Bohemian Cinema By Jonathan Pacheco

“There Will Be Blood”: An Oil “Odyssey”

Tags: There Will Be Blood, 2001: A Space Odyssey

NOTE: Contains major spoilers for There Will Be Blood and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Just saying.

Upon rewatching the beginning of There Will Be Blood, one thing struck me immediately—something I’m shocked that I didn’t realize before. The film begins with a blank screen, a title card, and then a fade from black. The score, however, consists of haunting, slowly-swelling strings. The sound immediately conjured thoughts of the overture from 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you hear to some audio samples, you can see the similarities.

• Excerpt from the Overture of 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Excerpt from the Overture of There Will Be Blood

After the title cards, each film fades into scenery of barren lands:

There Will Be Blood begins with Daniel Plainview chipping away with a pick-ax, looking for oil. As with 2001, there is no dialogue for a lengthy period as Plainview simply does “gruntwork.” You can even find him squatting in the desert, resembling one of the apes of Kubrick’s film.

Plainview’s process of finding oil can be seen much like the process of the ape, the “Moon-Watcher,” discovering “the tool”: it’s something that has the power to change forever.

And it does. 2001 makes the epic jump through millions of years, and after a short time, There Will Be Blood makes a jump as well; not millions of years, but Plainview has already evolved. Instead of the “grunt” with the axe, he’s become an oil driller and self-proclaimed “family man.”

At this second stage in their “evolution,” the protagonists seek an elusive power—in 2001 it was the power of survival, exploration, evolution, and of course the black monolith, while Plainview’s quest was for the power the comes from being an oil baron. Along the way, they discover that perhaps their biggest adversaries were those who were supposed to help them, not hinder them. To Bowman’s surprise, HAL grows a deadly personality and turns on the human. In There Will Be Blood, Plainview finds conflict with several parties: first and foremost with Eli, the town priest who insists that he wants to help the oil man.

Then there’s the gentleman who claims to be Daniel’s brother. The man does indeed try to help Daniel, but once Daniel discovers the man’s true identity, he is perceived as an adversary, and Plainview promptly does away with him.

As a child, H.W. never intentionally betrayed Plainview, his adopted father—he was the baron’s lone confidant. Yet once the boy sustained the injury that caused his deafness, the burden of caring for him took its toll on Plainview. The business man could feel himself getting weaker, and he felt as if H.W. was holding him back from his true passion, so he shipped his son away for the time being. Years later as the film approaches its end, H.W. tells his father face to face that he does not wish to work under him anymore—he’s going to forge his own way. By now, the immensely-powerful Daniel Plainview sees the pulling of H.W.’s support as equal an offense as a direct betrayal; if you’re not for him, you’re against him. Once again, Plainview’s foe was promptly done away with.

As both 2001 and There Will Be Blood conclude, Bowman and Plainview sit as old men on the brink of something new. Bowman encounters the monolith and is transformed into a new being: the Starchild. The new creature looks at the camera as the film ends, with the Infinite Beyond now presenting so many possibilities.

But Plainview, instead of finding the monolith, finds his greed. His transformation comes when he is engrossed by his love for oil and power, and he bludgeons Eli with a bowling pin—much like the “Moon-Watcher” does with a bone.

“I’m finished,” he says, and this completes Plainview’s transformation. But our new creature in There Will Be Blood doesn’t resemble the Starchild. It’s almost as if Plainview began the evolutionary process, but failed to take the appropriate steps that would lead him to a higher level. So now, instead of being reborn as the Starchild, he’s reborn as an ape.