Capitalism vs Religion (There Will Be Blood) There Will Be Blood

The central structural argument of There Will Be Blood is that Daniel Plainview and Eli Sunday are not opposites — they are rivals competing for the same territory. Both want dominion over the people of Little Boston. Plainview offers material prosperity: roads, schools, bread, employment. Eli offers spiritual salvation: healing, community, purpose. The conflict arises not from their differences but from their identical appetites. The film tracks their alternating humiliations until capitalism settles the account with a bowling pin.

Both men run the same operation in different costumes

Plainview's community address in beat 8 and Eli's faith healing in beat 12 are structurally parallel scenes. Both men perform sincerity for audiences who need to believe them. Plainview promises education, irrigation, and bread while planning to pay the Sundays "quail prices" for an ocean of oil. Eli diagnoses Mrs. Hunter's arthritis as a devil in her hands and promises to suck it out, staging a theatrical performance — "Get out of here, ghost!" — that functions as spiritual commerce. Both men are selling something, and both are more interested in the performance than the product.

"Both antagonists pursue identical goals through different mechanisms." — Little White Lies

Eli's church operates as a commercial enterprise from the start. His first act upon learning of Plainview's interest in the ranch is to demand $10,000 for the church — not for the family, not for the land, for his institution. He positions himself as the family's negotiator, extracting Abel's deference ("Yes. What Eli says") the same way Plainview extracts lease agreements from landowners.

The humiliation cycle is the structural engine of the rivalry

The Plainview-Eli conflict is organized as a series of transactional humiliations, each precisely calibrated to mirror and exceed the previous one:

  1. Plainview snubs Eli's blessing at the well inauguration (beat 10), performing a simple blessing himself and cutting Eli out of the ceremony.
  2. Eli confronts Plainview about the unpaid church money (beat 15), and Plainview drags him through the mud, slapping him — "I'm going to bury you underground, Eli."
  3. Eli beats his own father for surrendering the land (beat 16), mirroring Plainview's violence in the previous scene.
  4. Eli forces Plainview's baptism (beat 27), slapping him, making him confess to abandoning H.W. — the mirror of the mud-beating.
  5. Plainview forces Eli's renunciation (beat 39), making him repeat "I am a false prophet, God is a superstition" — the mirror of the baptism.
  6. Plainview kills Eli (beat 40), ending the cycle by eliminating the other participant.

Each humiliation references a specific earlier one, and the escalation is step-function rather than gradual — each new degradation exceeds the previous by a precise increment.

The film refuses to position either man as morally superior

Anderson does not make Eli a sympathetic alternative to Plainview's greed. Eli beats his own father, berates him as "stupid" and "lazy," and slaps him while Abel protests "I followed His word, Eli. I tried." Eli's vanity is as consuming as Plainview's ambition — he scripts his own introduction for the well blessing, demands $10,000 for his church before the first foot of pipe goes into the ground, and uses the baptism to extract personal revenge rather than spiritual redemption.

The bowling alley finale strips both men to their essentials. Eli arrives broke, his radio ministry failed, desperate for money. Plainview sits drunk on a bowling lane, wealthy and isolated. Neither man's system has produced anything worth having. Capitalism won the competition, but the prize is a mansion occupied by a man whose butler is his only companion.

The milkshake metaphor that Plainview uses to destroy Eli came from the Teapot Dome scandal — a real case where oil industry corruption reached the highest levels of government. Anderson's decision to place this historical language in a fictional character's mouth connects the film's allegory to documented history: the relationship between oil money and institutional power in America is not metaphorical. It is the actual story of the twentieth century. (nofilmschool)

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