Was talking with some friends recently and one of them told me that he never got more than a few minutes into There Will Be Blood because he found it boring and seemingly lifeless, if not completely pointless, for all its masterfully-rendered portent. This opinion haunts me like the shingles, flaring up whenever I think I’m about to enjoy a relaxing evening. Also like the shingles one day the flare-up will occur directly in my grey matter and kill me. But before that happens I must defend Paul Thomas Anderson’s wonderful film. Let’s get to work.

A Quick Defense of There Will Be Blood

Roger Ebert provided what has become a fairly common take on There Will Be Blood in his 2008 review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s fifth feature. In the review, the legendary Movie Opinion Haver said that Anderson’s film “is easily called great. I am not sure of its greatness… in its imperfections (its unbending characters, its lack of women or any reflection of ordinary society, its ending, its relentlessness) we may see its reach exceeding its grasp.” He then did that thing you do when you want to equivocate but you also want to sound smart while you’re equivocating because he immediately followed that assessment with the tempering and mollifying, and maybe even a little bit hedging, appendage that having a reach that exceeds your grasp “is not a dishonorable thing.” This is basically how a smart person says “I’m pretty sure this movie is a fart in the wind, but my word what a rip.” Such a butt-and-fart-based analysis of There Will Be Blood has, like I said, become a fairly rote talking point; it’s like saying that Nickelback sucks, or that ham is good. But while I can see why people would alight upon this opinion I think it’s fundamentally off-base and misses a genius, however uncomfortably rendered that genius may be, that runs throughout the story, a deeper reading that renders its ostensible story deliberately inadequate, and in the contrast making its truer, viler narrative more grossly fascinating.

Let’s Just Lay It Out There

I try to avoid a couple of things in defending or explicating movies because they always strike me as reductive and insulting to the complicated nature and thrilling emotional depth of a film. Things like “you have to understand that x actually represents y” or some belabored conceit (“I want you to pretend that the movie is a boat. Do you see the waves? Those waves represent conflict, but also opportunity. Now, if you’ll just look at this Venn Diagram…”) don’t just come across as smug and douchey but also imply that you can solve a movie the way you would an equation, as if there is some answer that will make the whole thing click. I don’t think that life or movies really work like that. I don’t even think math works like that. But in this case damned if I don’t keep coming back to the same belabored conceit every time I try to explain what I mean when I talk about the movie’s “truer, viler” narrative. So let’s just use the fucking thing and hopefully I can make the rhetorical device less clunky in the offering: There Will Be Blood is basically a horror story wearing the pelt of a recently-slayed hero’s journey. The ostensible narrative that so many find lacking (a somber meditation on greed! and family! and the birth of modern American capitalism! and religion, oh, yeah, religion!) can better be understood as a weak and bloody disguise that doesn’t exactly, uh, achieve much verisimilitude, as the dead outer coat keeps sidling back and forth, eye holes never quite matching up and, oh, yeah, the monster underneath is much larger than the skin it’s trying to hide under (whether the partially-obscured narrative is simply too feral to understand that its disguise is inadequate or is actually smart as hell and just doing it to fuck with everyone is never specified, which works to the movie’s morbid benefit). The much more engaging story is the story of the thing lurking underneath the ruins of the traditional narrative, and how this newer and darker creature obliterated any attempt at a “real” hero’s journey simply by virtue of its own size, and how focusing on the movie as a whole on those (admittedly esoteric) terms and through that lens makes the film’s run-time more coherent, chilling, and engaging. And I think there is real evidence for this reading, so much so that I’m confident I’m not just over-analyzing things, and that I will now try to prove with section names I have thought about far too much.

Mouths That Open From Nothing to Nowhere

One of the specific pieces of evidence that this friend, this Haver of Troublesome Opinions, offered up to me was the observation that the movie just starts. Daniel Plainview is introduced in profile already swinging his pickaxe with a furious and nearly inhuman tattoo that seems to imply he’s been at this, creepily indefatigable, for a long-ass time. There’s no context, no introduction, no backstory, nothing tragic about him, no wife or children mentioned (ones will be fabricated eventually, but that of course doesn’t count). Right off the bat, my friend was telling me, he had nothing to grab onto as a viewer. And I think this is a valid point! If you are trying to hitch yourself to the traditional narrative structure then this movie gives you no hand-holds. But I don’t think that’s an accidental failure on Anderson’s part. I think the inaccessible beginning (and middle, and end) of this movie is brilliant and deliberate, because it is establishing the geometry of the real story, one that is so fucking large and disturbingly outside the possible parameters of any film, even one epic in scope and runtime, that there can be no handhold, only the sliding and grating of more human behaviors (like pickaxing, or dragging your busted ass across the desert) along the massive canvas of its body. The real monster being portrayed in this movie is just too damn big to ever access, to understand, so we (understandably) alight on trying to access and understand Plainview, but he’s so indoctrinated, so enraptured by the presence that lurks behind the events of the movie that he’s equally inaccessible, and frustrations mount. It’s when you understand the movie’s bizarrely flat structure as a form of reverence (or possibly submission) to the nearly Lovecraftian horror always at work behind its more immediate conflict that things start to get juicy.

And this continues. Plainview is a bearded prospector in 1898 chipping away at rock in search of something precious. Years immediately jump by and he’s a little better groomed and a lot better off and now has his joyfully mean and completely polarized eyes set on oil. A few more years go by and he’s well-established, at least locally, and is wearing both a fine tweed suit and the stolen life of a child as he peddles his reassuringly devil-like presence to stupid people. This all happens quickly and without commentary, which is frustrating as hell to viewers. Where’s the scene where H.W. asks him uncomfortable questions, and Plainview is forced to reckon with how much evil he has already done, and done still so early in the story? Why is everything just glossed indifferently over? I think about this as time, like most action, being rendered insignificant on purpose. The “true” story, the one my brain always alights on, is one of an intoxicating, fully inhuman presence that has been unloosed, has consumed Plainview, and guides him through the actions of the story in a way that is completely ignorant of how a story is “supposed” to be told. We’re watching mold grow, or a body decay. There are no bumps or hand-holds, only a process you are meant to be disturbed by, whose inhumanness is manifest, which simply grows over and obscures, denies from us as viewers, any kind of context or readability.

An Entire Family Born Outside

And this notion of everything being subordinate to the monster includes Plainview himself. He’s a human vessel for the presence, and the one the camera, you know, follows around, so we call him our protagonist. But he’s just one of many limbs doing the work of the invisible body, and in my estimation is not held in higher or lower esteem than anything or anyone else. It’s only from the literal requirements of how the story must be told (i.e., the camera has to follow someone) that he becomes our “protagonist.” Plainview, the uniquely Western conception of capitalism, the discontinuities (Paul? Eli?) of the world they live in are all indoctrinated limbs of the monster. Lives are simply rewritten, rules are overrun with indifference. H.W. has his life reconstituted, like shards of metal rearranging themselves in a powerful enough magnetic field, to better fit the whims of the monster. Plainview just kind of says things, reality to him being completely insignificant outside of “what will better facilitate the growth of the poison” (I realize this can be chalked up to him simply being a sociopath who is trying to make a sale, but there is such a weird sonorousness to his lies, and the scenes are filmed with such unnerving implication, like there is a phantom tongue talking just behind his more immediate one, that it always makes me think of a deeper prerogative for his behavior). An outsider – poor fucking moron – tries to get in on the alternate-reality magic but he hasn’t breathed the fumes, doesn’t disbelieve in reality enough to replace wide swaths of it with his own (or something else’s) whims and will. He can’t make himself monstrous enough because the monster hasn’t inhabited him, and when the real monster smells him out…

(The next segment would, under normal circumstances, be about the existing power structures bearing witness to the rise of the monster, and how they respond to it, and their inevitable defeat at the hands (tendrils?) of said monster. And then somewhere after that I’d comment on the soundtrack. But the score to this movie is too good – and I think helps facilitate my point enough – that I’m bumping it up one.)

Sounds of An Alien Birth

I keep talking about the “real” movie hiding behind the ostensible one, and how its presence can be felt by degrees, indirectly, by tracing curious and seemingly incongruous moments back to the source. I don’t think there’s a better example anywhere in the movie of this occurrence than that genius fucking score. The closer we come to the monster’s presence being felt at any given moment the more Jonny Greenwood’s all-time great soundtrack flares disturbingly and with disproportionate presence into the aural foreground. That score is like a fucking Geiger counter for monstrous intent. And it is used so wonderfully improperly that I really think it’s done on purpose. Scenes that should be triumphant (Plainview and his crew hauling up a manual drill that is drenched in oil after its most recent drop, proving that they’ve struck it rich) are instead awash in this hideously alien sound, reminding us that none of this is good. As Plainview’s business expands throughout the movie (flatly, un-constricted in any real capacity, ignoring the usual pitfalls-and-roadblocks approach that you’d see in, you know, a movie) it is set to a score that just kind of wails like a dying animal, like something terrible is being birthed. Having your soundtrack act as counterpoint to the events on the screen is nothing new in cinema, but the harrowing, inhuman mournfulness that accompanies growth and movement and character and touch and even the slightest trace of incipient feeling is done so masterfully that you can practically see one of the monsters legs stepping into frame and pushing back off again whenever those damn instruments play.

Lesser Predators and the End of the Old Magic

There’s a scene in Unforgiven where English Bob, a feared badman in his native country, comes to America with a bit of pomp swirling about him. A gentleman gunhand, rolling towards a town built entirely on the proudly unimaginative parameters of the old American West? Well, here comes the culture and the hard hands, boys, because English Bob is going to teach you manners while keeping every last speck of dirt off of his ivory handles! Prepare to encounter what cultured violence can do, you filth-loving reductionists! Anyway, he rolls into town and promptly gets his shit ruined in a way that he not only didn’t see coming but clearly didn’t think it was possible, basic rules of human engagement and empathy just kind of assumed to be in place to prevent even the worst and humiliating ass-tattooing from descending too deep into the “medieval, just because we can” territory.

I think about that scene a lot when Standard Oil comes to town to try and buy out Plainview. They are the worst and most driven men they know, thinking – probably proudly – that they represent the apex of capitalism’s capacity for both progress and cruelty, the kind of people who enjoy reading about robber barons because who doesn’t want to see their name in Harper’s Weekly? They’re going to go out to this backwater area and its backwater “business people” and strangle them with the erudite and mostly indifferent gloves of a more gentlemanly-cruel capitalism, the kind that ruins you while squeezing your back shoulder affectionately, possibly even leaving you a little something left over after the robber-baron-ing is over, because aren’t they supposed to be gentleman monsters? Anyway, just like with English Bob the best-laid plans of smug, smug men go shit sideways and Plainview scares the entourage into nearly fleeing the meeting site as he at one point, flatly and brusquely – with an almost primal tick turning his sonorously cruel voice even more violent than usual – tells one of the men that he’s going to slit the out-of-towner’s throat. This is not a depth to which they thought a conversation could descend, and they are helpless and scared shitless. They are seeing something, like English Bob did, that they not only haven’t seen before, but didn’t think was possible.

“Yes, yes,” the viewer says, “another scene of how unapproachable and nearly inhuman Daniel Plainview is. I’ll file it away with the others.” But I think the way in which he doesn’t just negotiate with the men, how he instead disturbs them, and how it is these men in particular chosen by the film to receive this bizarre welcome to the West, is a telling decision with a lot more depth than “scene #2421 of Plainview reminding us he is a sociopath.” Anderson is deliberately introducing the extant and ubiquitous status quo – the unseen but constantly referenced, if not feared and revered Standard Oil –out here in this place where the fucking darkness has been unleashed, so smugly thinking that they will dominate this locale like they dominate everything else, only to turn tail and run like fucking Shaggy and Scooby when they realize the house is l-l-l-l-like totally haunted, man. We’re not just watching another empty scene: the bile is rising, and is starting to go national.

Which brings us to Paul, and the church. If we’re talking existing power structures and the way those power structures operate and the response those power structures have to whatever the fuck Daniel Plainview is (above and beyond merely being a sociopath) then the church is clearly the closest thing to what our friendly murderer-prospector has become, or is being controlled by, which makes their interactions even more interesting than the ones with Standard Oil. The church in this movie is a soft-shoe grift meant to imply not just intimacy with the monster, but more essential still the capacity to control it (for three easy payments of $19.99!). None of these showmen, these practitioners have truly encountered the monster before, wouldn’t know what to make of it if they saw it, but stories exist out in the timber, and if you throw a little opportunity for human redemption amidst the power of destruction latent in this undeveloped world then, bam, prosperous new church, and a whole flock of gooey-eyed followers. Notice how Plainview mocks this whole construct, especially during his final confrontation with Paul. He doesn’t denigrate the huckster for trying to control people, he mocks him for being such a (sorry) little pussy about it, for the shrill voices and the dances and the hugging of old women and the pandering and the storytelling. Plainview or the presence behind him isn’t disgusted by the thirst for control he’s disgusted by the method of control being little more than song and dance and misdirection – the need for attention, for theatrics, all satisfying some vile human need that prevents Paul and his ilk from any type of real ascension into the gloriously-freeing madness that Plainview enjoys. Plainview is inhabited by the spirit; Paul pretends he is. Of course he crushes his fucking head with a bowling pin.

So What’s the Point?

There have been other movies about a fundamentally broken presence or person haunting its frames. Nightcrawler is a recent one that springs to mind, and it is brilliant. But that movie still feels the need to accommodate the audience’s expectation, to give the film a point – however darkly satiric that point may be – to make the viewing experience smoother and more familiar. Gyllenhaal’s character does follow the hero’s journey from down-on-his-luck-protagonist to top-of-his-game big boy, and while this is done in a very dark way as a commentary on the industry he’s in and society at large it’s still telling that the movie wants to keep him incased in familiar narrative structures – i.e., to make sure there is a point the audience can keep coming back to for reference and, let’s call it narrative orientation. There Will Be Blood lets its conception of the monster loose with such abandon that the fucking thing just kind of blows the parameters of the movie into shreds with the meagerest movements of its body, and it is disorienting and terrifying and casts us down this alternative route of “progress” in the story that resembles more a virus eating away at a body – steadily, unrelentingly, without commentary or passion – than any type of undulating, highs-and-lows narrative structure that you might be more familiar with. This is not a hero’s journey: it is the unnarrated ascension of some darker instinct from conception to control. It was there even before we saw Plainview swinging that pickaxe – that was just our first unobstructed view of the creature’s influence on men and women and the world at large. It is clearly implied to be growing still even after the end, after Paul’s brains has been mopped up and disposed of and the boy forgotten by time. There’s no reason to believe, because this presence is not confined to the time-and-space limitations that Plainview’s own “arc” is subject to, that the bile hasn’t already made its way back east nestled in the coats and in the eyes and in the minds of the men he defeated at the negotiating table all those years ago, hungrily looking forward to its next ascension, which will again occur with complete indifference to narrative structure.

The End

I don’t think that what I’ve offered is some kind of solution to enjoying the movie, or that you’re watching it “wrong” if you don’t jive with my reading or share the context of my emotional relationship with the film, and I’m still more than a little wigged out at how closely my self-consciously smarty-pants blog post is trending towards being the written version of a YouTube “The TRUE Story of Modern Family, Explained (It is Disgusting)!!!” video. Hell, you might agree wholeheartedly with my reading but still feel that the movie fails even on these darker merits and parameters, or that the proposal I’m making, while real, is a sad and empty substitute for a more traditional narrative, one that would have gotten these same points across while grabbing you more. But I’ve never been able to shake the notion, even from the first time I watched the film, that I was actually watching this weird, invisible, Lovecraftian body moving about the frame and influencing all of the visible behaviors, to the point where I started to kind of just not see the more familiar narrative for all guts and tendrils I assumed it had been blown to. Ultimately, I’m just grateful that Anderson has given us such a challenging film – for whatever reason it turned out so challenging – and wish more people would give it a shot. It’s a damn fine picture, and well worth your time! Happy Fourth, everyone.