Thus Daniel rides into town and establishes what the Prince would define as a “new principality,” acquired through the “arms” of industry and profit, and by the twisted, capitalistic “virtue” of men like Daniel. To the poverty-stricken cattle ranchers of turn-of-the-century central California, the cities, with their smokestacks and big greasy engines, existed in an entirely different universe before the Plainviews of the world arrived with their derricks, drills and pistons. It oozes a fresh scent of industrialization in a location where industry had previously resided far away before the discovery of oil. XV of the Prince, Machiavelli makes it clear that if a prince intends to “maintain himself,” he must “learn to be able to not be good, and to use this and not use it according to necessity.” Daniel’s necessity is to maintain, in essence, a principality: his oil business has become highly profitable and extremely massive, as well something entirely new to those subject to its power. While it is more difficult to explore Daniel’s intentions in relation to Machiavellianism, since his intentions reside somewhere deeper and darker in his personal beliefs, his methods fit with the philosophy of allowable duplicity in achieving ends. Exactly how he acquires his assets is where distinctly Machiavellian methods come into play. He views the expansion of his oil empire as absolutely necessary, and the acquisition of more and more wells, fields, pipelines and efficiency is the only means to that end. Daniel is indeed a prince: a mover and a shaker, a man who has much at stake and seeks more as a mode of self-preservation. The way Daniel interacts with the people surrounding him in the film is a unique example of the attitudes of a Machiavellian prince towards his subjects. We offer you the bond of family that very few oilmen can understand. As he slowly wins his battle with the earth, Daniel’s war inevitably devolves into a bitter conflict with the other parasites, a war of competition, wits, deception, faith, and loyalty.ĭaniel: I am a family man- I run a family business. Nobody sees this deconstruction of humanity better than Daniel Plainview, who spends the first twenty minutes of the film quietly climbing his way up the ladder of material success, with only the crust of the earth between him and inconceivable wealth. Human beings are of little importance to each other they are merely fellow parasites that burrow into the flesh and feed off the colossal bull of the oil-gorged earth. The opening sequence of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood instantly puts the audience into a non-idealistic, harshly utilitarian world, where material success is the only end available to man, and it must be bought at a hard, non-negotiable price. He mutters breathlessly, “There she is! There she is!” The chunk glistens with a faint vein of some valuable mineral. How many hours, how many days has this man been at the bottom of this pit, with little air and light, with little space to move, bent over, back aching, plunging his pick over and over into the cold rock? An indefinite period of time later, the man is shown picking up a chunk of chipped rock, spitting on it, rubbing it with his hand. Suddenly, we are plunged into the darkness of a hand-dug mine, where a bearded man wields a pick-ax, tiredly letting it fall without precision into the gray bedrock. The scorching, unfiltered sun pierces right through the screen our eyes squint, our brow begins to moisten. For a story that’s all about the harnessing of fateful chthonic forces, Paul Thomas Anderson has dug deeper than ever before, and struck black gold.A string ensemble scraping at a dissonant chord mimics the thick drone of desert insects as a stark, static portrait of parched landscape slowly fades into frame. It offers a persuasive critique of the nihilism that the Coen brothers’ film simply (if effectively) re-enacts. But to me, There Will Be Blood is the greater film by far. Playing the slippery Eli Sunday, he shifts from piety to hypocrisy to menace while rarely raising his voice above a whisper.Įspecially as awards season approaches, There Will Be Blood is sure to be compared with No Country for Old Men, another epic study of male rivalry and violence that was filmed near Marfa, Texas. And Paul Dano, familiar as the Nietzsche-reading adolescent in Little Miss Sunshine, establishes himself as a major new actor. He inhabits this enigmatic character, loosely adapted by Anderson from Upton Sinclair’s 1926 novel Oil!, with as much authority as if he’d written the script himself. Daniel Day-Lewis is beyond praise as the misanthropic, egomaniacal, desperately lonely oilman.
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