The Master

16/10/2024

A Weak Version of the Deed

        How do you make a film about a charlatan who believes in what he says? This isn’t quite the same thing as making a film about someone who has conviction but that the viewer is made to see this as problematic or plain wrong, or about someone who fools people aware that he is talking nonsense but the film is happy to run with the character’s charm. Paul Thomas Anderson’s earlier There Will Be Blood is a brilliant example of the former and Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street fine instance of the latter. These are both great films in very different ways, and neither one is facile, no matter Scorsese’s constant frenetic and facetious tone. However, in The Master, Anderson may have set himself a more difficult task without us necessarily saying the film is equal to his earlier one, though it might be. He has a character asking profound questions without remotely the wherewithal to answer them, yet rather than judging this figure, Lancaster Dodd (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), as an idiot or a chancer, Anderson has created a work that seems bemused by his ambitions, and no less bemused, yet oddly hopeful, over the figure Dodd adopts as his star exhibit: Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix). 

          Freddie has come out of WWII a wreck but maybe he entered the war a wreck already. Near the beginning of the film, he is on an island in the South Seas with other troops and whatever their traumas, it is Freddie who humps a woman he has made out of sand, and masturbates into the ocean while others pass by. When he goes in for a psychiatric examination all he sees in the blotches are sex organs. He also has a drinking problem, is given to violence and would thus be the perfect candidate for someone like Dodd, who believes he can eradicate the animal inside us while seeking higher consciousness. If Dodd can succeed with Freddie, his treatments should work with almost anyone. But of course, his chief pupil is also his greatest liability, someone who will defend Dodds with all the loyalty of a dog that, in some ways, Lancaster sees Freddie as, but who, in defending him, shows the failings in Dodds’ method. If he were succeeding, Freddie’s instincts would be tamed, but one of the ironies of the film, without quite becoming one of amusement, is that Freddie wishes to prove his loyalty at the moment he illustrates Lancaster’s failed approaches. 

   Yet if we suggest the film offers irony without quite insisting on humour, it rests on laughter being too easy a response to Dodd’s absurd ambitions. It is obviously funny when a film shows a fussy owner determined to puppy train his dog into pooing in a particular place, only for it to defecate on a no less fussy neighbour’s lawn, but this is the sort of local irony that Anderson wishes to work beyond. Dodd is much more ambitious than this, however wrong-headed, and it would seem to be Anderson’s purpose to respect the scale of the ambition without at all taking straight Dodd’s claim that he is the man who understands human civilisation. In a scene at a rich benefactor’s party, Lancaster tells the assorted guests when questioned by one of them that yes he believes his approach to accessing people’s past lives (a sort of reverse hypnosis) can cure at least certain forms of leukaemia. Dodds reckons that his method can “treat illnesses that started thousands, perhaps trillion years” before. The guest says the earth is supposedly only billions of years old but Dodd dismisses the idea; even the best scientists can be fooled. The other guest proposes that without clear scientific evidence what you have instead is the will of one man and the basis for a cult. The discussion becomes more heated as Dodd reckons that what we need to do is travel far back into our past and rectify the problem, thus ending poverty, famine, war and the nuclear threat. His interlocutor isn’t impressed and the conversation ends with the increasingly irateDodd — who has been blinking furiously — calling the man a ‘Pig Fuck’. On a simple ironic level Dodd has proved himself incapable of the peace and prosperity he seeks in the very conversation he has just been having. But that would indicate potentially a useless hypocrite when Anderson is more interested in seeing him as a curious charlatan. 

        The director has been quite reticent in addressing the metaphysical properties of the film, saying “I mean, I try to avoid philosophical talks and things like that.” (Filmmaker) He also insists he didn’t want to have a go at Scientology even though the film draws upon it. “When it comes to Scientology, I think the expectation is that you should somehow attack it. That was never what we were doing, it was never what we were talking about doing or thinking about doing, we just had other things on our mind.” (Skinny) A cynic might see this as cowardice; that the most famous of Scientologists, Tom Cruise, is also a friend of Anderson’s, and had a key role in the director’s earlier Magnolia. Asked about Cruise’s reaction to the film, Anderson said, “Yes, I showed it to him. We're still friends and the rest is between us.” (The List) However, while Alex Gibney’s Going Clear a couple of years later examined specifically the movement and its brainwashing ways, Anderson’s film is narrower and deeper. It focuses chiefly on Dodd and Quell, and the tussle between one man’s mind and another man’s body, with Lancaster determined to save the world from its primal instincts and Freddie a creature of inchoate desire.

     When analysing the film Claudia Gorbman focuses on the voice and chiefly writes on Philip Seymour Hoffman’s to the detriment of Phoenix’s. This makes sense for various reasons but the most obvious is that Lancaster Dodd uses his voice rhetorically while Freddie usually expresses himself through his body. We see it in the scene at the upmarket party, with Dodd determined to command the room with his voice, while Freddie looks as if he is casing the joint. The first thing he does when he comes through the door and is introduced to the hostess is touch her necklace and, while everyone else follows the hostess as she introduces them to people, Freddie wanders off in the other direction. He touches a vase and searches out the alcohol. After, he disappears into a room on his own, and starts rummaging around looking to see how much expensive stuff he could leave with. At one stage he picks up an object and tries stuffing it into a pocket, in the inside of his jacket, but it isn’t his conscience that deters him; it is simply too big to pass unnoticed, so he puts it back. While much is understandably made of Lancaster’s argument with the other man, and Gorbman herself makes much of it, the film can be seen as all about the contrast between these two figures; one who wants to tame the human instincts; the other who wants to master his immediate environment. Near the end of the film Dodd says, a little inexplicably, that “…if you figure a way to live without serving a master, any master, then let the rest of us know, will you?” It may seem odd because nobody more than Dodd has sought to master self-control and nobody more than he has cast himself in the role of a master. There he is, asking Freddie if he discovers the answer to get back to him. 

   Understandably, Gorbman pays close attention to Dodd/Hoffman’s voice and all but ignores Quell/Phoenix’s. Whatever Lancaster’s limitations as a thinker he has a highly developed capacity for the verbal, and this is chiefly what interests Gorbman as she speaks about his “vocal charisma.” Discussing a scene where Dodd is giving a speech at his daughter’s wedding, Gorbman notes “…the drop in pitch and throaty timbre (“marriage previous to the Cause was awful“)—a vocal gesture he likes to use—suggest humorous irony of a brainless sort. Hoffman’s Dodd is a compelling speaker, even if the content leaves the hapless wedding couple high and dry.” “The speech”, she observes, “has a staccato rhythm of dramatic pauses and single-word outbursts and exclamations: the vocal style imitates brilliant, inspired substance. By being so compelling, it distracts from its own illogical transition from the topic of marriage to the topic of dragon-taming.” (Film Quarterly) Dodd holds his audience with intonation and sudden shifts in register, inflecting his voice all the better to convince them that rational language alone would not be capable of doing so. But if neither Lancaster nor Freddie have brilliant minds, they have arresting qualities. If Gorbman so astutely notes Dodd has vocal charisma, Freddie has animal attraction. This is a trite phrase of course but one that can have its uses when thinking of actors who possess a charisma that chiefly passes through their movements in space. Dodd, and by extension, Philip Seymour Hoffman, has almost no corporeal charisma, a term environmental geographer Jamie Lorimer uses in a very different context but not without its uses here.  Lorimer believes that “there is a taxonomy to this charisma that shapes the scope and the political economies of environmental concern. Charismatic species feature disproportionately in the databases and designations that perform conservation. They populate institutions of captivity as sacrificial ambassadors for the salvation of their free-ranging kin. They dominate the mediascapes that frame popular sensibilities towards wildlife.” (The Multispecies Salon) Freddie has this corporeal charisma, just as Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, James Dean and, in a different way and, partly because of different cultures, Gerard Depardieu, Richard Burton and Toshiro Mifune do. 

        While the voice carries through space, the body moves through it, and while the voice can be loud, piercing, irritating and obnoxious, the body can be much more intrusive. Someone yelling across the street might be intimidating but rather less frightening than someone who crosses the street to invade your space. This is partly the difference between Dodd and Freddie. Even when Lancaster calls the other man a pigfuck he comes no nearer to him, while Freddie, a couple of scenes later, goes to the man’s place with Dodd’s son-in-law. Once inside the room, he administers a beating we don’t see but hear. It is but one of several in the film. Early on, Freddie gets into a fight while working as a photographer in a department store, later gets into a scrap with a couple of cops who are arresting Dodd, and does so again when he starts beating up one of the group’s other members who reckons Dodd’s book stinks. Freddie constantly exhibits a frustration with the limits of space, which of course for Dodd means the highfalutin notion of galaxies that makes Earth look small. As Dodd intones to the cops when he is arrested and the officer says he is from the police department of Philadelphia, Dodd asks in which galaxy this has any merit as he questions the cops’ code and honour. But for Freddie, this space needn’t be so vast, and when, late in the film, Dodd speaks of Freddie hoping to live without a master, he also speaks of Quell finding a landless latitude. This is pompous alliteration as Gorbman notes, but what might be meaningless verbiagefrom the mouth of Dodd can contain within the film’s perspective an interesting contrast between Freddie and Lancaster. Dodd likes the idea of this landless latitude, this beyond that needs no empirical reality; one that can be conjured up in fatuous fancies. But Freddie is seeking instead to be very much in this world. He is a creature of the senses however fractured his thoughts and feelings, and taming his behaviour hasn’t done much to eradicate his violent impulses.  

     In the six actors we have mentioned who share Phoenix’s corporeal charisma, we needn’t only see a contrast in cultures but also within this animality differences in disposition. Brando suggests a desire for touch and taste, and in this sense (or these senses) is closer to Depardieu, who often in his work shows a need for food and fornication missing from, for example, De Niro while Mifune illustrates a capacity for self-laceration and anger quite distinct from Burton’s — and yet both are prone to bullying and lacerating others as well as themselves. But of the seven (including Phoenix) it is only Burton who uses language carefully — who sees in it the ease with which it can be utilised to wound others. Burton from this perspective more closely resembles Hoffman than Phoenix, an actor of diction and inflexion — like the equally classically or theatrically trained John Gielgud, Peter O’Toole, and Anthony Hopkins, but also Americans like Sidney Poitier, Charlton Heston and Morgan Freeman. Hoffman might sound the least commanding of them as his voice often contains within it a nasal aspect that makes it vulnerable more than assertive. But as Gorbman says, the range of it in The Master is broad. It is with his voice and not his squat and square body that Hoffman here draws people in. 

       To speak about the difference between Hoffman and Phoenix can help us understand why Anderson may be reluctant to talk about Scientology beyond offending Tom Cruise. A film on the subject could easily become satirical or critical, mocking or judgemental, and Gibney’s Going Clear attacks the movement strongly, and in turn the movement has attacked him. “And they are still calling up colleagues and trying to get them to talk dirt about me. It’s a campaign that still goes on. The number of legal letters threatening me, threatening HBO and the distributors and exhibitors in every single one of the territories has been staggering.” (Guardian) It is a fine but investigative documentary, unequivocally about Scientology. Anderson’s film is more about what is inside disposition and belief, as though a faith like Scientology offers the perfect opportunity to explore it as Catholicism, Judaism or Islam cannot. The difference between a priest, rabbi or an Imam and a cult leader is partly one of persuasion: the priest etc. convinces within the context of a faith that precedes them and will continue beyond them. A cult is chiefly the cult of personality and may solidify into an ersatz religion, like Mormonism, Scientology or the Moonies, but often never goes beyond the cult leader — and often leads to mass suicide or annihilation: as with the movements led by Jim Jones, David Koresh and Luc Jouret. If many a cult is a question of personality then it makes sense that a filmmaker interested in what underpins a movement rather than its cosmetic aspects, its perception in the public eye, would be interested in personality itself, and focus on the contrast between the two key figures: one who represents the cult and the other who underpins its purpose. This partly rests on Freddie being the truest of believers or at least the most loyal to Dodd. At various points others turn against him, refusing to take seriously what Dodd says, or they question his methods. There is the follower, Bill Williams (Kevin J O’Connor) who gets beaten up by Freddie for claiming the book is worthless, Dodd’s son, Val (Jesse Plemons), who tells Freddie his father is making all this up as he goes along, and an acolyte (Laura Dern) who finds it odd that Lancaster has changed the method from one of recalling the past to imagining it. But it also lies in Freddie as the perfect specimen: a man who lives more in the moment than any other involved in the group. Freddie lacks both self-control and the capacity for delayed gratification. If Dodd wants to indicate that we go back trillions of years, then Freddie is the perfect embodiment of the problem, as if he can't think in anything other than the present moment, no matter a lost love, Doris. Freddie can appear like a throwback, the atavistic error next to Lancaster’s determination to rectify it. 

     The dynamic becomes a psychoanalysis of the species, a variation of Freud’s ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ when he says, if “we start considering this possibility, we come upon a contention which is so astonishing that we must dwell upon it. This contention holds that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions.” Freud finds such a claim astonishing and tries to understand why people believe it, while also admitting he doesn’t have the historical wherewithal to do the question justice. Dodd would have no such reservations about this perceived failure of civilization, and no humility in facing the difficulty of the question. Freud tentatively goes back to the Christian doctrine to see potential sources for this unhappiness and sees too an overly romanticised view of those regarded as less civilised but happier than the cultured European. Dodd travels much further back in time as he decides that we need to find the source of our being’s misdirection and rectify it. If he can cure Freddie who won’t he be able to cure

    What this improved civilisation would look like isn’t clear, but it would seem devoid of certain cancers, poverty and the nuclear threat. It would be cosmic psychoanalysis and show Freud as a mere dabbler in the human condition. Anderson might view this as nonsense but this rests more on Dodd’s ignorant ambition than the nature of the question that Freud, Jung and others in different ways wished to address. As Andersons says, “the idea of recalling past lives is so hopeful, so optimistic, and it's something I would love to go along with…the basic idea...appealed to me, because it concerns memories and other lives, particularly after the second world war, and that's what got me excited. Getting into it from that angle felt like fertile ground.” (Guardian) It is the sort of question one of Anderson’s undeniable influences, Stanley Kubrick, was fascinated by as well when saying “think of the kind of life that may have evolved on those planets over the millennia, and think too, what relatively giant technological strides man has made on earth in the six thousand years of his recorded civilization — a period that is less than a single grain of sand in the cosmic hourglass.” This isn’t too far from Dodd’s language even if, like Freud, Kubrick would be much more circumspect in his claims. Kubrick’s idea is present as a question within The Master just as it had been in Anderson's previous film There Will Be Blood — Yaron Baruch even made an excellent short video essay showing all the visual similarities between Anderson’s film and 2001: A Space Odyssey

        But what interests Anderson more than Kubrick is human dynamics, the tension between different dispositions and their manifestation through his actors. Whatever Kubrick’s genius he wasn’t viewed as an actor’s director, and while Christopher Bray’s claim is too assertive, there is some truth to his insistence that Kubrick's “…lack of empathy goes to the hollowness at the heart of so many Kubrick movies. Like Hitchcock (who said actors should be treated as cattle), Kubrick had no interest in working with his players. He would demand retake after retake, without ever making clear to anyone what had gone wrong the last time.” (The Critic) Anderson is interested in working with his players, saying: “. I genuinely adapt to the actor. If somebody likes to rehearse, we can rehearse. If somebody doesn't like to rehearse, we're not going to rehearse.” (Cineaste) This no doubt makes Anderson appear much more obliging a director than Kubrick but the purpose isn’t to judge them as human beings; it is to understand why, despite some similarities, Kubrick could be viewed as a director indifferent to performance and Anderson so accommodating of an actor’s presence. The reason rests on how much the meaning within the films is predicated on what the actors can bring to them. The gist of The Master is about these two opposing sensibilities, so while Anderson is interested in metaphysical questions he wants to contain them in these different bodies, one that the soundtrack seems to allude to by suggesting that if language reflects Dodd’s preoccupation as he speaks fluently, the music track is often closer to the sound we associate with Freddie. Scored by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood (who worked on There Will Be Blood and also later Anderson films), at the beginning it is discordant and frenetic, determined and distressed, and though there are period songs used throughout, sometimes a lusher, almost sentimental score in places, this forceful aspect of the score most captures Freddie’s personality.

    If Hoffman’s body in the film is squat with a low centre of gravity and one that shambles through space, Phoenix’s is springy and alert, tense and tic-ridden. He never quite seems to be listening to the words people speak, but neither does he seem inattentive to what they are saying. When Lancaster makes a wedding speech and talks about a captured dragon, everybody looks as though they are listening with polite enthusiasm, happy to hear an accomplished raconteur regale them with tales real and otherwise. They aren’t fascinated, merely engaged — as one would expect at a gathering where the emphasis lies on social activity. But Freddie isn’t entertained and seems hardly to be paying attention to the very qualities Lancaster is determined to project, many of the qualities Gorbman notes in Hoffman’s performance when she writes about his vocal charisma. The married couple may be a little confused as at one moment they glance at each other in baffled complicity, but they know what to expect and their response would be far from inexplicable to Dodd. Freddie looks uncomprehending, preoccupied and entranced: an odd combination that Anderson acknowledges in the number of cutaways to Phoenix. Apart from one general, wide-angle reaction shot that takes in everybody in the room, the rest are devoted to Freddie’s response. 

     Gorbman understandably focuses most of her attention on Hoffman, yet Anderson shows here that Phoenix is one of the great receptive actors, very good at expressing complexity in the reaction shot. There is no reason to cut to anyone else as they no doubt react in the acceptable manner a speechmaker would expect. Phoenix offers a vast range of emotions in the five cutaways to him, and it is as if Anderson seeks to understand two men who will not accept the world in its present state; with Dodd unwilling to do so for chiefly vainglorious reasons, and Freddie for immediate, dispositional ones. While Dodd is unhappy with the direction civilisation has taken, or at least this is what he expresses to make an impression on others, Freddie looks like he needs all the help he can get living in this world, where he is so ill-equipped to function. The affinity between the men rests on two very distinct forms of resistance and power — one societal; the other corporeal. While Dodd’s determination resides in reading a room; in Freddie’s case, it is in territorialising it. Dodd is the social animal comprehending behaviour; Freddie the more primitive beast occupying it with his senses. When Dodd and Freddie are jailed, both are imprisoned but only one is caged. Dodd stands in his cell resting his arm against the bed, while in the cell beside him Freddie is handcuffed and banging his head over and over again on the upper bunk. He clearly hasn’t accepted authority and why he remains handcuffed. Freddie then sets about destroying the toilet in the cell. 

     It is an act of aggression that resembles the sink Phoenix took off the wall in I Walk the Line, and the clock he smashes in Joker, all scenes supposedly improvised, with IMDB saying of the scene in The Master: “during the jail cell scene, Joaquin breaks a real toilet. His actions were entirely improvised…Joaquin had no intentions to break the toilet, nor did he think it was possible.” The site also notes that during the early stages of the shoot, Anderson saw Phoenix using the whole space rather meeting his marks, and asked the camera crew to light the entire space to give Phoenix this mobility in the frame. While Dodd’s dissatisfaction can be expressed in words, Freddie’s can only be offered in action and this would appear to be the question that so fascinated the director. What is it to wish the world different from what it is, and what would be the means of expression when viewing it divergently? Dodd may or may not be a charlatan, even if the evidence the film offers would lead us to think he most certainly is. Dodd becomes insecure and angry when anybody counters his ideas, and it may even be his wife, Sarah (Amy Adams) who is responsible for them anyway: evident in a scene where she says, “we will never dominate our environment unless we attack”, while he is typing away at the desk. 

        Is he listening to her, ignoring her or dictating her remarks as he types?  It remains moot, but in her remark about the need to dominate an environment, nobody more than Freddie offers this as dispositionally natural. It is just after this, without it appears having access to Sarah’s remark, Freddie goes and beats up the person from the party. Whether Sarah is responsible for the work or Lancaster, they both share an interest in language as a tool for domination, while for Freddie a word is a weak version of the deed. This also means that any action needn’t be strongly based on motivation, which is partly why it makes sense Anderson eschews a direct link between Sarah’s words and Freddie’s act.

       Looking closely at the scene, we notice that the cut to Val is ambiguous. It can look initially like he is listening to his mother and watching his father, but when he gets up to leave the room he passes Freddie and Bill Williams as Freddie asks Bill if he has all the names and addresses of people at the party. The man does, and after this Freddie goes with Dodd’s son-in-law to beat up the person who criticised Dodd at the gathering. Yet we might note that the room Freddie and Val are in must be next to Dodd and Sarah’s because we can hear the typewriting through the wall, and so who is to say Freddie hasn’t also heard the discussion between them? We do not know, but we do know that Freddie doesn’t need much of a premise and certainly not a command to act aggressively. Just as when he tackles the police after Dodd is arrested, or beats up Bill, the premise to do so is unimportant next to the general desire to be violent.

    This yen for violence in Freddie would no doubt be part of his appeal to Dodd. While someone who gets into a fight with what would appear a justifiable set of reasons (someone stealing their wallet; insulting their wife; beating up their brother), would be all very well, the less of a reason for the deed the easier it is for Dodd to push the thesis that this is a primal throwback showing the wrong direction civilisation has taken and that Lancaster needs to rectify. Though there is a throughline from the group are kicked out of the party after arguing with the man who will get beaten up, Sarah saying they need to attack to protect their territory, with Freddie then going out and assaulting the person who has criticised them, Anderson is wary of such clear cause and effect.

             From one perspective a master is someone who controls the behaviour of others; from a different angle it is a person who controls their environment. Of course, controlling others can be part of commandeering territory, but in The Master Dodd relies on vocal charisma to do so, while Freddie, socially a mess and with none of the verbal skills Lancaster possesses, relies on the corporeal. When near the end, Dodd offers his enigmatic remark, about living without a master, he asks Freddie to let him know if he succeeds because he will be the first person in the world to achieve this feat, though nobody looks less inclined to this mastery than Quell. Yet if we see the film as the exploration of cultism without showing much interest in critiquing the Scientology that it is based on, we needn't view this as cowardice on Anderson’s part. It rests more on exploring the problem of mastery: do you master others or do you master yourself? Dodd sees in the post-war chaos there is a chance to control people, to claim he can end the sort of violence that produces a world war. Freddie would make no such claim and there is the irony. Freddie may be given to acts of primal rage but he doesn’t want to control the lives of others: he wouldn’t seem to wish that people follow his beliefs. He doesn’t really have any. Instead, he is motivated by bodily desires, by the need to fornicate, fight and drink. These might not be seen as positive qualities in a person but they are from a certain position much healthier ones that demand nothing more than self-mastery to conquer. The Dodds of this world, those charismatic men with words, might be a far greater problem.  

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin Tony McKibbin

The Master

A Weak Version of the Deed

How do you make a film about a charlatan who believes in what he says? This isn't quite the same thing as making a film about someone who has conviction but that the viewer is made to see this as problematic or plain wrong, or about someone who fools people aware that he is talking nonsense but the film is happy to run with the character's charm. Paul Thomas Anderson's earlier There Will Be Blood is a brilliant example of the former and Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street a fine instance of the latter. These are both great films in very different ways, and neither one is facile, no matter Scorsese's constant frenetic and facetious tone. However, in The Master, Anderson may have set himself a more difficult task without us necessarily saying the film is equal to his earlier one, though it might be. He has a character asking profound questions without remotely the wherewithal to answer them, yet rather than judging this figure, Lancaster Dodd (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), as an idiot or a chancer, Anderson has created a work that seems bemused by his ambitions, and no less bemused, yet oddly hopeful, over the figure Dodd adopts as his star exhibit: Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix).

Freddie has come out of WWII a wreck but maybe he entered the war a wreck already. Near the beginning of the film, he is on an island in the South Seas with other troops and whatever their traumas, it is Freddie who humps a woman he has made out of sand, and masturbates into the ocean while others pass by. When he goes in for a psychiatric examination all he sees in the blotches are sex organs. He also has a drinking problem, is given to violence and would thus be the perfect candidate for someone like Dodd, who believes he can eradicate the animal inside us while seeking higher consciousness. If Dodd can succeed with Freddie, his treatments should work with almost anyone. But of course, his chief pupil is also his greatest liability, someone who will defend Dodds with all the loyalty of a dog that, in some ways, Lancaster sees Freddie as, but who, in defending him, shows the failings in Dodds' method. If he were succeeding, Freddie's instincts would be tamed, but one of the ironies of the film, without quite becoming one of amusement, is that Freddie wishes to prove his loyalty at the moment he illustrates Lancaster's failed approaches.

Yet if we suggest the film offers irony without quite insisting on humour, it rests on laughter being too easy a response to Dodd's absurd ambitions. It is obviously funny when a film shows a fussy owner determined to puppy train his dog into pooing in a particular place, only for it to defecate on a no less fussy neighbour's lawn, but this is the sort of local irony that Anderson wishes to work beyond. Dodd is much more ambitious than this, however wrong-headed, and it would seem to be Anderson's purpose to respect the scale of the ambition without at all taking straight Dodd's claim that he is the man who understands human civilisation. In a scene at a rich benefactor's party, Lancaster tells the assorted guests when questioned by one of them that yes he believes his approach to accessing people's past lives (a sort of reverse hypnosis) can cure at least certain forms of leukaemia. Dodds reckons that his method can "treat illnesses that started thousands, perhaps trillion years" before. The guest says the earth is supposedly only billions of years old but Dodd dismisses the idea; even the best scientists can be fooled. The other guest proposes that without clear scientific evidence what you have instead is the will of one man and the basis for a cult. The discussion becomes more heated as Dodd reckons that what we need to do is travel far back into our past and rectify the problem, thus ending poverty, famine, war and the nuclear threat. His interlocutor isn't impressed and the conversation ends with the increasingly irateDodd who has been blinking furiously calling the man a 'Pig Fuck'. On a simple ironic level Dodd has proved himself incapable of the peace and prosperity he seeks in the very conversation he has just been having. But that would indicate potentially a useless hypocrite when Anderson is more interested in seeing him as a curious charlatan.

The director has been quite reticent in addressing the metaphysical properties of the film, saying "I mean, I try to avoid philosophical talks and things like that." (Filmmaker) He also insists he didn't want to have a go at Scientology even though the film draws upon it. "When it comes to Scientology, I think the expectation is that you should somehow attack it. That was never what we were doing, it was never what we were talking about doing or thinking about doing, we just had other things on our mind." (Skinny) A cynic might see this as cowardice; that the most famous of Scientologists, Tom Cruise, is also a friend of Anderson's, and had a key role in the director's earlier Magnolia. Asked about Cruise's reaction to the film, Anderson said, "Yes, I showed it to him. We're still friends and the rest is between us." (The List) However, while Alex Gibney's Going Clear a couple of years later examined specifically the movement and its brainwashing ways, Anderson's film is narrower and deeper. It focuses chiefly on Dodd and Quell, and the tussle between one man's mind and another man's body, with Lancaster determined to save the world from its primal instincts and Freddie a creature of inchoate desire.

When analysing the film Claudia Gorbman focuses on the voice and chiefly writes on Philip Seymour Hoffman's to the detriment of Phoenix's. This makes sense for various reasons but the most obvious is that Lancaster Dodd uses his voice rhetorically while Freddie usually expresses himself through his body. We see it in the scene at the upmarket party, with Dodd determined to command the room with his voice, while Freddie looks as if he is casing the joint. The first thing he does when he comes through the door and is introduced to the hostess is touch her necklace and, while everyone else follows the hostess as she introduces them to people, Freddie wanders off in the other direction. He touches a vase and searches out the alcohol. After, he disappears into a room on his own, and starts rummaging around looking to see how much expensive stuff he could leave with. At one stage he picks up an object and tries stuffing it into a pocket, in the inside of his jacket, but it isn't his conscience that deters him; it is simply too big to pass unnoticed, so he puts it back. While much is understandably made of Lancaster's argument with the other man, and Gorbman herself makes much of it, the film can be seen as all about the contrast between these two figures; one who wants to tame the human instincts; the other who wants to master his immediate environment. Near the end of the film Dodd says, a little inexplicably, that "...if you figure a way to live without serving a master, any master, then let the rest of us know, will you?" It may seem odd because nobody more than Dodd has sought to master self-control and nobody more than he has cast himself in the role of a master. There he is, asking Freddie if he discovers the answer to get back to him.

Understandably, Gorbman pays close attention to Dodd/Hoffman's voice and all but ignores Quell/Phoenix's. Whatever Lancaster's limitations as a thinker he has a highly developed capacity for the verbal, and this is chiefly what interests Gorbman as she speaks about his "vocal charisma." Discussing a scene where Dodd is giving a speech at his daughter's wedding, Gorbman notes "...the drop in pitch and throaty timbre ("marriage previous to the Cause was awful")a vocal gesture he likes to usesuggest humorous irony of a brainless sort. Hoffman's Dodd is a compelling speaker, even if the content leaves the hapless wedding couple high and dry." "The speech", she observes, "has a staccato rhythm of dramatic pauses and single-word outbursts and exclamations: the vocal style imitates brilliant, inspired substance. By being so compelling, it distracts from its own illogical transition from the topic of marriage to the topic of dragon-taming." (Film Quarterly) Dodd holds his audience with intonation and sudden shifts in register, inflecting his voice all the better to convince them that rational language alone would not be capable of doing so. But if neither Lancaster nor Freddie have brilliant minds, they have arresting qualities. If Gorbman so astutely notes Dodd has vocal charisma, Freddie has animal attraction. This is a trite phrase of course but one that can have its uses when thinking of actors who possess a charisma that chiefly passes through their movements in space. Dodd, and by extension, Philip Seymour Hoffman, has almost no corporeal charisma, a term environmental geographer Jamie Lorimer uses in a very different context but not without its uses here. Lorimer believes that "there is a taxonomy to this charisma that shapes the scope and the political economies of environmental concern. Charismatic species feature disproportionately in the databases and designations that perform conservation. They populate institutions of captivity as sacrificial ambassadors for the salvation of their free-ranging kin. They dominate the mediascapes that frame popular sensibilities towards wildlife." (The Multispecies Salon) Freddie has this corporeal charisma, just as Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, James Dean and, in a different way and, partly because of different cultures, Gerard Depardieu, Richard Burton and Toshiro Mifune do.

While the voice carries through space, the body moves through it, and while the voice can be loud, piercing, irritating and obnoxious, the body can be much more intrusive. Someone yelling across the street might be intimidating but rather less frightening than someone who crosses the street to invade your space. This is partly the difference between Dodd and Freddie. Even when Lancaster calls the other man a pigfuck he comes no nearer to him, while Freddie, a couple of scenes later, goes to the man's place with Dodd's son-in-law. Once inside the room, he administers a beating we don't see but hear. It is but one of several in the film. Early on, Freddie gets into a fight while working as a photographer in a department store, later gets into a scrap with a couple of cops who are arresting Dodd, and does so again when he starts beating up one of the group's other members who reckons Dodd's book stinks. Freddie constantly exhibits a frustration with the limits of space, which of course for Dodd means the highfalutin notion of galaxies that makes Earth look small. As Dodd intones to the cops when he is arrested and the officer says he is from the police department of Philadelphia, Dodd asks in which galaxy this has any merit as he questions the cops' code and honour. But for Freddie, this space needn't be so vast, and when, late in the film, Dodd speaks of Freddie hoping to live without a master, he also speaks of Quell finding a landless latitude. This is pompous alliteration as Gorbman notes, but what might be meaningless verbiagefrom the mouth of Dodd can contain within the film's perspective an interesting contrast between Freddie and Lancaster. Dodd likes the idea of this landless latitude, this beyond that needs no empirical reality; one that can be conjured up in fatuous fancies. But Freddie is seeking instead to be very much in this world. He is a creature of the senses however fractured his thoughts and feelings, and taming his behaviour hasn't done much to eradicate his violent impulses.

In the six actors we have mentioned who share Phoenix's corporeal charisma, we needn't only see a contrast in cultures but also within this animality differences in disposition. Brando suggests a desire for touch and taste, and in this sense (or these senses) is closer to Depardieu, who often in his work shows a need for food and fornication missing from, for example, De Niro while Mifune illustrates a capacity for self-laceration and anger quite distinct from Burton's and yet both are prone to bullying and lacerating others as well as themselves. But of the seven (including Phoenix) it is only Burton who uses language carefully who sees in it the ease with which it can be utilised to wound others. Burton from this perspective more closely resembles Hoffman than Phoenix, an actor of diction and inflexion like the equally classically or theatrically trained John Gielgud, Peter O'Toole, and Anthony Hopkins, but also Americans like Sidney Poitier, Charlton Heston and Morgan Freeman. Hoffman might sound the least commanding of them as his voice often contains within it a nasal aspect that makes it vulnerable more than assertive. But as Gorbman says, the range of it in The Master is broad. It is with his voice and not his squat and square body that Hoffman here draws people in.

To speak about the difference between Hoffman and Phoenix can help us understand why Anderson may be reluctant to talk about Scientology beyond offending Tom Cruise. A film on the subject could easily become satirical or critical, mocking or judgemental, and Gibney's Going Clear attacks the movement strongly, and in turn the movement has attacked him. "And they are still calling up colleagues and trying to get them to talk dirt about me. It's a campaign that still goes on. The number of legal letters threatening me, threatening HBO and the distributors and exhibitors in every single one of the territories has been staggering." (Guardian) It is a fine but investigative documentary, unequivocally about Scientology. Anderson's film is more about what is inside disposition and belief, as though a faith like Scientology offers the perfect opportunity to explore it as Catholicism, Judaism or Islam cannot. The difference between a priest, rabbi or an Imam and a cult leader is partly one of persuasion: the priest etc. convinces within the context of a faith that precedes them and will continue beyond them. A cult is chiefly the cult of personality and may solidify into an ersatz religion, like Mormonism, Scientology or the Moonies, but often never goes beyond the cult leader and often leads to mass suicide or annihilation: as with the movements led by Jim Jones, David Koresh and Luc Jouret. If many a cult is a question of personality then it makes sense that a filmmaker interested in what underpins a movement rather than its cosmetic aspects, its perception in the public eye, would be interested in personality itself, and focus on the contrast between the two key figures: one who represents the cult and the other who underpins its purpose. This partly rests on Freddie being the truest of believers or at least the most loyal to Dodd. At various points others turn against him, refusing to take seriously what Dodd says, or they question his methods. There is the follower, Bill Williams (Kevin J O'Connor) who gets beaten up by Freddie for claiming the book is worthless, Dodd's son, Val (Jesse Plemons), who tells Freddie his father is making all this up as he goes along, and an acolyte (Laura Dern) who finds it odd that Lancaster has changed the method from one of recalling the past to imagining it. But it also lies in Freddie as the perfect specimen: a man who lives more in the moment than any other involved in the group. Freddie lacks both self-control and the capacity for delayed gratification. If Dodd wants to indicate that we go back trillions of years, then Freddie is the perfect embodiment of the problem, as if he can't think in anything other than the present moment, no matter a lost love, Doris. Freddie can appear like a throwback, the atavistic error next to Lancaster's determination to rectify it.

The dynamic becomes a psychoanalysis of the species, a variation of Freud's 'Civilization and its Discontents' when he says, if "we start considering this possibility, we come upon a contention which is so astonishing that we must dwell upon it. This contention holds that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions." Freud finds such a claim astonishing and tries to understand why people believe it, while also admitting he doesn't have the historical wherewithal to do the question justice. Dodd would have no such reservations about this perceived failure of civilization, and no humility in facing the difficulty of the question. Freud tentatively goes back to the Christian doctrine to see potential sources for this unhappiness and sees too an overly romanticised view of those regarded as less civilised but happier than the cultured European. Dodd travels much further back in time as he decides that we need to find the source of our being's misdirection and rectify it. If he can cure Freddie who won't he be able to cure?

What this improved civilisation would look like isn't clear, but it would seem devoid of certain cancers, poverty and the nuclear threat. It would be cosmic psychoanalysis and show Freud as a mere dabbler in the human condition. Anderson might view this as nonsense but this rests more on Dodd's ignorant ambition than the nature of the question that Freud, Jung and others in different ways wished to address. As Andersons says, "the idea of recalling past lives is so hopeful, so optimistic, and it's something I would love to go along with...the basic idea...appealed to me, because it concerns memories and other lives, particularly after the second world war, and that's what got me excited. Getting into it from that angle felt like fertile ground." (Guardian) It is the sort of question one of Anderson's undeniable influences, Stanley Kubrick, was fascinated by as well when saying "think of the kind of life that may have evolved on those planets over the millennia, and think too, what relatively giant technological strides man has made on earth in the six thousand years of his recorded civilization a period that is less than a single grain of sand in the cosmic hourglass." This isn't too far from Dodd's language even if, like Freud, Kubrick would be much more circumspect in his claims. Kubrick's idea is present as a question within The Master just as it had been in Anderson's previous film There Will Be Blood Yaron Baruch even made an excellent short video essay showing all the visual similarities between Anderson's film and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

But what interests Anderson more than Kubrick is human dynamics, the tension between different dispositions and their manifestation through his actors. Whatever Kubrick's genius he wasn't viewed as an actor's director, and while Christopher Bray's claim is too assertive, there is some truth to his insistence that Kubrick's "...lack of empathy goes to the hollowness at the heart of so many Kubrick movies. Like Hitchcock (who said actors should be treated as cattle), Kubrick had no interest in working with his players. He would demand retake after retake, without ever making clear to anyone what had gone wrong the last time." (The Critic) Anderson is interested in working with his players, saying: ". I genuinely adapt to the actor. If somebody likes to rehearse, we can rehearse. If somebody doesn't like to rehearse, we're not going to rehearse." (Cineaste) This no doubt makes Anderson appear much more obliging a director than Kubrick but the purpose isn't to judge them as human beings; it is to understand why, despite some similarities, Kubrick could be viewed as a director indifferent to performance and Anderson so accommodating of an actor's presence. The reason rests on how much the meaning within the films is predicated on what the actors can bring to them. The gist of The Master is about these two opposing sensibilities, so while Anderson is interested in metaphysical questions he wants to contain them in these different bodies, one that the soundtrack seems to allude to by suggesting that if language reflects Dodd's preoccupation as he speaks fluently, the music track is often closer to the sound we associate with Freddie. Scored by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood (who worked on There Will Be Blood and also later Anderson films), at the beginning it is discordant and frenetic, determined and distressed, and though there are period songs used throughout, sometimes a lusher, almost sentimental score in places, this forceful aspect of the score most captures Freddie's personality.

If Hoffman's body in the film is squat with a low centre of gravity and one that shambles through space, Phoenix's is springy and alert, tense and tic-ridden. He never quite seems to be listening to the words people speak, but neither does he seem inattentive to what they are saying. When Lancaster makes a wedding speech and talks about a captured dragon, everybody looks as though they are listening with polite enthusiasm, happy to hear an accomplished raconteur regale them with tales real and otherwise. They aren't fascinated, merely engaged as one would expect at a gathering where the emphasis lies on social activity. But Freddie isn't entertained and seems hardly to be paying attention to the very qualities Lancaster is determined to project, many of the qualities Gorbman notes in Hoffman's performance when she writes about his vocal charisma. The married couple may be a little confused as at one moment they glance at each other in baffled complicity, but they know what to expect and their response would be far from inexplicable to Dodd. Freddie looks uncomprehending, preoccupied and entranced: an odd combination that Anderson acknowledges in the number of cutaways to Phoenix. Apart from one general, wide-angle reaction shot that takes in everybody in the room, the rest are devoted to Freddie's response.

Gorbman understandably focuses most of her attention on Hoffman, yet Anderson shows here that Phoenix is one of the great receptive actors, very good at expressing complexity in the reaction shot. There is no reason to cut to anyone else as they no doubt react in the acceptable manner a speechmaker would expect. Phoenix offers a vast range of emotions in the five cutaways to him, and it is as if Anderson seeks to understand two men who will not accept the world in its present state; with Dodd unwilling to do so for chiefly vainglorious reasons, and Freddie for immediate, dispositional ones. While Dodd is unhappy with the direction civilisation has taken, or at least this is what he expresses to make an impression on others, Freddie looks like he needs all the help he can get living in this world, where he is so ill-equipped to function. The affinity between the men rests on two very distinct forms of resistance and power one societal; the other corporeal. While Dodd's determination resides in reading a room; in Freddie's case, it is in territorialising it. Dodd is the social animal comprehending behaviour; Freddie the more primitive beast occupying it with his senses. When Dodd and Freddie are jailed, both are imprisoned but only one is caged. Dodd stands in his cell resting his arm against the bed, while in the cell beside him Freddie is handcuffed and banging his head over and over again on the upper bunk. He clearly hasn't accepted authority and why he remains handcuffed. Freddie then sets about destroying the toilet in the cell.

It is an act of aggression that resembles the sink Phoenix took off the wall in I Walk the Line, and the clock he smashes in Joker, all scenes supposedly improvised, with IMDB saying of the scene in The Master: "during the jail cell scene, Joaquin breaks a real toilet. His actions were entirely improvised...Joaquin had no intentions to break the toilet, nor did he think it was possible." The site also notes that during the early stages of the shoot, Anderson saw Phoenix using the whole space rather meeting his marks, and asked the camera crew to light the entire space to give Phoenix this mobility in the frame. While Dodd's dissatisfaction can be expressed in words, Freddie's can only be offered in action and this would appear to be the question that so fascinated the director. What is it to wish the world different from what it is, and what would be the means of expression when viewing it divergently? Dodd may or may not be a charlatan, even if the evidence the film offers would lead us to think he most certainly is. Dodd becomes insecure and angry when anybody counters his ideas, and it may even be his wife, Sarah (Amy Adams) who is responsible for them anyway: evident in a scene where she says, "we will never dominate our environment unless we attack", while he is typing away at the desk.

Is he listening to her, ignoring her or dictating her remarks as he types? It remains moot, but in her remark about the need to dominate an environment, nobody more than Freddie offers this as dispositionally natural. It is just after this, without it appears having access to Sarah's remark, Freddie goes and beats up the person from the party. Whether Sarah is responsible for the work or Lancaster, they both share an interest in language as a tool for domination, while for Freddie a word is a weak version of the deed. This also means that any action needn't be strongly based on motivation, which is partly why it makes sense Anderson eschews a direct link between Sarah's words and Freddie's act.

Looking closely at the scene, we notice that the cut to Val is ambiguous. It can look initially like he is listening to his mother and watching his father, but when he gets up to leave the room he passes Freddie and Bill Williams as Freddie asks Bill if he has all the names and addresses of people at the party. The man does, and after this Freddie goes with Dodd's son-in-law to beat up the person who criticised Dodd at the gathering. Yet we might note that the room Freddie and Val are in must be next to Dodd and Sarah's because we can hear the typewriting through the wall, and so who is to say Freddie hasn't also heard the discussion between them? We do not know, but we do know that Freddie doesn't need much of a premise and certainly not a command to act aggressively. Just as when he tackles the police after Dodd is arrested, or beats up Bill, the premise to do so is unimportant next to the general desire to be violent.

This yen for violence in Freddie would no doubt be part of his appeal to Dodd. While someone who gets into a fight with what would appear a justifiable set of reasons (someone stealing their wallet; insulting their wife; beating up their brother), would be all very well, the less of a reason for the deed the easier it is for Dodd to push the thesis that this is a primal throwback showing the wrong direction civilisation has taken and that Lancaster needs to rectify. Though there is a throughline from the group are kicked out of the party after arguing with the man who will get beaten up, Sarah saying they need to attack to protect their territory, with Freddie then going out and assaulting the person who has criticised them, Anderson is wary of such clear cause and effect.

From one perspective a master is someone who controls the behaviour of others; from a different angle it is a person who controls their environment. Of course, controlling others can be part of commandeering territory, but in The Master Dodd relies on vocal charisma to do so, while Freddie, socially a mess and with none of the verbal skills Lancaster possesses, relies on the corporeal. When near the end, Dodd offers his enigmatic remark, about living without a master, he asks Freddie to let him know if he succeeds because he will be the first person in the world to achieve this feat, though nobody looks less inclined to this mastery than Quell. Yet if we see the film as the exploration of cultism without showing much interest in critiquing the Scientology that it is based on, we needn't view this as cowardice on Anderson's part. It rests more on exploring the problem of mastery: do you master others or do you master yourself? Dodd sees in the post-war chaos there is a chance to control people, to claim he can end the sort of violence that produces a world war. Freddie would make no such claim and there is the irony. Freddie may be given to acts of primal rage but he doesn't want to control the lives of others: he wouldn't seem to wish that people follow his beliefs. He doesn't really have any. Instead, he is motivated by bodily desires, by the need to fornicate, fight and drink. These might not be seen as positive qualities in a person but they are from a certain position much healthier ones that demand nothing more than self-mastery to conquer. The Dodds of this world, those charismatic men with words, might be a far greater problem.


© Tony McKibbin