Tuesday, July 9, 2013

The Master


The Master – Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2012 film is a duet for two actors: Phillip Hoffman, playing an avuncular cult leader modeled after L. Ron Hubbard, and Joaquin Phoenix in the role of his true believer and acolyte, a bestial henchman. The film is uncanny and fascinating. It is probably a great movie although The Master’s subject matter is exceptionally narrow, bizarre, and idiosyncratic – this is not a film that provides the audience with a helpful lesson to apply in their own lives; the people in the picture are simply too eccentric and the situation too strange. Phoenix’s character, Freddy Quill, is a combat-damaged WWII vet, the product of an alcoholic father and a lunatic mother. He is some kind of alchemist – at the start of the film, we see him compounding horrific “home brew” using flasks and beakers. Some of this booze is made with fuel oil, paint thinner and other toxins – stuff like anti-freeze and chemicals used to develop film. These brews are apparently very intoxicating and, even, addictive – the Master takes one drink of Quill’s awful decoction and is immediately hooked, a rather surprising development which seems to be symbolic. Freddy Quill is severely alcoholic and ‘on the run’ (literally – we see him streak across an empty field with a mob following him) and, he has probably killed a man with his “home brew.” Quill staggers onto the Master’s yacht and, in a stupor, becomes a stowaway. The Master embraces Freddy as his disciple and it is obvious that there is some kind of inexplicable, probably even paranormal bond between the two men – somehow, these two strange creatures are complementary to one another. It’s like a Bromance version of Plato’s Symposium – Freddy is the Master’s lost half and, ultimately, the film is the story of the love affair between these two unlikely characters. The Master is a peculiar figure – he has developed an elaborate religion that involves curing neurosis through “processing,” a term for a belligerent brain-washing that is alleged to involve past-life regression. As played by Hoffman, the Master is jovial, charming, and curiously practical and down-to-earth. We don’t know why or how he developed his cult. He seems to derive only nominal benefits from the cult. Anderson is not so crass as to suggest that the Master’s motives are venal or, even, self-interested – and the Master also doesn’t seem to exactly believe his own theology. Is he a con-man? If so, his motives are exceedingly unclear and, perhaps, this is appeal to his followers – all of whom seem to be well-educated, upper or middle-class people who are absolutely normal. Geoffrey O’Brien has noted in a review of this film that one of the picture’s strengths is too make the cult seem completely quotidian, routine, not at all strange or frightening – and this is exactly true. The Master and his followers believe some very strange things, but they act like good citizens, seem down-to-earth, and don’t behave in a peculiar way. They are just a group of middle-class Americans with a weird hobby. The Master is not presented as serene or indifferent – his appeal is his merriness and wit, his insouciant self-confidence, his ability to entertain his followers. The cult leader is not scary or oppressive or hypnotic – he appeals to people’s reason and makes “reasonable” sounding arguments although they are completely wacky and insane when considered in the abstract. The Master has a bad temper and sometimes he seems exhausted or erupts into rage which disconcerts his followers. He has critics and, even, members of his own group sometimes criticize him – there is a startling scene where Laura Dern, as a true believer, notes an inconsistency in the cult’s dogma: in earlier versions of the theology, past life regression involved recovering “memories”; in his revised version of the book, processing involves purging the “imagination” – “which is it?” Dern’s character anxiously asks. If its “memories”, then, the processing involves recalling true past events; if it’s imagination, then, the Master “is making it up as he goes” – as his son has accused him of doing. The Master can’t answer and just shouts at Dern. The Master is a exceedingly peculiar film and the locus of its uncanny power is the performance by Joaquin Phoenix of the Master’s doomed disciple, Freddy Quill. The Master says that people who have not accepted the Cause are animals and Freddy Quill certainly fits this description. Phoenix’s performance is a great triumph of expressionistic film acting – it is like one of the greatest performances of the silent era, an incredibly expressive and utterly bizarre piece of acting that is more like the work of Lon Chaney in the old Tod Browning films than anything seen on screen recently. Quill is a baboon. He is always scratching himself, farting, his face is twisted into a Kabuki-like mask of derision and perplexity. He walks hunched over as if he has only recently learned how to ambulate, like he is an ape pretending to be a man. He is literally “twisted,” contorted. This is the kind of performance from which you can’t avert your eyes. Quill is the Master’s other half – the bestial desire to believe and to be lead that is half of the equation in the power relations between cult leader and his cult. The Master perceives Quill as unreachable, an animal who must do his bidding, but who can not understand his motives or the high objectives of the Cult. And he obviously loves Freddy Quill for his inexplicable combination of slavish devotion (Quill beats the Master’s critics) and intransigent defiance. At the climax of the film, the Master says that Freddy is the lost seaman, the only free man, traveling forever in latitudes that only he can access. The Master claims that he and Freddy have been soul-mates from before they were born. The puzzle posed by the film is how to understand and interpret the relationship between the men, one that seems to involve phenomena such as telepathy. Everything about this film is unique and remarkably interesting. The setting and milieu – the early 1950’s – is completely realized in remarkable detail. The film’s mise-en-scene which involves mosly huge close-ups and repetitive metaphoric shots, for instance, the wake of a large vessel at sea, is wonderfully fluent and persuasive. Ordinarily, I dislike movies shot in huge close-ups, but I make an exception for this picture: the acting is so extraordinarily good and strange that the close-ups induce a kind of hypnosis, a claustrophobic effect that materializes the notion of being entrapped by the cult leader’s charisma. The use of the close camera creates disorienting effects – when we first see Freddy he is visualized as a kind of bald, scarred bulb extruded above metal – we see what we think is a horrible scarred bald head, but it turns out to be only his GI helmet. This creates a sense of the uncanny from the start of the picture. The film’s ending is completely ambiguous and induces many questions. Has Freddy moved slightly more closely toward human status? Or does he remain mired in the bestial state that the Master found so strangely appealing? We see Freddy with an English girl in bed, applying some of the Master’s processing techniques to her, but while he is copulating – Freddy hasn’t overcome his animal self, but he is, at least, talking like the Master. And, then, we see Freddy reclining by the sand breasts of a sand woman that we saw him fornicating with in the beginning of the film. What does this mean? There are many possible answers and what makes this movie great is that all of them are intrinsically fascinating.

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