More Master Spoilers

Just stay away for a while if you haven't seen The Master yet.

I'm awaiting more posts and any interaction.

A little bit more rambling on the ending.

Saturday night, I think I thought of the ending as cynical. I made a joke about Quell using the "Master's" words as a pick-up line.

I didn't know how to feel about the ending. It felt like a throwing up of hands and a shrug, as if this man Quell could only go on to more drinking and start enjoying some "a-roving" with the village maids. I'm convinced now that this moment is more significant. I was thinking about it all morning today. As I wrote in the last post, I believe that the physical positioning of Quell in the frame is important. Throughout the rest of the film, he has been sexually aggressive, the one who mounts and destroys, as is evidenced in the sand scene at the beginning, but also evident in the aggressive way that he pursues other women in the film. In the end, though, he is brought into a relationship of opening himself up rather than closing himself off. He is out of attack mode and his defenses are down. Again, this is abstractly communicated through his position on the bed. That may seem like a stretch, but for a careful filmmaker like Anderson, why else present Quell in this way? Why else would Quell's sand woman be whole once more as if she had never been violated? I think that it's a cautiously optimistic end.