Of Masters and Men

One would expect a film called The Master to contain a character who is the master. In The Bodyguard there is no doubt that Kevin Costner is the bodyguard, nor that Adrian Brody is the pianist in the film of the same name. This is also true of The Machinist, a harrowing 2004 film in which Christian Bale plays a machinist, as well as The Dark Knight, The Mummy, The Postman, The Artist, The Patriot, The Highwayman and numerous others. Even films such as The Honeymooners and The Babymakers revolve around the kinds of characters you might expect.

It’s not clear in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2012 film, The Master, who the master is. It’s not even clear that the title refers to a specific character in the film. Maybe the master is Anderson. Maybe the master is you, the viewer. Or God? Maybe it’s a reference to the particular cut of the film we’re watching. Is there a master? No one knows. 

One candidate for “the master,” though not a very good one, is Freddie Quell (Phoenix). Freddie excels at rash behavior and excessive drinking. A WWII veteran tormented by unnamed traumas from childhood and war, Freddie stumbles drunk through life, unable to hold down a job or a meaningful relationship, leaving a trail of destruction in his wake. 

Eventually he stumbles into the orbit of Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman), a wealthy renaissance man who takes an instant, though highly paternal, liking to Freddie. Maybe Dodd is the master? He does lead a cult that includes his hypnotized-looking family and worships something called “The Cause” which resembles Scientology. He speaks forcefully and pretentiously, and waxes poetic about beliefs such as that the earth is a trillion years old and “man is not an animal”. 

Freddie is easily enthralled, and becomes obsessed once Dodd subjects him to “processing”, a bizarre interrogative technique designed to probe the subconscious and resolve something or other. Dodd professes to dig deep, but the deeper one digs into Dodd, the less of any meaning one finds. Is Dodd brainwashing Freddie or trying to help him? Maybe, like a lion tamer, he simply enjoys having a lurching beast tied to his post. 

In the downtime between therapy sessions, Dodd enables Freddie’s drinking, even while those in his inner circle warn him of the dangers of courting an unstable drunk. Freddie, the simple-minded mixer of poisons, carries the shame of being an alcoholic and a vagrant, while Dodd drinks furiously into the night and wakes up in the morning exalted as a healer. 

But what kind of master is Dodd? His wife, Peggy (Adams), looks at times opiated by her husband’s ferocity, and at other times totally unphased by him. One morning she finds hubby slouching over the bathroom sink, hungover from another night of boozing with Freddie, and proceeds to grab him by the manhood and masturbate him to completion. She knows what he’s been up to, and it only takes her so many seconds to start and finish the conversation. Who’s the master now? 

She follows that up with a visit to Freddie’s bedside, and implores him to put away the booze or get out. Her power grab in the center of the film begs a question: are Dodd and Freddie the kind of men to be admired? Do they have real demons and aspirations? Something in me wanted to believe that, but it’s obvious that Peggy sees them as garden-variety boys in need of some reckoning. 

The relationship between the two men turns and sputters. Freddie leaves, but doesn’t stop drinking, and it only takes a minor manipulation for Dodd to lure him back. Ultimately Peggy, despite all her conviction, proves unable to rehabilitate either her husband or his drinking buddy in the slightest. She stomps off in frustration. All prospective masters have given and gotten comeuppance, at least once or twice over.

Do human power dynamics resolve into such a mobius strip? Evidently every master has his or her master; as children we learned this in the game “Rock Paper Scissors”, in which each implement can defeat or be defeated by exactly one other implement. Somehow this weird fact of nature pervades human relationships way beyond childhood. Paper-thin Freddie is ripped to shreds by Dodd’s gnashing blades. Dodd buckles under the weight of Peggy’s rock. But Peggy is enveloped and neutralized by Freddie. Around and around it goes. 

Maybe Anderson means this as a rendition of the trinity: the father, son and Holy Spirit personified in his three leads. I imagine he is too much an atheist to make a religious film, though, so I prefer another interpretation, which is that Freddie, Peggy and Dodd represent the id, ego and superego, and the clash there between. 

Freud says that the human psyche consists of multiple opposing forces: sexual and aggressive impulses spring up from the id, the superego counters with morality, and the ego attempts to mediate with reason. Perhaps this is our trio — Freddie the id, Peggy the ego and Dodd the superego. If so, we have arrived at somewhere human, but still conspicuously without a master. Whatever the case, it’s worth realizing that this is not a film about “the relationship between two men.” That setup has been proposed in other works, but is probably the stuff of fairytales; in real life, there is always at least a third person present, if not a fourth, fifth and sixth. 

The charm of this film ultimately lies less in its psychological pursuits than in its craft. I have long admired Anderson because he excels at what he does. The Master is a filmmaking clinic, even if it says relatively little about the questions it raises. So what? Shot on 70mm film, the photography bursts through the screen with saturated colors and guile; like a late Edward Hopper painting, there’s no mistaking that this is mid-century America — a stark place brimming with confidence and delusion. 

Early in the film, Freddie works as a photographer at a department store, snapping portraits of the customers. Anderson gives us a series of closeups through Freddie’s lens: a beautiful woman, three young brothers, a debutante. Is this technicolor? It feels so familiar and yet so strange. In the soundtrack Ella Fitzgerald croons, “Get thee behind me, Satan”. War is over, and who doesn’t want their picture taken anyway?

Anderson deserves respect for putting so much faith in actors and cameras. One wonders how many times he threw the script on the floor and simply asked Hoffman and Phoenix to get in character. Depending on your perspective, the result is either a great film or a collection of taped acting exercises — or pretty much anything in between. 

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The Master. 2012. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams. Adult themes and booze, and occasional language and intimacy. Rated R.