In the Flesh: The Master (Patreon)

Seaman Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) sculpts something indefinite from the damp sand at the ocean’s edge, then abandons it as the tide rolls in. Some time later, he joins other sailors in  making a facsimile of a woman in the same manner, then climbs onto it and fucks it with a half-mocking sort of brutality. This is how women function in Freddie’s life, and in the life of his rival, teacher, abuser, brother, and surrogate father Lancaster Dodd (Phillip Seymour Hoffman): as proxies for relating emotionally to other men. As in Dominique Aury’s The Story of O, women enflesh the emotional openness and tenderness men can’t express to one another in daily life, taking into their bodies emotions fundamentally grounded in unrelated human beings.

Freddie and Lancaster are forever together and apart. Anderson first shoots them seated opposite one another in a narrow ship’s cabin, each smoking, neither making eye contact. Later we see them in adjacent jail cells. Freddie, handcuffed and in the grip of a severe PTSD episode, rages and bellows, breaking his cell’s toilet, throwing himself against its bunks, all while Dodd watches and makes the occasional biting comment, as though the two men are a divided Id and Superego trapped in a mind unable to relate to itself. In the film’s closing moments we watch Freddie clumsily reenact his first “processing” session with Dodd with himself in the Master’s role and his lover of the night in his. The film then cuts to a flashback in which Freddie clings silently to the woman made of sand as the sun sinks beyond the horizon. Which is more real, Anderson invites us to consider.

Immediately before this closing sequence, Dodd and Freddie meet one final time to formally part ways. As Freddie prepares to leave, Dodd sings him an emotional rendition of Dee Dee Bridgewater’s jazz standard ‘(I’d Like to Get You) On a Slow Boat to China’, moving both men to tears. It’s notable that earlier in the film Freddie recounts having left his teenage girlfriend to work a cargo hauler to Beijing, a voyage from which he promised to return and marry her and which instead spelled the end of their relationship. Doris becomes another narrative figure through which Dodd and Freddie’s relationship is mediated, a symbolic connector between the real boat and the song’s, between the woman of sand and the woman of flesh.