“There Will Be Blood” and the Depravity of Man
Last night me and my roommates watched There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Academy Award winning amorality play. I was stunned at the depth, power, and intensity of the story. There were several scenes that left me physically shaking and emotionally shredded.
Daniel Day-Lewis plays an oilman whose ambition gradually crowds out his conscience and his adopted family. Paul Dano portrays a fiery pentecostal evangelist, purposefully named “Eli Sunday,” whose ambition for power and influence makes a mockery out of his religion. Anderson littered Biblical imagery throughout the film, often as the inverse of the Biblical symbology. For example, the title itself, “There will be blood,” if said by a believer could be taken as a redemption theme. But Lewis and Dano never find redemption. The blood in this movie is the consequence of greed and ambition.
This film is a profound picture of man’s depravity and capacity for self-destruction. Man has the ability to pervert all that is good and right. One of my roommates complained at the end of the movie. He thought of the film as post-modernist dribble with no protagonist and no hope. He is right about the lack of a protagonist; there is no “good guy.” But to add a protagonist and/or a message of redemption at the end would change the movie beyond recognition. When I finished the movie my heart was weighted with the lesson to be learned about sin and its consequences. If there had been a “happy” ending, I’m not sure if that lesson would have been so clearly communicated.
Perhaps there is even a Biblical precedent. Not every Bible story has a happy ending. Plenty of Old Testament tales, and I’m thinking of Judges, are full of twisted characters without a protagonist or a redemptive ending. Sure, redemption in Christ is pictured by the delivery of God’s people by the judges, but individual stories are as dismal as any today.
What is valuable is the “rightness” of this story, not what it misses. This film provides us with half of the gospel: we are depraved. The cliche “You have to get someone lost before you can get them saved” sounds appropriate. Perhaps I like this movie because so few people in our contemporary culture truly understand that man is bad. This movie should encourage unbelievers to see mankind in a much more negative light.
There Will Be Blood is not a “fun” movie to watch. It is draining and thought provoking and worthy of your time. Not since Crime and Punishment have I seen a movie by an unbeliever that presents so Biblical a picture of the consequences of sin.
Here is a link to an excellent Books and Culture review.
Here is a link to the Christianity Today review.
A fine review. I agree that Paul Thomas Anderson’s deranged masterpiece represents half of the “redemption story.” I was hoping that it would beat out “No Country for Old Men” for best pic. While the Coen brothers’ “No Country” simply reenacted nihilism, “No Country” demonstrates where that nihilism leads to.
PS: Last time I checked, Fyodor Dostoevsky remains perhaps the greatest self-professing Christian writer of all time.
I betray my literary ignorance. To be completely honest, the only other Russian author I’ve read is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and “Gulag Archipelago.”
Stephanie and I watched this the other night and had many of the same thoughts. The scene near the end where he is speaking with H.W. is especially poignant. It seems at that point you fully realize the isolation that he has brought on himself through his sin. It was quite a sobering movie.
No worries. I once was called a “Philistine” because I had not read “The Great Gatsby”.
Check out this AS speech (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978.html).
BBB