The Master: Who are you? | Scanners
Some critics have detected a latent homosexual subtext in the relationship between Dodd and Freddie. OK, but I don't think following that thread takes you very far. Sure, there's some kind of attraction there because (in direct contradiction of one of Dodd's fundamental precepts) we are all animals. And while we tend to want to meld with those we love (part of what we love about them that they make us feel whole; they complete us), that desire to connect is not always explicitly sexual. Yet what are we to make of the late scene in which Freddie uses Dodd's "informal processing" questions as pillow talk while he's having sex with a woman? Has Dodd become his measure of intimacy? Or what about the pair's final meeting, in which Dodd gently serenades Freddie with: "I'd like to get you / On a slow boat to China / All to myself, alone..."?
It's interesting to note that the man who finally causes Freddie to explode, during his time as a department store portrait photographer, turns out to resemble Dodd. He's first presented as an off-screen voice, a happily married man, and something about him -- perhaps the picture-perfect scenario, in Freddie's mind, of a man getting his photograph taken for his wife to frame and keep on her dresser in their bedroom -- absolutely infuriates the photographer. Freddie attempts to pose the poor fellow so that he is nearly burned by the lamps. When we finally see him, sitting on his pedestal with lights trained on him, he looks very much like Dodd,** though Freddie hasn't yet met Master. Later, when he does, Dodd immediately senses something familiar in him and insists that they have met -- possibly in a previous life. That's the focus of The Cause: helping people let go of the burdens of their past lives and restore them to their pristine, natural state of "perfection."
And when Dodd's own son Val (Jesse Plemons from "Friday Night Lights" and "Breaking Bad"), who looks like a more exotic version of his father, becomes disenchanted with the old man's spiel ("He's just making it up as he goes along -- can't you see that?"), loyal "son" Freddie is outraged. Val disappears from the tale after that, his place filled by Freddie and Dodd's son-in-law, Clark (Rami Malek). Only after Freddie has left does Val return to Master's family fold.
Certainly the father-son dynamic involves competitive masculinity. It always does. Dodd carries an air of power and authority, not just as a revered intellectual leader but as a husband and father. Sexually and professionally, however, he is dominated by his steely, ambitious wife Peggy (Amy Adams). Freddie, meanwhile, has an animalistic obsession with sex: he humps a naked sand-woman on the beach (just the first of many times he takes a joke too far), sees nothing but female genitalia in the Rorschach inkblots he's shown, and imagines the drunken Dodd singing and dancing with naked women in a scene staged from his POV (all the men at the party remain clothed, invisible). What Freddie seems incapable of sustaining is any kind of long-term relationship -- sexual or otherwise. Both men seem to recognize in the other a side of their manliness that is missing or underdeveloped. In that sense, the union of the two of them is a form of completion, a yin-yang of post-war virility. When the two fight (separated by prison bars) and Freddie shows off his machismo by trashing his cell and smashing the toilet, Dodd attempts to one-up him by calmly, dismissively peeing in the urinal on his side of the barrier.
