making it up
by Douglas Messerli
Paul
Thomas Anderson (writer and director) The
Master / 2012
Through the link of Freddie’s potent "mixology"
of an 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 are 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the “master’s” unpublished papers are worth)?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 brain-washing.
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, however, 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, his wife Peggy quickly shifts him in
away. These frightful believers are, in Anderson’s telling, human beings,
despite Dodd’s huge ego and his followers’ absolute subservience to his
beliefs.
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 shift 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 followers 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 writing, it is a work well worth seeing again and thinking about.
For at the heart of 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 often behind any powerful sense of identity. And doesn't sex always meet at those two avenues, a sense of identity with a sense of powerful interconnection? So how should we imagine we might separate them? That is, obviously, what is behind almost all religions' attempts to intervene in our sexual lives! Sex and religion, alas, have been always inextricably intertwined.
Los Angeles,
September 21, 2012
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