Bloody Thoughts

PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON'S
THERE WILL BE BLOOD

By Professor Deborah Williams
Faculty Fellow

And indeed there was. At the end of the movie I felt bludgeoned: left limp by the force of Daniel Plainview’s energy. Daniel Day-Lewis, as Plainview, gives another brilliant performance (for a serious change of pace, go back to one of his earliest roles, the bottle-blond punker in My Beautiful Laundrette), as a man consumed by ... anger? desire? spite? appetite? Plainview says at one point that he “hates all people” and that as a result he never has to see past anything: to him all the flaws and foibles of humanity are right there on the surface. I’m not sure, however, if he is a hateful character. He’s what my three year old would call “a bad guy,” there’s no doubt about that, but do we hate him? Do we wish for him to fail? Are we pleased that he’s gotten his big fancy house?

As I think about these questions, I think they raise for me a larger question: what did you feel, at all, during the movie, other than to be overwhelmed by the hugeness of the landscape, the immensity of the struggle to bring oil out of the ground, the filth of the world of “oil men,” the inevitable loss of life? The movie is beautiful and the score is fantastic (Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead—thanks, Adisha, for the reminder) and there is a real wallop in the sheer scope of it all ... but emotionally? It kept me at arm’s length: I watched, I admired the acting, the film-making, the historical specificity ... but no connection.

That lack of connection is precisely what’s missing for me when I read other fiction from the period (the movie is based on the early chapters of Upton Sinclair’s book Oil [1927]): the relentless naturalism of Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris, for example, in which bad decisions follow worse decisions, in which human contact is doomed at best and dangerous at worst, and in which “escape” is possible only in death. Plainview is doomed from the beginning, it’s clear; the question is only what will be the instrument of that doom.

Plainview’s world is empty, despite its natural beauty and grandeur, because he can’t find any of the emotional counterparts to anger and envy. And the wretchedness on his face when he realizes that fact is perhaps the one moment in the movie where I felt a connection to this character—but that moment passes almost immediately, swept away by his rage.

So while I concede that the movie is masterfully made and that Lewis is one of the finest actors working today ... this movie isn’t the best movie of the year.

What do you think?