The 25 Greatest Characters of the Last 20 Years
6. Daniel Plainview- There Will Be Blood

Before a Catholic gets confirmed, he has to choose a confirmation name. This name is supposed to represent a saint whose life inspired the candidate’s own emerging identity as an adult of the faith, but most people just pick one that sounds good. Lots of Stephens.

Being a person who invests way too much significance in the symbolic,* even back then, I put a lot of thought into my name. I chose Ignatius of Loyola not only because I was Jesuit-educated (and he founded that religious order), but also because he seemed iconoclastically Catholic in his self-centered will.

Ignatius began life as a privileged, arrogant, secular—perhaps even profane—Spanish knight who, after getting his leg destroyed by a cannonball, was stuck in a hospital for months.* His only sources of entertainment were two books: a life of Christ and a guide to the saints. While many of us would be intimidated by the ascetic sacrifices of saints, Ignatius took their biographies as a challenge. If a person he was reading about had fasted for a week, he would fast for a month. If Jesus could pray until he bled, Ignatius could do it too. While he reached a more sincere endpoint, Iggy’s journey to sainthood began because he believed that he was better than all of the people who were already canonized. I have to admit that sort of conviction appealed to me.

Daniel Plainview of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is an anti-saint, concentrated from that same over-powering will. He is what would happen if Ignatius never came through to that other side of purity.

There is no dialogue for the first twenty minutes or so of the film, but we get everything we need to know about Plainview in one shot. While working by himself—naturally—Daniel shatters his legs after falling down a makeshift oil derrick, and Anderson pulls back to show the intimidating expanse of desert that Plainview will have to crawl across to secure his fortune. Then we dissolve to him laid up and signing checks. That solitary drive is what defines him for the rest of the movie.

Like most Anderson films, There Will Be Blood is about improvised surrogate parental structures, so it’s no surprise when Daniel takes on a son. We don’t yet know him well enough to judge the adoption as insincere. Judging the film in retrospect, it’s easy to see how he exploits the image of a family man to gain new drilling projects; but it doesn’t feel that way upon first viewing. If a man insists upon the value of his word, we have to take him at it until he proves we can’t.

As Daniel teaches H.W. to be merciless and exacting, we have to acknowledge the rough times they’re living in. And when he rushes to H.W.’s aid after the accident that takes his hearing, we see real fear and panic on Daniel’s face. As heartbreaking as his eventual abandonment of H.W. is, it might be more useful to look at their relationship as a failed experiment, rather than a sham. It might be more instructive to treat him as a broken man, not an evil one.

Just as he’s pushing H.W. out of his life, Daniel is embracing Henry, his long-lost brother. This familial bond barely overlaps with his fathering of H.W. at all; it’s as if Daniel can only bear to be with one human at a time. He admits as much to Henry in the most important monologue of the film:

“I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people…well, if it’s in me, it’s in you. There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money so that I can get away from everyone…I see the worst in people.”

Daniel Day-Lewis delivers this speech matter-of-factly, as if Daniel isn’t aware of how sociopathic his views are. His eyes are alert, and his jaw is clenched, as if he’s afraid to even admit these thoughts to himself. Because this is one of the showiest performances in screen history, it’s easy to remember the drinking of milkshakes and easy to forget these more understated moments, but Day-Lewis does show that range. He’s in almost every scene; the film wouldn’t be as dynamic as it is if his performance were one-note. If only there were videos of his formation of the character. If only we could see him arching his eyebrows and eating his lip in a mirror, experimenting with what a black hole of a person would look like.

When the sounding board of Henry—that’s all he ever is—reveals that he is not actually Daniel’s brother, Daniel kills him and buries him in a hasty manner recalling the second plot point of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a major influence on the film. Even though Henry’s betrayal of him is far less damning than Daniel’s own betrayal of H.W., Daniel considers it unforgivable. Just as H.W.’s literal deafness reflects upon Daniel’s figurative rootlessness, Henry’s lies bring about questions of uncertainty into the assured world he has constructed around himself. And whenever anyone else in the film makes him feel helpless, Daniel has to destroy them with his otherworldly instincts of competition.

As these relationships develop and then self-combust, Daniel is rivaled by another surrogate family member. Eli Sunday, a fundamentalist preacher, is perhaps the only man in town with more power than Daniel, and Daniel struggles with this realization, as a boy would when his younger brother starts beating him in races. When Eli requests to start the derrick ribbon-cutting with a prayer, Daniel rebuffs and embarrasses him. After witnessing a service, Daniel needles Eli with the critique of, “One goddamn helluva show.” (God bless Paul Dano, but he’s way out of his league here. At least he’s in the ball game though. He reshot the scenes of Kel O’Neill, who was fired from the production because he was too intimidated by Day-Lewis.)

Anderson’s masterstroke at this point in the film is inserting the audience into Daniel’s shoes. To a modern audience, Eli’s ranting and exorcising seems invented or outmoded. Most viewers would believe, like Daniel, that Eli is peddling hooey, and, at this point, when we can no longer excuse Daniel’s evil, we agree with him. Of course, the Old Testament vengeance that Eli is using to control the people is the same as the strings of financial dependence that Daniel is stretching. His resentment of Eli is just another form of self-loathing.

In the film’s truncated third act, an older, ruddier Daniel rejects his now-reconciled son once more when H.W. says that he wants to strike out on his own in Mexico. When H.W. breaks the news, Daniel almost seems relieved, as if he now has an excuse to hate and destroy, as if all of his suspicions of the world conspiring against him are true. Cruelly ridiculing the young man’s sign language—if it’s in you, it’s in me—Daniel flatly claims, “This makes you my competitor.” Even now, as a hobbled, empty old man, Daniel pushes away any rival. H.W. poses no threat to him. By now, Daniel owns any land that would be profitable. In fact, letting H.W. start his own company and fail would actually be the best course of action for Daniel’s business. But for the first time, something has become more important than money, and that something is a refusal to be redeemed.

When Eli shows up at Daniel’s hollow mansion—reminiscent of Kane’s Xanadu—he is there as a compromise. He wants to engage with Daniel on business terms and forgive him in the process. He believes that he is acting in the tradition of Jesus, the universal redeemer, but Daniel represents the antithesis of that deliverance. Eli is only looking for a phyrric victory, but he has already lost. At every step of the story, Daniel has gained more power, and he only uses that power to enslave. Daniel is the worst side of capitalism (OMG, his son’s name is H.W.! Oil!), and Eli is now kneeling down at his altar. So when Daniel “eats” him, he reveals the extent of his greed and madness. He crushes competition out of habit, but now he destroys even those who are in league with him. As Daniel shouts “I am the third revelation” before murdering Eli, we see what he means: This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a bowling pin to the head. All Daniel Plainview’s enormous, unrepentant will has given him is isolation, and that’s all he ever wanted.

21st century directors are often praised for their objectivity, for their resistance to moralizing. Steven Soderbergh can be downright clinical. Christopher Nolan and Darren Aronofsky are cut from the same cold cloth, subjecting the wicked and the righteous to equal punishment in their films. And as much as I love David Fincher, I have no idea who he is. The reason I appreciate Paul Thomas Anderson more than any other filmmaker is that he has a moral opinion. I do feel as if I do know where his heart lies. To me, it’s easy to leave everything up to the audience; it’s more difficult to communicate a nuanced yet fully-formed perspective. Anderson is five-for-five in that regard.

Like the best Flannery O’Connor stories, There Will Be Blood shows us how to be better people through grotesque counter-example, investing chilling significance in the symbolic. It didn’t surprise me when I learned Paul Thomas Anderson was Catholic.

*- Perhaps this is why I’m Catholic in the first place. 
*- This convalescence was unusually long because doctors had to re-break the leg at a different angle after it had set. A protruding bone would have hindered Ignatius from wearing the boots that he liked, so he made them start from scratch out of vanity—without anesthesia, of course. My kind of dude.