There will be Blood
Nov. 10th, 2008 10:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
"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.
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Re: Just found out we are both wrong and right
Date: 2008-11-12 11:17 am (UTC)