There Will Be Confusion
There are times when, even working on a highbrow publication such as Arena, alongside some of the sharpest minds in journalism, you start to wonder whether you aren’t getting, well… more stupid. One such moment was when I went to the cinema on Sunday to see the much-anticipated Daniel Day-Lewis film There Will Be Blood. I really didn’t get it.
Before I mire us both in my confusion, though, I will point out that I’m not the only one suffering brain rot from over-exposure to glossy paper and frivolous subject matter. The Time Out review I read before I went completely misled me – confusing two of the characters and unfavourably comparing the business methods of the central character, Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis) with the faceless corporations of today. I was left expecting a story based around the morals of an emerging US oil industry; when I looked at my watch, two hours into the film, and still found Plainview’s methods basically unshocking, I realised my mistake.
But I still didn’t know what I was watching. Was I supposed to pick up on symbolic moments in the early scenes around basic oil wells, with a noose-like rope being dropped into the hollow, and Plainview physically blackened by the oil? Would the complex father/son relationship form some kind of conclusion to the story?
The next half hour of cinema was definitely compelling, but I left the cinema feeling… restive. Unsure what to make of the film, I had nothing to say about it. What was the point? What is the moral?
Certainly awards-awarders and reviewers everywhere found plenty of reasons to like it. There Will Be Blood has been compared to Citizen Kane and Scarface. The editor of Men’s Vogue said Day-Lewis reminded him of his grandfather. Arena’s more measured account said something about director Paul Thomas Anderson having created an anti-hero.
In the end, I am forced to take it as simply that: some things happen to a man. The man starts to do increasingly unpleasant things, motivated by greed, enabled by money. Yet (and this is where my brain really starts creaking) it’s still more complicated than that. Plainview isn’t just a bad apple, or a man whose soul is rotted by success.
The first moment where he does something unquestionably bad is just shortly after an industrial accident harms his son. He beats a young man whose family plot he has bought, dragging him screaming into a pool of oil. The young man, a preacher, duly goes home and beats his ageing father. The father, we already know, beats his small daughter. I think the point might be, life gets you down. Something bad happens to you, so you do something bad, and then things escalate.
I only think, though, I don’t know. I’m so accustomed to linear narrative that I find anything which doesn’t evolve in a nice, neat, structured form very difficult to take in. I read somewhere that that was why some tabloids started accusing the McCanns of killing their daughter – people just can’t believe there isn’t a neat twist, or indeed that there might not be an ending at all. Perhaps for that reason, I need to pull myself out of this frame of mind. It’s intellectually lazy, and it doesn’t in any way relate to real life. For that reason, I’m glad I saw There Will Be Blood.
We are listening to Elbow
Finally saw this last night; I’d say don’t worry about it too much, not that you were by the end of your blog. “Some things happen to a man” is right. It’s just a character study that defies a simple paragraph of pop-psychology by way of an explanation.
And it’s good simply because it’s well made, in every department. That’s all you need.
The oft-remarked pinnacle of characterisation, Hamlet, is widely considered so brilliant because of all his inconsistencies and the gaps in follow-able reasoning between what he chooses to do from one situation to the next. And so he seems much more likely to be the product of a real, volatile chemistry set, which is what the human brain is.
There is a huge market for people-analysis now, for psychology and body language tv programmes etc. It makes it all seem more accessible than it actually is – to anyone at all including the experts.
Comment by Benjamin Knight — 26/02/08
You could pick up on lots of little bits of symbolism – the baby being ‘Christened’ in oil near the start for example – but I think the aspect that will have the biggest impact on cinema is the ending.
This film, and other Oscar success ‘No Country For Old Men’ had endings that didn’t follow a traditional plot arc or provide a neat conclusion. Films too often have a predictable Hollywood ending, especially ones where crimes and violence occur.
The theme of many films is often about the bad guy being caught and the status quo being preserved. Perhaps now, more films will break the traditional plot arc and be more than a journey towards a conclusion we can see a long way off.
As someone who grew up in Jersey, about 100 yards from what we now know is a scene of utter horror, the notion that evil occurs and bad deeds go unpunished is one that might be uncomfortable but one that also carries a weight of reality.
Comment by FLETCH — 3/03/08