There Willl Be Blood

For me, the most anticipated movie of the 2007 season was There Will be Blood, the new film by P.T. Anderson starring the inimitable Daniel Day-Lewis. (A rare profile of him is here). It was nearly unbearable that the wait stretched all the way in to 2008, but perhaps more galling that the film was released in Houston one week before Austin.

The film has been described as a withering critique of the capitalist aplomb that fueled the early development of the American West and that, ultimately, led to the crowning of the United States as an unrivaled economic power. TWB filters this capitalist fervor through the experiences of two ferociously ambitious and megalomaniacal characters representing two archetypes of the American experience--the rapacious oil prospector and the religious demagogue.

I interpreted the film, as I presume Upton Sinclair would have wanted, as a direct counterpoint to Adam Smith's optimistic nostrum: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." Indeed, there's a wonderful scene that, fortunately, wasn't tired out in trailers, where Day-Lewis' character makes grand promises of transforming the arid and desolate area under which "oceans of oil" lie, and bringing bread to a heretofore breadless population--the parched land was inhospitable to grain cultivation. But P.T. Anderson detours, somewhat, from this early direction, and focuses instead on the moral unraveling of the characters.

But the film's criticism of fanciful religious dogma, and the profiteering of it's exponents, is just as withering and, again, something that Sinclair would have approved of. It presents an unflattering comparison of organized religion to oil exploration, and the zero-sum mentality that drives them both--indeed, a tither to Lakewood is one lost to a smaller congregation (the Wal Mart-ization of organized religion?), just like an oil field lost to a rival. And both undertakings, if successful, pay quite handsomely. Comportment, as Joel Osteen urges, is important, too in the pitch:

"Even many good, godly people have gotten into a bad habit of slumping and looking down....[Y]ou need to put your shoulders back, hold your head up high, and communicate strength, determination, and confidence." After all, "We know we're representing Almighty God. Let's learn to walk tall."