"Life is but a dream."
Waves ebb and flow, created by the wake a boat leaves behind. Jonny Greenwood's dissonant musical chords thunder loudly. The recurring image, and its changing relationship to the soundtrack, mark three distinct chapters in Paul Thomas Anderson's beautifully elliptical The Master. The first chapter introduces Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a sneering, gnarly, hunchback of a man, a variation of There Will Be Blood's upright Daniel Plainview. During World War II, Quell spends his time on a naval gunboat making moonshine. The women he dreams of during his shore leaves are not human beings but objects for him to jerk off or hump to, as he does with a sand mermaid his shipmates build on some Pacific beach.
