Bloody Day!

Rating: 10/10 (30 May 2020)

Discovering oil and the toil behind it was a dirty work that created our leisured modern age; it's a dictum that seems so defining that we still reel under its spell. The title of the movie though is way nuanced than what one might be nudged to think or as Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian puts it in his review: Blood only makes its appearance in the very last, operatic scene. Before that, the wounds are internal, or covered by another liquid, gushing from the ground as from a slashed artery. The leading character is often to be seen darkly smothered in it, like a voodoo priest after a spectacular sacrifice. Oil is greasy and it has made so, our age; that so rests on the unitary principle of consumerism and ferocious extractivism. Or as The Atlantic muses over the movie in its review: The film has a carnal intensity, nowhere more evident than in its treatment of the early oil business, its danger and mystery and near-limitless possibility. Far from instigating shadows over human race, verging on the premises of climate change; our devour of everything naturally-draped to an extent of being dubbed as barbaric and callous: shows our descent over the account of being humane. There Will Be Blood is a movie that very much brings us to a flash of pouncing upon the very trenches of nature and downing everything that seems as granted. It touches upon how faith with all its stomp over bullying the profanity off from everything that doesn't drench its torso in sacredness and beatitude of the Divine; can go off extreme and make its own way into becoming a stepping stone for someone; for something. How faith and its adherence could seem to be pushed by a certain sanctimonious proclivity; wavering into becoming a mess in its own self and only becoming a stratagem, for wider influence or for a competing one?. Everything seems intertwined into who gets what; against one's respective preferences. One seems to run off into casting himself up as an oil-wriggler and jamming every hustle to block him off his way into flocking everything out there and the other gets on with a religious undertaking and goes into making a place for himself, by projection of a spiritual overtness. Both go extreme. Both vie for a push on the back of their particular tendencies: one going by an unfettered booze off the Californian troves of oil and the other goes by an edgy evangelism, pulling in everyone at his Church of the Third Revelation. A dialogue from the novel would be apt to contextualize the sacred-profane collusion over deciphering the reasons for earthquakes. (Sundays in the movie). "Bunny knew that her whole soul was hanging on his story; she fairly worshiped her brother. "And you never seen him again?" she whispered. "I never really saw him at all," said Bunny; "I wouldn't know him now, if I was to meet him. You don't know where he is?" "I've had three letters. Always it's a new place, and he says he ain't stayin' there. Some day, he says, he'll come to see me-jest me. He's scairt o' Pap." "What would Pap do?" "Pap would whale him. He's terrible set agin him. He says he's a limb of Satan. Paul says he don't believe what's in the Book? Do you believe it?" Bunny hesitated, remembering Dad and his "True Word." He decided he could trust Ruth that far, so he told her he didn't think he believed quite everything. And Ruth, gazing into his eyes with intense concern, inquired: "What is it makes yearthquakes?" So Bunny told what Mr. Eaton had taught him about the earth's crust and its shrinking, and the faults in the strata, that were the first to yield to the strain. He judged by the wondering look on her face that this was the first hint of natural science that had ever come to her mind. "So you don't have to be scairt!" she said."
The Watkins or the Sundays snugged into living their lives oThe Watkins or the Sundays snugged into living their lives off the brook in their ranch and follow in highly religious lives. Paul Watkins - who had come off to H.W around his aunt's home (depicted only in the novel) - seems to be driven by a material pursuit; and thus he vanishes off into obscure plains rendering all unable to decipher his whereabouts. His twin or as some believe his alter ego, Eli - goes on a highly religious pursuit and seems to run off certain stringent superstitions - becomes a bitter enemy of Daniel, over his biting disregard of religious cult. But then we have him going for the material pursuit too, as he skirmishes with his dad at the dinner and admonishes him with a delirious tilt: over skidding the land off to Daniel without much thought. He shoots: You've let someone come in here and walk all over us. You let him in and do his work here and you're an awful man for what we could have had. These words roll out of man, too tough on building up a church and professing the Word of God. These words seem to pave for the frustration of a man, who seems better conditioned to take in the boons off the oil money more than building up an edifice of religious strength in the community. The stakes seem to be put somewhere else. Daniel cajoles everyone through his CSR channeling and Eli seems to build upon the religious sentiments that everyone so shares. The sacred-profane collusion remains embedded into the movie's very character. Eli treads on a pursuit - sham and wretched - and Daniel gets on with a self-aggrandizing motif, in which oil seems to be the only color. Religion seems to have a biting disregard in the eyes of Daniel very much because it brings in an impassioned rebuke to everything that Daniel stands for or might stand for. The over-arching influence of religion in countering anything material and the baggage that it brings in with it, is something Daniel contests with throughout. One seems to get on with a community on the grounds of his interest; the other seems to go quite in contrast, with condemning the people off for an abode stationed alone. Or as Empire Online puts it, in its review: These two represent the wider forces of religion and capitalism and the role they've played in America's development, then the picture that Anderson paints of his nation's soul is bleak indeed. Both Plainview and Eli are corrupt, out primarily to consolidate their own power; both sell their snake-oil schemes with promises to better those who follow them; both ultimately betray those who choose to believe in them. Plainview at least is approaching honest about his perfidy, but the rot runs deeper in him than anyone - there are no depths to which he will not stoop in pursuit of more land, more money, more oil. It's a chilling portrait, and one which, while bafflingly evil, somehow never strays from believability. The movie seems to get on with rawness, gushing off onto the screen, with every snap of the scene. It starts with Daniel Plainview shoveling out silver meters down from a pit and incidentally falling roughshod on his peg, in a later retreat into it. Being bruised with a minor fracture, he still ventures into picking out silver with the same ferocity. His bitsy money-making hits take a haul into a biting realization; when he goes out into the Sunday Ranch - having been invited by Paul Sunday for oil-bound prospects - and goes quail-hunting, under the guise of prospecting whether this dry piece of land, streams with greasy blood underneath the sandy drape or not? He then talks Abel Sunday, Paul's father, into buying the land rather than leasing it: and thus making a wild turn to fiddling for oil: the dwindling lifeblood of our 21st-century prosperity. The film is a pressing tale of the unbridled push for more: that more consists in gaining more land; gaining more money through a proper channeling of oil as a penny-rigging gimmick; exploiting more and more the tenderness in others, mainly by superseding it all by a consummate disregard for anything with a soul (I look at people and I see nothing worth-liking, says Daniel sitting on the porch). The film centers on psychological rushes for exploiting with an unbridled vie, for everything that seems to be definitive before one. His adopted son H.W Plainview seems to be a bridging link with the world, that he so seems to botch. Dillon Freasier plays a reticent child even before being deafened by being blown onto the shack's roof by a gassy outburst in the oil well. His silence seems to have been impinged on him by the intimidating stature of his father, who only seems to talk to him on issues relating to business. An excerpt from the Oil! would suffice for it: "Dad had explained it-money had done it. Men of money had said the word, and surveyors and engineers had come, and diggers by the thousand, swarming Mexicans and Indians, bronze of skin, armed with picks and shovels; and great steam shovels with long hanging lobster-claws of steel; derricks with wide swinging arms, scrapers and grading machines, steel drills and blasting men with dynamite, rock-crushers, and concrete mixers that ate sacks of cement by the thousand, and drank water from a flour-stained hose, and had round steel bellies that turned all day with a grinding noise. All these had come, and for a year or two they had toiled, and yard by yard they had unrolled the magic ribbon. Thus, day by day, Bunny got his oil lessons. He wandered about the field with Dad and the geologist and the boss driller, while they laid out the sites for future wells; and Dad took an envelope and pencil, and explained to Bunny why you place your wells on the four corners of a diamond, and not on the four corners of a square. You may try that out for yourself, drawing a circle about each well, to indicate the territory from which the oil is drained; you will see that the diamond shape covers the ground with less overlapping. Wherever you overlap, you are drilling two holes to get the same barrel of oil; and only a dub would do that"