A bloody oil film
By
Saul Landau and Farrah Hassen Read Spanish Version
“I
see the worst in people,” confesses self-made oil man Daniel
Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) in director Paul Thomas Anderson’s
gritty California epic, “There Will Be Blood.” This statement
alone should warn audiences that they should proceed cautiously
before identifying with this protagonist. The opening of the film
shows a minutes-long, no-dialogue sequence of Plainview mining for
silver under harsh conditions and breaking a leg without uttering a
complaint. So intensely does he feel the need to find mineral wealth
that extreme physical suffering offers no obstacle. The abrasive
sounds of mining and the sight of men working invoke John Huston’s
“Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” “Blood” should remind studios
that audiences don’t need flashy cuts or intricately choreographed
violence and special effects to get lured into the drama of a movie.
Beyond
Daniel Day-Lewis’ resolute, verging on maniacal eyes — the way he
sees Plainview — the literate audience might well note
characteristics of John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon, Andrew
Carnegie, Edward H. Harriman, William Randolph Hearst and their
modern equivalents, the CEOs of ENRON, Halliburton and Blackwater —
men who played vital, supporting roles in the evolving production
(drama or dark comedy?) of American capitalism and its expanding
empire.
Like
the earlier and real 19th
Century Robber Barons — or industrial statesman in the greed-is-good
texts — the fictional Plainview accumulated his fortune from
1898-1927 through determination, manipulation, ruthlessness
(including cold-blooded murder) and an unwavering focus on wealth and
power.
He
does show human emotion in his concern for his adopted son H.W.
(Dillon Freasier), who he uses to help hustle local ranchers and
farmers who might have oil under their land. H.W.’s cherubic face
gives authenticity so this vicious fraud can better push his aura of
“honest family man” on the yokels. When H.W. loses his hearing
after an accident on his father’s newly acquired oil well
(ironically named after a sweet-looking, local young girl and friend
of H.W., Mary Sunday) and becomes a behavioral problem, Plainview
sends him away to a boarding school.
Without
H.W.’s presence, Plainview’s already weak relationship with the
rest of humanity — sanity — begins to slip. He drinks and grows
more obsessed with accumulating oil leases and drilling on them.
Picture a wealthy, well-dressed Fred C. Dobbs instead of the grubby
Humphrey Bogart character who loses his fortune in “Treasure of
Sierra Madre.” In B. Traven’s novel by that name, gold obsessed
men, which eroded their morality. In “Blood,” oil replaces the
more lustrous metal as the corrupter of Plainview’s soul! His
craving for wealth in the form of this black, viscous goop leaves no
space in his mind or soul for love, compassion or God.
In
the film’s script, those who believe in God get suckered not only
by Plainview’s promises, but by their own preacher as well. The
fundamentalist, country preacher uses Jesus as his avenue to wealth
and power. Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a baby-faced evangelical whose
father owns land that Plainview wants for oil drilling, emerges as
another cultural epigone. The stem-winding sermons of the late 17th
Century Great Awakening preachers led to a tradition of religious
fakers. Sinclair Lewis made Elmer Gantry his protagonist in a 1927
novel by that name, showing how false piety combined with Fire and
Brimstone sermonizing could bamboozle a poor, uneducated and anxious
flock. Just think of the Jerry Falwells, Pat Robertsons and Ted
Haggards of our era!
Plainview
doesn’t fall for this malarkey. He convinces the Sunday family to
sell their ranch to him, under the condition stipulated by preacher
Eli that oil funds will go toward funding a church to bless the local
community.
Plainview
despises the hocus pocus in this young character. Indeed, he loathes
in Eli huckster qualities that he himself possesses. In one memorable
scene during a church service highlighting the seeming disconnect yet
parallel lives between the two characters, a self-possessed Eli
attempts to exorcise the devil — in the form of crippling arthritis
— from an old woman. The film cuts to Plainview, shaking his head in
admiring disbelief over the success of the young preacher’s
theatrics.
Plainview
eschewed God, women and friends. He worshipped the God of oil, the
slithery fuel of the industrial empire that cannot unlink itself from
personal riches, power and modern war. Preacher Sunday had no
drilling knowledge, so he used God’s name to fuel his own empire of
spiritual gibberish.
By
the turn of the 20th
Century, as Anderson visually demonstrates, oil and religion had
established themselves as twin pillars of U.S. culture, politics and
empire. At this time in history, the Rockefellers oozed their way
into Venezuelan oil. In 1895, John D. also bought a railroad in
Manchuria, for a piddling $5 million. He quickly discovered, as did
the U.S. government, that such a trivial amount of money invested in
poor countries would provide enormous political clout. Such outlays
in Latin America, the Caribbean and parts of Asia in the late 19th
and first decade of the 20th
Century marked important steps for U.S. entry into the world as an
imperial power.
At
home, the Robber Barons preached “the gospel of wealth,” what
steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie defined as the prevalence of uninhibited
capitalism that would magically allow the most able and moral people
to make fortunes. These noble souls would then use the profits for
society’s benefit. This wrinkle on Christ’s teachings served as a
justification for the Robber Barons to do anything necessary to
maximize profits.
In
1913, coal miners struck against inhuman labor conditions in the
Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, the region’s
largest operator of coal mines. The company hired armed goons who
killed more than sixty people. The strike lasted into 1914, when the
hired strikebreakers on Easter night, at a mining encampment in
Ludlow, Colorado, murdered three women and eleven children. The
“Ludlow massacre,” as it became known, revealed the rapacious
lengths to which Rockefeller would go to preserve his control over
his operations.
After
decades of murdering workers and destroying incipient unions by
assassinating organizers and militants, after plundering the land and
what lay underneath, after bribing officials to get public favors to
increase their fortunes, Carnegie, Rockefeller et al. hired PR people
who promoted them as philanthropists and religious men. Some even
funded Missionaries to bring “God’s word” to the heathens in
Asia and Latin America — a “word” that insisted coincidentally
on ruthless capitalism as inherently Christian.
Plainview,
in the name of “development,” offers to buy-out — uproot —
local community members from their generations-old plots of land to
benefit the whole community. He assures the Sunday family, “if we
find oil, this community will flourish.” But the promise of new
schools, churches, better roads and shopping opportunities (think of
Wal-Mart) cannot disguise the uglier, personal and environmental
risks. “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,” the 1988 live-action and
animated film about the demise of LA’s public transportation
system, illustrated a similar point — only a toon could cook up
“that lame-brained freeway idea,” concludes the film’s
protagonist Eddie Valiant, alluding to corporate maneuvers to
dismantle the U.S. public transportation system and replace it with
freeways for cars.
“Blood”
shows the danger in drilling itself. A casual accident causes the
instant death of an oil worker; the Mary Sunday well bursts into
flames and a menacing black cloud hovers over the town in the
aftermath. In case the audience missed the significance, director
Anderson uses Radiohead lead guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s
unsettling, pulsating musical score mixed with drumming, thumping and
buzzing violins to drill the message home.
The
town’s residents stare in horror. But Plainview sees the black gold
lining. “There’s a whole ocean of oil under our feet,” he
exclaims, in an ecstasy of avarice. “No one can get at it except
for me!”
“Blood’s”
reoccurring dissonant sound is juxtaposed by cinematographer Robert
Elswit’s sweeping, ethereal shots of pristine California land —
all just waiting to be seized by speculators! In the film’s opening
sequence, the camera zooms in on a worker reverently smearing a dab
of newly discovered oil onto his baby’s forehead, mimicking a
priest’s conduct on Ash Wednesday. The pure born had become
tainted. Anderson relies on such metaphors to draw cinematic
portraits of greed and extremism. Loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s
1927 novel “Oil,” but without the tendentious muckraking spirit,
“There Will Be Blood” implicitly warns against fanatics in an era
when one form of that breed occupies the White House and other major
mountebanks consume countless daily hours of TV and radio time.
In
the end the fanatics meet, as older men possessing exaggerated
characteristics of their younger days – the religious huckster and
the monomaniacal oil baron. As the title warns metaphorically, when
such characters dominate the cultural and economic landscape of a
nation, “There Will Be Blood!”
Did
the film director intend to use blood as a biblical allegory? “I
will leave your flesh on the mountains, and fill the valleys with
your carcass. I will water the land with what flows from you, and the
river beds shall be filled with your blood. When I snuff you out I
will cover the heavens, and all the stars will darken.” (Ezekiel
32:5-7 NAB)
Saul
Landau is
an Institute for Policy Studies Fellow.
Read
his
A
BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD.
See
his WE
DON’T PLAY GOLF HERE
on DVD through roundworldproductions@gmail.com.
Farrah Hassen is the Carol and Ed Newman Fellow of the Institute for
Policy Studies. She can be reached at fhuisclos1944@aol.com
