There Will be Blood set the earth on fire and spired skyscrapers of oil-fire smoke into the sky. The Master, from the very beginning, portends a more beatific scene, calm at the edges, but churning underneath. The film begins with a wake being drawn through the ocean. The turquoise and lazuli hues of the cresting water as it separates are mesmerizing while the white foam effected by the boat’s propeller suggests both a disruption in tranquility and the inevitability that it will become lost in the distance as the boat moves on and the wake dissipates.
Here, we might begin to wonder what allegory to Scientology will be woven and how Paul Thomas Anderson plans to fictionalize L. Ron Hubbard, the controversial American pulp fiction writer and founder of the Church of Scientology. But The Master is as much about Scientology as There Will be Blood is an adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s book Oil. Simply put, both are loosely based at best, despite the consistent chatter about the connection prior to the movie’s release.
Rather, The Master is about why religions, cults, and sects (Scientology, Raeleanism, etc.) arise. The film does not focus on the politics of Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) as much as it looks at a war veteran (Dodd again) seeking a way to understand himself without being entrapped in the generalized diagnoses constructed by military psychiatrists whose protocol hardly varies from soldier to soldier as they inspect each one as if cursorily looking at scuff marks on a pair of Navy-issued shoes.
The Master then parallels Dodd with Freddy Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a Navy veteran returning from World War II. His kidneys have been shredded by shrapnel; his back and shoulders are contorted; and he has a severe drinking problem. (Think turpentine cocktails, not gin martinis.) And, like the rest of his fellow sailors, he is encouraged to assimilate into normalcy, burying everything he’s seen and experienced. In this, Anderson is looking at our overall treatment of soldiers as they return to and from war, but also the phenomena of forced isolation in society. Each sailor is told they are “blessed with the rejuvenating powers of youth” as if time will erase the horrors they have experienced during D-Day. They are encouraged to “go back to school” and “raise children,” all the while being told that they suffer from a “shameful,” “nervous condition.”
Effectively, modern medicine, psychiatry, and rhetoric label each soldier with an emasculating malady while pushing them to a socially approved state of normalcy, one that becomes more of a façade than reality.
Quell parapetetically moves from job to job. His position as a department-store photographer is short-lived as he antagonizes the customers, and his brief stint as a cabbage picker ends with him running across an open field, chased by his co-workers accusing him of murder. His inability to hold a job speaks to his inability to fit into normalized society, but something deeper resides underneath. Quell, as his name suggests, is holding something back, talking with garbled speech as if his voice battles a gauntlet of memories and desires that seize his tongue.
As I mentioned before, The Master is not really about Scientology, but about why Scientology and its ilk comes into being. For Quell, Dodd’s Cause (sort of like Hubbard’s Dianetics), offers as outlet. It offers a way to rationalize his existence by travelling back through time (like something out of Vonnegut) to understand why he is the way he is in the present day. And, for Quell (and possibly even Dodd), this new mysticism offers an outlet and an acceptance for his repressed homosexuality.
The movie begins with a wake, but then moves to a beach with a beating sun and dozens of shirtless men. In the sand, they carve out a female body with large breasts. Quell, in an attempt to exert his hyper-male sexuality, fingers the sand-woman and then climbs on top, emphatically humping the mound of sand. The other men watch, but the desire wanes as if act is less driven by libido and driven more by showmanship. He tires and walks to the ocean, wiping the sand out of his crotch. Quell’s visit with the Navy psychiatrist exemplifies more of the same exaggerated over-compensation of his sexuality. To each Rorschach ink blot, Quell offers an interpretation that has some variation on a vagina and penis entering a vagina. To be honest, the blots are quite sexual, but his responses seem more to convince the psychiatrist – and himself – of his sexual orientation than anything else. And here, Quell offers yet another mode of forced normalcy.
To be honest, I didn’t catch the homosexuality narrative until about thirty minutes left in the movie. This is certainly a credit to Anderson, whose narratives are subtle and profound at the same time. Perhaps I was still looking too deeply for a critique of Scientology, or of Hubbard. Or perhaps I was enthralled with the performances of Phoenix and Hoffman, both of whom are certainly the front runners for any Awards this season.
However, Quell’s repressed sexuality is present throughout, beginning with the scenes between him and the charismatic Dodd. Hoffman speaks with a present but subtle British lilt, and the corners of his mouth are always raised in a smile. He is forceful, but his voice is enchanting, as is the way he and Quell connect. As former soldiers, they share a connection through emotion, memory, and shunning. Their understanding also breeds a mutual attraction, and at time, it’s suggested that perhaps Dodd is hiding the same demons that plague Quell.
Characteristically, Anderson’s film is mysterious and difficult to decipher at times, like when Dodd’s pregnant wife Peggy approaches him as he washes his face over the bathroom sink. She reminds him that she doesn’t care what he does with other people as long as no one he knows or she knows learns about it. She says this – almost in recitation – as she masturbates him and he comes in the sink before she walks away. The intimacy here is null and the handjob is almost perfunctory to keep Dodd away from someone else, and the only someone else present in this film is Quell.
This scene occurs shortly after Dodd entertains everyone with a song and dance number. Always the performer, Dodd’s voice is clear, and his movements are fluid, but as he moves about the room, the in-and-out-of drunken stupor Quell watches him and hallucinates. Every woman in the room becomes naked. Ostensibly, this could bring the viewer back to Quell’s repeated mentioning of “vagina” in the shrink’s office, but there’s something very asexual about this scene. The naked woman dance around Dodd, but they are out of focus and deglamorized. They are not young supermodels; they are average women from their thirties to their sixties. The one person who remains in focus from Quell’s glaring in the chair: Dodd. Quell sees past the women, and it’s as if the nudes who gather and dance around Dodd are a forced distraction brought on by Quell’s subconscious. But, it fails. He sees Dodd. He follows Dodd, like the dog to a master. And, as he follows Dodd, Peggy’s eyes follow Quell’s, watching an attraction. And, as the audience, we feel the her jealousy of Dodd and her envy of Quell.
Quell’s struggles also present themselves on a linguistic level. Perhaps I’m reading too much into this, but I almost expect nothing less than a Lacanian-theory laden film from Paul Thomas Anderson now. However, it seems that Quell’s repeated note that he’s an “able-bodied seaman” corroborates the above reading by reaffirming his sexual subconscious as well as transferring it to language. Something most interesting about The Master and the methods employed by Dodd are their similarities to Freud’s talking therapy that ultimately birthed the foundation on which his psychoanalytic theories are built. Within The Cause, Dodd uses the power of speech and repetition to open the mind, as opposed to enclose it in concrete categorization. At the same time, this opens this film up quite a bit to a close reading of the langue. The able-bodies portion can certainly relate to his crippled back, but his – as Dodd notes – repetition of seaman seems to offer a deeper glimpse into Quell’s subconscious.
Something else to consider is Quell’s use of “away” when he describes the manner in which he left behind Doris – the sixteen year old girl who holds his fascination. First, her age suggests that nothing foreseeable can transpire, but more important is Quell’s fleeing from her to find comfort on a man-filled vessel. Yes, escape and the open waters could certainly call his name, but it also appears that his abdication is similarly “a way” for him to indulge his subconscious desires in a socially accepted form – the military. And, perhaps this word would be thrown away in a script that flows in a machine gun’s clip like The Master‘s, but as Dodd asks, “Why did [Quell] say away? Why was that the first word that came to mind?” And why, like “able-bodied seaman” is it repeated? As Deleuze notes in Difference and Repetition, the same events don’t occur over and over again; moments re-represent themselves in different forms channeling the same meaning and memories.
Throughout, The Master tantalizes and sends its audience on voyages that might be akin to Quell’s. And, in the end, perhaps we find what we’re looking for. Or, perhaps, like Quell, we find a close facsimile of what we want. For Quell, it’s Winn Manchester, a woman whom he picks up in a pub in England. And while this might bunk my theory of his repressed homosexuality, it should be noted that Manchester is the only woman he has sex with throughout the film, and her name bears a homophonic resemblance to Dodd’s. The syllables in Lancaster’s name that flow 1:2, reverse and follow 2:1 in Manchester’s. To compound the eerie transference here, it should also be noted that Winn bears a striking resemblance to Dodd. Her hair color, facial shape, and body type (complete with soft belly paunch) mirror Dodd’s.
All in all, The Master is a brilliant film that doesn’t preach about homosexuality and sexual repression, but uses this as one of many examples of lifestyles that clash with constructed normalcy. And, if we are in an age – and arguably have been for centuries – wherein traditional religion itself clashes with a constructed, contemporary normalcy, then our natural inclination is to evolve. And, this evolution might cause us to transcend the notion that there is a higher power and embrace the capabilities that we have within our own minds. Perhaps, in the end, Scientology and the like will merely be hokum, but, according to The Master, their inception offers an outlet to those who wish to deny categorization.
