David Ehrenstein wrote: I was reminded of the centrality of sexual identity most keenly this season with Paul Thomas Anderson's amazing There Will Be Blood. The protagonist, Daniel Plainview, has no sexuality whatsoever. He shows no desire for women, or men. The small child he adopts and claims as his own he treats -- by his own admission in the devestating thrid act -- as a prop to con the suckers. One scene where he goes with miners who work with him to w whorehouse is marked by the fact that he shows no interest in the women whatsoever.
What's his story? That's the mystery of the thing. And it's to Paul Thomas Anderson's credit that this mystery is maintained without defaulting to heterosexaulity as per usual.
I'm fascinated by this sort of thing as well, and deeply appreciative of it. One's first instinct, I suppose, is to suspect that the DDL character is simply a misanthrope and cares for no one; he does not have that capacity and has seen fit to exploit it as he finds it in others for the weakness it can be. Still, that's only a first, impulsive reaction. I seem to recall from reading the script that he exhibits genuine interest in his family, especially when his presumptive brother turns up. I'm curious to see how this is handled in the film proper, however, as the interpretation of the words can change much. Certainly, Plainview confides to his brother in a way he never does to anyone else. But does this just speak to a human need that even Plainview has? Also, I remember something else about wanting to rebuild the family house in this new location in a style more fitting Plainview's station and grand ambition/self-regard.
This issue of sexual identity as a determining, shaping aspect of individual character seems essential to me not to neglect. There is, as David rightly says, nothing reductive about it. It is only as reductive as any other perspective which is inherently limited by language and the construction of thought patterns. Everything can and is approachable only through certain initial attitudes, presumptions, axioms, whatever; none of which appears ex nihilo in our minds--these perspectives are always initially based on or a response to some prior model we held or someone else held. That seems obvious but also worth restating. It is, of course, what we do with that initial perspective, where we allow it to go and what insights it shapes that is worth anything at all.
Anyway, the absence of sexuality in Plainview reminds me of an interesting parallel in the character of King Sebastian in Oliveira's majestic
O Quinto Império. Though it isn't dwelt on at length, this character also displays a notable disinterest in sexuality. And he, too, is a man of enforced will and aggression. I don't believe that in either case there is a reductive argument being made that the absence of sex turns men into monsters. However, sex can and does have a certain mollifying quality to temper or blunt or divert aggression. At our level of cognitive development, sex has a poetic capacity which raw, grasping ambition does not (certainly not when ambition is unreflective). In other words, it allows for refinement through nuance. When it is absent, that kind of temperance and human connection is either also absent or it emerges in a different form. The question becomes what shape does it take and
is it pursued in any form?
The difference between the two characters is in the fact that Sebastian's vast, empire building aspirations are depicted as the product of a kind of naive, though hardly harmless, idealism, and yet an idealism that contains within it a certain nobility, a tenor of character which is, or at least can be, genuinely admirable. I get the impression that this dimension of character does not exist in Plainview, or at least is less overtly considered. Is his ambition admirable? I'm sure it is to some but can we who oppose what he represents see anything admirable in him at all?
This leads me to wonder how multi-dimensional the character is. Is he recognizably human enough or a monolithic entity for whom we can have no sympathy? Is it important to have sympathy for him? Is he a tragic figure or is his very existence our tragedy? His name alone is a dark joke, suggesting a semi-distorted, though all-American, Jeffersonian ideal.
I read a fascinating piece with Anderson somewhere in which he justified a change from the source novel. In the book there is a character that represents a viable socialist alternative to the representative capitalist figure. This character is absent in the film and Anderson insinuated that it was because he felt that it offered a false hope; that there could be no stopping someone like Plainview from the fulfillment of his ambitions, no impediment persuasive enough to shape his goals differently. That may be. But does the result emerge as Kubrickian cosmic wisdom or a cowed adolescent nihilism? I'm expecting something in between; not a muddle exactly but also perhaps not the precise invective I would like.
