The '68 Comeback Special: The Red & The White

I've been a little paralyzed lately. Great people, artists we'll never see the likes of again, keep dying. I've spent the last few days just staring into the middle distance, unable to speak coherently about the losses. Everything that can or should be said about Philip Seymour Hoffman has been said, and a good deal more besides. Many of us didn't expect to be hit this hard, but the loss is indescribable. We knew him, or anyway, we felt like we did. He was too good, at once untouchable and one of us. A revisit to The Master reveals less a movie than a spell cast upon the audience by Hoffman's self-made oligarch, all vices and flaws that we forgive because it's a pleasure to be in his presence. Sadness hiding confidence, the need to cast aside everything just to remember what real friendship feels like. He was more than an actor to many people. He was a whole cast of alluring acquaintances we wanted as friends and relatives. The best artists don't just create movies or performances, they tear a hole in reality and set up fictive constructions big enough to live in. They build houses for us to live in for the length of a film. Every decision builds ten years of life and experience for a character until we know everything we should know about them. Whole lives can be lived in two hours if the performance is good enough. Philip Seymour Hoffman was always that good. And as crushing, as unthinkable, as torturous as it is to deal with his death, it happened to come in a tidal wave of misery that also claimed the lives of Arthur Rankin Jr., Maximilian Schell, Eduardo Coutinho and Miklós Janscó. How are we supposed to soldier on after this last weekend? 

Miklós Janscó was a Hungarian director born in 1921, and if you know his name it's probably because of the higher-profile of two films he had in competition at the ill-starred 1968 Cannes Film Festival, The Red & The White. The other film, The Confrontation, may not be as monumental an achievement as its more famous brother, but it is a dazzlingly built delight. It's little wonder Janscó was the only director to ever compete against himself at the famed festival. No one ever talks about that, for some reason… Hardly anyone talks about Janscó at all. The Red & The White is an inarguable masterpiece, and yet his influence on contemporary cinema is rarely remarked upon. Watch a few of his films in a row and you can see directors entire canons springing in the wake of a couple of elegantly choreographed long takes. Béla Tarr here, Theo Angelopoulos there, Von Trier, Jodorowsky, the Peter Greenaway of The Baby of Mâcon, the Gerardo Naranjo of Miss Bala.

Jean Renoir once said that a director really only makes one film, each entry in a canon just a piece of the same puzzle. For Janscó, that film was The Red & The White, and everything else was a new interpretation of any given scene or idea from his 1967 masterpiece, chased down a new road. He was an old school auteur, each frame, each tracking shot's steadfast commitment to the fleet of dancing performers, were entirely and indisputably his. And though he traveled to France, Italy, Greece and Russia he never really left Hungary, just as he was always telling the story of a forgotten peasant class. His aim was to let the plight of the oppressed be heard through violent uprising, chanting, song, and eye-catching group dances. His films more often resembled ballet than traditionally cinematic antiwar narratives. He frequently put the lie to the "no such thing as an antiwar movie" fallacy. He rarely used squibs, or fake blood of any kind. Characters simply slump over and play dead, which is somehow more frustrating and stinging than if they exploded with some of Peckinpah's Kensington gore. He kills characters we like and whose good intentions he believes. The sound of gunfire, the flight of their abandoned bodies from the frame, and the camera glides over the spot, their lives edited out in camera. He pursued the idea of death with the rigorousness of Ingmar Bergman, though with a more firm sense of play. In his TV movie The Tyrant's Heart, a very theatrical work of myth-making, a character kills himself with a knife; then apologizes to the audience for having forgotten the fake blood. He never delighted in violence, and wanted to offer sympathetic viewers a safe place to contemplate his life's work. 

Though his break through was the very excellent The Round Up, a drama of persecution that looked to have been committed to limestone, The Red & The White is his stylistic gauntlet. Politically Janscó never veered too far from The Round-Up, in which Austrian forces torturing Hungarian guerrillas until they give up their leader, but he found himself when he made The Red & The White. Even if it were the first film in his oeuvre that you encounter (as I suspect is common) the sense of an artist freeing himself from all non essential grammar and forging a brand new path comes across with the directness of a shot of Vodka. The confidence with which he articulates his newfound language is deeply attractive. The film concerns opposing forces during the 1919 communist uprising in Russia. Hungarians and Bolsheviks joins forces against the czarists and a bloody struggle ensued. Janscó s biggest revelation was that in depicting warfare in order to make your way to the heart of war itself you must deliberately lose track of who's fighting who. All that remains is the fact of killing, the feeling of perverted order and chaos against all. You're meant to become a buoy floating between islands, uncertain who's who and what they're fighting for. There are no statements of purpose, no politicking. There are speeches, but they're callous, self-aggrandizing and almost abstract. How then could anyone glory in warfare if the only feeling the director allows us is bewilderment and loss? Of identity, of coherence, of so much life. He also discovered brilliantly choreographed long takes, which would become his stock-in-trade. You begin searching for the seams because too much happens in the takes for it to be reasonable that they worked all this out beforehand, but they did. Every time. Winter Wind, his follow-up to the defeat at Cannes, is 80 minutes long and features not many more than a dozen takes. In The Red & The White wins many small victories throughout by staging surreal dances in a wooded clearing and introducing faces we're drawn to, only to do away with them. One bathetic murder after another; it would all be too much if Janscó weren't one of the best directors alive. His sensitivity remains, not to mention his interest in theatrical superimpositions over his predominantly natural storytelling. Between the military actions where the warring sides keep experiencing reversals of favor, there are many haunting interludes like the dance in the forest, a sexual assault in a hospital, a nurse's distraction as troops arrive near a river. The warfare was set dressing and his disdain for on screen violence for its own sale lets him have his cake and eat it too. All in all, a completely bewitching exercise in the deflation of many of man's favourite lies. 

War is a man's game and Janscó refused to play it. He had for more sympathy for women and his films are lousy with earth mothers. Women who refused to be victims in a culture filled with men killing each other for ideologies they seemed to invent on the fly. Men see double crosses and conspiracy everywhere. Women are above petty suspicions. Though the nurses of The Red & The White are beguiling, strong women who are far more compelling than the male combatants, Janscó s strongest female character is the heroine of his 1974 Elektra, My Love. A post-modern restating (here Antonioni discovers many new tools: slow-motion, painted bodies, a more geometric and fanciful sense of composition to build into his famed tracking shots) of greek tragedy, it shows Elektra as a world-weary pragmatist. "I won't kill you," she says to her adversary the king, "for another will just replace you." She is never hysterical, never mocked, resigned to always being right and never being allowed to prove it. That is Janscó s underlying theme, in a nutshell. Machinations grind up the land, tyrants kill with purpose and at random and those who want the best for the people are never given the opportunity to do anything about it. Power and corruption always get in the way. After the bold, colourful The Confrontation, he kept right on working and his pace didn't markedly slow until the late 80s. In the wake of The Red & The White he had as fruitful a period of invention as Jean-Luc Godard in the 60s. Winter Wind followed mere months later, about a terrorist cell made up of Balkan agitators assisting in the assassination of French leaders. It trades The Confrontation's primary colors for drab browns and greys, the much bleaker story calling for a reduction in wonderment. It's a tug-of-war between the interests of 'the party' and sympathy for the individual, and in the mise-en-scene between unforgiving snowy zones of combat and the almost womb-like interior spaces of the barracks. Here tenderness is met with violence. Marina Vlady's conspirator keeps attempting some kind of intimate communication with a woman she hopes to keep alive, but something always interrupts her. It's a film of great mystery and one that hints at the impossibility of peace and piece of mind when you've decided to take your country's fate in your hands. 

I'm tempted to go film by film, give Janscó the proper eulogy he so richly warrants. He was after all still making films as late as 2012, at age 90, but how would we know that? He'd been all but abandoned by world cinema's tastemakers. I know for sure that I'm done making excuses for Truffaut and Godard at the '68 Cannes Film Festival. Their outrage at the firing of Henri Langlois didn't warrant them keeping works of genius from finding an audience. Janscó deserved better. He was totally committed to his definition of cinema, never giving an inch, even when given bigger budgets and access to big names. He made modern audiences come to him, rather than the other way around. He did everything, musicals, comedies, you name it. In 1971 Carlo Ponti brought him to Italy to make The Pacifist with Monica Vitti, looking for someone to fill Michelangelo Antonioni's shoes after he departed to make Zabriskie Point and The Passenger. Between the master's muse Vitti and Carlo Di Palma, Antonioni's cinematographer, with him at the helm, Janscó's images have a pastel-hued rigidity that brings bourgeoise excess and middle-class guilt, not to mention the vulpine features of his star, into sharp focus. Vitti meets angular naif Pierre Clementi and they instantly revert to a past connection they shared, only to have him taken from her by a gang of tough-as-nails karate enthusiasts who've been on a violence spree in her city. It's entirely an exercise, and his long-takes get claustrophobic in chic Italian residences, but it does feature the typically Janscóian phrase "we have to make noise to be heard," and a very different Vitti than we'd ever seen. She's an adorable wreck, far closer to today's manic pixie dream girls than her typically steely ennui sufferers. For showing us a new (blonde) side of Vitti, we can once more thank the Hungarian dynamo. When he returned to familiar territory it was to make Red Psalm, his first film to utilize experimental grammar, feeling more like a piece of theatre than the alternately ancient and intrinsically cinematic The Red & The White. Here is where he proves his willingness to try anything, his belief in our belief. From here he becomes fearless, trying anything once, even dabbling in something resembling erotica, but filtered through his robustly humane world view. That film, Private Vices, Public Pleasures [thanks for the correction, Roger], is one of the most enchanting films about sexuality ever made. A kind of anti-Salo, it follows a libertine orgy throughout the grounds of a grand estate. No film that I've seen manages to make sex organs seem as natural or beautiful. A proper bacchanalian celebration of innocent sexuality; a reprieve for humanity's worst crimes against itself. It may end, like so many of his films, with a shocking act of violence, but by then the spell is too strong to break. His films, no matter how dark, oblique or melancholy (the height of which must be his return to his homeland, 1979's exhausting but rewarding Hungarian Rhapsody), broiled with vivacity, with a rich appreciation for human creation and emotion. His characters dance across vast landscapes, through history and violence, aware that the best they can do is survive, and teach the dance to the next generation. "If I do not forget, then it is not forgotten."

We Need Cinema

Today an essay I wrote & edited about The Hudsucker Proxy ran over at Rogerebert.com. Today Philip Seymour Hoffman died. Today Eduardo Coutinho was killed. A few days ago it was Pete Seeger, Maximilian Schell and Miklós Jancsó. I have no energy to write. Nothing to say. I'm defeated by all of this. I'm going to post some thoughts I'd already written about Hudsucker because I want to do something with myself before I retire from today, content as I am to watch The Long Day Closes and not speak another word. It really was a shit day. Today we need cinema.

After years of hearing about what a joyless slog Intolerable Cruelty was, imagine my surprise when I discovered it was a delicious confectionary of expertly crafted wordplay and near-explosive levels of chemistry between its two quite flappable leads. "How had this happened?" I wondered, while laughing my ass off, "how could a film this good by America's cinematic sweethearts have been swept under the rug like that?" The Coen Brothers were at least used to that sort of disappointment. After all, they'd made The Hudsucker Proxy. Intolerable Cruelty is a delight, to be true, an homage to Howard Hawks, Leo McCary and Preston Sturges' comedies of remarriage centering appropriately enough on a divorce attorney who tastes his own bitter medicine and as well as it works just as well as tribute and stand alone comedy (George Clooney's comedic prowess never gets enough notice for my liking). Next to Hudsucker, however, Intolerable looks more like the work of Mitchell Leisen than Preston Sturges. Sturges was the genuine article in American comedy. In his best films, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, Hail The Conquering Hero and Unfaithfully Yours (As long as we're sticking up for the underdog here I'll just say that Unfaithfully Yours is a gem and I will hear no one besmirch it), he balanced humour so bold you wonder how it slipped past the censors, scabrous satire of values unique to wartime America and romance that shot past heartwarming into gripping. He had such a perfect hand with sentiment that he could appear to be making fun of the very notion of it, even as he freely indulged. He was one of a kind. But leave it to The Coen Brothers to make a film that pretends to his throne and earns the right to sit there. Painstakingly crafted through nostalgia-colored glasses and set in a place we recognize as our past but in no definite moment (despite the assurance that we're in the 1958 of Coen favourite Separate Tables), corporate stooge Tim Robbins rockets to the top of a toy company despite having no knowledge of the job or that he's being set up for a literal and metaphorical fall by his handler, a never-sleazier Paul Newman, cashing in on his impossible-to-dislike irascibility and charm. The boardroom antics, Sturges-esque wordplay and bureaucratic chutes-and-ladders are hilarious, but once Jennifer Jason Leigh enters the story, this stops being a comedy no one laughed at and becomes a masterpiece whose failure isn't just baffling, it's a tragedy on par with the sinking of the Titanic, the execution of the Rosenbergs or the cancellation of Pushing Daisies. Leigh's portrayal of a savvy journalist who goes undercover to scoop Robbins' rise to fame mirrors Jean Arthur in Mr. Deeds Goes To Town but without hiding her unscrupulousness so disingenuously as Frank Capra does. It's a testament to the Coen's writing and feather-light direction (rendered on resplendent art deco production design, for my money their best, through the prism of Roger Deakins dark-matter-heavy photography) that they pursue a route that out-bleaks famous Scrooges like Capra and Sturges, and still manages to seem more lighthearted than Meet John Doe or Unfaithfully Yours, which flirt with murder and suicide as aggressively as Leigh does with Robbins. Leigh's feisty journalist is a more endearing proto-feminist trouser-sporter than Cate Blanchet's Hepburn impersonation; better still, she brings a soft sexuality to her role that outstrips even the Claudette Colberts and Barbara Stanwycks of the golden age, and again, genuinely. Through the performance, through her palpably masked longing, through her robust personality. She maybe a shade of fast-talking-dames past, but she's a fully realized character, and if you don't want to marry her by the time the credits role, you must be a Franklin Pangborn character. Or worse, William Demarest. I still marvel at the level of detail that went into making Hudsucker Proxy such a loving, feel-good tribute to loving, feel-good comedies so dipped in sarcasm you could drown in it. And that's even without taking into account how fucking funny it is. It's that rare film that gets nearly everything right (wouldn't be on this list if it were actually perfect). When the film failed at the box office, I bet Preston Sturges took a belt for both Joel and Ethan Coen in auteur heaven. "Don't worry, boys. They didn't get me, either."

Understanding The Cause - on Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master

(We wrote this before Philip Seymour Hoffman died, unaware this was his last performance that didn't show the pain in his heart just as brightly as the joy he took in his craft. Rest in peace to a titan, one of the best American actors who ever lived.)

Films aren't often cultural events and granted I'm so deep inside the culture that I don't know what the view from outside looks like, but The Master was an event. The reasons why the average joe knew about the film are so boring I won't go into them - you know why because everyone knows why. It was everywhere. What made it unmissable for us, the people on the ground, was the celluloid. Shot on 65mm, shown in 70mm, like it fucking should be. Or so says I, anyway. Maybe some filmmakers wouldn't know what to do with 65mm, and lord knows some have botched it [ed 2026: they're still botching it], but it truly is a gateway to another part of our history. When Terrence Malick shot The New World in that loving and lovely format, I jumped for joy. It was my first new film in the format, after having seen the text opening so many bygone biblical and war pictures. It's how you do big. It's how you do epic. If the film feels huge even if its home is on the faces of its leads, its because it's on 65mm and because Paul Thomas Anderson is writing in dark, permanent ink. Here is our history, the ugliest parts with its gut out, its limbs jutting awkwardly like the creature Wilfred Brimley can't stop dissecting in The Thing. Joaquin Phoenix is nothing less than the failure of the American dream; a Sterling Hayden or Ralph Meeker brooding, warped, jutting into the present and hooked to the past. Here was the America of Act of Violence. No heroes, just victims and the people who want to help them, even if they bullshit the solution because they like feeling like they can help, like they're in charge. Watching The Master on 70mm in a palatial movie house in Lincoln Square, the kind they just seem to bulldoze today, was to be transported to the same deep recesses of the American unconscious that its hero finds himself in. You can see it in the film exactly when our hero falls asleep in a theatre, like the audience at the start of Holy Motors and someone brings him a wake-up call. "You can't hide. This isn't the past, this is waiting for you as soon as the movie's over." No one says it, but there it is. No one says anything directly, but the message is as clear as if it's sung right at you. Films should be events more often. In the days following the release of The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson's latest opus, to quote another Anderson, I've read dozens of people's reactions to it. 

Kent Jones' free-associative history is still probably the one to beat (ed from 2026, read Adam Nayman's book on PTA). But what I want to address is the notion many people have been floating that it's fundamentally hollow, that's it about nothing, that it wanders too much to be as great as people say it is (ed - 2026: funny to imagine this was ever the majority opinion). Nothing kills a film faster than hype and if there was a film more hyped than The Master this year (The Hunger Games for cinephiles) I can't produce it. We who breathe celluloid are fans of the enigmatic and Anderson's slate cleaning trilogy (Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood and now The Master) has us all ravenous. He'd always been good but now he's inescapably polarizing. He is the future (and past) of the medium. He is a compulsive masturbator taking up three hour chunks of our lives every few years with his untamed rambling. Tucker and myself are in the former camp, and we loved The Master though not without reservation (ed - 2026: those reservations are all gone, mostly because we had this conversation so early and figured the movie out - I give Tucker credit, his final thought opened it like a map). So we decided to pick it apart and find out just what makes it tick. 

Scout Tafoya: I'll start by saying Blood is better only so you don't have to correct your statements about it being the best film ever made [ed 2026 - I disagree]. The Master has improved elements and clearly lives in the same world as Blood but it doesn't have the razor sharp focus. That said it's a fuckin' masterwork [ed 2026: hopefully this was the last time I used that word in my writing but I doubt it]. Mihai Malaimare's cinematography proves what I've known since Youth Without Youth: he's one of the best cameramen we have and he and Anderson make a banquet out of their 65mm compositions. I might still dig The New World as the definitive 65mm filmed painting of the 21st century, but this thing is in a class all its own.

Tucker Johnson: It's a killer film, with beautiful imagery, and some of the best performances I've ever seen, but it's not perfect. It's almost there though. I can't even quite put my finger on what was wrong with it. I think for me and [an ex-girlfriend] it was the ending. The way the film ends is fine but just fine. My endings for the film were either letting Joaquin ride away on the motorcycle, or just cut to black and let Hoffman's singing to him in London carry over into the credits. I'll need your responses to really start talking about this thing but I will say that right now as much as I loved the film, I'm treating it as the best vehicle for an actor's performance I've ever seen. I should say two actors' performances.

Scout: What it's missing is, and this obviously is coloured by our many, MANY viewings of Blood over the years since its debut in late 2007, that it doesn't feel as though it builds to a confrontation. It builds instead to divorce. Which thematically is perfect, but dramatically just doesn't suffice when we know what the alternative is: Daniel Day-Lewis beating Paul Dano to death with a bowling pin. Thus The Master is the more romantic and wistful picture than Blood. Blood is about family, Master's about marriage or anyway a romantic bond between lovers. A family that falls apart or has to lie too much to stay together. It's a Tragedy of Remarriage, to invent a phrase

If Plainview's the father/brother that Sunday never had but needed, and Sunday is the son that Plainview deserves, mirror images of each other, Freddie and Dodd need each other because they fill the gaps in each other's wounded/inflated (and it must be said perfectly and uniquely American) psyches. Their relationship is no different than that between abusive lovers. Though it should be said they're both after women they can't have. Women won't fuck Freddie or make love to Dodd (one angry handjob as proof), so their bond is beyond merely sexual and into something deeper and more important for both of them, but like their sexual desire it can't be consummated while they're propping each other up with their need to be edified. Dodd needs Quell to prove his legend, which is why he snaps at Laura Dern at the second book publishing when she questions his revisionism to his own legend - the old sycophants are no longer what he needs. He needs only to make Freddie believe beyond a shadow of a doubt because he'd worked so hard on him, he needs to work to earn his respect; he's already got or doesn't have the support of people like Dern or poor Kevin J. O'Connor. Freddie is the ideal Dodd aspires to corrupt - he can't really believe in himself without a stubborn blank slate like Freddie. When we see the Cause's spiffing new center in England, teeming with the faithful, it's clear that this work is now just something Dodd can do. It's Freddie who he needed. The challenge of a true lost soul who got so close to being his everything. 

So, that in mind, it's easy to see the film as being about their on-again, off-again courtship. You can see its funhouse mirror in Freddie and the girl who doesn't wait for him when he goes to sea. That's what Freddie is to Dodd. When one leaves, he spends the next several years experiencing their absence and mourning. The film is most electrifying when they're processing each other and it means something (that first interaction is their version of fucking, which is why he tries to process that girl at the end of the film while they're in bed together - it's just one more trick he learned from a former lover, a different position or sensation). And most heartbreaking when Dodd sings to him because it's them remembering that connection they had, which his wife can't understand because she was always along for the ride - whether she believes in The Cause is entirely beside the point. My personal favourite scene, Freddie imagining a room full of naked women as the never-more-red-faced Dodd sings to a willing congregation, is crucial because though he's not the only person in the room, its clear that Dodd is singing just to Freddie. All this easy naked flesh, Dodd holding them in the palm of his hand, showing it to Freddie like the devil asking for his signature. See what I can do? See what I can give you? Only you see it, my friend. You're the one I chose.

Every single interpretation I've read of this scene says that it's Freddie and his libido imagining the women naked because, well... he's horny. I don't think that's true, even if it's funnier than my reading. I think he sees instead the futility of his search for fulfillment with any of the women that Dodd surrounds himself with. Dodd could sleep with any of them (and we suspect he's trying whenever his wife isn't around) and Freddie sees them disrobing for him not because he wants to sleep with them, but because he sees that these people will do anything for Dodd (he's suddenly seeing the futility of passing around "Do you wanna fuck?" notes while aboard the borrowed yacht). The women, especially pregnant Amy Adams, are unimportantly positioned in the scene, they're macabre set dressing; they're less the woman in Room 237 of the Overlook and more like a handful of demons in the penultimate scene in Fantasia. Freddie's gaze is most assuredly on Dodd, because he knows that if anyone's going to figure him out, it's the Master. And Dodd sees right past all the nude tributes to Freddie, who very gets a secret signal all to himself at the end of the song. If he wanted to, he could have any of these women seduce Freddie because they do anything he says, but because Dodd wants something greater for his charge (his own will imposed on Freddie's) his dour acolyte looks past them in their passive nudity, even if it's what he and Dodd both see when they look at the crowd. Together in sin.

What I love is that Freddie clearly doesn't understand The Cause or buy it (he wishes it were real), he just buys Dodd's conviction and sees that this man, with so many followers, believes in the poor damaged vet. That's what keeps them together as long as it can. So the film feels vacant between their meetings because it veers away from the horrifying purity of that connection. The movie isn't as fulfilling in the off hours because the two of them don't feel fulfilled or even engaged by anyone else. It's important to show the downtime because how else do we understand the importance of their connection? That said, yeah, there's no getting around the feeling that we're watching characters hopeless, beached without each other. It is aimless, it feels aimless, but that's also the point, so, I almost feel bad for complaining. Ha! I will say I disagree about the ending only because I absolutely loved the demented fairy tale aspect of those final scenes; that gorgeous shot of Phoenix on his own on the road, the equally gorgeous pasty, chubby english girl who's essentially a female Dodd. I'm torn about the truly unromantic last words "Put it back in, it fell out!" On the one hand they undermine the beauty of what we're seeing and understanding, but on the other they are Phoenix making sure his character gets the last word on the tone of the film. I could have lived without those words but then again it's his film really.

Tucker: My issue didn't even lie with what went on in the final scenes. I think, especially after reading what you had to say on the subject, which I agree with completely, that having the last moments of the film reflect the true power of their relationship together would've felt more conclusive for me. All that said though, it's a brilliant piece and requires several more views on my part to fully make a decision on where it fits into my favorite films canon. Also if you're going to pick a motif, shots of a roiling, swirling ocean due to ship's turbines is most definitely the way to go [ed 2026: why has no shot of the ocean ever topped these?].

It was such an interesting take on the idea of cults. On one hand, PT gives us the prime real estate for starting a cult: war damaged folks like Freddie, who we as an audience can see right away is a wayward soul who probably does need some kind of psychiatric help. The entire time I watched him lash out at people who treat him badly, I sort of wished I was as free. Sidenote: It could've just been me, but as they give the public service announcement to all the veterans who will have to assimilate back into civilian life, I couldn't help but wonder if he was on a ship full of Freddies. In which case, who's going to make that film? You see it in Lancaster Dodd that he wishes to be free the way that Freddie is even while he's trying to change him into a "suitable" human being. But as an audience member, you're never truly upset with the cult. You're too busy watching its two most interesting members have at the rest of the world. The scene where the dissenter comes to the house in New York was incredible because while he's asking logical questions, I took it as a personal affront the way that the other characters do. I found myself furious that this character would get in the way of what I was trying to see.

Scout: Anderson's treatment of Scientology is a fascinating footnote to the story, really. It's the setting and it does right by the ideas, but the story isn't "let's pick on Elrond" because ultimately Anderson finds his brand of megalomania too fascinating to write off or make one-note. If he could make us love Daniel Plainview (and I know I fucking did), than Dodd was no challenge, really. First of all, the movie is not anti-anything. Scientology is explained rationally as something that many people may or may not have needed - religions are all like that. People, especially damaged drifters like Freddie, need guidance, or at bottom, someone who will listen to them. To go from the navy (where he follows orders for a living) to suddenly being forced to live on his own makes him doubly lost - a fuck-up with no one to take orders from. The phrase "the world needs ditch diggers" was coined for people like Freddie. So when he can't fit in digging ditches, what do we do with them in an age where the depth of his psychological problems haven't been mined or explained? Dodd rather touchingly sees Freddie's disabilities as just what makes him beautiful (even if rather un-touchingly, he means to exploit him to a degree for self-actualization/aggrandizement). So it makes perfect sense that The Cause, Dianetics, Mormonism, Shen Yun, whatever, would attract followers. This country has more lost souls than perhaps any on earth , based on sheer tonnage, and no indigenous religion to which we listen. So The Master isn't an indictment, if anything its objective-bordering-on-sympathetic. Dodd is obviously a charlatan, but he is a powerful force to his people. He listens as loud as he speaks. And I'm right there with you about the interloper and his doubts. Anderson makes us feel so deeply for Freddie (or maybe pity is the better word? I prefer to think not, but Phoenix seems to actively seek it through his violent obtuseness and pained, crooked expressions) that when his saviour is questioned and it feels like he'll have no breakthrough, we feel threatened. Beautiful, Norman Bates,car-in-the-swamp reversal of fortune in that scene! Freddie becomes the audience in that scene when he throws food at the poor bastard, who, let's not forget, is right. Dodd realizes in that moment that Freddie is his foil, the only person he can really hope to influence. Those with facts and rationality will see through his bullshit; Freddie feels him on a gut level. When Dodd yells at him like a bad dog, their relationship's first benchmark has been met. Not man and master, but master and faithful companion. Dodd the devil, finally winning over his own Cerberus. Not any mere castaway. This is the biggest fish he's ever hooked. "Teeth! A lasso! Wrestle! Sit, Dragon!"

As for the turbines and the water they stir, I'll attempt to synthesize, but probably miss the mark: the war or progress or any great societal upheaval, leaving people like Freddie in its wake. Hence those fantastic shots of him leaning over various bows on his ship. The boats dragging him into the future, back to society, but he's too spaced out and in his own head and impulses to notice his fellow sailors throwing shit at him to get his attention. To quote Martin Sheen's similarly fried army captain in Apocalypse Now, he's "not even in their fuckin' army anymore." The world can't hold him. It's either prison, which he treats with worse fear than death perhaps because he fears he belongs there (his outburst disproving Dodd's Orson Welles-like reading of the platitude "Man is not an animal!") or Dodd. Either way: a cage. Or so it seems.

Tucker: I never realized while watching the film, but the woman made of sand that they build in the first scene of the film sums up the entire story in one shot. Dodd's movement is tailor made for Freddie. As Freddie sees it, it isn't there to judge him or tell him he's strange. So he latches onto it. Even though none of it is real at all. Dodd's cult is a woman made of sand. And Freddie's interaction with her goes right along with the structure of The Master. When he first meets the woman, he fucks it and fingers it. It's lewd, it's crude, it's Freddie. Much like his first encounter with the cult, he's just there to use these people. Get a bed to sleep in and some free booze. But the film keeps returning to the shot of Freddie curled up with the sand woman. He grows attached. He falls in love, either with the movement or Lancaster himself. Either way, as they keep returning to Freddie on the beach with Sandy it becomes more and more tender. But there's a crucial flashback moment in this. Because the first encounter with the woman on the beach, we learn that other navy men have built her, more as a joke than anything else. But after everyone's gone, Freddie constructs his own woman. She's his own creation. She's there for him alone and she'll never betray him.

Scout: That is indeed the entire story and I admit to having completely missed out on the significance of the woman in the sand until now. See this is why it's best never to write something off when you don't understand it. I think I understood a lot of The Master while walking out and quickly dissecting it with [an ex-girlfriend]. We raced through the dominant images, trying to hang them up like wet photographs in a dark room, trying to make sense of every image in context while we still remembered what, when and why something happened, but sometimes it's impossible without a week to think it through. I found myself blowing up images like David Hemmings trying to make sense of them and only distorting them. The moments that I don't feel need discussion are the things that seemed immediately impressive. We were both stunned by Phoenix and Hoffman's performances in the jailhouse, where they both turn into animals for a moment; Freddie a caged primate destroying everything he can put his body to and Dodd pissing after winning his argument to mark his territory. 

To return to your point about this housing two of the best performances of all time. Their two styles are in full view and equalized by the cage they sit inside. Philip Seymour Hoffman's warped, pink charisma, Joaquin Phoenix's brute demented physicality. People will talk about Anderson provoking these performances for years and they'll be right to do so, but what I love is that moment is that it sits neatly outside the dominant theme. You could draw parallels or figure out what it means in their relationship - Phoenix behaving like a jilted mistress when he finds that Hoffman's master has been untrue (admittedly to a medical school, but fidelity is transitive to Freddie, whose already been cheated enough to remember the particular sting that comes with that feeling; furthermore he doesn't trust doctors, they didn't 'cure him') - but ultimately Anderson stops his story to give them a fantastic moment to command the room and the movie entirely without his help. Their love affair picks up again when they meet on the lawn of the house in Philadelphia and roll around and do everything short of kiss each other in full view of Dodd's family and followers. I'll be seeing The Master again soon with all this in mind and see if I can't make sense of the parts that seemed to pass me by last time. I'll watch it forever, because I believe in the cause [ed 2026: still true].