A FREAKISH HOMEOSTASIS
Paul Thomas Andersonâs movie Phantom Thread (2017) serves as an interesting companion piece to his movie The Master (2012). Both movies take place during the 1950s and both movies are about unstable individuals entering the world of intense charismatic leaders and developing relationships with them for better or worse.
Phantom Thread concerns a brooding, talented dressmaker in 1954 London named Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day Lewis) who develops relationships with women before discarding them. He operates a designer clothing label with his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) and they provide dresses for high-flying clientele. He meets Alma (Vicky Krieps), a waitress at a restaurant near his country house and quickly firms a relationship with her that is very intense and odd and at first largely sexless. I have used the word intense twice in this review so far, and thatâs what this movie is: the performances, the atmosphere, the score which never goes quiet even for an instantâitâs all intense. Alma begins becoming possessive of the artistic genius and this eventually leads to some very bizarre and tragic decisions on her part which cause the movie to take a left turn into some really sick and pathological places. Itâs a psychological drama about two very damaged touchy people finding each other, falling in love, realizing they canât stand each other (Lewis is given several scenes where he is driven nuts by her chewing or cutting up toast or shaking dice at backgammon), arguing, and reaching a kind of homeostasis and freakish understanding. This is not a romance. Itâs about love but itâs very dark in places and would make a field day for psychology students or therapists in training wanting to learn about compulsive behaviors and cycles and something bordering on MĂŒnchausen syndrome.
In The Master, Freddy Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) was a warped, volatile, alcoholic veteran who got ensnared with Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his cult âThe Cause.â No one comes out and says it but it seems relatively clear this is supposed to be an analogue of L. Ron Hubbardâs Dianetics which led to Scientology. Dodd, running his own fraudulent circus, becomes Quellâs mentor and father figure. That movie was about what happens when cults, which are all but designed to be havens for societyâs outcasts, have to figure out how to cope with a truly dangerous outcast. Phoenixâs performance in The Master is frightening and twisted and American as apple pie: the veteran who canât cope with society but finds a perverse place in a subculture by beating up Doddâs critics and becoming an animalistic object lesson in Doddâs mind control techniques.
Alma in Phantom Thread is analogous to Freddy Quell. I couldnât tell if she was supposed to be German or Dutch or what. Somewhere in post-war Europe. She meets Woodcock (the âmasterâ in this movie) and ascends to a place of importance and power in his curious organization, a place which is tenuous and threatened by his attention to other women, clients in particular. Power struggles take place between Alma and the sister Cyril. Lots of doors are closed in peopleâs faces. Alma just wants to have Reynolds to herself and this causes him no end of enervation and emotional collapse.
Many PT Anderson movies are zany ensemble pieces (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Inherent Vice) but the tone of Phantom Thread is extremely controlled and brittle. It seems like this was made by a wholly different director. Sometimes the only joyfulness to be seen is in the clothes that are getting fabricated. Madness and toxicity is under the surface and exists between people more so than in any single characterâs outward behavior.
I wondered while watching this if PT Anderson were trying to say something about his own status as an artist, the ways that people around you will get you to bite the inside of your own cheek with their personalities and peripheral static. Some artists, it would seem, are better off without the constant stimuli of needy, imbalanced fellow human beings. I recently read Jack Kerouacâs Big Sur and became convinced that if one were to try to solve the main characterâs problems one might keep him away from other people for the rest of his life. Hell is other people, said Jean Paul Sartre famously. Thereâs a lot of this variety of interpersonal hell in Phantom Thread and little discussion about the beneficial side effects of love, marriage, companionship, partnership. Love is a pathological return to a pool of sweat, a seething hatred. Is this accurate for all of us?