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The clash between Eli Sunday and Daniel Plainview, between religion and industry, steeple and oil derrick, might come down to something like the difference between a gift and a skill. Eli calls himself a son of the hills of Little Boston, an inheritor of land and legacy, a member of a family, and of a faith imagined as a family. Daniel calls himself an oil man, but only after reciting his resume as proof that he’s earned the title. He tends flocks of derricks, not people, and he leases both land and family to strategic, rather than communal, ends. Yet ultimately, each lacks what the other has. What is a gift without control or discipline, a skill without purpose or meaning? And is there a difference between a gift and luck? Wes & Erin discuss Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 film “There Will Be Blood.” For more analysis, check out Way Too Close on YouTube: https://youtu.be/J3usJ4fqOJU Upcoming Episodes: Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Julius Caesar.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. The clash between Eli Sunday and Daniel Plainview, between religion and industry, steeple and oil derrick, might come down to something like the difference between a gift and a skill. Eli calls himself a son of the hills of Little Boston, an inheritor of land and legacy, a member of a family and of a faith imagined as a family. Daniel calls himself an oil man, but only after reciting his resume as proof that he's earned the title. He tends flocks of derricks, not people, and he leases both land and family to strategic rather than communal ends. Yet ultimately, each lacks what the other has. What is a gift without control or discipline, a skill without purpose or meaning? And is there a difference between a gift and luck? Today we're discussing Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 film there will Be Blood. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, when I had suggested that we watch this film, I was having trouble deciding between this one and no country for Old Men, which came out in 2007, which filmed in the same place. I don't know if you read about the story where the oil derrick burning down, that whole scene was actually causing problems for no country because they were filming so close together that the smoke was getting into the no country for Old Men shots in the background. And, you know, I know there's a lot of conversation about these two films being possibly the two greatest films of the 21st century so far. So I was wondering which. Which you think is better. 2:12 Wes: Hmm. Well, it's been quite a while since I've seen no country for Old Men, so I would have trouble saying I don't remember no country for Old Men well enough. 2:21 Erin: As much as I love There Will Be Blood, I think actually I prefer no country, strangely. But I thought this one would be, in a way, more fun to talk about. I mean, did you look at all at Oil, the Upton Sinclair novel? You know, this is, I guess, a bit more of a free adaptation, or it's just an adaptation, really, of the first hundred pages of oil. Not an adaptation in the way that no country is of its source material. 2:47 Wes: Yeah, I did look at Oil and it's loosely based on it departs pretty quickly. 2:52 Erin: But, yeah, so I thought. I thought, in a way would be easier to do because I think with no country would have to be continually looking over our shoulder at McCarthy if we were to just cover the film. But I don't know. I mean, the older I get, the more I like, the more I like There Will Be Blood. And I do wonder if it's actually more fun to watch. Like, the performances are so fun to watch, and it's so funny. But I don't know if you would agree if you found this particularly funny or what's your experience with the film, because I've seen it now quite a few times, including just recently on the big screen, which was great. Art House theater was running it. So about a month ago, I saw it on the big screen for the first time since it came out. What's your experience? 3:34 Wes: Well, it had been so long since I had seen it. I only had one memory of the film, and that was a memory of Eli killing Daniel at the end. 3:45 Erin: Oh, whoa. 3:47 Wes: I think I reversed it. 3:49 Erin: Wow. 3:49 Wes: Imagine coming with a gun and killing Daniel. So I think, you know, when I first saw it, I thought it was brilliant. Like, it didn't have the huge. A huge emotional impact on me. And I think that's because of the darkness of the Daniel character and the fact that, Right. He doesn't change very much, except that he just sort of drills in, so to speak, into his existing character structure, which involves a lot of envy and anger, and just deepens it and deepens it and deepens it. You know, it's almost. I was just thinking, now, is there something tragic about it? I mean, he's sort of. You know, I wouldn't call tragic in the sense that he's very focused on achieving this destiny of his, which is to kind of flesh out his envy, as he puts it. He's an envious man. He's angry. He hates people. He wants to get away from people, to have enough money to get away from people. And that's his project, and that's what he does. So there's no redemption. There's little hints of what might be redemptive, for instance, in his relationship with his son. But it always goes sideways. That, for me, subtracts from the. Or it doesn't subtract from the emotional impact. The emotional impact is just unpleasant. 5:08 Erin: You know, you don't admire him at all, though. I mean, I'm interested in the idea. This idea of envy. 5:13 Wes: And, I mean, he is very handsome. I'm just kidding. 5:19 Erin: I just looked at you with disgust. 5:21 Wes: He's got a good. He's got a good job. Oh, you don't think Daniel Day Lewis is handsome? 5:25 Erin: I think Daniel Day Lewis is handsome. I think Daniel Plain Lewis. Daniel Dayview. Daniel Days Inn, the hotel magnate. 5:44 Wes: That's great. 5:46 Erin: I think he's a little oily, actually. No, I mean, that whole opening sequence is. You know, you're on his side at first. That whole opening sequence is so incredible. I love that. You know, almost no dialogue and just him and the silver mine. You've got to admire him. 6:04 Wes: No, so I look at all that retrospectively now in terms of his larger project. Yes. But in the beginning, he's someone who is willing to put all this physical work and also to sacrifice life and limb, potentially. And he hurts his leg, of course, and has a permanent limp from it. To do what? To get rich, I think. And I. Yeah, you have to admire the sort of determination, I guess, in a way. But one of the very early scenes is of him prostrate in that office as another person is counting the silver for him. And it's a very nice visual image of the idol he's sort of bowing down to. He's prostrate before this project of becoming rich, and he's made lame by it. 6:54 Erin: Yeah, you know, it is about getting rich. Right. But I think there's also something deeper at work there which maybe speaks to the idea of oil. You know, I know we talked about gold in our episode on the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. And of course, we also have silver here as kind of a foil foil to oil. I think getting rich for Daniel might be proof of a kind of competence or dominance, domination, but it's. It's almost a kind of a side effect or. Or proof of his success on a business level. So I think that that's why when he gets rich, he doesn't know what to do with himself anymore. Or he's ultimately hobbled by that more than he is hobbled by, you know, the work itself, though literally. That's not true. But, you know, this idea of being envious. I mean, he also needs people. You know, I was thinking about the setting of the film often and the fact that it starts so relatively late in the history of Western expansion, you know, so we have. We have a person who hates people, who sees other people as competition, and yet who also has to build his entire business model around rhetoric and manipulation and sort of selling yourself and your qualifications to an audience because you're not Just one man out prospecting in the middle of nowhere. You have a continent filling up, so you have land already owned by people. You know, you have the Sunday family, for instance, on their ranch that they own. And we have people, you know, like. Like the camping trip is such a great symbol of this, right? Like the fact that Daniel takes HW On a camping trip. That's their excuse. You know, they're camping and quail hunting, so they have their little packs on their backs. That is so interesting to me that we are now at a point in time where you could be going out in California just on a camping trip and not because you're a pioneer who's doing this because of, you know, some kind of compulsion to move into the west or for necessity, maybe. So we have this, you know, immediate confrontation here between this lone oil man and a lifestyle which. Which is about kind of not really being part of the community. And then the most successful of those oil men are the ones who can bridge that gap with society, I think. And obviously, this is why HW is so important to give the appearance of the family business. So. So he needs them, and he's sort of reliant on them. And part of his skill is about this manipulation, both the rhetoric and ultimately what that comes down to is lies and strategizing in a way that kind of is using and manipulating people. That ambivalence, that envying them but also needing them, goes right to the heart of his character. I think it's why he's ultimately so obsessed with family, why he becomes attracted to the idea of Henry, his brother. Because I think there's something that Eli has that Daniel is actually quite attracted to, though he doesn't maybe see it that way. 9:52 Wes: Yeah, his motive. Right. So I said, you know, getting rich. He's focused on getting rich. And yet there's another motive that goes beyond that, and that is, you know, I've called it envy. So these are the lines from the movie where his brother says no. He says to his brother or his supposed brother, are you envious? Do you get envious? And this, by the way, is one of the. Maybe the only time we try to see him confide in someone or get them to confide in him. So there's almost none of that in his life. And then Henry says, I don't think so, no. And then Daniel says, I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people. Henry says, that part of me is gone. And then he says, work and not succeeding. All my failures have left me. And then Daniel says, I just don't. I just don't care. And he says, there's times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money so I can get away from everyone. What'll you do about your boy? I don't know. Maybe it'll change. Maybe it'll change 10:57 Erin: Daniel Plainview. We have to do that. 10:59 Wes: Maybe. Yeah. I don't know how to. 11:01 Erin: I'm an oil man. 11:03 Wes: There you go. That's great. That's a great impersonation. 11:06 Erin: I do so many lines from this movie. He completely failed to alert me to the recent panic in our economy. 11:17 Wes: That's great. So there's that central. So he knows, right. He's not someone who doesn't know that part of himself, that envious part of himself. Now, one might say, well, what he really envies in others is the capacity to connect. It's actually capacity for some sort of community. I think that is the part that he doesn't quite know about himself. But otherwise he's very conscious of his envy. And he has a certain project which is to dominate people because he hates them and to be able to maintain some sort of distance from them. And, yeah, as you're pointing out, he uses the idea of community to sell himself. And he sees this little boy that he's adopted as just a means to an end. But it's not entirely cynical. I think we get hints of the fact that this relationship, it's a real relationship in the end, he doesn't fully connect with hw. His temperamental hatred overcomes that connection in part because in a way, his pride is injured by HW's injury. He can't deal with the fact of that injury. And that's a pivotal moment in the movie where any redemptive possibility in that relationship is lost at the very moment that he's hitting oil kills off the redemptive possibility of that relationship with hw. But the other important thing that you're pointing to, I think, is that he puts himself in the place of being someone who can provide for a community. Right. So he's in Little Boston, Right? There's no bread. Let's look at his speech real quick. To my mind, it's an abomination to consider that any man, woman or child in this magnificent country of ours should have to look upon a loaf of bread as a luxury. We're going to dig water wells here, and water wells means irrigation. Irrigation means cultivation. We're going to raise. Raise crops here where before it just simply wasn't possible. You're going to have more grain than you know what to do with. All right, so this looks a lot like Jesus, you know, one of Jesus's miracles. And he's put himself into direct conflict with Eli here. Eli was supposed to do the blessing, wanted to do the blessing. And Daniel stepped into his place and said, look, my material providence is better than your spiritual providence. It's part and parcel of the envy and the competition that's in him. He can't have Eli being the one who's going to provide in some way for these people. He's got to be the one. Now it puts him in a kind of constructive position with regard to others and he does have that in him. When he says there's going to be no more hitting for Mary, he has certain constructive impulses that are evident here, but they all seem to get co opted by envy. Anyway, I'm not sure if I'm joining this up in the end. I forget where you got at the end of your comment. 14:05 Erin: The idea of his ultimate desire for connection or his reliance on people ultimately. 14:09 Wes: Okay, yes. So he's also relying on people, which is something he hates and doesn't really want to do. But he's got to have workers. 14:17 Erin: Yeah. And he has to use other people's land because he doesn't have any. I mean, I think this is central too to the ambivalence within oil itself as a symbol. I'm interested in Daniel and Eli as oppositional in terms of this idea of what you earn and what's just given to you. Things we, we do and don't earn. And I think Daniel is obsessed with what you earn, that is with like acquisition on the basis of skill, of not having anything and then getting it. Whereas Eli is interested in the idea of a gift. You know, he's the faith healer. He's interested in faith, period, which is about grace, which is fundamentally something that you don't earn. He is a pastor and therefore a maker of people to join this faith family. You know, the faith is conceiv…
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