The Master

I have so many thoughts about this movie, I don’t even know where to start. Needless to say, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix give masterclass performances. The cinematography is out of this world good. But I just want to talk about the themes circling in my head. Freddie Quell feels like Dodd’s unruly dog. wild, untrainable, yet devoted beyond reason. He unconditionally loves his master with the desperate loyalty of a creature that needs structure, and Dodd, for all his godlike posturing, forgives him with the tenderness reserved for an animal that keeps pissing on the floor and biting the mailman. Freddie is pure id: lust, violence, hunger, yearning. Dodd is the superego, convinced he’s transcended his inner animal but still ruled by its Jungian shadow. Their bond is magnetic because it completes a circle: Freddie gives chaos to Dodd’s order, Dodd gives form to Freddie’s formlessness. Together Dodd and Freddie form a perfect but poisonous symmetry; Dionysian instinct and Apollonian order, body and spirit locked in orbit. It’s the Greek eros: the longing to annihilate the boundary between the self and the other. They need each other because only together do they make a whole man. Yet their completion is fatal and self destructive. Freddie is the body seeking spirit; Dodd is the spirit seeking body. When they meet, they ignite. When they part, the world goes dim again.