Usually, any film that rotates around a central metaphor (such as oil as a metaphor for blood) fails miserably under its lofty ambition and blunt heavy-handedness.
Oil Derricks Photo taken by flickr user richardmasoner
Usually, any film that rotates around a central metaphor (such as oil for blood) fails under its lofty ambition and blunt heavy-handedness. Not so with There Will Be Blood, the incisive and bitter screed directed by P.T. Anderson.
Outside of the title, the film’s central metaphor shows up in immediately in the violence enacted upon the ground by the film’s main character, Daniel Plainview (played by Daniel Day Lewis). As the film opens, Plainview is in the ground hacking with a pick at the walls of a shaft he’s dug, and each swing of the pick is visually narrated like something out of a horror movie. As the scene progresses, Plainview inserts dynamite into the shaft and blows it up, sustaining a leg fracture in the process, and from his effort he’s able to pull one rock from the ground, which when wiped with spit reveals not the precious metals he was looking for but a strain of oil.
From this vignette the entire film unfolds, and it follows the same path throughout: Plainview travels around hacking up the earth for oil and reaping incredible profits, all the while sustaining injuries (some of which come as the emotional kind) in his war on the ground. When he succeeds in his campaign of violence, the earth spills its own black blood, and Plainview and those surrounding him find themselves soaked in the stuff. In fact, while most of the film involves the pursuit of oil, it’s when they find it that grotesque images of the fluid fill up the screen, including people coated with it, a chasm that opens up wound-like where it’s dumped, men waist-deep in the steamy stuff ladling it out of the ground bucket-by-bucket, and these moments are when the film crosses over into the repulsive.
The metaphorical implication of these visual representations would likely be easy to miss, however, were it not for the brilliant and stark score put together by Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead. Wholly within the style of Kubrick (Andersen worked closely with Kubrick before his death), There Will Be Blood uses its score to constantly hint at violence even when none is taking place. From the scraping of the piano wires that opens the film’s first shot of chaparral landscape to the pounding and dehumanized drumming that overlays the flowing of their most successful well, the film teems with the horror and energy imbued by its score. This music even threatens violence when none could reasonably take place from within the narrative, using the same kind of auditory cues that show up in The Shining to narrate an otherwise straightforward process of oil-drilling, and the resulting effect is deeply creepy.
This is all the more notable because without these achievements, the story would likely have been merely cliche: man pursues American dream, man loses himself and his family out of greed. Instead, what we get is a thoroughly repulsive, in some ways non-traditional, character and his thoroughly repulsive and violent pursuit of oil.
Plainview’s character in particular is interesting because he’s self-made. He’s never given a family in the narrative, and the child he rears and eventually comes to care for in his mangled, stilted way was actually the son of a employee who died in one his early wells. Plainview’s capacity for love may be revealed in his relationship with the boy, to whom he feeds alcohol in order to get the kid to fade off in the background so he can work. He even tells him when he finally grows up, “I just needed a cute face so I could buy land,” and the statement rings mostly true.
Still, Plainview’s actions too turn him not into a bad-guy caricature so much as an archetype. He’s not an evil figure in a morality play but the model American capitalist. In fact, good and evil have no place within this framework, a point illustrated by the absurd histrionics of Plainview’s nemesis in the film, an equally American-dream motivated preacher named Eli. Instead, what viewers are offered is the inevitable pursuit of resources for profit and the personal and environmental costs of these pursuits. These things are not developed within a framework of good and evil, but within a more modern framework of the socially responsible and the socially reprehensible. Indeed, the trick to revealing this is the subtle hint throughout the film at Plainview’s competitors: if he weren’t raping the land for oil, someone else undoubtedly would be. This is a fact, not a moralization.
Further, that oil is the goal of so many in the film comes to us at a time when the American populace is totally obsessed with the meaning of oil. It’s the stuff that comes from somewhere else, or sometimes (and with environmental repercussions) from here, the stuff that gets turned into fuel with wild fluctuations in price, the stuff we may or may not fight wars for, the stuff that is the make or break element in relationships the United States cultivates with other countries. It’s also the stuff that we dump in various forms into our cars and with which we spew pollutants into our air and water. In short, oil has a terrible reputation. It’s like some kind of national guilt, which is why Plainview’s violent mayhem within the ground in pursuit of it is a guilt his audience shares. We viewers are well aware that we need this stuff to survive, a fact we’re constantly reminded of, and many of us can’t stand it, especially when confronted with the violence and the grotesque attendant upon its production.
This is perhaps what gives the film most of its power. What is reflected in its brilliantly articulated metaphor is the power and inevitability of those who seek out and exploit resources. That we are pulled along by this inevitability is what makes the film compelling, and Anderson sees his task as waking us up to the fact, shoving our noises in it, and sending us out repulsed by the underlying fact of our daily existence. These things are hard to achieve artfully, but the film is a complete piece of work, and it both arrives at and reflects a very important place in time in which we, going forward, can either resign ourselves to the violence and filth that is oil or seek to replace it with something else, remembering the whole time the story of the stuff and its permanent repercussions.
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