The Master

In The Master (2012), Lancaster Dodd tells Freddie Quell, the man whom Lancaster wants to cure of alcoholism and mental illness, “I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher, but above all I am a man.” Given Lancaster’s presumption of infallibility concerning knowing that every human soul has been reincarnated even for trillions of years, the end of the line would more fittingly be, “I am a man above all (others).” With regard to being a physician, Lancaster comes up short because he underestimates the medical severity of Freddie’s alcoholism and his likely psychotic mental illness. Upon being released from jail, Lancaster should realize that Freddie’s rage and temper-tantrum in his jail cell evince mental illness of such severity that it is lunacy to suppose that the patient can be cured by walking back and forth in a room between a wall and a window and being sure to touch both, and by saying “Doris” over and over again in a dyad with Lancaster’s new son-in-law. In fact, Lancaster actually encourages Freddie’s alcoholism by asking that Freddie continue to make his “potion,” which contains paint-thinner filtered through bread. It is not Lancaster, but his wife, Peggy, who puts a stop to the “booze.” From her sanity, both that of Freddie and Lancaster can be questioned. That Lancaster is the Master of a religious cult, or “movement,” renders his mental state particularly problematic.

Lancaster is perhaps at his best as a writer; he is at his best in his second book, in which he subtly but importantly switches the question used in his hypnotic method to imagine your past lives from recall them. In being a religious leader claiming even to know that he and Freddie had worked together in a European army running supplies in a past life, Lancaster demonstrates the danger that can beset the human mind when it ventures into the domain of religion, wherein certainty is posited for that which only belief, and thus faith, can reach. That anyone would even believe that the embodied souls alive have had past lives for trillions of years even though the species has been around for only 1.8 million years demonstrates just how alluring, and thus mentally powerful charismatic leadership can be. That Freddie and Lancaster’s new son-in-law went to the hotel room of a man who had just been critical of Lancaster’s claim at a gathering at a private home and physically beat up the man testifies to just how dangerous charisma, or “gifts of the spirit,” can be.

In the 20^th century alone, Adolf Hitler, who led Nazi Germany, had incredible charisma, such that the Germans continued to follow him blindly, albeit with severe consequences if they objected outwardly to Hitler’s autocratic regime. At the same time, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt also had tremendous charisma, with millions of Americans tuning in to hear his Fireside Chats on the radio. Decades later, John F. Kennedy had Camelot-tinged charisma, and still later Ronald Reagan, a former actor, could deliver lines dripping with charisma. In the domain of religion, the Bible warns of false-prophets, whose charisma, like that of Jim Jones, who secretly served poisoned drinks to his followers because he deemed that the world was about to end, enabled the atrocity. That a religious leader can be so wrong yet still have devoted followers is portrayed in the film, whose A-list of actors gives it its emotional depth, which, by the way, is typically felt by followers of charismatic leaders.

At its core, the film is a picture of the human mind’s vulnerability when we enter the domain of religion. Unfortunately, this vulnerability tends to be invisible to the collective unconscious of humanity. In making such a blind spot transparent, raising it to the level of consciousness, the medium of film can serve a very important function for our species, and even contribute to its religious and political development, both of which have been retarded and thus kept from progressing. The mind’s innate susceptibility to religious lunacy as primped up as truth as if on stilts and thus untouchable can be grasped just by examining the substance of Lancaster’s teachings without the entrapment of narrative and charismatic characterization.

The first glimpse of Lancaster’s perspective comes when he officiates his daughter’s wedding on a boat: “as long as you hold these bodies, in this life, you may kiss the bride.” Lancaster goes on to give an utterly nonsensical speech at the reception, yet everyone in the room applauds. As a critic later says (before being beaten up), “Good science allows for more than one opinion. Otherwise, you merely have the will of one man, which is the basis of cult, is it not?” It is as if out of Lancaster’s sheer act of will serial reincarnation is created. Beyond the metaphysics of the human soul, Lancaster conflates religion with science. Of his dyad-based “method” by which participants can have bad memories from their past lives erased, Lancaster claims that some forms of Leukemia can be cured. He explains to his now-shocked critic, “In going back over past lives, we may be able to treat illnesses that started thousands, even trillions of years ago.” Doing away with negative emotional impulses from this and past lives can cross over onto medical science regarding the bodies that each of us “inhabit.” Even Freddie supposes himself to think scientifically; without a doubt, Lancaster considers himself a scientist.

Even though Freddie’s childhood had been horrendous, with his father having died a drunk and his other being committed for psychosis, facing Lancaster in the next jail-cell, Freddie glimpses the Master clearly. “You’re making this shit up. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” As if a schizophrenic whose knowledge of other realities cannot be shaken, the Master replies, “I give you facts.” So it is a fact that, as Lancaster tells a women whom he has just put under hypnosis, “Our spirits live on in the whole of time, exist in many vessels through time.” Even the hypnotic time travel back to past lives is presumably a fact, and thus to be deemed to be effective, without any empirical evidence, in capturing the mind’s fatal flaws to correct the mind back to its inherent state of perfect, while, Lancaster insists, “righting civilization and eliminating war and poverty, and therefore, the atomic threat.” This is the Master’s project, supported by a religious metaphysics of the human soul, or spirit, embodying trillions of bodies through time. The astute reader may recall Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal recurrence.

Perhaps when Lancaster first meets Freddie and believes that the two have met, it is because both men “connect” in having similar mental impairments. It is ironic that even though Freddie is the “identified patient” in the film, it is he who laughs off Lancaster’s claim of having recalled that both men had run military supplies together in another lifetime. That Lancaster changes his method in his second book from recall to imagine may just be an attempt to grow his movement by making it more credible, or he may have been coming to question even his own access to metaphysical truth. Such truth would have it that Lancaster and his followers were all about the human imagination, which, if so, raises the uncomfortable question of whether religious myth itself is so too, once the metaphysical and historical stilts are removed. Yet distinctively religious meaning, and thus truth, can be distinguished from these stilts and, as such, be unthreatened by the role of human imagination in clothing such meaning. 

Properly classified in terms of its distinctive genre, religious truth can be understood to not be about history, metaphysics, or medical science—claims of those domains are off-limits to the religionist; otherwise, conflicts and quagmires with the latter domains are inevitable while the innate fauna of the religious garden are obscured and overlooked. Were Lancaster to simply state that he uses hypnosis to get his patients to confront painful memories by imagining the latter to be safely distanced psychologically in “past lives,” then his medical practice would not be polluted by the assumed religious garb of infallibility, but then the film would not be such a good demonstration of one of the major lapses that is triggered in the human mind when it enters the religious domain: the deactivating of the mind’s ability to self-check, as in thinking, have I gone too far, maybe I’m wrong, so I should be more circumspect, for I am human, all too human.