Vintage Vault: There Will Be Blood
By Jeff Vandusen
Lance Writer
January 16, 2008
 Paul Thomas Anderson’s grand epic There Will Be Blood is, quite literally, a bat-shit insane movie. It’s an overwhelmingly creepy worm of a picture that burrows its way into your skin and chills you to the marrow. It’s exactly what I needed. I like my movies completely bonkers, thank you very much.
As manic oilman Daniel Plainview, Daniel Day Lewis limps around the California desert like the angel of death disguised as an earnest prospector. He talks with a deep, oil-slick drawl and sports a dark moustache that casts a shadow over his tight lips. Plainview is Satan himself, a personification of everything wrong with the world. He appears friendly, but admits to a confidant that he completely detests humanity. It’s clear what he’s out for—he’s like a guy who lies to a girl for sex.
The beginning of the movie has him chipping away for silver all by himself. This is where he starts his fortune before drilling for oil. We watch as his co-workers are killed off in the wells—not once does Plainview feel bad. He adopts the orphan of one of the men as his own and uses him for sympathy.The kid is quiet and is framed to appear like a parrot on a pirate’s shoulder.
“I’m a family man and I run a family business,” he says to the people of oil-rich Little Boston, California. “This is my son and partner H.W. Plainview.”
Oh, yeah? Let’s see the birth certificate.
Plainview has his cinematic roots—to name a couple; William Castle’s Mr. Sardonicus (about a ghoul who digs up his father to retrieve a lottery ticket, only to have a hideous grin frozen on his face. He spends his life stalking the halls of his huge mansion using the villagers’ daughters as sexual toilets), and Mr. Burns—everybody knows what he did. They’re all completely unappealing characters you can’t help but root for. “Scoundrel” is an understatement, but it’s possible to probe them for some semblance of humanity. Sardonicus was more interested in losing the grin and brought an English doctor to his castle to fix the problem. Burns had his bear Bobo, like Charles Foster Kane and his Rosebud, a reminder of his happy childhood. Plainview’s past isn’t known. All he wants is money and with his monomaniacal intensity, steps on everybody to get it. He has no family and no love except money. He’s a ghoul, a horror, the Great Satan and a sociopath all in one.
There Will Be Blood ends an incredibly bleak year with a lot of bleak movies. It was a year where soldiers came back from the Middle East wrapped up in body bags, a former prime minister turns out to be some shyster criminal and Hillary Clinton takes the stage and acts like she’s already won the presidency—no wonder somebody held up one of her campaign offices with road flares. The baddies triumphed last year and it’s no wonder why the downer atmosphere rubbed off on the movies. It’s only appropriate that we’d see a lot of blood (like the buckets of poster paint red arterial spray in Sweeney Todd or the high body count in No Country For Old Men) and a lot of anguish.
No Country For Old Men, (as an aside, both No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood were filmed at the same location), is a downer, tasty popcorn for nihilists. It leaves you with a sick feeling in the gallows of your gut. Unlike No Country, There Will Be Blood, depending on your mood, doesn’t leave you feeling sick. It burns, but you’re left smiling—I was shivering.
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