Thoughts on There Will Be Blood - get 'em while they're fresh & raw!

[bookshop]

WHAT WAS THAT FILM, omg omg. I loved it, I loved it so much. if it weren't 3 am right now I'd be re-watching it all right this second. I feel really wired, just, like, WHAT WAS THAT ZOMG.

There is no good TWBB fanfic, I know because I just went looking for it, lol. But oh my god, wouldn't it be amazing if there were?

vague film spoilers

Comments

[quaedam]

AHA, wow. :D Didn't catch that part when first I saw that film. I should see TWBB again some time; it's been a while since I did.

I mean, I certainly remember all of the, ah, writhing around and pummeling one another in the dirt (well, it was fairly one-sided, actually, I don't think Eli ever managed or perhaps even tried to land a blow...).
But what I mainly remember taking away from the film otherwise was "Yeah...in the end religion is not going to be able to use capitalism or its methods for its own ends without being devoured and dissolved into air right along with everything else (including the family bonds between Daniel and his adopted son, which are the next to last thing to go)." There's a long history in the US of religion using the methods of the market to proselytize. And the 'church growth' movement which spawned so many megachurches from the middle of the last century to now treats conversion not on the level of an individual choice or the result of a personal encounter, but on the scale of whole populations, as market share won through advertising. And insofar as it's effective in bringing in great numbers of new members, the ends supposedly justify the means (I will become all things to all men that I may by all means save some.). So you fool yourself into believing that capitalism is the safeguard of religion, home, and family, when in the end the driving urge behind it consumes them all.

But it didn't occur to me during that first viewing to look for a particular meaning in all the, what, overt sadomasochism between Daniel and Eli? (I enjoyed it, but I didn't think much about it. :D) So like I say, I should see the film again.

And I'd be curious to read the novel the book was based on.

[bookshop]

So you fool yourself into believing that capitalism is the safeguard of religion, home, and family, when in the end the driving urge behind it consumes them all.

ahhhhh, yes, absolutely. SO TRUE. I actually thought the film's score (which i thought was amazing, there was nothing about this movie that didn't blow my mind) did a fabulous job of emphasizing this. Like, towards the beginning, when DDL is speechifying to the town about how the oil boom will bring in all this wealth and irrigation and bread and money for everyone, the soundtrack is this, like, parody of every cheesy watered-down patriotic "America will triumph!" moment in every Hollywood film ever. It's the only time (apart from the use of the Brahms) when the score ever remotely sounds that polyphonic. The rest of the time it just feels like it's perpetually deconstructing itself and everything about the film, eating itself up LIKE OIL DRAINAGE, haha.

my main takeaway from the film as i watched it was the way both of their separate (but similar) roles as agents of capitalism involved pageantry and theatre, the way they were both so aware of this that being invited to one another's performances was like some kind of ritual of initiation into a brotherhood of nihilism, and they both understood that and were eager for it. Like the way Daniel's "performance" at the end was a mirror of Eli's performance in the church, and how well Eli understood that and was able to play along, the way Daniel played along on the day of his "baptism."

The way neither of them miss a beat or a line, and the way they both seem to welcome and relish violence as part of the theatre (like when Eli goes home and pummels his father right after being pummeled himself by Daniel)-- and how that spectacle of performance is mirrored in the theatre of the oil drilling itself, the magnificence of the fires and the geysers, even though the more magnificent it is, the more deadly it is.

i really need to watch it again before i can go much deeper than that, haha, but i kept being reminded of this scene from Greed! where character A murders character B. It's set at Christmastime and the composition is framed between two brackets of tinsel or christmas lights that hang in a wide low doorway--so that the christmas decorations become the curtains on either side of a stage. The murder itself is filmed without much embellishment at all besides the act of staging it like this, but that's all you need to remind the audience that this is a literal morality play. I felt like that kind of self-awareness is what There Will Be Blood was delivering in every frame, so all the camp of the revival and the confrontations with the oil men just felt like a natural setup for the operatic ending.