Despite (or perhaps in homage to) an inexplicable hangover yesterday — not that it takes much (certainly not intoxication) to induce one — I went to see Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. Friends had made a point of saying how much they had disliked it, how misled by the “must-see” reviews that this sort of movie is always sure to get. It is a must-see movie. It’s also an unpleasant and disagreeable one, with a disturbing narrative instability. Where is the story going? What is it about? The passages in which these questions recede, as they always recede when films follow familiar trajectories, never last for very long. The Master is certainly not an account of the early days of a Scientology-like cult. It contains the element of such an account, but it plays 52-pickup with them, and never ventures any suggestions about the career of Lancaster Dodd up until the moment that Freddie Quell drifts into his orbit. Lancaster Dodd (the character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a masterful sort of person, certainly — he’s born that way — but what is he a master of? Geoffrey O’Brien, whose acclaim in the The New York Review of Books made me keen to see what he was talking about, writes, “Dodd has the knack of sucking up everyone’s energy and playing it back as if it were his gift to them, all the while visibly delighting in the process, surprising himself with his own capacity to enchant and control.” But he doesn’t enchant us, sitting in the audience. We’re amazed that he gets away with his mountebankery. Amy Adams is lovely as his wife, Peggy, except that we are eventually forced to conclude that she, too, is either crazy or a fake. And Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell is very hard to watch. He looks dangerous at all times, not just the moments when he means to be.

The movie is set in 1950, an ostensibly “innocent” time, when Americans were trying hard to make being American look superheroic if not supernatural. The postwar settlement was not at all what Main Street had had in mind, and the country’s unwashed isolationism could not be concealed by sophisticated cologne. I don’t think that Anderson means to say that 1950 was an especially crazy time in American life. It appears that he finds American life crazy wherever he picks it up. But in 1950, with the War put away and the Civil Rights struggle still well over ten years off, things looked good. It was a time of shiny cars and big lawns — or shiny lawns and big cars; take your pick. O’Brien writes,

This is where we live, and it is a country of deep loneliness — that same loneliness that permeates all of Anderson’s films, and against which his characters are forever forming themselves into protective families or parodies of families, a population of paternalistic strangers, adoptive sons, surrogate mothers, fake cousins.

And, of course, cults that explain away our smallness and our isolation. Bogus, all of it.

***

Back at home, I picked up The New Yorker and was promptly hurled into an abyss of anxiety by James Surowiecki’s column about the “fiscal cliff.” Surowiecki was explaining why the “pre-commitment” idea hasn’t worked for Congress, and can’t.

For a start, there is no such thing as a single, unified “Congress” that can truly make a resolution—a fact that’s easily overlooked. Instead, there are lots of congressmen, all with slightly different incentives, and there are two political parties, with profoundly different views on the best way to cut the deficit. Then, too, the hopes for an agreement were built on Democrats’ expectation that, when push came to shove, Republicans would vote to raise taxes. This was never going to happen; in fact, most congressional Republicans have signed a no-taxes pledge, which is a kind of pre-commitment device in its own right.

The hidden message here is that the government of the United States can be treated by the various members of Congress as a scapegoat, heaped with impossible obligations and impractical regulations. When the government goes over the cliff, it is the fault of no individual congressmen, and, as Surowiecki points out, we it makes no sense to talk of a collective congressional identity. The United States itself, as a sovereign nation, is without representation in the Capitol. The national interest is off the congressional map. 

It’s easy to feel bleak about the future of this country, especially given the one ray of sunlight — the reasonable expectation that today’s culture wars will recede, and a willingness to compromise reappear, as the Boomers die off. As one of the older members of that admittedly short-sighted generation (possibly the most short-sighted, from having sat too close to the television set as children), I cannot welcome this prospect with unmitigated enthusiasm. And we’re still very much in power — the youngest Boomers are just turning fifty — and our scope for mess-making remains practically unlimited.

***

The Master, although unattractive, is a very beautiful film, even when the settings are banal. Anderson has always been a master of putting his viewers into the picture, without any of the gimmicks of Senssuround or 3-D. His serious approach to composition gives his shots a weightiness that can be oppressive or frightening but never ephemeral; never for a moment are we allowed to reflect that “it’s only a movie.” A great movie is never only a movie. I cannot recommend The Master to anyone who expects to have a good time, but I will claim that it is unsettling in important ways and for good reasons. There is, for example, a scene of truly shocking indecency — and you thought you couldn’t be shocked, no longer knew what indecency was. Well, think again. O’Brien describes the scene lightly, in a sentence that follows the first one that I quoted.

[Dodd] is mischievous, buoyed up by the powers of improvisation that enable him, for example (in a scene that may be a visualization of the dynamics that lie just under the surface), to persuade a roomful of women of all ages to strip for him, in an atmosphere of singalong merriment.

O’Brien doesn’t mention that what makes this scene indecent is the presence of a crowd of clothed men. I cannot wait to hear what the wild lady critics have to say about it. But the scene is not emptily shocking or indecent. It’s telling a terrible truth about the relations between men and women in this country, that we are still not so far from a time when it was considered “cute” of women to abase themselves, not as individuals but as women, and in ways that wouldn not lead to actual physical gratification for anybody. (We are not far at all, if those salacious images of busty topless girls atop motorboats on large Southern lakes are any indication.) I found it the hardest thing to watch in the entire film. It’s of no small interest that Dodd’s persuading is not shown. Anderson simply cuts into the state of nakedness. And nota bene: “of all ages.” <Gasp>

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, October 11th, 2012 at 10:40 am.