Is The Master Really The Best Movie Of The Year?

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Calling The Master the best movie of the year is actually reductive. Paul Thomas Anderson’s brilliant and elusive Scientology-based period drama is far too accomplished to be compared to a single year’s offerings and far too challenging to be widely accepted within that given year. The film’s sublime and subliminal mysteries are the kind that you grapple with long after it’s over. Revealing itself through repeat viewings and retrospect, The Master fits snuggly into terms that are both clichéd and ironic, like “instant classic” and “timeless.” What’s most ironic is that timelessness is among the film’s most pervasive themes. The Plot

The Master follows Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell, a war-torn veteran who returns home with trauma that may be caused by his actions overseas or may actually be rooted from a time before that. He attempts to reintegrate himself, taking a job as a department store photographer and then a farm hand, but in both cases, his “nervous condition” and taste for self-made poisonous hooch gets him in trouble. Freddie is constantly on the move, as if trying to escape his past and anything that will confine him (even the thought of marriage seems to repel him). He finally lands on a boat commandeered by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s L. Ron Hubbard... err... Lancaster Dodd, the leader of a religion that preaches about how past lives affect our present. According to Dodd, our bodies are mere vessels, while our souls, which have been around for “trillions” of years, bear the imprints of long-lost traumas. The Relevance Of Post-WWII America

At the Toronto International Film Festival, Paul Thomas Anderson (PTA) discussed how post-WWII America was an ideal environment to spawn such theories -- Scientology was born right around this time. The country was enjoying its newfound war-hero status and was ready to move on in an economic boom. However, Americans were still haunted by the horrors of war; casualties were laid to rest and traumatized soldiers like Freddie still lingered. “That creates situations where they want to talk about past lives,” PTA said. “They want to talk about what happens after you die.” The America PTA depicts is one that would rather forget the trauma, bury the past and move forward, which leaves a lost soul like Freddie on the outskirts (he’s frequently on water), searching for a place to belong but also constantly on the run. Past Lives In The Present Tense

While The Master is about a great many “timeless” themes, the idea of past lives is the most affecting. It’s actually a theme, like religion, that PTA has dealt with before. Remember that line in Magnolia: “We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us.” In The Master, Hoffman’s Dodd attempts to cure an old woman by searching into her previous life through hypnosis, where she was apparently a medieval knight or something to that effect. When he psychoanalyzes Freddie, the past lives he inquires about are not centuries old. Dodd interrogates Freddie’s recent past, which involves a mother in a loony bin, an incestual affair, a girl he left behind (more on this later) and, of course, the horrors of war. Evidently, his soul has suffered enough within one lifetime. We’re not sure what among these affects Freddie the most, but all are past traumas that haunt his present, memories that keep replaying in his mind, encouraging him to keep running while Dodd insists that he stay put and confront them -- one of Dodd’s exercises involve Freddie moving back and forth within a confined space. Most of the film follows this push-pull relationship between Freddie and Dodd, where the former breaks free and the latter reels him back into a confined space to confront his issues. At one point, Dodd describes their own past lives as carrier pigeons that fly over the war only to return home. This is the external conflict. It’s Freddie’s internal conflict that is most fascinating. According to Dodd, the traumas that Freddie keeps trying to run from, the past lives, are internalized, permanently imprinted on his soul. He lives with them at every moment. They manifest their presence on his perpetually anguished face. These traumas are as infinite as the souls Dodd preaches about, as they refuse to stay confined to the past and remain completely ignorant of whatever time has actually passed. Continue Reading

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