The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Paul Thomas Anderson · a film · 2012 · about 137 minutes · written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson · photographed mostly on 65mm
Mode
Period drama of a sailor and a founder, held on two faces; a love story without romance, comedy of the body and theology in one
Mythos
The master and the servant, built as the action; the beast and its tamer; the sea at the beginning and the end; the prodigal’s return evoked and refused
Phase
From the Pacific at the war’s end in 1945 to about 1953: California, a yacht from San Francisco to New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Lynn in Massachusetts and England
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 137 minutes, photographed mostly on 65mm and projected at 1.85:1, shown in some cities in 70mm; music by Jonny Greenwood
Register
From a drunk sailor’s farce on a beach to one close-up held through questions repeated until the face gives; strings set against percussion that will not settle
Scale
Two men, one household, a movement in its first years, and the country the war returned its men to
Governing Proposition
A sailor back from the Pacific, who cannot hold a job or a place, stows away on a yacht and is taken up by the founder of a new movement, who makes him his subject, his servant and the one follower he cannot master. The wager of the film is that the need between a master and a disciple is a love neither can name, that a doctrine of self-mastery is a household and a business, and that a period picture on the largest format can be spent on two faces and refuse the rise, the fall and the cure its form promises.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens on the wake of a ship, deep blue churned white, held under Jonny Greenwood’s strings. It is 1945 and the war in the Pacific is ending. Freddie Quell, a sailor, mixes liquor out of torpedo fuel, and on a beach he mounts a woman the men have built out of sand, as a joke, and afterwards lies down beside her. The film begins at the sea, and it will end there.
The Navy discharges him through its psychiatry, a Rorschach test and a psychological interview, into a country with no place for what the war has done to him. He takes portraits in a department-store studio and loses the post. He works in a cabbage field, and a man there is poisoned by his liquor. Twice, and in rising danger, he cannot hold a job or a place, and that is why a stowaway needs a ship.
Paul Thomas Anderson wrote and directed the film. It was produced by Annapurna Pictures (Megan Ellison) with JoAnne Sellar, Daniel Lupi and Anderson, photographed by Mihai Mălaimare Jr., largely on 65mm negative, projected at 1.85:1 rather than the wide frame the format usually serves, and shown in some cities in 70mm prints. Leslie Jones and Peter McNulty edited it; Jack Fisk and David Crank designed it; Mark Bridges made the costumes. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2012, where it won the Silver Lion for direction and Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman shared the acting prize, and The Weinstein Company released it in the United States the same month.
Movement II
Freddie stows away on a yacht leaving San Francisco for New York. Aboard it are Lancaster Dodd, played by Hoffman, a writer and the founder of a movement he calls the Cause, and his household: his wife Peggy, played by Amy Adams, his son, his daughter and the daughter’s husband, for a wedding is held on board. Dodd is jovial and needy, and he takes the stowaway up. He calls him a sailor of the seas.
Then the first Processing. Dodd sits Freddie down and asks him questions, the same questions again and again, and Freddie is forbidden to blink. The scene is held in close-up, mostly on two faces, and it goes on until Freddie’s face gives. The family history it draws out points both ways: Freddie may have been damaged by the war, or before it. The film turns on this scene: without it nothing binds the two men.
Dodd insists that man is not an animal. Freddie is all body: twisted shoulders, hands on his hips, a man always about to bolt. From here the whole action is a struggle over who serves whom, the tamer and the beast, the master and the servant, and the struggle is also love, of a kind neither man can name.
Movement III
The Cause goes into society. At a party in New York a man challenges Dodd. In Philadelphia a patroness keeps the movement. At a party Dodd sings to the women in the room, and Freddie, watching, sees them all naked: the film shows the scene through his eyes, farce and appetite at once, and does not say what is seen and what is wished.
The law arrives. Dodd is arrested, and Freddie with him, and the two are put in cells side by side, staged in a single frame. Freddie smashes the toilet; Dodd stands still beside him. It is terror and comedy together, and it states the bond as plainly as the film ever states it: a cage beside a cage.
Under the doctrine the film shows a household and a business. Peggy governs it, and at the bathroom basin she governs her husband. Dodd’s son says that his father is making it up as he goes. His daughter presses herself on Freddie. The movement of self-mastery is a family living on patrons, and its real will is a pleasant wife’s.
Movement IV
Freddie is put through exercises. He walks from the wall to the window and back, again and again, until the words wear out. He is drilled in holding another’s gaze. The questions are repeated until the answer changes. The film gives these drills their full duration, and they become something like a liturgy: conditioning seen from outside, and failing, for Freddie does not take the shape of a cure.
Dodd’s second book is launched in Phoenix. A follower questions a change in the book, and Dodd turns on the follower with a savage obscenity. The jovial master and the raging one are one man, and the business of the Cause goes on around him: a launch, patrons, a following.
In the desert the exercise is a ride: pick a point on the horizon and ride the motorcycle to it. Freddie picks his point and rides to it, and on, and the motorcycle shrinks into the distance until he is gone. The ride answers the yacht: a ship took him in, and he leaves the way he came, by moving on.
Movement V
Freddie goes back to Lynn, in Massachusetts, and to the girl he left there. The past that the Cause promised to recover is there, and closed to him. In a cinema a call reaches him, a summons from Dodd to England. The film does not certify whether the call is real or his imagining; its last third loosens into an order a dream could have, and that uncertainty is part of what it knows.
In England Dodd dictates his doctrine in a school. He receives Freddie and makes his last argument, that every man serves some master. He sings to Freddie, as a farewell. Freddie answers the argument by leaving.
In a pub Freddie meets a woman and puts Dodd’s questions to her, the Processing turned round and carried out of the Cause. Then the last cut, back to the Pacific beach, where Freddie lies beside the woman of sand. The film begins and ends at the sea, and the master stands between. The servant has gone; the master’s claim is left standing, and unproved.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure and cut. The film is built as a drift, and most of what looks loose is required. The portrait studio and the cabbage field show, twice and in rising danger, that Freddie cannot hold a job or a place, and the second ends with a man poisoned by his liquor, which is why a stowaway needs a ship. The first Processing is the hinge, and nothing else binds the two men. The two cells answer it; the motorcycle answers the yacht; Lynn is the past the Cause promised to recover, found closed. What holds the axis here: the exercises repeat one point at length, the New York and Philadelphia episodes do similar work, and the passage from the cinema to England is a joint where a cut could fall without the whole changing.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A master needs a disciple he cannot tame as much as the disciple needs the master; the bond between Dodd and Freddie is love of a kind neither can name, and the Cause can neither absorb Freddie nor do without him. Under it, the doctrine of self-mastery is a household and a business, and its real will is Peggy’s, shown governing her husband at the bathroom basin. And the men the war returned had nowhere to put what it had done to them but such markets in self-improvement. Most of this is disclosed through faces and duration, and is credited as fully as if it were said. What holds it below the top: Freddie’s condition is often rendered as a state rather than opened, and the refusal to judge Dodd keeps part of the meaning withheld.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The elevation is uneasy, and it recurs. The opening wake, deep blue churned white behind a ship, held under Greenwood’s strings, is a height the film returns to. The first Processing rises by attrition, a single close-up held while the questions repeat and Freddie is forbidden to blink, until the face gives. The two cells, Freddie smashing the toilet while Dodd stands still beside him, are terror and comedy at once. The wall and the window, walked between again and again, become something like a liturgy. The motorcycle shrinking into the desert, the farewell song in England and the last cut to the woman of sand are each high. Held at the figure because the elevation is spaced through stretches that are deliberately flat, and the last third rises less often than the first two.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The master and the servant is the film’s skeleton, and it is built, not cited: the whole action is a struggle over who serves whom, ending with the servant gone and the master’s claim, that everyone serves someone, left standing and unproved. The beast and its tamer is load-bearing too, in Dodd’s insistence that man is not an animal, set against Freddie’s body in every scene they share. Around them the sea is set up and paid: a sailor taken aboard a ship and called a sailor of the seas, a film that begins on the water and ends beside the woman of sand. The prodigal’s return is evoked at Lynn and refused. What holds it at the bar: the sea is more figure than structure, the myths are partly allusive, and the Cause’s own myth of past lives is satire, not depth.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance is the American prestige period drama and the study of a strong man, the line of Citizen Kane that Anderson had carried himself in There Will Be Blood. The film turns from it hard. A large picture about a charismatic founder declines the rise and fall the form promises: no exposure, no reckoning, no conversion, no climax. It is a love story between two men told without romance and without resolution, and its 65mm, a format kept for vistas, is spent mostly on faces at close range. The stake was real: Annapurna’s money on a film no studio would call marketable, its founder plainly drawn from a living movement. What holds it short of the top: the turn was prepared, by Anderson’s previous film, which had already bent the American epic toward one man’s will, and by the ellipsis and drift of the New Hollywood.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. The form is repetition under command: the Processing questions repeated until the answer changes, the wall and the window walked until the words wear out, the drill of staring, the ride at a chosen point. The film’s own structure is that conditioning seen from outside, and it fails as the conditioning fails: the narrative drifts as Freddie drifts and will not take the shape of a cure. The close-up at 65mm makes the face the field of the contest, so that the film’s events are changes in a face. The last third loosens into an order a dream could have, and the form cannot certify which of its last scenes are his imagining, which is part of what it knows. Held below the top where the society scenes could be arranged otherwise without loss.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence over promise, and fourteen years are a short span, so part of the figure is forecast. What is demonstrated is that the questions have stayed open and argued: whether Dodd is a fraud or believes; whether the call in the cinema is a dream; whether the film is a love story, and of what kind; how much it is about Scientology, which it never names, and how little that matters; what the woman of sand means at the end; whether Freddie was damaged by the war or before it, since the family history drawn out in Processing points both ways. No one reading has displaced the others. The form yields as well: the doubled sea, the doubled songs, the two cells, the Processing mirrored in the pub. Against it: the span, and a yield that turns partly on what the film withholds.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Released in 2012; the field is the cinema of the 2010s, so force and reach are scored together. The force is high: a major American film showed that a period drama of the largest scale could be built on two performances and a refused plot, and it made 65mm a medium for the face. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Phoenix’s performance, a body bent around its own damage, set a standard of physical acting by which critics measured others; the film topped critics’ polls of its year and is a reference for the American art film of the decade after; its 70mm exhibition was part of a revival of photochemical large format. The limit stands: it led that revival only in part, no line of later films takes its method openly, and it did not change the grammar of the medium.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Fourteen years, and survival can be weighed only on what fourteen years show, which against centuries is little; that holds the axis among the film’s lowest. The form survives whole: one release version, photographed photochemically, mostly on 65mm, so that the negative is a better source than most films of its year possess, and nothing is lost. Presence is continuous, in repertory and 70mm revivals, on home video and streaming, in criticism and teaching, but chiefly among the art-house public rather than the wide one, and it earns nothing more. The surface is little fixed to its moment: a period reconstruction of the late 1940s, made on film stock, with nothing in it to date it to 2012 except perhaps the style of its performances.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Read to the elder arts’ anchors, the making bears weight throughout. Hoffman’s Dodd is jovial, needy and suddenly savage, roaring an obscenity at a follower who questions a change in the book; Phoenix’s Freddie, the twisted shoulders and the hands on the hips, is a man always about to bolt; Adams’s Peggy plays the power in the room as a pleasant wife. Mălaimare’s photography gives skin and water a density few films of its decade have. Greenwood’s score sets strings against percussion that will not settle, as Freddie will not. The Processing, held mostly in two faces, and the two cells, staged side by side in one frame, are directing of the first rank. The costs: the last third is joined more loosely than the form can claim, Phoenix’s mannerism tips at times into display, and the society episodes are staged conventionally.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Freddie mixing torpedo fuel and mounting a woman of sand on a Pacific beach, and Dodd dictating doctrine in an English school. One law governs them: every scene is a contest between a will that would give form and a creature that resists form, and the contest is also love. It holds across the farce of the party and the pain of Lynn, across the cells and the Processing, and into the pub at the end, where Freddie uses Dodd’s questions on a woman and so carries the law out of the Cause. The range is wide, from comedy of the body to theology. The strain: the party seen through Freddie’s eyes and the passage from the cinema to England work by a dream logic the earlier film has not fully licensed, and the society scenes hold to the law more loosely.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Several orders are held, and integrated through the bond of two men. Consciousness, in Freddie; war and its aftermath, in the beach, the psychiatric interview and the men back from the Pacific; labour, in the studio, the field and the ship; the family, in Dodd’s household as an institution, a wife who rules it, a son who says his father makes it up as he goes, a daughter who presses herself on Freddie; the sacred, in a faith founded before the viewer’s eyes; commerce, in the second book’s launch; the state, in the arrest; class, in the patrons. What holds the axis here: the state and history appear in episodes rather than in their working, nature is the sea and the desert as figure, and the women other than Peggy are held at the edge, much as Freddie sees them.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.8, then The Unconcealment, The Swerve, The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.6. Performances, photography, score and staging that bear weight in every principal scene; a disclosure about the need between a master and a disciple, a doctrine that is a household and a business, and men the war returned with nowhere to go, that can be stated and holds; a turn from the period epic that refuses its rise, fall and reckoning and spends its 65mm on faces; a form of repetition under command that fails as the conditioning fails; and one law, a will that would give form against a creature that resists it, from a drunk sailor’s farce to a theology.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable, The Imperishable and The Encompassed at 8.1: a drift whose hinges are required but whose middle is porous and whose passage from the cinema to England is soft; a survival of fourteen years, whole but chiefly within the art-house public; and orders held through one bond, with the state and history in episodes and the women other than Peggy at the edge. Above them, Pressure on Tradition at 8.4, a high force with a narrower reach.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on three of five: The Unconcealment at 8.6 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep meets it exactly at 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 falls a tenth short of it and The Imperishable at 8.1 four tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.1, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.1. The work is held below the summit by two conditions, Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 and The Imperishable at 8.1 against the 8.5 the Epochal Gate requires, and by its aggregate, 8.5 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Master as released in 2012, the one release version, in colour, about 137 minutes (sources differ by a minute), photographed mostly on 65mm and projected at 1.85:1, from the wake behind the ship to the woman of sand: written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, produced by Annapurna Pictures with JoAnne Sellar, Daniel Lupi and Anderson, released in the United States by The Weinstein Company, photographed by Mihai Mălaimare Jr., edited by Leslie Jones and Peter McNulty, designed by Jack Fisk and David Crank, with costumes by Mark Bridges and music by Jonny Greenwood; with Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams, and Laura Dern, Jesse Plemons, Ambyr Childers and Rami Malek. Scripts as written, footage deleted and released later, and the makers’ accounts of the film’s sources are not part of the work. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted, and the dialogue is described rather than quoted. The prizes are given as facts of reception and are not evidence on any axis. Figures that could not be verified, among them the release date, the budget and the box-office returns, the share of 65mm footage, the scene and shot counts and the shooting dates, are not given.