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The Master’s Voice | Film Quarterly
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from Film Quarterly Winter 2014, Volume 68, Number 2

Claudia Gorbman

In sound cinema everything—narrative development, mise-en-scène, editing, other

sounds—is normally organized around the voice.1 Michel Chion thus asserts that the
sound film is vococentric. Strange, then, how seldom scholars and critics attend to
voices. Perhaps the focus remains so extensively on the image as a holdover from
silent film (the “art of moving images”), or perhaps it is because film studies has
been long concerned with establishing the difference between cinema and wordy forms
like literature.2 The film voice is, of course, not merely a vehicle for words as
text. Voices scream, cough, laugh, cry, sing, growl, and moan, and they carry
distinctive accents, pitches, timbres, and rhythms. Voices interact with other
voices, other sounds, and music, and with whatever appears in the image. Maybe it
is the voice’s very multidimensionality that makes it so elusive, so outside the
study that has been devoted to other key aspects of cinema.

In the last thirty-five years, sound studies has addressed the prevailing critical
deafness to sound in general and worked to advance the consideration of formal
audiovisual relations of all sorts.3 But what of the human voice as it is spoken by
actors in narrative films? Roland Barthes first wrote about the “grain of the
voice” in 1972, in a much-quoted essay in which he exults in the sensuality of
voices as molded by the body in “the encounter between a language and a voice”—but
it was the singing voice, not the speaking voice, that captured his fascination and
inspired his piece.4 Jim Naremore’s beautiful Acting in the Cinema (1988) mentions
actors’ voices, but his otherwise trenchant observations fall short of fully
regarding the ways in which actors speak or cameras and microphones deliver their
voices.5 A decade later, Sarah Kozloff’s Overhearing Film Dialogue takes as its
primary aim an explanation of the structural, narrative, and aesthetic functions of
movie dialogue. Kozloff devotes several pages to considering dialogue in the
context of its vocal performance, brilliantly synthesizing the range of
possibilities of the actor’s voice. She insists on the difference between dialogue
as written and as physically delivered: “Lines are improvised, cut, repeated,
stammered, swallowed, paraphrased; changes may be minor or major, but the results
represent the unique alchemy of that script in the mouth, mind, and heart of that
actor.”6 She quotes the drama critic J. L Styan: “The text is a tune to be sung.”
Today Barthes’s “grain” is more relevant than ever.

In The Voice in Cinema, Chion charts many more avenues of exploration.7 He writes
eloquently about the thematized voice—the powers of the mother’s voice in so many
films, the powers of the unseen speaker in horror movies, characters who don’t or
can’t speak, the gendered dimensions of screaming. In addition, he develops a
conceptual vocabulary for so many vocal phenomena that previously went unnoticed.
In an almost trivial example, he considers whether particular films allow the
audience to hear voices at the other end of a phone receiver or not, terming the
onscreen talker the “proxi-locutor” and the person at the other end the “tele-
locutor,” then takes up the sonic qualities given to those voices, and their
consequent effects.8 And from Greek and French words that essentially mean “unseen
being,” Chion comes up with the word acousmêtre for the unseen speaker in film that
is endowed with unusual powers—like Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick,
1968) or Dr. Mabuse in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1933).9 He invents
terminology for voices heard subjectively and voices heard from behind the speaker.
The immense value of his work lies less in his neologisms than in the new ways of
thinking about the cinematic voice that he brings to the fore. Chion’s writing
attends to the qualities given to voices both by their speakers and by cinema’s
technology and spatial dimensions.

The Voice of the Actor

This variety of perspectives on the voice in film suggests more thorough ways of
approaching its specific behaviors in the work of actors and directors.10 Paul
Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012) offers a particularly apt occasion to consider
a striking vocal performance at the height of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s career. For
if Kozloff can talk about “the unique alchemy … of that actor,” and if Barthes
writes about the thrill he derives from hearing the recorded voice of the French
baritone Charles Panzera, one realizes that in a new age of film acting, at least
with some actors like Hoffman, the essential, recognizable voice need no longer
prevail.

smug_seymour_gorbman_replacePhilip Seymour Hoffman gives voice to Lancaster Dodd in

Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012).

Was it Method acting that led some film actors to alter their voices for roles?
Think of the pre-Method star Humphrey Bogart, whose voice is always recognizable,
whether he applies a veneer of Irishness as the stableman in Dark Victory (Edmund
Goulding, 1939) or accents of street-toughness as Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe.
Laurence Olivier’s voice shines through whether he’s Hamlet or Heathcliff or Maxim
de Winter; and Cary Grant, despite some modulation between comedy and drama,
between British characters and American ones, remains Cary Grant to the core.

The classical period was marked by actors with stable and recognizable voices. This
tradition of the trademark actor’s voice persists in the postclassical era, but
actors such as Brando as early as the fifties, and De Niro in the seventies,
famously extended their vocal ranges. Meryl Streep has been the vocal chameleon par
excellence—with studied accents of Polish (Alan J. Pakula, Sophie’s Choice, 1984),
Aussie (Fred Schepisi, A Cry in the Dark, 1988), Irish (Pat O’Connor, Dancing at
Lughnasa, 1998), and Danish (Sydney Pollack, Out of Africa, 1985). She vocalized
such specific cultural icons as Margaret Thatcher (Phyllida Lloyd, The Iron Lady,
2011) and Julia Child (Nora Ephron, Julie and Julia, 2009), as well as other female
characters of all social classes, American regions, and personalities, from the
hesitant and accommodating Rachel in Heartburn (Mike Nichols, 1986) to the
witheringly sardonic I-don’t-have-to-raise-my-voice fashion autocrat Miranda in The
Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006) and the Oklahoma harridan-matriarch Vi in
August: Osage County (John Wells, 2013). Actors such as Streep, Cate Blanchett, and
Tilda Swinton approach a role by developing a specific voice for it, the opposite
of Bogart or John Wayne, who always began with themselves.

Philip Seymour Hoffman also devoted much effort to cultivating voices for his range
of roles. He memorably played the word-slurring SoCal shlub Scotty J. in Boogie
Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997), the deep-voiced, cool Lester Bangs in Almost
Famous (Cameron Crowe, 2000), the breathily fey Truman Capote in Capote (Bennett
Miller, 2005), a Jewish New Yorker with Asperger’s in the animated film Mary and
Max (Adam Elliot, 2009), and the mildly Boston-accented Father Flynn in Doubt (John
Patrick Shanley, 2008). One might say that Hoffman used his voice the way he used
his hair: just as the same hair follicles produced the wildly differing dos of the
cocky craps player in Hard Eight (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1996) and Gust in Charlie
Wilson’s War (Mike Nichols, 2007), so the very same vocal cords produced Scotty J.—
whose limp, mumbled Valley-speak expresses his spongily unformed core—and Truman
Capote—a complete transformation through timbre (breathy), intonation (higher, with
a kind of regal fatigue), and accent (uber-affected, a touch of Southern).

I want to examine just one Hoffman character, Lancaster Dodd in The Master, in
order to explore the dimensions of the cinematic voice. The Master‘s fine sculpting
of individualized voices (both Hoffman’s and Joaquin Phoenix’s), its sheer vocal
profusion, and its thematizing of the voice as that which charms, seduces,
equivocates, sings in many senses, and exerts and loses control, help to mark a
high point in Hoffman’s career and also to indicate something compelling about
Anderson’s skill as a director of voices. If I’ve already mentioned Hoffman’s roles
in several of Anderson’s films, it is no accident. The “master” of my title applies
not only to this film’s protagonist, to whom characters refer as “Master”; it
applies equally well to the director and the actor. And if the distinction between
Hoffman and Anderson sometimes gets fuzzy, that’s because it is exactly that
collaboration between actor and director that creates their film’s alchemy.

Michel Chion’s analysis of Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) can serve as a model
for considering movie voices thematically. Chion argues that Kane conducts his
quest for power first through the written word but then “meets his demise in trying
to be the master of voices.”11 It is through the written word—a mine deed and a
promissory note—that Charlie Kane comes into a colossal fortune as a child. He
continues to succeed through the written/printed word with ease; once he is grown
up, he chooses the musty Inquirer newspaper as the part of his inheritance to
develop. He buys “pens” for it—all the writers he hires away from the rival
Chronicle—and through the printed word he comes to exert enormous influence on
public opinion and even start wars. But then, as Chion puts it, he “has his work
cut out if he’s going to be a ‘self-made man’” by proving himself through vocal
rather than written means.12 Despite his increasingly grandiose efforts to dominate
the world through the voice—in his oratory as candidate for governor, and also in
his desire to assert control over Susan’s voice by building opera houses and making
her sing in them—Kane cannot do it. Everything was given to Kane through writing,
but in trying to remake himself through the voice he ends in failure.

Similar observations can be applied to the narrative prominence of the voice in The
Master, although here the written and the spoken word carry more equal powers.
Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) heads a postwar cult, The Cause, and Navy
veteran Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) finds himself in Dodd’s orbit. Dodd’s
personal magnetism depends largely on his voice, which he uses to spellbind
audiences, loosen the purse strings of benefactors, and pacify creditors. His
followers not only hang on every word of his speeches and performances but also
listen to recordings of his voice uttering pseudo-philosophical maxims. The film
recounts Freddie’s initial eagerness to believe, his doubts, his back-and-forth,
and finally his rejection of Dodd and the Cause. The Master might be seen as a kind
of distant remake of Citizen Kane in its treatment of a megalomaniac’s effort to
control the world through his voice.

Although Anderson has denied it, likely for legal reasons, it’s obvious that he
modeled his cult leader Lancaster Dodd on L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986), the founder
of Dianetics and the Church of Scientology in the 1950s. The official hagiography
of Hubbard can be found on a number of Scientology websites. In 1987, the British
journalist Russell Miller published a book that sets the record straight with
exhaustive documentation; it gives quite a different account of the author and cult
founder’s life, multiple marriages, dramatic shifts in thought about “the human
mind,” and often troubled relationships with the law in the United States and
abroad.13 Anderson’s film walks a line between the opposing accounts of the Great
Man and the charlatan, the visionary and the wacko, in the character of Dodd.

Dodd is full of contradictions. On the one hand, he stands firm on his outlandish
accounts of human evolution and appears wholly to believe in his unusual
therapeutic methods; on the other, he lies about his own credentials and is “making
it all up,” as his son Val blurts to Freddie at one point. Con man or not, he seems
to be sincerely devoted to curing Freddie of his torments; in their first
“processing” session he listens empathically and makes rapid progress in accessing
Freddie’s traumatic past. He’s almost always “on,” exercising magnificent control
over others and himself, but he turns belligerently paranoid and given to
involuntary outbursts of foul-mouthed hostility when anyone questions or challenges
him. A commanding paterfamilias with his adult children and followers, he submits
in private to the iron rule of his wife.

processing_gorbman_replaceFreddie (Joaquin Phoenix) undergoes processing.

Dodd’s voice inhabits the full range of cinema’s three types of audio—speech,
music, and noise—as Hoffman marshals every nuance of intonation, tempo, rhythm,
timbre, volume, articulation, eccentric pronunciation, and silence, as well as
facial expression and gesture, to constitute this voice, including an inventory of
coughs, gasps, grunts, and varieties of audible breaths. The character possesses
the voice of authority, speaking with a clear, resonant midcentury American
diction. Like a minister of the church, he conveys supreme confidence in his own
importance, using biblical and Shakespearean affectations or antiquated turns of
phrase to give weight to his utterances. For example, he advises Freddie to “scrub
yourself and make yourself clean” for his daughter’s wedding. He brings a close to
the wedding party with an oratorical “We fought against the day and we won, we
won.” Whatever that means, it sounds grand. He knows how to work language,
inserting dramatic pauses, raising and lowering pitch and volume, gesturing with
hands and demonstrative facial expressions, bringing his interlocutors in on a joke
with a wink, creating faux-irony by lowering his voice, and generally sharing his
wise and marvelous self with others through speech.

To Wit: Three Examples

Three examples of Hoffman’s vocal embodiment of Dodd may help to illustrate the
film’s particular combination of vocal performance and audiovisual style. I here
describe the scenes, provide verbatim dialogue, and in italics, their vocal and
physical expression.

1. In Anderson’s hands, the very first meeting between Dodd and Freddie becomes an
encounter between two mutually alien consciousnesses that exhibit a fascination
with each other. The inarticulate, shell-shocked sailor Freddie has stowed away and
awakened on the boat on which Dodd’s Cause followers are cruising through the
Panama Canal from San Francisco to New York. Freddie is brought to Dodd. They talk
briefly about Freddie working on the boat, and Dodd comments on Freddie’s drunken
“naughtiness” the night before. When it is Freddie’s turn to ask Dodd about
himself, the dialogue unfolds as follows:

Freddie: What do you do?

LD (looking down and away): I do many, many things. (Looks up at Freddie, then away
again.) I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist (looks up at Freddie), a
theoretical philosopher (shakes head slightly as he says the latter phrase, as if
astounded at his own breadth and depth. Pauses, tightens his lips as he continues
to look at Freddie, suggesting the simplicity of what he is about to say)… But
above all, I am a man (“man” said with unusually crisp consonants), a hopelessly
inquisitive man, just like you (said rapidly, emphatic through its very quickness).

This reply indicates that Dodd thinks quite a lot of himself, not only because of
the impossible list of vocations he lays claim to, but because of the long a of “I
am a writer.” His mispronounced “nucular physicist” is a dead giveaway that he is
precisely not a nuclear physicist. With great efficiency, Anderson and Hoffman
establish the likelihood that Dodd is a con artist, or at least not all he cracks
himself up to be. His combination of head-shaking and eyelid-fluttering connotes
gravitas. As he speaks, Hoffman alternates between looking at Phoenix and looking
into space. Looking away while talking can give the impression of thinking such big
thoughts that one must focus on an abstract space. By alternating the directions of
his gaze, he is at once establishing rapport with Freddie and displaying himself as
an important thinker.

Also in this scene, Dodd calls Freddie “aberrated.” He uses words pretentiously,
and incorrectly. (But L. Ron Hubbard actually used this word, too; more on the
Hubbard-Dodd connection presently.) He projects a mixture of arrogance (trapping
Freddie into admitting that he doesn’t know what “aberrated” means) and
inclusiveness (for example, flattering Freddie as an inquisitive person like
himself).

As Sarah Kozloff makes clear, it is most instructive to consider utterances in a

movie in the contexts of the visuals—gestures as well as camerawork and editing—and
other sounds. The words, and the visual and aural means used to convey them, all
contribute to the signifying system of dialogue. Anderson’s two main actors in The
Master create a complex, internally consistent reality through their voices and
gestures.

2. A few scenes later, after officiating at his daughter’s marriage, Dodd offers a
toast to the bride and groom at the dinner where his followers in the Cause are
gathered together:

The camera during this minute-long speech alternates between Dodd, Freddie, and the
rest of the wedding party. A hint of composer Jonny Greenwood’s lushly beautiful C-
major string theme for The Master can be faintly heard through much of the scene of
the toast. This astonishing monologue opens with a cut from the celebrating couple
on the ship’s deck, dominated by a joyous Dodd, to the wedding dinner below decks.
Dodd’s word “Marriage!” provides the audio continuity between spaces.

LD: Marriage! (shouted, followed by a dramatic pause) previous to the Cause, was
aw-ful. (Guests at the dinner celebration laugh.) Awful. There’s a cycle. Like
life: birth, excitement, growth, decay (this word said nasally, like a Disney
witch), death (said, like the first “awful,” in a cartoonish throaty low voice. The
guests laugh.). NOW,… now… How about this: Here it comes… A large dragon! Teeth!
(Freddie laughs.) Blood-dripping, red eyes… What do I get? A lasso. I whip it up… I
wrap it around its neck, and then I wrestle, wrestle, wrestle ‘im to the ground.
(Each “wrestle” pronounced with great emphasis, each higher in pitch, as Dodd makes
his hands into claws and wrestles with the air.) I snap up, I say “Sit, dragon.”
Dragon sits. I say “Stay,” dragon stays. Now it’s got a leash on it. (Guests
chuckle.) Take it for a walk. (More chuckles.) And that’s where we’re at with it
now. It stays on command. (Hands out like an orchestra conductor, head lowered but
eyes fixed on his audience. Long pause.) Next we’re going to teach it to roll over
and play dead. (This last sentence is said rapidly in low voice. Laughter and
applause.)

The substance of Dodd’s remarks is elusive, illogical. His speech is supposed to be

well-wishing the newlyweds, but very quickly he proposes a story about a dragon, as
a metaphor for what holds human beings down, and the way to tame this animal
instinct through the Cause. Dodd is a silver-tongued free-associator, addressing a
willingly sycophantic audience.

The dynamics of Hoffman’s voice in this speech, the drop in pitch and throaty
timbre (“marriage previous to the Cause was awful“)—a vocal gesture he likes to use
—suggest humorous irony of a brainless sort. Hoffman’s Dodd is a compelling
speaker, even if what he says leaves the hapless wedding couple high and dry. He
has vocal charisma. The speech has a staccato rhythm of dramatic pauses and single-
word outbursts and exclamations: the vocal style imitates brilliant, inspired
substance. By being so compelling, it distracts from its own illogical transition
from the topic of marriage to the topic of dragon-taming. Then at the end of the
monologue, Dodd rhetorically comes in for the kill: “next we’re going to teach it
to roll over and play dead.” Imagine if he delivered it emphatically: “Next, we’ll
teach it to roll over and play dead!” How much more authority he seems to have in
uttering the climactic punchline as a throwaway instead.

3. Dodd’s public voice is showcased on an occasion much later in the film, where he
gives a speech to adherents of the Cause to launch his second book:

Here is the substance of the speech:

LD: (His speech begins on MCU of Freddie, listening and watching intently) Book Two
… is about Man. And the title of the book is “The Split Saber.”14 And here we have
some answers… (cut to Dodd in LS, elbows out, hands on waist) No more secrets. The
source of all creation … good and evil … and the source of all (cut to Freddie),
now, funny enough, the source, of all, … is you. (Long pause, cut to Dodd in CU,
smiling smugly.) I have unlocked, and discovered, a secret … to living in these
bodies that we hold. And oh, yes, it’s very, very, very, very serious. (Dodd’s face
slackens in this last sentence as he looks down, and his voice drops comically.
After “serious,” he looks up, then to each side, and smiles paternally as the
audience chuckles.)

The secret … is laughter. (His eyebrows rise and he gives an impish sidelong look,
smiling. Then he clenches his mouth and pauses. Cut to Freddie, whose eyebrows are
increasingly knit.) Now I’d like to discuss processing and communication. The art
of listening, if you will. (End of scene.)

Here too, Dodd creates broad conspiratorial humor with “very, very, very, very
serious,” descending in pitch and pronounced with the same comic airy tone as “aw-
ful” in example 2. The monologue is nonsensical, even more so than the marriage
toast. He builds up “the source of all creation, the source of all,” to “is you”—
uttered not with an assertive downward inflection but rather a neutral, almost
questioning “you”—and then leaves the whole thought behind in the dust. Dodd
mobilizes all the signifiers of brilliance—twinkling eyes, raised eyebrows,
activation of muscles around the mouth, hand gestures, turning to address all sides
of the audience, quasi-biblical language (“living in these bodies that we hold”),
an enormous range of vocal modulations, repetitions, and pauses—but there is no
content to latch on to. Again, reaction shots of Freddie, the internal audience,
give a face to the puzzlement, the fruitless wait for a logical explanation. Is
Dodd vamping? Could it be that his wife is the actual author of the book, which he
hasn’t had time to read yet? Is he so secure in his command of the Cause that he
doesn’t need to make sense?

hooch_replaceLancaster Dodd and Freddie share Freddie’s hooch.

The Original Object: L. Ron Hubbard

At this point, it’s useful to return to L. Ron Hubbard, the ostensible butt of this
cinematic portrayal. Lancaster Dodd’s voice as performed by Hoffman is far more
varied, articulate, and entertaining than the historical figure on whom he is
modeled. The one extant sustained interview of Hubbard, filmed in England in the
mid-1960s, shows an affable man who dodges Scientology’s crazier claims.15

His lips project slightly forward, as if in a Jimmy Stewartish, folksy American

articulation of his thoughts. Aside from cult jargon such as aberrated (aberrant,
with “crooked thinking”), clear (the rare state of being fully conscious after
undergoing Scientology processing), and auditors (those trained to process
subjects, in Scientology), Hubbard’s vocabulary is prosaic—his speech is peppered
with “and so forth,” “and so on,” “that sort of thing,” and he’s given to invoking
the bland “very interesting.” His diction is flat, his voice is slightly nasal,
with a broad Midwestern r. This is hardly the voice of a great orator.
Anderson has opted for a much more compelling voice for the Master. His Dodd has
great fluency, an arsenal of pseudo-intellectual vocabulary, a more convincing aura
of sincerity, and a vastly more entertaining variety and dynamics of speech. He
uses much of the Scientology lingo (aberrated, processing) but none of the dull
space-fillers of Hubbard’s speech. To accompany his speaking, Hoffman gestures, his
eyebrows and mouth assume dramatic expressions, he controls eye contact as the
actor that he is. The actual Hubbard smiles frequently to establish his command of
the conversation, to indicate that no challenge can ruffle his certainty. He eye-
connects with his interlocutor, but not with Dodd’s showmanship.

Lest there be any question whether Hubbard is the real-life model for Dodd,
consider a scene where The Master quotes the actual 1966 Hubbard interview, during
a party at the home of a rich devotee of the Cause. Dodd has been processing a
woman before the eyes of the guests. As Dodd talks, a fellow in back has politely
been trying to engage him with a question and finally gets Dodd’s attention.
Physically this interlocutor closely resembles Hubbard’s interviewer in the 1966
video. Anderson’s “Mr. Moore” wears a suit, speaks in an intelligent and direct
manner (though without the British accent of the actual “Mr. Hidgeman”), and has
prominent eyebrows and short-cropped hair.16

Interviewer (in 1966): Is this some form of hypnotism?

L. Ron Hubbard: Oh, no … (chuckles) that’s very funny … Man is asleep. He is

hypnotized. … He eventually becomes a person who has no awareness. Now, in
Scientology, we reverse the process … he gets more and more wide awake, and his IQ
rises higher and higher … he becomes un-hypnotized.

Moore (in The Master): Some of this sounds quite like hypnosis, is it not?

Lancaster Dodd: This is a process of de-hypnotization, if you will. Man is asleep,

this process wakes him from his slumber.

Not only does the film obviously borrow words and ideas from Hubbard; it even pays
homage to the interview by similarly placing Dodd in front of a landscape painting.

Anderson transforms the Hubbard interview and gives it a dramatic arc: Dodd
expresses increasingly paranoid irritation at the challenge to his authority. Here
is where the film communicates the full madness of Cause doctrine and its leader’s
volubility. At first, Dodd’s voice is that of a tired schoolteacher addressing the
questioner, his singsong inflections conveying that the questioner is testing his
patience. But in a minute or two, his voice rises, both tempo and volume climbing;
he gestures more and more irritably, he uncharacteristically stumbles for words, he
interrupts the man, and he ends with a Tourette-ish verbal explosion, completely
out of control: “If, if, if you, if you, if if you already know the answers to your
questions then why ask PIG FUCK!” Shocked reaction shots follow, in silence.

This vocal explosion wonderfully encapsulates, in the fiction film, the decades-
long narrative of Hubbard’s and Scientology’s litigious paranoia. Dodd’s voice has
a mind of its own, and irrepressibly shatters the civil decorum of the Cause. This
voice issues from the body whose animal instincts the Master cannot entirely
master. Anderson reminds us of this body and its needs throughout the film: Dodd’s
gasping pleasure at his first taste of Freddie’s horrendous brew, his grunts as
Peggy summarily masturbates him over a sink, and a similar verbal explosion (“WHAT
DO YOU WANT?”) with benefactor Helen when she quietly expresses confusion about
Dodd’s new book:

The End: Four Vocal Strategies

The plot of The Master follows Lancaster Dodd’s efforts to make a true believer of
Freddie. Freddie embodies the animal instincts that the Cause endeavors to conquer—
sexual desire, aggression, alcoholism. When Freddie roughs up a critic or gets in a
fistfight with the police, Dodd addresses him like a wayward pet: “Naughty boy,”
“Silly boy,” “Freddie—STOP.” He seems to need the unruly acolyte to prove his own
viability as the Master.

At the very end, some years later, Freddie, who has left the Cause, goes to see
Dodd once more, in England, at Dodd’s bidding. Peggy crisply sizes up Freddie and
declares it pointless to continue his relationship with the Cause. She walks out.
Then Dodd unleashes all his means of vocal seduction: first, he speaks to Freddie
in poetry; second, he tells him a mythic dream; third, he issues a threat; and
fourth, he sings him a love song.

The first appeal, poetic language, comes out of the blue. Dodd turns gorgeously
eloquent, speaking in metaphors of sailors and the sea, using both meter and rhyme.
“Then go, go to that landless latitude,” he says alliteratively. It is both
pretentious and grand, and completely coherent, unlike the Hubbardesque ramblings
of earlier scenes. “For if you figure a way to live without serving a master, any
master, then let the rest of us know, will you?” Here we sense Anderson speaking
through Dodd, making some sense of the confounding and compelling film that is
coming to a close. But on the diegetic level, Dodd is daring Freddie to leave,
still confident in the power of his rhetoric to exert its magic on him.

In this entire sequence, nothing occupies the soundtrack save Hoffman’s almost
whispered voice. The poetic diction begins with Dodd in medium close-up, set
against the brightly lit rectangular-paned windows that form a sort of grid behind
him, and intensifies into a close-up of Dodd after one of Freddie. Hoffman’s
delivery of these lines is rather like some avant-garde theater performance: what
kind of psychological reality could it possibly express? “Free winds and no tyranny
for you,” he begins, looking alternately at Freddie and away. This is a far cry
from the naturalism of L. Ron Hubbard’s language, and also from the character of
Dodd until then. After a long pause, he says: “Freddie.” Then “sailor of the seas,”
with the very pure, tight “ee” of seas accompanied by a hand gesture sculpting the
air, as if Dodd is reciting a poem self-consciously. By now he is looking steadily
at Freddie, smiling, and gives out a little laugh before continuing his appeal in
poetic language. Why laughter? To what register has this monologue moved, and how
should it be understood?

Throughout the film, Dodd has been trying to remember where he and Freddie once
met. He seems to have summoned him to deliver the answer. The past life Dodd then
describes to Freddie (“I went back … and I found it”) casts the two of them in a
mythic, heroic partnership in Paris during the Great War, flying messenger pigeons
and delivering mail and secret messages past the Germans’ communications blockade
for the British to save the free world. In the same eloquent, intimate voice as the
earlier “landless latitude” spiel, he aims his preposterously romantic account well
at his impressionable target, Freddie the military man, who himself hardly dares to
dream of love. “We sent sixty-five unguided mail balloons and only two went
missing, in the worst winter on record. (Long pause) Two.” The repeated “two,” and
“the worst winter on record,” help put this dream-story into the category of
historical fact. How could Freddie possibly spurn an invitation to return to the
comradeship the two men had in this past life?

For his third rhetorical strategy, Dodd gives a simple ultimatum: “If you leave
here I don’t ever want to see you again.” A long pause, then he softens the
bargain: “Or you can stay,” he says, shrugging and smiling vulnerably. But then he
returns to the ultimatum, making it a threat: if the two men ever meet again “in
the next life, you will be my sworn enemy, and I will show you no mercy.”
The fourth vocal mode is the most striking of all. Without prompting, after a
sincere shake of the head, Dodd starts to sing to Freddie:

It’s an a cappella rendition of “Slow Boat to China,” a song penned by Frank

Loesser and made popular in 1948 by Kay Kyser’s orchestra (and thus would have been
popular at the time the movie is set). Poignantly, Hoffman sings, “I’d love to get
you / On a slow boat to China / All to myself, alone…” as the film cuts between
close-ups of the two men, looking deep into each other’s eyes. An extraordinary
moment, because it’s so mysterious. This is a musical number that is too
“realistic” to be recognized as a musical number—no orchestra strikes up, no one
sings “professionally,” and in fact Hoffman doesn’t hit all the right notes. He was
not an accomplished singer by any means, and commented after The Master‘s release
that he didn’t ever want to have to sing in a film again; sadly, he got his wish.

The song is sexily romantic. The “slow boat” resonates with several ships and boats
referenced in the story (Freddie is seen on his Navy ship, and in a later scene
recalling his relationship with the young Doris, he leaves her to sign up for work
on a ship headed for Shanghai). It also may refer to L. Ron Hubbard’s real-life
fleet of Scientology ships, his “Sea Org” that he headed as “Commodore” in the
1960s. Most directly, though, the song is a seduction. Dodd sings much of the song
offscreen, while close-up images show Freddie falling under its spell—amazingly, a
tear forms on his face as he smiles and even laughs quietly, until the tears take
over and he bows his head.

When the camera returns to Dodd, his voice gathers strength for the last line, “I
wanna get you on a slow boat to China / All to myself, alone.” Dodd’s lower lip
quivers as if in anger, as his singing voice expresses desperation, urgency, even
aggression. Loesser’s frothy, flirty song has morphed into a last-ditch appeal. The
lighting remains the same throughout the song, but the suggestion of menace in
Dodd’s voice at the end becomes emphasized by the backlighting of Dodd against
those windowpanes: his eyes appear like dark sockets. A silence follows, and a cut
to Freddie looking up toward Dodd, and the C-major orchestral theme comes in to
segue to the long tree-lined lane leading away from Dodd’s institute.

The ambiguity of the entire sequence is deafening. Is this patently what it seems
to be, a sexual proposition, now that Dodd’s wife has left the room, thus recasting
the story’s master-devotee relationship as a suppressed queer narrative? (This
framework would help make sense of the first scene where they meet, Dodd clad in a
red bathrobe that is saucily open at the top.) Or should the song be read more
figuratively, as Dodd pulling out all the stops to seduce Freddie once and for all
into the Cause? In any event, the scene is so memorable because it’s so surprising,
and Hoffman’s singing voice is so naked, without the armors of star talent or an
orchestra on the soundtrack.

Whether Freddie leaves after this assault of vocal seduction because he’s the
stronger character, or unnerved by its queer subtext, or simply too damaged to be
able to commit, his departure signals that Dodd’s voice mastery has failed—much as
Kane fails in Citizen Kane.17

Anderson does not stop here. Dodd may be the charismatic leader, but repeatedly the
film suggests that the locus of real power resides with his wife, Peggy. There are
hints of possibility that she is the Dr. Mabuse behind the whole operation. In the
scene where she masturbates Dodd, at the moment of his climax she makes him agree
to lay off his drinking—then dispassionately she washes her hands and walks out of
the shot. Similarly, when an important Cause event goes horribly wrong, it is
Peggy’s voice that runs the show. Dodd appears merely to be taking dictation on a
typewriter while she, angry at what she perceives as an attack on the Cause,
decides on the group’s next moves.
yell_replace_gorbmanFreddie rides off into the desert on Lancaster Dodd’s
motorcycle as Dodd yells “Freddie!”

At the end, just before Dodd’s four-pronged seduction attempt, Peggy stalks out of
the room, declaring of Freddie, “This is pointless…. He isn’t interested in getting
better.” In embodying the plain and plain-spoken Peggy, Amy Adams speaks in a voice
that is measured, quiet, uninflected, matter of fact, undemonstrative, but the
ultimate voice of power and control.

Epilogue

This brief analysis of the voice in The Master has hardly touched on gender. The
unassuming voices of the female characters—the Cause acolyte/benefactor played by
Laura Dern, the woman at the party who submits to processing, Freddie’s girlfriend,
Doris (the one other character who sings to Freddie), and Peggy Dodd—turn out to be
the voices of reason, unadorned and yet somehow the most threatening to the male
ego of the Master. Gender offers an alternate approach to voices in this film.

Nor have I dwelled on the curious status of the mediated voice in The Master:
Dodd’s recordings of endlessly looped Cause mantras to which followers slavishly
listen through headphones, his nonsensical speech at the microphone in Phoenix, and
his phone call from England to Freddie in a Hopperesque movie theater. (How has he
reached Freddie there? Is Freddie imagining or dreaming this call?) The mediated
voice, whether enhanced or filtered, seems even less trustworthy than Dodd en
direct.18 Is the film commenting on the mediated essence of cinema itself—an
essence that is deceptive—through these moments?

My aim here, however, has been less to drill down to psychological or social
meanings in The Master than to begin, through it, to appreciate the centrality of
voices (and not just dialogue) to narrative films in general, to begin to explore
patterns in their deployment, to attend to actors who are brilliant with their
voices (as both Hoffman and Phoenix are), and to discover directors who use the
voice as a key raw material.

It is imperative to develop a critical vocabulary for the voice in all its

dimensions, but more importantly, to actively use the concepts named in that
vocabulary. The spatial dimensions of screen voices—such as offscreen and onscreen,
close-miked and distantly miked, “theatrical” speech and “emanation” speech,
“frontal voice” and “back voice”—are as important to understand as are the temporal
relations between the voice and the diegesis.19 The gendered voice in cinema has
been explored by Kaja Silverman, Amy Lawrence, and others since.20 As The Master
indicates, though, individual film voices establish many other power relations in
many ways. The aesthetics of voice recording and reproduction can be crucial: for
example, the increasing intimacy of the operating system voice Samantha in Her
(Spike Jonze, 2013) leads to a humanizing, even romanticizing, of digital
technology. The often thin borders between speech, singing, and noise—think of
Streep’s and Hathaway’s quasi-naturalistic singing styles in Mamma Mia! (Phyllida
Lloyd, 2008) and Les Miserables (Tom Hooper, 2012), respectively—suggest how
conceptualizing the voice along these lines may be richly productive.

Is it possible to write about film voices with the same systematic rigor that can
be applied to film scene construction, for instance, which has built its own
vocabulary for shots and transitions? How can the inflections of a voice, even the
relative pitches and sound levels in a single line that an actor utters, ever be
adequately described with theoretical language? If it’s necessary to note the
rhythms of visual editing in conjunction with the rhythms of speech, how could that
possibly be accomplished in a form that isn’t unreadable and tedious?

Thankfully, the digital age has made it increasingly possible to reproduce video
excerpts and thereby free the accompanying writing to convey the musicality, drama,
power, and infinite variations of the voice. Recalling J. L. Styan’s
characterization of the text as “a tune to be sung,” it appears crucial not to
remain tone-deaf to cinema’s vococentrality, but to attend to its voices and the
way they shape the movie experience.21

Notes
1. “In actual movies, for real spectators, there are not all the sounds including
the human voice. There are voices, and then everything else… [T]he presence of a
human voice instantly sets up a hierarchy of perception.” Michel Chion, The Voice
in Cinema, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press,
1999 [1982]), 5.

2. The Introduction to Sarah Kozloff’s Overhearing Film Dialogue (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2000) succinctly presents the aesthetic positions
on the place of speech in film. She documents the long-held notion that speech is
somehow uncinematic, and argues against that idea (1–14). Chion’s characterization
of sound film as logo- and vococentric therefore came as a breath of fresh air.

3. The consolidation of American scholarship on film sound began in earnest with

David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s “Sound in the Cinema,” chapter 7 of their
textbook Film Art: An Introduction (orig. Addison-Wesley, 1979, now in its tenth
edition, Mc-Graw-Hill, 2013). See also Rick Altman, ed., “Cinema/Sound,” special
issue of Yale French Studies 60 (1980), with articles by Mary Ann Doane, Alan
Williams, Rick Altman, Claudia Gorbman, and others; and Elisabeth Weis and John
Belton, eds., Film Sound: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press,
1985).

4. Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in Image – Music – Text, ed. and
trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 181.

5. James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1988).

6. Kozloff, Overhearing Film Dialogue, 92.

7. Chion, The Voice in Cinema, (see note 1).

8. The Voice in Cinema, 62–66.

9. Ibid., 16–29.

10. Kozloff devotes the entire second half of her book to dialogue and film genre,
though she gives only minor consideration to the vocality of dialogue.

11. Chion, Voice in Cinema, 89.

12. Ibid., 90.

13. See www.lronhubbard.org. The introduction to this site mixes documentary photos
of Hubbard with stock footage and reenacted imagery. With a background of lushly
stirring Coplandesque music, it describes Hubbard as “the nation’s youngest Eagle
Scout … a pioneer at the dawn of American aviation … a giant in the Golden Age of
pulp fiction … and the most published and translated author of all time,” among
other accolades. Wikipedia’s entry on Hubbard supplies fact-checked
counternarratives to the Scientologists’ version of LRH’s life. It cites the Church
of Scientology’s extensive legal efforts to control the narrative of Hubbard’s
life. In one defamation case the Church brought in 1984 against a warts-and-all
biography, judge Paul G. Breckenridge ruled in the biographers’ favor, writing,
“The evidence portrays a man who has been virtually a pathological liar when it
comes to his history, background and achievements. The writings and documents in
evidence additionally reflect his egoism, greed, avarice, lust for power, and
vindictiveness and aggressiveness against persons perceived by him to be disloyal
or hostile.” See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._Ron_Hubbard. The main source cited
in the online article is Russell Miller, Bare-faced Messiah: The True Story of L.
Ron Hubbard (New York: Holt, 1987). See also Lawrence Wright, Going Clear:
Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (New York: Knopf, 2013).

14. Hubbard reported in 1949 that he was writing a psychology book to be entitled
The Dark Sword: Excalibur.

15. The entire program, “Introduction to Scientology,” filmed in April 1966, is

posted at http://vimeo.com/14485635.

16. Moore is played by Christopher Evan Welch, who coincidentally died just a few
months before Hoffman.

17. Elisabeth Weis points out resemblances between Kane’s verbal appeals to Susan
as she is leaving him and Dodd’s strategies toward Freddie here. At first, Kane
promises Susan that he’ll change to make her happier, but then he reverts to saying
“You can’t do this to me.” Thanks to Liz for this insightful parallel (personal
conversation, November 2014).

18. Throughout his work, Chion writes about many instances of the mediated voice,
its effects and meanings. For example, see his early comments on “on-the-air” sound
in Audio-vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 76–77.

19. The clearest exposition of these temporal and diegetic relations appears in
Bordwell and Thompson’s Film Art, chapter 7.

20. See especially Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in
Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) and Amy
Lawrence, Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991).

21. J. L. Styan, The Elements of Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1960).