The Master -2012-

In the pantheon of 21st-century American cinema, few films are as perplexing, voluptuous, and deeply unsettling as Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master . Released in 2012, the film arrived shrouded in controversy and curiosity. It was widely touted as a thinly veiled critique of Scientology and its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. Yet, to view The Master merely as an exposé or a biopic is to do a disservice to Anderson’s ambitions. The film is not a takedown of a cult; it is a tragic, intimate exploration of the animalistic nature of humanity and the desperate, perhaps impossible, search for a master who can tame it.

Phoenix portrays Freddie not as a man, but as a wounded animal. His posture is hunched, his mouth hangs open, and his eyes dart with a mixture of paranoia and predation. He represents the id—the raw, unformed, chaotic energy of the human spirit. He is the post-war American nightmare: a man who has seen the darkness of the world and cannot reintegrate into the polite artifice of society. the master -2012-

Enter Lancaster Dodd, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Dodd is everything Freddie is not: articulate, educated, composed, and charming. He is the leader of "The Cause," a nascent philosophical movement that claims to heal trauma by accessing past lives. If Freddie is the body, Dodd is the mind. He is the "Master," not because he possesses supernatural powers, but because he offers a structure—a cage—within which Freddie’s chaotic spirit might be housed. In the pantheon of 21st-century American cinema, few

Set in the immediate aftermath of World War II, The Master is a film of contradictions. It is a sweeping epic shot on 65mm film, offering vistas of crystalline clarity, yet its story is intensely internal, focusing on the dysrhythmic heartbeat of two men. It is a movie about the birth of a new religious movement, yet it is devoid of the supernatural. It is a story of control, directed by a filmmaker at the absolute height of his command over the medium. At the center of the narrative is Freddie Quell, played by Joaquin Phoenix in a performance that redefined the boundaries of screen acting. When we meet Freddie, he is a drifter, a Navy veteran suffering from what we would now call severe PTSD, though the film labels him merely as "cracked." Freddie is a creature of impulse. He is sexually compulsive, violent, and prone to drinking concoctions that would kill a lesser man—paint thinner, photo chemicals, and torpedo fuel. Ron Hubbard

In one of the most celebrated scenes in modern cinema, Dodd subjects Freddie to an unblinking staring contest, demanding answers to questions about his past, his desires, and his fears. The camera closes in tight on their faces. There is no music, only the ambient sounds of the room and the friction of their wills.

It is here that the dynamic of the film crystallizes. This is not a student-teacher relationship; it is a love story of sorts, albeit a deeply dysfunctional one. Freddie craves a father figure, someone to tell him that his urges are natural or, conversely, that they can be fixed. Dodd craves a subject who won't leave, a beast that will not be tamed, because the presence of the beast necessitates the Master.

The brilliance of Anderson’s screenplay is in how it subverts expectations. We expect Freddie to be brainwashed. Instead, Freddie absorbs the language of The Cause but fails to internalize its discipline. He continues to drink, to fight, and to disrupt Dodd’s events. He becomes the id that threatens to tear down the superego.