“YAAAA-HOOOOOO!”
His eyebrows ride up his face in tandem with a scrunched forehead. Two massive veins define his face like lightning strikes on the open plains; he’s accelerating towards a vast expanse of nothing. His mustache arches to permit an ecstatic scream of glee. Lancaster Dodd roars as loudly as he can, as loudly as he has in many lifetimes, seated atop a similarly thunderous motorcycle, the riotous duo hightailing over a southwestern salt flat. Here, finally, is a chance to disappear at the drop of a hat. When, he must be wondering, was the last time I could leave not a life, but an identity behind and start anew?
Dodd’s teachings as the (supposed) founder and leader of a movement colloquially known as the Cause — found in Dodd’s book of the same name — are founded upon the idea that the human body is merely a temporary vessel for consciousness. It’s a cyclical process. Something you do for a billion (perhaps even a trillion) years — or not at all. Leaving one half of one life in the salty California dust is barely a blip on the radar. Life has gone on and will continue to go on.
He comes back. He has to. What Dodd believes, preaches, and writes about are immaterial to how well this life has treated him. He’s a black hole, the gravitational pull at the center of every room he enters; his intelligence and charisma are so authentically brilliant that every shot of Philip Seymour Hoffman radiates Dodd’s pale, glowing sheen. When I think of Lancaster Dodd, I, like many others, think of The Master’s greatest scene: Dodd introduces the film’s protagonist Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix, in probably his best performance) to the Cause’s central practice of psychological processing. Processing is one of the best scenes of the 2010s, but I mustn’t forget the scenes of Dodd swaggering at the center of a Cause soiree. Dancing and singing, surrounded by his acolytes; every single one of them seem to be telling themselves there’s nothing they’d rather do than watch this man’s every move. Those same people follow Dodd to Philadelphia and sit in an empty dining room for hours on end to watch him direct Freddie, eyes closed, back and forth across the room as Dodd coaxes out of him imagery of otherwise nondescript windows and wooden walls. The same people who sat in that room almost certainly defended Dodd blindly after his arrest for fraudulent medical practices.
Hoffman plays Dodd with overboiling equanimity, with a composure that every so often gives way to a brief and powerful outburst. They arise sparingly throughout Hoffman’s time on screen, but these moments effectively indicate a man with a tea kettle for a brain, always on the edge of steam beginning to emerge. Perpetual flows of ideas and emotions are bound to create an occasional overflow — especially when they’re used to proffer a belief which Dodd’s apparently inventing off the cuff. He knows he’s a charlatan, but the act proves to be remarkably effective. One of the many reasons Dodd is so transfixed by Phoenix’s Quell is that Freddie’s perverse aimlessness makes him an ideal subject for Dodd’s pseudoscience, and his tendency to angrily lash out makes him an amenable enforcer for those who dare question Dodd’s ideas.
Dodd is one of several Paul Thomas Anderson characters with overwhelmingly strong intellectual skills and tactile charisma, so much so that their urge to display it continually comes into conflict with their desire to internalize it, so as to avoid alienating those that begin to worship them. Dodd, save for a couple of extremely brief but disproportionately violent outbursts, mostly does internalize the pressure he’s put on himself as the leader of this movement. He aspires to be the stoic and enigmatic figurehead that his people look to. The guilt of simultaneously knowing far more and yet nothing at all about the Cause weighs on him; Dodd’s ability to block out doubters is fully tested when a man like John More rightly and publicly disputes his leadership. He fails. More was somebody Dodd did not see coming; his cryptic facade, tirelessly prepared for all of the universe’s possibilities, cracks for the first time. (“Pig fuck!”)
The latter half of PTA’s career has so far marked a transition from the chaotic tumult of Boogie Nights and Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love to a quartet of films thematically linked by how humans are ripe for corruption and depravity and manipulation by big personalities. He’s told stories about the people who exploit those qualities (Dodd and his wife: Peggy, played by Amy Adams) as well as those susceptible to such exploitation (Freddie). Dodd’s jubilant rictus atop the motorcycle reminded me of another of PTA’s characters, perhaps his most famous character and undoubtedly his most notorious manipulator, another mustachioed live wire who was not so lucky in avoiding the seduction of his life’s luxuries nor in keeping submerged his true feelings.
Daniel Plainview craves the idolatry Dodd has at his fingertips. By the end of There Will Be Blood (the first of the aforementioned quartet), Plainview has more money than God Himself and has severed any and all loose threads lending him any hint of humanity. (To be fair, he really had only one to begin with: his adopted son HW.) His extreme misanthropy, however, allows him to see other humans only as cogs whom he can engineer for his own profit. Yet he still covets the reverence of these people, and his hatred for Eli Sunday emanates from simultaneous envy and admiration for Eli’s ability to commandeer the desires of Little Boston’s townsfolk for a sense of community and a cause to unite behind. Plainview looks at religion as a means of manipulation, to squeeze every drop of oil out of not just the ground but his employees as well. He sees right through Eli’s shtick but undergoes repentance himself. He does so not because he regrets killing the impostor Henry — William Bandy, a member of Eli’s congregation, caught Plainview with the murder weapon — but because a transactional baptism affords Daniel the rights to construct part of a pipeline on Bandy’s land.
To Plainview, God is a commodity, useful for transactions and easily replaceable by oil as the driving force of America. God and His mortal vehicle are one and the same in The Master; Plainview thinks God is in the ground in There Will Be Blood, and only he can conjure Him. Plainview doesn’t destroy humanity’s access to the Holy Spirit when he bashes Eli’s brains in with a bowling pin. He merely moved His hiding spot. Turn-of-the-twentieth-century America is no longer run by whatever spirit is at the heart of the Third Revelation. Plainview is the new revelation, and oil is His Cause.
All of Anderson’s films explore how things begin or how they end; he takes on both when he can. The Master and There Will Be Blood are magnetically opposite films, as are the characters of Dodd and Plainview. Dodd spends his days evangelizing the eternal presence of invisible universes and timelines and is constantly surrounded by both visible and invisible bodies. It’s reasonable to understand why he relishes the moments when he can be totally alone. There Will Be Blood is, on the other hand, utterly singular and self-contained. When Plainview tells his butler “I’m finished,” and the credits roll, that universe ceases to exist. An individual story about the ultimate capitalist is all There Will Be Blood needs to be, magnificent and rich as it is. Dodd and Plainview each have everything the other man wants, but their worlds dictate that things won’t ever be different. For one moment, though, just a handful of frames of sixty-five millimeter shot in the middle of Nowhere, USA, the two met in the middle; if Dodd’s to be believed, they will certainly meet again.
Recommended Reading on The Master:
Recommended Reading on There Will Be Blood:
