I’m about to dump three thousand words on you, which is probably as much evidence as you need not to read it. Then again, I’ve been quiet for several pages, so I suppose I’m just getting my money’s worth. My first viewing was an anxious one, disliking Freddie yet feeling his discomfort, a viewing heavily influenced by my own religious upbringing. My recent second viewing was enthralling. I don’t know if my observations are “correct” but at the very least, I perceived the action as follows while watching the film and had a complete and satisfying experience.
On my second viewing, I was amazed at how blatant Freddie’s PTSD was implied. The entire first act concentrates on Freddie in the service and his shortcomings at readjusting to civilian life. Freddie’s face is tightly framed in all remembrances of the war (including the lengthy opening shot). This suggests his isolation from the world was caused by his experiences in action.
He creates another sand woman on the beach after he masturbates (the first one was holding beers). This time, her arm is outstretched, inviting him to lay by her breast. This could suggest neither drinking nor sex is his master, but instead his desire for unconditional acceptance, as the oedipal themes suggest.
After his Rorschach test, he is admitted to a V.A. hospital, where they reassure everyone that due to the youthful rejuvenation of their minds, they can return to society and function at gas stations and chicken coops. Again, this is a direct confirmation that Freddie’s condition was war-induced. They specifically state no one will understand what they’ve been through.
In the hospital, the doctor asks him about a letter he received. Freddie says he cried while reading Doris’ letter because of nostalgia. What he’s really saying is in that moment, he was nostalgic for who he used to be in a world no longer accessible.
When the doctor asks about his dream, Freddie recalls his family was around the table, laughing and drinking. It’s the image of the American nuclear family. Then, he laments, “Why couldn’t it have stopped there?” We move straight from that question to his job as a photographer, viewing a montage of happy middle class families and their children, albeit with something slightly off in their appearance. He seems to enjoy the association with the so-called normal, though it’s ironic that he is the one defining it.
We see Freddie boozing in the backroom as the soundtrack plays “Get Behind Me Satan”. “Satan” in this case is his war trauma, which threatens his stability at work. Freddie’s drinking of “secrets” is directly related with being incapable of dealing with his trauma, aided by his genetic predisposal to alcohol.
It is an overweight, upper class businessman who first provokes Freddie’s wrath, obviously outraged at having to take a photo which reinforces the man’s importance over him. “You’re taking this for your wife?” he asks insincerely. “Y-yes,” the man replies, off guard. He then tests the power of his position, seeing how long the man will stay while burning him with his lamp, just as Dodd tests his control during the window-wall conditioning. Of course, the upper class businessman wins, and the next time we see Freddie, he has dropped to the lower class, harvesting in fields. (The floor model acts upper class in her lower middle class job. She mocks her affluent posturing with Freddie, which appears to put him at ease. Dodd will do the same thing.)
The man with alcohol poisoning looks like Freddie’s father. Despite later blaming the man for getting into his concoction, Freddie is the one who poured his glass and told him to drink it. That his father was an alcoholic raises an interesting question: is his trouble with authority from an abusive, alcoholic father, and he actually tries to poison the man, or was his father simply a drunkard and Freddie mistakenly gave the old man as much booze as his father would have downed? He legitimately seems fond of the old man, not anxious in his presence. When the migrant workers are tending to him, he attempts to give the old man water and appears genuinely concerned, though this could be to appease his guilt.
Freddie jumps back on a boat, as he has defined his limits in society, but also, from the land, the party on board promises familial warmth and elegance. The boat juxtaposes freedom and an image of community he wishes he could possess.
In their first meeting, Dodd states the ship is under his control. Clearly, Dodd knows what he’s doing from the get-go, addressing him in naval terms. When asked his profession, Dodd lists a string of jobs such as a doctor and nuclear physicist, but rejects all of them by saying ultimately, he is a man. Freddie is very pleased by this. Dodd is apparently the greatest man in all of society, upper class 100%, yet he wipes that away to be on Freddie’s level.
I honestly believe we learn what we need to know about Freddie’s background from his first processing. His father died an alcoholic, his mother went insane, and his aunt most likely raised him. (“Where is she?” Dodd asks. “I don’t know, probably at home,” Freddie replies.) If his Aunt raised him, then he had sex with his maternal figure. With his incestuous background, Freddie represents another unsightly undercurrent of the celebrated American image. Also, Freddie is more self-aware than I originally gave him credit for. He understands he’s a liar, he thinks about how insignificant he is, and he knows he doesn’t fit in to society. He admits he killed Japanese soldiers in the war. He says it doesn’t bother him, though seconds later he becomes unhinged, confessing about the old man he might have killed.
I found the Doris flashback moving on my second viewing. He gets a hug from her mom. It’s a traditional homecoming for a soldier without a home. Doris asks to kiss him and he gives her his cheek. He slowly warms to the idea of kissing her (Anderson cuts on their second kiss, but shows their third). He respects Doris in his way. She isn’t a sex object. He leaves her because he no longer knows how to function in society; by leaving, he sustains the fantasy of their possible happiness. He takes an oil drilling job in Shanghai, yet his passion expressed while ripping off Doris’ window screen shows a deep regret at not being able to enter her domesticated world, only kiss her goodbye from her window. Greenwood’s score is unusually sincere at this moment, and in my second viewing, I found myself emotionally in sync with the score, where as in the first viewing, the score felt like a distancing technique.
When Dodd tells Freddie he is the bravest man he has ever met, in a way, it’s appropriate for the moment. Dodd is giving him a benediction, forgiving him for his actions and accepting him into his family. His methods clearly give him power over Freddie, but at this point, this is an emotional cleansing, and Freddie finally receives his unconditional acceptance.
Immediately after this, we land in New York. We visit a patron’s upper class home, the true owner of the ship. This suggests most of his funding comes from upper class followers, not from the middle and working class. Like any ambitious American entrepreneur, his ultimate goal is to make his work agreeable with the dominant ideology. This is in part his fascination with Freddie; if he can convert him, he can convert anyone. If he can exploit the working class, where belief in faith-based healing is most deeply rooted, The Cause will find success. This is similar to how televangelists worked in the 80s.
We move to a middle class home in Pittsburgh, with its grand front porch and affirmation of the suburban Midwestern family. Their imminent arrest suggests he moved from the NY upper crust defensively, as it had started to turn on The Cause. This constant moving suggests Dodd does not have a home, and is as adrift and classless as Freddie. In this light, his position over Freddie is all the more tenuous and manipulative. This also kicks off his second phase, to win over the masses with a more accessible, Reader’s Digest-friendly second book about laughter, which Freddie inspired. (During processing, after Freddie farts, Dodd says, “It’s good to laugh; sometimes we forget that during processing.” Peggy had previous mentioned that Lancaster is working on his second book because Freddie inspired him.)
Val is one of the most sympathetic characters in the film, especially for Freddie. The way he tells Freddie his father makes it up is in a humored tone, as if he’s talking to a friend. Unlike the rest of the family, he doesn’t dislike Freddie, perhaps having already experienced Freddie’s arc with Dodd to completion. After Dodd reprimands Freddie for his violence in the townhouse and leaves the room, Val and Freddie are left visible through the door frame, and Freddie squeezes Val’s shoulder, as if two sons left behind. Hearing Dodd is a liar from Val has a stronger effect on him than if it came from anyone else; this is reflected in how his violence is largely limited to shoving Val’s chair before the police arrive (obviously an act of restraint from someone of his conditioned rage). While yelling at Dodd in prison, Freddie screams that even his own son doesn’t like him, suggesting Val’s revelation is the beginning of his distrust in his own father/son relationship with Dodd.
In jail, we can see Freddie’s shoulder blade protruding from his back. His shoulders are always slanted forward, which is perhaps why he finds standing akimbo so comfortable. A friend of mine recently told me his yoga instructor mentioned slanted shoulders are a sign of “severe emotional trauma” in one’s life. I have no idea if that’s a widespread belief in yoga circles, but it certainly fits the PTSD theory.
When Freddie is released, Dodd welcomes him back like the prodigal son as his audience claps, creating a respectable narrative for god-fearing suburbia, except they roll on the ground like animals and rip Freddie’s pants. Nothing is allowed to be a perfect mirror of the paradigm. After his return, partly because of his family’s pressure to ostracize Freddie, processing begins in earnest. He has flashbacks to the war during his processing which indicates the processing is hitting an unmovable object. Peggy’s pornographic story appears to be about a father encouraging his son to have sex his mother, which makes Dodd very uncomfortable. “I don’t want to hear this from you,” he pleads. Yet, once Freddie is declared successful through his assertion he can go anywhere from the window (now in the opposite situation of being at Doris’ window, inside looking out), The Cause moves west again, this time to Phoenix for their rebirth as an American institution, not simply a fascination for wealthy widows.
The photo shoots communicate the growing chasm between the two men, as Dodd begins to show his hand in oppressive ways. First, Dodd is dressed like the postwar hero, a cowboy (just missing the lasso) and questions Freddie if he knows how to do his job. Freddie, though his back is to us, is identified as upset. Second, Dodd is at his desk, looking exactly like the overweight upper class businessman at the beginning of the film. There are even two lamps prominently in frame, referencing the ones he pushed against the businessman’s face. While Freddie takes the photo, his head is down and obscured in darkness, while Dodd is bathed in adoring light.
The book reveal is the final straw for Freddie. He hands out fliers in front of the theater, promising cures for trauma and the love everyone needs, which almost cruelly contrasts his experience with The Cause. During the book reveal, Freddie looks down his nose at Dodd. He is unsure. So is Dodd, who can barely muster the energy to get through his speech. Dodd’s imagery, the book cover and the wall banner, is similar to the images in the Rorschach test, suggesting a parallel between Freddie and Dodd’s mental state, though only the latter has the power to repackage his trauma in the likeness of American kitsch.
Freddie beats up the editor, then respectfully puts his hat on the bench, sits down, and cries. He’s no longer boisterously defending Dodd, laughing about people with their smart lip. Despite his connection with Dodd, he no longer admires him.
Dodd is ridiculously pompous during the desert scene. Dressed like Brando in The Wild Bunch, he waves them out of their car, straddling an example of conspicuous consumption, the desert apparently Dodd’s attempt to marry religious aggrandizement with class. While watching Freddie on the bike, Dodd commends, “He’s going fast. Good boy.” I take this to imply Dodd feels his conditioning has been successful, as he is obeying the rules without concern for injury, making Freddie a demonstration of Dodd’s power more than an individual with value. When he doesn’t return, he realizes his experiment has failed. Dodd emulates the showcase reality but cannot harness America’s dragon.
Freddie returns home to Doris’ mom. He wants to know if Doris was sincerely in pain when he never came back. She was. He let her down, but in a way, she didn’t. She actually loved him. This might have helped him more than anything. That her name is Doris Day suggests a perfect integration with American culture, the American dream left slightly ironic by her husband serving in the Navy.
During his nap in the Casper screening, indicating he has nowhere to go and nothing to do with this time, he receives his telephone call. “Dodd” says he’s working on a cure for insanity, “to cure you!" What a heartbreaking comment for Freddie to project. It shows he is not insane, as he is frightened by his own behavior and wishes to be cured. “A Captain never leaves his ship!” says the Friendly Ghost. Next shot we’re hovering over the waters in the wake of a boat, a repeated motif which reminds me of a lonely God hovering over the waters before the seven days of creation. It is always accompanied by a forlorn cue.
Moving to England allows The Cause to escape their troubles temporarily, but also changes their goal. Dodd is again pursuing the upper class, this time youth instead of aged for his institution of indoctrination. Val greets him. I don’t believe Val is brainwashed. Again, when he meets Freddie, he seems emotionally sincere. That Val is back into the fold reinforces the overpowering need to find love and acceptance, a contrast to being a sailor alone on the seas. It’s his turn to be the prodigal son. When Dodd gives his “if you find out how not to serve a master, come back and let the rest of us know, please” speech, I believe this is Dodd speaking without any pretense. He can do so because he has no real need for him anymore. Freddie mentions Dodd told him in his dream that he remembered how they met. Dodd goes back into master role and makes up shit about balloons, though it’s interesting that they shared war responsibilities in this alleged past; when he repeatedly suggests they’ve met somewhere before, he means they both separately fought in the same war, and yet, they understand each other perfectly.
Freddie cries with Dodd during the "Slow Boat to China" serenade because they both understand life as a voyage of loneliness without a meaningful destination. The song links back to Freddie abandoning Doris for the oil rig on multiple levels, as he sings he wishes they could leave their loves on the shore to be together. Through the song, he expresses his wish to create a world where neither of them are the captain, one which will leave them alone, which is Peggy’s constant mantra against the encroachment of reality on her dream world. Because they cannot recreate the world and its damaging history, they either accept the fantasy or part ways.
While having sex with the girl from the bar, he repeats processing scripting in an affectionate way. Her physical “earthiness” recalls the nude party scene, and she directly recalls the bar maid in the "I’ll Go No More A-Roving" sea shanty, except his treatment towards her isn’t misogynistic. He isn’t aggressively fucking her like the sand woman; in fact, she’s on top. He’s relating to her as sincerely as he knows how, attempting to recreate the most intimate moment of his life, drawing on his own experience on how to make a connection, flawed as it is. He laughs with her at himself. That he falls out suggests sex is of equal importance as their companionship. Since Freddie has so many sexual misadventures in this film, it surprised me when I realized this is the first time Freddie has sex in the story, implied or shown. This might be the first adult, mature sexual connection he’s made in his life. The next and final shot creates a contrast from the real to the ideal, with his own image of unconditional love, the sand woman, motionless next to him, offering her breast, though the focus is on Freddie. The soundtrack is playing "Changing Partners", in which the singer changes partners throughout life, waiting until she can dance with her true love. Freddie has taken steps into the external world, where flexibility and integration are necessities, yet at his core, his desire for unconditional acceptance keeps him waiting, which renders him ultimately alone. The internalized world on which The Cause preys seems the point; the master everyone serves is themselves, their own history, their own sense of importance to the world and their narrative, and in this is our inherent isolation.
