There Will Be Blood
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
There Will Be Blood's closest aesthetic kin is to the gangster movie, but that may be because the only dramas about the entrepreneurial spirit made in America are gangster movies. Yet if the gangster movie is a type of cancer--hey, my favorite type of cancer, as far as cancers go--then this movie is a modern cancer, relentlessly observed, attacked, zapped, by the deeply objectifying and poisonous "cure" of oncology and radiology. This is a gangster movie splayed out in its backless hospital robe. You don't believe me? Take the character of Eli Sunday: he sort of hovers in the background and yet his role (and Paul Dano deserved a Best Supporting nomination for this) reminds me of the up-front role usually slotted for Edward G. Robinson in a gangster movie: the person on the lower rung of the ladder waiting for his chance to get to the top. His trajectory is the same, down to the stripping of his fortune and his inevitable violent death. So think of Daniel Day Lewis' aptly-named Plainview as sort of playing the narrative chorus, or the spirit of capitalism itself: not really the hero but the figure who sets the rules by which the traditional hero plays. He's The Money. And so our hero, Eli Sunday, sort of stands in front of the money in certain scenes and sometimes he stands far, far behind. And instead of displaying the pure, radiant self-confidence of gangsters past, he displays weirdness, otherness... a weirdness and otherness which is fascinating because he may be faking it. He is the gangster's contemporary analogue: a sort of profligate alien, equal parts Bartleby, Billy Sunday and Osama Bin Laden, calling upon vast reserves of illogic to sway us into sympathy. Yet where the Edward G. Robinson gangster dies ignominiously doing the thing he loves (and what The Money loves, and what we love to watch), here The Money has to take an extra hand, complete the narrative himself: he strips the hero down to a spiritual skeleton, exposes the weirdness as unworkable and barren, and then batters its agent with a ten-pin until it can no longer move or speak. By which time, it's too late--the hero has already brought The Money down to an accessible level, which is what all good gangsters hope to do.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:33 PM,
