There aren’t many hidden secrets in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007), the unsettling masterpiece that was recently ranked as the best movie since 2000 by both The New York Times and The Guardian. But there is one mystery in the movie that doesn’t have a ready solution, which is: why is it called “There Will Be Blood”? There’s not much blood, after all, and the source material is Upton Sinclair’s far more appropriately titled novel, Oil!. Why, then, this weird title? Let’s explain, starting off with some brief analysis that will allow us to cover the film’s broader meaning.
TWBB is a story of how greed and obsessiveness, represented by protagonist Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), come to dominate the American spirit, replacing the relatively feeble Puritan ethic represented by Plainview’s chief rival, pastor Eli Sunday (Paul Dano). The catalyst for this transition, as portrayed by Anderson, is oil: once untold riches can be sucked from the ground, those who adhere to pieties and doctrines, like Eli, quickly find themselves at the mercy of ruthless businessmen like Daniel, who will use any means necessary to acquire the available wealth, including crafty lies and even physical force. The two characters’ surnames indicate their respective strength and weakness: Daniel, a Machiavellian pragmatist, truly has a “plain view” of how to get what he wants, whereas Eli is held back by burdensome proprieties such as resting on Sunday, the Lord’s day. Daniel, of course, never rests. He has founded a new religion in which nothing is sacred, and the only fealty is to money. His soon-to-be adopted son is baptized with oil, hinting of the new faith in the making.
The final blow in this fairly lopsided battle of ideals, as per Anderson, is the Great Depression. It leads even Eli to question whether God, in fact, might not be as sturdy a protector as previously thought: he finds the now-wealthy Daniel in 1927 and begs him to buy property for oil rigging, admitting (to Daniel’s amusement) that God has “failed to alert [him] to the recent panic in our economy.” Blubbering tears of confusion, Eli wonders why Daniel, as well as Eli’s entrepreneurial brother Paul, have prospered, whereas he, the faithful one, has floundered. In response, the victorious Daniel takes this opportunity to bash Eli’s brains in with a bowling pin. This outcome removes any doubt about who will be running America going forward. Daniel’s battle cry ensures we don’t miss the allegory: “I am the Third Revelation!”
As I said, not so much to pick apart. But of course there’s more than what I just laid out, and it demands some inspection. In particular, we need to remember that Daniel, although successful, is not a happy man. That appears to be because his greed stems from an immutable narcissism: he can’t bear to have anyone get the best of him. Daniel himself acknowledges to his fake-brother Henry:
Daniel: “I hate most people. … I have a competition in me, Henry. I want no one else to succeed.”
This “competition” of Daniel’s leads him to exhibit some remarkable behavior throughout the film. Time and time again, he rages pathologically at those who disrespect him or give even a passing semblance of condescension. For example, when Henry takes advantage of Daniel by impersonating his brother for personal gain, Daniel kills him in cold blood with scant hesitation. When Daniel’s son H.W. sets a fire to alert him of Henry’s forgery, a (wrongly) perceived act of impudence, Daniel sends him away on a train alone. When Standard Oil rep H.M. Tilford expresses doubt that Daniel can build a pipeline to avoid onerous shipping costs (and incidentally suggests using his newfound free time to spend with his son), Daniel threatens to kill him and proceeds to move heaven and earth to build the pipeline, subsequently taunting a confused Tilford in a restaurant with maniacal glee.
And if Daniel demonstrates outsized anger toward these aforementioned individuals, we can infer that his thoughts toward Eli Sunday are, shall we say, none too friendly. After all, Eli is the only character during the course of the film to truly humiliate Daniel in an intentional, malicious way. The occasion for this humiliation is a baptism, which Daniel has grudgingly agreed to in order to appease William Bandy and thereby obtain permission to build the pipeline through his tract. This presents Eli with his chance for revenge on Daniel, who has repeatedly made a point of snubbing him. Eli doesn’t squander it.
Here’s the clip, which in my opinion is the best scene in the film. Thanks to the brilliant acting of Day-Lewis and Dano, there’s no mistaking that this is the worst day of Daniel’s life, as well as the best day of Eli’s. The relish with which Eli intones, unnecessarily, for Daniel to repeat, “I have abandoned my child!” is something to behold, and he even circles back to the subject after sensing that it particularly pained Daniel. As Daniel seethes helplessly, we can’t help but be afraid of what he might do later in retribution, based on what we have seen him do to others for far lesser offenses.
We might also realize that this is the only scene in which blood, the thing featured so prominently in the movie title, is mentioned. Eli is the first to bring it up, urging Daniel to “beg for the blood” of Christ. And as Daniel gets up after being baptized, the church hymn sings, “There is power in the blood of the Lord.” At this moment Daniel turns back toward Eli, shakes his hand, and says something to him that we can’t hear, but which on close inspection seems to startle Eli (see picture; moment is included in the clip linked earlier).
What has Daniel said to Eli?
Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Daniel, of course, has told Eli: “There will be blood.” As in: Don’t you worry about blood, Eli; there will be plenty of blood to come. Daniel, having just been utterly humiliated by his adversary, is promising in this moment to murder Eli one day.
So when Eli dares to seek Daniel’s help at the end of the film, the conclusion is foregone. Daniel hasn’t forgotten his promise; in fact, he soon makes a deft reference to the baptism as if it had happened only recently, gloating to Eli: “I suck the blood of lamb from Bandy’s tract.” This means, in essence, that the real blood of salvation isn’t Eli’s holy water, as Eli had characterized it at the baptism, but rather the oil that has made Daniel rich and powerful. Just like “I am the Third Revelation!” this comment indicates that Daniel perceives his oil business as an endeavor of religious stature, far grander than anything Eli preaches about, and Daniel accordingly makes Eli grovel before him: “I am a false prophet, and God is a superstition.”
Recall the moment early in the film when H.W.’s biological father rubs oil on his forehead in an apparently religious manner, as if it were holy water. Again, this foreshadows the new religion that Daniel promotes convincingly in his final showdown with Eli.
But although Daniel inevitably vanquishes the foe who crossed him most egregiously, what will he do now? After all, nearly all of Daniel’s important actions over the course of the film had been apparently motivated by the desire to revenge himself of perceived wrongs suffered at the hands of others. Now, though, all these wrongs have been avenged, and it’s not clear what he has left to live for. He ends the film, therefore, with with the appropriate words: “I’m finished!”
So while Daniel’s ethic is indeed stronger than Eli’s, it appears to come at a cost, as it springs from an innate “competition” and dislike of people in general. Why else would someone want to accumulate unnecessarily gaudy wealth, other than to feel superior to others? The conclusion of such a quest, even for those who succeed wildly like Daniel, is lonely and sad: we see, for example, that Daniel, as he sends away H.W. for good, flashes back to old times spent together with his son. He’s a human being, after all, and he’ll miss H.W. greatly—but his hypersensitivity to disrespect and his accompanying need for revenge leads him marching down the road to loneliness anyway. Is this the cost of ultimate success in America?
I’ll end this piece by observing that it’s impossible to meditate on the character of Daniel Plainview without reflecting on how similar he is to the real life American who would become president nine years after the release of the film. Echoes of Daniel screaming, unhinged, at his well-adjusted son—“Bastard from a basket! Bastard from a basket!—reverberated over Twitter throughout the four years he was in power, and one wonders at Paul Thomas Anderson’s giftedness in personifying that peculiar brand of American nastiness less than a decade before an actual person managed to encompass it so wholly for the world to see. Like Daniel, that person could never enjoy his success, tormented as he was by the slights of others: his default mode was rage, his rare smiles seemed forced and unnatural. Unlike Daniel, though, that person will never be “finished,” because too many have taunted and jeered him for revenge to ever truly be had.
I suppose, then, that in this day and age, There Will Be Blood carries a certain comfort. Because if we worry, based on what we see in politics and business, that the universe rewards narcissism, we might watch this honest examination of that character trait and how it came to such prominence in America. There Will Be Blood reminds us that the universe, in this regard, may be somewhat more just than we realize.
— Jim Andersen
For more PTA movies explained, see my piece on No Country For Old Men.
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