Its landmarks, presidents and holiday destinations are well known to many. But increasingly -some would say equally - well known are its transient pop stars, craggy chat show hosts, Perez Hilton, cult religions. America makes a point of keeping people interested in it, for seemingly any reason it can find. Lots of people are interested in it for lots of reasons. Commerce, media, culture - some academics have made careers out of being professionally interested in it.
Andy Warhol for example. This guy changed the culture that they worked in in a big way - the 15 minutes, Campbell's soup - clever-clever conceits that shot a sly look at its ever-evolving visage, brought about by its postwar cultural influence. Film directors have tried to assemble some sort of construct of what the idea/brand/nation it is, looks like, how it feels to be there.
Point being of course that - there IS no definitive image, there are only the images of interest, which have done their own work in moving things around, bringing different aspects of an intense melting pot of ideas, an album of snaps showing the huge variety of focus.. There's been interest in:
- Great citizens (Kennedy, Lincoln, Malcolm X)
- Great historical events (countless WW2 films, Vietnam films, films about the civil rights movement, even - in Short Cuts - a film about the film industry in Hollywood)
- Films about the country's geography (Terrence Malick is king here)
- Thousands of marketing adverts masquerading as films (hi Jerry Bruckheimer, welcome to my blog)
- The anti-establishment (essentially the Coens and Malick but Payne, Russell to an extent - even Stillman)
The other guy is Paul Thomas Anderson. During his career so far he's turned his lens towards various parts of the unwashed American anatomy; the porn industry got the close up in Boogie Nights (with a career-defining performance in lots of ways from Burt Reynolds), a coruscating document of the country's relationship with religion, the oil industry and free market economics in There Will Be Blood and now his most contemporary - and trippiest fantasia yet - The Master, which deals with celebrity, cults and the post-religious Western world.
I actually saw this last week but it's hard to put into words how I feel about a lot of this film. Having said that, I am aware this is a really long post. To begin I guess I should say I'm weirded out by stuff like Scientology and I am a pretty open minded guy - I'll generally listen to anyone's point of view in the hope they have a semblance of something interesting to add to that bubbling sea of opinion and rhetoric. Sometimes I'm disappointed. Especially when I listen to Nigel Farage. But watching Philip Seymour Hoffman's depiction of pseudo-scientific religio-extraordinaire (his full working title) Lancaster Dodd made me think of Tom Cruise (not going where you think it is) and his depiction of another bombastic nutcase Frank 'T.J' Mackey in Anderson's Magnolia. Only instead of 'RESPECT THE COCK' (you can't not capitalise that ejection of testosterone) you get 'PIG FUCK' when Dodd is challenged on his spaced-out worldview. Anderson certainly does explosive emotions very, very well. Particularly in men.
The reason a Lancaster Dodd is interesting in a way a Nigel Farage is not is not just that one doesn't exist. Dodd has that all-conquering personality trait; watchability. That's a very 21st century phrase (i.e. it's not a real word and it's basically a Big Brother thing) and it's also the great silent statement throughout the film. Anderson makes a special point of never telling the viewer how this quack worldview originated - and there is a compelling reason for it. By ignoring and never mentioning Dodd's history, you simply get the finished article - in contemporary terms, a celebrity. It's a clever trick, and you're constantly aware that by watching the film you're engaging with the conceit and consequently validating it, and therefore Dodd.
Anderson deliberately provides history and context to the other half of the central duo, Freddie Quell. A zigzagging dog of a man who dry-humps sand-ladies and harasses well-to-do gentlemen with his photography instruments, he is immediately cast as both lonely and unusual through his sexually charged analyses of Rorschach tests which he completes upon leaving national service after WW2. Dodd's relationship with Quell is thickened through the murderous cocktails the latter works on; the former's alcoholism serves to strengthen his 'cogence' (or at least makes him write a hell of a lot more).
(A sort-of coda of Quell's existence is inserted midway through the film when he's forced to leave a shelter he has been staying in after poisoning an alcoholic with his home-brew. The camera in this scene shakily tracks Quell's gasping progress across the hewn fields and encapsulates the escapee's demented lifestyle perfectly.)
There's something of a dramatic crescendo halfway through the film when Dodd stays with his 'followers' at a well-to-do home in Philadelphia state. The preceding longshot here showing the travelling circus greeting and hugging their devotees in front of a grand country home is obliquely idyllic. One of the things I particularly enjoy about all of Anderson's films is captured nicely here - the chance to introduce satire or smugness into a scene which dramatically must end badly - yet he never does. He pulled a similar trick with the fantastic baptism scene in There Will Be Blood and many, many times over (almost all involving a buxom lady asking Burt Reynolds if she could do something more and more disgusting and Reynolds's blithe reply - 'Yeah sure!') in Boogie Nights. Instead, he simply lets the camera watch and record.
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| Phillip Seymour Hoffman stars as the charismatic and intellectually dubious Lancaster Dodd in The Master |
This is followed by a grimly compelling scene involving fraud and the police, souring the sugar-coated joie de vivre in the house, and, in one very woozy scene observed through a blind drunk Quell's eyes (the jauntiness combined with the décolletage on show gives the scene something of a sinister edge), an intimacy that's strangely lacking from the film once the two men's temporary incarceration is complete.
Joaquin Phoenix then; although there's too much to extrapolate upon here he's a super talent and I've always enjoyed whatever he's been in. Quell is a difficult man to like and even understand in some ways - his violent capabilities seem to belong to a primal past and in one memorable scene involving paint-thinner, faux-psychiatry and a total lack of blinking, shocking revelations reveal the potential roots of his torment. A man unloved and unsure of his own capability to love, he becomes a loyal follower to his Master, their dependence on each other refracted through the prism of the whisky tumbler. Of paint thinner. And, y'know, other stuff.
The film's conclusion lands both characters in England in the late postwar years following an unsuccessful bout of rehabilitating Quell back into a 'normative' state. The resulting split has taken its toll on master and follower; Quell returns to the moody, aimless drifter who shows up at a former beau's residence and, unable to focus following the news she has married and left town, mutters an inanity about her having a famous surname as a result of her marriage.
Dodd, meanwhile, sits impotent behind a huge oaken desk, unable to engage again with his work following the completion of his second book (in which the primary focus of his original work is completely reversed - Anderson again dead-bats the obvious but does skew the perspective with another fiery, borderline-insane outburst from Dodd).
I can't leave this without mentioning the incredible Lady Macbeth-esque performance from Amy Adams as Dodd's wife; my friend Alun remarked on leaving that she reminded him of Laura Linney's wife to Sean Penn in Clint Eastwood's Mystic River and so she does perform a similar, bloodcurdling role here, embodying the ideas of the moment in sharp crystalline form. Her mastery of Dodd adds a different dynamic to the film and allows the relationship between Dodd and Quell crucial room to breathe and develop. It's a long way from Cruel Intentions 2 and well deserved - she is great fun to watch and upstages the central pairing with her icy demeanour and brutal use of her sex to get her way (again kudos to Anderson for actually allowing a woman to do something like that in a film - good to see some controversy in there!)
The Master ends and returns to its opening theme of clear, blue waves parting as a boat sails over the ocean on a glorious summer's day. Quell is present in both opening and closing scenes and I'd guess it's instructive to note Dodd's tale ends in ruminative darkness, in striking contrast to his counterpart who ends on a so-so happy note. Good times are there for the honest, was my inference of this conclusion - but I could be wrong. I would love to see a Paul Thomas Anderson film about something like surfing or a family ice cream business. I just don't think it's going to happen, and I guess based on this evidence I don't mind too much.
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