Paul Thomas Anderson's There will be blood maintained his word: there was blood, but a fake blood, a blood that does not redeem.
Let's be clear on one point: Daniel Day-Lewis (Daniel Plainview) is an outstanding actor, unquestionably best Hollywood's villain, and deserves the Oscar for his magnificent interpretation. The Plainview character is reminiscent of one of the best villains ever, Bill 'The Butcher' Cutting, of Scorsese's Gangs of New York. But even Day-Lewis could not do much to save an utterly confused Anderson.
Throughout the movie, Plainview is not given a soul because he doesn't have one, and this makes Day-Lewis' interpretation unnecessarily flat. Daniel Day-Lewis tries hard to fill in an empty final scene, but even him doesn't know where Anderson is heading as it becomes evident from his exaggerate limping, the back and forth movements that breaks the tension between the two characters, and the pathetic chase scene around the bowling alley.
Anderson portrays in this movie an apology of the lie: family is a lie, religion is a lie, God is a lie. Only blood and oil are real. Yet, he shamelessly draws from the Bible to put forward his truth.
- In the first scene we are presented with Plainview's fall, where he gets of the forbidden fruit, the oil: this is the only moment where Plainview is obliged to look up above his plain view.
- When death strikes one of his co-workers in a derrick construction, he feels compelled to adopt his baby: an evident new Moses left in the basket, as it becomes evident by the end of the movie when Plainview-Pharaoh doesn't want to let his adopted son go to pursue his own business in Mexico: "You're a bastard from a basket."
- The twin brothers Paul and Eli Sunday, are put before us as Jacob and Esau, as Plainview says : "You're not the chosen brother, Eli. It was Paul who was chosen" and as Eli savagely attacks his own old father for being stupid and idle, for believing a lie.
- Plainview is baptized while proclaiming a lie.
- Eli Sunday dies after confessing his lie. (I would go so far as to say that Eli is the anagram of lie).
- Plainview-Cain kills his brother Henry Bardy-Abel : but that's also a fake brother, a lie.
In conclusion, we would like to address director Anderson with Bill 'The Butcher' Cutting very own words:
"Here's the thing... I don't give a tuppenny fuck about your moral conundrum, you meat-headed shit-sack... That's pretty much the thing."
3 comments:
Looking at Blood by itself, I can see how you arrive at the interpretation that Anderson views family, religion, and God as lies. However, Anderson’s other works, particularly Magnolia, give me the impression that Anderson is not such an apologist of the lie. The truth expressed in Magnolia included the human needs for confession, reconciliation, and atonement. Love and God’s grace are explicitly real in that film.
I look at Blood as a moral tragedy, a contemporary telling of the Inferno, and only the Inferno, only the effects of sin upon the human soul. There’s no redemption here, although love is real enough, at least for Daniel’s son and his wife. What we get in Blood is Daniel’s decent into hell on earth. Like Macbeth’s, his life is full of sound and fury but signifies nothing. At the end of the film, he’s finished because he has committed murder and won’t get away with it. Anderson’s genius: Daniel doesn’t care. Blood, oil, and wealth mean nothing to him. Nothing is real for Daniel Plainview. Nothing is meaningful. Whatever soul he had he has corrupted. He’s neither happy nor sad; he’s empty, hateful and apathetic even of himself.
I think Dante would be proud because Anderson et al show what sin does to the human soul. The Inferno isn’t guesswork about what Hell is like; it’s a depiction of what sin is like. Anderson knows that the wages of sin is death, and he knows what spiritual death looks like here on earth. Utter absence of love. Life is a lie.
While we don’t get it from Blood, Anderson also knows what redemption looks like, and he knows the sacrifice and suffering needed for atonement.
That, at least, is my fallible take.
I haven't see Magnolia, so you maybe right when you see "There Will Be Blood" only as part of a bigger picture, and that I should perhaps consider Anderson's prior works before trashing him.
If it is true, however, that it is Anderson's intent to portray hell on earth (and who is the lier par excellence if not hell's landlord?), then I disagree that hell should be portrayed victorious over good. I do believe that hell has been defeated through Jesus Christ's blood, and I did not find a single word in the movie that may support this "good news".
"There will be blood" has been defined a flat-out masterpiece: yet, imho it does not even come close to a match with masterpieces such as "The age of innocence", "Diary of a country priest", or "Ikiru" (to mention just a few), where temptation is uncovered and finally defeated.
On the contrary, I read Blood's main message as "God is a superstition", as repeated by Eli seven times. It was not sufficient to say "I am a false prophet", nope, "God is a superstition" is the keyword here.
This point is, however, a matter of faith and should not be thrown at Anderson who is free to believe and portray whatever he wishes, even his own understanding of Dante's Inferno, if so it pleases him.
No, my main point of contention (besides the indisputable "cinematographic" failure in the finale of Blood) rests in the method.
I contend that this type of Derrida-like "de-constructivist" approach to the hermeneutics of the Bible, is philosophically wrong and socially dangerous, as other nihilistic philosophies are and have already been.
The words of director Anderson at NPR or at the LAweekly do not clarify our points of contention: hopefully, he will soon come forward to clarify his philosophy to us. I sincerely hope to be wrong, and I will be the first to pay homage to him. Till then, I will keep my eyes and ears wide open.
I do highly recommend Magnolia to you, Andrea, but be forewarned that there is quite a bit of crude language and sexually frank dialogue in the three-hour movie. It may give you a different impression of Anderson’s worldview. For what it’s worth, I found online several sources claiming that P.T. Anderson is Catholic. His MySpace page was one of those. I don’t know the status of his faith practice or how orthodox he is, but if he’s flat out rejected his faith I haven’t found evidence of it. Then again, I personally think that an author does not have the end-all-be-all interpretation of his or her own work, but that’s another topic.
Looking strictly at Blood, I don’t think it conveys the idea that Hell is victorious over the sacrifice of Christ. It merely depicts that hell-bent souls exist. Christ has conquered sin and death, but there remains what Gabriel Marcel called the refusal of salvation. As for Eli’s seven-times-stated “God is a superstition,” Eli isn’t exactly presented as good guy in the film. I wouldn’t look to Eli or Daniel for Anderson’s views anymore than I would look to Macbeth or Iago for Shakespeare’s. In fact, I think it is a logical fallacy to conclude an author’s philosophy from a text. Texts are suggestive, and may in fact express an author’s beliefs, but as a rule one cannot move from the text to the author’s intent, because a text has a surplus of meaning. As you say, it’s a matter of faith.
As for your main point of contention, the Derrida-like deconstruction, we’re going to have contention there as well, as I have found Derrida’s work in particular not nihilistic and anti-religion at all, but radically affirmative that there is more meaning than what is present to us in our languages. Because texts, the Bible included, have a surplus of meaning and are constructed in finite human language, they and interpretations of them are open to deconstruction and reconstruction. Not in the name of nihilism, but in that name of the undeconstructible, the Truth that is beyond human language, that no construct of ours can exhaust.
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