La Femme's Thoughts on...The Master

This is the freaky face Joaquin made the whole movie.  

I have a feature titled, La Femme Recommends where I expound on a movie I have seen that I think others would benefit from watching.  Well, this time, I saw a movie that so confounded me that I am not sure if I can recommend it (also I am trying to expand this blog from just being about drinking and movies so I want to start a new column about my other thoughts (yes, I get that this is still about movies, but it is a bit more abstract? maybe?)).   Weeks after seeing this film, I can honestly say, I haven't been able to completely parse my thoughts on it.

The Master is in my circle at least (that being some people I know and a lot of Internet friends I haven't met), a huge deal.  It is P.T. Anderson's follow up to 2007's There Will be Blood and stars Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman.  The movie is about, well it is sort of about everything, but the story follow Phoenix's Freddy Quell, one of the mos t f*#$ed characters to carry a mainstream release in at least ten years.  Freddy is the epitome of what society would consider a lost cause.  Much like myself, he is an aspiring mixologist, unlike me he likes to use paint thinner and developing fluid to make his cocktails. And this is really the tip of the iceberg.  Freddy at once seems to be a total misogynist, a narcissist and a sociopath.  Hoffman's, Lancaster Dodd is the opposite, completely put together, elegant, oh yeah, and the leader of a new age "cult" The Cause.

For any Whovians, this is not The Master this movie refers to. 

When they meet, it is in some ways like they are meeting their exact opposite, but in some ways they are meeting their doppelganger.  K, our friend S and I spent a lunch after watching the movie trying to figure out what the point is.  Like many of my best ideas, I just went ahead and stole K's thesis which he told me in the car ride home.  At the end of the film (not really a spoiler, this isn't a spoilery kind of movie), Dodd tells Freddy that when he finds a way to live life without serving a master that  he should share that with the world.  Therein lies the thesis, Freddy may seem to be free and serve no master but we see his tortured soul.  His master is woman (or sex, maybe that is the more honest thing to say).   Throughout the movie, I was completely disgusted in a way I have never been watching a P.T. Anderson movie before.  I just thought, what is with all the gross sex stuff.  But I also think that great art and great films should make you feel uncomfortable and weird and displaced.  The Master did just that.  It completely showed Freddy's dysfunction as a man and contrasted it with Dodd's dysfunction.  I honestly can't say what this movie said about women.  Women were at once victims of men's sexual obsession and at the same time, the ones in complete control.

Three weeks or so later, I am still puzzled over this movie but I can definitively say that I think it is an important work of P.T. Anderson and an important exploration of male perversion and relationships.  I wouldn't say it is for everyone to see, but anyone who sees it will have a strong reaction.

Also, it introduced the world to the insult Pig F&*#, so there is that.

Julie