“A Whole Ocean of Oil Under Our Feet”: ‘There Will Be Blood’ at 10
The power and pain of Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterpiece only grows deeper with each passing year“A Whole Ocean of Oil Under Our Feet”: ‘There Will Be Blood’ at 10
The power and pain of Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterpiece only grows deeper with each passing year
“That whole business with There Will Be Blood was completely apocryphal. There’s not a shred of truth in it,” Patrick “Ned” Doheny told the oral historian Jean Stein in her book West of Eden. “The only true part of the film was at the beginning with him in the mine shaft by himself: [My great-grandfather Edward] did always say he once fell down a mine shaft and broke his legs. But all the rest of it is utter horseshit.”
There Will Be Blood is a lie, in its way. It’s fitting that a descendant of Edward Doheny, upon whom Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! and Paul Thomas Anderson’s film are loosely based, would deny the real-life similarities in the story. The Doheny patriarch, a figure who looms large in Los Angeles history, was involved in several sordid tales, from the Teapot Dome scandal to the mysterious deaths of his son Ned and childhood friend Hugh Plunkett. But the mine shaft, the same one that Daniel Plainview plummets down into a lonely silver deposit in New Mexico in 1898, is the only verifiable truth that There Will Be Blood needs. The movie itself is a submergence into the depths of American desperation—for money, salvation, family, something to call your own. It’s a hole that you can fall down and never crawl out of.
Ten years since its release, There Will Be Blood has taken on the reputation of a Great American Work, larded with all the anxiety and expectation that comes with it. Anderson’s film, which tracks Plainview’s rise to great wealth and self-imposed isolation, is best remembered for the extraordinary performance of Daniel Day-Lewis, who won his second Oscar for his portrayal of the monomaniacal oilman. But the movie is more than a twisted man’s quest for power—it’s a comedy of manners, a psychological family drama, a silent film, an action movie, a spiritual saga, and, perhaps most especially, a horror flick.
From the opening moments of the movie, we feel dread. Here is how Anderson’s 132-page shooting script opens.
And here is what we see.
And, for just a few moments, what we hear.
Those New Mexico mountains sit eerily. Inside the earth, we learn, there is treasure and death. Jonny Greenwood’s Krzysztof Penderecki–meets–Bernard Herrmann score signals impending doom. The image is a static wide shot that becomes a trademark of the movie. Despite its nearly 160-minute runtime, There Will Be Blood features just 678 shots in total, averaging more than 13 seconds per shot. Anderson holds many of them for several beats at a time, on the faces of his characters, on the roaring scarlet fire lighting the night sky, on churches and oil derricks. Look long and hard, the camera seems to say, these things are important. When it moves, it bends around corners or into close-up to show us what’s worth seeing.
Through the film’s first 14-and-a-half-minutes, there is no dialogue, only the sound of a pickax striking rock, dynamite exploding in a mine’s walls, and Greenwood’s tense score. But for a movie with so much unbearable gravity, and from a filmmaker who had not filmed anything in nearly five years, Anderson remembers There Will Be Blood not like the nightmare it seems, but more like a dream.
“I’d just had a baby, so I had, at that time an 8-month-old, living in Marfa, Texas,” Anderson says of the experience. “We were in the middle of West Texas, hours and hours and hours away from anything. So it really felt like no adult supervision, the world’s greatest actor, a really good script, lights, cameras, film—it was exciting.”
Shortly after filming, the famously Method Day-Lewis didn’t remember the experience with such excitement. “The ranch,” Day-Lewis told The New York Times Magazine in 2007, “allowed you to have the illusion of an adventure that’s shared to the exclusion of all other things and people. We were drilling for oil, and that was that.”
“In the beginning on There Will Be Blood,” he said, “we were struggling. It’s always what doesn’t work that is most useful.”
“I am an independent oil man; what the Big Five call one of the ‘little fellers’—though not so little that I won't show here in San Elido county. I’ve bought 12 thousand acres and want to prospect for oil. If there’s any here, I’ll put a couple hundred wells on the tract, and employ a thousand men, and pay a few million dollars in wages, and double real estate values for five or 10 miles around. … Us independents pay more, and we make the big fellows pay more too. I assume I’m talking to a man who knows this game.”
—James Arnold Ross, a.k.a. “Dad,” from Oil! by Upton Sinclair
Ross is not Plainview and Oil! is not There Will Be Blood, but the first 150 pages of Sinclair’s novel bear a striking resemblance to Anderson’s film. Plainview’s performative streak, the introduction of his “son and partner H.W. Plainview” position him as an insurgent ready to work for the common folk lucky enough to be born upon the proverbial black gold underneath their feet. The people of Little Boston, California, are quickly enraptured by this mustachioed salesman, with his crooked posture and powerfully enunciated sales pitch.
Plainview is wound so tightly and is so internally devious that he has become a malleable projection for all manner of evil. The Donald Trump comparisons come easily, but they’re facile. Plainview is malevolent in the same way that a virus is malevolent—it’ll incapacitate you, but only to survive. He’s sui generis. Plainview’s primary adversary, the faith healer Eli Sunday (a quivering, convulsing Paul Dano), is a fitting stand-in for the obvious theme sitting on the surface of the movie, like the earthquake oil Plainview and H.W. stumble upon on the Sunday ranch. Commerce vs. religion (and their disquieting similarities) is a plain and simple notion. It underestimates some of the deeper ideas in the movie, but still it resonates.
I can specifically recall the feeling I had when I saw the film for the first time, a wild combination of being strangled by the neck and tickled under my arms. I choke-laughed. The balls on this guy! I remember thinking. The more I watch There Will Be Blood—and I watch it often—the more it becomes a parable about closing yourself off in pursuit of an impossible goal. To make a movie, to acquire wealth, to capture God, to write a damn story—these all apply to the film. That it is sometimes funny is part of the point. Everytime Plainview grumbles, “Yes, I do!” and “Give me the blood, Lord!” during Sunday’s slapping fit in church, I lose it. Sunday and Plainview’s duelling is emotionally grotesque, but also high comedy.
Sinclair’s novel isn’t terribly funny, and the story of the Doheny clan, who eventually built and occupied the historic Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, is ultimately a tragedy of excess and for no good reason. Plainview is similar, though money never really seems to be his endgame, only a means to isolation. “I have a competition in me,” he memorably snarls at one point. “I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.”
“I want to earn enough money I can get away from everyone.”
“We had an actor come to the set one day to do this confrontation scene with Daniel, great actor named David Warshofsky,” Anderson remembers. “He’s the guy in the scene where [Plainview] says, ‘One of these nights I’m gonna cut your throat, wherever you live, I’m gonna cut your throat.’ This actor has to do this scene with Daniel all day back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And at the end of it, he just stood up and said, ‘I feel like I went 10 rounds with Federer.’ And it was exactly like sports, that feeling of the energy between him and other actors that would come on. Fucking great to watch.”
The performance is still astounding. Before filming began, Anderson sent Day-Lewis a copy of the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and urged him to watch documentaries on its director, John Huston. Huston’s voice—a kind of lyrical Western croak, elegant but gruff, articulate but violent—is the inspiration for Plainview’s specific, captivating speaking style. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre depicts one of the great moral dilemmas of 20th-century cinema. It’s Anderson’s favorite film ever made, and a fitting prequel.
Huston is also known for portraying one of movie history’s great bastards and another Southern California natural-resource magnate, Chinatown’s water-hoarding Noah Cross. One of Cross’s most famous lines, “Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water,” has a Plainview-esque circuitry to it. It indicates a need for power and control over the unconquerable. When Plainview’s derrick in Little Boston bursts forth and catches fire, injuring his son, Plainview is defiant. “What are you looking so miserable about?” Plainview asks his colleague Fletcher Hamilton. “There’s a whole ocean of oil under our feet. No one can get at it except for me.” He’s peering at destruction and all he can see is success. Plainview, like Day-Lewis, is serially focused. In Chinatown, private detective Jake Gittes askes Cross why, despite a sizable fortune, he continues to pursue success. “How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can’t already afford?” “The future, Mr. Gittes!” Cross responds. “The future!”
Day-Lewis’s immersive approach to roles is legendary. For Phantom Thread, his latest collaboration with Anderson, Day-Lewis trained as a couturier, learning the intricacies of dressmaking and sewing to play the role of 1950s fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock. In There Will Be Blood, he endlessly studied 19th-century drilling technologies while plunging into Plainview’s dark recesses. “I see the worst in people,” Plainview says. Imagine occupying that space all day, every day, for months, isolated in West Texas.
“It’s elaborate,” Anderson says of Day-Lewis’s process. “It doesn’t scare me. It’s only intense on set, the level of concentration he has is really severe. It’s tops. There’s no reliever when Daniel’s pitching a game. He’s going the full nine. The bullpen doesn’t even come in that day. And that’s intense, that level of concentration is intense. ’Cause usually the most intense actors I’ve worked with, it’s like ‘It’s lunch’—let’s just take a break. But it’s strong all day with Daniel.”
The actor originally selected to play Eli Sunday couldn’t hack it in the face of Day-Lewis’s commitment and had to be fired by Anderson, who’s no slouch when it comes to obsession. They’re a natural pair.
“If we were stealing from anybody, it was a little bit of Kubrick. But that tends to be kind of Paul’s taste anyway,” the cinematographer Robert Elswit said in 2007. “But in terms of temperature—and we’ve said this a million times—it was Treasure of the Sierra Madre. We really wanted a sense of that. Oil drilling was a really hard life, and I think Paul was absolutely obsessed with capturing that.”
At the time of There Will Be Blood’s release, in The New Yorker, the critic David Denby wrote, “I’m not quite sure how it happened, but after making Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love—skillful but whimsical movies, with many whims that went nowhere—the young writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has now done work that bears comparison to the greatest achievements of Griffith and Ford.”
There is a magisterial quality to the movie, something classical in its construction—the way Eli’s newly raised Church of the Third Revelation stands in the shadow of the derrick, their fresh lumber unsullied, two monuments to growth and community. It’s like John Ford, sure. But the way turn-of-the-century America looks at that time also recalls the recent vintage of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, ’70s moral Westerns about the quagmires of industry and expansion. It’s an evolution in the way movies portray the past, an echo of an echo.
“When we had that train going down those tracks—we’d gone to all this work to get it, you’re like pinching yourself,” Anderson says. “Like, this is a dream come true. This is like fantasyland.”
When Anderson was shooting the movie in Marfa, the Coen brothers were making a Western of their own, No Country for Old Men. As Anderson and his crew tested the pyrotechnic system used in the oil derrick scene, a huge billow of smoke drifted across Marfa and into the Coens’ shot. The brothers were forced to suspend shooting for the day. The Coens would have their revenge more than a year later, on Oscar night, when No Country bested There Will Be Blood for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. But Blood may be the movie that transcends time.
With Anderson’s subsequent works—The Master, Inherent Vice, and now Phantom Thread—we can see There Will Be Blood with more clarity. We know now that he has a keen sense of the obsessive. Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love feel like interior stories, about the madness of familial death and the flowering of new love. There Will Be Blood is a new chapter, bigger and bolder, but also removed from the recent history of California. It’s generations ago—the origins of the coked-out excess of Boogie Nights and the vainglorious starfuckers of Magnolia are still 50, 60, 70 years to come. If you’re looking for the origins of Southern California’s untamed ego, look no further than Daniel Plainview.
While discussing the film with Marc Maron on the WTF podcast in 2015, Anderson asked, “What’s the difference between survival and ambition?” It’s a worthy question he doesn’t answer. In replying to a sweeping question from Maron about the movie’s meaning, Anderson kind of ducked it with text. “Family. Power. Black gold. I think about that movie and I think about Daniel and his boy.”
Eventually, it becomes a little more complicated than that. After H.W. is rendered deaf in the well accident, Plainview sends him away, fracturing the one delicate relationship in his life. By film’s end, after a dash 20 years into the future, H.W. breaks ties with his aging, still-angry father. “I thank God I have none of you in me,” a grown H.W. says to his raging father after learning that he’s an orphan. Seemingly moments later, Plainview’s other surrogate son, Eli, arrives at the mansion. Across 30 years, the two men have tangled, trading the upper hand in a deathless battle of righteousness—black gold vs. the blood of Christ. Money is always the object of their affection. Plainview’s “drainage” speech has become an iconic, much mimicked, oft-memed bit of movie coinage. In many ways, “I drink your milkshake!” is the first line of dialogue to become a cliché on its own terms—a “Here’s looking at you, kid” for the Twitter era.
The line’s provenance also derives from Doheny, during the 1924 congressional hearings regarding the Teapot Dome scandal. The New Mexico Senator Albert Fall—who was famously bribed by Doheny—reportedly said, “Sir, if you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake and my straw reaches across the room, I’ll end up drinking your milkshake.” Anderson is nothing if not a master synthesist, bending the arc of history to fit his fascinations, whether the subject is an oilman, porn star Johnny Wadd, or the origins of Scientology. “I drink your milkshake” is one more beautifully integrated snatch of history. It’s a myth but it’s true.
By the time Plainview bashes Eli’s head in with a bowling pin, the story is all but over. “I’m finished!” Plainview hollers, to his butler and God or maybe to no one at all. He’s rich, drunk, and without purpose, dragging his bum leg all over his empty mansion, living with the remnant of that tumble down the mine in the opening moments of the movie. He’s right back where he started, all alone. And that’s all Plainview wanted in the first place. He’s not a historical figure; he’s a creation. His murderous sociopathy doesn’t make him an avatar of American greed or even an agent of death. But it may mean that bad people feed off the world—until they die. Ultimately, There Will Be Blood is about a unique, corroded, driven man. In other words, it’s a Paul Thomas Anderson movie.
