***Spoiler Warning***With “There Will Be Blood,” director Paul Thomas Anderson has crafted a social horror film for the ages. The film even comes complete with Anderson’s own Dracula, an oil-sucking prospector by the name of Daniel Plainview.
Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), in his own words, is an “oil man,” an entrepreneur daring to carve out his fortune drilling in turn-of-the-century California.
He has a nose for oil and a charisma he uses as a bludgeon. He rolls into the town of Little Boston on a tip that there is an ocean of oil in its hills, with promises of wealth and positive social change.
But then, of course, he gets a bit greedy. What Anderson sets up as a possibly analogous scenario to the invasion and its subsequent promises of a prosperous Iraq quickly becomes something more complex and horrifying.
Like his brilliant but over-stuffed “Magnolia,” thematically Anderson is fascinated by the social dynamics of the family and the things that tear them apart.
Plainview totes around his young son H.W. (Dillon Freasier) to help him play the sympathy card as a devoted single parent.
We’re led to believe that there may be genuine love between the prospector and his orphan, but all of that dissipates in a jet-black cloud of oil that comes roaring out of the earth under Little Boston.
In a scene of apocalyptic bravado, Plainview unearths a gigantic geyser of oil that catches fire and whose explosion deafens H.W.
After coldly abandoning his newly-deafened son on a west-bound train, Plainview scurries back to see his black ocean of wealth flow from the ground, his face horrifyingly lit by the oil fires about to consume the town.
There is something more powerful than the bonds of family, Anderson is telling us in this scene. It’s the sheer power of greed in world of the free market.
Plainview exists in a world pre-Labor Movement. We see more than one laborer killed in the dangerous work of oil derricking followed by Plainview’s callous dismissal of the workers’ deaths. Plainview acts without consideration of moral or ethical consequence.
Plainview understands the world of public relations and corporate influence, but knows he truly answers to no one.
This is the stuff Libertarian dreams are made of – capitalism completely unchecked by that pesky American Federation of Labor or the socialists taking up offices in the EPA.
Daniel Plainview is the embodiment of unhinged greed and competition – the kind that, according to the Libertarian mentality, if left outside of society’s purview would propel the U.S. into a new kind of cutthroat utopia. Utopia is supposed to be cut-throat though right?
By the film’s end, Plainview has descended into complete madness. He estranges himself from his own son and lapses into desperate alcoholism. He has learned that in this wonderfully capitalistic American system, his cocoon of wealth can insulate him from family, love, the law, moral, ethical or spiritual consequence.
But, despite his complete lack of morals, ethics and consideration for humanity as a whole, hasn’t he just always acted for the good of America?
“There Will Be Blood” is currently playing at the Real-to-Reel movie theater in Johnson City.

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