There Will Be Blood

In bringing Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel, Oil, to the screen as There Will Be Blood, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has been faithful to the author’s socialist intentions.

The adaptation also resonates with the politics of today as the neo-cons kill to keep democracy safe for big oil.

The film title has multiple meanings. One is from the story’s revivalist preacher – with his Church of the Third Revelation - who promises to wash away sin in the blood of the Lamb.

Another is for the blood shed by the workforce. Yet a third is the denouement, which I shall not give away.

There Will Be Blood is a relief from the progressive scripts where no one lifts anything heavier than a laptop or a pistol.

Once again, the commercial screen shows human labour at the point of its exploitation. More than that, the cost in lives and limbs is central to the plot. The protagonist’s adopted son is deafened by an exploding drill.

In the lead role of Daniel Plainview, Daniel Day-Lewis is transfixing. With his measured tones and suppressed rage, he leans his body forward like a man always pushing against a headwind. In escaping from the might of Standard Oil, Plainview has to match its chicanery and ruthlessness.

We are shown, not told, what capitalists must do, thus spared a lecture in Marxism 101, as in Pontecorvo’s Burn! (1968).

For instance, Plainview’s quail shooting is a metaphor for his treatment of the farmers whose land he acquires, for they too are small and almost flightless, no match for his double-barrels of guile and greed.

Plainview is the personification of capital, realising the fundamental proposition of historical materialism – we become what we do, as a species and as individuals.

The land-owners offer Plainview and his boy the warmth and decencies of folk for whom faith is indeed, as Marx observed, “an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering”.

As secular outsiders, Europeans risk minimising the conviction that quickens politics and business in the USA.

The teenage preacher is something else. He falls victim to the sins of the flesh and to the vagaries of the stock-market.

Yet he remains more than a caricature of hypocrisy, and not merely a premonition of recent Televangelists. He and Plainview compete for redemption, each obliging the other to declare what they fear is the truth in order to get their hands on the means to earthly salvation.

The Role of Oil in US Capitalism

“It is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows – the Iraq war is largely about oil,” Alan Greenspan, the arch-Republican ex-chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board, admitted in his memoirs last year.

Oil runs through the history of US capitalism and its efforts to dominate the world. It’s where its greatest business dynasty, the Rockefellers, made their money.

Today the Western oil super-majors and their local rivals still ride high at the top of the global corporate hierarchy.

The transformation of the Bush family from East Coast bankers into Texan oilmen – symbolized by George Bush, a Yale frat boy masquerading as a cowboy – demonstrates the attraction of Big Oil.

The Bushes jumped onto the bandwagon after the Second World War. But the dark roots of the US oil industry lie much earlier, in the last decades of the 19th century and the first of the 20th.

There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, probes these roots. Anderson is a clever, individual director. The spilling of much blood for Iraq’s oil must have been in the background when he wrote and directed There Will Be Blood.

The central character, Daniel Plainview, brilliantly played by Daniel Day-Lewis, is proud to be an oilman in California in the opening years of the last century, when the state accounted for 22 percent of world production.

The film is about his efforts to develop an oilfield around a dilapidated town in the southern Californian desert and to get the oil, once extracted, to the market.

Plainview struggles to build a pipeline to the sea, which would allow him to bypass the railroads and their extortionate rates, which were set in collusion with the Rockefellers’ monopolistic Standard Oil Trust.

Powerful

Two of the many powerful scenes in the film have Plainview confront Standard Oil. But he doesn’t underline his possessive individualism in the standard American way by appealing to divine justification.

On the contrary, Plainview can’t conceal his contempt for Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), the ambitious young fundamentalist preacher with whom he spars throughout the film.

Perhaps in developing this tension between God and capitalism Anderson is interested in the contrast with contemporary figures such as Bush, for whom such a conflict would be unconceivable.

The film is inspired by Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil (1927). Plainview is based on a character whom Sinclair modelled on Edward Doheny.

Like Plainview, Doheny started off a mining prospector but switched to oil. By the 1920s his Pan American Petroleum was producing more crude oil than any of the successors to Standard Oil after the Trust was forced to dissolve itself in 1911.

Doheny was a central figure in the Teapot Dome scandal that ravaged the administration of President Warren Harding in 1922-4.

Doheny admitted to a senate committee that he had sent his son with $100,000 in “a little black bag” to his old friend and sometime fellow prospector, secretary of the interior Albert Fall.

In exchange Fall leased oilfields to Doheny and another independent producer, Harry Sinclair.

Fall himself told another senate hearing how oil wells could drain all the oil out of a piece of land they surrounded.

“If you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake, and my straw reaches across the room, I’ll end up drinking your milkshake.”

This scam is pivotal to the climactic confrontation between Plainview and Sunday. But the Teapot Dome scandal and Doheny’s role in it don’t figure at all in There will be Blood. This highlights a real limitation in Anderson’s portrait of a driven individual, compelling as it undoubtedly is.

Sinclair’s book was part of a much larger political assault on Big Oil in the early decades of the 20th century.

After the Iraq catastrophe, the time is surely ripe for another assault. But Anderson’s focus on personality drains the politics out of oil – something that should be impossible.

tags: movie  hollywood  capitalism  socialism  oil  corporate  

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