In his Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar
Wilde remarked that 'Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the
work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord
with himself.' There are other American filmmakers who could be said to possess
this accord with themselves: the Coen brothers, Tarantino. But the latter
enfant terrible turned pop culture institution appears arguably to have been increasingly in thrall to a static (some might say sterile) and patented
image of his work, producing variations on a schtick that has its origins in
the earliest days of his career.
PT Anderson, on the other hand, shows with his latest release, The
Master, that he is committed purely to his own vision, and has little
interest in paying lip service to what others might expect of him. If nothing
else, and for good or ill, The Master is a movie by a filmmaker who is
truly liberated, unlike the characters who form its subject.
Certainly there has been a great deal of diversity in
critical opinion of the picture, with revered figures such as Roger Ebert and
David Thomson proving baffled and bemused by the film's restlessness and
unresolved structure. It has been called muddled and confused, but I would be
more inclined to agree with those who think of it as an example of
authentically exploratory filmmaking. One gets the sense when watching it that
Anderson shot enormous swathes of footage and found the film he wanted to make
during the shooting and in the cutting room.
In spirit, it's far closer to European cinema than anything
in the USA, and certainly anything in Anderson's back catalogue. Its habit of
dwelling upon the spaces between significant events, often omitting the events
at all, is straight out of Antonioni - only coupled with Anderson's endless
fascination with American archetypes.
If there's one major influence on PT Anderson's The
Master that has so far passed largely unobserved, it is that of American
literary giant Thomas Pynchon. Anderson, no stranger to using classics from the
American corpus as raw material for his own singular imagination, has
previously stated that he is adapting the author's 2009 novel, Inherent Vice,
but it appears that elements of his aesthetic have already filtered into the
filmmaker's work.
The ghost of Pynchon is tangible in its period setting in
the years immediately following the end of the Second World War and America's
campaign in the South Pacific - the same period explored by Pynchon's magnum
opus, Gravity's Rainbow.
The film begins with veteran Freddie Quell's fitful attempts
to adapt to life in California after he is discharged from the Navy, before he
experiences a chance encounter with the charismatic Lancaster Dodd, leader of a
spiritual movement not dissimilar (ahem) to Scientology. After this, the pace of the
movie slows and the picaresque narrative gives way to a nebulous character
piece cum sociological survey as Freddie and Dodd embark upon a deeply
enigmatic friendship.
Like in Pynchon's famous (and infamous) cornerstone of postmodernism,
the post-war USA of The Master is depicted as a metaphysical,
specifically ontological rabbit hole, torn open by the psychological trauma of
the returning soldiers, where the future of the American individual, the
American dream and the American soul are perilously up for grabs.
Time itself appears to have been fragmented in these texts:
Pynchon jumps from days of war to peacetime in disorienting fashion; Freddie,
despite his seemingly careless and unencumbered forward momentum, is actually preoccupied
with a pre-war romance that he regrets fleeing from, and we as the audience are
continually presented, via fleeting, Malick-like interludes, with incidents
from his past.
Dodd, for all his hokey bluster and pseudo-psychology, hits
the nail on the head when he defends his movement's practice of attempting to
access followers' past lives by saying that even if one cannot see what is
around the bend in the river that one has already passed, that does not mean it
has ceased to exist. The world according to The Master is one where
time, memory, and the ever-present past, are both the keys to our prison and
the means of our redemption from it.
Dodd, with his obsessive attention to the past, hammering
away at Freddie during their 'Processing' sessions with questions about his
personal history, comes to represent the tyranny of memory. He re-awakens
Freddie to himself, to who he has been and who he can be, and thereby bestows
upon him a much-needed identity: that of the soul-searcher and the (temporarily)
willing patient. But eventually Freddie outstrips Dodd again and strikes out
into an unknown, ostensibly liberated future.
The scene where Freddie escapes on Dodd's motorbike,
speeding away into the heat haze of a desert landscape is rife with contradictions
that enrich this key theme: The landscape itself, redolent of the mythology of
the Old West and the new frontier where America dreamt that a man was free to
forge his own future, is undercut by the fact that - as we soon realise - Quell
is actually heading back into his past, returning to the home of the wartime
sweetheart he abandoned nearly a decade previously. It's also surely symbolic
that the vehicle Quell uses to stage his escape actually belongs to his
psychological captor, Dodd. If Quell has extricated himself from his past,
which is not at all certain, it is only because Dodd has forcibly immersed him
in it.
For a film so concerned with time, it is apposite that
Anderson seems to have edited the picture with the screening room of memory in
mind. Like The Tree of Life, it is a film of elliptical, discrete
moments, rather than of a fully intelligible narrative. And its puzzle-box
structure is arguably only really understood or felt hours after one has
experienced it, as one combines disparate moments from its length in a quest
for patterns and meaning.
One pattern that springs to my mind 48 hours after
originally seeing it is that of men wrestling, an image recurring throughout.
There's the boisterous rough-and-tumble of a group of seamen on a beach in the
South Pacific, Quell's violent and comical shoving-match with a disgruntled
customer in the department store where he finds himself briefly employed, and
his playful, affectionate roll in the grass with Dodd upon their reunion after
a brief spell in police custody. At least two of these instances can be
construed as partly homoerotic, particularly in light of the fact that - as
recognised elsewhere and confirmed by Anderson - Quell and Dodd's relationship
is on one level that of a love affair. Very unusually for American cinema,
where male interaction rarely strays from implicit affirmation of that which is
hetero-normative, in The Master Anderson subtly explores how the
violence of male expression might conceal or displace other suppressed desires.
As in the auteur's similarly unclassifiable Punch-Drunk Love, he also
sheds light on the liminal spaces where love and violence, happiness and
madness can become difficult to distinguish.
It's intriguing that, given such a visceral depiction of
male relationships, Anderson should keep women in the background as either an
idealised form of innocent love or an image of sexual objectification: think of
Dodd prancing about like a ridiculous satyr amongst an audience of naked
acolytes, or the nymph the soldiers fashion out of sand, with her grotesquely
proportioned breasts, before cheering raucously as Freddie humps it. Is
Anderson saying that, in a society run by men where female sexuality is penned
in by male desire, male sexuality consequently turns back upon itself?
Tellingly, at least until the very end, no male character is able to consummate
a sexual relationship with a woman.
As is emphasised by their explicitly physical confrontation,
Quell and Dodd's encounters are often battles of personality, where each tries
to gain the upper hand over the other in a manner that is successively
sinister, adoring, outwardly hostile and nakedly flirtatious. If Quell is the
raging Id and Dodd the Super-Ego, then one might ultimately say that The
Master is about one soul, the American spirit of self-determination and
self-destruction, in conversation and conflict with itself.
In an interview with the Spanish elder statesman of modern
queer cinema, Pedro Almodóvar, Anderson shared his admiration for the way his
interlocutor often fills his movies with many possible storylines that are left
partially open and unresolved. It appears to have rubbed off: What you get,
ultimately, with The Master is a movie that lays itself boldly,
shamelessly, open to interpretation, and needs the participation of the viewer
to illuminate its inner recesses.
It might be an easier film to admire than it is to love, but
the same can probably be said for all great modern art - anything that is
vital, complex, and new.
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