Originally posted on: Oct. 15, 2012
THE MASTER (USA, 2012)
[Spoiler in the last paragraph]
The gist: Paul Thomas Anderson's critically acclaimed sixth feature boasts his stylistic idiosyncrasies in depicting the mentally distressed WW2 vet and his relationship with the leader of a burgeoning cult in postwar America.
His chin angled slightly upward, mouth
contorted at random into a sneery smile, eyes washed out, and entire face
frequently slipping in and out of focus, Freddie Quell may well come across as
permanently drunk and hypnotized. When his inebriated face dominates the
screen, it’s often followed by a closeup of a stern-faced person opposite Quell
giving him orders and/or asking questions, determined to make him one of their
subjects or dupes. There’s a sort of dialectical process at work that leads up
to a furtive power shift: most scenes exemplifying this process open with a
two-shot of Quell and the person sitting next to or across from him, both given
equal screen space. Once an interrogation or a “processing” session begins,
however, it cuts to alternating closeups, in which Quell ends up revealing his
propensity towards sex addiction or his insecurities, whereas the other
person—whether a doctor, a V.A. officer, his mentor, or the mentor’s
wife—remains distant and poised. This transitional process doles out glimpses
into Quell’s backstory and psychological states, but it above all epitomizes
his way of relating to the world outside himself, including his master
Lancaster Dodd.
Unfortunately, though, one seldom gets
to know much about Quell, despite a generous portion of the movie being devoted
to probing the Navy vet’s past. Most of the time, morsels of information about
him are dispensed here and there, yet the majority of it is concentrated in the
first few sequences in the form of discrete chunks of his post-WWII vagabond
stints: as a sailor, a portrait photographer, and a cabbage farm worker.
Meandering between jobs, places, and the situations of his own making, Quell
carries with him a whiff of disorientation and total isolation. His postwar
years unfold episodically, without allowing much context with regard to his
whereabouts, except in very generic locations such as a ship, store, and farm.
If there’s anything constant about Quell, it’s that he’s helplessly intoxicated
all the time. Indeed, only so much can viewers learn about him.
Then what part of the story, which
centers deceptively on the origin of a belief system devised in 1950s America
to cure the war-traumatized, makes it a compelling character study of Freddie
Quell, when the events of his past seem unlikely to form a coherent whole? The
answer might be a sense of discontinuity or disconnect that prevails
throughout, indicative of not just Quell’s apparent mental disorder but his
relationships with others, notably Lancaster Dodd, and with society at large, as
well as Paul Thomas Anderson’s stylistic approach to presenting them. The first
half hour or so is all about Quell’s ephemeral attempts to readapt to civilian
life. These episodes of his postwar striving to survive are strung together in
roughly chronological order, but spatially almost unrelated. Even after Quell
enlists in Dodd’s burgeoning spiritual crusade called The Cause, the narrative
sometimes gets disrupted by the prewar flashback fixated on his first love
Doris or cutaways of the open seas. This overarching ellipsis mirrors Quell’s
crushed, amorphous psyche, his wandering tendencies and inability to relate to
other people. He isn’t in the least interested in adjusting himself to blend
into society; he stoops to primitive instincts and impulses often at others’
expense.
Such facets of him at once bring out
the contrast between him and Dodd. In fact, a straightforward illustration—or
rather, schematization—of their antithetical relationship can be found in a
symmetrically designed jail cell shot in the second half, where on the left
side Quell unleashes his fury and tries to destroy everything around him while
on the right Dodd takes it all in his stride and pisses unperturbed. It seems
as if not only the toilet gets shattered into shards, but so does Quell’s
(forced) faith in The Cause. A bit of context would help here: Before their
imprisonment, Dodd’s son tells Quell with nonchalance, but not without
condescension, “He’s making it up as he goes along. You don’t see that?” Quell
instantly pounces on the son; his overreaction seems rather a failed disguise
of his harbored yet barely repressed suspicion that the way of life Dodd
preaches is plain sham. Why doesn’t he just turn around and run away, as he’s
always done, instead of defending the con artist so vehemently? Now let's go
back to Dodd and his protégé’s first encounter.
Quell meets Dodd, a self-professed
writer, nuclear physicist, theoretical philosopher, and “hopelessly
inquisitive” man, after he sneaks aboard a yacht Dodd commands. Sitting in a
noir-ishly low-lit room and looking contemplative and self-assured, Dodd
regards a lost, worn-out Quell lingering on the threshold with fatherly
sympathy. During this sequence, Anderson conveys the two’s instant camaraderie
by narrowing the physical distance between them in just a few alternating
shots. Thereafter the varied distance between them ostensibly delineates
something close to a common push-pull courtship pattern. At the wedding
reception for Dodd’s daughter, Quell examines the Master from the back row, who
warms up the guests by spinning a tale about dragons with a confident display
of glibness and geniality. Then, their second rendezvous advances the
relationship to the next defining phase. At first, the pair is seen in one
frame facing each other in preparation for a therapy session. But once Dodd
starts churning out repetitive, increasingly demanding questions leading to the
two's exchange of tight facial closeups, the session quickly establishes their
relative positions in this relationship. That way, Dodd soon succeeds in
breaking through Quell’s boozed-up armor and simultaneously anointing the
subject a precious guinea pig of his.
And thus Dodd is the ultimate master
and their one-sided liaison continues unhindered… But of course, there’s more
to it than that. True, they manage to find their own places where they feel
most secure, the kind of stability that helps them regain their bearings in the
chaotic postwar reality and assures them that order can still be restored and
things returned to normal, exactly the way they were before, even in the
aftermath of total man-made world annihilation. To foster such delusional hope,
they are compelled to rely on each other—as much as Quell needs some guiding
figure like Dodd, who proclaims during their fight in the jail cell, “I’m the
only one who likes you!” Dodd also depends on the fidelity of his followers
like Quell to sustain his cult and to survive. And needless to say, this
symbiosis developed out of necessity extends to other believers in The Cause as
well. Their desire for a decent, normal life without feeling alienated reaches
a point where the degree of faith doesn’t even matter. Dodd’s son, for
instance, who lives off his father, plays along although he considers him a
charlatan. Quell secretly nurses his own doubts about the Master, but he
willingly curbs his animal instincts and obeys. The whole enterprise is founded
upon lies and deceit, in which all the related parties, the master and his
patrons/acolytes alike, are complicit to the extent that the cult subsists. And
that seems one of the few viable ways people acclimatized to postwar America.
In the end, Quell frees himself from
Dodd’s hands, but his reclaimed independence is not the same as the unfettered
freedom he enjoyed before The Cause. He’s still afloat—wandering in search of
the affection, comfort, and security that Doris, and possibly Dodd, offered
him, yet the imprint Dodd left on him appears indelible when Quell casually
reenacts that “thought-processing” on a woman with whom he crosses paths in a
pub during sex. The sex scene’s also reminiscent of the beach sequence
bookending the movie, where Quell humps a female body sculptured of sand, only
to find it frustrating altogether since it’s not a real woman. He finally gets
to have intercourse with a real woman, but Anderson’s powerhouse
performance-backed elusive character study ends with Quell wistfully eyeing the
sandy woman.
