There Will Be Blood: Oil, Blood, and Religious Charlatanism in Paul Thomas Anderson’s American Tragedy

1. The Silent Genesis: Capital Born from Broken Bones and Black Sludge

Widely acclaimed by film critics and scholars as one of the greatest cinematic achievements of the twenty-first century, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007) is an apocalyptic dissection of the dual founding myths of the American empire: predatory capital and evangelical religion.

The film opens in 1898 with fourteen minutes of near-total silence, accompanied only by the abrasive, microtonal dissonance of Jonny Greenwood’s avant-garde string score. We witness Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis in an indelible, volcanic performance) chipping away at the bottom of a barren silver mining shaft in New Mexico. When dynamite shatters his leg, Plainview does not cry out; he claws his way up the wooden ladder with broken bones, drags his bleeding body miles across desert rock, and secures his assay voucher. Capital is not born from polite mercantile exchange; it is extracted through solitary, agonizing physical brutality.

Day-Lewis constructs Plainview with an unforgettable vocal cadence—a low, resonant, theatrical baritone inspired by John Huston—and a posture that tilts perpetually forward like an iron oil derrick. Plainview is the ultimate misanthrope. In a chilling fireside confession to the man he believes is his half-brother, he articulates his spiritual sickness: “I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people… I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money to get away from everyone.”

2. The Symbiotic Monsters: Daniel Plainview vs. Eli Sunday

The dialectical core of the narrative is the relentless duel between Plainview and Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), the young pastor of the Church of the Third Revelation in Little Boston, California. While Plainview despises Eli, he immediately recognizes that they are mirror reflections of the same predatory instinct.

Where Plainview uses the gospel of economic prosperity (promising schools, roads, and irrigation to poor farmers whose land he leases for pennies), Eli uses the gospel of spiritual salvation, staging hysterical theatrical exorcisms to harvest social power and donations. Neither man believes in God or community; both worship only their own dominion over others. Their relationship is a series of escalating public humiliations:

• Plainview slaps Eli into the mud, mocks his faith, and baptizes him in foul ditch water after Eli demands a promised $5,000 church donation.
• Eli forces Plainview onto his knees before the entire congregation, slapping Plainview’s face repeatedly and forcing him to scream: “I am a sinner! I’ve abandoned my child!” so that Plainview can secure a pipeline right-of-way across William Bandy’s devout Christian farm.

3. The Bowling Alley Climax: “I Drink Your Milkshake!”

The film’s climax in 1927 inside the subterranean private bowling alley of Plainview’s cavernous, tomb-like mansion is one of the most astonishing finales in film history. Now a decrepit, alcoholic hermit surrounded by stuffed animal trophies and empty whiskey bottles, Plainview is visited by an impoverished Eli Sunday, who has been wiped out by the Great Depression.

Eli begs Plainview to buy the oil rights to the Bandy tract, offering to sell his church’s blessing. Plainview agrees on one condition: Eli must explicitly confess that he is a “false prophet and God is a superstition.” Desperate for cash, Eli screams the humiliating confession again and again into the echoing bowling alley. Once Eli has thoroughly degraded his soul, Plainview breaks into manic laughter and delivers his devastating explanation of drainage:

Because Plainview slant-drilled into the Bandy reserve from surrounding wells years ago, the land Eli is selling is bone dry. When Eli realizes he has sold his faith for nothing, Plainview chases him across the polished wooden lanes and beats him to death with a heavy wooden bowling pin. Panting over Eli’s crushed skull as blood pools across the white gutters, Plainview sits on the floor and mutters to his butler: “I’m finished.”

4. Conclusion: The American Wasteland

There Will Be Blood concludes not with an ideological sermon, but with an open grave. By revealing that the founding titans who industrialized the continent were driven not by patriotic vision, but by a diseased, pathological hatred of their fellow human beings, Paul Thomas Anderson delivers an unsparing verdict on the cost of empire. Daniel Plainview owns everything—thousands of oil acres, mansions, private railways—yet he ends his days a raving monster in a basement tomb, bathed in oil, whiskey, and blood.