I suspect Flannery O’Connor would have appreciated the mystery and manners of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, particularly its vile characters, its parody of Christian imagery, and its fascination with the soul-eating effects of sin and the moments of grace that arise from the macabre.
Unlike his other films Boogie Nights and Magnolia, Blood is not ultimately about atonement and reconciliation, but about the decent into madness and hell on earth. When its protagonist Daniel Plainview shouts he is a sinner in a baptismal ceremony presided by preacher Eli Sunday, he would be making an understatement if he weren’t being almost entirely insincere. “Give me the blood, Lord, and let me get away!” he yells. Plainview thinks God is nothing but a superstition, but he agrees to be baptized by Eli as part of an agreement to purchase vital land from a church member.
The movie shows us Daniel’s hatred consume him bit by bit until he has gained all he wanted and has garnered nothing he cares about. Indeed, he cares for nothing, not himself, not his things, certainly not his son. In his blood flow neither life nor love, but greed and hatred.
The film’s end has baffled not a few viewers and reviewers, for it changes the whole dynamic of the narrative. We finally see into the depths of Eli and Daniel, and what we see are lives filled with sound and fury signifying nothing. In an act of pure cruelty and in parody of his baptism at Eli’s hand, Daniel demands Eli renounce his faith in order to be saved from the market collapse that ushered in the Great Depression. Only Daniel tricks Eli, for the terms of the deal turn out to be meaningless. Eli falls and then dies in an act of drunken, violent rage from the hands of Daniel. The blood that ends the film is not spilt from a deed of planning and calculation, but it is nevertheless inevitable, an overflowing of Daniel’s violent hatred of every person and everything, himself and his things included.
In his rage before descending to murder, Daniel shouts, “Did you think your song and dance and your superstition would help you, Eli? I am the Third Revelation! I am who the Lord has chosen!” When it dawns on Daniel that he has murdered and this time will not be able to hide the body and blood, he utters in a voice of utter nonchalance, “I am finished,” echoing in perversion the final words of Christ on the Cross. He has substituted himself for God, and the effects of that can only be bloody and bad.
There is blood, and when it pours at the end it pours not for salvation but in damnation. Yet the saving Blood of Christ for which Daniel has substituted his act of hateful, bloody murder remains as a specter, haunting the final scene and with it the whole film.
Dante would be proud.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
There Will Be Blood, An Interpretative Sketch
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
11 profound comments:
I suspect Flannery O’Connor would have appreciated the mystery and manners of...its vile characters, its parody of Christian imagery, and its fascination with the soul-eating effects of sin and the moments of grace that arise from the macabre.
Does this mean that Ms. O'Connor would have been a fan of Madonna's videos?
I haven't seen a Madonna video in decades, but I doubt it. Anderson twists Christian imagery in the way that Dante does; he gives us Hell's version of the image. He's not mocking the image or what it represents, but using its meaning to reveal the truth.
I finally watched the movie, and then got around to reading your post about it.
I was also struck by the use of Christian imagery (particularly Daniel smudging HW's forehead with oil in an early scene). The director certainly wants us to see the effects of Daniel's actions on his own character.
I thought Eli was also a fascinating character. Our first impression of him is of a devout, pious young man, concerned above all with the future of his church. After seeing a church service, however, he comes across as a fraud - his services are mere spectacle, a show for the gullible townsfolk.
Eli's insecure ambition is further revealed in his abuse of his own father, his jealousy towards his disloyal elder brother, and (obviously) in his denial of God in the last scene. Unlike the proud and confident Plainview, however, Eli is weak. His death inspires only pity; he is a pathetic character.
Yet Anderson leaves us wondering what ultimately is motivating Eli. Was he corrupt from the beginning? When does his desire for wealth become all-consuming? Does he believe the gospel he preaches, or is it only a mask?
What were your impressions?
Eli strikes me more as weak than as a fraud. Were Dante to put his soul in the afterlife, I'd suspect he'd place him outside the walls of Dis, where reside those guilty of incontinence.
I have just found your comment, and I wanted to share what I wrote after I saw the movie
http://andreacortis.blogspot.com/2008/02/there-will-be-blood.html
I think we do have some common views, but also some differences: I am not sure how Dante will be proud of this movie.
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.
Thanks for your comment.
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.
Ms. Cortis:
If you didn't hear a word in favor of the good news in this movie, then I think you missed the key scene.
The last scene, imo, is a fairly straightforward rip off of Flannery's A Good Man is Hard to Find story, and is NOT the key scene. Eli is the grandmother, and Daniel is the Misfit. The grandmother effectively renounced her faith when she offers the misfit money to save her life, just as Eli renounced his faith for what Daniel could give him (money).
No, the key scene is the second to last scene, where the good news you were looking for was proclaimed by the 'bastard in the basket.' The foreshadowing of that key scene comes when H.W. marries Mary in a simple Church service that if you recall appears to be Catholic, or at least not the fire and brimstone evangelical Third Revelation type of church. H.W. comes to Daniel and he asks for nothing more than his fair share of the millions his father has accumulated in part by relying on H.W. When Daniel utterly rejects that idea, and finally and fully shows himself to be utterly black of soul, H.W. does NOT plead for the money. In response to Daniel throwing it in H.W.'s face that H.W. is in fact not his son, H.W. simply says, "I THANK GOD that I have none of you (Daniel) in me." He then turns his back on evil, having put his faith in the true God, and walks out.
That H.W. says, "I thank God that I have none of" this evil man in him is not an accident of scriptwriting. H.W. is the representative of real Christianity in this movie, along with his wife Mary. He puts his faith in his real Father when he walks out on his faux father.
I may be going too far, but in the eyes of the secular world the baby Jesus was just a 'bastard in a basket,' as well.
I am not familiar with Paul Anderson's other movies and I frankly found this movie tedious until it neared its end. I may have enjoyed it more without that infernal soundtrack. But the religous implications, and the levels of meaning, certainly held my attention throughout the film.
And I definitely agree with the idea that Flannery would have appreciated what the filmmaker appears to have gotten across in this movie.
I just watched this movie last night and found this blog specifically because I was searching Google to see if anyone had made a connection between it and Flannery O'Connor. I have not read much of her, but I agree that this would dovetail quite well with her sensibilities, though it is hard to tell what she would have thought of contemporary cinema in which violent descriptions are brought so vividly to life.
I do agree with Miller that this ending is very like the ending of "A Good Man is Hard to Find," in its unexpected and sudden violence. In a very real sense, Eli Sunday needed "someone to shoot him every day of his life," as, indeed, do we all.
Kyle, I disagree that, "Nothing is real for Daniel Plainview. Nothing is meaningful. Whatever soul he had he has corrupted." Or, at the very least, there may have been a time before the movie when somethings were meaningful to him. After he kills his faux brother he is very moved, not from the killing, I do not think, but from seeing evidence that he had a brother. Though, he may have wanted a brother simply to know that someone else had the "competition" in them which he did.
And though his conversion is feigned, I do think that he comes at least to the brink of confession of sin when he says repeatedly, "I've abandoned my boy," who I think he did love somewhat, even as he used him and discarded him.
And, Miller, thanks for pointing out that the church seems to be either Catholic or a protestant denomination with more connection to historical Christianity. And, yes, I do think that H.W. and Mary portray one instance of grace and goodness in this film.
Finally, has anyone thought about the significance in the names in the movie. Daniel, Paul, and Eli are all prophets of a sort. Not sure that Anderson means anything by this but it is interesting. Also, I agree that (rather disappointingly) the author/creator is not always the best interpretor of his or her own work or may not even understand what they have done. For example, I seem to recall an interview in which Anderson did not include the frog scene in Magnolia as a reference to one of the judgements of Egypt, but was intrigued by the parallels, though I could have my information wrong on this.
In Magnolia, Anderson had signs for Exodus 8:2 or with those numbers placed throughout the movie, so I tend to think he meant to refer to the Biblical event.
As my statement pertaining to Plainview's nihilism, I had in mind the character at the very end of the movie, a state of being to which he has progressed.
Thanks for contributing, Neil!
Post a Comment