The Master

 

 

I just finished watching Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master. I wasn't much interested in seeing it, as people whose judgement I trust found it intolerable walked out of theaters. Yet I generally find Philip Seymour Hoffman a compelling screen presence, so I decided to give it a look. First of all, I understand why Anderson disavowed any specific analog between "The Cause" and Scientology, if not between L. Ron Hubbard and Hoffman's character, clearly inspired by Hubbard. Though the Anderson takes his context from the early years of Scientology, The movie is much more about the homoerotic, quasi-incestuous relationship between Hoffman's character, Lancaster Dodd, and Joaquin Phoenix's character, Freddie Quell, a damaged character whom Dodd does indeed seek intensely yet unsuccessfully to quell. It is also about the spell certain extraordinary people are able to cast upon others. Upon my first (and maybe last) viewing, I took two things away from the movie.

Hoffman was remarkable as the narcissistic, brilliant, extemporaneous "truth" creator, and magnetic cult leader, Dodd. His performance was a study in the attraction of characters like L. Ron, David Berg, Jim Jones, Joseph Smith, David Koresh, and any number of wacko rabbis who have cropped and created cults within Judaism. Why some cults evolve into respectable dominant major religions like Christianity, or minor-but-growing respectable religions like Mormonism, and others live on as toxic and dangerous influences like Scientology, is an interesting question, but not one that will be addressed here; nevertheless, Hoffman skillfully creates a Dodd who embodies the qualities that bind people to false prophets. I liked his Lancaster Dodd, and have always somewhat feared coming under the influence of someone like him. 

One thinks of the Burt Lancaster's charisma in The Rain Maker and Elmer Gantry.  Anderson may have been consciously evoking this cinematic history by using the name. There are some few "chosen" people who have a genius for sounding right and exploiting the desire of others to feel noticed or loved, discover meaning for their lives, or some kind of truth. There are a gifted few who can spout inanity and insanity and somehow sound reasonable and compelling. It is partly the devotee who hands him this power, seeking to fill that empty spiritual space we all feel more or less, but it is no less the innate charisma of these types who have a gift for exploiting this need. "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." People like Dodd are why, within the logic of the Catholic church, the Inquisition existed: to protect the truth. Oops, there I go, defending Buddha killing and the Inquisition again.

The second thing I took away from the movie was the power of Phoenix's character Quell to both quell and incite the insanity in Lancaster Dodd, who was somewhat more his captive that he was Dodd's. Dodd clearly loved Quell as a son and gave him more attention than he did his actual son. Just as obviously, he was connected to Quell on a profound erotic level, while Dodd was primarily just a surrogate father to Quell. Yet Dodd was also willing to banish him in the end, led mainly by the will of his minatory wife, well played by Amy Adams. Relinquishment is something cult leaders are notoriously unable to offer, yet he does in his way, weirdly singing the 1940s love song "I'd Like to Get you On a Slow Boat to China," over the phone to him in the penultimate scene. Paradoxically, Quell was the more transformative character than the cult leader, stuck as he was in the grip of his own messianic complex, and he very nearly got through to Dodd, despite himself, on a transformative human level, a level of truth. But in the end, each remained within his prison, something beautifully illustrated in an earlier scene where they are incarcerated in adjoining cells. Each man in his own prison arguing with and shouting at the other--which is what they have done throughout the relationship.