Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Talent: Joaquín Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams
Release Date: 16th November 2012
Paul Thomas Anderson’s sixth feature arrives in cinemas with a level of expectation heretofore unexperienced by the young director (he is still only 42!), after the critical and commercial success of 2007’s There Will Be Blood, a film in which Daniel Day Lewis’ remarkable lead performance was met halfway by Anderson’s directorial bravura, the result widely considered his masterpiece. If There Will Be Blood married a thematic concern of Anderson’s that had been persistent throughout his career to that point—that of troubled and unconventional father-son relationships—with a wider comment on structures of power in capitalism—evoked most glaringly in the film’s grand guignol closing scene, in which Day Lewis’ oil baron beats Paul Dano’s evangelist priest to death with a tenpin in his private bowling alley (an addition made to America’s own White House by Richard Nixon on his inauguration as President)—then The Master certainly attempts something similar, casting Philip Seymour Hoffman as the charismatic, blustering head of a bourgeois cult called “The Cause”, one Lancaster Dodd, and Joaquín Phoenix as his ex-navy protégé and possibly PTSD-afflicted (amongst other things) loose cannon, Freddie Quell: the symbolic bases are, so to speak, loaded.
But before we examine the film in more depth, a comment about its commendable depiction of mental illness: Anderson runs counter to the decades-old Hollywood representational convenance of understanding mental illness both through visual metaphor and as a narrative function unto itself. Quell does not walk around with shoelaces untied, exhibit a prominent facial tic or live in a cluttered houseboat (indeed, Quell is a drifter, and we never see his home) as shorthand and, further, his mental ill-health is not a rational device, couched in cause-and-effect logic, to be explained and understood as a cogent narrative element*. The Master is a deeply uncomfortable film to watch, and it is in no small part due to Phoenix’s unsettling, repulsive and tragic performance in the lead role.
We join Quell at the end of WW II, on a tropical beach, getting drunk on torpedo fuel, telling gruesome jokes and performing sex acts on women crudely sculpted out of sand for the amusement of his fellow recruits. Rather quickly with the latter, however, Quell goes too far for his colleagues’ laughter to be sustained, manhandling the crotch of the sculpture with an intensity equal parts focus and bewilderment, oblivious to their discomfort. The urge to look away is a common one, in this film. Quell does not have any friends, as such: his only social interactions with others tend to involve him offering them hard drinks, often of his own concoction—and he seems to be proficient chemist, capable of producing highly intoxicating substances from improvised ingredients that are non-toxic, provided you “drink them smart”, he maintains—or treating them cruelly or aggressively. He drifts from job to job, farming cabbages to working as a photographer in a big department store, leaving destruction blithely in his wake, until he encounters Lancaster Dodd after sneaking aboard his festive yacht. Quell’s unpredictability, intensity and aforementioned skill in producing intoxicating beverages immediately endear him to the master, with his enthusiasm for Dodd’s “processing”—essentially an interrogation designed to elicit emotional responses, often relating to the uncovering of past trauma—establishing him both as a protégé and a long-term “project” for The Cause. What appears to Dodd as Quell’s will to “get better”, evidenced by his ready participation in processing, may well however be a manifestation of a self-destructive impulse, a wish to be hurt, in the young man. There is a tension evoked, then, between The Cause’s ability to heal, and its potential to damage, the individual. If this is manifest in the character of Quell, the perpetual prodigal son, without self-control but longing for the sense of purpose or belonging offered to him by his continued relationship with Dodd, then it operates within the film on a wider level, and is directly concerned with representations of mental illness, as mentioned earlier.
Dodd, like the Hollywood cinematic convention eschewed formally by the film, sees Quell as a “broken man”. His mental illness comprises a departed individual identity, a floating set of characteristics and tics that constitute the rubble of the real man lost. For Dodd, Quell is there to be remade, reshaped, by The Cause, just as cinematic representational convention attempts to annihilate and reconstitute mental illness within an established, consumable matrix of signs and functions. Dodd’s project is as Hollywood’s: an obfuscation, in which the individual is not lost, but distorted by the means of “treatment”. However, as Anderson makes abundantly clear, he is a huckster, a charlatan and a megalomaniac; if sanitised, cinematic visions of mental ill-health allure and excite unblinkingly, Lancaster Dodd’s mask slips all too regularly for the illusion to be sustained. Peggy (Amy Adams), Dodd’s demure but assertive wife (and, it is heavily implied, perhaps the real “brains” of the operation), attests that their time spent on the yacht is the only peace they get, away from his many “enemies”, and indeed it is only this sequence in which a sense of hope and comfort is conveyed to the audience, with regard to the relationship between Dodd and Quell. On land, this harmony falls apart.
Dodd’s delicately structured pantomime cannot sustain itself against the incursions of a wider social reality. Quell becomes ever more violent and unpredictable when faced with detractors of The Cause, while his own belief in his master falters and fluctuates with the passing of time. In perhaps the film’s crudest scene, Dodd is interrogated by an attendee of the party at which he is performing a processing with the hostess. Unable to overcome the man’s enthusiastic skepticism with rhetoric, he furiously decries him as a “pig fuck”. Quell throws an hors d’oeuvre at the man’s shirt; later on that night, he will call to his door to administer a retributive beating. One gets the sense that Dodd’s encounter with the skeptic would have held more dramatic tension were Dodd himself a sympathetic character, but instead he is faintly ridiculous, his religious project manifestly intellectually bereft, to the viewer. Where There Will Be Blood’s Daniel Plainview’s monstrousness and, later, sheer malice was met by a magnetic heroism (remember, he dragged himself through miles of desert with two broken legs in the film’s opening sequence!), Lancaster Dodd is a doughy, bourgeois cultist whose wrath extends to piss-weak profanity and the ham-fisted exercise of psychological dominion over his subjects. From the outset, we are given to treat him with suspicion and cynicism: The Cause is not revealed to be ridiculous, as it seems that way to us from the outset (indeed, the endless comparisons of Dodd to L. Ron Hubbard and The Cause to Scientology in media coverage of the film cannot have helped in this regard). It seems inevitable that there will be no heartwarming recapitulation, none of the poetry of a titular line, no rousing, redemptive speech and no reconciliation, no healing for Quell. Instead, we are left to observe the film’s slow, steady self-destruction, like the frothed wake of a yacht, that lingering image of blue and white to which the film returns again and again, with the bewilderment that is the lived experience of mental illness.
If The Master’s eschewing of dramatic satisfaction, or refusal to resolve its inherent tensions and conflicts, is justifiable in the context of a revision of the depictions of mental illness as something beyond narrativisation, then it replaces these saccharine elements with a cosmic pessimism, one that confronts uncomfortable realities but offers nothing other than to define itself negatively with respect to them: Dodd is a fraud and Quell cannot be healed. No major American film has ever embodied the internal, fatalistic logic of the melancholic so thoroughly, felt so hermetic from any kind of social realism. Kristeva had it that mental illness was a space of near pure individuation; The Master maintains that sensation, all its sounds and images poised precariously above an ocean of terror, a sadness of unimaginable depth.
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* Contemporary films to exhibit one or both of these dehumanising tendencies are, amongst others, David Fincher’s Fight Club, Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind and Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator.
