Take heart, pemmican, at least a few of us agree with you. And this is hard for me to say, disposed as I am to love PTA unreservedly. I too have reflected long and hard on this film and my experience of it but, unlike with most others apparently, for me it has not weathered well in hindsight. However much of my own complicated problem with it has to do with the excessively enthusiastic reception it's received which I don't believe is deserved and this has colored my own attitude.
HerrSchreck wrote:So what is so wrong with presenting a narrative that says "we start here-- man swinging pickaxe-- then move here-- man lucks into the lifes lottery-- then move here-- a few things happen-- end." I couldn't think of something more destructive to the kind of narrative PTA & DDA fashioned in this film than carping on Obvious Moral Tropes.
Certainly
this is not what makes the film "near-exalted" for you? Though I appreciate your attempt to move us away from reductive binary readings of narrative, I'm really surprised that it wouldn't be the formal qualities in this case that would most attract your praise.
I'd like to link to a few pieces that for me are closer to the mark on this picture:
Daniel Kasman,
Zach Campbell and
Godfrey Cheshire.
I actually like the film considerably more than Cheshire does or probably pemmican for that matter (I particularly love the second hour, for instance). It's just that I'm troubled by the fact that what is weakest about it is what seems to be most celebrated. The generally awful last twenty minutes, for instance, with all their bombast, undermine any previous nuance by rendering it superfluous, merely the surface affects of someone repressing their "real" nature. It's no easy task to balance out the hyperbolic with the genuinely human and Anderson simply doesn't succeed here. There is so much to cherish, however, that my misgivings are almost incidental. All the flaws in this picture seem only to be flaws of Anderson's grand ambition and there is indeed something noble and commendable about that. But it doesn't change the fact that the problems are serious ones which point up a lack of real foresight or insight. Far from being the staggering denouement he may have been striving for, the final scene comes across much more as the product of faltering uncertainty, of not knowing what to emphasize or why. What simply set poorly with me initially has solidified into a symbol of the film's final fatal limitations in the face of its own seeking and striving.
Still, what is superb here is the nuance, while we can still believe it has value. For me the greatest scene in the picture by far is the exchange between Daniel and his faux-brother in which we get what seems to be Plainview at his most unexpurgated and least self-conscious, least closed. That confessional moment should certainly be fixated on as much as the end. I would argue that what it reveals is more honest and more legitimately troubling. Because this is a film about how hatred is codified and made socially applicable, how it can find a place in a social structure built around it as a normative value. The ending then
can work but only in a vague, attenuated sort of way, as an acknowledgment not of how this was an inevitability but of how the inevitability is self-made, self-perpetuated.
That would be profound and worth while.
Beyond this, it is pleasing that Anderson sets Plainview apart from a too easy association with the expected standard villains of Standard Oil. It does have the welcome effect of broadening the scope of his critique and gives the impression that Anderson is indeed cognizant of the ways in which the driven individual interacts in competition with the notion of an established network, how competition and the "entrepreneurial spirit" can come to be the embodied limits of one driven primarily by will and hate. After all, the American Myth is as much about the veneration of the "individual" as it is about the embrace of capitalism. In fact, it is the assumed inherent value of pure pragmatics and individuality that has shaped the social paramters which allow for the emergence and sustenace of capitalism at all.
I also enjoyed the fine grasp on the delicate particularities of character which Anderson provides for us, especially in that glorious second hour. We get that Plainview uses HW as a prop but what is fascinating is the vague, undefinable menace that enters the situation
for Plainview once HW suffers his accident and attitudes toward him shift. On the surface it is because the distraction is unwelcome and, more humanely, that the circumstances fall frustratingly outside of Plainview's ability to ever fully control the outcome. More than this, however, it has to do with the disturbance caused by the expression of vulnerability, the imbalance brought on by the introduction of an acknowledgment of weakness or need. This is great, wise stuff and the sort of thing running through much of Lynch's best work, too.
Once HW is gone, Henry essentially takes his place and fulfills Plainview's need for a confessor of a sort. This is the only configuration he seems to deem possible for an intimate relationship. Still, the burgeoning awareness that Henry is not who he appears to be is disruptive because it forces Plainview to become aware of his own complicity in weakness, exposing himself to someone outside the realm of "family" with all the presumed discretion that supposedly implies.
Because Anderson has crafted such a truly intricate piece, every detail carries more sway than usual. For instance, a friend and I spent ten minutes or so arguing over the five second, Malick-esque, flashback at the end, which should be evidence of how important every little thing is. That was another point in which the real problem emerged, though, which is the fact that Anderson seems to be trying to find a justification for his ending by finding ways to code all the subtle complications of the earlier scenes within the hysterical excess we are left with. In principle, this is a noble goal–in the flashback, for example, I am inclined to think that Anderson was trying to relate something beyond the indication that Plainview was capable of harboring fond memories, inflected with gentleness. I think he was trying to suggest something about the very inevitability of the repression of those feelings, their forcible remove from immediate access. Still, I would have rather seen that conveyed without the “risk” of being read as sentimental which happens when presenting it as an ethereal flashback moment; maybe just stay on DDL’s face for a second or two more once he’s left alone in his office (this opens up another problem, in that I don’t like to be made to feel as though there is any intellectual “risk” implied in embracing sentiment). Or, if a flashback was unavoidable, why not use the scene with Plainview cradling HW after the blast? That's surely the closest to a true moment of empathy or bond of human connection between them.
I will admit that the end works as a thematic bookend, returning us to a kind of primitivism that we saw glimpsed at the beginning, but the problems, which are very significant, remain and are detrimental to the whole. At the very least it’s unwise to leave us with a sequence which encourages a dismissal of the nuance which made the rest of the film worthwhile. Once again, I’d like to think there was another way to do this but perhaps Anderson’s goal really was to legitimize grand, melodramatic gestures. I resist and resent the idea, however, that they need to be legitimized. In other words, melodrama which is complicated with qualifications, whether implicit or explicit (see Todd Haynes), runs the grave risk of blunting its own impact, of rejecting sincere intent for the default position of presumed cynicism or self-conscious glib irony. This may not be entirely fair but it does make melodrama into something else; it cannot be viewed the same way and yet someone seems to think it can.
In respect to the thematic bookending, only the scenes at the beginning really work and they only work because we automatically respond to the portentiousness of them and, if we are fans of PTA, we anticipate a development which will position these moments as the appropriate representation of some latent principle, resistant perhaps to any fulfilled description. But, ultimately, I sense that what he is going for here is just not anywhere near as profound a truth as he thinks it is and that is a depressing conclusion to have to reach. Either that or he doesn't know what he has and mishandles it, choosing to go out with an eye roll inducing orchestral flourish to "complicate" his scenario with an automatic presumption of irony. But the irony is ill formed and ultimately counter-productive; it detracts rather than adding the kind of sophisticated intellectual rigor or challenge he must have seen it to be. In other words, it transforms the whole experience into a very specific register of potential worthy meaning or else reveals it to have been delimited by much more retractive and localized ambitions than was previously thought.
For those interested I would recommend, as much more genuinely profound forays into this territory, the early 90's work of Jon Jost, especially
Sure Fire and his masterpiece
The Bed You Sleep In. These films are also designed as reflections on the American character, specifically its entrepreneurial spirit and the cost of buying wholesale into that particular mythology. Jost has made a life's work out of examining the nuances of the American psyche and though he often develops seemingly broad portraits of capitalistic evil he never allows us to believe we have some final understanding or grasp on the wholeness of the problem which those characters represent. As he says in his documentary
Plain Talk and Common Sense, America was founded on two principles, "get rich" and "find yourself" or "find yourself" and "get rich". The ease of the reversal is an indication of the final fatuousness of this whole foundation. Once again,
The Bed You Sleep In could not be more instructive in this way as it bathes in ambiguity and the form of the thing is like a bulwark for it.
I realize some can and will argue that Day-Lewis builds a complex portrait which Anderson then taunts us to reduce at our own risk but I am unconvinced by that as it presupposes a film of great, highly elusive subtlety in which the final conclusions drawn demand to be read almost as epistemological ones. I just don't buy that he is playing on that kind of field but if he is not the ending reveals just how limited the playing field has really been.
