Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master looks like a “masterpiece.” What does that actually mean?
Critical regard for independent cinema so rarely converges upon universal consensus that when a film elicits a response like Barry Jenkins’ 2016 feature Moonlight did, it demands special attention. That a coming-of-age story about a gay black man won the Oscar for Best Picture was in itself a triumph, and yet what is perhaps more fascinating about the acclaim for Moonlight is how consistently the critical attention towards the film seemed to be captivated less by its content and more by its startling stylistic beauty. A.O. Scott of the New York Times dubbed it “a poem written in light, music and vivid human faces,” later adding that it was “about as beautiful a movie as you are ever likely to see.” The titles of reviews by the British Film Institute (“Moonlight, a prism of repression and desire, awash in poetry”) and NPR (“Moonlight: a cinematic poem of love, loneliness and coming out”) sound essentially interchangeable. Perhaps most revealing was Vox’s concise observation that “Moonlight feels more like a symphony or a poem than a mere movie.” The precise words may differ, but the sentiment remains the same across the board: if Moonlight is a Great Film, it is because of its ability to transcend the plane of ordinary cinema into the dimension of visual poetry.
My point in bringing this up is not to provide more affirmation of the genius of Moonlight, a film that has rightfully been called by many the best of the decade, but rather to offer a glimpse into how cinema has written the discourse by which it evaluates itself. After all, the impulse to elevate cinema to poetry is not a recent phenomenon. As Orson Welles, director of perennial best-film-of-all-time candidate Citizen Kane, once put it, “A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.” The metaphor of “poetry” as the ultimate aesthetic ideal to strive for is especially fitting given cinema’s historical inferiority complex—a need to constantly assert itself as a legitimate art form that has only grown more acute with the contemporary explosion of low art blockbusters in the Marvel age. But all of this begs one simple question: what does it even mean for a film to feel like a poem?
It is with the hopes of answering this question that I now wish to turn to Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, a film whose deliberate use of formal elements such as cinematography, framing, music, and editing provides a perfect backdrop for thinking about issues of cinematic style. Released in 2012 as Anderson’s sixth feature, The Master tells the story of Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a traumatized World War 2 veteran who drifts through post-war life in a haze of erratic behavior, senseless violence, and substance abuse (he mixes his own drinks using whatever bizarre chemicals are at hand, from jet fuel to paint thinner). Freddie eventually wanders onto the boat of Lancaster Dodd (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), the charismatic founder of a Scientology-esque movement named “The Cause” who has gained a cult following with his pseudo-religious teachings. After using a self-invented therapeutic exercise called “processing” to probe Freddie’s past with a series of intense psychological questions, Dodd takes Freddie under his wing and transforms him into his most unquestioningly loyal follower. The rest of the film explores the attachment that these two men develop for each other, a relationship that is by turns familial, servile, and homoerotic.
When I sat down to rewatch The Master a few days ago in the midst of my quarantine cinema binge, I was immediately struck by how much it tries to call attention to its own style. Just watch the opening sequence of the film:
The film’s first minute consists of just three elements: a shot of the wake of a boat, followed by a sudden classical overture, and then a cut to a shot of a helmeted figure (Freddie) whose face is almost completely obscured by the prow of that boat. By stripping the scene of any clear narrative context or purpose, Anderson presents us with cinema in its most basic, or “purest,” form—the juxtaposition of image and sound—and thereby accentuates his stylistic decisions which might otherwise go unnoticed in a faster-paced or more expository sequence. Consider the use of editing, for instance: whereas the typical film has an average shot length of between 5 and 15 seconds, Anderson lingers on this fragmented portrait of Freddie for 42 whole seconds before finally cutting to the next shot. Unlike most directors and editors who attempt to keep the cuts in a scene as understated as possible, Anderson goes out of his way to make them visible, to force us to feel the unconventional, almost uncomfortable visual rhythm of the film. In a similar sense, the absence of diegetic sound, coupled with the abrupt loudness with which the overture begins, turns the soundtrack from a secondary player into an actively felt presence, an atmosphere that we simply can’t stop hearing or thinking about. And then there’s the use of framing, of course—by deliberately hiding Freddie’s face behind the boat’s edge, Anderson reminds us of our condition as cinematic spectators whose perspective is always limited by the positioning and movement of the camera. In other words, he never lets us forget that we are in fact watching a movie.
At the heart of all of these aesthetic decisions lies a deeper reverence for style itself, a desire to allow the sound and image to speak for themselves without any burden of entertainment or storytelling. By slowing down the scene, Anderson effectively forces us to keep reading and re-reading the same shot, as if to suggest that the tableau he has crafted for our sake is worthy of being admired and celebrated. The overall effect of these stylistic gestures is that Anderson injects the first scene of The Master with an impression of artistic weight. Thrown into sharp relief by the sheer absence of dialogue or action, everything that we actually see or hear on-screen feels as if it has been woven together into something deeper, more beautiful, and profound. Much like a Shakespearean sonnet, the film attempts to convey “meaning” not through narrative or content, but rather through the very elegance of its formal language.
It is perhaps not surprising that the opening frames of The Master highlight the type of restrained artistry that we have come to associate with cinematic and literary “masterpieces.” After all, the film is about mastery itself: mastery over others, mastery of oneself and one’s craft, and, ultimately, mastery of style. As leader of The Cause, Lancaster is the obvious “master” of the film, a man who pursues mastery over others to the extreme by turning it into the very purpose of his existence. And Freddie is his greatest foil: the man who cannot be mastered, who wanders aimlessly from place to place acting on his every whim and impulse, and who eventually rejects the offer of a comfortable yet subservient life in The Cause. The tension between these two impulses is the thematic crux of the film, something that becomes clear in the final scene when Lancaster rather pointedly tells Freddie, “If you figure a way to live without serving a master, any master…you’d be the first person in the history of the world.” Anderson’s real insight, however, is to tie up these narrative threads with a series of layered, meta-cinematic nods to artistic mastery more generally. For instance, note how Anderson characterizes Lancaster as a peculiar kind of artist, someone who employs his unique style – his proclivity for storytelling, oration, singing, performance – in order to amass his cult following. And then there’s the actual performers of the film themselves, Phoenix and Hoffman, who treat every scene as a stage to showcase their own incredibly thought-out, controlled, masterful acting styles.
Ultimately though, I think the titular “master” of the film is not one of the characters or the actors, but rather Paul Thomas Anderson himself. In that sense, The Master can finally be read as a curious sort of homage to Anderson’s own cinematic mastery, a statement proudly proclaiming himself an artist at the peak of his talents and, in the process, commenting on what kinds of films can rightly be called masterpieces. And as we have already seen through our analysis of the opening scene, Anderson justifies such a bold statement on the grounds of his stylistic flair. Just look at the language critic Peter Travers uses in his overwhelmingly positive review of the film: “Written, directed, acted, shot, edited and scored with a bracing vibrancy that restores your faith in film as an art form, The Master is nirvana for movie lovers. Anderson mixes sounds and images into a dark, dazzling music that is all his own.”
While I don’t personally agree with Travers’ glowing endorsement (more on this in a bit), I find this remark so incredibly revealing of the more general framework by which critics today evaluate cinema, of which I have no doubt Anderson is totally aware and consciously playing to. The focus on the film’s style rather than its content or subject (“directed, acted, shot, edited and scored”); the use of metaphorical language to elevate the work to something greater (“mixes sounds and images into…music”); and the suggestion that good films must reaffirm the value of the medium (“restores your faith in film as an art form”)—these all remind me of the same exact assumptions and judgments that encoded themselves into those reviews of Moonlight I cited earlier. The striking consistency in the reception to these two films points to the existence of a well-defined, if unspoken, set of aesthetic criteria by which the community of critics and filmmakers distinguishes between mere movies and visual poetry.
What exactly are these criteria that characterize what I call, for lack of a better word, the “poetic style” of cinema? Below, I have taken a stab at writing a list—by no means intended to be exhaustive—of the major stylistic decisions that stood out to me when I re-watched The Master, and which I think are indicative of broader trends in cinema today. Since any such attempt at generalization is inherently fraught, I have tried to include clips and images to help illustrate how exactly this particular film seeks to produce the impression of “beauty” or “elegance” through specific cinematic techniques.
- Dramatically slowed down pacing. I mean this both in terms of narrative (longer scenes, a shift in focus from story to visuals) as well as editing (less frequent cuts and significantly longer shot lengths) and cinematography (greater emphasis on static shots and slow, deliberate camera movements). We’ve already seen one instance of this in the opening of The Master, but the stylistic device that’s really in vogue today is the extended long take—after all, it nearly won 1917 an Oscar for Best Picture. In the department store scene below, the smooth, languid tracking shot of the sales girl lasts a full minute and 25 seconds and functions almost entirely just to show off Anderson’s virtuosity behind the camera.
- Distortion of visual perspective. Although we typically expect most movies to be filmed largely in medium shot, the poetic style places a much greater emphasis on close-ups and long-shots, both of which often distort the scale at which we see what is on-screen. This becomes most apparent in the conversations between Freddie and Lancaster, which for the most part are shot entirely in extended close-up (perhaps to visualize their inner psychological states). For instance, in this scene from the end of the film, notice how Anderson keeps the camera almost uncomfortably close to the faces of his characters:
- Immaculate framing. Watching The Master, it’s hard not to feel as if Anderson has spent painstaking time deliberately designing every frame to look like a stunning tableau. One particular quality that sticks out in the following shots is a subtle obsession with using the camera to capture exterior or natural beauty:
- Extreme method acting. Setting aside for the time being the fact that The Master chooses as its subject a middle-aged white male whose response to an unhappy existence takes the form of violent aggression, Phoenix’s performance in The Master gives his award-winning role as the Joker a run for its money in terms of his ability to truly immerse himself into the psyche of a troubled, disturbed character. Somehow, he makes it through nearly 2 full minutes of this intense conversation without blinking a single time:
- Surrealist dream or fantasy sequences. Much of what happens in The Master is presented to us from the highly subjectivized perspective of Freddie, who quite clearly functions as an unreliable narrator. Concretely, this manifests in the form of sequences that toe the line between fantasy and reality, such as the party scene where Freddie, almost drifting off to sleep, imagines the girls in the room suddenly stripping their clothes off as they dance with Lancaster (to keep this post PG, I’m not actually going to post the clip, but the scene in question takes place an hour and eight minutes into the film).
Taking all of these artistic decisions as a whole, the phrase “visual poetry” feels like an appropriate condensation of the rough, intangible impressions one experiences when watching The Master. But the truly important question is whether such a commentary on style is enough by itself to warrant the film’s reputation as a masterpiece. Travers certainly seems to think so, and he’s not alone—in a recent BBC survey of 177 critics, The Master ranked among the top 25 films of the 21st century, and Anderson himself has called it his best work, for whatever that’s worth. And yet…for me, the film feels strangely hollow, as if the story itself couldn’t possibly bear the weight of Anderson’s elaborate stylistic gestures. Or, as renowned critic Roger Ebert put it, “The Master is fabulously well-acted and crafted, but when I reach for it, my hand closes on air.”
And therein lie the dangers of fetishizing style, of transforming it from a tool into a goal in and of itself. Because any work of art that aims to simply be beautiful instead of attempting to create a genuine emotional resonance with its audience has already lost sight of art’s proper object. That Moonlight strives towards a higher level of cinematic beauty works because, ultimately, Moonlight is a film about celebrating beauty—the beauty of childhood, of first love, and of all the people who for far too long couldn’t see their own faces or stories on the big screen. In other words, the film’s use of style bears a meaningful relation to its content. The same simply cannot be said about The Master. If Anderson intends us to read his film as a celebration of stylistic mastery, then what are we supposed to make of Lancaster Dodd, a man who exploits his ability to craft style without substance in order to seduce others into subjugation? And if Anderson instead intends us to read it as a cautionary tale on the dangers of style, then his fascination with his own craftsmanship feels gratuitously self-indulgent to the point of undercutting his message. In more ways than one, the failures of The Master bear an uncanny similarity to that of Joker, a film whose inability to create sensible cohesion between the beauty of its aesthetics and the horror of its content proved self-defeating. So in the end, I think Travers only got it half-right: The Master isn’t nirvana for movie lovers, but rather for style lovers—for those people who prefer to look at art from a distance rather than actively engaging with it.
There’s also a second, and perhaps much more acute, danger to this kind of fetishization. By repeatedly elevating a certain set of films on the grounds of their shared cinematic style, the critical discourse has, in effect, handed down a neat, tidy template for any young filmmaker who wishes to be taken seriously. As a result, a certain distinctive and easily identifiable visual style has become virtually codified into standard practice for a large number of films occupying the middle-ground between commercial entertainment and art cinema (i.e., the critical darlings that manage to retain a robust level of mainstream appeal). I like to call this trend the “A24 Effect”:
- Long Takes: First Reformed, Midsommar, The Farewell, The Souvenir
- Conversations in Close-up: Moonlight, Waves, Room, Uncut Gems
- Framing/Exterior Shots: Last Black Man in San Francisco, Lady Bird, Ex Machina, The Florida Project
- Method Acting: The Lighthouse, The Disaster Artist
- Fantasy Sequences: First Reformed, The Witch, The Lighthouse
Despite the wide range of genres and subject matters these fifteen films cover, they all have two things in common: first, they were all produced or distributed by A24, and second, they all make extensive use of the very same cinematic techniques that I listed out earlier when attempting to characterize the visual style of The Master. Assembling the clips above is simply my attempt at formalizing a sentiment that pops up time and time again in conversation with friends: the idea that A24 films tend to have a cookie-cutter “look and feel” to them, a general stylistic quality designed to confer the impression of artistic seriousness or legitimacy. A24’s ability to earn a reputation for injecting fresh energy and creativity into cinema while systematically supporting auteurs who operate within a fairly homogenous and restricted aesthetic regime is perhaps the clearest testament to the studio’s true strategic advantage, namely their skills at branding and marketing.
Now don’t get me wrong—I’m definitely not trying to argue that there isn’t any artistic merit to the style of filmmaking popularized by A24. On the contrary, several of the films that I’ve singled out here to make my case easily rank among my favorites. Nor am I suggesting that the problem, insofar as one exists, lies solely with A24. What I’m simply lamenting is the fact that an art form once celebrated for pushing the boundaries of visual representation and storytelling has somehow arrived at an unprecedented level of creative staleness. The aspiration to produce the A24 model of visual poetry certainly deserves a place in modern cinema, but to treat that as the only style of filmmaking that ought to be taken seriously would be to rob us of the delight that comes from seeing great directors utilize the full possibilities of the medium. For instance, just look at Edgar Wright’s use of quick-paced editing and exaggerated sound effects to create comedy out of narrative contextualization:
Or how Wes Anderson evokes feelings of childhood nostalgia by leveraging sudden tilts, zooms, and insert shots to establish a setting:
Perhaps the most pressing form of stylistic diversity we need in cinema today isn’t even such visual inventiveness, but rather the willingness to celebrate directors who know when style should take a backseat to content. Consider Can You Ever Forgive Me?, a film with an understated, unassuming visual style that simply lets the narrative do the heavy lifting. While it lacks the kind of grandiose stylistic flexes we typically associate with masterful cinema, what it gets so right is that emotion can be elicited from a well-written, well-acted story just as effectively as it can from a stunning visual.
It’s perfectly understandable that in making a film about the struggles of a marginalized queer, female artist, Marielle Heller chose to forego a cinematic style that has historically belonged to quintessentially male, quintessentially straight narratives. Likewise, it’s probably not accidental that of the fifteen A24 films I listed above, only three were directed by women and only two were directed by people of color. Maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised that award-winning films all look the same today when so often the people who write, direct, finance, and evaluate them do as well. In other words, what films like Can You Ever Forgive Me? ultimately teach us is that carving out a space for more people to share their stories might increase the diversity of not only the kinds of stories that are told, but also of the styles with which they are brought to life. Until Hollywood stops asking for our forgiveness and chooses to actually deal with its representation problem, the burden of seeing through films that simply wear the mask of mastery lies squarely with us.
(P.S. While I’ve only hinted at some of the ways cinema’s lack of representation informs critical tastes, this topic has rightfully been gaining more attention in media today. For a look at this issue in the context of canonization, check out this fantastic recent article by the New York Times on the Criterion Collection, one of the canon’s crowning jewels that just happens to feature remarkably few black directors.)
