Film Review: The Master

The Master is a big film for Joaquin Phoenix. It’s his first appearance since fall-out of his fake documentary I’m Still Here, in which he faked a mental breakdown and aspirations towards a rap career. It was an ultra-dedicated piece of method acting which could have exorcised him from Hollywood. His role as Freddie Quell, a drifter ex-marine who falls in with a religious cult, needed to be fantastic, to re-establish his place as one of his generation’s best actors, and Phoenix does indeed play the role exceedingly well. His Freddie is a tightened coil of a man, constantly hunched, as if crushed by a physical injury sustained during the Second World War (of which he is a veteran), or by deeper emotional toils. His face is constantly contorted into a snarl, and he mumbles most of his lines in a Massachusetts drawl. He is ugly, in every sense of the word.  

The Master is also a big film for Paul Thomas Anderson. Like Phoenix he has been away from the limelight for a few years, emerging now to write, direct and produce the follow up his 2009 masterpiece There Will Be Blood. Regarded as one of the best films of the last decade, it would be a hard act to follow for anyone, but Anderson has a greater weight of a career-long run of excellent films to uphold. Again, like Phoenix, his work on The Master accomplishes this task, directing a film with extraordinary depth, both in content, as well as visually. Unfortunately I was unable to see the film in the intended 90mm version, but even the 'standard' print looks gorgeous. There is a pervasive sense of sadness around the film, as Anderson invites us to pity both of the main characters in turn.   

He again returns to a theme that has become as familiar a trademark of his films as expertly crafted tracking shots –the father-son relationship. The patriarch of The Master is Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), figurehead of ‘The Cause’, a cult which believes that a person’s current life is pre-determined by past-existences from thousands of years before. Like Phoenix, Hoffman gives a terrific performance (as does Amy Adams, playing Dodd’s wife Peggy). He delivers his solo scenes, the sermons extolling the theories of The Cause, with the magnetic fervour typical of film’s religious zealots (powerful, but not alienating), but his best scenes are those when he is one-on-one with Freddie. Theirs, like many of the father-son relationships in Anderson’s films, is a tense one, based on fear, or need, as much as love. It is an obsession; a need to conquer the other, a conquest which they believe will help the other. Think of the warring relationship between Daniel and Eli in There Will Be Blood. Dodd believes that he can be the saviour of the wayward Freddie, and adopts him with a view to making him a project for The Cause, a test of their true redemptionary powers.

 

Dodd first finds Quell drunk a yacht where the former is hosting his daughter’s wedding (as well as allowing The Cause some time away from the ‘attacks’ detailed by Peggy – dissenters, non-believers, and Lancaster’s ex-wives). Quell has fled from a farmer where he worked briefly as a land labourer. An elderly man drank some of his homemade alcohol (one of several toxic blends Freddie makes throughout the film, using everything from paint thinner to torpedo fuel) as died. Before this Freddie worked in an upper-class department store as a photographer, which gave his access to further chemicals he can use as intoxicants, and offered him teasing glimpses of perfect families captured on film.

As stated above, much of the film focuses on the interactions between Freddie and Lancaster. Some of the most gripping scenes of the film, (the same ones which are the most uncomfortable, for this is an uncomfortable film) are a back-and-forward between the two men. Soon after they first meet Lancaster tapes an interrogation by him of Freddie, where he grills him about his view of life, as well as his sexual relationship with his aunt. Lancaster forces Freddie to undergo a form of past life regression therapy (the practices of The Cause appear to be mainly a cherry picking of this and parts of a Buddhist circle of life theory), but, unlike other characters in the film who take part in this, he asks Freddie to think about Dorris, his pre-war love.

Despite this focus on the paternal relationship, Anderson still devotes time (the film is drenched in detail, and strains to fit in even its two hour-plus running time) to explore The Cause, and the insular workings of a cult. Once Freddie meets them, it films hands itself over completely (flashbacks aside) to the group. Dodd’s biological son Val, for example, at one point denounces his father’s theories, and claims they are made up on the spot. After this scene he disappears from the film, only re-appearing when he returns to the fold once again, at The Causes’ England-based school. This is similar to the way that real-life cults work – when you get in, you are always in. If you leave, you are forgotten about. It is at this point that doubts about Lancaster and The Cause begin to seep in. Freddie begins a flirtation with scepticism, and Lancaster is slowly revealed as a fraud, and as a much weaker man than he imagines himself to be.

Similarly, the theories of The Cause are presented to outsiders (the audience) as nonsense. Anderson refrains from any detailed explanation of Lancaster’s writings, leaving us to pick up odds and ends as they are dropped in front of the camera. What is clear is that it is a theory obsessed with metaphysics, and of the ‘journey’ which a person takes throughout their many lives. Another part of the teachings are important to the role of the cult in the film in general – the clear superiority of men to animals. Men, Lancaster states, are not animals, and animalistic actions – like flatulence – are to be looked down upon.

As a war veteran, Quell has seen some inhumane - some animalistic - things. He suffers from some kind of mental disorder, which is not specified, but inferred it may be some form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This goes some way to explain his often-sociopathic behaviour. In the opening beach scene, for example, he starts dry-humping a woman rendered from sand by his fellow sailors. They laugh, but the scene, and Freddie, drag on, as he becomes more graphic and intense in his pleasuring of the sand-woman. Later he lies down with it, as if enjoying a post-coital hug. His is oblivious to their disgust and confusion, or least does not care (another credit to Phoenix's performance is the way he portrays Freddie's disorder in a way that avoids the typical Hollywood tropes of verbal tics, or being able to count cards). His job as a store cameraman exposes him to family life, and to happiness he cannot attain. His past, be it in the war or before that, haunts him, and has reduced him to a shell of a man, on the run and alcohol dependant. In this scenario, religion becomes a safety net, a shelter, and, as Marx stated, 'the heart of a heartless world'. Marx believed that embracing religion was actually a cry for help, and that religious belief was not a barrier to a socialist society, but a sign that this society was needed, even if the people did not yet know it.

Anderson's films, as obsessed as they are with warped representations of the family unit, often allow themselves to spread out into analysis of a wider situation. There Will Be Blood explores the growth of greed and capitalism in America, Boogie Nights looks at the morality, and the negative effects of, the porn industry. The Master is an exploration of the abandoning of war veterans, and their various coping strategies. The film was apparently inspired by Anderson reading that post-war societies are particularly susceptible to new forms of organised religion. Set in 1950, The Master captures a period of American history where the hangover of the most brutal war in world history remained, albeit below the surface. Around this time, many of the men who were mentally scared by the deaths and bloodshed may have realised that they were not getting any better, and that their PTSD was not subsiding. Destruction on such an epic scale removed the barrier of civilisation between men and animals, reducing life to a dangerously pointless exercise. What The Cause offered Freddie, in this context, is obvious.

Down With New Atheism!

"I don’t want good causes like secularism and scepticism to die because they’re infested with people who see issues of equality as mission drift. I want Deep Rifts. I want to be able to truthfully say that I feel safe in this movement. I want the misogynists, racists, homophobes, transphobes, and downright trolls out of the movement for the same reason I wouldn’t invite them over for dinner or to play Mario Kart: because they’re not good people.

Now it’s time for a third wave – a wave that isn’t just a bunch of “middle-class, white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied men” patting themselves on the back for debunking homeopathy for the 983258th time or thinking up yet another great zinger to use against Young Earth Creationists.

by Jen McCreight

 

I can't remember the exact time I realised I never believed in god. I went to church with the rest of my school as a child, and never really enjoyed it. But at the same time, I never really thought about the existence of god until I was a teenager. At that point, being vaguely sceptical about the whole thing, I bought a copy of Dawkin's The God Delusion*. And I lapped that shit up. I bought Dawkins book at exactly the right time for it to have a positive effect on me - I was an inquisitive teenager exploring a belief system which often comes in-built with smugness, and here was a book which explained complex scientific matters to me in a way which I understood, thus making me think I understood them because I was intelligent, and not because they'd probably been simplified for a mass audience composed mainly of people like me.

So I read The God Delusion, and for probably about a year of my life I attempted to immerse myself as much as possible in the world of Dawkins. I think I re-read the book a couple more times as well, just for good measure. I was at that point, officially, an atheist. I still am. But now I hate atheism.

You see, that quote from Jen McCreight about is just a quick stop off in the unsavoury world of New Atheism. For a movement that prides itself on forward, progressive thinking, many of the figureheads (deitys?) of the New Atheism movement display attitudes which stretch beyond the usual realm of smug superiority and into, as McCreight lists above, misogany, racism, homophobia etc. I'm not going to trawl throught the examples, just pluck a select few to display:

Elevatorgate: Rebecca Watson is proposition by a man at an atheist conferance in a lift. She complains about this online, giving the context that she a) doesn't expect this type of Laddish behaviour at an intellectual gathering and b) she had just given a talk about feminism at said intellectual gathering. Of course, the online vitriol followed (as is to sadly be expected) by Richard Dawkins also got involved, saying she should 'stop whining' and related a (fictional) story of a woman who was beaten and genitally mutilated by her Muslim husband, so being propositioned in a lift isn't that bad after all.

Ah, that old 'you-aren't-in the-worst-situation-in-the-world-so-stop-complaining' trope.

Moving on, the entire career of Christopher Hitchens could be responsible for McCreight's list. He famously wrote an article for Vanity Fair about how woman aren't as funny as men. He supported British wars in the Falklands and the countrys recent excursions to the Middle East. This, he claims, was due to his anti-authoritarianism, so he neatly avoided the issue of authoritarianism implicit in the imperialistic attiudes displayed by Britain in both these wars.

Oh, and here's a good blog illustrating the less-than-savoury attitudes of Bill Maher.

(And, oh fuck, that's not even mentioning the subhuman waste of skin and webcam that is vlogger The Amazing Atheist).

For longer than I've been sceptical about religion I've been left wing to some degree, and perhaps because of that I used to believe that atheism and left-wing politics were meant to be together. I used to mis-appropriate Marx's 'opiate of the people' criticism of organised religion, before I found out that actually, he called it 'the heart of a heartless world', and referred more to opium's use to mask pain you acknowledged than hide from the truth. This article from M-L-M Mayhem! explains it better, but capitalism and religion are not one and same, not always intertwinned.

The reason that New Atheists are unable to chime with some of the Left (like myself) is that they see the world through a fixed lense, where religion is the only, or at least main, problem. Marxists could well be accused of seeing the world entirely throught the class conflict - that is our main reference - but anyone who wants to consider themselves part of the 21st century Left must realise that racial inequality, misogany etc are all intertwinned with the class system.

The New Atheism movement lacks this sort of thinking - as I said, it is concerned only with the effect of religion, a debate largely removed from the political sphere. Hitchens won many fans on the Left by proclaiming himself a Marxist, and stating that Lenin and Trotsky were great men, but his support for Lenin stemmed largely from his admiration of Lenin's fight against religious Orthadoxy in the USSR. His support for the wars in the Middle East him hoping to wage a holy war against Islam. If the Crusades weren't ordered by the Pope he'd probably have used them as a blueprint.

Quite why the New Atheists have chosen religion as their only societal battleground, that I don't know. I suspect it reinforces their intelligence if it seems like they only ever talk about things that they know a lot about. It's easier to 'debunk homeopathy for the 983258th time' than have a go at racial inequality, for sure.

So I'm backing McCreight's call for a Third Wave of Atheism. New Atheism has got comfortable, appointed itself some backwards-thinking figureheads and settled in for the book deals. Compared to other movements, atheism is still relatively recent to the public eye. It still has to evolve, and this time we cannot let it be run by a small group of bigots, comanding a larger army of internet troll who just sneer at anyone who goes to church.

Hitchens, a fan of Trotsky, would no doubt appreciated this wish for a permanent revolution within the atheist community.

*Thinking about my reasons for choosing this particular book, considering it came as part of a wave of anti-theism publications, I just realised how much The God Delusion seems like the type of book specifically designed to shift copies. It's got a provocative and slightly enigmatic title, and the cover has an explosion of red on it. It looks like a novel you'd see in Tesco, and I wonder if it was designed to look related in some way to The Da Vinci Code.