Oil and the Blood

Will there be blood?

That is the question answered in the Paul Thomas Anderson movie I saw last night, an odd psychologically black and white film where evil, stupidity or hypocrisy is affirmed in nearly every character. In brief, it's the story of Mr.Plainview, an oil man, who builds his fortune by buying up the land at the expense of his own humanity. He serves the dual gods of oil and hate, with a special loathing for people, and people of faith.

Religion is represented by a cherubic faced man-boy named Eli, who is from the family that sold Mr. Plainview drilling rights in the first place. Eli is the town's minister, and essentially a false prophet, and uses every opportunity he can to try to get at the wealth that Plainview represents. His congregation--always seen in groups--are presented as sheep, unable to see Eli for the manipulate imposter he is.

Surprisingly, considering the genius of Magnolia, the director faulters here in the presentation of religion. By making Eli the obvious hypocrite, and his flock the willing stooges that the wily Mr. Plainsview thinks they are, the film almost confirms his worldview, siding us with an alcoholic and murderer.

The oil world is much different now. All grown up and run by huge corporations and national entities. Exxon Mobil announced record earnings on the level of $40.6 billion for the year, the type of attention getting number that let's people without perception skills get outraged. Exactly what a company with over $400 billion in sales should earn is open to question, with those outside the industry supplying the most easily constructed and far fetched non-answers. But they know it should be lower, so that it creates less confusion between having your cake (driving whatever car you like to wherever you like) and eating it too (paying ridiculously low commodity prices at the same time a good portion of the rest of the world-China, India- is industrializing).


While reading about Exxon, I kept going back to the movie, and its title, There Will Be Blood. It's a contradiction, because there is actually very little blood until the very end, and it pours not in a vivid red, but in a deep dark grapejuice color. And it comes during the depression when Eli, still the phony, shows up at the large mansion of Mr. Plainview. He tries to work a deal, only to be humiliated by Mr. Plainview and forced to admit his falsehood (thereby renouncing God) in a stark replication of what he had done to Mr.Plainview earlier, where Plainview decides to accept Jesus in order to gain the trust of an old man whose land he wants to build an oil pipeline through.

The depression is almost invisible in this film, and the word appears just once. And it's a word rarely spoken today as we sit on the edge or recession. It got me thinking about where our economy is headed. Because things are uniquely odd. Investment firms, home builders, bond insurers, and banks have taken huge losses. There is speculation that there is more to come. Yet I don't really see any pain at all. Sure mortgage brokers are taking up catering, and anyone dealing with mortgage related products at the investment banks are facing slips. But where is the hurt? While you even see the "for sale signs" up, and read about this family or that who are returning to the joyful world of renting, there is no flagrant pain.

Will there be blood?

Of the three main characters, it is Mr. Plainview's adopted son who carries the moral center of the film. Early on his father dies in an oil drilling accident and Plainvew takes him as his own. We see the boy following Plainview about, silent, and Plainview seems happy to have this person to teach his ways, while at the same time exploiting the boy for the appearance of family that his presence brings. You see that Plainview does indeed care for the boy, until, an explosion damages the boys hearing and he is thus flawed and unable to further obsorb what Mr. Plainview has to give. Plainview sends him away.

It is strange also how religion plays out in this film. Behind me in the theatre was a man with the big laugh of the easily amused, and it filled the theatre, dominating other laughs that accompanied Eli during his humiliating confrontations with Mr. Plainview. At one point in the film, Eli walks into Plainview's little temporary field office, and says,"When the oil pump is ready to be put into production, let me say a few words of blessing". Plainview looks at his oil boys (hardened, hardworking types), kind of smirks, and says fine. But when the day comes, with the town standing watching, and Eli waiting to be introduced, Plainview dedicates the well himself. A masterful humiliation.

I wondered exactly what these people in the theatre, not more than twenty or so, were really laughing at. The flaw in the film was that Eli was so obviously over the top in that evangelical manner that turns up in films that hope to say something about Christianity. But it always confuses me. If a man takes on Biblical aires, but fundamentally does not believe in God, or what he is preaching, is that a knock on Christianity, or is that man one and the same as the man who professes a profound disbelief in faith or God? At what point does a professed Christian stop being a Christian?

For example, if you send thousands to ovens to die, and yet, you go to church, are you in fact Christian? Or are you of that cultural Christian type that is so dangerous. You have taken on the trappings, but read not a jot of what Christ was all about. For Christianity, one would think, begins with Christ, and his testament, with the Old Testament used as object lessons for how God would have to judge in a world without Christ. Thus Old Testament as what God would do to sinful you without Jesus, and New Testament as what we are to do regarding God with Jesus.

It seems to me director Anderson has misstepped, or perhaps the audience was not perceptive enough to realize that Plainview and Eli both believed in nothing at all, with both characters equally loathesome and mirrors of each other. It said more about men without God than men with God, but people rarely make the distinctions.

Today the trend is toward reaffirming the ridiculousness of faith via a slew of popular books by men of solid intellect. The big knock seems to be that Christians are some combination of stupidity and self-righteousness wrapped in hypocrisy, though all those features can be found in man sans religion.

It is Plainsview's adopted son who turns up near the end, grown and married, to confront his father. He is deaf, though still able to verbalize. He tells his father that he loves him, but also, that he needs to be away from him. He decides he will go to Mexico to form his own oil business. He tells his father he will not compete with him, and obviously so since he is leaving the country. But we know from words spoken earlier that his father lives for competition. Plainview is angered that his son is rejecting what he represents. In an attempt to humiliate the son (in the same way he was humiliated by Eli with the fake church salvation moment, and in the same way he humiliates Eli later), he forces him to speak. Tell me with your mouth, not your hands, he sneers. The son, of course, speaks nothing but truth and love.

The importance of truth and love, and how the generations impact each other appear in P.T. Anderson's better film, Magnolia, a masterpiece with more to say about responsibility, religion, the consequences of action, and the power of divine judgement. It is interesting that some have reacted to the bizarre but necessary ending of this film in the the same way some critics reacted to the freak moment in Magnolia when frogs fall out of the sky.

But it is people like the man behind me in the theatre who likely would have laughed at the frogs, or walked out with a "What the hell?", so removed from any sort of religious framework. The frogs, pulled right from the plagues in the Old Testament, represented a moment of release in that film, where God intervenes in man's heart, in much the same way he softened Pharoah's heart just long enough for the Hebrews to spring free. Then too, if one is to believe that God is who he says, one ought not to hold God to a level of possibility that suggests that he cannot in fact intervene. To many, however, the frogs in Magnolia were seen as gimmick, if the film was seen at all.

The final moment of this film ends with Plainview, a wealthy drunkard, sloshed in his mansion's bowling alley. He has forced Eli to renounce faith and admit fraud, only to laugh and tell him that he has done so for nothing. There is no money to be had in the deal that Eli was proposing, for Plainview had already gotten what he needed via leaching the oil. He chases Eli around and clubs him...to death, and with a bowling pin. His butler approaches the door and Plainview, mirroring Christ, responds to his inquiry with, "I am finished". He has spilled blood, and not in Christlike redeeming fashion.

Plainview has nothing more to gain in earthly goods, he is likely off to jail, and the movie is over.

There will be blood, and often enough you don't see it coming when it hits you.