The Fifth Desk · Canonical Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Paul Thomas Anderson · a film · 2007 · 158 minutes
Mode
Period epic narrowed to one man; frontier drama, family tragedy and grotesque comedy on one line
Mythos
The self-made man carried to his end; a doubled founding of well and church; oil as blood and as chrism, over a suggestion of Cain and Abel
Phase
Twenty-nine years, 1898 to 1927, most of the film spent in 1911 and the months after, between a wordless prologue and an epilogue
Presentation
Feature film in colour, in English, about 158 minutes; dated intertitles; an original score by Jonny Greenwood, and Brahms after the last line
Register
From labour without a word to a lease negotiation played as farce; dread held long, then tipping into the grotesque
Scale
One man, one son, one preacher, one oil field
Governing Proposition
A prospector who begins alone at the bottom of a shaft builds a fortune out of other men’s land, a dead worker’s son and a preacher’s congregation, and ends alone on the floor of his own house. The wager of the film is that American capital and American revivalism are one appetite in two costumes, each needing the other’s crowd, and that an appetite with no object but more consumes every bond it first uses as a selling point.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins underground, and without a word. A card gives the year, 1898. In New Mexico a man works alone at the bottom of a shaft, breaking rock for silver with dynamite. He falls, and his leg breaks. He drags himself out and across the scrub to an assay office, where the silver is weighed and he is paid for the find. No one speaks. Greenwood’s strings hold a long sound against the empty land, and the man, Daniel Plainview, is a body and its labour before he is anything else.
He turns to oil, with a small crew. A worker is killed in the well, and Plainview takes the dead man’s infant son. On a train the baby reaches up and touches his face. Almost nothing is spoken here either. The family that the rest of the film will spend begins with a death in a hole in the ground, and with an act whose motive the film does not give. The man who will later present the boy as his partner is first seen simply holding him, and the gesture is allowed to stand without a word to explain it.
Dated cards mark 1898, 1911 and 1927. The story spans twenty-nine years, and nothing between 1911 and 1927 is shown: the opening years are a prologue, the last card an epilogue, and the body of the film is 1911 and the months after. It is credited as based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, and its last card falls in 1927, the year the novel was published. It opens on one man alone in his shaft and closes on the same man alone on the floor of his own bowling alley. Between those two images it sets everyone he takes up and everyone he puts down.
Movement II
In 1911 the film begins to talk, and its first talk is a pitch. Plainview stands before a town and offers to drill. “I’m an oilman,” he says; he presents himself as a family man, and the boy beside him, H. W., as his partner. The town is promised schools and bread. The words are a tool of the deal, and the order of the film has made them so: a man seen for a long time as a body, working and suffering in silence, opens his mouth to sell.
A young man, Paul Sunday, comes to him and sells him word of oil under his family’s ranch at Little Boston. Paul appears in that one scene. Plainview goes to the ranch with the boy on the pretext of hunting quail, and finds Paul’s brother Eli, played by the same actor, Paul Dano, preacher of the Church of the Third Revelation. Whether the brothers are twins, or one man, the film never settles. Their father is called Abel.
Plainview buys the leases. Two men now stand on the same ground with the same need of the same people. The oilman needs the land and the town; the preacher needs the town and its money; each needs the other’s crowd. A well and a church go up on one piece of land. At the dedication of the well Plainview passes over Eli. It is the first of the public humiliations the two will trade, each on his own ground, and the film is built on the exchange.
Movement III
Another worker dies in the well. Then the oil comes in, and the gusher blows out. H. W. is thrown, and his hearing is gone. That night the derrick burns, and Plainview’s face is lit by the fire while the percussion of the score drives the scene. The oil that first came to him through a death in a well has now marked the son: the boy has been baptised in it, and has paid for it with his hearing.
Eli comes for the money he was promised. Plainview beats him in the oil-mud, in public, on the oilman’s own ground. The preacher’s church and the oilman’s derrick stand side by side on the Sunday land, and the film shows that they work by the same means. Eli’s church heals before a congregation; Plainview’s pitch promises a town its schools and bread. Each draws the crowd, and each takes from it.
The argument is now in the open, though no one in the film states it. The well and the church are one appetite in two costumes, and the town between them is promised schools and bread and given a derrick. The workers die in the wells; the town is seen mostly as a crowd. And the boy whom Plainview called his partner can no longer hear the pitch, so the one bond that the pitch was built on is the first to be cut by what it won.
Movement IV
A man called Henry comes and says he is Plainview’s half-brother. Plainview lets him stay. H. W. sets a fire in the house, and Plainview sends him away on a train, the boy screaming. Standard Oil offers to buy him out, and he refuses. The son goes out as the brother comes in, and for a while the man whose every bond is a deal keeps company with a stranger on the strength of blood.
He confesses to Henry twice. “I have a competition in me,” he tells him, and it is the law of the whole film, said aloud to a man he takes for kin. Then he finds that Henry is an impostor. He kills him at night and buries him. The film does not say which he kills him for, the lie or the kinship he had begun to allow, and it leaves both open. The test of blood has failed in both directions: the brother was false, and the son was sent away.
The pipeline to the sea needs one more piece of land, and its owner, Bandy, sets his price: Plainview must be baptised in Eli’s church. Before the congregation Eli slaps him and makes him confess, and Plainview, his voice breaking, cries “I’ve abandoned my child!” The confession is real and it is a payment. H. W. comes back, and the pipeline is laid. The preacher has had his turn on his own ground, and the oilman has bought a right of way with his own guilt.
Movement V
A last card gives 1927. Plainview lives in a mansion. H. W., grown and married to Mary Sunday, comes to tell him that he means to drill in Mexico, and Plainview disowns him. He tells him where he came from: the dead man’s son, the story of the basket. The partner of the pitch is a competitor now, and the father will not learn his language. The family that began in a death in a well ends in a single scene of speech.
Eli comes, ruined, to sell him Bandy’s land. The scene is in Plainview’s own bowling alley, and it is almost all speech. Plainview makes the preacher say that he is a false prophet, and tells him the land is worth nothing to him: “Drainage!” The oil under it has already been drawn off through his own wells, and he says so in the image of a milkshake. Then he kills Eli with a bowling pin. The lease negotiation, the film’s governing act, is carried to its end, and the terror tips over into the grotesque.
Plainview is left on the floor of the alley. “I’m finished,” he says, and the third movement of Brahms’s Violin Concerto in D major follows the line into the end credits. The man who began alone at the bottom of a shaft ends alone in his own house. Everything he took up along the way, a son, a brother, a preacher, a town, he has used and put down, and the film closes where it opened, on a man by himself.
Act III · The Twelve
Run the subtractive test part by part. The wordless prologue is required: it shows the man as body and labour before he has a voice, and the dead worker’s son taken there is the origin of the family the rest of the film spends. The Sunday plot, the blowout and the baptism are each load-bearing, because each turns one drive on a different bond. The Henry episode is required in kind, a test of whether blood can reach him, but it runs long, and the Standard Oil meetings and the pipeline negotiations carry the business argument at more length than its weight. The 1927 epilogue is required in kind, since the son must be disowned and the prophet killed for the argument to close; its pitch is permitted rather than compelled.
Score: 8.5 / 10
What the film brings into the open can be stated. American capital and American revivalism are one appetite in two costumes, and each needs the other’s crowd: Plainview needs Eli’s congregation to lay his pipe, and Eli needs Plainview’s money for his church. Each humiliates the other in public, Eli in the oil-mud, Plainview at the altar. The drive to accumulate consumes kinship, which it first uses as a selling point; the confession to Henry, “I have a competition in me”, states the law. It is held below the gate because the statement was not new after Greed, Citizen Kane and Elmer Gantry, and because the film shows the oilman and the preacher but not the town or the workers who are the subject of both: a type disclosed at strength, not a social condition.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The elevation is dreadful, and it recurs. The opening: the shaft, the dynamite, the fall, the crawl across the scrub, with Greenwood’s sustained strings against an empty landscape. The gusher, then the blowout that takes H. W.’s hearing. The derrick burning at night, Plainview’s face lit by it, the percussion of the score driving the scene. The train taking the boy away, screaming. The baptism, with Eli’s slaps and Plainview’s voice breaking. The bowling alley, terror tipping into the grotesque, and the last line. What holds it at this height is frequency: the middle hour of leases, Henry and the pipeline has long stretches at a lower pitch. The last scene is as much grotesque as high, and is credited only in part.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The myth is built rather than cited. The load-bearing structure is a doubled founding: a well and a church raised on one piece of land by two men who need and hate each other. Oil works as blood and as chrism. H. W. comes to Plainview out of a death in a well, and the blowout baptises him in oil; the title, commonly traced to the plague of blood in Exodus, names the price. The self-made man of American myth, prospector to king, is carried to its end, the king alone in his castle. Under it runs Cain and Abel: the Sundays’ father is Abel, his two sons are played by one actor, and the film ends with Plainview killing Abel’s son with a club. That pattern is suggested more than built, and Eli stays nearer a type than a man.
Score: 8.6 / 10
There are two traditions to depart from. Against its maker’s own manner the departure is large: the ensemble, the Altman-inflected crosscutting, the pop songs and the talk of Anderson’s Los Angeles films give way to one man, wide spaces and long silences. Against the American epic of Giant (1956), it removes the romance, the women and any redemption, and puts a modernist score on the frontier. The stake was real: a period film with no love story, a wordless opening and a grotesque ending. But the precedents are close, in Greed, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Kubrick’s period austerity and Malick’s Days of Heaven, and the stake was cushioned by a leading actor of the first rank and two studio divisions. A swerve from its maker’s manner more than from the medium’s.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The wordless opening makes Plainview a body before he is a voice, so that when he speaks, in the pitch of 1911, “I’m an oilman”, speech arrives as a tool of the deal. The film knows that this man’s language is salesmanship, and only the order of silence and speech can show it. H. W.’s deafness makes the theme literal: the son can no longer hear the pitch, and the father will not learn his language. And the frame narrows across the whole, from open scrub to an interior with a bowling alley, so the form enacts the man’s closing in. Held below the top by the middle, where the Henry and pipeline passages run in a plainer grammar, the form a container more than an instrument.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The evidence is nearly nineteen years of return, and the questions still open are the film’s own: whether Paul and Eli are twins or one man; why Plainview kills Henry, for the lie or for the kinship he had begun to allow; whether he loves H. W., and whether the disowning is cruelty or release; whether the ending is tragedy, farce or both at once. The form yields as well, in the score set against the landscape, the recurring frame of the man alone, the oil as baptism. Critical writing on the film has been steady since its release. Two things hold the axis here. Nineteen years is demonstration of a shorter kind, and some of the openness is withholding, since Plainview’s inner life is shut. The figure is scored partly as forecast.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Released in 2007, so force and reach are scored together. The force is real: the film showed that an American studio epic could be built on a single unredeemed figure, in silence and dissonance, and its score of modernist strings and quarter-tone clusters carries the drama rather than accompanying it. The reach is narrower: the film did not reorganise the grammar of cinema or redirect a genre in a way that can be dated, and part of its reach is a quotation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Day-Lewis’s performance won the Academy Award and became a reference for screen acting; Greenwood became a leading film composer, and his score is widely credited with turning film music toward its register; “I drink your milkshake” passed into common speech; and Anderson carried the method into his next films.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Scored on the survival shown so far and on what the film is built to bear, with no discount for its age. Survival is demonstrated across nearly nineteen years: its standing has held and, if anything, risen, it has stayed in repertory and reissue, and its score and last scene have a public life of their own. What it is built to bear is strong: the surface is 1898 to 1927, not 2007, so nothing in it belongs to its production era, no technology and no topical reference. At release it was read against the oil politics and the evangelism of the 2000s, and has outlived that reading. The cost is the central performance, pitched high, the part of a film most exposed to changing taste. Beyond what nineteen years can show, the figure is scored partly as forecast.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Robert Elswit’s photography sets a man against land in wide frames and lights the derrick fire by night. Jack Fisk’s design builds the derricks, the wooden church and the boom town rather than suggesting them. Jonny Greenwood’s score makes the drama audible as dread. Daniel Day-Lewis gives Plainview the voice, the walk on the broken leg and a manner in which every exchange is a deal. Dylan Tichenor’s editing lets the prologue run without a word, and the sound of the blowout carries its terror. The costs are visible. Paul Dano’s Eli is pitched high and is uneven against Day-Lewis, and the doubled role is a burden on him. The Henry passage is slack. The last scene’s performance approaches caricature, by design.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The two most distant elements are the silver shaft of 1898, wordless and bodily, and the bowling alley of 1927, all talk and grotesque comedy. One law governs them: appetite with no object but more, and its consequence, isolation. Plainview is alone in the frame at the start and on the floor of his own house at the end. The middle obeys the same physics: every bond is weighed as a lease, every claim of kinship as a pitch, and the milkshake speech is a lease negotiation, the film’s governing act carried to its end. The range is wide, from documentary labour to farce, and the law holds across it. The strain is the epilogue’s register. Its comedy is prepared by the film’s argument but not by its earlier tone, and the shift is charged.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Several orders are held in one structure. Labour: the shaft, the drilling, the deaths of workers. Capital: leases, the pipeline, the Standard Oil offer. The family: a false son, a false brother, the Sunday household, a marriage. Religion: the church, healing, baptism, public confession. The land, the scrub and the oil under it; and the town, promised schools and bread and given a derrick. They are integrated, since each order is shown as one more thing Plainview leases. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what a film of one man leaves out. The state is nearly absent. Women, love and sexuality are close to absent. The town and the workers appear mostly as a crowd. The film holds fewer orders than its period would allow, and the absences are weighed.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 — Final Average
Canonical Placement: Tier IV — Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.2 and The Living Form at 8.8, then The Sublime, The Imperishable and The Inner Law at 8.7. A making that bears weight in every department, a form in which the order of silence and speech is the knowledge, dread that returns through the film, a period surface with nothing of its production era, and one law of appetite and isolation from the shaft to the bowling alley.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8 — labour, capital, the family, religion, the land and the town are held as things one man leases, while the state is nearly absent and women, love and sexuality are close to absent. Below the rest, Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 and The Swerve at 8.3. They share a cause: a film built on one man, which draws its intensity from that narrowing and pays for it in what it holds and in how far it could move the field.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.2, The Living Form at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.7 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4, The Swerve at 8.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met — no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The aggregate alone would hold the work in Tier IV: the twelve sum to 102.5, below the 107.4 the upper tier requires, so passing all three failing gates would leave the placement unchanged.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of There Will Be Blood as released in the United States from 26 December 2007, at about 158 minutes, with no other cut known: written for the screen and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, credited as based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! (1927), produced by JoAnne Sellar, Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Lupi for Ghoulardi Film Company, released by Paramount Vantage and Miramax Films, and dedicated to Robert Altman. No print, script or recording was consulted. The novel, the history of the oilman on whom Sinclair drew, and Jonny Greenwood’s score as a separate work stand outside the unit, and nothing from them is imported. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, and briefly. Details that could not be verified, among them the date of the second intertitle, the length of the wordless opening, the budget, the shooting locations, the treatment of sound after the blowout and the other music cues, are not given.