There Will Be Blood · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man lies at the bottom of a hole he dug himself. His leg is broken. There is no one to call, no music to grieve for him, only the scrape of his body hauling itself up the rock and across the flats toward an assayer's office. Paul Thomas Anderson gives us fifteen minutes of this before anyone speaks. We learn Daniel Plainview the way you learn an animal — by watching what it does to survive — and what we learn is that the wanting comes before the words.

Deleuze had a name for a cinema built on wanting like this. He called it the impulse-image, and it is the strangest, ugliest creature in his bestiary. Most films run on the sensory-motor circuit: a character sees a situation and acts to change it, and the action resolves things. The impulse-image is that circuit gone feral. Beneath the social surface — the lease negotiations, the handshakes, the church socials — Deleuze finds what he calls an originary world, a savage zone of pure drives, appetite and exhaustion, where men are not agents but symptoms of a force moving through them. The genius of Anderson's film is that it lets you watch the social world and the originary world occupy the same frame at once. The Californian oil desert is a derived milieu — a real place, dated 1898 to 1927, surveyed and bought and sold. But Anderson keeps showing you the milieu as the skin over something older. The derrick fire at dusk, photographed at real scale on a real burning rig, is not a plot event. It is the originary world breaking through, fire and oil and a deafness that costs Plainview his son, and Plainview watching it with something close to joy.

That is the impulse-image's tell, and Deleuze names its trajectory the line of slope: an irreversible downward grade toward ruin. The film has no plot in the ordinary sense; it has a deterioration. We watch Plainview shed every attachment he permits himself — the son who becomes a prop, then a bond, then a competitor he discards by letter; the 'brother' he executes in a creek. Each scene strips one more human thing away until what is left is appetite with a voice. 'I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed.' This is not a man choosing. It is a slope finding its bottom.

And oil itself is what Deleuze would call the fetish — the part-object charged with compulsive force, the relic the whole drive organizes around. Plainview smears it on his son's forehead like a blessing. He pulls it out of the ground and it pulls everything human out of him. The exchange is the film's whole economy.

Against this drive Anderson sets a second performer, and here the film moves from drive into what Deleuze called the gest — a posture or attitude that exposes a social relation as theater. Eli Sunday's faith healings are staged so that you see the machinery: the shouting, the laying-on of hands, the congregation as audience. Plainview recognizes it instantly because it is his own trade in another costume. The mud baptism — Eli forcing the capitalist's body down, smearing him, making him bellow 'I have abandoned my child!' — is the gest at full grotesque power: two frauds performing contrition and conversion neither feels, each exposing the other's ceremony. The body carries the meaning. Deleuze would call this a cinema of the body, where the everyday or ceremonial body becomes the bearer of duration and social truth, not a vehicle for dialogue. The bowling-alley finale closes the circuit: the gest turned to slaughter, held on Day-Lewis's face past the point of comfort, the edit's central argument that duration itself is the horror.

This is also why Anderson reaches back the way he does. The wordless opening is a direct debt to von Stroheim's 'Greed' — silent-cinema grammar sustained to render obsession through labor and environment, character built from a broken leg and a long crawl. The deep-focus blocking of the Plainview–Sunday confrontations, figures arranged across the full depth of the church or the field so that dominance is read off spatial placement rather than cut into us, is Welles and Toland's invention from 'Citizen Kane', repurposed for a feud staged as force against force. And the low-angle figure dwarfed by enormous sky comes straight out of 'Shane', 'The Searchers', and 'Giant', where Stevens and Ford made landscape proportion carry moral scale — the anamorphic frame as national myth-space, the derrick as America's totem. Anderson inherits the Western's grammar of the solitary man against the sky and uses it to film not a hero but a drive.

What the film did, finally, was prove that the American epic — the form built for nation-building and heroism — could be turned inside out to host Deleuze's most pessimistic image, the impulse that consumes its own world. Greenwood's score, all Penderecki cluster-chords and col legno scraping, refuses to console you; it sounds like the originary world thinking. Watch it again and notice how rarely Plainview reacts to anything. He only ever extracts. The film hands you eyes for the difference between a man who acts and a man who is merely the shape his appetite takes on its way down.