There will be Blood

[shadowkat]

"Are you an angry man? A competive man?" Daniel asked.

"No. I've had so many failures in my life, that I find I no longer care." Henry said.

"I'm a competive man. I find I don't want others to succeed. I'll hunt ways to make them fail even. Don't like people much, you see. Never have. The more I get to know them, the less I see in them to like. For some reason I only see the negatives, I hunt for them. Find them, no matter how good or upright they may appear, until that's all I do see.
Don't care for people. When I make enough money, I plan on going somewhere where I don't have to put up with them any more..."

(From the film, There Will Be Blood. (Paraphrased, since I can't remember the exact speech. Wish I could.)

Say what you will about There Will Be Blood, it stays with you long after the final credits have rolled, assuming of course you stuck around to read them. Saw the film on Sunday night and the speech, reproduced from memory above, still haunts me. Granted there are other, far more famous lines from the film - such as I drink your milkshake, but none affected me in quite the same way. The delivery of this speech, I think, more so than the I drink your milkshake line - earned Daniel Day Lewis his Oscar Win. It's delivered quietly, in the candlelight, and is perhaps the closest the character of Daniel comes to self-reflection or awareness. It is both explanation and justification. Sad and painful. And in the delivery, you sense an yearning in the character to connect to his listener, to be something other than who he is. Knowing that he is doomed and will not connect, makes it all the more haunting.

What hits me most about the speech is the emphasis on competition. He backs away from anger. Stating it once, but not again, or if he did, it was not emphasized in quite the same way for me to remember it. Daniel is an angry man. Filled to the brim with Anger. And like most people who are "angry", it has made him mean and brittle as the desert that houses the oil he craves. The oil that makes him rich in material wealth and power, but little else.

The film, There Will Be Blood, is by Paul Thomas Anderson, stars Daniel Day Lewis, and is based on the Upton Sinclair short story "OIL!". I have a feeling the film takes longer to watch than the short story, but I could be wrong about that. Anderson likes his long moody cinemagraphic vignets, where you sit watching the sun set over the landscape as the characters sit silently on their verandas. About forty percent of the film is made up of silent vignets, most of which are of the dry bitter landscape where the film is set. The landscape that Anderson uses as a metaphor for his protagonist, Daniel, a man as bitter and dry, and rough as the land he relentlessly and successfully drills for oil. A crude, sludgy substance that seems to come at a hefty price. At least four men are killed in drilling accidents through the film, and several injured.

If you know anything about Upton Sinclair, and I admittedly know very little - outside of what I just found on wiki and read way back in the 1980s, you'd know he was a writer who advocated socialist values, and acheived considerable notoriety for The Jungel - a novel about the meatpacking industry which is partly responsible for the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. Socialism is not the evil system Palin and McCain were declaring at their rallies nor is it what Hitler embraced during WWII, no matter how much they'd like you to believe that to be the case. It is an economic system [ETA: and a poltical or social system**] that in places such as Sweden, provides universal health care, public transportation, welfare, and education to people in exchange for high taxes - the government takes care of the basic requirements of its citizens. I'm not sure most Europeans and Canadians understand the US's abhorrence of socialistic systems, acting as if it and taxes are dirty words. I also, admittedly know very little about socialism, not being an economics guru or major.[ETA: Socialism is confusing because it describes both an economic and a social system. It is possible to be socialist with a capitalistic economy or be libertarian with a socialistic economy.]
What I know I've gleaned from articles here and there - the latest in Newsweek, by Jacob Weintraub, which clarified that Obama and McCain both advocated a socialistic/capitalistic system (economic system), which the US always has advocated - neither would take us as far as Sweden. [ETA: if we were purely capitalistic - we would not have social security, medicaid, medicare, or the FDIC just for starters, nor would we have put up 700 billion to shore up the financial industry.] It's in the Nov 10th issue of Newsweek and worth checking out.[ETA: For links on how socialism is defined go to the comments.]


Anderson's film does not take on the same themes in quite the same way as I'm guessing Sinclair did. The focus here is almost entirely on Daniel - an anti-hero in the true classification of the noir term. He's not completely evil though, any more than any human being is, no matter how much we'd like to paint them as such. It's easier, I think, to pain people who have done abominable things as less than human or pure evil - because it let's us off the hook. This film doesn't do that. Daniel is complicated. Early in the film, after one of his co-workers dies in a well with him, he adopts the man's three year old son as his own.
We watch tender scenes between the two of them. And on numerous occassions, Daniel is shown putting the boy first. There's an accident with a well, in which he goes nuts saving the boy, letting the well burn in the background. Then coddles the boy to him all night long, whispering that he will be alright. The boy in some respects represents Daniel's life-line to his own humanity. The part of him that is not consumed by rage.

Other characters, equally layered, include a faith-healer named Eli, who is Daniel's nemesis.
OR competition. Yet Eli is not necessarily a better man than Daniel so much as different, he is in some regards used as a mirror to Daniel. Eli uses faith to get ahead. Like Daniel, he lies and pleads, and conjoles. Does he believe in God, in faith, or is he a false prophet? We don't know. He is as greedy over the oil as Daniel and like Daniel sees the money as a means to power. Both fight over the power. And the final scene of the film, the denuoment, which contains that crazy line : "I drink your milkshake", is between them.

The setting, time period, and economic issues in which There Will Be Blood is placed, syncs well with our own time period. The film starts with the quest for Oil or "drill baby drill" and ends with the stock market decline of 1927. And the men depicted are mirror images of the ones I see floating across the news channels today - with AIG and Exon and General Motors.
In that sense at least, There Will Be Blood does echo Upton Sinclair's timeless themes of oppression and greed.

But, There Will Blood is still at heart a character piece, about a man who is doomed to lose all that he cares about to his own ambition and relentless desire to be on top. His inability to forgive or trust or share....isolates him. Until he sits alone in a galatial mansion bowling and drinking and shooting at targets.

To say he is evil or irredemable, which many reviews stated, is not quite doing the piece the justice that it deserves nor Daniel Day Lewis' acting. I think he is, early on. But the choices he made for the reasons he made them..took their inevitable corse.

It's a long film, slow and plodding in places. The characters are not what I would describe as likable, so much as riveting and fascinating - you can't quite look away and they stay with you long after the final reel. I saw it last night and still remember scenes from it today, vividly. (Considering I've read, focused on, and watched other things in between, that is saying something.) At the end of this film, you know Daniel, the protagonist, you may not remember his name - but what is in a name anyhow. It's just a name. And he does haunt you.
Showing how competition and anger, if left unchecked can warp us much as they warp Daniel at the end both physically and mentally.

Comments

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

Just flying by to say that socialism is not an economic system but a political movement, born at the beginning of Industrial Revolution, through criticizing capitalism (which is an ecominic system)for creating an unjust society based on huge social inequalities. It's all about the kind of society you want to build.

There had been socialist thinking before that (even in Thomas More's Utopia!) but it's basically the Industrial era and capitalism that caused socialism.

At the beginning of the 19th century socialist movement divided itself, giving rise to several ideologies: marxism, anarchism and reformist socialism.

Modern socialism is in favour of social justice and solidarity, hence the importance of government. But welfare state doesn't necessarily mean socialism.

For instance in France we've had, since 1945, services and health care granted by the government, yet most of the time our administration was right wing. And even when left-wing was "in the office", the only socialist politics we had, occurred in 1945-1946 and in 1981-83.

USSR and Eastern European countries (until 1989) had what they called a socialist economic system, that precludes private property, but Western Europe never experimented it. So far we've been living within capitalism.

Sorry for pontifying...

Just found out we are both wrong and right

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the response, but apparently, we are both wrong and sort of right.

Socialism is an economic system and a political movement, depending on the context. The Newsweek article discussed it as an economic system - a short-hand description is a system where the wealth is equally or evenly distributed. None of the current economic systems are "pure" capitalism, by the way, you are wrong about that as well. They are actually a hybrid of socialism and capitalism. In the past twenty years, the United States and a good portion of Western Europe's economics systems have become increasingly laizzez faire in regards to capitalism or free-market, where there are fewer regulations and little to no oversight. But they are not pure capitalism. Capitalism would not have affordable housing, medicaid, social security, or the FDIC. Banks and businesses would be permitted to fail without any assistance. The government would not provide health care to the eldery or the poor, and when you retire you would not get money from social security. Also there would be no unemployment under a capitalistic system. Capitalism is cruel in its pure form. France is more socialistic economically than the US, for example.

Here's some links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/socialism

Like most words in the English language, the meaning of socialism appears to depend on the context in which you are using it. ;-)

The other definition - which you describe above is the political movement. This was what Upton Sinclair subscribed to and believed in to a degree. Idealistically it is a communal system, where people share the wealth. But, in its extreme, this brand of socialism - the political movement that you describe above becomes facism. Examples include the National Socialist Party of Nazi Germany and the Communist Party in Russia.

The US is not a purely captialistic system, any more than it is a pure democratic system. It's a hybrid of a number of different systems. Historically - the pure systems do not work in the long run.

Re: Just found out we are both wrong and right

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

Mmmmm....no. Actually there's an issue of vocabulary indeed, and it causes confusion.

Capitalism isn't the same as free-market or deregulation(what we call "libéralisme économique" over here), even though they usually go together to a certain extent, but sometimes there's a clash between capitalism and free-market (for instance capitalism may cause monopoly that free-market completely forbids, hence anti-trust rules, ask Bill Gates!).

Capitalism is a system based on separation of capital and labour, on private property of means of production and on the research of profit...which is exactly the system we have always lived in since Industrial Revolution (while in a socialist system such as what USSR had, there's no separation of capital and labour, and there's collectivization, all means of production belong to the state).

However, because of our long history(I think it's very important to understand how differently state is considered here, compared to the USA)and because of the post-war concept of the Welfare State, we've had regulation (less and less unfortunately)and we never were as free-market-oriented as the USA indeed. The government often intervened in economy (it has changed because of the E.U though)either directly through nationalizations or less directly through regulations about the working life, retirement, wealth care etc.

As for the NSDAP, it's much more complicated than that. First there was a Workers' Party and then Hitler infiltrated it (he worked for the army at the time)took over and changed it into the NSDAP keeping part of the socialist rhetoric in the party propaganda to attract people(there was a crisis after all)and adding other stuff(nationalism, racism). A few nazis were still very anti-capitalism (mostly in the S.A)but others were not at all, and Hitler got rid of the left-wing very quickly because some buisness men in Germany asked him to do so and he needed their money.


It's difficult to understand each other when vocabulary is so fluctuating, innit?

Re: Just found out we are both wrong and right

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

Oh and I forgot to include the law of supply and demand in my definition of capitalism! Of course in the soviet system, there was no market, only public stores and the prices were fixed by government, not by the law of supply and demand.