I've never seen: There Will Be Blood
Men try to explain things to essayist Rebecca Solnit, who called it mansplaining. Men try to get me to watch There Will Be Blood with them. You might say it’s left me with PTAD. Paul Thomas Anderson’s slow-burn period drama, set during the southern California oil boom at the turn of the 20th century, was released to widespread acclaim in 2007. The same year, I turned 16 and started dating in earnest. In the 13 years since There Will Be Blood, and men’s admiration for it, has been a running theme in my romantic history.
According to my anecdotal, longitudinal survey, no other film has so captured the heterosexual male imagination in more than a decade. There may be some bias: for many men of my age, There Will Be Blood might have been the first auteured film they “discovered” for themselves, marking the transition from a boy to a man with an Esquire subscription.
As for me, I’ve been asked, “Have you seen There Will Be Blood?” so many times, I count it as a relationship milestone – yet I’ve still not seen it. My first attempt was in 2012, when my boyfriend at the time – a film buff in the completist way that only a thirdyear university student can be – sat me down in front of the laptop with the quiet conviction of someone who can’t wait for you to see the light. Instead I fell asleep long before Daniel Day-Lewis made it out of the dark hole in the excruciatingly protracted opening sequence. My boyfriend was disappointed – but happy to watch it again.
My second viewing was a few years later, after enough mentions that I had started to wonder: is it actually men, or is it something about me? Again, I fell asleep – at a later stage this time, but still having got nowhere close to grasping the film’s widely-agreed-on genius. “Was there a very white room?” I hazarded on waking, single-handedly causing a crisis of masculinity. “Something about milk?”
Sure, maybe I should get my iron levels checked. Or maybe it’s more that a film has to hold my attention.
Even from the little of it I had seen, it was clear that There Will Be Blood seeks to impress on you how important it is – in being not only long but slooow, with capital-A acting and a dissonant score – more than it actually wants to engage you.
I have always felt an aversion to art that seems to hold itself above people. Not to dismiss the importance of auteur’s vision, or audiences willing to meet them on their terms, but when it has come to the choice between making a statement and delivering entertainment, I’ve wondered: why not both?
But I am often wrong (you can see from the comments!), and I like to dismiss something from an informed point of view. So I sat down with my latest study participant – and a cup of coffee, this time – and sallied forth once more, into the mine.
Yes, I fell asleep, but later, and for less time, than ever before – and now I think I get it. The beauty of the cinematography isn’t lost on me, and though the film is inarguably bloated at 158 minutes, its slow pace and Jonny Greenwood’s unsettling score amplify the sinister, insidious effect of oil money on Little Boston. The scene of the oil derrick inferno, set to rattling tribal percussion, lingered in my mind long after the film, finally, finished.
Above all, who can’t help but relish Paul Dano’s scone-faced, spittle-flecked performance as an evangelical preacher? Eli Sunday was mesmerising whenever he was on screen, his studied politeness hardly masking his writhing anger. How did as meek a man as Abel Sunday bear someone so zealous? What was it like to be his twin brother? And how, as a celebrity radio preacher, did he fall to temptation?
Alas, we never find out. Instead we get interminable hours of Daniel Plainview, a character not nearly so intriguing as the film believes him to be, adequately summarised as “burning ambition with a big hat and a moustache”. The writing buckled under Daniel Day-Lewis’s trademark intensity, which I always find distractingly overbearing, as though the other characters are interacting with a cartoon. (Whenever I pass a Day Lewis chemist, I think: his most ambitious transformation yet.)
I would give There Will Be Blood a 6/10. But having finally seen it, I wonder what had led so many men to think I would like it. Then I realised that was the wrong question: they weren’t thinking about what I might like at all. The answer was obvious from the film.
Watching it, I’d been struck by the absence of women. The first we hear from a woman is when little Mary Sunday asks – I am not making this up
– “What are the men doing over there?” The film shows more curiosity in the inner workings of pit mines.
I’m not saying that I only enjoy films about women, or that There Will Be Blood (or the men who tried to get me to watch it) is explicitly sexist. It is more that it’s uninterested, in a way that reminds me of bad dates where I’ve timed how long it takes for me to be asked a question. (Current record: 45 minutes, or about as long as it takes Plainview to get out of that hole.)
From its superficial engagement with Eli Sunday and poor little HW Plainview, whose epilogues are crammed into the last half-hour, I’d say There Will Be Blood is not interested in people at all, other than its protagonist. It seems an oddly narrow perspective through which to make a grand, universal statement about capitalism and greed as the film seems to be straining for – and it might sum up why it leaves me cold. At least now, after almost 15 years, I can fairly say I’ve seen it. Or, rather: “I’m finished!”