"There Will Be Blood'

Material success, moral failure

ANDREW MANGRAVITE

When we first see Daniel Plainview, working away as a solitary silver miner, he seems an almost admirable, if limited, character. His life is all about The Work, and even when he comes close to losing that life, it’s perversely admirable that he perseveres, literally dragging his injured body back to what passes for civilization and refusing medical assistance until his precious claim has been duly assayed and recorded. For the remainder of the film Plainview will walk with a limp, like Peter Cushing’s similarly-obsessed archaeologist in The Mummy.

Even when he returns years later as “an oilman,” Plainview exhibits the sort of zeal to succeed that we automatically ascribe to the Victorian Age. He designs his own equipment, hires his crew and works by their side. He’s an odd, solitary figure, but still an admirable one. He wants to find oil. He wants to be an oilman. He wants to succeed.

Outwardly human, but…

When Plainview adopts the infant son of one of his dead workers, he seems to strive for a measure of humanity. That is, he wants someone to bequeath his successes to. And thinking this becomes our first mistake. As writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson and actor Daniel Day-Lewis will reveal to us, there is nothing human about Plainview other than his outward form.

Upton Sinclair’s source novel, Oil!, puts it more narrowly, suggesting that Plainview’s growing success alienates him from his fellow men. But Anderson is reaching for something deeper. Other successful men can be found in There Will Be Blood, and although they may not be nice men, they are not Daniel Plainview. There’s something lacking in Plainview’s genetic makeup. Whatever it is that makes humans human, Plainview lacks. He can mimic human behavior. Anyone seeing him with his young son H.W. would assume him to be a doting if stern father. But later Plainview reveals that his sole purpose in adopting the boy was to use the child as a prop to make him appear more likeable, the better to con unsuspecting farmers and ranchers out of their land.

And the end result is….

On numerous occasions during the film Plainview will express his admiration for “plain speaking,” but the one time he speaks plainly— to a stranger whom he takes to be his long-unseen younger brother— it is to express his hatred and disdain for humanity as a whole. When H.W. is damaged in a mining accident, losing his value as a sales tool, Plainview heartlessly dispatches him to an institute for the disabled.

In the end we see Daniel Plainview the self-made man dwelling in a faux-Tudor brick mansion—except that he uses its long empty hallways as shooting galleries and sleeps on the polished floor of his private bowling alley, where he also cooks his food by a mock campfire. In short, Daniel Plainview is one of the wealthiest animals in California. All of his plotting and scheming, and a murder or two, have led him to an existence not appreciably improved from the one he led as a solitary silver miner in 1898. It’s enough to make one question life’s little pieties. And I suspect that’s exactly what Anderson—if not Sinclair—was aiming for.