There Will Be Blood
by Spencer Warren
Issue 103 - March 12, 2008

Movie-making obviously is a very demanding business, requiring artistic talent and mastery of a complex craft. With rare exceptions, it requires a lot of experience. In the heyday of Hollywood, when the studios controlled the production and distribution of movies, directors usually lacked the autonomy many have today. The creative ones who had a personal vision nevertheless managed to impart their vision through their mastery of their own personal style. They often complained about the control of producers, but in retrospect, some creative producers, like Darryl F. Zanuck, often worked fruitfully with directors and improved the films. For example, Zanuck made possible two of John Ford’s greatest films, The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and How Green was My Valley (1941), which have tighter narratives than Ford’s later, personally produced post-war films. Zanuck’s ending for the great Ford Western My Darling Clementine (1946) is better than Ford’s – only in the past few years have we seen Ford’s original (on DVD) and learned the classic finale is what Zanuck in fact wanted.

Further, the studios, through their “assembly lines” of highly talented and experienced writers, art directors, cinematographers, editors, costume designers, composers and so on, provided priceless support for the directors. The Wizard of Oz (1939), for example, directed by Victor Fleming, would be inconceivable outside of the vast resources of the MGM of the time. Fleming directed most of Gone With the Wind the same year; it would be inconceivable without the most hands-on of producers, David O. Selznick. The same applies to Warner Brothers’ Casablanca (1942) and The Adventures of Robin Hood(1938), both directed by Michael Curtiz. Indeed, this team approach helps to explain why so many classics that we love today came out of that period of studio-run film-making. The frequent absence of this team approach in our contemporary world of totally liberated “artists” is a major reason why films tend to be so bad today.

For in our world, directors like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino often can make their own multi-million dollar films with total or almost total personal control. It is doubtful, however, whether this has made their films better. Overlong, self-indulgent displays like Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2003) (see my essay at http://acuf.org/issues/issue83/070504med.asp), Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), and Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) and Kill Bill: Vol.2 (2004) are ego-trips of nonsense that dissolve into violent, pointless depravity. Spielberg’s The Color Purple (1985) and Saving Private Ryan (1998), and even his Schindler’s List (1993), are too long and lose focus; they would have benefited from the guiding hand of a Zanuck (who used to brag he could save any film, however mediocre, in the editing room).

These days one need not even be in the “elite” class of this quartet to have total control of your “creation.” Take Paul Thomas Anderson, the writer as well as director of the Oscar-nominated There Will Be Blood. Born in 1970, this supposed wunderkind first made his name in 1997 with Boogie Nights, a wild descent of “personal expression” into the world of pornographic film-making, with lots and lots of filthy dialogue. Following a few more films, now he has come up with his first opus, a free adaptation of the novel Oil, by the radical author Upton Sinclair.

This film is so bad it is hard to decide where to begin. Basically, it’s another venture by left-wing Hollywood into the evil of businessmen and by implication the entire American historical experience. At the beginning we see the budding entrepreneur, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), struggling in a dark hole with a pickax, trying somewhere to find oil in 1898. He is risking his meager funds, and the work is dirty, very hard and dangerous. After this interesting start, which does show why businessmen are entitled to their profits, the remaining two and a half hours are devoted to showing Plainview cheating his way to a fortune, all the while abandoning his adopted son (who loses his hearing in an oil well accident), murdering one man for no reason, and generally losing his mind as the psychosis of Anderson’s view of free enterprise overtakes him. He flies into a rage and rejects Standard Oil’s offer of millions for his Southern California wells just because the latter’s representative made a comment that Plainview would then be free to devote his time to his son – unwittingly tapping into the guilt he feels from abandoning the boy in the pursuit of oil.

The other plot-line, if one could call it this, is the Bible-thumping Evangelicals (led by one Eli Sunday) whom Plainview cheats in order to make millions drilling on their parched California land. I doubt that believers have ever been depicted as more stupid, superstitious and worthless than here. Eli is depicted as something of a parallel to Plainview’s ruthless hustler, only Eli is after power through the new church he persuades Plainview to finance (modestly). Thus the “artist” Anderson can defame the devout as well as the entrepreneur with his “unfettered personal expression.” Plainview is so desperately hungry for success against Standard Oil that, in order to get the rights to build a pipeline to carry his oil to the ocean, he allows one poor landowner blocking his project to blackmail him into becoming baptized. He prostrates himself in the clapboard church, confessing his sins louder and louder at the demand of Eli Sunday, before being received into the church. But Plainview – and Anderson – get their revenge in the film’s final, truly ludicrous scene.

This is lifted right out of the classic Orson Welles 1941 expose of the empty world built by newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, Citizen Kane. Where Welles places the elderly Kane all alone amidst his gargantuan – but worthless – material acquisitions in his mammoth castle, Xanadu (an obvious reference to Hearst’s San Simeon, outside San Francisco), Anderson plops the older, now deranged Plainview all alone in a mansion, with its mahogany walls for him to stare at. Here, two long scenes of unending talk finally, and mercifully, end the film. In the first, Plainview bitterly rejects his now adult son’s confession of his (inexplicable) love, and sends him off never to be seen again. In the second, Plainview, lying drunk on the bowling lane of his private bowling alley, is roused by a visitor from the good-old days – Eli Sunday. This visit degenerates into Plainview turning the tables on his humiliating baptism of decades earlier: Eli wants money from Plainview for his church, so he allows himself to be blackmailed into a confession of his own – that there is no God; it’s all superstition. (See, even the pious have their price.) But this does not satisfy the mad Plainview, who proceeds in his rage to murder Eli, smashing his head in with a bowling pin. At this point, I was laughing, just as I was laughing at the comparably ridiculous, very violent end of Scorsese’s Oscar-winner of last year, The Departed.

And that, dear readers, is the end of a film that the effable New York Times movie critic described as an “epic American nightmare” and “a terrifying prophecy about the coming American century.” Unable (like the maker of this film) to restrain herself, the critic compares the picture with others “that have dismantled the mythologies of American success and, in doing so, replaced one utopian ideal for another, namely that of the movies themselves” (whatever that means). The film, she proclaims, “is above all a consummate work of art.” The “window it opens is to human consciousness itself.”

Not for nothing has the New York Times become, as the communists would say, the leading “organ” of American Cultural Marxism. The film fulfills these Cultural Marxists’ need for the only thing that counts, ideological purity – the evil of our free economy (I don’t like to use the term capitalism, which I believe Marx devised). This helps to explain a review which has nothing to do with reality, but everything to do with promoting the ideological “cause.” It represents the attitude that pervades many parts of the Times: among many examples, note the paper’s abandonment of any standard of fairness and objectivity in favor of tendentiousness in its news pages, the hysteria of its editorials and of columnists like Paul Krugman and Frank Rich, the vicious attacks on Mel Gibson’s The Passion in 2004, the Jayson Blair affirmative action fiasco in 2003 that led to the then editor’s resignation, and, most recently, the dishonest article trying to smear Senator McCain. This is the true Culture War raging on many fronts.

It is not likely we will see contemporary Hollywood coming up with films like Edison, the Man (1940) or King Vidor’s 1944 epic of the American Dream and free enterprise, An American Romance (see my essay at http://acuf.org/issues/issue96/071117med.asp ). The latter is based on the true rags to riches story of a poor Danish immigrant, William Knudsen, who rose to become the president of General Motors and then directed the mobilization of the industrial might of our free people that destroyed Hitler and Imperial Japan.

But, if any film-maker is interested, he might look into the life of Charles Martin Hall who, just out of Oberlin College, in 1888 discovered the electrical method of extracting aluminum from aluminum ore, or bauxite. Until then, aluminum had been as rare, and as valuable, as gold. Hall and financier Alfred E. Hunt then founded what we now know as the Aluminum Company of America – ALCOA. Without his discovery and the entrepreneurship of a great corporation, people like Anderson would not be flying around the world promoting their films, because without the lightness and strength of aluminum there would be no modern airplanes, not to mention countless other essentials of modern life. Indeed, without the inventive and business genius of George Eastman, whose celluloid film in the 1890s replaced paper in his new easy-to-use camera, the Kodak, Anderson would not even be making films. Eastman set up the first profit-sharing program for corporate employees and later gave away his immense personal fortune, to the University of Rochester, M.I.T., the Tuskegee Institute and various medical and dental clinics.

Alternatively, some Hollywood wunderkind might look into the life of a poor Serbian immigrant named Nikola Tesla, who between 1887 and 1890 created and patented the basis of modern alternating current electricity generation, transmission and distribution. Backed by George Westinghouse (the inventor of the modern railroad air brake, a foundation of the railroad industry during America’s post-Civil War industrialization), Tesla’s invention proved far superior to Edison’s direct current method for long-distance electricity transmission. Tesla and Westinghouse first demonstrated their genius by providing all the lighting for the tri-centenary Columbian Exposition World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893. Three years later, they harnessed Niagara Falls to light Buffalo, definitively demonstrating the practical superiority of alternating current. The cinematic possibilities are obvious. (Note that without such abundant electricity, we would not have the washing machines and refrigerators which came into abundance after World War II; in replacing the labor intensive washing boards and iceboxes, whose primitiveness required shopping many days of each week, they later made possible the liberation of women so acclaimed by the left today. No free enterprise, No Women’s Lib.)

An enterprising film-maker also could acquire the rights to Robert Hessen’s biography of Charles M. Schwab, Steel Titan. Beginning as an unskilled laborer, in twenty years he rose to the presidency of Carnegie Steel, then became first president of U.S. Steel and then founder of Bethlehem Steel, where early in the twentieth century he revolutionized the building of the budding skyscrapers by the highly risky development of a certain kind of new steel beam. Schwab played a key role as manager of Carnegie’s Homestead steel mill following the deadly, infamous strike in 1892, when Carnegie destroyed unionization in the industry until the 1930s. Later in life, Schwab descended into a life of hedonism. All these subjects offer rich dramatic possibilities, at the same time giving a complex, balanced view of our country’s epic industrial development -- unlike the ignorant, crude, fanatical hatred exemplified by There Will Be Blood.

Spencer Warren is www.ConservativeBattleline.com's media critic.