An Ex-Scientologist Discusses The Master

Hey everyone, this video has been a long time coming. I had originally planned on doing just a straight movie review of The Master, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, but I think this format will be far more effective for what I wanted to always say about it.

First, let me tell you that I’m not just a movie lover but I was raised in Scientology and advanced to its highest levels as a Sea Organization member during the 27 years I was involved. The Sea Org represents the core essence of Scientology, a group of about 5,000 of the most dedicated, even fanatical, members of the Church of Scientology. These are the people who sign a billion year contract of committment and dedicate their entire lives to the cause. I was part of this group for 17 years before I finally burned out and left in 2012. Shortly after that, I discovered all of the truths about Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard which had been carefully hidden from me while I was a member. That’s how destructive cults work. They control the flow of information to their members and keep them from seeing anything critical of their cult. From all that time and all the study I did of the topic both in and out of the cult, I have a pretty good understanding of what Scientology is all about and how its members think and act.

When I first saw The Master and again in doing this review, I have to admit that it was somewhat disturbing because of how much it reminded me of the more serious and destructive parts of its nature. Anderson claimed while making the movie and after it came out that it was not a treatise on Scientology and that while he had researched it as part of his writing process, the movie itself was not supposed to be a documentary or study of Scientology itself. I beg to differ and I think you’ll see as we go through it why I would say that.

We’ll watch parts of the movie and I’m going to comment on them from my knowledge of Dianetics and Scientology and how Anderson incorporated so much of it into the story, even in places most people wouldn’t see or notice it. I noticed so let’s go through and I’ll point them out. The movie is far too long to get into every single minute detail but I think we’ll cover most of the broad strokes and important points. So let’s get started.

02:30 – 02:48
The music, the use of a fish eye lens and Freddie Quell’s very odd behavior set him up as being in a very bad place. It appears he spends time in a military mental home after the war and has substance abuse/addiction issues. He tries to hold down a series of jobs, all of which involve him making and drinking a kind of moonshine between bouts of bipolar episodes.

23:40 – 25:30
Here is the first meeting of Lancaster Dodd and Freddie. Dodd is the “commander” of the ship, which has a passing resemblance to the Athena, one of the main ships of the Sea Org flotilla. Hubbard didn’t have any of this put together until 1967 whereas in the movie here, he’s sailing his ship from San Francisco to New York via the Panama Canal in 1950. Interestingly, he does not own this yacht, it belongs to one of his followers.

Dodd calls Freddie “aberrated” which technically means “to go astray or diverge from a path” but has a particular use in Scientology to mean a departure from rationality or being deranged.

Dodd identifies as a writer, doctor, nuclear physicist, theoretical philosopher but above all, he says “I’m a man, a hopelessly inquisitve man, just like you.” This is the way Hubbard would ingratiate himself to others, a subtle form of compliment wherein you tell someone who is clearly not what you are describing them as, that they are a certain way. It establishes a kind of mutual illusion of the person being better than they really are which they are happy to ascribe to and even start believing themselves even though it never would have occurred to them to think of themselves that way before. They bond over Freddie’s moonshine. Notice the play of light on Dodd, his face getting darker, as he invites Freddie to stay and to leave his worries and memories behind for a period of time.

The movement Dodd leads is appropriately called “The Cause.” This is not a random name. In Scientology, being “cause” is very important. In fact, one of its highest levels promises that one will achieve a state of “cause over life” which is pretty wide open to interpretation but most of us Scientologists believed it meant a state of godlike power and ability to not just influence but control the events of your life and the lives of others.

27:07 – 27:30
Of course the wedding ceremony is conducted by Dodd, just like Hubbard used to do and using a similar theology to Scientology, referencing “holding these bodies, in this life.” Dodd’s family is exactly like Hubbard’s. Red haired, a young wife who couldn’t have fathered the man sitting next to her and also the baby in her lap, Dodd’s hair and mustache a salty mix of dark and light giving him an advanced but middle aged look. There is no question this character is modeled on L. Ron Hubbard to the core.

27:50 – 29:10
Incorporating the “cycle of action” – birth, growth, decay, death – a key Scientology teaching. Dodd is talking using the exact same pauses and intonations as Hubbard does and something only a Scientologist would notice is that the wedding crowd laughing in response to his jokes doesn’t just sound a little like the audiences in Hubbard’s taped lectures – they sound exactly like the audience in Hubbard’s lectures including laughing and clapping at something he says which is supposed to sound clever and profound but actually is just a bad joke. It’s obvious here that Dodd likes to be the life of the party and commands the attention of the room when he’s present. That’s how Hubbard was according to every person I ever spoke with who knew him, and I talked to a lot of those people over the years.

31:05 – 31:46
Here is Amy Adams’ first real scene, playing Dodd’s wife Peggy. Anderson is an insightful man. I don’t know how many of Hubbard’s lectures he listened to or how many books about him he read, but it clearly was a lot. You see, in almost all of the literature and media about Scientology, Hubbard’s third and final wife, Mary Sue Hubbard, is only mentioned when it comes to talking about Operation Snow White and the fact that she went to jail as the patsie for Hubbard, who was too much of a coward to take responsibility for his own orders and their consequences. So his wife went to jail for him and Hubbard remained an un-indicted co-conspirator. But that was all in the late 1970s and early 80s, well after the heyday of Dianetics and Scientology in the 50s and 60s. That was the period where Mary Sue really shined and Anderson somehow saw that and incorporated that into his script. It takes a good, long, thorough research trail to dig into what Mary Sue was like, what her role was in the bigger picture and then to get it right.

Notice here how she talks about how they are attacked and how she is critical of Dodd, saying he spends too much time defending himself. Like Mary Sue, Peggy is deeply involved in the running of the organization they have founded. She has her own strong opinions about what should and shouldn’t be done. Where Hubbard was a wastrel who could never save any of the money he earned and was always struggling to keep things afloat, Mary Sue was a kind of buoy. It was only after she came into his life that some semblance of real and lasting organization started appearing in the organizations of Scientology. Her reference to Book 2 puts this at the fairly early stage of the development and here is where Anderson widely diverges from the real chronology since Hubbard didn’t go back to sea to develop the really advanced Scientology materials until 1967. So I guess you could say Anderson did some “smushing” of real events even if the overall structure is still pretty similar to what really happened.

31:48 – 32:54
This is practically an exactly demonstration of a Dianetics auditing session as it would have looked and sounded back in 1950. The woman on the reclining chair would be called a “preclear” in Scientology and she is repeating “back beyond” because those are significant words to the traumatic episode she is recalling. That’s called “Repeater Technique” in early Dianetics. The blackboard has key words that Hubbard used from that time period including “coitus” instead of “sex” or the “sexual act” and the sequence from birth through cellular life and conception, back to earlier lifetimes that one would go down in recalling traumatic episodes. The fact there is an audience there indicates that this would be a demonstration auditing session which the audience members would be watching for educational purposes. Hubbard did a lot of these over the years, but others did too, they just weren’t ever recorded.

From what the young woman is saying, they are running an incident of a father wanting to have sex with his pregnant wife or girlfriend and the mother is resisting. The woman here is the unborn fetus who can perceive all of this from within the womb and now recount it. Of course, there is zero evidence that anyone can recall this level of detail from their time in utero, but that wouldn’t stop anyone from making it up if they wanted. Hubbard actually wrote out examples just like this in the book Dianetics to demonstrate how the technique would go and he liked to use incidents exactly like this as well as attempted abortions, which he said were very common throughout American society.

36:40 – 40:15
Here is another take on an auditing session, this time with Dodd himself doing it and recording it at the same time. There’s some chitter-chatter at the beginning and then they get into it. The bit of repeating his name over and over was exactly the kind of thing Hubbard would do to establish control and to “get the person there.” Then it gets interesting though, because the questions Dodd is asking Freddie are lifted almost word-for-word from Scientology’s personality test. The questions weren’t actually made up by Hubbard and normally these aren’t used in an actual auditing session but you know what? They might as well be because you can see they are odd yet probing questions which can bring out all sorts of interesting details about almost anyone’s life, attitudes and feelings. The personality test is a written exam, it’s not given orally like this, but Scientology auditing looks exactly like what they are doing here.

Of course, Anderson is also doing an interesting take on Freddie, who in this movie is the epitome of the classic follower while Dodd himself is the epitomized leader. At this point in the movie, we know Freddie well enough to know he’s pretty unhinged, is almost obsessive/compulsive when it comes to sex, is physically not well and has a host of other life and personal problems. Yet he freely answers “no” to almost every question he should be saying “yes” to, a fairly classic demonstration of the denial that most people live in when it comes to themselves, while he over-estimates his abilities in areas where he is incompetent. I don’t know if Joaquin Phoenix did any kind of research on what Scientology auditing looks or sounds like, but between his acting and Anderson’s direction, his speech and mannerisms and the way he thinks about some answers and glibly glides over others make him look like almost every preclear I ever audited.

There’s also an interesting bit in here and this again would be something only a Scientologist would notice. There was a point where Freddie says he “doesn’t understand” and Dodd’s reply is “Yes you do.” Technically that would be a violation of the code of conduct a Scientology auditor is supposed to follow, since one of the points of that code is to not tell a preclear what they should think. Yet in many of Hubbard’s auditing demonstrations, he said exactly what Dodd said here and he often broke his own rules in his demonstrations.

Finally, you can see by the end of the session that Dodd’s face is significantly more red than it was at the beginning. He is completely drunk and this is reflective of how Hubbard did some of his research, especially in the early days, with certain drugs and alcohol.

40:40 – 44:00
Now this scene is interesting and powerful. It’s a sort of medley of old-style Dianetics along with more invasive questioning that is akin to what we called “security checking” in Scientology. The procedure Dodd is doing here is not something you’d find in Scientology now but you’ll find bit and pieces of this throughout its procedures. Dodd says “infringement” when he corrects Freddie for blinking while in Scientology they use the word “flunk.” This business of having Freddie not blink and Dodd staring deeply into his eyes is him looking for pupil dilation. In a couple lectures, Hubbard talked about how before Scientology had an E-meter he would do processing on people watching their eyes and with a finger on their wrist to measure their pulse. The E-meter is an electric device used in Scientology which measures skin resistance to an electric current and which Hubbard claimed gave the auditor an insight into subconscious thoughts. It doesn’t but where people don’t know much about human biology and science, it’s very easy to give them faulty explanations that sound good but don’t really make any sense.

Auditing in Scientology is usually a much slower affair than this but what Anderson does here is encapsulate the pressures of an auditing session into a four-minute film sequence and the emotional curve that Freddie experiences from boredom to elation to grief to regret and everything else is very much what an auditing session can feel like. When the questioning leads to a person better facing their fears or admitting to things they would not normally want to admit to, it can be quite cathartic. There are a lot of reasons for this, none of which have to do with a spiritual existence or a reactive mind, but we won’t get into all the psychology and neurology of what processing does here. I’ll just say that the reasons that Hubbard gives for why this kind of questioning can be rehabilitative or helpful are not the real reasons.

And by the way, this scene is a master class in acting by both Joaquin Phoenix and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. They were both nominated for Academy Awards for this film and they certainly deserved them. The fact that Phoenix was able to perform this scene in character and not blink for so long is beyond impressive – it’s super human. If you don’t know what I mean, try re-watching the scene and don’t blink the entire time it’s playing. Now imagine acting at the level Phoenix is for that entire time.

50:29 – 52:29
Here we are a bit later in the auditing scene where Dodd has Freddie recall an emotionally charged incident from his past and when he brings him out, he uses Scientology questioning to bring Freddie’s attention back to the present and lets him know it’s over by saying “End of session.” He also makes references to other Hubbardisms such as his obsession with communists and inter-galactic invader forces. But it’s Dodd’s validation of Freddie as the “bravest boy he’s ever met” that is such an important line here. You notice how Freddie immediately smiles, the upbeat piano music plays and how even their positions have changed at the table. Whereas before they were sitting opposite each other, now Dodd and Freddie are closer together, their guards are down and Dodd shares another drink with Freddie. They even both light up unfiltered Kools, the exact brand Hubbard smoked. This is the conversion moment right here. This is where Freddie becomes a true believer in The Cause. How? By Dodd having him recall an emotionally traumatic memory and walk through it and then validate him for doing so without any judgement or condescension. That is how simple a conversion of this magnitude can be. Now Freddie will do anything for Dodd. As we’ll see in later scenes, Freddie is not actually any substantially different from his experience in this session and he still acts awkward, unhinged and even criminal. He’s the same person as he he’s always been, except now he’s fanatically devoted to another man.

55:40 -1:00:47
Now this was a longer clip but there is a lot being demonstrated here. The scene begins with another person Dodd has processed and Dodd discussing how we are spirits occupying bodies from one life to another, which of course is exactly what Scientologists believe. But when someone questions his claims, you see him lose patience and say the exact words Hubbard himself used to rationalize the fact that his techniques are just like hypnotism and his claims are exaggerated beyond belief. Curing leukemia, the universe being trillions of years old, bringing about a crime-less and affluent utopia and a host of other claims fill Scientology’s literature and if you question them too closely or persistently, Scientologists will treat you exactly the way Dodd does when he explodes on the man publicly questioning him. And what does Freddie do? Of course he is incapable of contributing anything constructive so he does the only thing he knows how to do and throws a piece of food at the critic. If that is not the perfect representation of the childish antics that cult members get up to in “defending” their beliefs, I don’t know what is.

1:00:57 – 1:01:50
It was telling to me that Anderson chose to have Dodd’s wife do this monologue, lamenting that they have all the answers and yet have to grovel and were kicked out of the home they were guests in because of Dodd’s behavior. You’ll notice that in her righteous anger, she never once thinks to question her husband’s callous behavior or rude language. What she lays down here is the exact thinking of cult members and specifically Scientologists when she says that you must always attack. This is actually the written policy of the Church of Scientology in regards any criticism and they follow it to the letter.

1:02:20 – 1:03:14
Here is something no one talks about but I think should be said about how cult members respond to critics. We all know about “fair gaming” from Scientology but the blame is mainly laid at the feed of the cult founder or leader, such as Hubbard’s policies to “ruin them utterly.” And blame should be laid there, but what about the people who are doing it?

In general, cult members can’t deal with the kind of cognitive dissonance created by critics’ questions and complaints. It causes cognitive dissonance – a noise in their head from differing or conflicting ideas which can’t both be true. Their solution to this mental disturbance is not to deal rationally with the issues being raised, but instead to somehow – anyhow – get rid of the critic himself. To their way of thinking, that solves the problem and their cognitive dissonance goes away.

What a lot of people don’t look at with the kind of stalking and harassment that cult members engage in towards critics is that it’s as much for the cult member’s peace of mind that he retaliate against the critic as it seems to help the cult itself. Sure, there may be policies and directives from a cult like Scientology that say to ruin those critics utterly, but at this point those are just words on a piece of paper. They could be ignored. They could be cut out and cancelled entirely. But the cult members who carry out “fair gaming” as it’s called in Scientology need that kind of thing to keep themselves believing.

For them, it’s a kind of catharsis to hurt critics. The more harm they can bring to their perceived enemies, the better they feel. The sad, even pathetic, thing about this is that not once does the cult member ever stop and wonder at what they are doing. They are FULLY invested in their belief system, so ANYTHING they do to defend it or “keep the faith” is justifiable. Anything.

1:13:25 – 1:14:00
This is the scene that reportedly pissed off Tom Cruise when Paul Thomas Anderson screened this film just for him. And of course, Dodd’s son here is expressing exactly what L. Ron Hubbard Jr said when he denounced his father as a fraud and said “Scientology is a power- and money- and intelligence-gathering game.”

1:16:50 – 1:19:40
There’s a lot to be said about this scene and about the nature and behavior of leaders and followers, the primary theme of The Master. There is Dodd, calm and almost relaxed in his cell, not handcuffed and considering his circumstances while Freddie in the next cell over is chained, tearing the place up and acting like a wild animal in pain and misery. Dodd offers Freddie an explanation for why he feels the way he does, an explanation which under other circumstances Freddie would accept and even perhaps think is a profound statement. But when Freddie rejects the teaching, Dodd just keeps on pushing it in his face. That business about invader forces was mentioned in an earlier scene too and is a key component of the Scientology mythology. That might as well have been Hubbard talking there. But Freddie in his stressed out state isn’t buying it, especially since Dodd’s son planted that major seed of doubt just before this. When Freddie calls Dodd out, Dodd’s temper gets the best of him and out comes his animalistic side, shouting right back at Freddie. They’re dropping truth bombs on each other but Dodd has the upper hand because he’s right – the only person in the whole world who seems to have any liking for Freddie at all is Dodd. And he uses that truth to cudgel Freddie into silence and then reject him.

1:23:27 – 1:24:04
And of course, Freddie comes back and all is forgiven because he remains a loyal and true follower. There was mention in some articles that talked about this scene about the homoerotic nature of their relationship, here expressed in the hugging and rolling around on the lawn. While sexuality and its expression is a big part of some cultic groups, it’s not so much in Scientology but it does bear mentioning that any cultic relationship between the leader and his or her followers has an aspect of, if not a sexual connection, then a familial one. This scene could just as easily have been a father welcoming his recalcitrant son back into the family after being estranged for a period. He even gives him a little spanking at the end. The same people who were badmouthing Freddie to Dodd in the scene just before this now applaud his return because The Master does.

1:24:14 – 1:27:47
These various exercises and processes being done on Freddie are not anything I recognize as straight Scientology but are extremely similar to what Scientology processes look and sound like. That business of walking back and forth touching and describing things is one form of what Hubbard called Objective Processing, meaning that it has to do with physical objects and the real world versus subjective processing which happens in your head, like the recalling of traumatic events we saw earlier. Objective Processing was developed in the mid-1950s and is used extensively today in all Scientology organizations around the world. Scientologists spend literally hundreds of hours doing these things. There’s a part later on where they show Freddie doing this by himself with no one else there and that wouldn’t be how it’s done in Scientology. You would always have an auditor there.

The exercise where Remy Mallick keeps repeating “Doris” at Freddie is a different kind of training exercise in Scientology called TR 0 Bullbait. It’s not done exactly the way they show here because Freddie isn’t sitting back and relaxing but is all tensed up and they usually don’t have a third person sitting there with a stopwatch but the idea is the same.

1:30:46 – 1:31:13
Now we see Freddie after he’s been doing these exercises for hours and days and he can sit and stare at someone else with no reaction whatsoever to things being said to him which previously made him violently angry. Most people would say this is probably a good skill to acquire, but in someone what like this, under these circumstances, is this truly a therapeutic exercise or just a successful way of repressing your feelings? What we see in scenes coming right after this is Freddie truly is more functional, less awkward and antisocial and capable of paying attention for longer than a few seconds at a time. He becomes of some material help to The Cause and his interactions with others are friendly even if not totally genuine. So yes, I’d say there is some positive gain here and I think Anderson was trying to show that too. We have to remember that people who get involved in cultic belief systems get into it and stay in it because it did do something positive for them, otherwise they wouldn’t stick around for any length of time. When we read the litany of abuses that Scientology and groups like it inflict on their followers, it’s easy to forget that often there are little nuggets or kernels of genuine help available in these groups, even if that help is as simple as a social circle that doesn’t judge you for your weaknesses but emphasizes your strengths, or gives you a method of staying calmer and more level-headed where before you would have been angry, or whatever. These things are not all just the stick; there is some honey too.

1:44:37 – 1:45:47
But as we see here, whatever Nirvana Freddie attained is not a permanent state. Here is another member of The Cause badmouthing Dodd’s latest work and Freddie’s response is immediate and violent, and is carried out for the exact same reasons as before: he is faced with his own internal conflict and knows that something is rotten but he’s not willing to admit that and so it comes out as rage against someone else saying the same things he’s feeling. But now we see, unlike before, that this is not something he is prideful of but it makes him miserable.

1:46:08 – 1:47:16
Now this is an interesting scene because it’s actually based on a real change that Hubbard made in the second book of Dianetics, published in 1951 and called Science of Survival which could be described exactly as Laura Dern’s character does in this scene. And Hubbard reacted exactly like this when people questioned him, especially a few years later when he created Scientology and made the whole thing into a religion. Not everyone agreed with Hubbard’s so-called Thetan Theory and they didn’t appreciate the fundamental shift of a self-claimed science into what Hubbard called an “applied religious philosophy.” The reaction of his most loyal followers to his anger was predictably poor and Hubbard lost followers because of this.

1:56:07 – 1:57:40
Freddie has escaped The Master and his cult and in an earlier scene, finally got some closure on the situation with his old flame Doris, who has since married and had kids. He’s alone, asleep in a movie theater when he gets this phone call from Dodd, asking him to come back. But you’ll notice there’s a lot more going on than just two estranged men talking here. Dodd announces his presence by telling Freddie he misses him. He’s not raging or angry at Freddie’s betrayal but claims they are “tied together” as though their cosmic connection will always bring them back together. That, in fact, is very much a Scientology view of relationships. There are more than a few guys who have picked up women in Scientology by inferring they knew each other in a past life and it’s a kind of karmic destiny that they would find each other again. Hubbard also flat-out told his original Sea Org crew that they had come together again in this time and place after being apart for millions of years but having fought and bled and died together in the distant past in a similar cause. In fact, the motto of the Sea Organization is “We Come Back.” This attitude is not a small point of minutiae in Scientology but is an understood and accepted truth among many of its members. Here Dodd uses that same line to entice Freddie to come back to him.

He also pretty plainly tells Freddie that he is insane when Dodd says he has come up with a new way to cure insanity, thus he can cure Freddie. This is Cult Recruitment and Recovery 101: you have a problem and we have the solution. Be part of us, come back to us, give us everything you are and we’ll make you happier than you have ever been.

This always reminds me of that scene near the end of Labyrinth when David Bowie as the Goblin King is trying to convince Sarah to submit to him through his generosity and servitude to her desires. But the whole thing is just one big lie, an effort by him to enslave her forever. The Goblin King is just another version of a destructive cult leader. (show Labyrinth scene)

“Let me rule you and you can have everything you want.” If there is a better line in cinema history that describes everything we have been talking about here, I’ve never heard it.

2:01:28 – 2:03:16
At Dodd’s request, Freddie has traveled to England and his reception is anything but warm and friendly. This kind of bait and switch is very common in cults and was used routinely by me and others in Scientology when we would get people recovered or back into the fold. Peggy tells him he looks tired and sick when you might notice that she is the one who appears haggard and unhealthy. She is intolerant of his presence, even though it was her husband and “master” who requested Freddie come back and she tells him in no uncertain terms what he thinks and feels, a standard mode of control in destructive cults like Scientology. Cult members really believe they have special insights and understandings of why people think and act the way they do and they usually aren’t shy about pushing their ideas off on non-members, exactly as Peggy does here, especially when their ideas are all about how horrible and awful those non-members are. This is what they really do think about other people. They consider them lesser beings, not just unenlightened or ignorant but actually a kind of lower order of life form. This is us versus them thinking dialed up to 11. Imagine the arrogance behind that kind of thinking, while at the same time these people are living in the delusion that they are the ones who have all the answers, they are the ones who can lead the whole world to salvation. Unfortunately, this permeates religious faiths of every brand. These are the kinds of people who begin jihads and enslave people, never doubting for a moment their righteousness. These are perhaps the most evil human beings who have ever or will ever exist. Their expressed empathy is a facade, their sympathy a pretense. Beneath all of it is a conceit, an egotism, that is almost unimaginable to a non-cult member. And you’ll notice that it’s Peggy who is doing all this while The Master just sits and watches it play out.

2:03:34 – 2:06:38
And here is the heart of the cultic master-slave relationship in plain words. You either stay and do everything I tell you or you are my sworn enemy forever. It’s perhaps the most black-and-white description you’ll find anywhere and the most accurate. The master tries to hold sway over his followers with myths and stories and mysteries, all designed to capture and hold their attention, to keep them enthralled. When the illusion fades and reality creeps in, the master reaffirms his sacred knowledge and tells his followers that only by obeying him can they attain what they most desire. The followers who buy into it continue to give everything while receiving almost nothing in return. But as Dodd says here, if you can find anywhere in the world, any way to be free of a master of any kind, then please let him know. He himself is not free. He is a slave to his cause, a performer who must keep performing in order to pay his rent and keep himself and his family clothed and fed and alive. It’s a circular, co-dependent relationship and one that Dodd and every other cult leader is a slave to. This is why when a follower sees through the facade and can perceive the real dynamics of the relationship, the master has no choice but to shun that follower. They can’t have them hanging about. They can’t just be friends. They can’t just live and let live. That would never work if the cult leader is going to continue to be a cult leader. In his world, it’s all or nothing. There cannot be any other way to it.

2:06:46 – 2:08:27
And here is the disconnection. I think Freddie sees that and I think he knows the Master sees it too. They both know that Freddie has broken free of Dodd’s spell and there is no putting that milk back in the bottle. And he mourns the loss because that relationship for a time was everything he had, everything he knew and everything he ever wanted. Dodd is mourning in his own way but as you see in his singing, where it begins softly and tenderly, it ends in anger and resentment as Dodd cuts ties with Freddie forever. This is perhaps the most powerful scene in this movie and the one that most accurately shows what I think is the theme of this movie: that no one is ever truly free but the boundaries we set and the limits we are willing to go ultimately are our own choices, no matter whether we are a slave or a master.

Thanks for watching. I really enjoyed doing this and I hope you enjoyed what I had to say about this film. If you are looking for more content on this topic, subscribe to my channel and check out the wealth of content about Scientology, critical thinking and a host of other topics. I’ll see you next time. Bye now.