Can someone smart explain this film to me?

Really tried to like it, but I didn't get the point.

Try watching it again. Remember not all films have to have a "point". Not saying this one doesn't but try to appreciate it for more then that.

The point? What the fuck, do you think movies need a "point" to be made? Some kind of motive or moral?

The point is you got trolled. Remember Masturbating Commander and the farside of the house?

I can try, famalam, but you've got to ask more specific questions.

What are you having trouble with?

it is about a shady cult being formed through the eyes of a drunk bum who is desesperaly seeking salvation

All movies have a point. They might not necessarily have a lesson but they exist for a reason.

The Master is one of the worst films I have ever watched

>they exist for a reason.
There is no reason in this universe user

You probably don't watch many movies

they should have cut that stupid motorcycle game desu
stupid

There was a point to that though

You probably don't have many IQ points

a stupid point

what was it

Dodd created this cult to scam people. Though I'm not entirely sure if he believed his own stories

He attracts Freddie since Freddie is in outcast, even within his own group of veterans

Dodd starts to connect with Freddie a lot and even feels sort of empowered by him since he sees that Freddie believes most of his shit

Later own though, even Freddie starts to see the ridiculousness of Dodd's exercises; the motorcycle scene Dodd even stops caring about The Cause, hence this scene where he yells at Laura Dern.

Dodds wife is now the one who cares about The Cause more and forces Dodd to choose between her (and The Cause) or Freddie

He chooses her but seems sad about it

The End

Tits or GTFO.

The Master had a point tho

Everyone is controlled by that one 'thing'.

Phoenix is violence then Seymour takes over him.
Then phoenix sees the bs and goes back to drifting as we see seymour being coerced into letting phoenix go to focus on Amy and the cult.
She is his master.

Am I a pleb for not understanding this, I liked it but didn't have a fucking clue what it was really about other than the obvious things.

like the ending, what was that about?

Which part of the ending?

Dodd and Freddie are both plagued by personal demons but in different ways. Freddie is the primal ID to Dodd's calculating Ego. Hence why if they met in a different life they would be worst enemies if they weren't both addicts.

Freddie, as in the very end of the film and what it meant.

He couldn't overcome his demons and ended up a lost soul.

if you don't "get it", then you're not ready. in 10 years, after you have had some life experience, come back and watch it again. most films worth watching work that way user. they require attention from the viewer and life experience to draw from.

i thought it was the complete opposite, don't really remember it but I thought it was him having freed himself from the cult and stopped trying to find easy ways out through the cult or through alcohol

Another aspect of Freddy was his constant "outsider" status (except with Dodd, but really Dodd liked how much he could play Freddy) and inability to meaningfully connect with others. Seemed like the ending hinted that might have changed some with him, as he was playing together with the girl he meets at the end

yeah, I really need to rewatch this.

The film was trying to demonstrate how all of human existence is centered around the Master-slave dynamic. A central tenet of our lives is our search for answers and meaning, the more dim-witted and dependent of us becoming acolytes and followers who get their truth through the words and teachings of others, others who decide to become the source of answers and absolution themselves, becoming demagogues or 'masters'. This is all done to impose an understandable order to the universe that we can cope with, but in the end even those that apply the leadership role to themselves are beholden to other 'masters' in turn. Freddie was an acolyte to Dodd, Dodd was in turn subservient to his wife. But in the end, the master of everyone is the incessant need to create and establish a basis for truth and order.

The Master is good and I got it

Magnolia on the other hand...

Good write-up

To me this movie is about two things: how we deal with the past and who is the master that guides our will.

The opening shot are the waves created by his ship. The past is seen as something left behind, not something from which we build who we are today, just like the trails of a boat. The Cause says something radically opposite to that: you are not only a product of your past, but also of past lives, of billions, trillions of years. They play you as a victim, but they invent a past for you to blame. At the same time, Dodd works better in a boat, leaving a trail and not on dry land. When teased by the scientist, the Master says something like "you go around the bend on a river, but it doesn't disappear, you know that it is there!", except he forgets to mention that curve doesn't really interfere with your course later.

There are tons of boat references.

Freddie enters the Cause's boat to escape from the past (being accused of killing that man). To drift, like he drifted on top of his ship.

When Freddie is first processing and remembers Doris, the last thing he sees before Dodd wakes him is the first sequence of the trail of the ship in the sea, except the camera moves towards the horizon, the past, and you see there are less and less waves as it goes farther from the ship. Until it's nothing.

cont

cont

In the cinema, near the end, the cartoon he is watching says "the captain never leaves his ship!" (who is this captain? Isn't it Freddie, if the ship is his life? but does he know that?). Dodd ask him to come to England (remember: oversea) because of a matter of "urgency", but the urgent thing is that he figured out how the two of them met (in the past). How could that be urgent? But we notice that he is trying to bring Freddie so that Freddie doesn't turn against them if approached by antagonists. The Cause is trying to tie the knots with its past.

When Freddie goes to England, you see the same trail of the ship again.

And while Dodd's hate to write on dry land, Freddie makes a girl in the sand and lies down on the shore.

In the end, Dodd sings a song "I wanna get you/in a slow boat to China/all to myself...alone".

Freddie is pure id. He is often violent and childish, he only plans when he is building a scenario to act impulsively later. He is not trying to control absolutely anything, then again he faces how people react strangely to his impulses. He sleeps when he wants, he farts, he just think of sex and masturbate when he feels like. He is inconsequential, he is naked. People like to say he is "just an animal", but remember that's only how Dodd describes him.

cont

cont

Because Dodd, on the contrary, likes to control, he doesn't like to be questioned. He is ego. He builds himself on excuses, justifications, a weird arrogance and humility at the same time. He buries things. You're not sure if he is merely making things up or if he actually believes in it. To him, it makes no difference. He is thinking about the Cause, thinking about himself and protecting himself

Dodd's wife is from a distance, controlling everything, a superego entity. She masturbates her husband, telling him it's alright to do anything as long as she doesn't know. Compare that to Freddie masturbating on the beach, not giving a fuck, just because he feels like it, in front of the sea, not in front of a mirror like Dodd. What happends is that she is "too nice" to him so she doesn't have to worry that he will betray her, afterall, his guilty would do the job of punishing him, she puts the load on his back. He can't even masturbate himself. She sounds even more serious than Dodd about the Cause and about the belief of some people being ill, like Freddie.

You see that even though Dodd has problems with Freddie, he defends Freddie when his wife tells him to forget about him. Their children are close to the way they think, but only at the surface. They agree to play the couple's fantasy, but behind their back, they don't trust it at all, they know better. Same with Dodd's friend who Freddie beats for speaking crap of the book.

cont

cont

When Freddie and Dodd go to jail, Freddie fights all the way to the end, makes a scandal inside his cell. Whereas Dodd is cool, reproving Freddie for his behaviour and in fact, blaming it on a "billion years old" fear of being caged and boosting himself for noticing that. But he too is caged like Freddie! Is Dodd in control(the master) of the situation because he cooperates? Or isn't he weaker for accepting it so easily or pretending to accept it? Isn't Freddie (perhaps) more honest about the way he faces jail? Not wanting to be there. Dodd is only pissed when Freddie says he makes shit up, he is only mad when someone attack his beliefs. Freddie breaks the toilet, Dodd accepts it and give it a piss.

And who is in control? Who is the master? Who "wants it and gets it"? When releasing his new book, Dodd says it simply that the secret is in "you" and the method is "laughter". What a silly response isn't it? There is a wonderful mixture of something empowering and at the same time completely ridiculous and impotent about it. Is that the answer to everything there is? What does that change? What does it say? You see in Freddie's face a mixture of faith and disbelief. And I think this is another core of the film. What does it change who is the master? Didn't he get what he want in the end? A girl in bed. A girl in the sand. Why would one think of past lives at a moment like that? It's only himself and laughter.

I loved this film to death. Definitely one of my favourites and I couldn't stop thinking and feeling it throughout my day. I hate the idea of trying to fixate "theories", or to impose an interpretation or to push it until it fits. This is how I saw the film in a way that I couldn't help but to see and there is more to it which will never be matched by anything that we can think of it afterwards. I see a lot of people "not getting" the film and I don't think there is something to get, I think there is only what I can say about what I got from it.