Men Love ‘There Will Be Blood’ A Little Too Much
By: John Devore
Tags: Movies, Film, Masculinity, Essay, Culture

Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the very few filmmakers who earns comparisons to the American Master Stanley Kubrick, whose movies included absolute classics like Paths of Glory, The Shining, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like any brilliant artist, Kubrick was a contradiction. His movies are both cold-hearted and warm-blooded. He was a sober-minded perfectionist who told stories about madness. He was the real deal.

And Anderson’s camera is as disciplined and patient as Kubrick’s was. His ability to pull emotions out of his actors is another talent he shares with the great director. As is a dark sense of humor. Both Anderson and Kubrick find humanity’s various ambitions to be darkly funny.

Kubrick’s movies often end with a break-up —human dumps robot, wife runs away from husband possessed by a hotel’s worth of evil, etc — and then a soupçon of hope. Dr. Strangelove is a dark comedy about nuclear armageddon. A Clockwork Orange is a cruel, vicious piece of work. It’s a hard watch, even now. But it has a happy ending.

Well, There Will Be Blood is not a sweeping period epic. I mean, I suppose it was marketed as one. No. There Will Be Blood is a romantic-comedy about American masculinity. The truth is, Paul Thomas Anderson makes love stories: 1997’s Boogie Nights was about the love of family. The Master is about two people who cannot resist each other, for good or bad. Magnolia is his most obvious romantic movie, a disjointed Altman-esque quilt of lost people searching for some kind of home.

The punchline in There Will Be Blood is that American men chase money instead of love and that’s why the movie ends with a bloody kiss from a bowling pin. Before that murder, it’s just two broken dudes yelling at each other, sometimes close enough to embrace. Daniel Day-Lewis ’ Daniel Plainview, a turn-of-the-century oil prospector who ripens into a rich recluse who hides inside mansions, isn’t a tragic figure. He’s a laughable dipshit who should have chosen love.

Is There Will Be Blood a work of genius? It’s not a perfect movie. It can be confusing — Paul Dano plays two different characters — and, as Hunt points out, it can be a slog. Let’s talk in ten more years. All I know is don't tell Anderson his movies are romantic comedies because I want him to keep making the same kinds of movies.

If you don’t like There Will Be Blood, fine. Awesome, even, Let me know what movie you think I should watch! If There Will Be Blood is one of your absolute favorites, fine. But I invite you to love that movie for the correct reasons. It’s funny, is reason numero uno.

One reason I wanted to write about Elle Hunt’s essay, aside from the obvious, is because it made me feel guilty. I have been that dude who wanted my partner to love a favorite movie of mine. In fact, a few weeks ago I delivered what I thought was an inspiring speech about the Lord of the Rings movies to my girlfriend—singular cinematic experiences that explore what it means to be good or evil. Or some such shit like that.

My girlfriend politely responded “sure,” and then we watched her favorite TV show, Rupaul’s Drag Race, which has become my favorite show. Heidi, there’s no reason you’d read this, but I think you’re fabulous.

So I relate to Hunt’s boyfriends. I’m sympathetic to men who want to share art that turns them on. I can be obnoxious about my opinions and if you’ve made it this far into this essay you know that to be true. I also like to argue about movies and sometimes I get a little too wound up.

There are men, of course, who argue about movies in bad faith. I have been the victim of dudes who use culture like a truncheon. I mean, just type the words Star Wars: The Last Jedi into any social media platform. To some of these dudes, they’re just following political marching orders and fighting the “culture war.”

I swear future generations will laugh while wearing respirators about the American ‘culture wars’ of the late 20th century and the first few decades of the next: what a fun meaningless game it must have been to shoot mean words at each other over whether or not a space adventure movie featured more women than men, or whatever.

My point is, the men online who are opinion fascists about video games and movies and TV and comic books are pro-bono ideological internet mercs and/or bored. They don't’ really represent actual real-life dudes.

But that doesn’t mean real dudes are any less aggressive when it comes to art that makes them feel things. Men don’t know what to do when they’re moved. We don’t know where to put that energy.

Generally speaking, men do not know how to appropriately express their passions. We’re socialized to project two basic emotional states: anger and pile of firewood. It’s like we’re ducks doomed to quack, and only quack, no matter how we feel. Sad? Quack. Happy? Quack. Only instead of one single noise representing many emotions, it’s the opposite. When men express a feeling, let’s say love or anxiety, it comes out sounding like anger.

So when men love a thing — a song, or food, or a movie — they can come off intense, like joy bullies. I’m not trying to excuse this behavior. My hope is that one man — just one — will read this and realize “Yikes, I can come on really strong when it comes to Battlestar Galactica.”