Blood's End
Most everyone* seems to agree that There Will Be Blood is pretty amazing, if possibly also something a failure. What’s less agreed upon is whether the film’s hysterical, bowling-alley ending is weird, or genius, or kind of a cop-out.
Roy Edroso of Alicublog makes the case for the ending:
This leads to an ending many critics find problematic. I disagree. It’s formally audacious, but the whole film has been that — this is just a new, shocking type of audacity. Suddenly it’s years later, we’re in a little room, and under bright lights Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano (Plainview and Sunday) act their asses off in a chamber drama/cage match. And there’s Blood!
I suspect the arguments over the ending have less to do with the tone shift than with an unease with the whole film that the mini-gotterdammerung ending throws into relief. For me, the ending satisfactorily fulfills the story.
I liked the ending, maybe even more than Roy, and you can find my take on the film’s final scene over at the Horizon. But I wanted to add that what actually did bother me about the film was not the bowling-alley showdown with Eli, but the final confrontation with Plainview’s son that preceded it. In truth, I’m not exactly sure what it was that bothered me about that scene — it seemed at once too flat and too overdone — but it felt off. Not narratively; the son was destined, like all other men in Plainview’s orbit (which is to say all other men), to become a competitor.
But tonally, perhaps, the scene felt wrong, with small, constrained rhythms. Everything previous in the film had been expansive, wide, epic, even while keeping a very narrow, intimate focus on its lead character. That scene, even in Plainview’s cavernous mansion, felt crammed in by comparison. Perhaps this was intentional, to show how Plainview had sunken into himself, cut himself off, barricaded himself inside with his wealth. But it still felt wrong. Maybe it would’ve worked had it taken place out on some grand estate ground, as if to suggest that all the world was Plainview’s, that he had finally conquered everything. But as it is, the scene plays just slightly off-kilter, a single off-key note in a grand, strange symphony.
*By which I mean the incredibly small group of people who spend far, far too much time reading and thinking about movies.
You wrote:
“…small, constrained. Everything previous in the film had been expansive, wide, epic, even while keeping a very narrow, intimate focus on its lead character…. Perhaps this was intentional…”
I think we have to assume it was intentional, and it seems appropriate enough to me. This was, after all, the story of a fall rather than a conquest. Plainview collapses into himself. He gets what said he always wanted: “….to get away from all these…people.” Hence the scenes in the mansion show us how Plainview has finally cut off the entire outside world. And hence the severing of his relationship with his son. And hence his final scene acted out in the even more restrictive confines of a bowling lane. (Note that there are actually two lanes there, just enough to preserve a field for a symbolic sort of competition.)
Despite Anderson’s surprising choices, I thought the film was sheer genius.
— D.I. Dalrymple · Jan 31, 06:49 PM · #
To me it was just right. Some scattered thoughts:
Plainview’s quest of transcendence was very specifically about getting to a point where he doesn’t have to (consider, rely-on, listen-to) his fellow man — financially, emotionally, or existentially. During this Faustian journey to rid himself of Care and gain quiescence, people and resources are acquired, spent, and tossed aside with little to no consideration; the former with no more empathy than the latter. New Boston, H.W., Henry, Gold, Oil, these are all means to a very personal — and, per Anderson, archetypal — end: to destroy all vestiges of interdependence and breath the unspoilt air of dominion. This desire to be free from fate — the will to power, the drive to break through one’s Fichtean obstructions — is a caricature of capitalism’s centrifugal, atomizing essence, and the central theme of the entire movie.
Dano’s Eli, as the Second Estate, represents a similar drive toward control, one that is often at cross-purposes with Plainview but whose interests converge with him, too. It’s like Anderson is saying, “Capitalism uses Religion, but holds its nose, and Religion uses Capitalism, but holds its breath.” Like the interfering crests and troughs of light waves, their combination doesn’t create smooth gradients; instead, paraphrasing Goethe, the greatest brightness and the greatest darkness are right next to each other: light and dark, Good and Evil, spring from the same phenomena, and Anderson takes this insight to great artistic heights over the course of the film.
Ultimately, though, one or the other is used up, and Anderson, in his macabre and grotesque ending, tells us who he thinks is the winner.
Capitalism, in his decadent luxury, literally passed-out drunk on his own prowess, awakes to find Religion — hat in hand, appeasement and conciliation in his eyes — waiting to ask one last favor for old time’s sake. Capitalism strings Religion along, promising to restore the latter’s worldly empire, if — and this went right to the bone — Religion will admit his false prophecy and renounce God as a superstition. Religion, pushed into a corner by this new world of fact and commerce (Eli lost his money in the stock market), submits to this final humiliation out of the most impious instinct of self-preservation, only to find he had been fooled by Capitalism’s promise of remuneration into giving away the last shred of credibility he had left. Religion thought he had built his house on rock. But out of sight and under foot, and to his great horror, Religion’s Dominion had been slurped up by the longer straw of Capitalist Man.
And, in the coup de grace, Capitalism chases and taunts Discredited Religion around a room which is exclusively, defiantly and unabashedly not of the latter’s world — a private bowling alley! — until Plainview finally corners Eli’s prissy ass and beats him to death with a bowling pin. “I’m Finished!” — indeed.
— JA · Feb 1, 06:40 PM · #
This reminds me of when everybody was debating what No Country for Old Men “means.” The truth is that that being a talented director doesn’t mean you are a great philosopher. Young men like to impute philosophical meanings to art works that catch their fancies, but that doesn’t mean they mean much of anything.
— Steve Sailer · Feb 2, 03:01 AM · #