TOOL The Master 映画

Overall

The production of the film, the mise-en-scène, the music, the acting, the props, and the sets gave the impression of a thorough and well-done job of filmmaking, and very understated. There was at least some CGI, for example, when Amy Adams' eyes changed from green to blue to black, so whatever else there was, it seems to have gone well-hidden.

I took this to be an analogy of the founding of Scientology and Lancaster Dodd to be L. Ron Hubbard. I wondered whether Freddy Quell were an historical figure or no.

Les Personages

Freddy Quell's drinking of toxic substances, the poisoning of the man at the farm, and subsequently giving similar potions to Dodd to drink made me wonder if it were a metaphor for his mental state, his relationship with Dodd, and Dodd's mental state. At one point Dodd's wife tells him he needs to stop drinking (since he got very sick after the "A'Roving" song scene, where he made the nose-and-ear gesture to Freddy to make booze), and then she went to Freddy with the same message, i.e., quit boozing or leave.

Dodd is ambivalent about Freddy's role as a semi-informal enforcer. One can wonder whether we are to assume that that was one of the reasons why Dodd was so keen to keep him around, i.e., his easy propensity to violence.

Joaquin Phoenix gives us a similar character and performance to Joker, his wiry skinniness, mentally ill, often violent, lacking restraint, in this case even more sexually obsessed and perhaps slightly less sexually frustrated. 

I really liked Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal. His hair, his moustache, and the fact that he was a little bit unshaven. Sometimes he was florid, and other times not. I'm told that actors are able to modulate that. He was a great actor. He was able to flip between emoting calm, even in the face of chaos, sharp and sudden anger, and so on, and as I mention below, his in-group jokes, control of tone, and expressions served well to depict him as a believable cult leader.

Poignant Scenes

What do we draw from Freddy chucking his cameraman job? He was drinking his developing chemicals. He attacked the corpulent businessman he was photographing--why? He was drunk from the day before, hungover, after fooling around with the woman (did she work at the store?) in the dark room? Next he was working on a farm, and again getting into trouble with alcohol. It did a good job of painting him as a social awkward, emotionally disturbed, unstable, potentially violent person.

There were a couple of scenes where Dodd was speaking, after the wedding at the beginning, and also at the book release, where he talked about wrestling with a dragon, mentions "death" with a comic and falling intonation, and also at the book release saying how his discoveries are "very, very serious" and the point is the attendants laugh, even though what he says is quite banal, not particularly funny, full of in-group references, so laughing asserts loyalty, membership, and recognition.

Keeping adherents' attention, engagement, even through the banal and the boring, is, I think, characteristic of the behavior of a cult leader. Another part is speaking a lot, even if one say little, or talks nonsense. Apparently a standout sociological parameter which makes group members perceive one as "a leader" or such is the share sheer length of total time one is the one talking.

The scene where he said "Pig Fuck!!" to the guy who was questioning their beliefs and was later beaten up by Freddy and Dodd's son-in-law. This kind of liberty-taking, i.e., using crass language or references in front of adherents, and against opponents, seems to be a typical feature of cults and cult leaders. Obviously the threat or the actual exercise of violence against opponents or dissenters is another.

Another feature is doing crazy, meaningless things, or talking a complete load of bollocks, as perhaps exemplified in renting the big yacht, doing the "pick a point and ride toward it" and "things that happened a trillion years ago," "Time travel," "curing leukemia" and so forth. Each of these gives adherents and scoffers alike a choice: do it and you're in, otherwise you're out. It's a well-marked and well-closed meme, if a stupid one. A fun thing about cults is that they exist entirely on the "religious", "dogmatic," or possibly "pseudo-spiritual" plane, so spiritual significance may be attached to anything with almost complete freedom, and memetic pairing, already something which the human brain is highly susceptible to, is a much more lightly constrained affair. You can pair total nonsense with existing memes, often recycled mainstream religious memes, like the Mormon's repackaging of Jesus, Satan, the children of Noah, among other things.

The scene where Lancaster Dodd was singing "I'll Go No More A'Roving" and the women in the room got progressively completely naked. I wondered whether this were really happening, or whether it were Freddy Quell's imagination, or some surreal fugue, as in a meta-reference to how cult leaders tend to take advantage of their female (or otherwise vulnerable) adherents.

Why do they do this? Is it to impress the male adherents, for example? And if so, how and why does this work? This is a whole big question. The way the scene was shot sort of put this whole hidden sexual underbelly of cults out there, visible, but uninterrogated.

The idea of accessing past experiences, if not past lives, is part of trauma therapy and re-evaluation counselling. Hence the shift of "can you remember" to "can you imagine" looks like a significant shift from psychic healing to demagoguery. 

At minute 1:45, at the book release, Laura Dern and Dodd get into a tiff about the not-all-that-slight change from "can you remember" to "can you imagine". The well-balanced scene depicts it as on one hand seeming nit-picking by Laura Dern, but by the content of her issue and Dodd's explosive reaction, a seminal point. 

It makes me think of things like how the Supreme Soviet, I believe it was in the 1980s, changed the Soviet Constitution from the classic Marxist phrase "from each according to his ability and to each according to his need" to "...to each according to his work" and the "botched baptisms" performed by an American priest where he substituted "we" for "I" in the sacrament, and the Vatican ruled that those so baptized were not saved and had to be rebaptized since the invocation was not to God through the agency of the priest, but to the congregation, as was the priest's apparent intention, i.e., not a valid source of salvation.

I believe the priest may have been defrocked. One can presume that he hadn't molested any young boys, since in such a case the church would've surely leapt to his aid. Sorry for the off-color joke... Again, cults taking advantage of their most vulnerable adherents.

Words have meaning, ideas have consequences, but it is harder to show a way of saying things to be problematic or an idea to be false than it is to simply say it in the first place and have it sound good and have a few people back it, especially if those people are attractive or powerful...or violent. Standing up for basic values and even conservative traditions is one way to keep cultish madness in check. There may be others, but arguing with somebody who's talking sheer nonsense tends to give weight to their position by sheer dint of attention (the talking length principle again) and resorting to the defense of one's own position may often be at the expense of telegraphing to anyone paying attention that one's position needs to be defended.