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, ,


First Post of the New Year: Terror, Fun
Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Here's the critical outlook for you. It takes a good minute to understand that this "open forum" has something to do with a pending legal case against an entrepreneur who broadcasts Puerto Rican cockfights over the web. As one begins to read the text, a video window comes to life, relaying the same information, but interspersed with the entrepreneur's other interest, which is chicks with guns-- or, as he puts it "cultural sports." A citizen (citizens on Yahoo News are given avatars in the form of bug-eyed anime heads) contributes this helpful bit of commentary from "yuvaraj s": "PATHS MAY BE DIFFERENT.BUT EVERY RELIGION TAKES US TO THE GOD. JUST RIVERS IN NO. MAY BE MANY. BUT EVERY RIVER FINDS ITS OWN ROUTE TO REACH THE SEA."

Is the article/articles/whatever critical of cockfighting? What part of open forum don't you understand? This is objective journalism, here. Yet the tone manages nonetheless to be hectoring and moralistic. A sort of uncanny moralism that doesn't require any specific morality. So its as if the guy is being interrogated by a legal interrogation machine set on its loosest Libertarian setting--that'd be neutral, it it were a car--in which value exists but can take any shape it wants, which is always true, but in this case is explicitly true (see above comment from "yuvaraj s" or "jk poet's" more explicit commentary, "to harm any creature is an offense to God.") One almost begins to sympathize with the mouth breather at the center of the controversy, who, powered by the self-confidence of a man who has probably actually gone to Puerto Rico and had his back slapped by exotic Men of the capitalized sort, who, having then had a truly trancendant form of self-congratulation--the sort of "real" experience unavailable to Americans since the founding of the Republic--decided it could make him "real" too, which is to say, rich. There he sits, then, knowing what he knows, knowing he is real, but attempting to defend him self against a tiny digital camera, the neutral unreal wimp interrogating him. "It's funny that a human can kill an animal, but it's okay...but an animal kills an animal, that's not okay."

I haven't really attended to this blog since the beginning of 2007, which, in spite of an uptick in publications, or perhaps because of said uptick, I consider something of a lost year. So, back in. Mouth-breathing ideologues versus neutral blobs of light and color. I'll try to remain in the breach for as long as I can hold out.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:49 PM, ,