'He gave me some money but I think I lost it' #4
There Will be Blood: 2007, Paramount Vantage/Miramax
In the last of a series of posts that considers together In the Valley of Elah, No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood, I've finally reached TWBB. There's some spoilerage so if you don't want to know who wins, don't read on. Otherwise, this concludes my rambling on the subject of the state of the American nation and its men, as discussed in these three great movies. If nothing else, do see them. And there's an intro as well as the two other movies, if that's your thing.
Plot summary
Located this time on America’s western frontier, TWBB takes place chiefly during the Californian oil rush at the turn of the last century. Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis) transforms himself from hard-up silver prospector to oil magnate and in so doing is drawn into a power struggle with the minister (Eli Sunday, played by Paul Dano) of a charismatic Christian sect in the small community of Little Boston where Plainview makes his fortune.
Archetypal themes
Fathers, sons and legacy
The film charts a struggle for the soul of the nation between two ethically questionable belief systems: oil and religion. The oil man Daniel Plainview stands for self determination, exploitation (of natural and human resource, of opportunity), money and a will to progress. He is a man perpetually driven but with no clear object in sight other than always to defeat the competition. He is at once a passionate father and a cruel, rejecting one (like the God of his adversary). His adopted son H. W. is cherished, mothered and fathered by him as another, future self, as a vehicle for his beliefs, abilities and ambitions. But the boy’s disability, a result of the father’s ceaseless drive, makes him the representation to his father of an unconscionable weakness; it makes the boy himself painfully impossible to accept, even at times to speak to or look at; and the boy’s quietness, stillness, love for another is an offensive statement about his father’s loudness, activity, isolation and devotion to hardship.
The father here is therefore attempting to provide a legacy that is at the outset more problematic than in either of the other films, even though some of the content overlaps. Set earlier than either of the others, this film asks whether the originating US faith/myth of male identity is itself ethically flawed.
The film’s other son, Eli Sunday, is the opponent not only of Plainview but of his own father. He is also driven, visionary, deeply avaricious and power-hungry. He and his twin brother (also played by Dano) betray their own father, one for money and the other for control of the family and its homestead. Both are contemptuous of their father’s weakness and inability to make money or derive power from what he has – which could be described as a contempt particularly American in character. In principle Eli should represent the ideal Christian moral standard and God’s will for the nation (as a larger version of the father’s will for his son). In fact there is a clear gap between the will of Eli and the will of God, with Eli ultimately empty of faith and abandoned by God.
Faith and the nation
The struggle between the oil man and the minister is that of capital and religion for the loyalty and labour of the people, for the nation itself. The ultimate, complex victory is for capital, triumphing through ingenuity and then shocking violence over corrupted and venal religion. But what is the object of that victory? Plainview is hollowed out by his insatiable, uncontrollable hunger that damages and destroys even that which he values; and his final words of the movie are ‘I’m finished’.
Belief here is less innocent, more transcendent than in the other films; there is more passion and less honour in the father/son relationships and the Bible is a symbol of person authority used for personal gain, not direct instruction and guidance by God. There is no pre-lapsarian fantasy; TWBB challenges the truth of that very fantasy and suggests a reason for the continuing complicated difficulty between oil and religion, enacted in violence, that is now situated outside US borders rather than at its frontier.
Conclusions
Taken together, then, these three movies explore facets of a cluster of archetypal forms. In a famous dream interpretation, Jung related his patient’s dream of a giant father to her longing for God. God the Father and God the Son are present as referenced and unreferenced figures in these films, standing in front or behind literal fathers and sons who in turn are synecdoches for generations of American men. Fathers and sons pass from one to the next the faith in God the Father and in the archetypal Father, his power as a paradigm of manhood and arbiter of justice. The Law of the Father is a familiar psychoanalytic concept that, in the Freudian model, is explicitly associated with separation from the mother, injunctions against cannibalism and murder as well as incestuous sexual desire. The Lacanian analysis took this further, unravelling the connection between the Law and the creation of identity through response to it. Often discussion around repression and the Law of the Father has revolved around sexual desire; in these films the focus is instead the containment of violence – towards the father, rivals and the self as well as the mother (NCFOM). The transmission of faith from father to son is a location for archetypal interaction and tension in all these films; and in all them it is clear that there is disruption of this transmission that is specific to the American experience now and literally as a capitalist nation and a nation at war. The close connection between the formation of masculine identity and formation of nations and national identity is exposed in all three of these films to the glare of narrative dissection.
It’s also striking, viewing these films close together, how similar are the landscapes that the characters inhabit. They are almost all US borderlands: arid, dusty, with functional and featureless towns whose people work hard for not much. These are harsh places where people lead harsh lives. From the psychoanalytic perspective this intersects interestingly with the Law of the Father, which demands separation between mother and son. In obeying the Law of the Father and separating from, even rejecting, desire for the mother the son deliberately denies himself nurture, nutrition and comfort. This is not the lush, life-giving Edenic idyll where man does not need to work for his food; it is a landscape from which survival is won with a struggle. Given this demand for separation there is no option but to leave the mother only her bloodless, passive and sorrowful role (ITVOE).
Carl says: I find the greatest self-control in the world among the Americans – and I search for its cause… and I find for an answer brutality. I find a great deal of prudery. What is the cause, I ask, and I discover brutality. Prudery is always the cover for brutality. It is necessary – it makes life possible until you discover the brute and take real control of it. When you do that in America, then you will be the most emotional, the most temperamental, the most fully developed people in the world… When I see a man in a savage rage with something outside himself, I know that he is, in reality, wanting to be savage toward his own unconscious self.
Dr Carl Jung speaking to the New York Times, published September 29 1912.
In the last of a series of posts that considers together In the Valley of Elah, No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood, I've finally reached TWBB. There's some spoilerage so if you don't want to know who wins, don't read on. Otherwise, this concludes my rambling on the subject of the state of the American nation and its men, as discussed in these three great movies. If nothing else, do see them. And there's an intro as well as the two other movies, if that's your thing.
Plot summary
Located this time on America’s western frontier, TWBB takes place chiefly during the Californian oil rush at the turn of the last century. Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis) transforms himself from hard-up silver prospector to oil magnate and in so doing is drawn into a power struggle with the minister (Eli Sunday, played by Paul Dano) of a charismatic Christian sect in the small community of Little Boston where Plainview makes his fortune.
Archetypal themes
Fathers, sons and legacy
The film charts a struggle for the soul of the nation between two ethically questionable belief systems: oil and religion. The oil man Daniel Plainview stands for self determination, exploitation (of natural and human resource, of opportunity), money and a will to progress. He is a man perpetually driven but with no clear object in sight other than always to defeat the competition. He is at once a passionate father and a cruel, rejecting one (like the God of his adversary). His adopted son H. W. is cherished, mothered and fathered by him as another, future self, as a vehicle for his beliefs, abilities and ambitions. But the boy’s disability, a result of the father’s ceaseless drive, makes him the representation to his father of an unconscionable weakness; it makes the boy himself painfully impossible to accept, even at times to speak to or look at; and the boy’s quietness, stillness, love for another is an offensive statement about his father’s loudness, activity, isolation and devotion to hardship.
The father here is therefore attempting to provide a legacy that is at the outset more problematic than in either of the other films, even though some of the content overlaps. Set earlier than either of the others, this film asks whether the originating US faith/myth of male identity is itself ethically flawed.
The film’s other son, Eli Sunday, is the opponent not only of Plainview but of his own father. He is also driven, visionary, deeply avaricious and power-hungry. He and his twin brother (also played by Dano) betray their own father, one for money and the other for control of the family and its homestead. Both are contemptuous of their father’s weakness and inability to make money or derive power from what he has – which could be described as a contempt particularly American in character. In principle Eli should represent the ideal Christian moral standard and God’s will for the nation (as a larger version of the father’s will for his son). In fact there is a clear gap between the will of Eli and the will of God, with Eli ultimately empty of faith and abandoned by God.
Faith and the nation
The struggle between the oil man and the minister is that of capital and religion for the loyalty and labour of the people, for the nation itself. The ultimate, complex victory is for capital, triumphing through ingenuity and then shocking violence over corrupted and venal religion. But what is the object of that victory? Plainview is hollowed out by his insatiable, uncontrollable hunger that damages and destroys even that which he values; and his final words of the movie are ‘I’m finished’.
Belief here is less innocent, more transcendent than in the other films; there is more passion and less honour in the father/son relationships and the Bible is a symbol of person authority used for personal gain, not direct instruction and guidance by God. There is no pre-lapsarian fantasy; TWBB challenges the truth of that very fantasy and suggests a reason for the continuing complicated difficulty between oil and religion, enacted in violence, that is now situated outside US borders rather than at its frontier.
Conclusions
Taken together, then, these three movies explore facets of a cluster of archetypal forms. In a famous dream interpretation, Jung related his patient’s dream of a giant father to her longing for God. God the Father and God the Son are present as referenced and unreferenced figures in these films, standing in front or behind literal fathers and sons who in turn are synecdoches for generations of American men. Fathers and sons pass from one to the next the faith in God the Father and in the archetypal Father, his power as a paradigm of manhood and arbiter of justice. The Law of the Father is a familiar psychoanalytic concept that, in the Freudian model, is explicitly associated with separation from the mother, injunctions against cannibalism and murder as well as incestuous sexual desire. The Lacanian analysis took this further, unravelling the connection between the Law and the creation of identity through response to it. Often discussion around repression and the Law of the Father has revolved around sexual desire; in these films the focus is instead the containment of violence – towards the father, rivals and the self as well as the mother (NCFOM). The transmission of faith from father to son is a location for archetypal interaction and tension in all these films; and in all them it is clear that there is disruption of this transmission that is specific to the American experience now and literally as a capitalist nation and a nation at war. The close connection between the formation of masculine identity and formation of nations and national identity is exposed in all three of these films to the glare of narrative dissection.
It’s also striking, viewing these films close together, how similar are the landscapes that the characters inhabit. They are almost all US borderlands: arid, dusty, with functional and featureless towns whose people work hard for not much. These are harsh places where people lead harsh lives. From the psychoanalytic perspective this intersects interestingly with the Law of the Father, which demands separation between mother and son. In obeying the Law of the Father and separating from, even rejecting, desire for the mother the son deliberately denies himself nurture, nutrition and comfort. This is not the lush, life-giving Edenic idyll where man does not need to work for his food; it is a landscape from which survival is won with a struggle. Given this demand for separation there is no option but to leave the mother only her bloodless, passive and sorrowful role (ITVOE).
Carl says: I find the greatest self-control in the world among the Americans – and I search for its cause… and I find for an answer brutality. I find a great deal of prudery. What is the cause, I ask, and I discover brutality. Prudery is always the cover for brutality. It is necessary – it makes life possible until you discover the brute and take real control of it. When you do that in America, then you will be the most emotional, the most temperamental, the most fully developed people in the world… When I see a man in a savage rage with something outside himself, I know that he is, in reality, wanting to be savage toward his own unconscious self.
Dr Carl Jung speaking to the New York Times, published September 29 1912.
posted by Ask my Animus at 9:09 PM
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