Okay, some extremely disjointed thoughts on the film, since it's been sloshing around in my mind like paint thinner in a delicious brain damaging cocktail. I'm going to spoilertag everything, even non-spoilers, because this won't be a review, just a spoiler-y discussion of anything that's on my mind. I'm not even going to directly address any questions/issues above, just because I don't know if just by seeing the film once, I'm remotely qualified to do so. This is extremely challenging work, particularly for mainstream American film, and it's not something I feel like I can comfortably speak with any authority about after only one viewing. There are deeper themes in this film - some obvious, some not - about the nature of man's relationship with his religion, about family and community, about one's need to believe in something without understanding it, and about violence, that I especially don't feel comfortable writing out until I can meditate on them a whole lot more. This is the best film of the year because it won't leave me alone.
I don't know if the film wants to dwell on it, because I think it can stand on its own without this being stated outright to us, but Freddie Quell is severely brain damaged. When you pass a homeless man on the street who doesn't seem to have it together mentally any longer, because of something, and you wonder how his younger life might have been - this certainly is as good a story as any as to what could have made him turn out that way. That might be an odd way of putting it - I don't know if the film wants us to assume that Quell is headed to any particular economic or social trouble that would isolate him from humanity, because of how charismatic he can be. But the film was certainly communicating to me that his cocktails are doing serious, serious harm to his mental well-being beyond what mere alcoholism would do. This is a man who is tremendously ill, who is killing off and retarding the growth of brain cells at an exponential rate.
Lancaster Dodd takes a shine to Quell because of how well he fits the mold of someone who, personally and professionally, he wants around him at that point in the growth of his cult. He is surrounded by people who gawk at him, treat him with unquestioned reverence, and would do anything (including fake it outright) in order to ensure that his methods seem to be working. Here, in Quell, he has found an opportunity to both be entertained (he's in love with this strange, strange creature) and to put his methods to the test on someone who actually will show results if there are results to be had. He's an animal trainer who has decided it's time to make the leap from training dogs to training wolves. This is the ultimate test for him, whether he believes in his dreck or not. Quell isn't looking for much of anything, but like characters in Paul Thomas Anderson films past, a family structure lets someone who, in absolute terms, needs to be drifting along, gather himself and find comfort.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Quell like someone who has never had sex, but does nothing but think about it. While I don't think that's true, it's an interesting angle there. Quell has the sexual immaturity of someone who's never seen a vagina, in person, in his life - the maturity level of someone who comments "I'd put it in her butt." on an internet comment thread about an actress or model. Someone who is confused, and foul, and scattered when it comes to controlling his urges and communicating with women. His reaction when his co-worker at the department store shows him her breasts is that of a fascinated child - poking at her nipples playfully as if he was completely shocked that he was seeing them, and didn't know quite what to do with these odd protuberances.
Dodd is bored with how easily everyone is buying into his line of bullshit. He needs to make his life interesting, but his wife knows better. Mary Sue proves herself to be the muscle and the brains behind this operation - in her husband, she has a perfect charismatic puppet with an ability to put pen to paper, but someone that she still needs to work on controlling. He's ultimately in charge of this enterprise, but is capable of making irresponsible decisions ('boozing,' as Mary Sue keeps calling it; or having a loose cannon like Quell around at a pivotal time for The Cause) and needs to be reigned in. She understands the business side of this. If The Cause is going to become what it clearly can become, she needs to keep Dodd's eyes on the prize and it's thrilling to watch her manipulation of him when he seems to be getting off track. There's also a jealousy there with regards to Dodd's affection towards Quell - but it is coldly moved to the background for her more pressing concern that this could jeopardize their success - the cult is more important to Mary Sue than her marriage to Dodd ever could be. Anderson shows all of this through very tiny bits of communication - verbal and nonverbal - and both Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams are up to this difficult task.
The latter half of the film seems to give people the most trouble, and it certainly is complicated, but I think the answers that are needed are there. The conditioning of Quell is, like the cult as a whole, merely an exercise to mentally break him down. I think that putting too much emphasis on the importance of scenes like Quell walking from the window to the wall ('till the sweat drips down my... nevermind) is foolhardy, as, regardless of the importance that Dodd puts on it, it is merely a way of breaking down Quell's self-confidence and mental stability, and then winning him back at the conclusion of the monotonous, confusing 'test'. The communication session between Dodd's son-in-law and Quell was a common type of exercise in Dianetics, also parodied in The Simpsons - and is an effort to drown Quell's self-esteem and any lingering sense that he can survive without The Cause. These endurance tests are not Anderson trying to communicate something high and mighty to us - they're just ways of showing us the kinds of techniques that makes Dodd's work so easy for him, and that will lead to his success.
The motorcycle scene is an important one because of how incredibly confounding it is. We're not given a direct explanation for whether or not Dodd wanted Quell to drive off into the sunset, though he certainly thought it was a possibility, and he wouldn't have gotten involved in this 'test' if he didn't prepare himself for it happening. My personal thought is that if Quell turned around and came back, Dodd would have felt as if his brainwashing of Quell had been a success, but would have been disappointed that he still has a burden aboard The Cause as they try to expand. He needs a son, a partner in crime, but it's become obvious that it isn't going to be able to be Quell. There's no winning in this situation, as Quell drives off. Anderson sets it up as a moment of incredible tension - we're waiting for the motorcycle to spin out of control, or for Dodd to try to drive after Quell. Hoffman looks like he's going to vomit. He doesn't want either of these outcomes, but he's put himself in a situation where one or the other is going to happen. And Quell drives away.
It'd already been established that Quell is hallucinating, most bizarrely when he pictures every woman in the room naked as he drifts off on the couch, surely filled to the gills with his homemade poison hooch. Everything that happens after the motorcycle scene, including the passage of time, is in question. Quell visits his sweetheart's home, and it's established that she will not be back in his life. She was his only hope, as Dodd says later, for him to find another Master out in the world to keep him grounded. In the script, the movie theater sequence is directly referred to as a dream of Quell's - and when you think about it, a sleeping man in an empty movie theater with a Casper cartoon on being handed a phone by a man in a suit is nearly in Lynch territory - but I can see why it frustrates because Anderson doesn't communicate directly whether we should believe that what we're seeing actually happened or not. Particularly because of what follows. Dodd accepts the cigarettes as if he's aware that they were coming, and is prepared to answer Quell's question about where they met (with a hilarious bit of bullshit). What turns this scene on its ear is the contrast to a similar one in There Will Be Blood. In that film, Daniel Plainview insisted that his son speak directly to his business partner, but proceeds to take the reigns in berating his son himself. In this film, Mary Sue takes the ball and runs with it - chewing out Quell (who Phoenix plays in this scene with otherworldly silver-tinted eyes, with a sadness and a panicked resignation of a dog that's being put down) and making it known to Dodd just how strongly she disapproves of Quell's reappearance in their now stable and ever-growing world. Dodd is deeply in love with Quell. Fuck, he serenades him. He wants his 'son' back. But he feels obligated to invite Quell to leave, and to steel him with just the kind of remarks that will ensure that he does leave. Either it's Mary Sue's influence on him, or him wanting to shield Quell from what The Cause has become (and vice versa), but he is willing to cut the cord. But his heart wants what it wants. He serenades Quell, shaking, trying with a stunning degree of failure to beg Quell on a human level to stick around. He's in pain. He does not want this. He threatens Quell that if he leaves, he can never come back. He has transformed from someone caring enough to let his protege go to someone who, like Plainview, is begging for his 'son' back by insisting as harshly as possible that he'll have nothing without his 'father'. Dodd is a much more sensitive man than Plainview. He struggles to keep from weeping as he sings, he shudders, he turns a shade of red that one does not often turn. And Quell knows that there's nothing for him here. Despite his usage of what he learned from his time with The Cause in his efforts to fuck everyone and anyone, Quell is shown in the final few frames of the film to be doomed. His Master is now himself, and someone with the mental illnesses and brain damage that he has should not be in service of himself. The rest of his life will be a terrible struggle.
