Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch There Will Be Blood
2007 · Paul Thomas Anderson · There Will Be Blood on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Count how long the film runs before anyone speaks. (structure)
The first fifteen minutes are a man alone in a hole, prospecting by hand, breaking a leg, dragging himself across rock to an assayer. No dialogue, and only dissonant strings for music.
Payoff: You learn Plainview the way you learn an animal, by watching what he does in order to survive.
Look at how low the camera sits under the sky. (camera)
Robert Elswit shoots wide and anamorphic, setting figures against enormous desert sky in full midday sun. Close-ups are held back and saved for the moments the film wants to rupture.
Payoff: The proportions come straight from the Western, and Anderson uses them on a man who is not a hero.
Listen to the strings scrape, cluster and refuse to soothe. (sound)
Jonny Greenwood writes in the idiom of Penderecki: cluster chords, bows played on the wood, extreme high and low registers. The cues disrupt rather than accompany. Long stretches carry no music.
Payoff: The score will not tell you how to feel, and the silences turn ambient noise into part of the composition.
Watch what Plainview does with the oil on his hands. (setting)
He pulls it from the ground, handles it, smears it on his son's forehead like a blessing. The film keeps the substance physically present: gushing, burning, coating everything and everyone.
Payoff: The oil is not only money here. It is the thing the whole appetite organizes itself around. In the reading: fetish. The reading calls the oil a fetish: the charged object a compulsive drive collects around and cannot stop touching.
Watch where Plainview and Eli stand relative to each other. (staging)
Anderson blocks their confrontations in depth, moving figures through a church or a field rather than cutting between them. You read dominance off who is upstage, who kneels, who approaches.
Payoff: The two men are the same trade in different costumes, and the staging keeps scoring the contest between them. In the reading: binomial. The reading calls this a binomial: two opposed forces set against each other as principles rather than as plans.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Notice how rarely Plainview reacts to anything. He only extracts. Watch the difference between acting and appetite.