![]() ![]() He is by this time seeking to buy leases on plots of land where he wishes to drill for oil, offering a share of his profits to the owners. It is not until 1911, some thirteen years after his first discovery, that we hear Plainview speak for the first time. It is a means to greatness, progress and flourishing. These early scenes of injury and death set the contours of what will follow: destruction, loss and injury is seen throughout the film as an integral part of all that is exceptional, energetic, life-affirming and productive, not as antithetical to it. Plainview adopts the orphaned boy, who goes by the name ‘H.W.’. Several years pass, and again we see Plainview prospecting for oil, this time with a team of colleagues, one of whom is killed in an accident at a primitive drilling site, leaving a son. There is no dialogue during the opening scenes, and our attention is drawn instead to the raw, uncivilized physicality of man as animal struggling against the elements. The film opens in 1898, when we see Plainview making his first discovery, and badly injuring his leg in the process. The central conflict of There Will Be Blood is between Plainview, who is a plain-speaking businessman with big ambitions in the burgeoning oil industry, and a hypocritical Christian preacher, Eli Sunday, who shares Plainview’s ambition for wealth but doesn’t want to get his hands dirty earning it. The parallels go far beyond Plainview’s bushy moustache. While Plainview embodies many aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy and personality, I will limit my focus to how the film illuminates Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity. ![]() Instead Plainview is a thoroughly Nietzschean figure, and if one is seeking ways to vivify Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy – especially his attitude towards Christian morality – one can do no better than through this film. ![]() But this is no typical tale of poor boy made good, for Plainview is far from good in any moral sense, despite his admirable characteristics. The narrative, a cinematic adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil, centres on the epic rise, and ultimate decline, of oil magnate Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis). Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 Oscar-winning There Will Be Blood marked a rare exception to this rule, giving audiences an unconventional protagonist – one seemingly beyond good and evil. Simplistic though it is, Hollywood cinema seduces us all with these Manichean conflicts that persuade us to side with the good guys. If Hollywood genre movies can be depended upon to deliver one thing, it is a good hero pitted against an evil foe. SUBSCRIBE NOW Films There Will Be Blood Terri Murray tells us about a Hollywood hero beyond good and evil. ![]()
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