There Will be Blood: Daniel Plainview

Daniel Plainview: “I see the worst in people. I don't need to look past seeing them to get all I need. I've built my hatreds up over the years, little by little, Henry... to have you here gives me a second breath. I can't keep doing this on my own with these... people.”

How many of you guys love Daniel Day-Lewis’ character Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood (TWBB)? This character is probably my favorite character.

He is the symbol of capitalism, and some even say America herself. Of course, his character evolves throughout the movie, or you might say ‘devolves’, as he descends deeper and deeper into his own madness and hatred.

I love the imagery - is it on purpose? - at the beginning. He is in the womb of the Earth digging for the gold he needs to fund his future career in oil drilling. A bearded and gruff Plainview is in the middle of nowhere, in the desert, 100 feet underground, in the awful heat, covered in soot. There is no talking - only Johnny Greenwood’s eerie strings that just seem echo bleakness.

I remember that quote from John Milton in his Paradise Lost poem: “long is the way
And hard, that out of Hell leads up to Light.” Only it isn’t into Light that Plainview ascends up to. It is the pit of darkness - and it is hard and long.

We have to remember that TWBB is primarily a character study. It reaches into the psychology of a man who is consumed by his own ambition, his hatred for other people, for competition because of his own competition. He says: I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.

But throughout the movie, I felt more and more like I was spiraling downward through Dante’s Hell, and as you get further and further down, the cone gets more and more condensed and you’re left with the suffocating, claustrophobic straightjacket of madness and Hell.

The movie is dominated by very powerful scenes. Like I mentioned, the beginning scene is amazing. He is in the belly of the earth. There is no dialogue. We get to know the drive of the character. He is alone, trailblazing a career for himself. He is injured after accidentally falling down the mine-hole, fracturing his leg, even though he manages to drag himself across the desert to safety.

I get the feeling that this is a time and these are men who are real men, hard men, men who are dirty, who don’t complain, who have nerves of steel, forged and tested like a sword freshly-made in the fire.

When he starts to talk, his dialect is almost haunting. Every syllable is pronounced. His gait is determined but awkward. He has a son, but he is adopted after his dad died in a mining accident. But Plainview mainly takes him under his wing as a marketing ploy, though the movie does show that Plainview cared for the boy as much as his character allowed.

There is the powerful scene in the church. Plainview’s rival, Eli (a corrupt and manipulative preacher at a church in the town where Plainview is trying to drill) puts Plainview through the humiliating ordeal of getting up in front of the congregation and admit - no, yelling - that he is a sinner, that he has ABANDONED HIS BOY, HIS CHILD! Very powerful.

There is another scene where something goes wrong with the derrick and H.W. (Plainview’s son) is catapulted by an explosion that makes him permanently deaf. There is the roar of the oil rupturing out of the ground, the soundtrack is loud, the percussion and the strings are riveting, the camera follows the running men around the derrick to fix the problem, and the background noise is shrunk to a minimum as the music just takes over the scene. The sun sets as the men are scrambling and we get definitive shots of Plainview glorying in the prospect that THERE IS AN OCEAN OF OIL UNDER OUR FEET, and no one can get at it except for him. Epic.

Not very many people like the end, but I think it makes perfect sense. Like I said before, there is a spiraling downward, like going further and further down into an inverted cone. At the bottom, everything touches, and things are almost banal, which is probably what Hell is. The two main forces in the movie, Eli and Plainview, end the movie cooped up in the mansion where a petty argument - with connections with previous events in the movie - ends with Plainview smashing Eli over the head with a bowling pin.

Let’s not forget the final words: I’m finished. I can’t help think of Christ: It is finished. Not sure of a connection there - it’s just the first thing that popped in my head.

There’s so much I’m leaving out. But the main thing is that the most subtle and brilliant element about this character is that as you look at Plainview act and talk and behave, his facial expressions, his tones of voice, his motives, his confessions, his degeneration: you see there is something in his soul that his just plain evil. It is that element in his soul that - if we look at ourselves carefully - we also see in ourselves.

The more I see the movie, and the more I pay attention to the character, I see so much of myself in the character and it sort of scares me. But parts of him are in everyone. Like he tells his supposed brother (who met a bad end): if it’s in me, it’s in you.

I remember the scene where Plainview is asking why he doesn’t own a certain tract of land. Why don’t I own that, he asks. WHY DON’T I OWN THAT?, he repeats. Al, his helper, says it’s owned by someone else and that he might want to think about making the pipeline around it. Build pipeline around 50 miles of tract? Plainview snaps: Don’t be thick around me, Al. I can just feel the frustration. His drive met a speed-bump and it’s quickly swatted out of the way like a gnat. Everyone in his way is reduced to a gnat.

I love that scene when he is talking to a competitor, someone who wants to buy Plainview’s drilling rights and in exchange make him rich. The competitor makes an off-hand remark about Plainview’s son, something with just the right amount of ambiguity for Plainview’s ruthless ambition to rationalize. Did you just tell me how to raise my son?, he asks. One night, I’m going to come into your house while you’re sleeping and slit your throat, he says. Wow. And you know he means it.