John Cope wrote:As others have said, this is actually exactly what I like most about the film and it's not easy to do well. There is a certain real mastery (sorry) observable in that which I think is much of what continues to compel fascination with it (same might also be said for Mulholland Drive though I don't share the enthusiasm for that one). That its meanings are effectively irreducible while still being guided or regulated seems very much like a major accomplishment to me
I'm a fan of inexplicable or, as you say, irreducible films as well, but I feel to do it successfully, the film can't spend so much time playing at significance while also leaving out the connective tissue or structural framework that makes significance possible. There's a point where a movie can become so oblique and indefinable that it shades into meaninglessness. With such movies, you could really say anything about them without there being a compelling reason to choose one interpretation over another. That's what I feel with
The Master: I can say whatever I want and it hardly makes a difference after a while. This is different from, say,
Last Year at Marienbad, where one can interpret the scenes in a number of ways, but that multiplicity itself contains the significance. Like with Todorov's concept of the fantastic, where a narrative can be interpreted equally as either supernatural or not (eg.
The Turn of the Screw), it is the presence in
Last Year at Marienbad of multiple competing interpretations--the contrast between something being ugly or innocent, memory or lie, fantasy or reality--that contains the significance. Each new interpretation brings one deeper into the mystery. That the film can be read as a suppressed rape narrative
or an absurdist expansion of a conventional pick up
or a story of thwarted love and nostalgia draws the viewer into a complex emotional state where these ideas are all meant to be held in the mind at once and the failure to resolve is indeed the triumph. In
The Master, each new interpretation is just one more dart in the handful you're tossing at the board.
After a while, I felt the mannered obscurantism of the film wasn't hiding a presence so much as disguising an absence. If that had been a theme of the film it'd be alright, but it isn't. The film doesn't seem particularly post-modern or deconstructive; it seems like a traditional character study, just one uninterested in cohering.
John Cope wrote:By "permanent" do you mean lasting beyond the rest as a likely consistent reference point in film culture? If so, in large part I think I can see how that could be. It isn't as opaque as the later work for sure which, I guess, would be discouraging or off putting to some (if not indeed forbidding).
Yeah, the one I think most likely to last. Admittedly, these kinds of predictions are silly, but there's a ferocity and energy to the movie that I think will carry it through different periods of taste and sensibility.