Lurching drunkenly through his bowling alley in his ragged clothes and greasy hair, immediately after proclaiming himself the Third Revelation and hurling bowling balls toward the screen, seconds before bludgeoning his nemesis to death with a bowling pin, Daniel Plainview bellows “I told you I would eat you!” This is the moment that has been lurking in wait throughout There Will Be Blood; every scene has portended its coming. It is the Absurd that was immanent in the film’s persistent, nearly static tone of apocalyptic foreboding; it is the rupture of that tonal stasis via a grandiloquent fit in which both the narrative and its protagonist achieve an almost cathartic self-annihilation.
At its most basic level, the film’s plot revolves around the modern clash between capitalism and religion. In the two central characters, Eli Sunday the preacher and Daniel Plainview the oil tycoon, religion is personified as self-righteous hypocrisy and business as swollen, vicious egoism. These broad archetypes and their mutual enmity are a simplistic characterization of complex social structures. But the story is more than a simple allegory or treatise on the failings of those structures: it is a myth dredged up from the American subconscious. Its archetypal characters come from nowhere (Plainview, in climbing out of a vertical mine shaft in the film’s first scene, literally issues forth from the earth) and are never involved with a larger social context. Historical details of the film’s time period are pointedly absent, as if the story takes place in an indefinite period of America’s monolithic past. A pivotal character is introduced almost as a figure from another world, appearing from unknown wanderings as does Satan in the Book of Job; soon afterward, we are introduced to another character that we must assume is his twin brother, but their relationship is left purposely ambiguous, their identities conflated, creating a feeling of textual indeterminateness and bringing to mind the differing versions of the Gospels and of God’s creation in Genesis.
Within this mood of mythic ambiguity, the cinematography and score create a palpable foreboding, a tension that awaits the film’s finale. Despite its “historical epic” lineage and the predominance of outdoor landscapes, the camera gives us few, if any, sweeping panoramas, and P.T. Anderson’s trademark visual flamboyance is entirely absent—instead we get mostly static shots or slow movements; with only a few pointed exceptions, we are sequestered in an interminable, arid stasis. Occasionally the characters are shot slightly out of focus, pointing again to their mythic instability and to the final moment of clarity awaiting them. (In one notable shot, an oil pipeline lies in the foreground, perfectly in focus, as the potentially emotional reunion of two central characters is left out of focus in the background.) The music, a triumph of atonality, with notes stretched to their breaking point or pitched with a feverish forward momentum, underscores each scene with a sense of impending doom. Only in the final scene are we given the smooth, glossy tracking shots that we expect from P.T. Anderson, and the glorious jubilance of Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D.
All of this is in service of the film’s central portrait: Daniel Plainview, the boundlessly driven, hate-filled oil man. As Plainview, Daniel Day-Lewis gives a performance that dominates the screen, creating a character of monstrous charisma with a voice of honey-coated gravel. Complementing his performance is some of the most memorable dialogue in recent memory, creating a larger-than-life vision of misanthropy. Plainview loathes people and society as a whole, purposely isolating himself from them, even as the success that he craves is inspired by common social goals of family and wealth. Because of his loathing, “the competition in him”, he won’t accept that these goals are part of a larger society and a tie to that society; instead, he perverts them by insisting that they must be his alone, that they must be part of a society that is solely for him. He craves personal relationships, with his son and his brother, but those relationships must be on his own terms; his family must be companions in arms against the world; as soon as they are not his, they are intolerable. He wants to build a house just like one in his home town, a symbol of success, but he wants it to bear no resemblance to the original—which, because it is another’s and not his, nauseates him. Of course, once removed from their meaning in a societal context, his social goals become meaningless. He draws his desires from society, but his hatred for that society makes him loath to accept the mores that accompany those desires. And though he is aware of this dilemma, as evidenced by his guilt at being accused of abandoning his son, he refuses to accept the values of the people around him, leaving him in a perpetual state of nihilism.
But, simultaneously, another view runs counter to this within Plainview: he actually does value what society does. He agrees with society’s ideals, but he is disgusted by its failure to live up to them; hence, his distaste for one character’s physical abuse of his daughter. Thus, the society that he desires for himself is no more than the idealized version of the society around him—unsullied by the failures of actual people. In this context, his abandonment of his son takes on monumental proportions for him, symbolizing his failure to live up to his own ideals, thereby casting him irrevocably into the filth of humanity around him, and epitomizing the impossibility of reconciling his misanthropy with his desire for familial companionship. His misanthropy is thus turned ineluctably inward, as even he cannot escape the fierceness of his own loathing.
In opposition to Plainview stands Eli Sunday. A false prophet and an embodiment of religious hypocrisy, he serves less to characterize the falsity of America’s religious nature (although he serves that purpose as well) than to characterize Plainview’s hatred. As a voice of pure belief, Eli represents everything that Plainview’s nihilism disdains; as a hypocrite, he represents everything that fails to meet Plainview’s standards. When Plainview is baptised by Eli in a pivotal scene, he is horrified by being forced to submit to society’s empty rituals, even as he acknowledges their meaning by proclaiming his guilt over abandoning his son. In an earlier scene, Plainview was covered in oil at the very moment of that abandonment, suggesting that his public baptism only serves to draw out the guilt and hatred already formed in his personal, nihilistic baptism by oil.
In the final scene(s) of absurd flamboyance, which mark a rapid temporal shift as well as a radical tonal shift, two events occur: first, the mythic style and the foreboding tone are suddenly ruptured; second, Plainview reaches his inevitable end. These two events are inextricably linked, since the mythic style served precisely to create a mythic environment and personage for Plainview, and Plainview’s downfall is precisely what the tone foreboded. In these final scenes, Plainview has achieved his goal, having won his riches and living in a mansion isolated from humanity. As a necessary consequence, he has alienated everybody around him, particularly the son that he loved. He has everything that he wanted, and therein lies nothing that he wanted. With no more ties to other people, he has collapsed completely into his nihilistic side, even as he has achieved the superficial goals of his desiring side. The shift in tone from mythicism to absurdity immediately and brilliantly evokes this loss of meaning. In his final moment of nihilation, Plainview coerces Eli into admitting to being a false prophet, exacting a twisted revenge for his baptism, forcing Eli to admit that society doesn’t live up to its own false ideals—and thereby exonerating Plainview’s refusal to accept those ideals. When Eli has admitted that religion, and hence society as whole, is a lie, that it is a scheming manipulation of its own rules, Plainview feels free to eradicate it completely, because any moral restriction has been removed by Eli’s admission of the falseness of that restriction and of its believers. But because Plainview’s goals were always based upon society, Plainview finally kills those goals along with Eli. With this completed, Plainview pronounces his final words: “I’m finished”. He has annihilated all his ideals, and hence has annihilated himself. Cue Brahms’ Concerto.
