There Will Be Blood (2007)

I watched There will be Blood when it came out and I was enthralled by its general vibe. I mean: I really liked it and thinking back on the movie, I remembered certain things about it: the scenes portraying oil drilling mostly, the music, the cinematography. The second time around, I wasn't as convinced that this is a good movie at all - as a matter of fact, I felt a bit embarrassed that I was tricked, fooled by Paul Thomas Anderson's grasp of style. I was struck by how unclear the film is, how it is hard to pin down what it tries to say. We have this elusive main character, Plainview the oil man and his maybe-son. What drives them? How is his cruelty to be understood? I was confused, rather than overwhelmed.

Watching it for the first time, I thought this is one of the best images of the Entrepreneur ever produced: that, ultimately, it is impossible to say anything about the idolized entrepreneur other than that he is Driven by some strange force, that he embodies Will power and that he will never ever give up, no matter what obstacle he comes across. When the entrepreneur is elevated, it is ruthlessness and violence that is elevated - it doesn't mater what the aim is, what the goal is - the entrepreneur never stops working and when he does, there is nothing in his work that fills him with joy (when work is over, life is over, but work itself is nothing but an obsession). The only thing that the entrepreneur ends up with is a sense of loneliness and isolation: this is the world he has built for himself, a world 'of his own hands', but this is just a form of self-deception about having created something. I still think there is something to Paul Thomas Anderson's approach here, that we know so little about what motivates Plainview - we just see him work, bargain, force his way ahead - is a merit, rather than a weakness. Or, at least, half of me thinks like this and that therefore the end of the film, where we see Plainview's success as misery, is intelligible. Plainview's demonic strivings is a good representation to keep in mind when one reads the business pages of a newspaper and comes across 257356889 attempts to defend the charity-loving, prudent entrepreneur who from early childhood on knew that he would become something important. In this film, the entrepreneurial ideal is madness.

OK - so Plainview is and remains a cipher. But Paul Thomas Anderson does not manage to create a Lawrence of Arabia. Plainview's elusiveness never haunts me, it just mystifies.

One interesting disagreement about this film that was evident when I discussed it with friends concerns how the progression of the story is be understood. Should one say that the film evokes 'good capitalism', which would be the work of ones own hands, the self-made man's gruelling toil, and then 'bad capitalism' no longer connected with work in a fundamental sense. For my own part, I think the tendency from the get-go is that even hard labor has something sinister to it (one of the brilliant moves of the film is the first 15 minutes - no dialogue at all). In one of the very first few scenes, Plainview gets hurt. A few moments afterwards, he is holding a glimmering stone and something about the scenes makes me think about Greed. We see Plainview go from silver mining to the oil business. He works hard, and the kid that he raises as his son accompanies him everywhere he goes, as a 'business partner'. They travel around, making villagers sell land leases to them, taking advantage of their ignorance. Derricks are set up, the oil wells pour out the the good stuff and business begins to pay off. Accidents happen, but work is unceasing: Plainview sits in a shed, watching the men work while drinking whisky.

In a way, Anderson's depiction of capitalism is fairly typical: the tone of the film is that of elation and violence. Capitalism is presented as an unstoppable force were human beings have a minor role, their own shady psychology rendered a question of minor importance. I mean, this type of description is very common: capitalism is presented as a mix of enthusiasm and destruction (cf Marshall Berman and others). The problem with this image is that it makes too much of the idea that capitalism is a form of force of nature - its aspect of unceasing activity is here muddled so that one starts to think about many things at the same time: modernization, labor processes, that capitalism has no other end than making profits, that capitalism turns everything into instruments etc etc. From this it is too tempting to evoke the superforce that one does not quite know how to approach: shouldn't one also say that ruthlessness and capitalistic enthusiasm is admirable because how it has the power to change the world? Isn't that exhilarating? I mean, this as a temptation, and my suggestion is that There will be Blood is not so far from this sort of ambiguous image of unstoppable capitalism. One could say that the problem is that the film contains a form of pessimism in which capitalism and figures like Plainview are seen as figures that mould history, the outcome being necessarily tragic (so the argument turns into this: capitalism and evangelic Christianity shape American history and the result is a big, fat fraud - hm, that is ---- really deep.).

Then there are plenty of stuff that just don't work very well. The second time I watched the film, I was embarrassed about the plot about the 'religious' guy, and the points the film made about his similarity with Plainview. (In one of the worst scenes of the film, Eli the preacher makes Plainview 'confess his sins' - the scene says nothing it all, it just evokes, something something.) They are both relentless men, but we understand no more about their connection that they are both men of strong wills, men who are prepared to use power and humiliation, men who will not be stopped. But in this, they both become caricatures. What confrontations like these leave me with is no more than a contrived and overwrought bit of cinema, too conscious of itself and less conscious of where it is going.