Everyone has the same ability to accept or deny who they are. But according to French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), there is a specific habit that all human beings do constantly, and that habit is to deny and deceive ourselves. We keep ourselves from thinking that we have the freedom to make decisions because there is a chance that we are going to get a negative consequence from what we decide to do. Sartre coins this as “mauvaise foi”, or the more commonly known term as “Bad Faith”. Bad faith to summarize is denying some part of the important role you have in becoming who you are, and Sartre believes that this is all we do, not matter how much we try to avoid it. In the movie The Master, the main character Freddie Quell, shows many forms of Bad Faith. But the main area where Quell shows bad faith when he initially joins ‘The Cause’.
When Quell, joins Lancaster Dodd, or more referred to as ‘The Master’, in his religious group, called The Cause, Quell joined in thoughts that he could change who he is and he could change, or forget the past about he joining the military and his past relationship with Doris. But the military and his other past experiences, changed the way Quell has lived, and it is now something that he cannot change about himself. But when he joined ‘The Cause’ he immediately went into bad faith, as he is trying to change who he is, and change his own action. Before Quell joined the religious group, he was a WWII veteran, who like many others drank, to drown themselves in their own sorrows and attempt to forget about the war in general. At this time, Quell isn’t in bad faith, because although he is suffering, he isn’t denying who he is and isn’t trying to change himself. But once he meets the Dodd family, and they try and convince him to change, that is when Freddie starts, to enter bad faith. In the beginning he was being manipulated into “being a better person” and Quell does not see that he is in bad faith, he simply sees the change as a good form of living in that time. But as the movie progresses, he sees that they are trying to change who he is and he may not exactly know that he was in bad faith, but he knew that wasn’t supposed to be who he is. Once he sees that he quickly tries to overcome it and leaves The Cause, at the end of the movie, he supposedly had a dream (could have been real—no one really knows) and that dream lead him back the Master, in London, where Quell himself tried to convince himself that he should be with The Cause again, but he finally makes that decision not to succumb himself into bad faith again and reverts back into his old self. In this case, Quell originally does not see the bad faith in himself, but as many events, such as being pushed to do something over and over until he breaks, made him see that this form of him at the time is not the true him he should be and at the end of all of the mental pain that the Master put him through, he relinquishes himself from the bad faith, that The Cause put him into.
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