Watched There Will Be Blood tonight. I wanted to watch something really good. It’s what I needed. Don’t really know why, but I could just feel it. I needed to watching something really good, and There Will Be Blood is. First time watching it since…theaters, I think? And I do believe I went to go see it in theaters. No Country For Old Men, too, which I can’t help but think of the two movies in the same breath.
It was an interesting watch as a full-ass adult. Very interesting. I got a lot more out of it, I think. It’s place in art and storytelling is much clearer to me now than it was back then. There Will Be Blood is never a movie that would come from me. I don’t inhabit its headspace naturally, and when it first came out, I knew it was good, I was entertained by it…but I didn’t understand it. Even scarier, I didn’t really understand why everyone else loved it so much. I get it more, now. I’ve read more. Watched more. Observed more of humanity.
It’s heavy on character. And literary in the sense that it’s about a man who’s a miserable person. That’s what I understand, now, about art and about myself. I don’t naturally think of miserable, often despicable characters. I have to really work to find them. And there’s a lot of literature—both in the meaning of ‘books’ but also in film; I mean literary in the wide world of storytelling as a whole—a lot of literature that deals with miserable, desperate characters. Daniel Plainview is one such character, and that’s what There Will Be Blood is about, completely: him. It’s not really about the oil boom in California. It’s not really about religion. It’s not a Western. It’s not even about tycoons and their nature, though you can extrapolate that from Plainview, certainly. The movie really is, plainly, about him. Anderson takes us meanderingly through respecting him, fearing him, sympathizing with him, being disgusted by him, disliking him, feeling sad for him…in and out. Up and down. That’s his draw. That’s the game. How much can we love this man, and how much can we hate him? I can feel it, now, coming off the images like mist, his fascination with this character that he’s created. The oil fields are a means to an end, a playground for this person to run amok. That’s very literary.
I wish I could write like that. It’s very masculine, too, which is something I often struggle to feel or express. But I do understand it, now, much more than I used to. I suppose that’s something.
Night night.