Notes on "There Will Be Blood"

There Will Be Blood is a 2007 Paul Thomas Anderson film about the early days of the oil business in California. It is loosely based on an Upton Sinclair novel, Oil. It felt like an Upton Sinclair novel. It has a plot arc of the naturalistic fiction of Frank Norris and Emile Zola or of the Italian films of the '50s. That is to say, the plot arc steadily in relentlessly downhill.

This is a geek film. Most films about the oil business would show a derrick and gray men working around it, but here we see the evolution of the technology from a man with a pick and shovel at the bottom of a hole to men with buckets slopping oil out, to primitive pumps. We see primitive braces and pulleys turning into 80 foot derricks. We see barrels rolled onto trains evolve into pipelines. It is fascinating to witness. Often, the details of the mechanics are exposed as a setup to some dramatic catastrophe. One becomes conscious that, if the camera spends time showing the course of a belt, then soon that belt will break and someone will be harmed. We do not see the mechanics simply for the interest of the mechanics, but that's okay.

A theme this movie has in common with Paul Thomas Anderson's earlier Boogie Nights is family, specifically rejection of family. Both, Daniel Plainview, the protagonist of this film, and the subject of Boogie Nights have turned away from family, and spend much of their respective films trying to reconstruct a version of it. In Boogie Nights, the family is the porn movie production company. Both lose their bearings when their pseudo-families fall apart.

- J