossing invectives at
Freddie until he learns to control his temper and accept what he is told are
“helpful” family observations. After hours and hours of such painful encounters,
the outsider is once again brought into the fold.
But why, we must ask? What does the film want to say about these
cultists? To give Anderson credit, he proffers no easy answers. For, in fact,
Freddie is better off under their care than he was previously, careening
through a culture which might have, in the end, landed him, like his mother, in
a mental institution. Moreover, Dodd, despite his absurd assertions, is, at
heart, loveable. Even his loyal son, himself, sometimes wonders if his father
isn’t just “making it up as he goes along?” When Dodd, at one meeting, steers
in the direction of having the women of his congregation go naked while he
sings a roving sailor song (perhaps merely a surrealist-like projection of
Freddie’s own fantasies upon Dodd’s obviously sexual advances), his wife Peggy
quickly shifts him away. These frightful believers are, in Anderson’s telling,
human beings, despite Dodd’s huge ego and his followers’ absolute subservience
to his beliefs.
And despite the film’s lack of direction or, I should say, the
director’s refusal to pilot his film in any one direction, the wreck of Dodd’s
perverse religion moves forward, often quite stunningly through the richness of
Anderson’s images, shown in the version I saw in 70mm (shot in 65mm), and
through the dexterous acting skills of all concerned. While one cannot deny
Hoffman is not, at times, overacting—throughout much of the movie he seems to
be channeling Orson Welles—he still creates a personable character who is
always watchable. Phoenix’s eccentric performance does not permit us to take
our eyes off him, particularly since Anderson focuses on his ever-changing
face, at one moment a handsome young man, at the next a snarling mad-man; with
the off-center scar running across the top of his lip, the actor has the
ability to smile and sneer in the very same instant.
While Freddie remains loyal to the increasingly off-kilter “master,” we
begin to see doubts hovering, particularly when Dodd introduces his second
volume of revelations at a Phoenix, Arizona conference of the devout. One
member carefully brings up a crucial shift in the “master’s” teaching from a
question of “remembrance” of past lives to asking if the interviewees might
“imagine” something of their past—a change Dodd claims is simply more
inclusive, but, as anyone acquainted with any church teachings knows, changes
everything. Remembering asserts the event, while imagining merely permits it.
We suddenly see Freddie, after Dodd’s speech, marching back and forth, a
troubled look upon his face. When he queries one of Dodd’s most loyal
followers, the man admits that the entire book seems fraudulent and might just
as easily have been winnowed down into a three-page pamphlet. Freddie’s violent
attack on the man a few minutes later says more about his own doubts, surely,
than the follower’s aspersions. Freddie cannot afford to not believe anymore.
Yet it comes as no surprise, after Dodd takes his closest followers into
a flat desert expanse and challenges them each to pick a point in the far time
and space and speed on a motorcycle furiously toward it, that Freddie will
leave Dodd’s congregation. Returning to his Massachusetts hometown, he attempts
to visit the 16-year girl he had left behind years earlier, only to be told
that she is now married with two children. Once again, he has been left in the
lurch without the possibility of love.
Throughout the early part of Anderson’s film, Freddie has been portrayed
as a macho woman’s man, desperately on the search for a quick moment of
intercourse. Stationed away from women, he and others create an Amazonian-like
sand sculpture of a woman, which he fervently fucks before curling up to the
object’s mountainous breast. But slowly through the film’s uncoiling
revelations, we grow to perceive that Freddie, far from loving women, is a
desperate misogynist, at war with every woman from his mad mother on. Moreover,
as we have sensed all along, there is more between these two men, Freddie and
Dodd, than a love of raw-gut liquor. Receiving a telephone call from Dodd, who
is now heading a religious school in England—or perhaps just dreaming up the call—Freddie
takes the long voyage to visit the “master” once again. Peggy rejects him
outright, arguing that he is unfit to try to rejoin their community. But Dodd
is only too ready to accept his protégé back into the fold—if only he will
agree to rejoin them. The young man’s answer is as inevitable as unpredictable
is Dodd's singing, in several verses, the song “Slow Voyage to China,” offering
Freddie up all his love, both patriarchal and, given the song’s lyrics, sexual.
I'd love to get
you on a slow boat to China,
all to myself,
alone.
Get you and keep
you in my arms evermore,
leave all your
lovers weeping on the far away shore.
Out on the briny
with a moon big and shiny
melting your heart
of stone
. I'd love to get you
on a slow boat to China,
all to myself,
alone.
A tear falls from Freddie’s eye, reassuring us
that the love, never acted upon, is quite mutual.
In a local bar, Freddie picks up a girl, with whom he has sex while
repeating the interrogation that he underwent with Dodd upon their first
meeting. If he has learned nothing else, he now recognizes the hidden language
of seduction. Certainly, the “master’s” involvement with a young man is not
uncommon in such cult leaders. One only need think of Jim Jones’s love for
several of his male followers with whom he was sexually involved; or of the
accusations of David Koresch sodomizing several of his male congregants to
prove their homosexuality.
So Anderson’s seemingly misdirected film comes effectively to an end, as
we discover that the cult Freddie (and perhaps all the others) was involved in
represented for him not so much a religious awakening as an embracement of his
being, a sense of meaning through family and love.
Ultimately, if Anderson’s film is not a great piece of cinematic art, it
is a work well worth seeing again and thinking about. For at its heart The Master is the realization that
religion and human desire has never been fully separated—as hundreds of lusting
priests, ministers, and cult leaders annually attest. Power—in every sense of
that word—is always behind religious belief; belief—in every sense of that
word—is generally behind a powerful sense of identity. And doesn't sex meet at
those two avenues, a sense of identity with a sense of powerful
interconnection? So how should we imagine we might separate the two? That is,
obviously, what's behind nearly all religions' attempts to intervene in our
sexual lives! Sex and religion, alas, have always been inextricably
intertwined.
Los Angeles, September 21, 2012
Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (October 2012).
