There Will Be Blood

Kingdoms, Christendoms and The Market
by Jonathan Heaps

Daniel Plainview is alone in the desert. That simple fact alludes to the grandest of Christian and Biblical tales. The punishment of Cain. Israel's exodus from Egypt. David tending his flocks and hiding from Saul. Jesus' fasting and temptation. Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus. St. Anthony and the commencement of monasticism. The opening scenes of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (loosely based on Upton Sinclair's book Oil!) call to mind most fervently the story of Jacob wrestling with the Angel of God. Having severed himself from his society, a man (whether Daniel or Jacob) struggles with a mighty force he has found in the desert. Both leave the encounter with a blessing. Both leave with a limp.

After a millenia and a half of Kingdom and Christendom, a new beast stirs in the halls of the industrial revolution. Whether the Kindgom had been empire, feudalism or democracy and teh Christendom had been Catholic, Protestant or Evangelical, now the Market towers over the world. When the Marxist distrusts it or the Capitalist applauds it, they both confirm its preeminence. When a new social order emerges, a kind of person who exemplifies the virtues of that order follows not far behind. The Citizen, Lord or Statesman is the essence of his Kingdom incarnate. Likewise, The Saint, Priest or Monk represents for us those who fully become the person for whom Christendom has prepared the world. Daniel Plainview is emblematic of the priest and citizen of a world shaped by the Market.

The secular state is largely ignored by this tale. In so far as Blood is a thematic meditation on the frontier (which is both socio-economic and geographic), the film is an exploration of human life with little or no law. Democracy perhaps creates the very conditions of possibility for kind of world that spans Plainview by its emphasis on freedom. The lack of social structure provided by democracy, especially a democracy pressing westward, opens a social space for a competitive profiteering way of life. If we don't socially express a "greater good" beyond the naive belief in a providential "invisible hand," then Machiavellian self-service just is the summum bonum.

Christendom of the period, on the other hand, receives its due attention. The force for social order in Boston, California is Eli Sunday's "Church of the Third Revelation." From pulling away from a post-sale prayer to undermining Eli's attempt to bless the new oil derrick, Plainview cannot bear the imposition of religion upon his operations. The Market will, however, do business with Christianity. Christianity's pre-determined goals create demand within its own structures. We want buildings, hymnals, vestments, etc. Eli wants a new building and Daniel provides, with a promise of $5000 more dollars to come. This promise is never kept. The Market must dominate religion. It cannot be beholden to religion, not just because they have incommensurable ends, but because there is no virtue internal to the Market that demands it treat the stranger with honor.

This would all be true enough and tale enough for our times. There Will Be Blood does not just posit that the Market has followed the state and the church or simply emerged in their recession. It suggests that Plainview is a newer, more powerful version of Eli. Blood puts forward the businessman as the charlatan and huckster of a new age. It is a role the Preacher used to be sufficient to fill, but these are more sophisticated times. The simple folks need a leader and that leader lies to them to keep the order and fatten his billfold. If we add that they (and we) really don't need a leader, we've got dialectical materialism and Marx.

There Will Be Blood's story left the insulting impression that it did not take the Church very seriously. Eli is conniving but never truly as cunning as Daniel. The congregants are portrayed with a kind of shuffling, misty-eyed disdain. They are sincere in the way only suckers and sheep can be. Plainview's workers have the benefit of perspective. They know that they are risking life, limb and health in the search for a paycheck. Their suffering holds no mystical meaning. It is instrumental. "Superstition," as Daniel calls it, dupes the religious follower. The worker knows the game and chooses it without the comfort of duplicitous promise.

In one scene, though, the tenacious capacity of Christianity to unmask the market is remembered. Plainview's baptism, that he had meant to be purely perfunctory, becomes a moment of sincere confession. He has abandoned his son, deafened by Plainview's own industry. He does repent of the one sin he cannot ignore. H.W. Plainview comes to the desert to join his father again. The baptism scene will be paralleled when a financially desperate Eli Sunday admits his own hypocrisy before his is unceremoniously baptized in blood by a bowling pin. The "New Atheists," such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, ought to remember that unmasking the other's motives by suspicion can cut both ways. After all, they cannot seem to account for why, if religion is so obviously false, so many still flock to it. So many still defend it with ferocity and intelligence.

In terms of pure oppositional interaction, P.T. Anderson's film may be right that religion will, in the end, be killed by commerce. In so far as they are factions trying to "win" society, the Market lacks the self-deception and limitations of Christendom. The Market will denude religion of its pretense and then snuff it out once it has no resources left to offer. However, in so far as Christianity is a body of believers in unity with each other and the person of Christ, There Will Be Blood leaves space for religion to survive the isolating effects of the culture wars. Even the formal elements of Blood as a film speak to how their ways of life isolate Plainview and Sunday. Other characters just lurk around the edge of the frame. Even when they speak, the camera hangs on Day-Lewis and Dano in reverence of the characters' narcissism.

The world of opposition and social combat elevates men to pinnacles of wealth, honor and pleasure. It is, of course, lonely at the top. Plainview "want(s) no one else to succeed," and so tastes victory alone. He has no friends. He drives away his only son, both by mishandling H.W.'s new deafness and by being unable to see his son's genuine passion for the craft of oil-work. The one man he welcomes into his life turns out to be another (but inferior) opportunist, merely pretending to be Plainview's half-brother. Daniel's limp, in a brilliant bit of physicality on the part of Day-Lewis, worsens as his success grows and his loneliness intensifies. By the end of the film, he is nearly crippled. Plainview's bum leg is the biological manifestation of his bum soul.

Anderson does hint at the small decency at work in Plainview's nature. His love for H.W. is sincere, if not often full of wisdom. Lest we think this is some kind of fluke, he also subtly advocates for Eli's sister, who is being beaten by her religiously zealous father. Plainview is a man who genuinely cares for children and family. Yes, he is lonely and these people present little or no threat to him. This could be just one more exploitation, but of an emotional sort. Still, Day-Lewis portrays this characteristic as a compulsion. He can't help but be this way, despite his pathological need to "win." We don't easily forget our moral frameworks, even when vice commands us thoroughly.

This film is a tragedy not just because someone dies at the end. It is tragic because we see two men who value victory and success over unity and community with others. Or, put another way, these men define victory and success as something other than unity and community with others. Churches seem lured into the competition and collusion that Eli and Daniel perpetrate all the time. Evangelicals have become a much-seduced demographic in secular elections. The "christian" music industry defined itself as opposition to the secular market and yet colluded with it to meet its goals. Now, a major secular label owns every major "christian" record label. It's a demographic play and advertising ploy. The successful "christian" university often cannot maintain that identity, if it ever had such a thing to begin with. We will lose when we compromise because for the Market, there is no compromise. We ought not be at odds with a consumer culture. We ought to defy the Market by our studied indifference to it. We don't need its opportunity, because we have a promise. We don't need luck, because we have hope.