“We cut ourselves to suit the cloth. We cut ourselves to size when first we are delivered to the world’s blunt engine. Barely twenty, with catalogue shoes and faces not our own, we step out on the shifting funhouse floor, clumsy at first but rapidly adopting the requisite compensatory gait, a paraplegic cakewalk almost graceful when offset against the rhythms of society. We buy old cars, new clothes; are careful not to dwell on those infrequent sinking feelings.”

Alan Moore, The Birth Caul

***

Neither Lancaster Dodd or Freddie Quell want to admit that they’re animals, but that doesn’t count for much when they’re stalking about in front of you. Quell reels through the frame like a wounded beast, barely aware that he’s looking for a way out. It’s no problem for him to make raw hooch for Dodd because he’s clocked where to raid supplies from without even blinking. Whether or not he actually did ask how much Dodd’s unpublished writings would be worth, we can believe the allegation. For all Dodd’s careful affectations – “Trillions… with a tee, sir” – and the cavalcade of knowing faces he deploys as protection, punchline and punctuation, people in his circle know the score. “We sit far above that crowd, perched as spirits, not beasts,” he says. But his son is happy to say that he’s making it up as he goes along, his wife knows when to sternly wank him back into line, and he’s vulnerable to random hecklers in a party setting. Like Quell, we see him constantly working, always moving even when he’s holding court or sitting eye-to-eye with a follower.

What we don’t get is much of a true sense of what shaped these animal behaviours. We start and end with Quell, and get to know more about the mangle that made him, but as with most Paul Thomas Anderson movies, this movie is obsessed with faces and bodies interacting moment-by-moment. The film is an accumulation of notes that – like Johnny Greenwood’s ‘Overtones’ – occasionally coheres into something more than a dissonant racket. History, memory, some sort of grand pattern.

So we see Quell in the dying days of his navy career and the early flame-outs of civilian living. We hear about the traumatised condition he’s in, and about the tearful incident he had upon reading a letter from a sweetheart. We listen to him speak about fucking his aunt, and hear his boasts about having won the war. All of this is important, regardless of how garbled, but nothing here shows a way beyond tears and memory.

As for Dodd, when we meet him he’s already a ship out to sea, a huge and intimidating vessel whose crew can only delude themselves that they will ever get to go back to where they came from. He talks as though this isn’t the case, of course, promising a chart more reliable than the stars. Where Quell’s animal desperation is obvious from his lack of social polish, in Dodd it’s his very urbanity that gives us some sort of measure of the instinctive thrashing that’s going on beneath the surface.

***

“We stumble, walking wounded from the in-tray to the tea-tray, numb with disbelief, and when the bandages come off we do not recognise ourselves, our bruised expressions, our ill-fitting lives.

“How did we come to be these wraiths in treadmill corridors? What were we before we were this? We work and sleep. We work and sleep. Weekend a coronary, a nervous breakdown. There is no way forward. We must the action in reverse. We must turn back the world’s blunt engine.”

Alan Moore, The Birth Caul

***

The idea that Dodd is helping people to “Process” inter-generational trauma is not one that the movie bothers to take seriously, and nor should it. Most of us are lucky enough not to need to be told that Scientology is a bad scam, and smart enough to describe the bad scams we’ve been signed up to since birth.

The desire to go back, though? To find a place before some sort of unfixable damage was done to you, or maybe to the world? That’s something that howls out during every second that Phoenix is onscreen. The knowledge that it’s an impossible dream is never far behind.

This knowledge was there in that brief look of calm on Freddie’s face after his first session. It’s also there when he calls Dodd a fake through the bars of a cell he’s ended up in through loyalty, just as it’s there in his tragicomic attempts to fuck and cuddle up to a huge, motherly woman figure his fellow sailors conjour from the sand.

You can see a further reflection of this desire to reverse the tides in Dodd’s face every time Quell is in his eye-line. Almost every actor in The Master plays someone involved with The Cause, but it feels real when Quell is involved. Other people go through Processing, but when Dodd and Quell play the game, we feel both sides of the frustration. In fact, if we tune out for a moment, we might even believe those fleeting moments where the lie promises to come true.

***

“The rich black waters and the belly mud amino acid river and its nucleotide tide, a fast and churning smart-foam, bearing everything before it, rushing backwards to a source that is abhuman, absolute and utter.

“A precambrian driftwood littering its banks, it surges through dams of category, banked up ocean wall of definition separating us from other, dashing it aside as if it were no more than words, another hurdle in the breathless race upstream towards our spawning ground, our secret fountain.

“In its seethe and boil we are eroded, whittled back to nothing with the layers of what we are fallen away like scales… our core exposed, the raw gob-stopper heart of us, revealed and glistening… as verse by verse the song unwrites itself back to the word, the syllable… the cold white page.”

Alan Moore, The Birth Caul

***

In a film that’s so haunted by the idea of what went before, it might be wise to pay attention to what time travel the film allows. We see a fragment of Quell’s past life in a flashback, a talk with a young sweetheart. Later in the movie, we see Quell driving straight towards that point. He tries to drive out of the movie, and arrives back to find that love is no longer present, and anyway, it already has a husband. The technology of cinemas does not adhere to linear chronology, but Dodd and Quell can only aspire to this state. In The Master, no amount of heartbreak or high rhetoric will make it so characters can travel through the fourth dimension, even if they think they can see their destination.

In a film that’s so agitated by diatribes against orthodox thinking, it might be wise to pay attention to those moments where the film feels like a dream. Again, these are few and far between but that only makes them more powerful. Think of the scene where Quell is woken up in a cinema so he can take a phone call from Dodd, now based in England rather than America. It feels like a fantasy, but its consequences appear to be real. So Quell travels to see Dodd, to be sung at by him, and to discuss past and future lives. One’s knowledge of the other is enough to enable them to reach out across the ocean and call the other to a fresh confrontation.

Elsewhere, we find hints that the world is not as solid as it might seem. These are fleeting images, glimpses of the world’s true inhuman scale. We see a boat rocking in waters and looking like it may eventually become one with the bridge, a solid slab of modernity in an eternal sunset. We see a desert scene that locks around the figure of one man and a motorcycle so intently that you might be convince yourself that wherever this man travels, this exact stretch of desert travels with him. Over and over again, we see the water churning in the wake of a passing vessel, an inscrutable map of comings and goings that promises rebirth and annihilation.

***

“These hollow days, these strangers in the bathroom mirror, flinching and diminished. We have wandered too far from some vital totem, something central to us that we have misplaced and must find our way back to following some hair of meaning, guided by some ancient bloodstained chart. Someone is judged tonight. Someone is judged tonight.”

Alan Moore, The Birth Caul

***

The question of where Dodd and Quell have met before comes up in their dialogues. In the language of The Cause, this is expressed as a story about the same spirits inhabiting different bodies. Perhaps they were friends in another lifetime, perhaps next time around they will be great and powerful enemies. Outside of that rhetoric, The Master is agitated by another possibility: that Dodd might become Quell, or Quell Dodd. To go further that they might become something completely new together, or that they might drive each other to annihilation, which amounts to the same thing.

This doesn’t come to pass, of course. Like the idea of healing the trauma of the past, this possibility end up in fragments on the floor after every interaction between these characters. But unlike the sense that we might go back through time, the idea of one of these men becoming the other seems plausible to me while the movie is playing.

Perhaps Quell might make a huge Dodd out of Sand and crawl inside it, taking control of his master’s cultured form. Or maybe, if he stares hard enough at Quell as he rides his motorbike towards the Horizon, Dodd might find himself switching places with the rider, free to rove off into the hills in search of fresh poisons and adventure.