| Nazeeh Alghazawneh |
The Master plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, March 14th, through Sunday, March 16th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
“You know how you get rid of crabs? You got to shave one testicle. All the crabs go over to the other testicle, you got to light the hair on fire on that one. When they all go scurrying out, you take an ice pick and you fucking stab every single last one of them!” — Freddie Quell
A sentiment often circulated among film discourse that I tend to agree with goes something like, “All great filmmakers essentially make the same movie over and over again.” Anderson’s cinema restlessly posits the human condition as a struggle to reconcile that we are animals whose spiritual sentience has rendered the hierarchy of the food chain obsolete. The characters of his films are often existential transients, dilly-dallying in personal limbo, in the chasm between the corporeal and the ephemeral and the tension tethering those ends. More importantly for Anderson is the central emphasis that whatever separates us from other animals can never erase or replace our base primal instincts.
The Master introduces Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell, a disillusioned WWII vet who fashions Chernobyl-level cocktails from whatever chemicals he can siphon from his surroundings, with a crude, sadistic joke about how to get rid of pubic lice. It’s a wonderfully disarming piece of opening dialogue, a first impression for Freddie made all the more cutting by contrasting its ugliness with the idyllic, fantasy-like setting of beaches bathed in oceanic pastels, nostalgic navy hues that no longer exist. Beyond a cursory introduction, Freddie’s joke foreshadows how the blacked-out unreliability of his alcoholism is the thread that leads him to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd. When Freddie talks about how one gets rid of crabs, he sells it as a joke, but it’s also entirely possible that it’s something he’s actually done to himself; it’s by design that neither the viewer nor Freddie knows the truth. There’s a scene early on where Freddie is accused of poisoning a man to death with his industrial-grade alcoholic swill and is run off, exclaiming that the man drank his death elixir intentionally. The ambiguous nature of Freddie’s will to live is brought into question—the temporal splitting of his consciousness by way of poisonous booze that should kill him but doesn’t, finds Freddie accidentally transcending onto a new plane of reality, like an inverse of asceticism.
Freddie has no memory of his arrival when first meeting Lancaster Dodd, on a ship, and is told by Dodd he ended up there after an alcoholic crash out. When Freddie rejects that scenario, Dodd insists Freddie advertised himself as an able-bodied seaman looking for work. Once again, neither we nor Freddie know for sure whether Dodd’s account is indeed the case, but do know that it’s entirely possible, and likely, Freddie caused an unscrupulous, wasted raucous. Dodd declares Freddie a wayward scoundrel, utterly lost in life, while simultaneously marveled by the alchemy of his deadly hooch, which he refers to as a “remarkable potion.”
I find the framing of The Master as a film about Scientology reductive in its thematic scope and uninspiring in its exploration of spiritual power dynamics. The controversial cult as a point of reference is primarily notable for how common and unremarkable its massive success is. The thing about mystic grifters pontificating as modern-day prophets is people are tired of waiting for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. What Lancaster Dodd, and men like him, understand is that the Bible never accounted for the arrival of the atom bomb—a weapon capable of instant mass extinction was supposed to be reserved only for God. Perhaps the Second Coming hasn’t quite arrived, but at the very least, it appears Jesus has outsourced His Divinity to man; Lancaster Dodd isn’t so farfetched now, everything is on the table. This dry run for The Rapture has tripped a collective, existential seizure so severe, people have become desperate for an inferior cypher they can perceive in the physical, to project their contrition onto. The foundation of Dodd’s dogma orients our souls as infinite lifetimes in a non-linear consciousness, that exist in a quantum space where time is not chronological, but a single, parallel point of singularity.
The film’s epilogue finds Freddie faced with the ultimatum of either returning to The Cause or to his life as a philanderer. Peggy Dodd (performed by the always beguiling Amy Adams), the matriarch of the cult and arguably its most lucid champion, incredulous at Freddie’s fence-sitting, washes her hands of the louse: “You either do this for a billion years or not at all! This isn’t fashion.” A billion years. In her ire one could presume such a number is clearly hyperbole. And that’d be correct. One could also take her words at face value, with equal conviction. That is what The Cause offers to its members, not immortality, but a cognitive dissonance so malleable that it’s close enough. Lancaster Dodd is incredibly fond of Freddie’s death-inducing potion. He finds it to be a deep well of inspiration, to get where he’s trying to go. Plutonium-239, a primary component used in nuclear reactors, with a half-life of 24,000 years could very well be found in a Freddie Quell concoction. Not quite a billion years but it’ll do for now. It’s the 20th century and modernity has given us the nuclear bomb. There are new, chic ways to die—abstract post-mortems to assuage the fresh horrors pioneered by American exceptionalism.
Edited by Matthew Tchepikova-Treon