There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)

[mfunk9786]

Perhaps the fact that the scene between Paul/Daniel is PERFECTION played a part in the decision not to reshoot it.

Knives: Do you mean to say identical twins? And yes - there's also the factor that it's unlikely that Paul was able to travel back home by whatever travel method he'd need to use before Daniel got there, likely with his pedal to the metal. Also, Paul had mentioned his brother Eli when he ran down the members of the family to Daniel. And of course, the juicy "afterbirth" line from Daniel late in the film. And for the record, what I was describing was a momentary "Hmmmm, how about that?!" just like Daniel and H.W. exchange upon seeing Eli, not a confusion that lingered throughout the rest of the film. And that only occurred during the first viewing, of course.

I'd say that my father's confusion over H.W. was a bit more understandable, especially considering that the next scene involves Daniel spouting a line of bullshit about his dead wife. All we see to place H.W. with his actual father is a moment of him being held before his father went down in the well - if one isn't paying close enough attention to the rhythm of that sequence of events (since you can't really make out the man who's killed in the well's face), I could see it being confusing. The penultimate scene of the film with Daniel yelling at H.W. genuinely took my father by surprise, and lent another layer of to the cruelty of Daniel for him at the time, since he thought that he was lying to H.W. about his origin in order to pour salt into his wounds from being disowned and alienated from Daniel.

[feihong]

I thought the ambiguity of the Paul/Eli doubling mirrored the weird, dreamlike doubling of Daniel and his half-brother. And it contributed to the ambiguity of the question hanging over the film: the notion of whether or not Eli believes in the whole schtick he's peddling, as Plainview might have put it. Which itself doubles as the question of whether or not Plainview believes the schtick he's peddling. It never occurred to me that the brothers might be separate characters, to be honest. I actually think it would have depreciated There Will Be Blood a bit if the brothers were wholly different people. To me there's always the question of whether there's really only one of them, or if there's two, just as there's a question whether or not Plainview's half-brother is real, and whether or not Plainview really kills him. Even in the beginning, when Plainview is hacking away at bare rock, it seems as if half of his antagonists are the product of his own imagination. Which reflects on Eli and the way he invents his own adversary, be it ghosts inside of people, or whatnot.

To me the elliptical editing is very purposeful, in that it distorts our sense of linear progression. It's hard for me to imagine that it's handled poorly in The Master, because I thought it was done so well in There Will Be Blood.

[mfunk9786]

As much as I respect your writeup and your enthusiasm, I don't see There Will Be Blood as anything but a linear film - and PTA has said in the past that nothing is hallucinated or imagined by the character(s), including the very end.

[Roger Ryan]

I want to agree with "feihong" that the ambiguity in ...BLOOD works to the film's benefit, but given the way the climatic "I drink your milkshake" scene plays out, I just feel that a better established relationship between the two brothers would improve the drama. I didn't really want a twist ending, but Plainview's reveal of Paul's early betrayal of Eli is what the climax hinges on and I think the character of Paul should have been bolstered a bit more.

From all appearances, THE MASTER is about three characters who undoubtedly will have ample screentime, so I'm not too worried about it...as long as Joaquin Phoenix's twin brother doesn't show up in the last reel!

[mfunk9786]

I'm not so sure I agree with you that it's ambiguous, though. Like Knives said, it's pretty clear that they're two separate people. And there's so much more going on in the final scene, Daniel's mention of Paul's betrayal of the family is hardly an important part of it, especially since Eli had been aware of it all along (see: what he says during the scene when he tackles his father). What Daniel says about Paul in that final scene isn't even true - he didn't give him another dime - why would he?

By the way, I've seen There Will Be Blood so many times theatrically and at home that this gives me an opportunity to bring up an edit on the DVD that bugs the hell out of me. In theaters, when Daniel drags Eli to the mud, Eli shrieked "You owe the Church of the Third Revelation five-thousand dollars!" I guess Anderson thought that wasn't clear enough, because it's rather poorly dubbed in the DVD/Blu release... "You owe the Church of the Third Revelation five-thousand dollars... as part of the agreement that we made!" It takes me out of that scene every time now since I saw it 11 (yes, 11) times in theaters and recognize where the splice is.

[feihong]

I want to agree with "feihong" that the ambiguity in ...BLOOD works to the film's benefit, but given the way the climatic "I drink your milkshake" scene plays out, I just feel that a better established relationship between the two brothers would improve the drama. I didn't really want a twist ending, but Plainview's reveal of Paul's early betrayal of Eli is what the climax hinges on and I think the character of Paul should have been bolstered a bit more.

To me the final scene in There Will Be Blood was part of a series, prefaced first by the scene in which Plainview shows up the oil man in the restaurant and continued when Plainview reveals to his son that he found him as a child and is not his actual parent. In the series of confrontations, Plainview goes to some length to puncture all the illusions set up in the story, and he becomes more pointed and direct in that goal as the scenes develop. He knocks down the illusion that his son is anything more than a prop, and in the "milkshake" scene he goes to lengths to get Eli to admit that he knows he's a fraud. But Plainview isn't simply debunking the illusions of the other characters--he's stripping everything away from himself, divesting himself of every meaningful personality and experience around him, leaving only his need to dominate and be right. The important revelation of the scene to me isn't that Paul has gone off and profited grandly while the story of the film has gone on without him; the important aspect of the scene is how Plainview reveals himself; the rabid capitalist has at his pinnacle only the need to defeat all others, and be alone with his own hard ball of self. That he attempts to scourge his competitors finally proves that he has nothing left to gain but their own knowledge of their defeat. Paul is to me a prop in that scenario, and doesn't need to be a secret figure--wending his way through the story, popping up here and there as the narrative unfolds--to provide pathos in the face of Eli's defeat. The milkshake scene really exists for Plainview to immolate himself--the "milkshake-drinking" becomes a metaphor not for diagonal drilling, but for Plainview's need to dominate his environment--to "drink up" what belongs to everyone else around him, from their oil to their sense of personal authority.

I like the idea that Paul is missing throughout the film, so that there is still the carrot held out there that Paul might simply be a schizoid doppelganger of Eli, haunting him without ever touching him or crossing his field of vision. Plainview's half-brother only seems to be a doppleganger for Plainview; the scenes with the half-brother seem to exist in a bubble, separate from the rest of the action of the film. Whether or not they are actual phantoms or hallucinations in the story seems less important to me than the way the characters function as fractured mirror images of one another. It seems self-evident to me that Eli and Paul and Plainview and his brother are matching pairs of mirror images, in which one character in the pair is more notional than substantial. Plainview's brother appears only to Plainview; he hardly acts on the plot of the film, and following his murder he evaporates as if he never existed--Plainview awakes from the killing of his brother in a way that makes it seem like a dream, and Plainview himself is dazed and disoriented in a way that he isn't in any other part of the movie. Paul sets the story of the film in motion and then evaporates into the background. That both brothers are so insubstantial serves to better link the two competitive "salesmen" of the film, Plainview and Eli. They both have a doppleganger tugging at them, but Plainview defeats his, and Eli's...I don't know...maybe Paul grows larger through absence. While he mirrors Eli, he seems to be the agent of Plainview's victory over Eli.

I don't think the film isn't linear--there are no flashbacks per se, or movement out of linear progression--but the film has potent ellipses that dismantle its momentum as a plot and force us to look at the narrative in separate terms: in this case as a competition. In this context, the scenes we focus on are not so much a series of linear plot developments as they are a series of skirmishes: Plainview versus the townspeople; Plainview versus Eli; Plainview rematched with Eli in front of Eli's congregation; Plainview versus Standard Oil; Plainview versus his half-brother, or his fake son; Plainview versus the oil well. Or to take it back to the first scene, Plainview versus rock and earth. But with the narrative drive repurposed like this the film can't help but feel somewhat dreamlike in its thrust, and it can't help but create a suggestive atmosphere in which the veracity of characters and incidents becomes naturally ambiguous. In Anderson's mind everything might be straightforward, but I don't think he means that we shouldn't wonder about the various characters' legitimacy and purpose. Why is Plainview's half-brother in the movie if not to introduce doubt? He doesn't serve the plot of the film. But if he exists to be a weaker double of Plainview, if he exists because Eli has a stronger double that works in a similar way, then the half-brother has purpose. He doesn't have to be a hallucination, exactly, to be a phantom that haunts the narrative; a competitor who falls away in defeat. And Plainview's murders don't have to be imagined to be private ceremonies he enacts in a kind of interior world. The uncanny way in which no consequences emerge from the first murder is at once real and challenging to the notion of its own substance. Consequences may emerge from the second murder, but only because Plainview allows it by admitting his butler at the end. These are strange situations, not explained away by insisting that they really happen. But to me this is part of how the film works the way it does: it works through ambiguity and association, rather than direct narrative movement and momentum. I can see The Master panning out in a similar way, from the sound of things.

[Mr Sausage]

The uncanny way in which no consequences emerge from the first murder is at once real and challenging to the notion of its own substance.

Don't Eli and that one land owner use their knowledge of the murder to finally convince Plainview to accept his humbling in the church of the 3rd revelation?

[knives]

Yes. I forget how exactly it is phrased, but they do use the murder to coerce him into several actions.

[mfunk9786]

Yeah, again - god bless, but your interpretation of the film has already been debunked by the writer/director of the film.

[feihong]

I don't see how a writer/director can debunk an interpretation of their work. Is our experience of the film dictated only by how the filmmaker intended the film to be perceived?

[knives]

But there's also information in the movie itself which makes your interpretation less than possible.

[mfunk9786]

I don't see how a writer/director can debunk an interpretation of their work. Is our experience of the film dictated only by how the filmmaker intended the film to be perceived?

Yes, when it comes to factual interpretation of the events of the film. If you think something is hallucinated by a character, for example, and the writer/director said it wasn't - I'm sorry, the director is correct and that should be the end of the discussion as far as I'm concerned.

[willoneill]

If you think something is hallucinated by a character, for example, and the writer/director said it wasn't - I'm sorry, the director is correct and that should be the end of the discussion as far as I'm concerned.

I take it you're not a believer in intentional fallacy.

[mfunk9786]

This isn't a case of making assumptions about the artist's intent, though. He's a living man who did plenty of interviews about this film that he made five years ago, and he said flatly multiple times in those interviews that there isn't a supernatural element to it whatsoever.

[willoneill]

While that is definitely true, none of those interviews are part of the text itself, hence, intentional fallacy. That being said, I don't think there's anything "supernatural" either, I just think think that feihong's interpretation has some validity. I say this as someone who read Roth's "American Pastoral" completely differently than everyone else in the class, and while no one else agreed with my interpretation, no one could say why I was wrong, either.

[mfunk9786]

We can certainly agree to disagree! I never meant to imply that feihong was not allowed to ultimately have his own thoughts on the film, but I do subscribe to the idea that the director ultimately has more of a say when it comes to their own work than any critic, forum poster, etc etc.

[Mr Sausage]

The intentional fallacy simply assumes that the actual effect of the movie on a viewer can be different from what the director intended. It's a fairly basic position. I don't agree with Feihong either, but it is perfectly within reason for him to claim that what Anderson says he was trying to do is irrelevant next to how the movie actually comes across. And if that's the line he's going to take you simply have to use internal evidence to argue him out of it. You can't just dismiss it as if there weren't decades of solid argument behind this assumption. Feihong is on solid ground when it comes to using the intentional fallacy.

[ianthemovie]

A nit-picky question about the opening title of the film: am I alone in remembering that the first ominous chord of Jonny Greenwood's score hits before/just at the moment of the main title ("There Will Be Blood") appearing on the screen? I was looking at the Blu-Ray today, in which the title appears and disappears in silence, and then the music comes up as we fade into the first shot. I could swear it was otherwise when I saw it theatrically, mainly because I seem to recall (pleasurably) the queasy feeling that set in when the title appeared in conjunction with that creepy-ass chord. Then again, that was five years ago now, so I could be mistaken. I'd be interested to know if anyone else remembers differently.

[Brian C]

Can't say with 100% certainty, but I remember it theatrically the way it is on the Blu-ray.

[mfunk9786]

The title doesn't appear until the end of the film, as I remember it.

[PfR73]

The title appears 3 times: at the beginning of the film, at the beginning of the end credits, & at the end of the end credits. I remember walking out of the theater joking to my friend "the title so nice they showed it to us thrice." As I remember it, the opening title is in silence with the music beginning over the landscape, as is on the Blu-Ray.

[mfunk9786]

Wow, I haven't a clue why I didn't think the title appeared at the beginning of the film. I just remembered a bit of a foreboding overture tone over a fade-in of the landscape right after the studio titles. And I've seen the film over ten times, so it's particularly embarrassing how unreliable my memory is.

[ianthemovie]

The opening title is definitely there on the DVD, and I distinctly remember seeing it at both of the theatrical screenings I attended. The music under the main title, though, must have been wishful thinking on my part. Thanks for the clarification, all.

[zedz]

I remember the title appearing four times. First, at the very start of the film, before the score proper begins, accompanied by 'The Birdie Song'. Second, superimposed over some random scene in the middle of the film (landscape, oil well) for a split second, accompanied by white noise. Third, at the beginning of the end credits, misspelled as 'There Will Be Blod', accompanied by an awkward silence, and finally, two minutes after the end of the end credits, accompanied by a choir of celestial voices singing "Goooo hoooome."

But I only saw the film once, heavily medicated, and might have got some of those details wrong.

[feihong]

Wow, I haven't a clue why I didn't think the title appeared at the beginning of the film. I just remembered a bit of a foreboding overture tone over a fade-in of the landscape right after the studio titles. And I've seen the film over ten times, so it's particularly embarrassing how unreliable my memory is.

I saw it without a title at the beginning, as you remember. I watched it at the Cinerama Dome; maybe they were treating it like a roadshow?