There Will Be Blood, 2007

 In my interpretation of this film, it presents statements on two broad categories of meaning: the first being the nature and interaction of two great American “religions”; the second, aspects of the personal human condition. 

First, a brief summary. There Will Be Blood is an adaptation of an Upton Sinclair novel about oil, although that is about as much as I know about that novel. The main character, Daniel Plainview (played by Daniel Day-Lewis), is an oil wildcatter in the U.S. Southwest working in the late 1890s through 1920s. He’s an extremely driven but damaged individual, a serious alcoholic. He works with his young adopted son, H.W., an orphan whose father was a colleague of Daniel’s killed in an oil rig accident. 

Daniel is told of a very promising oil field in Southern California by a poor resident boy of the area, prompting Daniel to go there and speak with the boy’s family. It is here that we meet one of the other primary characters, the first boy’s identical twin brother Eli, an aspiring preacher. Daniel must struggle against many impediments arrayed against him - the vagaries of nature and drilling, Eli’s growing religious movement, competition with other wildcatters and the big oil giants like Standard Oil, as well as his own significant inner demons. Through a mix of luck, cunning, and determination, Daniel succeeds - he discovers an enormously productive oil field, builds a pipeline to the sea, gets his product to market, and becomes a fabulously wealthy man. 

Along the way, several key narratives occur which are dripping in symbolic meaning. These are: Daniel’s rivalry with Eli, relationship with H.W., and relationship with Henry.

First, consider the rivalry with Eli. While Daniel is a powerful and self-controlled man, Eli is portrayed as weak and emotional. He claims to be a healer who can commune with God to some degree, and has sufficient charisma to develop a devoted following first in the small town and later to large audiences as a radio preacher. Eli attempts to blackmail and control Daniel via his religious influence over the people, and is somewhat successful, but Daniel’s stronger nerves and harder ruthlessness render Eli’s task impossible. Nonetheless, Daniel doesn’t stamp out Eli completely, and Eli’s movement grows up alongside the oil industry. This may be because of the usefulness of the religious belief as a legitimating force for the oil work, or out of fear for a worse backlash. At one point, Daniel accepts baptism from Eli in order to continue his work despite having previously mocked Eli for his powerlessness and false prophesying. 

I believe the film portrays capitalism and Christianity as two competitive yet codependent religions or ideologies at play in the American setting. Their interaction is what determines the course of American progress. Both ideologies are presented in their highly Americanized versions - Christianity through the fire and brimstone evangelical revivalism of Eli that is spiritually a direct ancestor to the political evangelicalism of today, and capitalism through the rugged individualism and cutthroat brutality that created our industrialized economy. While the two ideologies are largely at odds due to their differing assumptions about and goals within the world, they each have their ardent and fervent ideologues and proselytizers who wish to change the world to fit the demands of their faith. 

Yet the two movements also enable and strengthen each other despite the differences, as seen by Eli’s wish to bless on the oil rig, and Daniel’s funding of Eli’s church. It is an uneasy alliance filled with contradictions, but profitable for both sides. In the end, the film pulls down Christianity from any pretense to a higher moral position, down into the muck of all too human motivations like greed, ambition, desire, etc, when Eli petitions Daniel for money and is willing to call God a superstition to get it.

As mentioned in the opening line of the essay, aside from the interaction between capitalism and Christianity in America, I believe the film explores some universal elements of the human condition through Daniel.

Why does Daniel search for an enormous oil discovery? Despite all my discussion about capitalism, it doesn’t seem to be greed per se that drives Daniel. He explicitly states in the film that he hates other people and wants to have enough money to be far away from them. He also says there is a competition within him, and several times in the film we see how strongly he is motivated by competing with and moreover overcoming or besting the other oil men, especially the larger companies. While some commentaries online claim that this internal competition is a statement about Daniel’s fully internalized capitalist ideology, I think this competition within him is a psychological artifact that Daniel uses to help himself explain why he hates other people, while in fact it is all really a hate of himself.

There is certainly a great deal of self hatred within Daniel. His degree of alcoholism is one that pursues self obliviation and self harm. We know that Daniel possesses some degree of compassion, as evidenced by his saving H.W. and raising him as his son. But that compassion is trampled and forgotten by Daniel’s competitiveness, leading him to cause suffering in the pursuit of his goal. He’s even willing to abandon his son to continue the work on the oil rig by sending him away to a deaf school after H.W.’s ears are damaged in an accident. The small degree of compassion shows Daniel is not totally depraved and totally gone, and it is what makes him able to recognize the evils in himself and in his deeds - it’s what makes him hate those things in himself.

We also see a mirror held up to Daniel upon the arrival of Henry, the man who pretends to be his brother. Henry employs the same methods as Daniel in order to gain an advantage in the world - he lies, steals, and cheats, even though he does seem to be a somewhat kind and loyal man. In a moment of clarity, when Daniel sees the lies in Henry, he murders him, possibly due to the fact that those things that Daniel hates in Henry are within him as well. Symbolically, Daniel attempts to murder himself.

I don’t think Daniel likes any of this about himself, this willingness to destroy in the name of his drive, but he isn’t able or willing to really admit or recognize the character of the dynamic. So he blames and hates other people for it, and finds solace in the self oblivion and self harm of the bottle. He wants to get away from other people and no longer compete with them, no longer destroy them.

The film ends as a tragedy. In the late 1920s, at the end of Daniel’s career, he is a very wealthy man living alone in his mansion, drinking himself to death. His son H.W. visits him to inform him of his ambition to start his own company and pursue his own career. Daniel is furious and reveals that H.W. was a “bastard in a basket” rather than his real son. H.W. seems to be a more honest and upright version of Daniel, and I think Daniel doesn’t want to see that version of himself succeed in the form of H.W., for that would put into question the necessity of his own evils and demons that Daniel leveraged and appeased to win his own success. Afterwards, when Eli visits Daniel, groveling and begging for money, Daniel humiliates him, forces him to admit that God is a superstition (thus ending the yearslong dance between them) and then kills Eli. Daniel’s final words in the film are “I’m finished!” in response to a call from his butler who is about to enter the scene of the murder.