Cult Crazy

We hate cults, don’t we? They are nasty little things, brainwashing nice simple people. Danger! Danger! Don’t go there. That’s the idea, isn’t it? Have you ever been inside a cult, I ask… You look at me blankly. You have your doubts, I can see. They are confirmed when I mention Paul Thomas Anderson and his film The Master.

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There are many ways into this movie, a mark of its quality. So where shall we begin? Do we start where a good film should…at the end, where Freddie, having been shagged by an English woman - a servant we guess from the eves of her bedroom - lies on his back trying for another erection. He is asking her name over and over and over again until, at the last, he says, you’re the bravest girl I’ve ever known. She laughs, finding it all - the floppy penis, his American accent, the drunken repetitions, that incomprehensible phrase - funny. Comical chap he was with his JT all crumpled up; thought I’d have to get the iron out, and him going on and on with his silly talk, and there’s me going soft on him I says it was the jet lag. Smiling there, like my mother's pussy cat, and me going yank yank yank, giving me hand a real pain, but you knows how it is, knackered now I takes one last bloody good yank and up I gets his Empire State Building, wobbling about like our grannie's best jelly; you couldn’t stop me laughing; bring on the custard I said! to cool me down. Bravest girl he’d ever known; well, when I clambered on top I told him he’s lucky I’ve a head for heights; ha! ha! ha!… Cut to the opening scene and Freddie sleeping on the beach next to a huge woman made of sand, her two huge breasts an impossible dream.

We go to a different place. On board ship Freddie enters a room where young people are listening to the Master’s voice through headphones. He is telling them that they are not beasts; he is saying, repeating himself again and again, over and over and over these phrases roll, that the mind must be in charge, that reason, by controlling the emotions and restraining our animal desires, will make us fully human, reason being the soul of man. As he listens uncomprehendingly to these words Freddie scrawls “Would you like to fuck?” on a piece of paper and passes it to a pretty woman listening intently to the master’s exhortation.

We are in the Master’s cabin. He asks Freddie his name over and over and over again; it is one of the many questions that seem to probe this man’s character. It is not so. The questions are a chant; hypnotic in their constant repetition they produce a trance-like state which ends when Lancelot Dodds says you’re the bravest boy I’ve ever known.

A sceptical guest in a swanky Manhattan party tells the socialites these dreams and reincarnation memories are nothing but clever tricks; Dodds using hypnosis and other psychological conditioning techniques to brainwash his listeners. He’s a conman tricking people into joining his church. It was going so well! Before this bore arrived Dodds was enjoying himself with these rich American aristocrats, who appeared ready converts. His rumbustious personality, that endless flow of talk - he is a Ganges of conversation - together with his charm, his intelligence, that doctor’s bedside manner, and that capacious bag full of psychological gadgets, seemed sure to convince the willing and the unwary. Then smart-arse arrives, and Dodds blows it; the questions penetrating and persistent, he loses it, shouting then swearing at this man who knows too much and insists on arguing his case. Public tantrums are a terrible mistake. Establishment wealth will not tolerate bad manners.

The Master is an actor who improvises his lines that dense with the latest technical jargon, and sharp with an evangelist’s proselytising edge, are yet leavened with wit, his charm adding its own sweetness. Often we feel he is testing the audience. Like Houdini, though tying himself up in the ludicrous, Dodds creates the tightest of situations so to exercise his talents for escape. He loves a risk! White water rafting over the most outrageous absurdities he waits for the shouts and screams of his listeners, their demands he stop this nonsense. The demand never comes… They are enjoying themselves too much! The excitement trapping the naive and needy it is the performance not the ideas that convince. Dodds is no thinker. It is his Achilles heel. A disciple describes him accurately: the big bible could be condensed into a three page pamphlet. Yet the believer thinks this verbosity a weakness that hides the Master’s real quality, his mysticism. This outsider has a different view: the torrent of words hides a shallow pool of thought. The Master’s gift is his linguistic brilliance, each new improvisation dazzling the audience, who are mind-numbed by his long solos that perplex the intelligence. He can talk, my god he can talk! A magician of the newly minted sentence. With dialectic Dodds is as useless as a child: he cannot debate. This loses him much support. There are other failings too. His knowledge is wide but superficial; it is the intellectual junk an intelligent person picks up from the endless flow of information thrown out by the industry of print – the Bible, self-help manuals, guides to psychology, popular histories, magazine articles, newspaper puffs… This is a magpie mind making its nest out of epistemological ephemera. Dazzling the uninitiated with arcane facts and bizarrerie Dodds cannot hold a rational discussion with an informed person, who will expose the limits of his knowledge and understanding. Of course this makes him uneasy. Reasoned argument is a risk to his own psyche, which has to dominate, the monologue protecting him against the reality of others; his words a tank patrolling the streets of his sentences. A man alone is Dodds, whose power lies in the magnetism of a personality that gives both force and coherence to his ideas: there can be no separation between this ego and the concepts it preaches. There is a sacred mystery here. It is this man’s charisma, which the religion tries to capture through its maxims and rituals; all churches the institutional attempt to preserve the atmosphere of their founder (Christianity inseparable from the mystery that is Christ). With believers Dodds has no worries. The sceptics will always cause problems, his ideas fused with his personality to challenge an idea is to assault his very existence. Compromise is impossible. What he says is absolute. He must be right and for all time; his paragraphs have the monumentality of the pyramids; they are meant to last for eternity.

No thinker… 

A disciple walks into the marquee - it is the church’s first national congress - to congratulate him on his new book, the second part of this religion’s bible, a mix of pop philosophy, mysticism, fantasy, self-help psychology and extravagant claims about psychic healing. She likes it. When prompted, though, Helen says that it may contain some errors, mentioning one which completely overturns the teachings of the first book: no longer do we recall past lives but we must imagine them, is the argument presented here. Dodds tries to argue his way out, but in his usual helpless fashion falters and reduced to incoherency he loses control, shouting then raging; his words a bludgeon useless before Helen’s impregnable intelligence. Her look is her reply: it pierces him. A rich follower is lost. 

Lancelot Dodds loses people with his words. A deluge of the wise and the foolish, mixed with the flotsam of the banal, carries his disciples away; a never-ending flow of non-sequiturs, mixed metaphors, jokes and commonplaces constantly surging up and through his sentences, which, we are convinced, will soon flounder on the rocks of gibberish and error; surely, having escaped these boulders of stupidity he’ll sink in this whirlpool of contradiction, but oh no, on he sails… His disciples do not even try to make sense of these performances; blasts of elemental matter which are not meant to be analysed, they are existential events to be experienced not understood. In a marvellous scene at his daughter’s wedding he introduces a dragon metaphor, but then loses control of it, literally wrestling with the image to give it some meaning; the speech’s original purpose quickly forgotten in the drama of the performance. The wedding party accept this tomfoolery as part of his eccentric character; they see it also, no doubt, as a sign of his superior being, his secret wisdom; a sort of divine madness. Freddie, not yet conditioned into the ways of this church, and whose mental deficiencies ensure that he will always remain on its margins, acts out a perfect parody of these people’s responses: initial curiosity, then confusion, and finally bemusement and acceptance as Dodds somehow manages to carry off his performance with laughter and silly facial gestures; his charisma has seen him through.

An especially weak improvisation occurs at the church’s first national congress. Delivering a speech without notes it becomes quickly apparent that Dodds is making it up (so confirming his son’s view that he does this all the time). He hasn't a clue where the speech is going! He says the new book has no secrets, that it is about man, whom we must therefore assume is straightforward and transparent; to comprehend him we need little more, perhaps, than common sense. Then suddenly he changes tack - has he realised the thrust of his words? - telling the audience that he has found the secret to the universe: the secret is in us, and it is…the secret is…laughter! Thinking they were in church the membership now find themselves listening to a stand-up comedian; is it all a joke… During this speech there are extended sequences concentrating on Freddie’s face. When Dodds begins he is listening, like the rest, in rapt attention, but when Dodds talks about laughter we see the bewilderment in his eyes, and we sense (though perhaps wrongly) that he is losing his belief in this man (is he remembering the son’s words?) who is obviously floundering, his words running out of control.

Freddie doesn't understand the Master, but unlike these rich followers - with their endless fund of educated fantasy - his misunderstandings breed scepticism not awe. He has his doubts, we are sure, these doubts causing him to beat up a disciple who criticises the Master for writing too much - Freddie also cannot argue, his weapons his fists and feet. Having become emotionally dependent upon Dodds Freddie has to believe in him. When the doubts start he will have to go.

Freddie does leave the church. The Master is not omniscient. He is fragile too. This departure hurts him very badly.

There is a coda of much interest. Asleep in an empty cinema while a cartoon plays on screen (we hear it in the background) Freddie drifts back to an earlier scene aboard a ship, when in an interview with a military psychiatrist we discover the sexual obsession that has crazed his personality. Dodds now rings up, asking Freddie to come to England: come, I will tell you when we first met (it is a game he often plays). Bring some “coolies”, he asks, for they don’t have them in this country, lovely though it is. The conversation is a dream, but Freddie mistakes it for reality, going to visit his master in the English countryside.

This section of the film is difficult to read. Splashing about in the sea we shout for a life raft… The influence of Dodds is that of a dominant lover over the weaker partner who adores them. Now sitting behind a large desk in an outsize office, that looks like a banqueting hall of a baronial mansion, he starts to sing On A Slow Boat to China (the use of music in this film is at times incredible). Tears fill Freddie’s eyes, and squeezed out they dribble down the side of his nose. This moment is unbearable. But as he sings, Dodds, unable to restrain his anger and frustration, loses control of his voice; which helps Freddie to regain his composure, his recovery complete when the song ends. Here are two lovers about to part. The Master retains his power, but he has lost that wholehearted dedication which he previously inspired; doubts, and Dodds’ own instability, have distanced the devotee, who has regained his independence.

In this scene we see both the brilliance of the cult leader and the reason why, ultimately, he must fail: Dodds wants total control, which is impossible: there will always be some resistance inside the disciple’s psyche. Love me! Love me! and all the time is the demand. This will not happen. Each person is an independent being, whose emotions have their own life and unpredictable flow, which should make the leader wary, always they should be careful around another’s autonomy. They are rarely so. Dodds went too far with his protégé, whom he conceived as his greatest challenge; the attempt was anyway flawed: Freddie’s psychotic personality is too extreme and too entrenched to be changed by psychological tricks and emotional overkill. Despite all the work of Dodds and his followers Freddie remains sex obsessed and a violent drunk. Nothing can change this, except a ready supply of concupiscent women (the work of a harem not a church). The limit to Master’s power has been revealed; On A Slow Boat to China both a lover’s goodbye song and a requiem to his own defeat. Lacking God’s gift of total transformation he must accept that Freddie cannot be his own creation. How hard this is! The godhead exposed as just another human.

Freddie is a political instrument. The members of Dodds’ inner council - his young wife, his daughter and son-in-law - dislike this outsider’s violence and unpredictability; the general ugliness of his character appals. They resent the (to them) inexplicable bond between these two men; while sexual tension and jealousy – the daughter is attracted to Freddie - generates an aggressive and unstable atmosphere, making everyone uneasy and insecure. This is what the Master desires. He is using this tension to bolster his authority over his closest associates, whose feelings of instability and fear force them to submit to his will. This strange bond with a man little more than an animal has regained Dodds his mystique; once again he exercises a magical power that is beyond their understanding.

Dodd’s rejection of Freddie represents a loss of power inside the church. From early on we see his young wife, limited and narrow, a typical dogmatic follower, increasing her hold over him (there is a curious scene in a bathroom where she applies her own form of conditioning: she masturbates her husband while dissing his ideas). Freddie is the means to reduce this influence; but when he leaves she once again exerts her authority, which is implacable on his return. He cannot come back now. The disciples will not allow it. The Master, being super subtle, asks Freddie to make the decision, but the thrust of their conversation, together with his body language, is too obvious to be ignored. Freddie accepts he is outcast.

This is a film about that transitional period when a personality cult metamorphoses into a church; the wild charisma of the founder, magnetising a community of believers, turning into a staid and stable bureaucracy, run by clerks do not want holy fools in their offices. The church, moving away from its chaotic beginnings, the source of its religious spirit, is seeking to tame and exclude the uncultivated vitality that is its origins. Men like Freddie no longer wanted on the premises.1

In a bureaucracy the charismatic man is dangerous. The bureaucrats have to stifle him, and over time the clerks will win out, charisma helpless against the relentless routines of organisation, and its remorseless expansion. Freddie is the last chance for Dodds to control his own cult. It was not to be. This church will belong to his wife.

The two men are in adjacent prison cells. Dodds is still and quiet. Freddie a riot of uncontrollable energy, smashing up his room’s contents. When Freddie has worn himself out Dodds begins to speak. A shouting match ensues, during which the Master, always under control, manipulates his interlocutor, orchestrating a devastating climax: I am the only friend you’ve ever had and…I’m through with you, he says. It is an immensely powerful statement, reinforced when he turns away to piss in the toilet. The dismissal final the defeat is complete; Dodds has destroyed this human being. This scene - the screen is divided down the middle - shows the extremes in their two characters, while also suggesting a commonality: they share the same wild spirit. To a leader or visionary this is a goad, encouraging the urge to convert, the similarities surely making it inevitable. Life of course complicates matters. Dodds’ attempt at total mastery creates the unforeseen consequence that he becomes dependent on the person he would dominate.2 Freddie a weak and needy individual whose inadequacies are a trap for the stronger man, who comes to depend upon the total submission of someone they can never wholly control; for feelings, unlike ideas, do remain free, especially when strong and volatile, as here.

Dodds has exposed himself. His weaknesses are obvious. They are to be used against him. Freddie no longer the tool for the Master’s re-ascendency but a sign that the old man is a liability, a relic of the past, an out-of-date boy not suited to present business.3

This church, a highly managed and austere place, it resembles a corporate HQ, is no longer a revivalist campaign. That first congress was the end of the impresario’s one-man show; public improv by an unmoored performer too risky for an institution that to survive requires order, discipline and the safe formulas of the bureaucratic personality. Dodds has become an anachronism, his charisma transferred to the advertising department, where it will be used to attract the religious and desperate. A leader no longer. His church to be run by his obedient disciples.

We return to the attic bedroom, and the British woman atop the American laughing at his strange words. Freddie has learned little from his time with the cult: to endlessly repeat a phrase is only to mimic his master’s phrases, it is not to acquire his intelligence. A beast now behaves like a malfunctioning automaton. Dodds has failed. The conditioning has not transformed Freddie’s sensibility; rather, this man’s mental incoherency breaks down the conditioning; the oft repeated passages, under the pressure of strong emotions, breaking out into a rash of linguistic tics, this mind reacting to language as a body to external stimuli; shivering in the cold, wincing at a screech, running away when Mr Wasp flies in to say hello. Freddie’s damaged character has deranged the behaviourist techniques designed to inculcate new habits by rote and mechanical association; the outcome a sort of freak show which this woman finds amusing. You’re the bravest girl I’ve ever known. Who wouldn't laugh, given the context, those two large bosoms swinging fancifully over a penis shortly resurrected? The Master sought to control the passions. They were too strong for him. It gives our British lass some fun. 

Dodds is a smart person, able to quickly acquire ideas and aphorisms. But he should do more than this. Here is a man not clever enough to understand and so develop what he has found; no scholar or thinker, able to transform what he knows into knowledge, Dodds remains for always an intellectual magpie, flying back forth to the nest collecting his baubles and tinsel. Intellectually he cannot grow. His thought is therefore shallow and, because used to control people, dangerous. Yet Freddie has been made a little better by methods that by rights should have destroyed him. Dodds hasn’t completely failed. A dream has come true. Freddie enjoys a post-coital ecstasy.

A wonderful film wonderful in many ways; the music I have already mentioned; the photography in places is extraordinary; the acting supreme; this sympathy adding the craftsman’s final touch.4 

A cult and its charismatic head may be unattractive to us liberals but it is a place that can do good to those who need it. To have made beauty out of ugliness. Wisdom from folly. A genius out of a nincompoop. This film is packed with talent. Our director knows what he’s about. Each movie its own kind of cult, Paul Thomas Anderson is the master.

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1.  For the tension between an established church and religious passion, the millenarian urge, see my Divine is Dynamite.

2.  Harold Pinter has a genius for describing these relationships.

3.  It is Chas in Performance.

4.  Contrast with the much weaker Martha Marcy May Marlene. My Which Way To Go…  has a few words to say.