Phantom Thread

PTA's weed era - the composition-forward, psychologically rich stretch of masterpieces from There Will Be Blood onward - is defined by great men; barons, cult leaders, artists, and developing hustlers whose self-seriousness leaves them and their orbits vulnerable to the moral rot of capitalistic pursuit. Although PTA's rarely engaged explicitly with materialist analysis - his interests lie more in interpersonal power dynamics and dialectics of individual desires - his diagnosis of American(/British) hyperindividualism and Protestant work ethic as destructive forces manifest in his characters. The form and scale of these films reflect the grandiose presentations and projects of his oft-troubled men; explosive oil, crashing waves, and fragile dresses are tactile microcosms of both individual as well as societal and historically situated pathologies. If there is salvation to be found in the PTA universe, it's in unencumbered love, and every male protagonist from Daniel Plainview to Gary Valentine (minus potentially Doc Sportello, whose film I owe a rewatch) seemingly get closer and closer to achieving it. The title of his 2019 Radiohead short "Anima" is a fitting encapsulation of this throughline, as the Jungian idea of the masculine force to explore, reason, and conquer countered by the need for vulnerability and connection (setting aside the gender essentialism here). PTA is a profoundly spiritual filmmaker, and both The Master and Phantom Thread subtly support an interpretation of his films' interlaced dyads as reincarnations. Above all, the characters who find themselves escaping with their souls intact are those who overcome the social and psychological barriers of their times and places and surrender to the processing of feeling with others, in whatever perverse form it takes. His films are prescriptions to chill out and pass around a joint, if you will. I haven't read Vineland, and by all indications One Battle is a loose adaptation anyway, but a Reagan-era father-daughter revolutionary epic feels like a natural progression. Given the filmmaker and subject, I'm primed to be thinking about the dual functions of nostalgia as comfort and weapon. Ghosts of the past are another prominent PTA throughline, and Phantom Thread's transcendent New Year's scene and pretty much all of Licorice Pizza suggest that a hopeful future can be found in human connection. Despite their rosy surfaces however, the threat of a changing, darker world that threatens to undermine the sublimation of nostalgia is present in the periphery of both of his most recent works. Fascism relies on a more deliberate and overt weaponization of the past, and I could not be more hyped for my favorite American filmmaker to expand the ideological scope of his fixations. What better time than now.