There Will be Blood (2007) and the Power of Spectacle

Oil frontier films equate land acquisition with a sense of progress as a way to tame the frontier, no matter what the consequences for native cultures or the land itself or whether few (from a progressive perspective) or many (from a populist point of view) gain access to its benefits. This focus on property and profit contributes to the battle between “big guys” and “little guys” that inevitably leads to overuse of land. The “land rush” of 1889 and 1892, especially, evolved from a rush for farm and ranch land that culminated in wildcatting, oil booms, busts, and ultimately the spectacular nature of the force of oil gushers and oil field fires in Oklahoma and Indian Territories, Texas, and California. There Will Be Blood (2007) demonstrates filmic spectacle that both reveals and disguises ecodisaster on the oil frontier.  

Oil well fires and spectacular land runs play on what Nick Browne calls the “rhetoric of the spectacular.” Browne asserts that “formally, the rhetorical parameters of the spectacular work by modulation of cinematic scale, repetition, and perspective.” Here, filmed oil well fires take on spectacular qualities when they assume the large-scale dimensions that such fires produce, when they are shot repeatedly or for a long duration, and when they are shot from an angle that emphasizes the fires’ force. Oil well fires and spectacular land runs play on what Nick Browne calls the “rhetoric of the spectacular.” Browne asserts that “formally, the rhetorical parameters of the spectacular work by modulation of cinematic scale, repetition, and perspective.” Here, filmed oil well fires take on spectacular qualities when they assume the large-scale dimensions that such fires produce, when they are shot repeatedly or for a long duration, and when they are shot from an angle that emphasizes the fires’ force.

There Will Be Blood (2007) attests to the continuing power of spectacle in oil frontier Westerns. In spite of its attempts to critique unfettered capitalism and development in oil fields, it is spectacle that underpins both the aesthetics of the film and its melodramatic center. In his Rolling Stone review of the film, Peter Travers highlights the repercussions of Daniel Plainview’s (Daniel Day Lewis) greed as a critique of unfettered capitalism, asserting,

This is [Paul Thomas Anderson’s] bloody and brilliant Citizen Kane. … Social history isn't his concern. He's out to show how violence of the flesh and the spirit is hard-wired into the American character…. He rapes and pillages in the name of progress. and winds up estranged from the human species he has long ago forgotten to call his own.

But Travers also notes the spectacle on display in the film that entices the eye when he asserts, “if you want proof that cinematography can be an art form, behold the brute force of the images captured by Robert Elswit, a genius of camera and lighting who can make visual poetry out of black smoke and an oil well consumed by flame.” He calls There Will Be Blood “a beautiful beast of a film,” perhaps because it rests on spectacular images. 

Roger Ebert claims, however, that “Watching the movie is like viewing a natural disaster that you cannot turn away.” From the first oil pipe accident that kills a partner and gives Plainview a son, H.W. (Dillion Freasor) to the spectacular blast that takes H. W.’s hearing, spectacular effects propel the film’s narrative and facilitate its melodramatic center—Plainview’s fight with church and country and mourning for his now deaf (and no longer a commodity) son.  But they also highlight the environmental consequences of the oil frontier. Although There Will be Blood entertains through spectacular effects more than it emphasizes environmental degradation or resource exploitation, it also illustrates illustrates the economic, sociological and ecological repercussions of conquering the oil frontier, perhaps the last frontier in the modern age. Spectacle both reveals and disguises ecodisaster.