How to Greenwash

If you are a large corporation, or even a medium-sized one, and you are in an industry which exploits natural resources, you probably find it very inconvenient that most of the American public says they care about the environment and that they want the government to protect it. This can really interfere with the way you do business: you may have to pay more to transport the resources you have extracted; there might be limits placed on how much you can extract in the first place; there could even be fines you are forced to pay for the by-product of your manufacturing activity. What a pain in the posterior. You didn’t go into business to placate a needy planet. Let the planet eat cake!

 Granted, you do have the option of relocating to another country where democracy is still struggling, especially where democracy of local people resisting multi-national corporations like your own is still struggling. However, you are likely very accustomed to the various perks of your CEO life in the U.S., so the most cost-effective solution is if you can get round the American body politic and then never have to leave home at all!

Listen up for just a few minutes – have your secretary tell whoever it is you’ll call them back -- and soon I can teach you how to be a whiz at Greenwashing too.

There are two major goals you will want to meet and address. Fortunately, there are clear steps to accomplish both.

Goal #1) Greenwashing your company

In order to satisfy the public’s deep suspicion that companies do not care about the environment but merely value profits, you will need to do a lot of work to change your image and brand yourself as a conscientious, responsible, communitarian company that voluntarily curbs its own greed and cleans up its act. You want the public to feel that you are on the same side as them. There are two options that will help you make this shift.

Option A) Hire an expensive public relations firm.

  The highest-end public relations firms have a great deal of experience in manipulating public opinion to conform with the wishes of corporate clients. Hire one of these, and be willing to pay hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. They will then handle everything for you. Before you know it, the public will be willing to vote against their own interests and for yours instead. 

Try to find a PR firm which worked for the tobacco industry for a long time -- they will have had  a great deal of important and instructive experience in the paradigm that so many other industries have successfully followed ever since. Those firms deserve awards for how many decades they managed to paint the tobacco industry as genuinely interested in finding out the truth about nicotine and addiction. This is the kind of magic trick you want someone to do for you too!

Or

Option B) Use your own internal public relations people, but train them well to follow these three steps:

1) Partner with a prominent environmental organization:

a) Look for a well-known, established environmental organization so that you can benefit from the name recognition of an alliance with them. Find a big enough, top-down, hierarchically-structured group so that they have assets they want to protect and a docile membership – look for  organizations with fancy offices, national membership bases, sleek newsletters, and extensive fundraising operations. This will make them much more likely to be willing to work with you than organizations which are more action-oriented. Since the more sedentary organizations do not have much opportunity to actually boast of specific actions and accomplishments, if they can boast to their membership that they have pressured you or transformed you, it will look like a big achievement for them. This is of course a win-win situation for you both. You do realize, I hope, that no actual transformation need happen.

b) Be willing to make some superficial concession if they require it. If your company has been responsible for a massive oil spill, for instance, you will want to show that you are willing to consider some sort of plan that will improve the environmental health of the devastated area. Do not, of course, just blindly concede to their requests. You are not allying with this organization in order to reform your own company, but to use the credibility of the organization to mend your own credibility. It is about image. 

c) Donate money to the organization or to a specific environmental project that your company and they develop together. Sponsor an event which seeks to make everybody feel good about helping the environment but that does not bring up controversial issues or raise too much awareness: cleaning up litter, for instance, or gathering items for recycling. Go for the kind of events that are good harmless fun for the whole family. (Planting trees makes you sound like hippies, though -- and besides, do you want the fake-tree manufacturers to get annoyed?) Make sure to tell stockholders, customers, and the public at large about your generosity and take lots of photos.

d) Treat the partnership as a long-term collaboration. Serve on their board of directors of the environmental organization; it is an inexpensive way to spy on them and shape their attitudes at the same time. Find joint ongoing projects that you can contribute to and thus give you something to boast about yearly. This will give you long-term credibility and be insurance for any further trouble you may get into in the future if your chemicals turn out to be toxic, your products turn out to come from old-growth forests, you realize you’ve killed off an entire species of fish, or some other potential problem.

2) Pay for slick ads which portray your company as environmentalist:

Ads do not have to bear any relation to actual facts, so you can just throw up images of trees, grass, water, children playing, butterflies, dandelion seeds blowing in the breeze, and so forth. Use terms like “clean,” “safe,” “healthy,” “Earth,” and “future,” all of which have positive connotations and can be applied to virtually anything. Make sure you stress your “commitment” to the environment. It is okay, you won’t have to get specific.

3) Counterbalance your perceived negatives:

If you are in a relatively new industry which the public tends to think is artificial and dangerous, like genetic engineering or the manufacturing of synthetic chemicals, make sure you play off the idea that you are making big and heartfelt investments in technology and innovation, and that you really have respect for the wonders of science. Be on the side of progress. Imply that the other side is superstitious and uninformed.

If your business needs to exploit natural resources that have been around for centuries – but which your company is fast using up – make sure you emphasize how much you value traditional things like family, our natural heritage, and common sense.

Goal #2) Pursuing your own agenda

It would not be much of a benefit for your company if collaborating with a green organization prevented you from continuing to pillage or pollute, so of course you also need the PR firm or your own PR professionals to guide you in a plan to prevent regulations from limiting your profit margin. These are easy principles to execute:

1) Delay, delay, delay

You may not be able to hold off regulations forever, but you can hold them off long enough to continue to grab what you can get in the meantime. You just need to keep telling the public that more information is needed before the health and safety of your product or activity can be determined. Scientific studies can take years to finally finish, but in the meantime, Wall Street stock trading takes place daily. Profits accrue!

2) Pretend that you care about the democratic exchange of ideas

Pass your company off as a proud part of that whole American democratic tradition thingy. Emphasize words in your public pronouncements like “dialogue,” “debate,” “openness,” and the weighing of all the information. (If you add the word “robust” to those nouns, that’s always helpful.) Promise to take action as soon as all the facts have been tabulated, just do not give a firm deadline by which anyone can expect said facts to arrive or to actually be conclusive. Take a calm and dispassionate tone!!!!!!

3) Engage in name-calling

Though you might think it would back-fire, somehow it never does. Make sure that you target your critics as “alarmist,” “nay-sayers,” “doom and gloom,” “anti-capitalists,” “kooks,” “emotional,” etc. Dismiss the science that criticizes your company as “junk science” and elevate science which redeems you as “sound science” -- no media outlet will ever mention which studies are funded by you, so this is a safe strategy.

4) Paint your side as the compromise position

Part of your name-calling approach should be to portray your opponents as extremists who have unrealistic demands and little interest in practical solutions. Contrast this with how you and your industry just want to pursue “wise use:” techniques and methods which still allow humans to make use of the environment, within reason. Do not allow the environmentalists’ arguments for “sustainability” to sound like the same position you are taking. Do not, of course, sign up for any true limits on exploitation or pollution of natural resources. 

You’re all set, as will be the future of the planet! If you follow these recommendations, you will be able to meet both the important aim of greenwashing your company so you can benefit from the public trust, and the pivotal goal of pursuing your own corporate agenda so you can keep doing whatever you were doing that the public objected to in the first place. 

In other words, you will be able to go on making use of the Earth’s bounty forever, or for as long as that bounty lasts. Even if that may not be for very long.

12 Years a Slave and the Oscars

This article was originally published on OpEdNews on January 12, 2014.

 I normally hate to make Oscar predictions. It usually depresses me. By the time the predictions start proliferating, it’s a cold matter of analysis of the awards already given out by the guilds, BAFTA, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and (to a certain extent) the critics’ associations, like predicting presidential nominees by counting poll numbers and delegates before the conventions. You wouldn’t even need to have seen the movies first, because it tends to be a simple numbers game. I don’t much like thinking along those lines; I’d rather keep my mind on what should win.
 

This year is different. I actually think that, rather miraculously, 12 Years a Slave is going to win the Oscar for Best Picture. This may be the one time in Oscar history when the film which so unquestionably deserves to win actually does win.

Moreover, the selection of 12 Years a Slave brings a great many other precedents with it. It is the most uncompromising of the movies likely to be on the list of Best Picture nominees. It is not comfort food. It is not the kind of film which requires nothing of the audience, or reassures them about their own complacencies. Although the performances are amazing, they can’t be separated from the crystal-clear relevance of the film — unlike for instance, the striking, masterful, 8-category nominee There Will Be Blood (2007), when everyone talked about Daniel Day-Lewis’ fearless performance but overlooked the damning psychological portrait of an American oil baron. The directing, acting, screenplay, cinematography, editing, and music of 12 Years a Slave are all astonishing, but none of them let the viewer forget that this is a true story — an adaptation of a first-person slave narrative published in 1853 — and that it is a history churning with urgency about politics, race, and justice in America.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that director Steve McQueen would be the first black director to helm a film that receives the Oscar for Best Picture.

I won’t go into whether he will automatically win the Oscar for Best Director too, since we know very well from last year that the two categories are not necessarily in lockstep, but he should. He would be the first black director to do that as well: John Singleton and Lee Daniels are the only two to ever even be nominated in that category. (It’s hard to believe, but Spike Lee has never been nominated for an Oscar for Best Director — only for Screenplay and Documentary — though he did get a well-deserved Golden Globe directing nom for Do the Right Thing.) No black director has won the Golden Globe for film directing before either. If McQueen wins the top Directors Guild prize leading up to the Oscars, he would also be the first black director to achieve that honor.

It’s certainly a year with an abundance of talented, thoughtful, and fiercely independent directors. (Alfonso Cuarón’s technical skill, graceful style, and boldness of vision in his gorgeous Gravity are especially impressive. Even more notable is the degree to which he turned a potentially “Hollywood-ized’ sci-fi actioner into a compelling meditation on space, our dependence on Mother Earth, and the insignificance and significance of a human life.) I feel rather sorry for Steve McQueen’s competitors, in fact, simply because they might have had better chances another year.

The director, who is about as far removed in attitude and appearance from the cocksure 1960′s movie star Steve McQueen, has actually only made 3 feature films. (Although he has directed an incredible number of shorts.) Yet this British filmmaker’s first feature clearly showed him to be an extraordinary artist, idiosyncratic and visionary. Hunger (2008), a biographical drama like no other, was jaw-dropping. He has simply continued to get better with each feature, single-mindedly carving out his own path with utterly unique projects on rock-serious subjects that few would touch. Hunger is about the 1980′s IRA prisoners’ hunger strike led by Bobby Sands: McQueen makes the concept completely visceral by boldly showing us what it looks like for a person to starve to death. His second film, Shame, mercilessly examines sex addiction, incest, and psychic pain with a minimum of dialogue and a shortage of easy answers.

McQueen’s latest, 12 Years a Slave, is a searing period drama adapted by John Ridley from Solomon Northrup’s memoir. It’s a story that, as McQueen himself has said, was crying out to be made into a film. Northrup was a free, educated, black father and husband; a prominent member of an upstate New York community; an engineer and respected violinist. Then he was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the south.

By focusing on a protagonist who has grown up free, the film is able to expose slavery anew: we can feel the horrors of it more vividly and acutely because the victim is so confident, so used to self-determination. He goes through enormous suffering, his faith and hope are destroyed, and he finds himself unable to philosophically reconcile the horrendous crime against him — yet in this way he’s a kind of witness for all slaves. Though Northrup’s kidnapping is part of an illicit commerce between the states (the process of abolition in the Northern states gave slave owners ample time to divest from their slave holdings, thereby leading many to just sell their slaves to the south), the 12 million Africans who were kidnapped and brought to the Americas before Northrup’s story even began were themselves ripped from their homes, loved ones, and sense of their own humanity in very much the same way.

Actor Chiwetel Ejiofor’s face, no matter how devastated, always reveals the free man inside. And McQueen makes clear the inner dignity of those born into slavery as well, in a variety of scenes with black supporting players — the fact that some are used to this mistreatment certainly doesn’t make it any easier on them than it is on him.

Black men on the boat traveling south try their best to overcome their terrible situation, but the odds are against them. The price of rebellion is death. Another angle is presented by Alfre Woodard, in a cameo as a privileged apple of a white man’s eye; though she plays house rather like a society matron, she bears no illusions about her status or the meaning of the slavery project as a whole — unlike the cartoonish Candyland toadies which Quentin Tarantino had so little sympathy for in Django Unchained.

It is Lupita Nyong’o, however, in a truthful and heartfelt performance as the charming, spirited, much-tormented slave Patsey, who deeply enriches the moral significance and complexity of the world Northrup encounters — and whose continued captivity when Northrup is finally freed helps ensure that we don’t regard it as an unalloyed happy ending. McQueen doesn’t let the audience off the hook.

The movie lays bare in chilling detail a great many of the mechanics of slavery, and even familiar tropes like the masters’ rapes, the wives’ jealousy, and the backbreaking toil are brought home in ways that seem fresh. McQueen’s special ability to invoke the audience’s empathy in Hunger and Shame are even stronger here, where Ejiofor’s raw emotion and spiritual pain lend a depth to his suffering that is almost Shakespearean.

Indeed, the acting is tremendous with the exception of Brad Pitt, and the visiting Canadian he plays too close to the vest (though Pitt should be commended for his vision in producing the film — getting it made in the first place.) Paul Giamatti is first-rate as the slave trader who slaps and shoves his “merchandise’ around and makes domination his business. Paul Dano is quite brave as an overseer who seethes with resentment over Northrup’s intelligence — Dano’s willingness to dig into the ugliness of such a mentality is profound . Sarah Paulson is intense as a brooding, tightly-coiled, wronged wife, full of perhaps the most virulent race-hatred in the movie. And Michael Fassbender (in his third collaboration with McQueen) is wonderful — as he always is — in a colorful, eccentric role as a depressed, alcoholic, hands-on master; his villainy is also Shakespearean, by turns red-hot and soft-spoken, powerful and needy. (In the interests of full disclosure, I must mention that his character’s last name is Epps. Since this is based on a memoir and that might be the real slave master’s name, I pray that there’s no relation.)

There’s such a subtle, wide-ranging understanding of racism in the film, it really is provocative in the way it challenges viewers on issues of personal accountability for social wrongs. The versatile Benedict Cumberbatch is Ford, Northrup’s first master after the kidnapping. Ford is an intelligent and feeling man who admires the special musical and engineering skills of his slave — but he still gives him a violin instead of freedom. Ford’s complicity in the injustice against Northrup is one of the finer points made by the film; Ford sees how much suffering the slave market creates, but he makes only the merest peep and then drops his complaint. (The agony caused by separating parents from their children is an extended topic of the film.) Ford is also impressed, and takes advantage of for the benefits to his business, Northrup’s exceptional levels of education. But when Northrup tries to tell him that he’s a free man, Ford exclaims “I cannot hear that!”



The question of “what did they know and when did they know it?” is a strong ethical refrain of the movie — since everyone that Northrup meets, like the cast of characters in a Dickens novel, ends up skewing either cruel or kind, trustworthy or treacherous. 12 Years a Slave answers that question, implicitly as: they all knew, everything, and they knew it early. They knew that slaves weren’t really happy, that slavery was earth-shatteringly unjust, that their workers were intelligent and soulful fellow humans rather than property (Fassbender keeps repeating the word “property” as if needing to convince himself). Numerous instances speak to this knowing: characters can quite plainly see Northrup was born free, yet they go ahead and deprive him of his human rights; Patsy’s master believes he has a special regard for her, but treats her brutally; a distraught enslaved mother is told she will soon get over the separation from her children, but when she doesn’t, her grief — and the powerful evidence it thrusts on the white folk that she is, actually, just like them — makes her expendable.

Some long-standing contradictions of slavery are enumerated in the film: if slaves were naturally subservient, why would their spirits need to be broken; if blacks were so intellectually inferior, why would literacy among slaves be such a threat; if all God’s children were equal, how could Christianity be applied so differently to whites and blacks; and so on. (Fassbender even formally preaches scripture to his slaves, explaining to them that he is the “Lord” referred to in the text.)
We are also frequently reminded that this whole enterprise was very much a business. This story reveals a little-known activity within the U.S. slave trade that seems particularly striking in its outrageousness: kidnapping free black northerners and selling them into slavery down south. The kidnappers are so perniciously, smoothly evil — they win Northrup’s confidence by complimenting him, deceiving him into believing that they respect his education and sophistication — that the shamelessness of the way they make their profit is even more horrifying. They know, more than anyone else in the entire film, what they are putting Northrup and others through.

Most of the film is very naturalistic, but an early visual uses computer-generated imagery to make an ironic social comment. After Northrup has been drugged and kidnapped, he is held in a cell and beaten. When finally left alone, he cries out desperately for help. McQueen carries us outside to the rooftops of the 19 ^th century Washington, D.C. skyline. At the very top of the skyline is the Capitol building. Though a potent symbol of democracy, Northrup receives no protection from it.

The movie poster shows Northrup running, but this is not a movie about a fugitive slave — he doesn’t get that chance. He’s always stuck on a plantation, and the movie reveals how fully white society conspired to keep slaves stuck there. Even the abolitionists or friendly whites in the film seem to be scared of that powerful system. (David Blight, a Yale expert on the history of slavery, describes that system as “a police state.”) The poster’s image actually comes from a revealing moment in the film when Northrup is sent on an errand alone, and it occurs to him that now he might escape. He’s wrong, however; he soon comes upon some white men hanging blacks from trees, and he quickly realizes that not only is he powerless to help his brethren, but without the note from his mistress, his own life would have been of no worth.

Yet a couple of scenes later, McQueen teases us again over our Hollywood-reared naïveté . He cuts to Northrup running through the woods once more. We’ve just seen how deadly it would be for him to run away, how impenetrable the barriers are. Yet we still hope that he’s broken free; we’ve been spoon-fed so many popcorn movies of heroes triumphing over gigantic obstacles. Though of course Northrup is resilient and courageous, and that’s how he survived, he’s only a human being. He happens to be running simply to reach the place he has been sent to faster; to summon Patsey back to their master.

That one moment encapsulates how eloquently McQueen reminds us of how much we have forgotten — how much we have averted our gaze from so as to avoid the pain of remembering that shameful legacy. 12 Years a Slave deserves to win the Oscar for Best Picture not just because of its artistic excellence or the ground-breaking precedents it will set, but also because it preserves for posterity a crucially significant part of world history. It’s a history we ignore at our own peril.

Awards Update: 
12 Years a Slave is now the winner of the Golden Globe Award for Best Picture — Drama. (It was also nominated at the Golden Globes for three of its performances and for Directing, Screenplay, and Original Score – tying with American Hustle for the most Golden Globe nominations this year at 7 apiece.)

12 Years a Slave has already won Best Film trophies from the American Film Institute and from numerous local critics associations around the country.

It also has 13 Critics Choice Awards nominations, 10 BAFTA nominations, 10 Satellite Awards nominations, 9 London Critics Circle nominations, and 7 Independent Spirit Award nominations.
Director Steve McQueen’s first two films won numerous international awards as well, including the Venice Film Festival’s FIPRESCI prize.  

Blackfish: Putting the 'Killer' Back in 'Killer Whale'

by Jennifer Epps

Originally posted on Political Film Blog on August 22, 2013.

 

The non-fiction feature Blackfish currently in theaters is in many ways a sterling example of summer counter-programming: a success at the Sundance Film Festival this past winter, it now provides a quiet voice of seriousness, an exposé on a serious subject, amidst the usual superheroes and monsters at the multiplex in the hot weather months. It begins, however, rather like a famous summer monster movie, with the mystery of a young woman’s gruesome, watery death, and like that blockbuster, proceeds to pile on clues of just how she died and how many others like her there might actually be. The template I’m referring to is the 1975 thriller Jaws, which together with Star Wars, launched the gargantuan juggernaut of costly, loud, franchise-heavy action pix which dominate the out-of-school season -- so there is a poetic irony in a documentary cousin emerging from the depths to challenge that paradigm. The irony pales in comparison to the tragedy, however;  the genesis  for the making of Blackfish was an actual death, that of 20-something Dawn Brancheau, an accomplished swimmer and trainer at SeaWorld Orlando, who was mauled and dismembered in 2010.

The culprit in Blackfish is not a wild rogue shark but a tame orca or ‘killer whale’, a large male named Tilikum who Dawn knew very well. While much of the file footage in the documentary shows positive, intimate interactions between humans and these giant marine mammals, there is still a very ominous slow build of suspense and horror. Some of the segments feel (unintentionally, perhaps) like the July 4th beach scene in Spielberg’s movie -- a sense of impending doom arises as documentarian Gabriela Cowperthwaite scrutinizes, in forensic detail, old footage of trainers’ key interactions with killer whales who’d been involved in violent incidents. We soon realize that it is not at all unusual for orcas to attack marine park staff, even with highly athletic trainers who follow protocol to the letter and who, in addition, adore the animals they train.

Ultimately, Blackfish is about more than just one kind of monster. Like the resort-town business leaders in Jaws, there are irresponsible figures in Blackfish ignoring all the evidence of a serious problem  – and prioritizing profit over life itself. Only in this case, they’re not fictitious, but real, and not just a few bad apples, but an entire corporate structure with an institutionalized pattern of lying to their employees and to the public. The documentary shows that SeaWorld’s public statements after the death or injury of its trainers tended to blame the trainers themselves, while maintaining a culture of internal secrecy. For example, a former trainer complains that when she was hired, SeaWorld already knew there had been dozens of incidents of whales attacking trainers, yet this was not disclosed to her. Indeed, it would seem that if SeaWorld really believed their arguments of ‘trainer error’, then they’d go out of their way to show their staff the footage leading up to the ‘accidents’ -- and to painstakingly review exactly what fatal errors their staff ought to take care to prevent. They did the opposite.

Much like the Robert Greenwald documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, this documentary accumulates its accusations of carelessness, corner-cutting, and duplicity on the part of a big corporation until the evidence seems overwhelming. Cowperthwaite builds the case incrementally, conservatively -- she consults marine mammal experts as well as a large number of former trainers, but stays away from potentially incendiary advocates like animal rights leaders. She interviews one apologist  for  SeaWorld as well. And in publicity for the film, she maintains that she tried very hard to obtain interviews with spokespeople from the company -- however, they weren’t willing to participate in the documentary. They waited instead until it was about to open, then sent a letter to film critics calling the documentary dishonest, misleading, and scientifically inaccurate.

It is clear that SeaWorld was not doing its employees any favors sending them into the water with its orcas, but the movie also examines the effects, on the killer whales themselves, of captivity and of training to perform what are essentially circus tricks. The film does not want to make us fear killer whales as a species, the way Jaws made us afraid of sharks, and it points out that there are no reported incidents of orcas attacking humans in the wild. It is more about how they got to be this way, how their misery grew so intense that they felt the need to be violent.

Though other orcas are discussed, Blackfish focuses in particular on Tilikum’s story, as the most complete and the most horrific. Cowperthwaite has been able to unearth a fairly rich biography about Tilikum: from his childhood abduction on the ocean, through his apparent interest in learning and his joy at interacting with people, to his series of fatal assaults on humans. Blackfish becomes a study in the creation of orca psychopathology.

The grief orca families feel when ripped apart, the sensory deprivation the naturally far-ranging animals endure when shut up at night, and many other stressors are eloquently expressed. Experts weigh in on orcas’ advanced intelligence, complex social needs, and how different their normal behavior is in the wild from that seen in a tank; trainer testimony is provided attesting that in these marine parks the animals have been deprived of food or collectively punished if just one among them got a trick wrong; and visual evidence is supplied that whale-on-whale violence, a rare occurrence in the wild, is commonplace when these mammoth beasts are confined together in close quarters.  (One element of captivity that is overlooked, however, is how sonar bouncing back from the tank walls is a form of aural torture.)

Very intriguing scientific information is interwoven into the narrative. The discovery that orcas have an extra part of the brain that we don’t, a part that processes emotion, is fascinating. So is the description of killer whale cultures in the wild and how distinct they are from each other, even down to having completely different languages. Throwing animals from disparate families together, as is the norm in marine parks, is likened to throwing people from different nations together without interpreters. (You could also add that it’s like throwing them together in jail.) 

Part of the documentary re-enacts  SeaWorld’s hearings at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) over violations of safety law. A federal judge rejected SeaWorld’s position that it should be exempt from these laws; he ruled that a barrier must separate the trainers from the killer whales at all times for the workers’ protection.

This would, however, put an end to a major component of SeaWorld’s activities and the entertainment that they’ve been marketing for years -- so they’ve fought strenuously against the ruling. If the ban holds despite SeaWorld’s attempts to circumvent it, perhaps fewer trainers will be injured. That is hugely important.
Unfortunately, it won’t mean that life for the many orcas SeaWorld owns around the world will improve. The fact that trainers have been killed and injured is just the warning signal that something is very wrong – they are, if you will, the canaries in the gold mine. Blackfish never forgets that.

One particularly striking revelation of the film is how SeaWorld spreads blatant disinformation about the animals it houses -- despite the company’s pretences at fulfilling an educational function.  In order to make what they are doing look less terrible, SeaWorld lies to its staff about orca biology and sends them out in turn to lie to the public. This pertains to the most basic facts about orcas’ life expectancy (SeaWorld won’t admit that it’s less than half the length in captivity than it is in the wild) and about persistent signs of ill-health (because drooping dorsal fins on the animals’ backs are so common at the marine parks, the corporation promulgates the idea that it’s normal for dorsals to droop in the wild -- though others interviewed in the film state categorically this is untrue.)

In short, Blackfish depicts how SeaWorld betrays orca whales by kidnapping them, holding them captive, and mistreating them in the name of entertainment; how they betray their staff by endangering and misleading them, while abjuring accountability; and how they even betray the public, systematically deceiving them about the animals for whom they are supposed to be ambassadors.

The young swimming champs the corporation hires are seen in Blackfish starting out full of energy and enthusiasm, genuinely excited to be working at what they believe to be a fun and noble job where they will get to bond with special creatures. The trainers Cowperthwaite interviewed believed what SeaWorld told them in the early days, believed that killer whales actually enjoyed being in the tanks and performing, believed that this work elevated the stature of the species in the public eye. Many of these trainers now sound as if they are heartbroken -- and as if they came to that opinion in part by watching the orcas’ own broken hearts.

One of the saddest takeaways from a documentary full of lingering sadnesses is how SeaWorld exploits and abuses the positive feelings that many people have towards these impressive, mysterious leviathans. When I saw the film, a toddler sitting next to me had come to see it with his family and ecologist older sister. The little boy was obviously a fan of killer whales, clutching a stuffed orca toy in his arms the whole movie. His mother told me they had just been to SeaWorld two weeks before.  Obviously, it was hard for this small child to process all that cognitive dissonance. What he was a powerful symbol for, however, was another of SeaWorld’s offenses: that they take the fascination, awe and love for animals which children entrust them with and turn it all into dross.

Rebel, Rebel: "The Company You Keep" and "The East"

by Jennifer Epps

THE EAST

In The East, a film showcased at the Sundance Festival, co-writer and up-and-coming star Brit Marling plays Sarah, a young private-sector spy keen to do well for her agency. She has to keep her assignments so secret she tells her nearest and dearest she’s off to Dubai when really she’s just a drive away in the deep woods, infiltrating a troublesome band of youthful anti-corporate eco-terrorists. She lives with them, learns their ways, and becomes assimilated in order to uncover their schemes to disrupt big business – a service much coveted by those same businesses. But the experience is so intense, this monkey-wrench gang gradually starts to change her. Whenever the unit temporarily disbands and she heads back to her normal city life, she feels like she has come back from a foreign country, only now it’s her home that feels foreign.

The East is named after the fictitious anarchist collective Sarah spies on -- a mysterious, much-hyped group of rebels out to punish mega-corps which heartlessly destroy the planet or poison masses of human beings. The movie is many things – spy caper, romance, psychological drama, crime thriller, coming-of-age story, animal-friendly environmentalist lament – but it is perhaps predominantly a journey-to-another-world. Like Alice or Dorothy, once covert agent Sarah slips into the woods, she finds herself in an alien, Looking-Glass world. There are no surreal talking animals in this universe, but with the very first initiation rite Sarah can see she’s “not in Kansas anymore” – and that she’s out of her element. Tough as nails and primed for a fight, Sarah is astonished to discover that battle isn’t really the point here among all the soul-baring and trust exercises.

Of course, Sarah is a stand-in for the audience, so Marling and writing partner Zal Batmanglij (the film’s director) peel away the outer layers of the forest-dwelling radicals incrementally, letting us first see them the way she would. The most immediately alienating is Benji (an ardent Alexander Skarsgård), who comes off at first as a Charles Manson-like cult leader. His hair is archaically, kiddingly, long, and he appears to hold a privileged status in the commune-like encampment from which he delights in breaking newcomers’ spirits. Then there’s diminutive Izzy (Ellen Page), so solemn and ideologically fierce she seems like the most potentially dangerous. And though the group turns to Doc (Toby Kebbell) for medical help, his manner and his simple home remedies are so unorthodox his ministrations seem likely to do more harm than good. Yet before too long Benji’s wild tresses have been shorn, Izzy has revealed her soft side, Doc’s qualifications have been affirmed, and we, along with Sarah, have gained insights into this band’s traumas, regrets, and vision.

Though Batmanglij and Marling disapprove of these activists’ tactical choices when they injure others, we can see, eventually, how much respect they have for the young outliers’ heartfelt motivations, and for their willingness to explore an alternate form of living. Rather than just showing the surface trappings of counterculture, The East tries to get inside all this experimental living and find out what it’s really all about. (Marling and Batmanglij were inspired to write the film because they spent a few months living with squatting freegans.) And often the script is quite deft in the economical way it scores its points. The first dinner at the East’s remote hideout is a clever, visual way to show the group’s internal philosophy of interdependence. Then, at a climactic juncture, Sarah finds herself impulsively eating from a trashcan to illustrate the principles of freeganism – it’s a perfect merger of story, theme, character revelation, and eloquent speech-writing. It’s also a moment of humor/suspense that works beautifully.

Kudos are definitely due to Batmanglij and Marling for navigating a minefield with this kind of story: they could have easily fallen into preachiness either for or against their characters. Instead, Benji’s lynchpin character is variegated enough for Sarah and the audience to change our opinion of him in each of the film’s three acts. Likewise Sarah’s boss at the agency, the wonderful Patricia Clarkson, is never a cartoon but moves deliciously from mentor to formidable opponent.

The East doesn’t make us choose between collectivism and the power of one – it honors both. Its slight of build yet tightly-coiled heroine – thanks to a visceral performance by the ferociously intelligent Marling -- is a mesmerizing protagonist. She’s no latex-squeezed, ultra-competent action-heroine, but is instead serious and resourceful, sensitive and relatable, and she pays a high cost for her achievements. But after learning about harmony, equality, and unity from the rebels, she comes out the other side as an exemplar of the idea that one person can make a difference. It is thanks to her dynamic character that the film is able to pull off its balancing act, conveying the notion that: in questions of morality, even when the goals are harmony, equality, and unity, perhaps one’s own conscience is the only reliable arbiter.

Along the way, Marling and Batmanglij expose something that gets very scant attention – corporate spying on citizen activists – and at a time when Edward Snowden has made people more conscious of the extent to which our communications are being captured as a matter of course, this film couldn’t be more timely. Without lecturing (except briefly, in the sequence where Izzy confronts her CEO dad), The East manages to convey searing criticism of current business as usual in the U.S. of A. It is one of the most eloquent and vital movies indicting late capitalism you could hope to see, underpinning its twisty, surprising climax with the burning philosophical problem: how can we save the world?

The film provides no easy answers but is on the side of the angels -- it promotes, without spelling it out too much, mutual respect, co-operation, open-mindedness, and educating the public. It is clear that Batmanglij and Marling believe in film as a force for social change. But they also realize that to be effective they must be disciplined in providing us with compelling characters, a gripping conflict, and a tight story structure. They deliver all that in spades. The East lays down the gauntlet for other fiction filmmakers to retain a strong point-of-view on hot political topics and make an exciting entertainment to boot.

THE COMPANY YOU KEEP

Robert Redford’s Sundance Festival gave Batmanglij and Marling’s film its premiere, and Redford even cast Marling in a pivotal supporting role in his own film The Company You Keep -- clearly he wasn’t concerned about the similarities between the two indies, though they were released within weeks of each other this spring. There certainly are similarities, though. The East and The Company You Keep are both thought-provoking political thrillers about a small group of domestic left-wing militants who are designated as terrorists by authorities. Both show the radicals’ driving forces to be reactions against mass-scale atrocities perpetrated by those in power. And both films clearly condemn violence as a tool of political resistance.

Still, Redford’s film has its own precedents. It seems to make sense to view The Company You Keep as the third film in a Redford trilogy about the ‘War on Terror’. I haven’t heard him describe any such trilogy, but Redford’s last three films seem very much concerned with the post 9/11 era and the direction the country has taken. The first, Lions for Lambs (2007), was a politically laudable but artistically dull and didactic Bush-era anti-war screed. The second, the superb and moving drama The Conspirator (2010), was set in the maelstrom right after Lincoln’s assassination yet was indisputably modern in its portrait of the oppressiveness of railroading military tribunals like those Bush had brought into the fore as part of the ‘War on Terror.’ Most of the referents in Redford’s third film of the trilogy, The Company You Keep, are to the 1960’s and 1970’s, but the film is set in modern times, and its subject matter is terrorism, unjust war, and dissent. No doubt it wasn’t just a historical exercise.

The Company You Keep, like Redford’s prior two films, is the story of an older man, an educated liberal, who mentors an antagonistic or disengaged young upstart. In Lions for Lambs it was Redford as a university prof teaching apathetic student Andrew Garfield to care more about what his government is up to; in The Conspirator it was Tom Wilkinson handing over a complex defense case to Civil War veteran James McAvoy. Here it is Redford once again, as an aging attorney who is an upstanding citizen working for the public good. He scolds cocky rookie reporter Ben (Shia LaBeouf) – even while fleeing him half-way across the country. The chase begins because LaBeouf’s ambitious stringer discovers that Redford’s small-town lawyer is a big-time outlaw, an ex-member of a militant 1960’s group, and a fugitive from the FBI because of his secret terrorist past. 

The mentoring dynamic throughout Redford’s trilogy may simply be a natural outcome of Redford being in his 70’s and being highly successful, sought-after, and opinionated. Yet, if there’s one overriding aspect of Company which prevents it from being truly politically effective, it might be the film’s underlying ageism – an elevation of those politicos over 60 and a patronizing slant on the uninformed under-40s. The movie evinces an implicit belief that Hippies were much more aware and engaged than Tweeters are. The politicized people in Company are all above a certain age (played by Redford, Nick Nolte, Sam Elliott, Julie Christie, Susan Sarandon, Richard Jenkins, and Brendan Gleeson). By contrast, none of the young adults in the film (LaBoeuf, Marling, Anna Kendrick, and Terrence Howard, who plays an FBI agent) are politically opinionated – except, perhaps, about terrorism. The ex-hippies express passionate views in the film on current events, but the young people are more concerned with their careers, schooling, and personal lives. It’s weird that the retirement-age radicals who flee to the deep woods in Company somehow have no idea that anyone like the young rebels of The East could be hiding out too; in Company’s world, activism seems to have halted in the mid 1970s.

This isn’t to say the youngsters don’t have winning personalities. LaBoeuf’s cheeky, devious, irreverent reporter uses some of the sly techniques Redford himself used, alongside Dustin Hoffman, in All the President’s Men. He is also the Tommy Lee Jones character to Redford’s Harrison Ford, for just as in The Fugitive we find ourselves pulled in both directions, unsure whether to root for pursuer or pursued. But ultimately, the view of the press evinced by Company is that it is both shallow and overzealous: Ben’s doggedness in pursuing the ex-Weatherman is cast in a similar vein as Sally Field’s destructive investigative reporting in Absence of Malice.

Unlike the fictitious anti-corporate group living on the fringes in The East, the organization under scrutiny in Company is a real domestic terrorist organization: the infamous albeit small revolutionary group which dubbed themselves the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), formed in 1969 as a splinter of the Students for a Democratic Society. Discouraged by the failure of mass protest to end either the war in Vietnam or virulent racism at home, the Weather Underground chose to make bombs and try to overthrow the U.S. government. They were of course eschewed and condemned by the large protest movements of the time, but became more infamous.

Though the kernel of Company is based on actual history, the names of the former Weather members are fictional and the characters composites. Dramatic license is taken to fashion a mystery about decisions of the past. It is not a literal evaluation of the Weathermen, it doesn’t care about the exact details of their tactics, whether there was any discipline to their goals of property destruction (warnings were generally issued so buildings could be evacuated) or how exactly they crossed the line into violence against living beings. (There is a documentary about the Weathermen to cover that, however – Ben is even shown watching it as research in this movie.) The facts, which Company doesn’t dwell over, are that three members of the WUO died while bomb-building, and three security officers were killed during a Brinks truck robbery staged by a couple of ex- WUO members -- who got sentenced to life, and 22 years, in prison. But Company is quite vague about the internal workings of WUO, or what led to the deaths of innocent people, because its characters are composites and because it doesn’t recreate the events of the fateful day – it is enough for the moral probing of the movie simply to establish that people died. There is a central mystery, but it manages to lie beyond the details of the long-ago crime; the film is not much interested in forensics, and focused instead on the human heart.

Screenwriter Lem Dobbs has adapted Neil Gordon’s novel The Company You Keep for this film. It is a book first published in 2003, long before the McCain-Palin campaign brought the Weather Underground back into the spotlight with charges that co-founder Bill Ayers knew Obama in Chicago. But the novel did emerge as Bush was laying the groundwork to make the world America’s battlefield. And like The East, this story asks the question of whether or not the ends justify the means, of whether criminally violent resistance against powerful criminals is warranted when the system itself is so violent to so many. Not too surprisingly, the answer in both films is no.

Author Gordon seems especially pissed off at the WUO: “I don’t think highly of the positions the Weather Underground took and I don’t believe that political violence was an effective or appropriate tool”, he told an interviewer. And he blames the WUO for an awful lot: “when Weather broke up SDS, which they did violently, undemocratically, and with huge cruelty, they destroyed what could have been an enormous, powerful progressive movement in this country…The American left never recovered.”

*

The trouble with having two back-to-back films which debate a choice between violent and non-violent resistance is that, surely, non-violence won that debate for most people long ago. It is not a major question for the millions of people who oppose corporate and imperialist agendas. Given that it sure isn’t every day that features about left-wing dissent hit the big screen, when two in the same season depict committed grassroots activism as extremist, violent militancy, there is definitely the chance of creating the wrong impression about those movements. And right-wing blowhards would love to milk that wrong impression and spread it to PETA, Greenpeace, peace marchers, and many others who try to fight the systems of cruelty and oppression the right would like to protect.

Of course, that is not what any of these filmmakers would want. Neil Gordon argues: “There is a great pathos to the history of the American left. Its death is the saddest story of our country…[W]hen we look at it from the vantage of today, where America, for all its power, has near–pariah status throughout the world, it can only make us long for the lost ideals of our country.” Both films want to take a complex view, to mourn the wasted opportunities for change when people with noble motives abandon core principles. Both of them keep alive the idea that an unjust system and the need for resistance still remain.

The flaw with the approach of nostalgia and bitter regret in Company is that though the characters may find clarity, they don’t offer much of a solution to the audience  – beyond an assertion that parents should take care of their children. (Despite his age, Redford’s character is often shown, in rather cloying scenes, as a dutiful father to a prepubescent daughter, and his commitment is a pillar of the film.) It’s true that nothing requires art to provide solutions, and often asking questions or exposing problems is enough. But we are dealing with the future of the planet and human civilization, and it would be nice to have something to go on. I get that the theme of Company is the importance of taking personal responsibility, and that this could very well be interpreted as a responsibility to become more active and engaged. But the metaphor of progeny-over-politics could also make any conservative family-values champion proud – they might not admit it, but that message is right up their alley. It is also, whether intentionally or not, a kind of argument in favor of disengagement.

The East takes a different approach from The Company You Keep in many ways. The characters feel rawer and more immediate. It’s less reserved, and it has a more youthful energy. And it has more relevance in the issues it presents: it’s about the state of the union right now, and the examples of corporate lawlessness targeted by the East’s members are loosely based on true recent instances. But perhaps the most important difference of all is that The East suggests at the very end – fleetingly and delicately – a way out of this mess of corporate mayhem and crimes against humanity. And that, ultimately, is a discussion well worth having.

The Unacknowledged "Master": Paul Thomas Anderson, & a film that's not about Scientology

Originally published on Daily Kos on February 9, 2013.

Movie still from The Master

Paul Thomas Anderson is my favorite film director who isn’t Scorsese. And even then, it’s getting very close. When I ambled out into the light after the L.A. native’s sixth feature, the psychological period epic The Master, I felt like I had just seen one of the greatest American films in a couple of decades. If you haven’t heard much about it, however, that’s because it isn’t nominated for any Oscars in the Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, or Best Score categories – in all of which cases it was robbed, in my humble opinion. It did still, nonetheless, receive 3 Oscar nominations for the work of each of its principal actors (Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams). The acting was so rich and full it was impossible not to notice, but the Academy has treated the success of The Master’s cast as some kind of fluke, as if they could all just give spectacular performances without the words, story, and characters P.T. Anderson supplied them with in the first place, or the nuanced direction he gave them to guide them through some challenging and unusually-paced material.

One hears a lot about Kathryn Bigelow being snubbed by the Academy this year, and the question of whether this was in reaction to how she depicted torture in Zero Dark Thirty. One also hears about Ben Affleck, Quentin Tarantino, and Tom Hooper being left out of the Best Director category while their films were all nominated for Best Picture (though obviously when there are only 5 directors nominated yet 9 Best Picture nominees, there have to be some exclusions). What’s given little attention, however, is how severely Anderson and The Masterwere overlooked by the Academy (and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association) in the top categories. In fact, Anderson was not even part of the “directors’ roundtables” assembled by various news agencies early in the awards season. The reason for this perhaps is that Anderson’s work is so stubbornly idiosyncratic. The Master is even more uncompromising thanThere Will Be Blood; both of these surprising films exist in alternate universes of filmmaking with scant interest in building a story along familiar lines, cutting where audiences expect a cut, or scoring a scene in a way that sounds like other movies.

This weekend, there’s a chance for the British Academy to take a stand for originality at the BAFTAs, as The Master is nominated (once again) for awards for all three of its principal actors, as well as for Original Screenplay. And next weekend, the Writers’ Guild could recognize Anderson’s screenplay at the WGA Awards. However, I’m not sure anyone is holding their breath at this point, since there’s a little thing called “momentum”, and The Masterseems to have lost that, while other, more commercial fare, has surged ahead.

But it is important to note that the title of this review is not strictly accurate. The Master, and Anderson’s impossibly fertile talent, is not completely ‘unacknowledged.’ For one thing, Anderson took home the second highest award at the Venice Film Festival, the Silver Lion, for Best Director. The Venice jury also awarded the Volpi Cup for Best Actor to both Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix. And apparently, the jury also wanted to award The Master the top prize at Venice, the Golden Lion, for Best Film, but new rules limited the jury to no more than two awards per film, no matter how exceptional the film. (The third awardThe Master picked up at the City of Canals was from the critics, the FIPRESCI award for the best film in competition.)

The Master has been a critical darling at home, too. Early in the awards season, it picked up a boat-load of trophies from critics’ associations across the U.S. Its wins are noted in the table below. That won’t help anyone in their Oscar pools, but it shows how far apart the critics and the Academy are. And it is worth keeping in mind when The Master is released on DVD on Feb. 26th, two days after the Oscars.

Film Critics Associations Awards:	Film	Director	Script	Actor	Supporting Actor	Supporting Actress	D.P.	Score	Prod. Design
Austin	---	WON	---	WON	---	---	WON	---	---
Boston	---	2nd	---	---	---	---	WON	---	---
BFCA	---	---	---	---	WON	---	---	---	---
Chicago	---	---	---	---	WON	WON	WON	WON	---
Dallas-Ft. Worth	---	---	---	2nd	2nd	3rd	---	---	---
Florida	---	---	---	---	WON	---	---	---	---
Kansas	WON	---	WON	---	WON	---	---	---	---
L.A.	2nd	WON	---	WON	---	WON	2nd	2nd	WON
NSFC	2nd	3rd	2nd	2nd	3rd	WON	WON	---	---
N.Y.	3rd	2nd	---	3rd	---	---	2nd	---	---
San Diego	---	---	WON	---	---	---	---	WON	---
San Francisco	---	---	---	WON	---	---	---	---	---
Southeastern	---	---	---	2nd	WON	---	---	---	---
Toronto	WON	WON	WON	---	WON	---	---	---	---
Vancouver	---	---	---	WON	WON	WON	---	---	---
Washington	---	---	---	---	WON	---	---	WON	---

To his enormous credit, when Ben Affleck won the HFPA’s Golden Globe for Best Director, he mentioned (in one of a slew of generous speeches he has given in accepting prizes for Argo) that there were great directors who had not been nominated for Globes this year. And then he singled out “Paul Thomas Anderson, who is like Orson Welles.” It is a lovely comparison; indeed, like Welles, Anderson both writes and directs, clearly loves actors, came from an artistically-inclined family, makes excellent and expressive use of all elements of the film medium, creates almost insanely ambitious and utterly original projects on giant themes, and also seems to be a misunderstood genius. (Welles never won an Oscar for directing -- thirty years after he picked up a trophy for co-writing Citizen Kane, the Academy finally gave him an Honorary Award for his body of work.)

The boldness of the fictional biography that is the premise for The Master may be one more reason Affleck likened Anderson to Welles. Like Citizen Kane’s sly portrait of then-living media magnate William Randolph Hearst, The Master bears the incredible cheekiness of speaking truth to power. Welles had to deal with a lot of pressure against his movie from the Hearst papers. Today, the Church of Scientology opposes The Master. They are very disturbed by the thinness of its fictional veneer; and that’s not surprising, since the parallels between Scientology and the religious cult Anderson invented for this film are striking, as are the many echoes between founder L. Ron Hubbard and the movie’s Lancaster Dodd.

While the Church of Scientology seems to wield a fair amount of clout, even just in terms of its Los Angeles real estate, I’m not sure we can blame them for suppressing The Master. On the contrary, if anything, its box office returns might have lowered in part because it didn’t dish about Hubbard much – there probably would have been plenty of people ready to believe the worst about Scientology, especially as the movie’s release came tight on the heels of Katie Holmes’ split from Tom Cruise.

But a film by Paul Thomas Anderson is usually very understanding of its characters, be they porn stars, oil barons, sex-chat addicts, trophy wives, former child prodigies, or misogynistic motivational-speakers who teach men how to “seduce and destroy”. (The latter character was played by Cruise in Magnolia; he and Anderson are said to have remained friends despite how differently they feel about Scientology.) It is unfortunate that Zero Dark Thirty’s filmmakers have recently given the idea of ‘not judging’ a bad name, because Anderson shows how avoiding judgmentalism should be done – not as a cop-out, and not from a credulous distance that allows for disengagement, but close-up, with a glaring light on the characters’ blemishes, and as part of a full and brave investigation which peers inside the characters’ psyches.

At the same time, a moment’s thought reveals how political The Master really is -- American faith-based movements of many stripes have long had a bizarre, enmeshed relationship with the free enterprise system and the film shows, without stressing it too heavily, how much of a cash cow a thought system which promises cures for every ailment, psychological or physical, felt or unfelt, current or “billions of years” old (as Scientologists claim), might well be. The Master delves into the dynamics of spiritual hucksterism and charismatic leaders at a crucial time in our current culture, when these issues are still strong in numerous places besides the Church of Scientology.

Yet this is certainly not a film whose purpose is a simple exposé of Hubbard, or a criticism of cult brainwashing. Anderson has said that it’s really not about Scientology, and I don’t think he’s being coy. At its core, this elegant film is actually about the dynamic between the cult leader Dodd and his devotee Freddy Quill. What they bond over is not as important as the fact that they do bond. Like other father-son types of relationships in Anderson films, this one is complex and mysterious.

If you had not read advance press on The Master, you would have no idea what’s going on for the first few minutes: Anderson makes no mention of the cult (which he will name “The Cause”) throughout the early scenes, but instead immerses us in the desperate, pathetic life of Freddy Quill, a World War II veteran who is so weird he freaks out the other enlisted men as they pull out of the Pacific and return to shiny, materialistic, mid-century America. The tightly-coiled Quill (played with an other-worldly selflessness by Phoenix) is imprisoned by inarticulateness and a lack of control over his impulses; when he stumbles upon Dodd’s traveling cult, he starts to feel like he has been set free.

Dodd (in a magnificently layered performance by Hoffman) shows Quill another life. This suave, benign-seeming philosopher, this hypnotist and sci-fi novelist, wins over the hapless Freddy Quill with his warmth, charm, intelligence, refinement, and, above all, rapt attention. Freddy begins the film as a kind of anonymous Everyman, adrift in a prosperous urban America; he clearly feels alienated, and the psychological assessment the Navy gives him upon his discharge is too standardized and impersonal to be of use. Dodd, on the other hand, immediately treats him as somebody special and pays him the honor of staring deeply into his eyes and into his soul.

It’s mind control, of course, but we can see how it helps Freddy at the same time as it messes with him, how it fills a visceral need he has to belong to some kind of family. Most interestingly, we see that Dodd himself yearns to have someone that needy around. Anderson doesn’t focus on the vastness of the empire Dodd creates; he focuses on Dodd’s power over one person, and how he gets off on it.

Those in the film with some sanity or self-possession can take or leave Dodd’s ideas, even if they are hooked on the power he wields over others. (Particularly ambivalent is his complicated, wholesome-on-the-outside/ruthless-on-the-inside wife, chillingly played by Amy Adams.) But Freddy is so loyal he’ll lash out violently at anyone who so much as looks askance at Dodd or questions ‘The Cause’, and Dodd is thrilled by this. In a telling scene, Dodd learns of a piece of thuggery Freddy has perpetrated. He happens to be sitting in a kind of furniture storage closet, and Dodd is framed sitting on a criss-crossed stack of dark-wood chairs that resemble a spindly, Grimm-fairytale throne. It boosts Dodd’s ego to have a fiefdom, even if it’s just pretend and even if it’s in a closet. But Freddy’s devotion feeds his ego even more, and so Dodd’s rebuke is perfunctory. Underneath, he is delighted that Freddy wants to be an avenging angel for him.

The search for happiness is a recurring theme in Anderson’s films; we can see it clearly in Freddy’s sad case but it is also behind Dodd’s grandiosity and his hedonistic, addict’s personality. It is Dodd’s vanity which will eventually undermine him. The unraveling of his god-like status will be gradual, and low-key -- and the empire will go on. For Anderson, it is enough to show the point when Dodd is no longer Freddy’s “master”. The film, ultimately, is not about Dodd: it tells the story of Freddy finding a Cause, then losing a Cause – and to some degree, gaining himself.

Anderson is terrific at parables of disillusionment and redemption. The Master could have been from Dodd’s point-of-view, making his moral decline into arrogance primarily a cautionary or sensationalistic tale. Or it could have made Dodd evil or venal, perhaps also painted his followers as laughing-stocks to be satirized. But Anderson is too intrigued by concepts of success and happiness in America for that. In Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood, each character’s decline is taken seriously, and each figure’s lonely struggle in the night is unique, compelling, unpredictable, and moving. This time around, the film depicts the amazing grace that saved a wretch like Freddy – and also why, in the end, it isn’t enough and can’t stick.

All of this is done in frequently intangible ways, with an experimental score and gorgeous 70 mm cinematography that feels epic without needing a cast of thousands – it is grand in its depiction of characters and behaviors rather than in sweeping panoramas. The large format creates an extraordinary intensity between the actors, which I’m sure was part of the reason this iconoclastic director insisted not just on using film in a digital age, but on using a size of film that is a dinosaur today. Anderson milks that large frame for deep emotion – he trusts his actors and knows exactly when to lock down on a moment and let their eyes fill the screen in a staring contest. Anderson’s rhythms are reminiscent of Kubrick’s unhurried pace, but whereas Kubrick could be dryly intellectual and remote, Anderson is always about human beings first, and there is an abundance of feeling in The Master.

In the end, he has not made a film that mocks or critiques religion but merely one that examines the need for it. It is both fascinating, like a William James study on the psychology of spirituality, and refreshingly honest.