Alice as "The Common People" watches the trust giants terrorize Wonderland.From the Library of Congress--Anti-Trust cartoon, 1903
P. T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is a slow, methodical, treacherous triumph. In its march toward an absurd and seemingly inevitable violent climax (in the form of a cartoonish and bizarre finale), we see a gritty, gory film that is equal parts enamored of and disgusted with itself—much like the characters it showcases and the capitalists and evangelical Christians that it skewers.
For several years unable to produce anything that he felt was up to Anderson Standards, word on the street (or at least in my Fall Movie Preview issue of Entertainment Weekly) is that PTA started writing this script as an exercise to end his writer’s block. Using Upton Sinclair’s Oil! as a starting point, he quickly veered off course into the symbolic territory of a fight between capitalism and evangelism for the sudden and astronomical wealth prompted by the discovery of oil (and, to a larger extent, a fight between the two for an adolescent America coming into its own and truly understanding the power if its financial muscle for the first time). This exploration is probably more poignant today than the original message behind Oil! would have been—I think the book was actually about the plight of socialism and organizing workers (though I haven’t read it, so I’m trusting Wikipedia on this one). In any case, both the capitalists and the wacky Christians in this movie are, it seems, representative of a variety of societal evils in their own charming ways—while the capitalist is constantly trying to brush aside the needy, whiny, ravenous churchgoers, the congregation is in turn trying to incorporate the selfish, greedy capitalist into its fold to reap the benefits. It’s like a shark and a pilot fish, but the shark is trying to dismember the pilot fish instead of letting it come along for the ride, and the pilot fish is trying to suck the shark’s blood.
PTA has said something along the lines of “I like this movie fine, but I’m more interested in the mystery project that I’m currently working on.” (Or something like that.) But I think it’s telling that you can’t really sense this ambivalence when watching Blood—it seems as though PTA has poured all of his heart and his bitterness into this project. It’s beautiful in its violence and in its moment of familial tenderness, and some of the shots are, really, just perfect—And I like that Anderson had a complex relationship with his protagonists, seeming to both love and hate them, relishing long shots of their monologues but also taking pains to see them beat, broken, and humiliated.
Blood follows the emotional and financial rollercoaster that is the main character’s life, a handsome, lean, and wiry Daniel Day Lewis as Daniel Plainview, focusing mostly on the years in which he develops an oil field in a small, Southern Californian town, peopled partly by a small but earnest group of the faithful and their beloved Church of the Third Revelation (with its spooky, soft-spoken boy-reverend Eli). Although this movie is very much about the fight between Daniel’s greed and the religious group that’s just as good at duping people as he is and wants some of the action, it is also simply a close study of Daniel’s character. The film slowly, unhurriedly explores the huge reserves of insanity that lay just beneath Daniel’s surface, waiting (like the slick, black, crude oil) to erupt into a firey column of destruction if penetrated in the wrong (or right) way, by the right (or wrong) person. Certainly the movie begins to meander a bit at the end, going off on long tangents about a long lost brother of Daniel’s and Daniel’s relationship with his severely injured son , and culminating in two drawn out, painful final scenes that at first glance make close to no sense at all. But the film cleaves to Daniel—he’s in almost every shot of every scene—so this loss of focus makes sense. I can’t fault the film for being so misguided and stumbly at the end because it’s Daniel who’s losing his mind, and the movie is just following along because it has no choice.
Coming away from the film, I found that at first I could only remember the last 20 minutes—I was obsessively trying to make sense of the finale, and so for a while I forgot to remember how incredible the filmmaking of the majority of the movie was. The shots have a wonderful way of inhibiting the viewer—often the audience is forced to just stare at Daniel, in various forms (oil drenched, fire-lit, grinning, teeth clenched during a baptism), with barely a glimpse at the surrounding scenery. Sometimes this is just due to the commanding presence of DDL as an actor—he is, very often, impossible NOT to look at. But in many scenes, the camera is trained on Daniel’s face and we cannot look away, even if we want to. For example, toward the beginning of the film there’s a scene in which Daniel is talking to a town hall meeting after the discovery of oil there. He makes several claims—about his history as an oil man, the family business he runs with his son, etc.—politicking for the town’s sympathy, support, and trust. For several painful minutes Anderson reveals no further visual clues about the setting—we can hear the yells and jeers of a crowd to our back, but have no chance to see the melee in which we have been placed. The camera is stuck to Daniel (and briefly his glassy eyed son H. W. next to him), and we watch as he nods, smiles, turns serious, laughs, gestures, and sweats (lone droplets curving through the scruff of his facial hair), and finally gets up to leave. This is suspense at its most subtle and frustrating.
The shots of oil, poured into heaping, steaming bowls of earth, are sensuous and disgusting. The violence is real and dirty (literally). Daniel Day Lewis is hypnotizing and repulsive. With a brilliant (and sometimes haunting) debut by Dillon Freasier as Daniel's son, H. W., and a less brilliant but still compelling performance by Paul Dano as the nut job “prophet” (and maybe also his twin brother?), the film isn’t just carried by one man—but it is mostly on his shoulders and he delivers with the mustachioed excellence audiences should expect following The Gangs of New York. The moral of this story: If you have a script and a director good enough to coax DDL out of the Italian shoe shop where he works for the majority of the year, you might as well stick a mustache on him because it will probably triple the value of his performance.
Throughout the story we see that Daniel is just waiting for an opportunity to go crazy—his lunatic threats to the Standard Oil men and his near drowning of Eli in mud, for example—so it is no surprise that when the film jumps ahead by about 20 years, we find him thoroughly mired in the warm haze of his insane greed. I wouldn’t like the final scenes at all (which seem over the top and disjointed) EXCEPT that I feel that they aspire to something more than just a manifestation of how loco Daniel has become. In fact, I find I can only understand (or at least, I can only like) the last 20 minutes of Blood if I view them as a reinterpretation of traditional political caricature and cartoon art. Just as the movie is symbolic of the slow, inevitable, and crushing march of capitalism and its battle with earnest-as-hell evangelical Christians, the final scene is symbolic of the way in which greedy oil tyrants were portrayed in print art during the early 20th century.
Daniel Day Lewis’s goofy, over the top acting in and the setting of these final scenes recall cartoons of the early 1900s of the industry kings (like Rockefeller and Vanderbilt), fat off the land they have raped, now pulling the strings they have in the government and suppressing small business start-ups (the same start-ups that their success encouraged—like the damaged and despised H.W.).
Take the scene where Daniel really starts to lose it—he does a little chicken dance with one hand above his head and the other behind him that is both laughable and terrifying. Here we see the same violence with a funny edge that epitomizes early American caricature art at its best (and creepiest).
'The Modern Bird of American Freedom', in 'The Verdict', 1900Both the dialogue and the imagery in these scenes are made up of cartoonish moments—You can just see a caricatured Daniel (thin, gangly, and magnificently mustached) sticking a long straw across a restaurant into Eli’s milkshake, maybe with the caption “All’s fair in love and drainage!” Then, as he begins to rampage in his madness, he yells, perplexingly, “I’m going to eat you!” Now, just take that line and put it in a caption below the image of Daniel only a few minutes earlier, gnawing on his steaks. He takes the same gulping bites of the cold slabs of meat, pausing every now and then to remove the gristle from his teeth, except imagine that this time the steaks are labeled “Impoverished Christians” and “Small Farming Communities.”
Interestingly, in most of the anti-big business cartoons of this era, it is Standard Oil that is demonized (as a many-armed octopus, or a many-headed, ravenous cow, etc.). In Blood, Standard Oil comes across as bit smarmy, sure, but they’re also clean, crisp, and honest about their intentions (however greedy). They don’t get riled up when provoked and their business dealings seem fair and straightforward. They are out to make a dollar, but at least they let you know it in advance, whereas Daniel’s m.o. is to “straight talk” the people from whom he is buying land into selling it for far beneath its value, spinning lies about great schools and housing improvements, making the deal sound more like an investment than a sale. Although it’s the entrepeneur, the little guy, that most of these political cartoons ask you to root for, in Blood it is this character, so symbolic of the American spirit, that is the blood-thirsty, shameless, ruthless tyrant.
Standard Oil reaches out its many arms--early 1900s anti-Trust cartoon. From the Library of Congress.
