| Ryan Sanderson |
The Master plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, March 14th, through Sunday, March 16th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
When The Master came out in 2012, a lot of the conversation centered around Scientology–which made sense, at least at first. “Auteur Wunderkind Attacks World’s Most Litigious Religion!” makes for a pretty compelling headline. “Auteur Wunderkind Explores Identity and Inspiration with Meditative, Abstract Postwar Period Riff on The Wizard of Oz” doesn’t have quite the same ring. In interviews, you can see Paul Thomas Anderson withdraw into himself any time someone mentions the S word. Maybe he should have seen it coming. Maybe he did. Maybe courting controversy is part of how independent visions fight their way into the cultural consciousness. But once The Master–which charts the origins of a Californian religion founded by a science fiction writer in the wake of the second World War–entered the world, Anderson pretty vigorously and convincingly argued that real world parallels were far from the point. He even invited former collaborator and most famous Scientologist Tom Cruise to a private screening.
The truth is it’s harder to tie The Master to a single cultural or artistic inspiration than any other film of Anderson’s career. I mentioned The Wizard of Oz just now, which is certainly in its DNA. Note how Jonny Greenwood’s score jingles mystically as traumatized soldier Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) stumbles from his broken life onto the party boat of minister Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his newfound religion, The Cause–as though Quell has crossed some invisible boundary into a new reality. Dodd certainly fits the bill as The Wizard, a self-proclaimed expert on everything, whose every word is meticulously chosen to proclaim his own authority, expertise, and even magic. He refers to Freddie’s alcohol as a “potion.” He talks about conquering a dragon at his daughter’s wedding reception. He even offers Freddie the gift of courage at the end of the film’s best scene, saying, “You’re the bravest boy I’ve ever met.” But the film doesn’t look or feel like The Wizard of Oz, not in the same way that Boogie Nights looks and feels like Goodfellas or Magnolia looks and feels a bit like Nashville. It’s not rooted in a specific cultural moment like There Will Be Blood or a specific popular genre like Punch-Drunk Love. The primary driving force of The Master seems to be Anderson himself, his personal thematic obsessions, his own long-gestating style, his relationship with the medium where he’s made his life’s work. Every scene, every frame bears his hard-won, individual mark as an artist, to the exclusion of any other voice or way of doing things.
Anderson always wanted to be a master American filmmaker, and it made sense that his films were in dialogue with the doyen of previous generations. With The Master, he explores the very nature of influence, ultimately declaring himself graduated from its orbit. “He’s absorbed the lessons of his idols, the formalist Scorsese and the improvisational Altman,” David Ansen wrote in The Daily Beast, following the film’s release, “and merged them into a passionate style all his own. It’s there in every haunting scene of The Master, the impeccable, classical craftsmanship in search of the live-wire moment of emotional truth.”
The Master is at least partly a film about influence, about the thrill of discovering a person, movement, or work of art that helps you to live in this world; followed by the quiet tragedy of discovering you’ve outgrown them. Of course Anderson was never ripping off Scorsese or Altman. He was exploring his own experiences, occasionally using tools they lent him, like all artists developing their craft, like Freddie uses Dodd’s teaching to address his trauma. Then the day arrives when another man’s words and discipline are no longer good enough. Freddie falls in and out of love with The Cause a couple of times. It helps him rediscover himself, embrace a kind of discipline and self-respect. But then there’s always blowback as he realizes some unignorable flaw in the spell cast upon him. For all the ways The Cause inarguably helps Freddie, note the others who give The Cause their unquestioning loyalty, who it exploits for money, labor, and influence, who don’t seem to be moving towards truer, healthier versions of themselves.
The Master raises questions that arise no matter what your inspiration or discipline happens to be. When I consider how I relate to this story, I think about my relationship with Cinema itself–thirteen with few friends and a budding anxiety disorder, emerging from The Fellowship of the Ring. One moment I felt like Freddie running across that field, forcing myself to throw up each morning so I could skip school. In a mere three hours I felt brave and powerful in a way that I never quite forgot. Of course, the “Ride for ruin!” speeches I gave myself before auditions or asking someone on a date ultimately led me to a nervous breakdown my freshman year of college, trying to turn a 30-point video production assignment into the next Citizen Kane with no formal knowledge of the medium. These spells are as limited as they are powerful. Or I think about recovering from adderall withdrawals, my mind huddled in some dark abyss, emerging from an afternoon matinee of Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, my attention redirected, my resources restored enough to understand just how much I had already healed, how much healing I was still capable of. The peace and freedom Freddie feels at the end of his first processing mirrors perfectly how I feel when I emerge from a great film. And his occasional disillusionment reminds me of my own disappointment as the spell fades, when my attention has left the protection of a master storyteller, and I’m back to forging my own path in a semi-disinterested world.
I suspect Anderson’s sympathetic disillusionment with the classic Hollywood narrative fuels his approach to storytelling. The Master is bursting with ideas that challenge and linger beyond their narrative function. The images feel so simple taken alone. When Freddie finally outgrows Dodd once and for all, he drives a motorcycle farther than his mentor. That’s about as simple and direct as a visual metaphor gets. But those same simple images somehow take on new significance every viewing, like the Rorschach tests Freddie is shown during his failed rehabilitation after the war. Freddie is meant to be empathized with, but he also holds the viewer at arm’s length. His breakdown in the department store is framed in a single shot, shifting the viewer to the position of witness and bystander. Imagine yourself seeing a man in public behaving that way. Would you immediately empathize with Freddie, reach out to help him, or would it feel perfectly reasonable to either step back and avoid him or repel him exactly like everyone else? Where does the line exist between trauma and personal responsibility? Perhaps your mind and gut disagree. The film nudges the audience ever so slightly one way, then the other.
By the time Freddie arrives on that boat, he’s truly all alone in the world, abandoned, I suspect, by even some in the audience. Every room he enters, people immediately clam up; all except for Lancaster Dodd, who, whatever his faults, seems driven by a sincere desire to help this man. It’s certainly hubris and self-importance, a need to believe his own hype as healer, but that doesn’t mean it’s not sincere. Whatever his reasons, Dodd dares himself to go somewhere most people never would. His methods are based on bunk science and mythopoetic stew, but they’re no less effective than the mid-twentieth-century psychiatry that failed Freddie years before. When Dodd and Freddie first meet, the subject is Freddie’s wretched drinks mixed with ethanol and cleaning solution and other household implements. Dodd, an artist, sees how these drinks are Freddie’s art and asks him to make more. He finds something noble (if somewhat toxic) about the man and immediately begins fostering it. Even if his reasons are grandiose and egocentric, isn’t that kind of noble?
And yet Dodd’s quest for power does have terrible consequences. Note how his daughter (Amber Chylders) and her husband (Rami Malek), once true believers, are no longer with The Cause as it grows successful in London. Whereas Dodd’s son (Jesse Plemons), who doesn’t believe in the faith and doesn’t respect his father, is at the heart of the movement when Freddie returns. Philip Seymour Hoffman described the nature of Dodd’s movement like this: “The film kind of gets it right at the point where it’s starting to go bad. Something’s starting to twist in a way. And it might be turning into a cult. It might be turning into more than just a movement. But at the time when you meet him he really is the head of something that’s working, that people are excited by.” We see the power of Dodd’s approach on a single individual, but his tragedy might be the inevitable poisoning that comes with ambition and expansion.
Freddie begins the film obsessed with alcohol and sex. He ends the film in bed with a woman he met at a bar. The external details of his life barely change. His journey is almost entirely of the soul, the distance measured in how he carries and expresses himself, his capacity to accept himself and his place in the world. When Dodd tells Freddie, “You’re the bravest boy I’ve ever met,” you can tell it’s the most important thing anyone has ever said to him. By the end of the film he’s laughing about it, not in a dismissive way, exactly, just to show how far he’s journeyed from the man who so desperately needed to hear that. The film wants you to experience these wholly subjective but nevertheless utterly real distances our souls must travel in this life. These moments unfold as reflections of reflections, simple images complexifying, daring you past your initial conceptions, characters who feel real, even naturalistic on first glance, revealing themselves as vivid, expressive theatrical masques that both disguise and explode, meeting the viewer a bit differently with each return.
The Master isn’t quite my favorite Paul Thomas Anderson film, though it’s close. That honor goes to Inherent Vice, his next project, the third in his trilogy of romances between Californian men at pivotal moments of the twentieth century. Both mark an artist at the peak of his powers, producing work that reveals new layers with each viewing, with (at least as far as I’ve tested the last decade) almost infinite rewatch value. The Master ebbs and flows depending on the needs of its audience. Perhaps you need to hear you’re the bravest boy in the world, or perhaps you need to grow beyond a relationship that once made you feel that way. The human spirit is both simple and mysterious, like the surface of the ocean, and Anderson offers his art to address that split nature in ways no other filmmaker I’m aware of has tried before.
Edited by Matthew Tchepikova-Treon