Dispatches: What the Ending of There Will Be Blood Means About You

Note: Herein I discuss the film in such a way as to ruin it for those who haven't seen it.

There Will Be Blood is a movie that begins by making good on some of the remarkable formal promise that Paul Thomas Anderson demonstrated in certain key sequences in his last movie, Punch Drunk Love.  (He's developed quite a way with titles, too.)  In the earlier movie, Anderson was discovering an ability to produce riveting sequences without dialogue or camera movement, simply by sound, composition and cutting.  It was a refreshing improvement on the allusion-heavy style he deployed in his first films, which quoted Altman and Scorcese to no end.  (An example of this would be the fully Scorcese-esque tracking shots in Boogie Nights.)

There Will Be Blood suggests even further independence of technique, that PTA is emerging as a formally unique artist (sometime, I have to investigate my overreliance on the concept of formality in movies).  It begins with a truly striking landscape shot, over which we hear an orchestral swooping, out of a horror movie.  This unmotivated shot leaves much to infer, leaves the viewer in what I'd term a rich state of ignorance.  What follows is also powerfully restrained, as we see Daniel Day-Lewis' character, Daniel Plainview, discovering oil while mining for silver in circumstances of extreme privation and physical risk.  He lights a fuse, dynamites a wall, blows his tools up while trying to winch them out of the mine, climbs back down, and at a beautifully unexpected moment the rung of a ladder slips away from the wall and down he plunges.  Back to the ominous landscape.  Cue orchestra.  Shiver.

Such moments are staged so freshly that you have the sense, in a way similar to Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (though perhaps not as fully achieved), of a film finding a magical way to make the experience of other times, other forms of consciousness, palpable.  It's something the best period films do, and even if it's always all a fake, there is something about the way movies can record being-in-the-world that makes them a special vehicle for this.  The first two-thirds of There Will Be Blood are peppered with revelatory material, non-judgmental observations of Plainview's Nietzschean will to dominate.  Plainview rejecting a town whose members are too excitable; Plainview bargaining with a sheep-like farmer; Plainview saving his son from a spectacular oil fire that manages to suggest both Kuwait and the Old Testament.  Yet the movie never makes its moral judgment too plain--it never fully betrays its origins in the Upton Sinclair muckraker, Oil!.

Until the last third of film, that is, when Plainview's paranoid, psychotic nature becomes drastically clear.  He humiliates a preacher, kills a man who had pretended to be his half brother, and after becoming a Howard Hughe-grade recluse, piles up furniture in his living room and shoots at it, viciously abuses his own son, and in the movie's final scene, he manipulates, bullies, kills the younger preacher, with whom he has contended for the entire movie.  Not only kills, but kills by beating him to death in Plainview's own private bowling ally, with a bowling pin.  Suddenly, Day-Lewis has become Joe Pesci--and P.T. Anderson again the Scorcese disciple.  It's acting out as acting.  (The cut from the establishing shot of Plainview's neo-Gothic mansion to this bowling alley says so much more than the craziness that follows.)  Plainview's descent into homicidal behavior, though, seems much less menacing than the more ambiguous behavior that came before, when it appeared his love was as dangerous as his hatred.

How does one take this overstated ending?  If you're me, terribly.  Anderson gives away much of what he has achieved with it.  He re-roots the movie, so unique before, in the American genre tradition of the psychotic picaresque, aligning Day-Lewis with the great Method scenery chewer of modern American film, Al Pacino.  Anderson's love of movies and desire to point his movie at something, like a sharp stick impaling religion and capitalism together, seem to overtake his purer filmic qualities.  The movie loses its internal cohesion.  It's probably still a great film, but less great.

Or maybe not.  The day after I saw There Will Be Blood, I spoke about it with a great friend of 3qd occasionalist Descha Daemgen, let's call him Tittymouse, who loved the ending.  In revealing Plainview's character to be basically evil, in making itself into an allegory about the unholy alliance of oil and God, said Tittymouse, the film was making visible its desire to critique, and blasting out of a specious naturalism into a more obvious pastiche of genres. This seemed a more honest filmmaking style to Tittymouse, in that it brought our attention to the artificiality, the constructedness, of the movie, rather than "fooling" us by maintaining its tone.  I see Tittymouse's point, though I feel there is something  important in our disagreement.

For Tittymouse, and those like him, there is no knowledge that can be higher than the knowledge that accepts and signals its own insufficiency.  So postmodern effects like pastiche and artificiality, the showing of seams, are to be admired.  For me, and those like me, I think, the immanence of a piece is more interesting than its signaling of its theoretical sophistication.  In Tittymouse's worldview, the work is important not for itself but for its expression of certain favored themes in post-Heideggerian Continental philosophy, basically about the impossibility of knowledge of the object.  Because of this, elements like the ending of the movie, that rupture the self-consistency of the film, are admirable.  The auteur of the film is irrelevant, in this post-death-of-the-author mode of understanding.  But to me, a movie shouldn't be a representative of a school of thought.  It should be a movie.

(I'm being a bit unfair to Tittymouse, ventriloquizing him this way, making him say what I want him to say and then arguing with it.  But he's partially a literary character, so it's okay.)

There's something more interesting to me about seeing a work as immanent, independent of philosophical thought.  You can see it from a productive zone of ignorance, if that's not too vague.  What I mean by that is that ignorance is what allows you to develop a personal, fully (emotionally) engaged response to a work, while obsessive knowledge, or an obsessive relationship to relating things to other things, makes for a good critical stance but does a kind of violence. 

Maybe another way to get at this is with an anecdote.  I once went to Dia: Beacon, to look at look at those most consecrated of artists, with a friend, Jimmy, who was then the director of a major gallery.  I had expected him to pontificate interestingly on the brilliance of all those titans of contemporary art, the Smithsons and Serras and Lewitts.  Instead, he said, "This stuff is alright, but it's not that interesting to me, it's not what's happening now."  He was pretty much nonplussed by the stuff--as the director of a downtown gallery specializing in much more contemporary art, he was electrified by his own peers and not the generation before.  Jimmy's response surprised, intrigued, and has stayed with me.  Rather than a curatorial, reverential relation to artworks, he had more selfish, disrespectful and, in a way, ignorant relation to them ( I say this in a good way, actually).  That was hugely enabling.  He wasn't worried about the place of a particular in the history of art, as embodiments of conceptual revolutions, or rather, he was, but only to the degree that he was.  The zone of ignorance is productive.

And that, in a way, marks the difference between two worldviews, that are cleaved quite deeply.  You want a work to be immanent in the moment you encounter it, or you want it to somehow symbolize and perform historical transformations.  You either see it as a thing or a representation.  You're either with us or you're with the Tittymouses.  And I think your response to the last scene of There Will Be Blood will tell you which.

Comments

[Akbi]

Thank you for putting into to such limpid words something that needed to be said--esp. using the term "immanence" to describe what you were looking for in viewing "There Will Be Blood", vs. Tittymouse's stance toward films. I think it's very true that the critical stance, for all its benefits, is violent in that it seeks to break down (to then analyze) works, such as a film--so obviously it's destructive. And it's sort of sad to think of people ONLY seeing movies or other art in such a way, not having any reaction to their immanece. Also why I think the people involved in the creation of art or so often such different thinkers than those who analyze/critique it. I don't know what I'm even saying now. But thanks, again, for this lovely post.

[Abbas Raza]

Interesting. Not having seen the end, or for that matter, the beginning, of the movie, I'm still pretty sure I'm a Tittymouse man. By nature. It is hard not to be because the philosophical content of much of 20th century art is often most of what is (deliberately) there--sometimes pretty much all of it, as in the case of Duschamp, e.g., no?

[laney]

Like Ligeti for Kubrick, this (I'd say -Xenakis' style) sort of dissonance converging towards a unison goes far beyond horror movie status, as does the entire first sequence. Rather limited, in my view, to suggest horror here. And maybe even a bit insulting.
And, faced with your "choose your side" conclusion, I'd say I'm both. Must we choose? When faced with white light or darkness, can't we see the colors of the spectrum and black to boot? Can't we float on a thousand plateaux rather than dig our feet in up there OR down below? More fun to be mobile. Silly wabbit, Serra's for kids too!

[Andrew]

Interesting perspective, but I think your analysis of the stylistic rupture between 2nd and 3rd acts is too reductive. I don't think it can just be reduced to a self-reflexive move or a shift into pastiche or parody. Rather, I think the final scenes can be seen as consistent with the rest of the film's particular stance regarding the themes of deception and the performance of 'belief' that was established earlier in the film. Plainview's willingness to manipulate familial and religious values for his own ends comes back to haunt him as those around him (fake brother Henry, Eli, etc.) demonstrate a willingness to do so as well. It's only in moments of excessive performance that Daniel breaks into some kind of emotional truth ("I abandoned my boy!"). I think Daniel concieves of truth as something that must be blasted out of the constant deception that makes up normal life in a competitive, capitalist society. It is this struggle that manifests itself in grotesque form at the end of the film. That's an off-the-cuff analysis, but I just wanted to make clear that I feel the last scene is not so much a stylistic departure as a twisted, excessive climax to all that preceded it.

[anechoic]

yes, we could all walk around staring blankly at Pollack's or Rothko's and feel satisfied that we have checked off yet another item on our 'things to do that make us seem more sophisticated than our co-workers' laundry list...and be forever in the dark after reading something more rigorous than Harry Potter or the Da Vinci Code – but why should we tacitly allow anti-intellectualism to dumb down our culture and encourage people to let their analytic functions atrophy?

The lack of critical thinking has created a sad predicament in the US where Britney, Paris, American Idol and Pirates of the Caribbean slap a McDonald's or Disney logo on US culture and makes us look like blithering idiots (Idiocracy) to the rest of the world.

As for your curator: I've never met a curator who was not a clueless philistine who were fed 'up-and-coming' artists by their interns and are all-too-ready to press-fit a 'techno DJ' into any event in order to affect a pose of urban hipness.

[Akbi]

I agree, anechoic.

[Jane]

I agree with Andrew--PTA always stays on stage a little too long, but I didn't sense a formal rupture when the killings started. Even that creepy bowling alley shot you mention is an echo of the first landscape shot. As for your question, I think the best films etc can support ignorance (productive or otherwise) as well as obsessive knowledge (violent or otherwise). I guess what I want is for you and Tittymouse to sit cozy on a couch--you could watch Barry Lyndon--and not feel such a divorce between wanting to enjoy the story and pull it apart. The problem is reverential watching, where, depending on your stance, you think it's somehow disrespectful to do one or the other.

[Elatia Harris]

I haven't seen the film, so my reaction is the cleanest of all -- nice and natural, if you will.

This is wonderfully interesting and well written, Asad, and it takes me back to the apres-cinema discussions of my youth, when there was everything to say about Antonioni, Bergman, Herzog, Resnais, Bertolucci and a few others whose films had to be seen and talked about -- or else. What we sometimes forgot was how the film did as a movie -- which it also was. Like, did it grab you? Did you leave the theatre feeling somehow both exhausted and renewed? Or, had you been manipulated? If you felt manipulated, you could start talking right away, of course. Otherwise...

With some of us, a too-formidable critical apparatus got to work right away, however -- right in the middle of the presumed afterglow. Much as with discussing a work of literature that everyone has just read. Then as now, I read or go to films to be shattered and reorganized. There may be better reasons, but I don't know what they are. Thinking is for afterwards, or so I reason. What I'm leading up to is the emotional element in your essay -- to my reading, it kinda MIA'd. The film made you think and write -- and really well, I loved reading it -- but: how did it do as a movie?

[H. Williams]

I posted the below earlier in response to Dana Stevens' confusion about the ending of There Will Be Blood at Slate. Obviously it doesn't address your points specifically, but I think it gets at the matter of consistency (on which point we disagree). I'd add, though, that comparing Plainview to Pesce is specious. Go back to Kubrick, who (as someone also points out above) bookends the film. I would add, too.... You say: "Yet the movie never makes its moral judgment too plain--it never fully betrays its origins in the Upton Sinclair muckraker, Oil!. Until the last third of film, that is, when Plainview's paranoid, psychotic nature becomes drastically clear." But if this is Plainview's nature and his nature only, there is no allegory, or if there is an allegory, it's one that trumps any kind of perdition narrative with the return of the film's ending to the primal roots of its opening. There are no unholy alliances struck in this film because unholiness is as inoperative as holiness in its world. The oil business occasions the goings on of the film and that is all. Oil has nothing to do with the ending, only character does. Plainview chose Oil, not Oil Plainview: he, not Oil, is the author of his crimes and the film's ending (which this viewer would count among the high points of world cinema).

Ms. Stevens,

You said that you were "of the camp that puzzled over the comic-histrionic coda of There Will Be Blood, not sure how its departure in rhythm and tone—not to mention the sudden appearance of a bland adult actor in the key role of the oilman's son, so wonderfully played up till then by the nonprofessional child actor Dillon Freasier—flowed from what came before." I wonder what people suppose the movie to be about that they think something is missing in the leap from 1911 to the late 20s (is that right? 1927?) when the movie ends. The pipeline is effectively complete and Daniel's fortune assured, and though this doesn't preclude there having been similar such coups in the time elided, seeing or knowing about them would be superfluous: the mansion says all we need to know. There is nothing left to show but what is shown in the end: skip to a man wasted by his own wealth, ennui, and resentments--a man who, when offered the buyout for his holdings, asks: "what would I do?"; whom we see as a fledgling oilman toiling with his workers in the air-poisoned mire; and who, true to his word in his speech to the settlers of the land on which he would drill, was not content to collect on his production in wealth and leisure from afar, but insisted on overseeing his operation in person while living humbly and simply out of a shack. Despite its length, There Will Be Blood is remarkably economical and lean. The 1911 sequence ends by neatly establishing the trajectories that point rather predictably (and this is no slight) to the film's ending. The "leap" from pipeline in completion and H.W.'s being taught sign language while Mary, the sister of Daniel's now arch-nemesis, who we already anticipate will develop some kind of relationship with H.W., learns it too (by choice in contrast to H.W.'s necessity) is no leap—not on the film's discursive terms, at least. To complain that a lot of years intervene and that a child has grown into a man behind our backs strikes me as not at all to the point. Segueing from sign lesson to sign marriage is a smooth and lovely transition (one of the few fond moments in so bleak and dark a film) and a bit of trim causation. So is the cut to the mansion, in which Daniel is drunk and firing a gun, a consequence of his success and his son's formerly budding, and now consummated, love. Daniel is a social monogamist who expects nothing less than the same devotion in return. His "brother" suffered for his betrayal and so does his "son." That is continuity. Daniel begins as a desperate, primal figure crouching in silence on a barren landscape quoting Kubrick's "The Dawn of Man" and ends by clubbing his enemy in reference to the same sequence in the same film (the discovery of tools; the waterhole). The ending is integral and very much in key.

[Brandon Keim]

Re: "For Tittymouse, and those like him, there is no knowledge that can be higher than the knowledge that accepts and signals its own insufficiency. So postmodern effects like pastiche and artificiality, the showing of seams, are to be admired. For me, and those like me, I think, the immanence of a piece is more interesting than its signaling of its theoretical sophistication."

I need to get back to work and thus don't have time to comment on the entire argument, but just wanted to say that some of the same questions occurred to me right at the very beginning of the film, in one of the oil-is-gushing scenes, when the viewer is looking up into the sky as the oil shoots and some of it comes smattering down over the lens. PTA at least gives some hints of the seams to come later....

[anechoic]

'I read or go to films to be shattered and reorganized.'

-- this is exactly the same for me...and in reorganizing I need to sit and think and put the pieces into a new arrangement while finding new relationships
and meanings
-- excellent post!! :)

[Michael Blim]

Asad: Terrific column. Thanks for giving me such a clear litmus test for upcoming viewing.

[Nick]

Wow great column with great comments.

I would like to discuss it as a movie, (not a dichotomy of thing versus representation) because in the end that is the context that it will be seen in by most people. saw the movie and immediately after leaving the theater I thought to myself... that was the worst movie I had seen in a long time. I hated the ending, honestly.

My first reaction was a result of me feeling cheated that the final, grand symphony of a man ravaged by hatred was that he killed the person he hated. The whole movie is a slow motion fall off the deep-end? I mean, there was none of the "shattering and reorganization" of myself that a good movie does. It told us what we know-- hatred is bad, power corrupts (both "prophets" and rich men) and they square off at the end and whoevers hate runs deeper, wins, but both really lose. There was no wonder, no revelation, no paradigm shifts. Granted few movies do this nowadays but still I did have some hope. In the acting lies the real value I believe, and the only thing that reached me.

Cheers, Nick
TheIssue.com

[tom jacobs]

el sid,

you've once again broken standards of eloquence and intelligence in ways that are disturbing. a brilliant analysis of a film that this very post inspired me to see.

now that i've seen it i am struck by two things (well, more than two, but this will have to suffice under the circumstances). one is that the film has no real ideas--it pitches itself as a troubled man who becomes successful max weber-like. but the allegorical/symbolic dimensions of the film left me cold. they seemed less intersting than the story of danny-day louis's character, which was more than enough to keep me happy watching.

more importantly, this whole business about post-modern (or "post-heideggerian continental philosophy," if yo prefer) narrative stylings is profoundly interesting and relevant, but reading about you and "tittymouse" made me realize that we constantly negotatiate conflicting and competing demaands in our reading of a film/text/image/thing all the time. the same distinction between thing and representation (which is, as you note, a particularly crucial one), vibrates in an audience member's mind alongside other tensions like "did s/he intend this or am i just seeing it, and does it matter?"; or is this interesting as an insight into the artist/director's aesthetic narrative or because it's distinctive; are these people producing compelling narratives (i.e., are they inventing, by virtue of their particular genius, stories that strike at the heart of things) or are they merely reflecting what they see?; and finally, how do we negotiate the invariably twinned and insoluble problem of being moved by the cathartic thrust of narratives and finding them theoretical intersting?

It is, i think, like the image of the rabbit/bride-to-be that Wittgenstein found so compelling--we can't have both but we must have both.

of course, no of this is to say that judgment doesn't matter--you're quite right, i think, that this story interpellates us to respond to a rather specific call--and knowing all of this...that we are all bearing the unbearable shearing forces of a thousand contradictions (think of this film as unique or as part of PTA's ouevre?; engage with it as an allegory or as a literalization of human problems?: is it ironic or sincere?.

you get the idea. it's insanely complicated and complex, but we mustn't reduce it to a choice, a matter of "a or b", because nothing in life is that way (even if, as i think you're suggesting) they are in our private, reflective, meditative minds). we swim in inter-helixing pools of contradictions, and we'd better get used to it... (there's more i'd like to say, but i'll stop....judgment, is, after all, crucial in life, and doesn't accept the contradictions i've laid out above...)

all best, and namaste to you and all...

tom

[Ben]

I think Asad Raza's critique misses a few key points about why the ending is great, without getting into philosophy (although it does seem like Raza has forgotten that films are works of art and as such often fall outside the realm of predictability, and generally the amount of discussion of interpretation, the better).

First of all, the movie is constantly building to that exact ending. Plainview's rage and insanity is building the entire time. Also, if you even thought about the title a little bit, you knew the ending would be surprising vile.

I was surprised when I first saw the ending, and the closing music was particularly unsettling, but thinking back, it was almost the perfect ending. Without that ending, we're looking at a great period piece rather than a great film.

I have to say, my favorite part of the film were the extremely long shots without cutting. That takes some serious acting chops.

[Dillon]

Thanks Asad! I decided not to read this until I had seen the film. I agree that the a,b choice may be an oversimplification but it does inspire a nice debate. My initial reaction is that I fall on the immanence/'not liking of ending' side.. A while ago, when I read the title to this article I was actually scared of the film, thought it would somehow challenge the strength of my morals or something - make me feel complicit about religion or oil/money or blood, Hanneke style. But the end clobbering felt too personal to me! (a personal issue not involving me, the witness) like pta was trying to somehow regain control of the film from day-lewis. Is it in character, yes - so? So imagine there is a this stubborn obsessive guy and he gets really obsessive and kills someone in a certain poignant context, fine! It's an allegory or a symbol or something. But I like the preceding rich state of ignorance, the formal suggestions that there is something unholy about the whole situation, excellent! It raises questions as opposed to imposing auterish will. Now we discuss the filmmaker instead of the content, (career choice?). Don't get me wrong I really liked this film, and who knows, maybe this discussion is proof that it did raise questions. See how I feel next time I watch (one of few films that I look forward to watching again)
thanks-D

[Pete Chapman]

There are films that are almost more interesting to recall than they are to watch. The line that you draw from "There Will Be Blood" to "Barry Lyndon" works at a number of levels. We have a protagonist who runs through the strata of his society, accumulating and acquiring the things it values but remaining a driven cypher whose emptiness increases as the story unfolds. Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon" was a sort of holy fool, he wanted to be a gentleman and in the end that goal costs him dearly. He may in fact be more of a gentleman than those born to that state but this seems to leave him no wiser. Had Kubrick lived to do his version of "A.I." one can imagine the trajectory that the robot-boy character would have followed in his attempt to be human would have been more harrowing and bleaker than what Spielberg came up with.
The oilman Plainview is a much harder character to understand. He is driven and methodical and others exist for him as tools, obstacles and means to ends that only require the existence of others as a measure of his distance from them. His killing of Sunday at the end arrives in a rapidly accelerating series of changes in the character relations in the film. Even the density of the dialogue increases. The open spaces of the first two thirds of the film and the time between events are gone as the end plays out quickly in a series of enclosed rooms in Plainview's mansion. The film's score provides a compressed motif of this overall arch as repeatedly, chromatic string harmonies move towards increasingly near dissonant resolutions. The film doesn't just fill the time it takes, it uses the time as raw material to create through its' over two and a half hour running time a temporal pacing as defined as its' dominant visual image of wide but curiously flattened spaces.
Sunday's murder is shocking in that there is no way back from it despite the fact that we have seen Plainview kill once before. And why did he kill his phoney brother? And why does he kill Sunday? Wasn't humiliating him enough? In the structure of the film's events the bowling pin death blows echo the accidental deaths of a least two of Plainview's workers. The growing puddle of blood around Sunday reminds the viewer of oil but makes the flashing of the film's title at the end almost a silly punchline. Yes, there will be blood. Even that falls apart when one considers the other meaning of blood as family. But who is Plainview's family? His "son" is adopted. His "brother" was a fake. Sunday, however, by marriage is his brother-in-law and pleads with Daniel calling him brother right up until his murder.
Despite all of this, I have to admit, I think that you and Tittymouse saw a much more interesting film than I did. Still, in its' overall design, it impresses its' details and structure in such a way that it continues to trouble one long after a first viewing and that is so rare these days. Thanks for post.

[ProfDave]

As professional, classically trained philosopher, I just turn away from pseudointelectuals blabbing about Heidegger whom they barely understand (and what is understood is right out of any introductory secondary source on Martin). One sees this here very clearly by many making that most primal of mistakes - applying your text to yourself. You can't say there is no meaning meaningfully, can you, without contradiction?

[Asad Raza]

Sorry, ProfDave, you've failed to understand my point, which is that there is today a common way of reading cultural products that celebrates their discontinuity, inspired by a strain of thought that explicitly identifies Heidegger as a forbear. I happen to oppose this perspective. Wherever did you get the idea that I am claiming that there is no meaning? You might spend less time congratulating yourself on your classical training and more on reading comprehension--or would engaging with "pseudointelectuals" like me be stooping too low for a man of your professional achievements?

[phestus]

i sure wish you folks would write the way people talk.

why didn't the movie get darker in tone a the end? Why did it turn into the Coen bros? Why was teh music, before so trestrained and sparse, now at the end brassy and comical? what up with that?? it just was too goofy at the end. I didnt like the end.

[Asad Raza]

Sadly, phestus, I think I do write the way I talk!

But, yeah, the end confused me a bit too.

On reflection, the movie seems to me to be PTA's oblique response to living through the Bush Administration.

[Mathew Eugene]

Lovely essay. The film demands discussion like this.

[Jared]

"i sure wish you folks would write the way people talk"

On 3qd the comments do tend to sound like grad school essays. This is not a good thing. It has been a long time since I was in grad school.

As for the movie, did no one notice the parallels with Citizen Kane? Lonely man with no real family seeks happiness by accumulating wealth and power only to find it is empty and futile. The movie was a disappointment to me. Compared to a rich a subtle exploration of human greed and compassion like Sancho the Bailiff by Kenji Mizoguchi, it was predictable and boring.

[X]

Listening to the Brahms at the end right now.

Beautiful. Beautiful. This movie, god, an acquaintance of mine passed a review (subtly reeking of Christianity) trying to say this movie was about the "depth of darkness of a guilty conscience"!!!

This movie is a hymn of strength; the movie starts in silence; there isn't an utterance until Mr. Plainview stands in front of people explaining why he wants to take their land and why they should give it to him. His will flows through every scene; it's slighted in that first speaking scene and he leaves.

I was troubled by the question of why he seemed so out of it and anguished - it's easy to mistake it for sorrow - when he said "I've abandoned my son, I've abandoned my boy." It's not anguish. It's hatred for the other people in the room with him, that they can't accept the honesty of the life of pure will to which he has dedicated himself, not out of any ideals, but because that's the species he belongs to. He hates that he abandoned his boy just to find out his brother was a fraud; he was looking for another one like him and let his guard down with the false brother; he had no brother, no like-minded expression of pure will; he had these "nothings," these ciphers all around him his entire life, these people who're too impotent to take their will into pure and direct - plain - expression. The Sunday father, who takes the money and is so excited; the Paul Dano kid Eli, who has to mask up his desire for money and power and attention in this fake charade thing, this parasitic relationship with people who produce and create, who make their own way.

He felt bad about abandoning his child because it was a tactical error. When he held the kid for the doctor to look at his ears he held the kid like cattle. Not a child.

In the last scenes, he's rid of the encumbrances: his kid becomes his competitor and in that instant Daniel states it was a bad idea, and then destroys him: he tells him the truth about his being an orphan because - precisely because - he was suddenly a competitor; he knew a real person he could respect wouldn't really care about whether he was his father or not; it doesn't change the primal map of wills which informs the entire jungle of signs and eating, the meshwork of life, both modern and other. Daniel tells his false son that exactly when his son becomes a direct hindrance to the true will.

And the flashback? The sort of faux sentimentality? What does it show him doing? Tending to the children affectionately? No. It shows him pushing his son down like a dog. And walking back to the derrick.

He destroys his fake son and then he deflates (ha! I drink yourrrrr milkshake!) the insect-like mind of the fake religious, the fake pastor, the false prophet, makes him speak his true creed, thirst for money and for power, thirst, first and foremost, for food. For the subsistence, the harsh grinding ritual of blood bred from the flesh of grain. Then Daniel smiles. And he's happy, when he's killed him, with the same psychology as a lot of us Westerners squishing a bug. And without much moral hesitation.

This is not nihilistic; there is in this movie the constant study of will: Daniel's will moving through the people as they watch him, listen to him, Daniel's will as he drills (when his false son goes deaf he thinks only about the ocean of oil underneath him, metaphor for the power flowing through him), Daniel's will as the pipeline continues through the Bandy property (after going through the theatrical stupidities of the baptism), his will as he can finally live in a house without people coming around him like mosquitos thirsting for the blood of a more living person. This movie is a seamless, singly-cast hymn of strength. Not one moment does Daniel waver in sympathy; his only mistake - his brother - was hope for a likeminded ruthlessness.

[Jared]

x,

Sounds like you admire this will to power even though the movies shows quite plainly that it leads to an isolated and sub-human existence. What's to admire? Such a life as Daniel's - no family, no friends, is not worth living and is, in fact, insane.

[Hart]

It is not an admiration, it is the single best assessment of the character and the film here so far.

Simple and to the point without trying to sound like a post grad term paper in some attempt to appear smart by using words that most people will have to look up to understand.

[Max]

Jared, fully agree with you. I thnk reading all the comments, right after watching this movie, i re-lived the movie once again. I have a 2 year old son and watching the boy in the movie getting hurt made me shiver. Watching Daniel screaming in church" i've abondend my son" made me tear. Daniel is power hungry money maker,but make no mistake, he is not a fat cat that walks all over the little people. He works his ass off, he is dirty, he is smelly, he is DRIVEN like no one else. He wants to be alone because he is always dissapointed in people. They all want something from him. They want money, jobs, bread, water. And he gives it to them. He is GOD!!!!!!!! and this is why he can't stand religion. Because he is THE Religion. The religion of others allows them to beat the little girl. He doesn't. He only requires total devotion to work - his work. And when his son abondons him - he doesn't take it well, because maybe he takes it as a pay back for abondoning his son when he lost his hearing. All his life he fought greed and lazyness with drive for victory. It wasn't the money - he could be millionere and retire to his bowling laned fortress way back in the day, but he refused because it's not the money that he wants - it's purpouse, it's a life long race.
Killing Sunday was one more touch to that struggle. Sunday represented that sleazy, rotten food we are being fed daily from the screens of our tv's, pages of newspaper, internet. He represents false hope. Follow me and you will loose weight in 10 days. Do what i say and you will be rich from the comfort of your home, take a pill and you will be the strongest man ever. All lies. Pretty, nicely made, tasty lies. And what does Daniel offer? Grunt, oil and dirt under your fingers, in your nostrals, lungs and stomach work. Nobody likes it, not many want it and so he is alone, with no friends, no woman, no brother and ultimately no son. His son didn't want to countinue his work, his company. His son wanted to part, go separate ways. Wrong or right, a man like Daniel could not accept it and his son knew it.
This film is a great story, a story if trial and loss. Daniel got what he wanted - he was all alone. But in the end he did loose big - he lost the one who could take it further and the pipeline went dry into nowhere. That's my take on it.

Max.

[Max]

Sorry i didn't mean to agree with Jared - i was agreeing with X and Hart.

[max]

And another thing. The relationship, or rather the father and son line through out the movie is sensitive and those who look at it with simplicity is, in my view, making a major mistake. The boy is a huge part of his father. He is always with him. And no, not for the reason of money making, although he uses the boy as a symbol of a familly values. The boy, his son... his son! Those who have sons will understand. His son, his pride, his future, his cells, his blood, his best.
When boy gets hurt he cuddles him, whispering to him. And then despare settles in. What do you do, in the middle of wasted land, with nobody who can help. What do you do with a hurt child who can't hear you? What do you do to deliver your love, your comfort to your boy when not one word can reach him? Do you scream the words to him? Do you cry them out to him? Daniel was at a loss and it was killing him. He could do nothing. Don't you dare comparing handling of the kid during doctor's visit as catle. Have you ever took your son to a doctor for a check up, a shot? A kid who would not listen even when things are done for his own good? You, as an adult, as a parent, overpower, take over and let the right be done. And so the right was done when Daniel sent him away. However wrong that was, Daniel needed to do it just so that he could realize that he can't be without his son. And he was in termoil this whole time. He knew that he abonded his son and that realization placed all the things in the right order. He knew that now he can handle his son and so he brings him back. Daniel is a tough man, not without his faults. But he loved his kid, however tough that love was.