Riffing on L'Avventura

Synopsis: When a young woman (Lea Massari) disappears without a trace on a boating trip, her lover (Gabriele Ferzetti) and best friend (Monica Vitti) at first attempt to uncover what has happened to her, but become increasingly attracted to each other during the long search.

1. Released the same year as L'Avventura, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho seemingly shares some of the former's 
concerns. In both, the apparent 'heroine' of the piece vanishes. In both, an inquest occurs into the disappearance. In both, there is unease, social and cerebral. Both films were derided upon release, later becoming emblematic of their time. Yet the similarities are merely surface-deep; in Psycho, we witness Marion Crane's terrible death, the following investigation, and the solving of her murder, even if we cannot comprehend the motives or psychology behind it. In L'Avventura, there is no such moment of reckoning. There is no murder, nor is there a true mystery. The characters do not allow for a mystery. The thematic concerns of L'Avventura lie far from the realm of Hitchcock; they lie far from the realm of most filmmakers. The plot may be simple, but the possibilities are endless. If I was going to choose a film that L'Avventura most resembles, it might be another film released in that same year of 1960: Fellini's famous paean to wanton excess, La Dolce Vita. The two are almost flip sides of the same coin; both concern wealthy Romans ensnared in a world of bored alienation, trying anything that comes along in order to 'get their kicks'. Both concern the towering figure of lust, rather than 'love'; nobody could possibly be 'in love' in L'Avventura; there is simply no place for it. Love is another way to pass the time. Just as Marcello Mastroianni finds himself sexually obsessed with Anita Ekberg's starlet, Sandro and Claudia will play with each other until their time is through. Even a tragic happening is a distraction; vanished Anna is essentially erased, as the lusts and needs of a life continued consume each character in turn. Unlike Psycho, this is not a film about a lost woman. It is a film about the emptiness of our modern world, and how we might overcome it.

2. I'll admit, I watched L'Avventura several nights ago and initially dismissed it as 'tedious'; 'bored, boring characters stumbling around in beauty', I wrote on Twitter, trying to sound for all the world like I knew what I wanted to say. The truth is, I was stumped; this is like no film I have ever seen, and I wonder how it has eluded me for this long. It's a running joke with a friend that I've been trying to watch it now for several months, and keep being thwarted; I've concluded that I'd made up my mind about the film before I'd even seen it. I had several plot points fixed in my head, but was mistaken about several; I was convinced the whole 2 hour and 23 minute running time was set on an island; convinced also that it was Monica Vitti who disappeared, and Lea Massari who sought her; convinced there was a lesbian scene, for some outlandish reason. Maybe I was expecting another Persona.  And I didn't want another Persona. These preconceptions prevented me from just sitting down and watching the goddamn thing; I thought I had it all worked out. And even as I watched it, I thought to myself, 'This is what I've heard so much about?' Like many, I was blinded by the glare of the film's surface; a series of happenings, played out by a clinically disinterested few, in a world that seems alien and, almost, hostile. This is the world of what many jokingly called 'Antonioniennui'; existential oblivion, devoid of responsibility or passion. These are people searching for something, or perhaps not even searching; perhaps content to float in a limbo of moral dilapidation. I thought to myself, 'How can I relate to these people? What is the film trying to tell me? Is it a warning? Do I desire their destruction, their downfall?' 

3. Yet the film has played at the edges of my subconscious since I watched it. I find myself engrossed with the idea of the 'adventure' of the title. It is not, of course, an adventure of the body, nor one of narrative construction. As Ebert says, you can imagine Antonioni sitting down and having a good laugh to himself as he wrote that title. He cleverly manipulates the audience's preconceptions, in that at first we believe we've seen this story before; lost girl, single friend determined to discover what's happened, eventually overcomes the corruption of the police force etc. But this film is more about what becomes 'the disappearance of the disappearance'; the passage of time, even a relatively short amount of time, and how it wipes away the memory of Anna's vanishing; as Claudia laments, how can so much have changed, how can she have forgotten, in only three days? This is an entropic concern; what at first seemed of the utmost importance shrivels into insignificance. The 'adventure' of the title becomes altogether different. It is one of the mind, and it is one born in the mind of the viewer. It is not a journey easily navigable. There are two key destabilizing forces in L'Avventura: Antonioni's wonderful cinematography of space and his treatment of time. These are the elements, far away from the happenings on screen, which make up his 'adventure of the mind'. 

4. Antonioni's 'cinematic language' was hailed at the time as one of the most innovative cinematic techniques in history; critics at Cannes circulated a petition declaring the film 'irredeemably important', following a harshly critical reception at the initial screening. It's hard now to imagine modern cinema without Antonioni's innovations; fluid long-takes, epic spaces, the marginality of the characters. All of these were given life in his breakthrough film. What first hits you about this film is the importance of sheer scope. The great liberty of Antonioni's spaces allows for seemingly boundless reflection; in L'Avventura, there is, it seems, humanity, and then there is nature. The parallel between the two is where cinematic perfection is found. The 'adventure' becomes one of inward contemplation, between these great spaces and the distinctiveness of each and every character. Antonioni begins with the island, the physical representation of the moral wasteland of these characters. Throughout the scenes when the characters search for Anna, his cinematography accentuates the insignificance of these subjects in comparison to the vast perpetuity of nature; characters are located off-centre, several wandering aimlessly at the peripheries of each shot. The vast ocean of the background accentuates the barrenness of the foreground; everything is 'other', completely separate from these tiny figures trying to navigate their way. If you are to take this notion that there are humans and there is nature, you could find yourself at the inevitable conclusion that Anna has simply been consumed by the landscape; nature has taken her. There are hints of logical explanations; a boat is heard leaving the island, a group of smugglers are interrogated and appear reticent to explain themselves. Yet the fact of the matter is still the same for the audience; Anna is gone. And by ceasing to exist, at least within the temporal framework of the film, she has rendered the thread of existence as infinitely fragile. The discrepancy between this fact and the behaviour of the characters is what creates the thematic contention; they continue as if nothing has been altered. 

5. The lack of human centrality in scenes continues after the island. Empty space, devoid of human subject, is one of Antonioni's most important innovations; Scorcese took it as his own, most notably in Taxi Driver, another film concerned predominantly with alienation in the vast urban landscapes of America. Throughout the second hour of the film, Claudia and Sandro float from place to place, never truly connecting with any one landscape, until, perhaps, the very final shot of the movie. The dramatic contours of the island yield to city streets, hotel rooms, a bell-tower. The framing of a scene becomes the purpose, rather than the character within it; idle moments and spaces which do not engage the viewer in movement or happenings. Human interaction, as much as it is, occurs on the borders of the frame, or in altering perspective; Sandro in the extreme foreground, for instance, and Claudia lounging in the background, her back to the viewer. More than any, this affect estranges the viewer; the idea that subject is simply an aspect of the space, that the space exists and will always exist; they appear into, and disappear from, the spaces, never making them their own, reflecting their eternal disinterest with everything around them. Similarly, the face is not the integral aspect of each character; Monica Vitti becomes the focal point of the film, yet during many scenes, her face is not displayed at all, either too distant for us to make out, or simply turned from the audience. We come, also, to know her body; the curve of a neck, the basin of an ear; details of a human figure that cinema had, until this point, kept hidden from us. Everything is decentred, rendered abstract; we spend our entire time with these characters, yet we cannot know them.

6. This disjointedness of space becomes united with Antonioni's idea of temporal reality, of the passage of minutes, hours, days; the discrepancy between past and future becomes blurred and indistinct. Time, in L'Avventura, is part of the method. Strangely enough, the film is almost doggedly linear; no flashbacks, no scenes out-of-place, barely any sequences running in parallel. The entire second half of the movie follows Claudia and Sandro on their 'quest' to discover the truth about Anna; their are no interruptions from this narrative. Yet the pacing, the construction of individual scenes, and the blank spaces between, create a feeling of unease, of alienation from the temporal flow of time. The film glides along at a glacial pace, the sheer duration of scenes contributing to what I at first labelled the 'tediousness' of its method; viewers are given too much time and space to contemplate events, to look and to think. Silence reigns, broken only by meaningless babble. The cultivation of a kind of disinterestedness in the minds of the viewer is reflected by the characters; Monica Vitti pulls faces at herself in a mirror; reclines against a wall as Sandro talks to a witness regarding the disappearance; conversations begin, are halted, begin again; Claudia sings to herself, pulling stockings onto her feet. The entire flow of time, already fragmented by the disappearance, slows to inconsequential moments and slots of happenings, where nothing is revealed, no great narrative consequences occur; we are merely witnessing the passing of lives, in the search for something to pass them with. The viewer becomes inexorably bound in this moment-by-moment existence, by turns bored and anxious. This is the world of a life lived without purpose. 

7. L'Avventura is also a masterpiece of body language and sexuality. Sexual desire fills the movie, and it is mixed up with the threat of violence. Desire is often portrayed literally; the gathering throngs that follow Claudia through the dusty streets, eyes ravishing her lovely body, are manifestations of the thoughts and longings of every woman and man. The sense of aggression seething beneath the surface is palpable; though there is not a single scene of violence or brutality, the film crackles with the possibility of it. Anna's 'shark' is our first indication of this violence; her disappearance brings to mind endless visions of heads dashed on jagged rocks. Yet the contortions of characters in the act of lust or despair do not conform to this idea; from the opening scene of Anna and Sandro engaged in disinterested lovemaking (Anna is more concerned with Claudia being aware that they are having sex than with the actual act) it is clear that tenderness in this film takes rather the form of adulation of the body, of the simple act of conquest, rather than anything approaching affection. Later Sandro will return the favour, kissing Anna passionately while Claudia watches, pushing her aside when he knows they are alone; minutes later, she will be gone. Later another character, Giulia (Dominique Blanchar), is seduced by a seventeen year-old painter, falling into a sensual dance with him even as Claudia looks listlessly on. Sex, the seeking of it, becomes the new mystery. Anna falls by the wayside. Yet we never see sex; like Bunuel, Antonioni allows our minds to fill in the blanks in forms of fetishization; stockinged legs, figure-hugging dresses, the flick of a tongue; these are Antonioni's outlets of desire. These subdued glances of hungry infatuation become intrinsically bound up with the apathy of each character toward the world around them; what else can they do but what they must? The film's conclusion illustrates this inevitability, as I shall study in the final point. When everything is done, one must move onto the next thing. Desire is fleeting, entropic, burning itself out before it even begins; fuelled by a moment, a crisis, the glimpse of flesh, it cannot be sustained, just as the memory of Anna is gone before it is accepted. Like Severine in Bunuel's Belle de Jour, perhaps a return to the primordial violence and danger of sexuality is all that can save them; the expensive prostitute who seduces Sandro intentionally rips her skirt to attract male attention; hers is a dangerous game, one that Claudia could never dream of, yet one that would draw her out of her listlessness.

8. "Tiredness and waiting, even despair, are the attitudes of the body. No one has gone further in this direction than Antonioni. His method: the interior through behavior, no longer experience, but “what remains of past experiences”, “what comes afterwards, when everything has been said”, such a method necessarily proceeds via the attitudes and postures of the body." 

So Deleuze said of Antonioni. The characters are formed in this exactingly broken flow of time and experience; Antonioni is concerned with what occurs when everything has happened, when the main thrust of the narrative is finalized; what happens when when the mystery has been solved, or has proven to be unimportant? How do these people continue when they have forgotten what brought them together in the first place? The inevitable conclusion comes when Sandro finds another woman; like Anna, Claudia 'disappears' in the conscience of this man who simply seeks to pass the time in masturbatory self-interest. We see this when he ruins a fellow artist's portrait; destruction for destruction's sake. The byproduct of his position in society is his abject narcissism; he is often portrayed as foolish, too stupid to take anything seriously, or perceive the gravity of situations. Hence, even as he searches for his fiancee, he lusts after her best friend. Claudia, on the other hand, could be called an innocent, but only in comparison to the other characters; she is as trapped in the web of self-involved actions as every other character, but she finds it in her heart to believe at least that Sandro loves her, or somehow cares enough to respect her. It is also only Claudia who keeps Anna in mind, when even we, the audience, may have forgotten or ceased to care; her relationship with Sandro, and her belief in his love, stems from the fact that he will not defile the memory of their time on the island. By the end of the film, she becomes convinced that Anna has reappeared, seeking perhaps revenge. Again, Antonioni hints of a conclusion; Anna returning, or even a vision of Anna on the part of one of the characters, would have been the finale of choice for a lesser director, concerned with a lesser purpose; as it is, Antonioni leaves us in his cruel limbo. The film is one of the only I can think of which 'winds down' to almost a standstill, so that by its end there is nothing but the jagged edges of these characters, and the ineradicable display of nature; Sandro weeping on the bench, Claudia standing behind him, unsure whether to pity this contemptible figure, Mount Etna in the background, another island. How we are supposed to feel is never explained; how you feel is part of your experience of the film. You may be bored to fucking tears by this point; if so you may have understood the film more genuinely than anybody.

Some random observations:


Antonioni has stated that the film is is intended to be a 'detective story back-to-front', but also said that there was never any intention to reveal what happened to Anna; the focus is firmly on Monica Vitti's Claudia throughout. However, there are several theories; the shark, the boat (a boat engine is heard twice while the characters search the island; once seemingly for the old man, once unexplained); the smugglers; or death, either by suicide or pure accident. 

This is part one of a loose trilogy, along with Le Notte and L'Eclisse. Much like Bergman's 'Faith' films (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence), Antonioni never intended it as a trilogy, but, due to the thematic links, cinematic historians have labelled it such. Gene Youngblood stated that they are a "unified statement about the malady of the emotional life in contemporary times."

Altman's 'The Long Goodbye'

"What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough." 

--Eugene Delacroix

Synopsis: Washed-up, wise-cracking detective Phillip Marlowe (Elliot Gould) attempts to clear a friend who is accused of murdering his wife, all the while pulling together various scrambled threads and red herrings in the sun-bleached underbelly of a neo-noir Los Angeles. 

1. A writer I used to know once told me: 'Always start your piece with an anecdote. It'll draw your readers in.' I never liked him, but here's one anyway.

Robert Altman, apparently, once tattooed Harry S. Truman's dog. In what sounds like a forgotten excerpt from M*A*S*H, the young Altman found himself prospectless and back in America following a stint in the army during WW2, and was somehow recruited into a primitive canine ID-ing operation with a man named 'Skimmerhorn' (even the name is pure vaudeville, or possibly a Pynchon reject). Says Altman:"We would shave the area on the inside of the right hind leg, up near the groin … then I would write in these numbers. … We got through to someone who knew Truman. Truman had this dog he didn’t even care about, a little dog of some kind. They sent it over to us and we tattooed it."

He was later questioned about it in a 2001 BFI interview. "Do you regret having given that up for filmmaking?" asked the interviewer. Altman, seemingly flippant, simply replied: "Well...they're both about the same."

2. Filmmaking, for Altman, was no great shakes. He knew filmmakers, and he didn't want to be like them. He was once famously asked about the directors who inspired him and replied: "I don’t know their names, because I was mostly influenced when I’d see a film and think, 'Man, I want to be sure to never do anything like that.' So I never learned their names." There were men and women of his era who idolised the filmmakers of yesteryear, pored over them almost shot-for-shot, and recreated their achievements in new and subtle ways. Altman was not one of these (there are exceptions, notably his paean to Bunuel's twisted Last Supper in 1970's M*A*S*H). Instead, Altman took what he saw as the essentials of cinematic Americana, and made them his own. To take his most productive period (1970-1975/6, from M*A*S*H to Nashville) and place it under the critical microscope is to witness a man intent on deconstructing the towering monoliths of the Old Hollywood; the patriotic war film, the western, the 'musical', and, with The Long Goodbye, the original subversive cinematic movement, film noir. All are skewered and refigured under Altman's singular and idiosyncratic vision. Yet each is a palimpsest; each bear visible signs of their original form. The Long Goodbye is, in this vein, pure noir, right down to the femme fatale and the almost unfathomable plot-line. 

3. How much Altman initially intended of this run of astonishingly anatomical pictures, and how much came about during the respective production processes, is pure conjecture. Take McCabe And Mrs. Miller, for example. In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind relates the story of the rewriting process, and it offers some insight into the process by which Altman formulated his filmmaking edict: 

"Altman was too unhappy with the script, as he was unhappy with most scripts. 'It was one of the worst Western stories you've ever heard,' he said. 'It had all the cliches. This guy was a gambler, and she was a whore with a heart of gold, the three heavies were the giant, the half-breed and the kid...I said, you really wanna make this film?' Continues Beatty: 'So we started taking it apart scene by scene, and I realized that Altman just wanted us to improvise the movie. I believe in improvising, but I don't believe in improvising from nothing. So we had to write a script'."

At this point. Altman only had M*A*S*H under his belt. The film made him a star, an auteur in a Hollywood system finally taking risks on outside projects. In it, he attacked the Vietnam war with what Roger Ebert called his 'three most cherished tools: whimsy, spontaneity and narrative perversity'. And the same goes for The Long Goodbye. In his films are the great legacies of American cinema, of John Ford, Howard Hawks and Billy Wilder, but also the notions of art cinema, the substitution of story for structure, of concrete narrative for pure kineticism and the dominating effect of the image over everything else. As we shall see, Altman is less concerned with 'who killed who and why' than with the sensation of his film (in this he is more like Chandler than might be imagined. There is the famous story of Hawks calling Chandler in the middle of the night and asking him who killed a character in The Big Sleep, to which the novelist responded that he had no idea. Perhaps if Altman had scripted his own vision of a post-noir, things may have been different. 

4. But, now, lets get it out there and say that Elliot Gould is the quintessential Marlowe. Forget Bogie. Gould is the one. Hawks may have adapted The Big Sleep almost to the letter, and Bogart and Bacall certainly smouldered together, but Elliot Gould, and Altman, capture so much more of the essence of that broken-down, sardonic and neurotically obsessive figure of loneliness and defeat in a world gradually burning itself out around him. “I see Marlowe the way Chandler saw him, a loser. But a real loser, not the false winner that Chandler made out of him. A loser all the way," said Altman, who probes into Marlowe's mind with ease, finding there shadows of his own spirit; a principled man in the wrong time period, surrounded by people and institutions that have lost their values. The aspect of the film that most Chandler-aficionados found issue with was the period setting; Chandler's novel is set around 1949, immediately post-war, and his Marlowe, while an eternal drifter, nonetheless belongs in this time-frame. Altman's adaptation, however, seems to answer a question nobody had ever asked, or really thought about asking: What would happen if Marlowe, a character quintessentially 50's, woke up in the 1970's? The contemporary setting is completely at odds with Gould's Marlowe; his suits, his unkempt mannerisms, his disheveled wisecracks, and his smoking (nobody else smokes, another inversion of all the laws of film noir) are all immediately visible. For a private eye, he's utterly conspicuous. His attitude towards many of the contemporary details, such as the topless hippie girls who live opposite, is almost one of resigned acceptance, reflected in his oft-repeated catchphrase: "It's alright with me." He's also the youngest Marlowe, despite his old-world feel, and his sense of having seen it all; Gould was only thirty-five here, and yet he plays Marlowe with a burst-out-laughing, infectious defeatism.

5. And nowhere is this more evident than the first twenty minutes-or-so of the film. Altman changed much for his version of The Long Goodbye, and the cat is all him. This is a masterclass in mundanity; Marlowe shuffling about, mumbling to himself, trying to one-up his cat and failing completely. He seems utterly out of place in the modern convenience store, and the fact that the whole plot spirals out of control simply because he is awoken by his cat is pure Coen Brothers. Wrong place at the wrong time. Here we are first introduced to Gould's mumbling, scatter-brained voice-over, a quite brilliant inversion of the snappy, well-scripted dialogue in classic noir films; where Bogie would have cracked off a one-liner, and snatched the dame, Gould's shaggy-dog detective almost narrates his movements to himself, wondering aloud how he has come to be in the mess he is in. This is because Marlowe is hopeless to resist the irrationality and debauchery surrounding him. He cannot even resist the mewling urges of his cat. His side-of-the-mouth rambling is something of a coping mechanism with everything around him. And that 'everything' is just simply Los Angeles.

6. Altman's LA has always been a preoccupation, one that would come to flowering maturity in the 90's with both The Player and Short Cuts. In The Long Goodbye, the city is intrinsically bound up with Marlowe himself; he is our reference point to comprehend this strange new world. If the Marlowe of Chandler's novel came up against typical '50's hard-boiled stereotypes (loan-sharks, down-on-their-luck heiresses, casino heavies, debilitated war veterans), Gould's Marlowe confronts their 70's counterparts: hippies, stoners, failed writers and political protesters. The fiber between these two disparate versions of Los Angeles is the same that links many of Lynch's films, and the same thread that would later bind the seemingly incongruous elements of The Player; the spectre of artifice, of pure illusion, that settles over the city like a haze, emanating from that strange pseudo-world, Hollywood. The Long Goodbye is not set in the world of filmmaking, but, just as Chandler's novels could not be set anywhere other than LA, Altman's film would be utterly out-of-place in, say, New York, Chicago or Atlanta. Just take the security guard who offers impressions of old movie stars to his guests. This is a Los Angeles movie, filled with Los Angeles people, and Marlowe, the only honest man, it would seem, in the entire city, must navigate between an endless parade of liars, fools and crooks to haul his principles out of the dusty underbelly. We are introduced to the terrible violence of this world in a notorious scene involving a coke bottle and a woman's face; the antagonist simply turns to Marlowe and says, glibly: "Now that's someone I love. I don't even like you." Far from the invincible hero, Marlowe is very vulnerable, much like Jake Gittes in Polankski's Chinatown. Anythinh could crawl up out of the shadows and hurt him.

7. So what of the plot? Well, it's labyrinthine, like all good noir should be. Most of the crucial action happens off-screen; a less perceptive viewer could come to the end of the film and be taken completely off-guard. Piecing it all together requires a spreadsheet, yet it is deceptively simple. Marlowe is approached by an old 'friend', Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton) who it turns out has been accused of murdering his wife, and drives him to the Mexican border. He is questioned by the police, and becomes increasingly convinced that all is not what it seems. The parallel plot concerning the drunken antics of writer Roger Wade (the wonderful Sterling Hayden) is almost a MacGuffin; Marlowe is hired by Roger's wife Eileen (Nina Van Pallandt) to find her husband, who often goes 'missing'; it turns out he is involved in a secretive series of rehabilitation clinics, and has fallen into a self-destructive drinking habit. The focus in this sub-plot must be placed firmly on Eileen Wade  if one is to make head-or-tail of just what is happening; it is she, the femme fatale figure, who keeps this plot ticking, although, bypassing the rules of noir, she does not appear to sleep with, or even advance, upon, Marlowe. This is because Altman's Marlowe is, apparently, utterly sexless; Hawks' Big Sleep centred around the blossoming romance between Bogie and Bacall where the book did not. Altman simply plays Marlowe as the only man in LA unconcerned with the pantomime of sex. The film noir femme fatale has always ensnared the hero in some capacity, yet Marlowe remains aloof. He is simply trying to uncover the truth, from the moment Terry Lennox appears at his apartment. 

8. By the close of the movie, something is finally 'not alright' with Marlowe. His laconic exterior is stripped away and we glimpse the principled man beneath. Roger Wade commits suicide, due to intense external pressure, and Marlowe inevitably discovers the terrible connection between the Wades and the Lennox's. From the moment of Wade's demise, something changes in Marlowe, as in the film. Many Chandler purists have condemned the ending of the film in particular; it's almost a 'Han shoots Greedo' kind of deal. They simply cannot accept that Marlowe would kill Lennox in cold blood; again, if you're not paying attention, the scene is abrupt. But, in reality, Altman leads us to this point with expertise. Marlowe's blundering naivety throughout the entirety of the film is suddenly shattered by a moment of clarity. Roger Wade's suicide brings him to his senses. Almost as if he had snapped awake in the wrong time and place, Marlowe has been carried unwillingly on the current of the plot with little or no resistance. Altman's subdued hue reflects Gould's performance; weakened, dulled, a Los Angeles without the sunshine. Yet, by the close of the film, the colour has brightened, and Marlowe has come back to himself. As soon as he glimpses the true meaning of what he has become embroiled in, he takes action. He shoots Lennox. Some of the old Hollywood rules exist in Altman's world; betrayal, a moral crime, is punishable by death.

"Nobody cares but me," he says, just before he pulls the trigger. Lennox responds: "Well, that's you Marlowe. You never learn. You're a born loser." 

And Marlowe just says, "Yeah. I even lost my cat."




Some random observations:

Altman makes a subtle reference to Chandler's notorious inability to explain a death in The Big Sleep, by forcing a character who was murdered in the book to commit suicide in the movie; Roger Wade was originally murdered by Eileen. 

The idea of Marlowe being awoken in a new existence can almost be taken literally. The movie starts with him suddenly waking up, disorientedly attempting to navigate his apartment, and to feed his cat.

The disorienting hue of the film is supposed to approximate human vision, probably Marlowe's. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond exposed the negative to controlled light, dampening the colours to mimic the affect of the sun on the eyes. The technique is not used in any scenes following Roger's death, as Marlowe has emerged from his obscurity and can finally witness the truth.

It's worth noting that Marlowe's betrayal at the hands of Lennox results in death. His betrayal at the hands of Eileen, however, does not raise an eyebrow, though he trusted her and she played him for the entirety of the film like an accordian. Thus, Altman clings to the old noir holdover that all women are corrupt, and must be treated as such.

Riffing on 'The Master' (2012)

Synopsis: Freddie Quell (Joaquin Pheonix) is a WW2 veteran struggling with his inner demons in an unfamiliar post-war society. Living for a time as a transient, he encounters Lancaster Dodd, leader of a mysterious religious movement known only as 'The Cause', after drunkenly stealing onto his boat, and is quickly drawn into the world of his beliefs.

1. As a child and young man, I was part of a 'radical evangelical church', or at least my parents were. From the age of eleven onwards, I witnessed the slow decaying affect it had on almost everybody around me. The leader was an almost Dodd-like figure, a charismatic enigma, who was eventually discovered to be fiddling the finances. The similarities between my experiences and The Master are obvious, and it illustrates the point that the concept of Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film is grounded in more truth than we might imagine. Movements and powers lacking rationality exist all around us. 

2. Anyway. The Master is possibly PTA's most fully realized achievement. Both Boogie Nights and Magnolia are Altman-esque ensemble pieces; sprawling connect-the-dot narratives encompassing a time and a place. There Will Be Blood is a dedicated one-man show, expending almost its entire energy on the fractured psyche of Daniel Plainview. The Master takes the same road as TWBB, but expands the canvass to two men, both flip-sides of a similar coin; outsiders, interlopers, dropouts. It's as close as anybody's come to pure literature on film, more so than any loose cinematic attempt to film a book. Of course, There Will Be Blood was based (again, loosely) on Upton Sinclair's OIL! but The Master achieves that feeling of pure literature, in the vein of, say, Faulkner, Beckett or Woolf. You can almost hear the internal monologues of the characters, thanks in no small part to the almost transcendental acting throughout. And the whole film leaves you in that satisfied, yet completely unsatisfied, limbo of dedicating part of your life to finishing a beautiful book, which is a remarkable achievement for a film of only two hours in length. It's a film much more interested in those moments of understated beauty than concrete narrative; a laugh, the curl of a lip, the churning of water, the flash of a camera. There is simply nothing here that is to be found in other films of its type. Words cannot adequately describe the sheer pleasure of watching it. All this is down to Anderson and his idiosyncratic vision; he pulls together the disparate tendrils of American fiction and dream, weaving them into a unique and vibrant tapestry.



3. But what's it about? Why do we have this film? Who is the Master, and who the slave? Well, like all great literature, that's up for endless debate. This is not a film with any easy answers. It's a transient piece of cinema; Roger Ebert stated that it left him 'grasping at air'. The movie is essentially a Rorschach Test, open to many interpretations. Many devoted cinephiles simply have not been able to get their head around it and despite it's prominent position in the 2013 Academy Awards canon, it just doesn't have those choreographed qualities necessary to 'bag the big one', as it were. The ending is anti-climactic, the character development seemingly negligible (Joaquin Phoenix's Freddie Quell begins the film as an alcoholic, womanizing drifter, and apparently ends in the same way) and there is no 'pay-off'. At least not in the traditional sense. It's a character study, more than anything, one of the best I've ever seen, and also follows There Will Be Blood as a chronicle of the birth of America's modernity. The period setting in integral, with the bursting synapse of American Capitalism in full flow, and the conservatism of 1950's post-war society serving as a backdrop to these two peerless men. At the flowering point of our modern world, Anderson has unearthed an opus of those left behind.

But we'll get to that. First, there's the elephant in the room to confront.

4. Lets get the least interesting aspect of the film out of the way first, so we can move on. The big hubbub at the time of release was centered around the apparent similarities between Seymour Hoffman's Lancaster Dodd and L. Ron Hubbard. Many anticipated grisly lawsuits, a Scientology speciality, though there had been no official statement that the film directly concerned the followers and beliefs of the Church of Scientology. Anderson later stated that, as well as Hubbard, he based much of the plot and concept of the film on anecdotes related to him by Jason Robard on the set of Magnolia, as well as the life of John Steinbeck. PTA also apparently previewed it for Tom Cruise, Hollywood's most famous and vocal Scientologist, and later stated that Cruise had 'some issues' with it, most notably scenes where the authenticity of Dodd's belief system is questioned directly. For his part, Anderson never altered or removed any scenes from the film, whether due to lack of pressure, or simply steadfast belief that it was not necessary or artistically authentic.

5. Nevertheless, there are several moments within The Master where characters explicitly or implicitly question whether the mysterious belief system (labelled 'The Cause') is simply a product of Dodd's imagination. In one, Dodd's own son directly tells Quell that his father is 'making it all up as he goes along', and receives as beating from Quell in response. In another, Dodd flounders when confronted by an outspoken critic, resulting in one of the most memorably humorous put-downs in any film (and also the only usage of the word 'cult' in the entire movie). Dodd himself seems mortally wounded by any criticism of his mysterious and eccentric beliefs, retorting as if he finds them somehow self-evident. Rather than engage in rational argument, Dodd shouts down his critics in displays of visceral verbal ferocity. Yet at other, quieter moments, we see him engulfed in reflective silence, almost as if he is wrestling with a great guilt or secret. As with everything else, there are no true answers in The Master. Every person I have talked to has a different take on the entire scope of the film.

6. Of all the scenes that could have courted lawsuits, there is the one that comes closest to the mark. It comes toward the end of the film, and is somehow more subtle than its precedents. It's also one of my favourite scenes in the entire film. As a product of his growing success, Lancaster Dodd is previewing his highly anticipated second book to devoted followers. By this time, we have begun to more than suspect he may not be all that he seems (as has Freddie; indeed, this scene is the final time they will be together; Quell will escape Dodd in the next, literally riding off toward the horizon, and will never again be an intrinsic part of the Cause). One of his acolytes (the wonderful, criminally underrated Laura Dern) approaches Dodd to ask about fundamental changes to the ideological framework of the Cause in the new book; particularly the changing of the word 'recall' to 'imagine' in relation to the visions received in the hypnagogic state followers of Dodd's Cause engage in. The scene essentially establishes the falsity of Dodd's religious constructions: in the first book, the assumption was made that followers were 'recalling memories' from former lives; however, in this book, the word 'imagine' insinuates that Dodd does not readily distinguish between the 'reality' of these memories and pure confabulation. Whether a mere Freudian slip on his part or something else, the discrepancy causes Dodd to become defensive, again reverting to violent outburst when confronted with criticism. 

7.  Despite certain similarities between the Cause and the CoS, for me, viewing the film as a Hubbard 'biography' of sorts, or even as a direct critique of Scientology, detracted from the true essence of what PTA is trying to say. Watching with my girlfriend, she lamented the fact that PTA never lets us in on the inner workings or the true intellectual essence of 'The Cause'. We never really peek behind the veil; we simply know that it concerns some form of subconcious time-travel, and seems to be based primarily on the idea of Dialectics. In one sense, the entire film could be seen as revolving around the idea of whether or not Dodd is a charlatan; in another sense, this barely matters at all. What matters is that these two characters found each other. What matters is that Quell and Dodd spend this brief, ephemeral period of their life together, and affect each other in such a way.

8. Because, at is its very core, the film is not about Scientology. It's not even about the unreasonability of marginalized views, such as Dodd's. This becomes increasingly evident the more you watch. It's certainly not about whether or not Dodd is a con artist, just like Boogie Nights is not really about porn and There Will Be Blood is not about the oil industry. PTA is the master (pun intended) of character studies, and that's what his films are, at their most simplistic. As stated earlier, this is one of the finest I have ever seen. And much of that is due to Phoenix's Freddie Quell, who is, in title at least, not the Master, but the Slave of this film; slave to his traumatic war experiences, his alcoholism, his wanton womanizing, and, finally, slave, of sorts, to Dodd, who seeks to make of his protege something of an example, proof that 'The Cause' can redefine the life of a doomed man. Phoenix plays Quell as a pent up, jittering force-of-nature; there are the foundations of the very earth running through his every mannerism. From the first time we see Quell nestling up to a pair of sand-sculpted breasts in the South Pacific, we feel every ounce of his psychosomatic agony; Pheonix is so unsettlingly brilliant in the role that every twitch and jerk of body and face brings to light new revelations about the character; his desperate loneliness, his abject vulnerability, his cracked and broken mind, reflected in that stooped gait, fists dug into the small of his back. His speech is broken, difficult to understand at times, and Phoenix's haunted face, gaunt and shadowy, pulls everything together, plastered with a twisted grin. He's the ultimate lost soul, a figure of utter malaise lost in a society building itself into modernity around him. We catch glimpses of a time when he was happy, during which scenes Anderson's sometimes disorienting cinematography, possibly echoing the disorganized and paranoid state of Freddie's mind, is paired back to pure aesthetic simplicity, the candidness of joy, of happiness. His childhood sweetheart, Doris, waits for him, but he does not return to her until the end of the movie, and by then it is too late.

9. Naturally, Quell's implosive nature initially excites and impels Dodd, just as it does the audience. The two share a love of hard moonshine (perhaps another subtle indication of the falsity of Dodd's beliefs), something that Dodd's wife, Peggy (Amy Adams, marvellously controlled and simmering) objects to instantly. The consummate showman finds in his heart a place for the lowly, untameable 'animal', as he often calls him, for he sees in Freddie aspects of himself. To accentuate this, Anderson often films them in split-screen, or sitting across from each other, directly confronting each other. In no scene is this duality more obvious than the 'jail cell' scene, in which the men's emotions finally get the better of them, and they let rip. The screen is literally split down the middle, and the eye darts to and fro, as the characters bounce of one another. It's difficult to label this film 'funny', but this particular scene had me in stitches. 

10. The first scenes with Dodd and Quell, particularly the 'counselling' scene, are acting masterclasses, almost sparring matches, as one would expect of Pheonix and Hoffman. Quell, as yet unsure of Dodd's motivations, agrees to participate in a form of counselling, more a psychological interrogation, which Dodd calls 'processing'. At this point in the film, Hoffman's commanding performance has us in steadfast acceptance of Dodd and his beliefs, even if we may suspect otherwise. Sheer charisma can sometimes overcome rationality, and we begin to see how men and women have been drawn into such movements, and how figures like Dodd attract followers. 'Processing' follows the form of a series questions, which Quell must answer without hesitation, and without blinking: are you thoughtless in your remarks? Are you unpredictable (in answer to which, Freddie farts)? Have you ever had a sexual encounter with a member of your family? Quell treats it as a game, initially, yet as the layers of Freddie's psyche peel back one by one, we begin to see a side of Dodd that desires the raw, naked emotion of the man before him, and we witness trauma of a separate kind to that of war in Freddie's reactions. The scene is sinister, somehow greatly homoerotic, and whips itself into a wild frenzy of emotion that binds the two characters together for the remainder of the film. Dodd will later attempt to use Freddie's past against him in a sadistic manner, as he puts him through the rigors of The Cause's healing process. 

11. The question is: who is the Master? Quell is a despicable, almost pitiable, figure, lost in a wilderness he cannot fathom, nor control. He is, almost inevitably, drawn into Dodd's movement and, maybe, exploited by a monotheistic world view. If, as Dodd says at the end of the film, we are all of us living for a Master, is Quell simply one those who follow, and Dodd one of those who lead, as the old generalization says? Maybe it is not so simple. When Freddie finally takes leave of The Cause, Dodd states that if they encounter each other in the next life, Quell will be his enemy. It got me to thinking about the similarities between the two men, which are obvious, but also the fact that their almost ill-fated partnership has come to an end not because of Dodd, but only because Freddie refuses to follow Dodd's dogma, the very dogma which has now scuppered Dodd's peculiar freedom. As the figurehead of an increasingly recognized global movement, that primal sense of liberation is gone. The honeymoon period is lost. He is under the control of his followers. He is, as we have seen, under the control of his wife. He has, in a sense, created his own 'Master'. Freddie, on the other hand, is still 'free'. He was able to ride the motorcycle to the horizon without returning. For him, freedom is not simply an 'exercise', exhilarating while it lasts, yet ever fleeting. He is a transient wanderer, and there is no return to normality. He has forged his own normality. Dodd has tried, with the Cause, but it will always be apocryphal. And so he says to Freddie:

"Free winds and no tyranny for you, Freddie, sailor of the seas. You pay no rent, free to go where you please. Then go, go to that landless latitude and good luck. If you figure a way to live without serving a master, any master, then let the rest of us know, will you? For you'd be the first in the history of the world."

11. There is another aspect of the film that insists upon Dodd's role as servant, rather than 'master'. While Dodd is the founder and leader of his acolytes, his wife Peggy can be seen as the driving force behind his ambition. In one scene, she confronts him in the bathroom, ordering him to 'stop drinking that boy's liquor' as she aggressively brings him to sexual climax, essentially chastising this seemingly powerful and unimpeachable figure like a small boy. Throughout the film, she attempts to convince Dodd to release Quell from the movement, repeatedly stating that he isn't interested in bettering himself. At one point she tells Quell directly: 'This is something you do for a billion years or not at all. This isn't fashion.' Throughout, as our belief in Dodd begins to wane, Peggy becomes the ideological focal point of the movie; she, not Dodd, believes totally in 'The Cause'. She is the personification of dogmatic faith in Dodd's movement, impelling him onwards when he might otherwise have fallen. In Dodd there is more Freddie than she would care to admit; we hear of his womanizing, his ex-wifes, and witness his love of alcohol. Another character unchanged by the film's climax, she remains the cold, hard face of monomania, refusing Freddie even the basic kindness of acknowledging his service and place within the Cause, walking out on him forever. 

15. So, is The Master a chronicle of the inadequacy of truth? Is it an allegory? I think not. It may be more of a fable, and it is certainly the fable of the long-sought-after American Dream, of two men seeking it, maybe finding it in each other, or beyond each other. 

This is my interpretation. There are many others. This is what makes great cinema. Comments welcome.

Some random observations:

Peggy is pregnant throughout the entirety of the film, until the end, when The Cause can be seen to have 'gone global'. As something of a mother figure to the enterprise, the pregnancy itself could be viewed as the gestation period of the movement, and Freddie a kind of wandering Messiah, the physical product of this phantom pregnancy. When the Cause is truly born, she is no longer pregnant. Thus she is the mother of the Cause, physically, and emotionally.

The boat that Freddie breaks into and meets Dodd is called The Alethia. In philosophy, alethia means 'the state of not being hidden, the state of being evident', or the 'understanding of truth'. Quell boarding the vessel of Dodd's truth is obviously mirrored in the plot of the film, and is perhaps a literal physical representation of his entering Dodd's consciousness, or perhaps the amalgamation of the two consciousnesses. Either way, it's interesting.

One of the biggest influences on the film was John Huston's Let There Be Light, a study of emotionally debilitated soldiers following WW2. Quell repeats several lines from the film during his psychiatric evaluation scene, including the line, "I believe, in your profession, it's called nostalgia." 

At the very end of the film, during the scene with Freddie and the girl in bed, Freddie's shadow can clearly be seen forming a Rorschach image on the wall.