There Will Be Blood · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The nearly wordless fifteen-minute opening — Plainview alone in rock and dirt, suffering a broken leg, hauling himself across the frame while Greenwood's strings scrape without resolution — plants *There Will Be Blood* firmly in the mode of **opsigns & sonsigns**: pure optical-sound situations emptied of narrative motor, where the camera holds at middle distance as witness rather than guide, and time accrues in the body rather than in incident. This is not the self-made-man's founding story; it's the animal beneath it. What drives the film is **impulse-image** — Deleuze's term for cinema governed by raw drive in a degraded 'originary world,' which here is the oil-soaked Californian desert: a pre-social environment where appetite operates before civilization's forms arrive to mask it. Plainview doesn't want to win; he wants to consume, and Day-Lewis renders this as a full-body fact — the prospector's crouched physical labor in the early sequences is continuous with the bowling-alley predator of the finale, appetite having shed every remaining disguise. The formal vocabulary for staging power descends directly from Citizen Kane: Anderson and Elswit employ **deep focus** to position Plainview and Sunday across the Z-axis of the frame in their confrontation scenes, encoding territorial dominance as spatial arrangement rather than speech — who stands where, at what depth, in whose plane of focus, maps the epistemology of control without requiring a line of dialogue to name it. Two men running identical confidence systems on the same congregation; the geometry does the arguing.