And when Daniel Plainview needs to buy Bandy's farm, and supplicates himself before the church, Eli uses "the truth". He repeatedly faces down authority, rendering his own father meek and disenfranchised - a case study in speaking truth to power. Eli Sunday is that part of the story.Įli Sunday may stand in for "faith" and "religion," but on a deeper level, he represents the universal ideal of "truth." He lays claim to the power of prophecy and revelation he sees right past Daniel Plainview's neighborly facade when they sit down together at the dinner table. Rather, the film shows how power and wealth, infiltrating the society and the soul, begin to break down the integrity of truth. There Will Be Blood doesn't just let truth stand, unmolested, to be assessed and accounted for. In the second universe, man never had any humanity, except what he fabricated to manipulate himself and the people around him.īut if the truth of Daniel's poisonous confession is the pivot point in this Janus-faced narrative, then we have to consider the damage wrought by these events upon truth itself. In the former universe, wealth and oil have the power to rob man of his humanity. he now exists in two parallel universes: one where he was a practical, competitive man who at the very least loved his son another where his whole life was a con, an offense against our most basic human sensibilities. Though you might prioritize one narrative over the other, you can never efface either of them from your image of Daniel. This development splits his life into two competing narratives, as revisionist histories tend to do with their subjects. In this final monologue to HW, Daniel offers no less than a sudden, complete revisionist history of his own whole life. If he is telling the truth, it's only to reveal that his whole life has been a lie. It's a striking paradox: if Daniel is lying at the end of his life, it's to hide the fact that he was once a decent human being. But if Daniel is telling the truth to HW, it means that his whole life, his every act of kindness and humanity has been inauthentic, part of his pursuit of profit. These damning claims are merely weapons that Daniel Plainview is using, here at the end of his life, to scorch the barren earth of his own relationships and good name. If Daniel is lying about these things, it means that his concern for his son - his earnestness as a father - was real, at least at the beginning. That point: when Daniel tells his son that he never cared about him, is he lying, just to injure his son in a moment of passion? Or is he telling the truth? in There Will Be Blood, it's a strict binary, and it hinges on a particular point, right at the end of the movie. When a question like this is just floating in the air over a narrative arc, it's easy to take the middle path: "Well, I think he always had the innate potential to be evil, but it was the oil and the money that hardened him into a villain." It's the most logical answer, but also a little bit of a cop-out as to "human nature," as it were. According to this interpretation, his final sadistic moments are the blossoming of a man who was always rotten deep down. a Grendel before he was humanized by Gardner, a Cormac McCarthy antagonist. He becomes the type of evil, cruel, unredeemable character rarely found in the bible, or in any literature.
However, read strictly as a villain, Daniel Plainview becomes a culmination of all of humanity's most horrible potentialities. This story is a story of a fall from grace, the story of Adam or Anakin Skywalker. Read as a fallen hero, a failed father figure, Daniel Plainview is a study in disillusionment, a showcase for the destructive power of wealth and obsession. Your interpretation of Daniel's actions must answer that question, and it will, in turn, retroactively color your experience of the whole film. There Will Be Blood begs a question - was Daniel Plainview always an asshole, even when he came from a humble station and chipped away at rocks for silver? Was his early appearance of earnestness simply cover for a calculating, malicious nihilist? Or is this the story of his fall from earthy humility into the madness of alienated wealth? Is it the oil and the money that are evil? Or is it simply human nature, poisoned at the root, fertile ground for corruption and betrayal? WARNING: THIS ENTRY, LIKE MOST OF MY ANALYSES, IS A RELENTLESS STREAM OF SPOILERS.
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