Paul Thomas Anderson‘s “The Master” covers a lot of territory as it tracks the post-World War II dysfunction of a Naval veteran who briefly finds a purpose with the enigmatic cult leader Lancaster Dodd, but how it glances against Scientology can’t be ignored. From the parallels to the life of L. Ron Hubbard to certain practices within the belief system, the film puts clues to the controversial church throughout. All that said, Anderson has long explained that the film is not about Scientology itself.
“The last thing I want to do is insult someone and their belief system. That’s not my bag at all. And the impression people seemed to have is that if you do something about Scientology then it must obviously be an attack, when something like ‘South Park‘ can do that way better than I ever could,” the director told The Guardian in 2012. “But yeah, I knew we were trafficking in elements that were very delicate.”
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Even more, Anderson says he was drawn to the ideas in Hubbard’s “Dianetics,” the Bible of sorts for Scientology, rather than creating a scathing critique.
“It’s more the basic idea that appealed to me, because it concerns memories and other lives, particularly after the second World War, and that’s what got me excited. Getting into it from that angle felt like fertile ground,” he explained. “You listen to the songs from that period and everyone’s singing about seeing you in my dreams, or finding you in another day. All the lyrics are ghost stories, coming out of the war. Or science-fiction stories about travelling in time. You come back from the war and the love of your life is married with kids and you’re not the same person who went away. That kind of stuff is so heartbreaking to me.”
Indeed, Joaquin Phoenix‘s portrait of an eternally broken Freddie Quell is at the heart of “The Master,” but as a new video essay from Nerdwriter reveals, the Scientology practice of auditing is also a key component of the movie. Of course, it’s not referred as auditing in the film, but questions from Scientology’s Oxford Capacity Test are used in one of the early scenes between Quell and Dodd, and some of techniques Dodd uses in manipulating Quell reflect the church’s methods as well.
It’s all fascinating stuff, and certainly adds an extra thematic layer to an already wonderfully complex film.