6/3/2023 0 Comments V thomas pynchon reviewWith hindsight the film can almost be seen as Pynchon-lite – a testing of the waters, before Anderson went on to fully adapt one of the writer’s novels in 2014’s Inherent Vice. Many of the novel’s ideas and themes, both literal and ideological, appear in his 2012 feature film. Though The Master is set in the lull of peacetime America, it’s firmly rooted in the devastating upheaval of the 20th century – a period chaotically chronicled by Thomas Pynchon in his 1963 debut novel ‘V’, which Anderson drew inspiration from for The Master. Behind Freddie, as Anderson noted in an interview with Vanity Fair, “is an incredibly large body count… can you really feel victorious with so much death around? I guess that creates situations where people want to talk about past lives.” He dreams of his mother as the past eats away at him. Starved of meaningful human connection, Freddie is both lustful and melancholic. Like human driftwood, Freddie has been discharged back into a world he no longer feels a part of. When we first meet Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, we see a misshapen and contorted figure, masturbating into the sea or lying prostrate on top of a Navy ship as it floats along the surface of the water.
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