THE
MASTER (USA, 2012)
[Spoiler in the last paragraph]
His chin angled slightly upward, mouth contorted at random into a sneery smile, eyes washed out, and entire face frequently slipping in and out of focus, Freddie Quell may well come across as permanently drunk and hypnotized. When his inebriated face almost fills the screen, it’s often followed by a closeup of a stern-faced person opposite Quell giving him orders and/or asking questions, thereby making him one of their subjects or dupes. There’s a sort of dialectical process at work that leads up to a furtive shift in the power dynamic. Most scenes exemplifying this process open with a two-shot of Quell and the person sitting next to or across from him, both given equal screen space. Once an interrogation or a “thought-processing” session begins, however, it cuts to alternating closeups, in which Quell ends up revealing his propensity towards sex addiction or his insecurities, whereas the other person—whether a doctor, a V. A. officer, his mentor, or the mentor’s wife—remains distant and poised. Such transitional process doles out glimpses into Quell’s backstory and psychological states, but it above all epitomizes his way of relating to the world outside himself, including his master Lancaster Dodd.
Unfortunately,
though, one seldom gets to know much about Quell, despite a
generous portion of the movie being devoted to probing the Navy vet’s past.
Morsels of information about him are sprinkled here and there most of the time,
yet the majority of it is concentrated in the first few sequences in the form
of discrete chunks of his post-WWII vagabond stints: as a sailor, a portrait
photographer, and a cabbage farm worker. Meandering between jobs, places, and the situations of his own making, Quell carries with him a whiff of disorientation
and total isolation. His postwar years unfold episodically, without allowing
much context with regard to his whereabouts, except in very generic locations
such as a ship, store, and farm. If there’s anything constant about Quell, it’s
that he’s helplessly intoxicated all the time. Indeed, only so much can viewers
learn about him.
Then
what part of the story, which centers deceptively on the origin of a belief
system devised in 1950s America to cure the war-traumatized, makes it a
compelling character study of Freddie Quell, when the events of his past seem
unlikely to form a coherent whole? The answer might be a sense of discontinuity
or disconnect that prevails throughout, indicative of not just Quell’s apparent
mental disorder but his relationships with others, notably Lancaster Dodd, and with
society at large, as well as P. T. Anderson’s stylistic approach to presenting
them. The first half hour or so is all about Quell’s ephemeral attempts to
readapt to civilian life. These episodes of his postwar striving to survive are
strung together in roughly chronological order, but spatially almost
unrelated. Even after Quell enlists in Dodd’s burgeoning spiritual crusade
called The Cause, the narrative sometimes gets disrupted by the prewar flashback
fixated on his first love Doris or cutaways of the open seas. This overarching
ellipsis mirrors Quell’s crushed, amorphous psyche, his
wandering tendencies and inability to relate to other people. He isn’t in the
least interested in adjusting himself to blend into society; he stoops to
primitive instincts and impulses often at others’ expense.
Such
facet of him at once brings out the contrast between him and Dodd. In fact, a
straightforward illustration—or rather, schematization—of their antithetical
relationship can be found in a symmetrically designed jail cell shot in the
second half, where on the left side Quell unleashes his fury and tries to
destroy everything around him while on the right Dodd takes it all in his
stride and pisses unperturbed. It seems as if not only the toilet gets
shattered into shards, but so does Quell’s (forced) faith in The Cause. A bit
of context would help here: Before their imprisonment, Dodd’s son tells Quell with
nonchalance, but not without condescension, “He’s making it up as he goes
along. You don’t see that?” Quell instantly pounces on the son; his overreaction
seems rather a failed disguise of his harbored yet barely repressed suspicion
that the way of life Dodd preaches is plain sham. Why doesn’t he just turn
around and run away, as he’s always done, instead of defending the con artist so vehemently? Now turn back the clock to Dodd and his protégé’s first
encounter.
Quell
meets Dodd, a self-professed writer, nuclear physicist, theoretical
philosopher, and “hopelessly inquisitive” man, after he sneaks aboard a yacht
Dodd commands. Sitting in a noir-ishly low-lit room and looking contemplative
and self-assured, Dodd regards a lost, worn-out Quell lingering on the
threshold with fatherly sympathy. During this sequence, Anderson conveys the two’s
instant camaraderie by narrowing the physical distance between them in just a
few alternating shots. Thereafter the varied distance between them ostensibly delineates
something close to a common push-pull courtship pattern. At the wedding
reception for Dodd’s daughter, Quell examines the Master from the back row, who
warms up the guests by spinning a tale about dragons with a confident display
of glibness and geniality. Then, their second rendezvous advances the relationship
to the next defining phase. At first, the pair is seen in one frame facing each
other in preparation for a therapy session. But once Dodd starts churning out
repetitive, increasingly demanding questions leading to the two's exchange of tight facial
closeups, the session quickly establishes their relative positions in this relationship. That way, Dodd soon succeeds
in breaking through Quell’s boozed-up armor and simultaneously anointing the
subject a precious guinea pig of his.
And
thus Dodd is the ultimate master and their one-sided liaison continues unhindered…
But of course, there’s more to it than that. True, they manage to find their own
places where they feel most secure, the kind of stability that helps them regain their bearings in the chaotic postwar reality and assures them that order
can still be restored and things returned to normal, exactly the way they were
before, even in the aftermath of total man-made world annihilation. To foster such
delusional hope, they are compelled to rely on each other—as much as Quell
needs some guiding figure like Dodd, who proclaims during their fight in the
jail cell, “I’m the only one who likes you!” Dodd also depends on the fidelity
of his followers like Quell to sustain his cult and to survive. And needless to
say, this symbiosis developed out of necessity extends to other believers in
The Cause as well. Their desire for a decent, normal life without feeling alienated
reaches a point where the degree of faith doesn’t even matter. Dodd’s son, for
instance, who lives off his father, plays along although he considers him a
charlatan. Quell secretly nurses his own doubts about the Master, but he willingly
curbs his animal instincts and obeys. The whole enterprise is founded upon lies
and deceit, in which all the related parties, the master and his
patrons/acolytes alike, are complicit to the extent that the cult subsists. And
that seems one of the few viable ways people acclimatized to postwar America.
In
the end, Quell frees himself from Dodd’s hands, but his recovered independence
is not the same as the unfettered freedom he enjoyed before The Cause. He’s
still afloat—wandering in search of the affection, comfort, and security that
Doris, and possibly Dodd, offered him, yet the imprint Dodd left on him appears
indelible when Quell casually reenacts that “thought-processing” on a woman
with whom he crosses paths in a pub during sex. The sex scene’s also reminiscent
of the beach sequence bookending the movie, where Quell humps a female body
sculptured of sand, only to find it frustrating altogether since it’s not a
real woman. He finally gets to have intercourse with a real woman, but Anderson’s
powerhouse performance-backed elusive character study ends with Quell wistfully
eyeing the sandy woman. (9/10)
