In our weekly seriesAnatomy of a Scene's Anatomy, we're going to be taking a look at (in)famous sexscenes and nude scenes throughout cinema history and examining their construction, their relationship to the film around it, and their legacy. This week, we'll be looking at Paul Thomas Anderson's 2012 film The Master, and specifically at its horny protagonist Freddie Quell. Perhaps the horniest protagonist inthehistory of serious cinematic drama.
I'm an Anderson acolyte, so I'm not about to break bad on him as a filmmaker, but not everyone was quite as pleased with 2012's The Master as Anderson die-hards. It's an often indulgent character study about two broken men—one who can barely contain it and the other who hides it well—thrown together by chance at the birth of a religious movement. Freddie Quell, as played by Joaquin Phoenix, is the broken man who can barely contain his brokenness. Constantly drunk on homemade concoctions—a trick he picked up drinking stored ethanol out of torpedos in the Navy—Freddie can't hold down a job due to his hair-trigger temper.
The film's opening montage shows Freddie in the service, enjoying some shore leave at a beach where his comrades have created a naked woman in the sand. Freddie pretends to have sex with the sand woman, first for laughs, but he lets it go on a little too long and too aggressively...
Hard cut to Freddie jerking off at the beach in full view of people just out there enjoying their day, before he sadly curls up next to his beloved sand woman...
Freddie's deviant nature is pretty evident right away. This is clearly a man looking for a connection but completely uninformed about the correct way to do such a thing. This is his character in a nutshell, however. Good intentions often marred by impulsive actions. Back home, he works as a photographer, mixing up more potent potables and has a brief fling with a salesclerk played by Amy Ferguson...
While evading the law, Freddie ends up on a boat commandeered by Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), founder of The Cause, a Scientology-esque religion which is also evading certain law enforcement officials by staying mostly in international waters. Dodd is attracted to Freddie's impulsive nature, not to mention his borderline poisonous cocktails, and he is soon accepted into the inner circle of The Cause. Dodd's wife Peggy (Amy Adams) is no fan of Freddie's however, though we'll get to her motivations in a bit.
Freddie spends most of his time on the ship making fuck eyes at any woman who will glance at him—including Dodd's engaged daughter (Ambyr Childers)—and balances that with time spent as Dodd's faithful guard dog, not necessarily sure what The Cause is all about, but willing to defend it with his life, if necessary. Back on land, a wealthy benefactor played by Laura Dern hosts Dodd and members of The Cause at her home for a religious retreat. One night, Dodd gives the crowd a rousing rendition of theold sea shanty "The Maid of Amsterdam," and Freddie's hornynature once again rearsits ugly head...
As Dodd dances around the room, Freddie zones out and soon imagines all of the women in the room are nude, starting with Katie Boland...
Hoffman then spends the better part of a verse singingnext to a mufftastic Liz Clare...
The scene showcases a number of things, mainly that Freddie is potentially the horniest dude to ever grace a film set in the 1950s. His libido never takes a break. It also shows Dodd's charismatic nature, and why it's so easy for people to fall under his sway. The third thing it shows, however, is that Dodd's wife Peggy, is always watching...
It's subtle, but she quickly comes into focus while her gaze is fixed on the camera, which represents Freddie's POV, so in reality, she's staring at Freddie. And her eyes quickly dart up to her husband. Freddie is turned on by what he sees, because he sees a bunch of naked women, and the audience knows this. However, in Peggy's eyes, she sees trouble on the horizon for her husband. Peggy is clearly the focused mind behind The Cause's success, and she spends most of her time behind the scenes keeping things together. It is therefore interesting to note that immediately following the musical nude scene,Peggy finds her husbandin the bathroom and gives him a handjob in which she tells him the following...
You can do whatever you want as long as I don't find out. And as long as anyone I know doesn't know. Other than that, you stop this idea and put it back in its pants. It didn't work for them and it's not gonna work for you. We have enough problems.
She then demands that he "cum for me" repeatedly while also making him swear not to drink any more of Freddie's hooch. The curious line in all of this is "It didn't work for them and it's not gonna work for you."One of the great debates around the film is whether or notthatis anallusion to Dodd's repressed homosexuality. Dodd is obviously very attracted to Freddie's primal nature, but whether or not it tips over into homoerotic subtext is completely up to your interpretation of the film.
For my part, I think it's definitely there—Dodd serenades Freddie in their final scene together—but Freddie does not reciprocate in any way. He views Dodd as a decisive man of action who can play the authority figure in his life now that he's out of the military.
In his final scene, Freddie makes love to a local woman (Jennifer Neala Page) in the English village where Dodd and The Cause have moved. There's no way to deny that she is physically imposing compared to Freddie, something that hints toward Freddie's need for a physical dominant figure in his life...
The more important thing, however, is the look she gives him in the film's closing moments as he asks her some of the processing questions he went through with Dodd earlier in the film. There is a genuine tenderness in her eyes, making her the first character to look at Freddie without judgment or disdain since Dodd, and before that, Doris, Freddie's first love and the proverbial "One That Got Away."
We then cut to Freddie, once again, lying with his voluptuous sand woman on the beach from earlier in the film, and we can be content to know that Freddie has ended up exactly where he wanted to be. His dreams of home have been fulfilled... Not to mention, all that horniness.
Catch up with our other editions of Anatomy of a Scene's Anatomy...
—The "Real Sex" ofDon't Look Now
—Scarlett Johansson's Nude Debut inUnder the Skin
—The 2 Very Different Sex ScenesofBasic Instinct
—How Halle Berry's Nude Debut Led Her toMonster's Ball
—HowMulholland Dr.'s Legendary Lesbian Scenes Deepen the Film's Mystery
—Showgirlsand the Dangers of High Camp
—Rosario Dawson Laid Bare for Danny Boyle'sTrance
—Katie Holmes MakesThe GiftWorth Remembering
—Jennifer Connelly Comes of Age inThe Hot Spot
—Lisa Bonet's Bloody Nude Debut inAngel Heart
—Monica Bellucci Gets Brutalized in Gaspar Noé'sIrréversible
—Stanley Kubrick, The William Tell Overture, and A Clockwork Orange
—Wild ThingsPresents Every Man with His Dream Threesome
—Chloë Sevigny Goes Down in History forThe Brown Bunny
—Helen Hunt Does Her Best Nudity at 48 in The Sessions
—Anne Hathaway Wreaks Havoc on Her Disney Image
—Body HeatBrings Noir Into the 80s, Sexes Up the Genre
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Non-nude image via IMDb