Paul Thomas Anderson is a family man. Or rather, he’s the kind of man who can’t resist the temptation to explore every angle of some of the most dysfunctional families around. His first two films, Hard Eight and Boogie Nights, center around two seedy-but-loveable found families as they maneuver their way through casinos, nightclubs and porn sets. More recently, Phantom Thread touches upon the undeniable pull of toxic romantic relationships (and mushrooms), and Licorice Pizza flirts with first love in the San Fernando Valley where PTA, himself, grew up. But to really get to the heart of this director’s fascination with complicated families and their complicated values, you have to dive headfirst into his intense period drama There Will Be Blood.
Much like Anderson, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) is also a family man. But unlike Anderson, Daniel’s concept of family is little more than a house made of cards. After he discovers oil in the early 1900s, he quickly becomes a tycoon of sorts, buying up land to drill it for a bit—or quite a lot—of that black gold. He is ruthless in his pursuits and has little to no empathy for his workers and the dangerous situations he puts them in. After one of the men dies in a freak well accident, Daniel adopts the man’s infant son, choosing to raise him as his own. This son, who goes by the name H.W. (Dillon Freasier), accompanies Daniel across the country, unaware that his real father died years ago. Using H.W. as a selling point, Daniel assures any new clients that he keeps his oil business in the family. “We offer you the bond of family,” he says, “that very few oilmen can understand.”
When a young man named Paul (Paul Dano) shows up wanting to know how much Daniel would be willing to pay him for information about potentially oil-rich land, Daniel bites. He gives Paul a handsome sum in exchange for the intel—the land just happens to be the very ground on which Paul’s family farm sits—and proceeds to buy up the property and as much of the land surrounding it that he can. Drilling quickly begins, but Daniel soon finds himself butting heads with Paul’s twin brother, Eli, who is also the local preacher. The two men are constantly, quietly at war with one another—Eli believes the oil wells will only be prosperous if Daniel allows them to be properly blessed, and Daniel is too preoccupied with harvesting his riches that he pays little to no attention to religion.
And therein lies the crux of There Will Be Blood. Sure, it’s a film about capitalism and the ways greed can push us to do dark, unforgiving things for money. But on a deeper level, it is a fiercely religious film that’s meant to highlight the divide between true faith and conspicuous prosperity. Daniel is not a religious man, though he describes himself as being okay with any and all religion, but Eli presents himself as a firm believer in God and his miracles. Many of his sermons involve intense healing prayers in which Eli allows the power of God to flow through him to produce miracles. He badgers Daniel about building a church at the end of the town’s main road, and when Daniel snubs Eli over the blessing of the new oil well, the following tragedies that befall Daniel and his oil crew feel like a direct reflection of his unwillingness to embrace God.
There is nothing holy about Daniel at all. He is as slimy as the oil that is often seen coating his clothes and his skin. His stories always change, shifting to meet the needs of whatever deal he is trying to make next. His relationship with H.W. is tenuous at best, and even though it might seem like he cares for his adoptive son, his actions over time only prove that H.W. is nothing more than another pawn in Daniel’s plan to reap as much wealth from the land as possible. When his workers die in gruesome accidents, he looks upon their dead bodies with disgust, as if they have thrown an unexpected and burdensome wrench into his plans. He is not a good man, but he is a smart man, and his dicey moral code never seems to interfere with his accumulation of wealth. Money drives him, yes, but he also harbors a deep desire to be admired. He wants others to envy him, his wealth, his business skills, and it is this hubris that ultimately causes him to end up alone and isolated from everyone he knows.
Eli, on the other hand, is a well-liked and trusted preacher who eventually leaves town to become a seemingly successful radio preacher. He moves through the world with the grace of a man confident in his faith and himself. At first, Anderson presents these two characters in direct opposition to one another—Eli is the righteous, just man of God, and Daniel is the greedy heathen hell bent on destroying everything in his path—but as time goes on, it becomes clear that the two men are actually more alike than they seem. After Daniel humiliates and beats Eli in front of the men at the oil well, Eli doesn’t resist the opportunity to return the favor, shaming Daniel in front of the congregation in exchange for allowing Daniel to run a pipeline through the property of a neighbor who originally refused to sell his land. He also beats his own father in private, chastising him for being too dumb to realize that Daniel was going to ruin their town and their lives. His violence and anger, while quieter than Daniel’s, seem to match in their intensity and their drive. Like Daniel, Eli desires to be believed by the people of his church. He wants them to put their faith in him in exchange for monetary donations to the church. In this way, he is no better than Daniel: both men want to be worshipped in exchange for cold, hard cash.
So what, then, is the point of all this? If both Eli and Daniel are money hungry hucksters peddling false promises in exchange for riches, then what does the film’s brutal ending mean? Is Paul’s death at the hands of a drunk and maddened Daniel really supposed to represent capitalism’s triumph over religion, or is it more that Daniel, as crude as he is, is actually more honest than Eli since he doesn’t seek to hide his greed behind false sanctity? If this is the case, then true religion ceases to exist in the confines of this film, replaced instead by lavishness and false abundance.
And what is the deal with the milkshakes, or milk in general, which makes its presence known in the film multiple times in fairly subtle ways? By the film’s end, we know that the oil is the milk, slurped up by Daniel from every crevice underground, but it is also the drink Daniel forces H.W. to down after he loses his hearing during a gas explosion at the well. True milk is white, pure. In the Bible it is a symbol of richness. It is the opposite of the black gold that oozes from the land, and to drink it is to bring health upon yourself. It is a liquid only produced by female mammals, and women are the one thing this movie seems to lack. However, H.W. eventually ends up marrying Eli’s sister, Mary (Sydney McCallister), and moving to Mexico to start his own, separate oil drilling business. He has no desire to be in direct competition with his father, and unlike Daniel, he escapes his father’s greed in exchange for a more modest lifestyle with a woman that he loves. His milk, his abundance, lies not in the rampant commodification of natural resources but rather in the traditional values of marriage, family and hard work. H.W., then, becomes our symbol of purity amongst the corrupt oil tycoons and false prophets. Yes, Daniel may have triumphed over Eli, but in the end, it is H.W. who wins out, escaping the trap of his father’s life in exchange for modest salvation. And that, at least, is a family value worth its weight in black gold.
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