Plainview as Anti-Hero There Will Be Blood

Daniel Plainview is one of the rare American film protagonists who openly states his contempt for other people and never recants. "I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed," he tells Henry. "I hate most people." This is not subtext — it is text. The film does not ask the audience to decode Plainview's true motivations. He tells you what he is, and the film watches what that costs him.

Anderson built the film around a character who does not change

Paul Thomas Anderson described the film as "100 percent straightforward, old-fashioned storytelling." The straightforwardness is the strategy: Plainview is not a mystery to be solved but a trajectory to be tracked. His misanthropy is present in the opening shot — a man alone underground, working in silence, injuring himself in pursuit of mineral wealth — and fully expressed in the closing one. The fifteen-minute wordless prologue establishes everything the audience needs to know before a word is spoken.

"They could never really shake that ambition and that drive to work, that what they enjoyed the most was the fever and the insanity, just the process — that actually getting the stuff or the riches from it somehow was really unsatisfactory to them." — Paul Thomas Anderson, Fresh Air (2008)

Anderson's observation about early oilmen applies precisely to his protagonist. Plainview refuses Standard Oil's million-dollar offer not because he needs more money but because he cannot tolerate anyone else profiting. When Tilford suggests he take care of his son instead, Plainview threatens to cut his throat. The money is irrelevant. The competition is the point.

The Henry subplot reveals the only relationship where Plainview's guard drops

The arrival of Henry — a man claiming to be Plainview's half-brother — produces the film's sole moment of genuine vulnerability. Plainview takes Henry in, confides in him, and delivers the firelit confession that defines his character: "I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed." The confession is sincere. The listener is a fraud. The sincerity is real; the audience is real; but the person hearing it is not who he claims to be.

When Plainview discovers the imposture, he murders Henry and buries him in the desert. The film presents the killing without buildup or aftermath — a fact of Plainview's nature, not a dramatic event. The wordless murder echoes the wordless prologue: Plainview's most consequential actions happen in silence.

The Henry subplot is the structural hinge of the film. It is the only sequence where Plainview attempts a human connection, and the betrayal it produces delivers him into Eli's hands — the murder leads to Bandy's condition, which leads to the baptism. At act-summary level, Henry is a subplot. At beat level, he is the mechanism that forces every consequence in the second half.

The film uses John Huston as both vocal and structural model

Anderson watched The Treasure of the Sierra Madre nightly while writing. The influence is structural: both films track a prospector's moral disintegration as wealth accumulates. Day-Lewis built Plainview's vocal register partly from Huston's own recordings — the deep, authoritative tone that sounds reasonable even when threatening murder.

"I put on Sierra Madre before going to sleep at night for a week, just trying to get it to soak into my head." — Paul Thomas Anderson, Fresh Air (2008)

But Plainview diverges from Fred C. Dobbs in a crucial way. Dobbs begins as sympathetic and deteriorates. Plainview begins as an isolate and never changes. The film's argument is that his misanthropy was fixed before the story began, and success merely gave it room to express itself.

Plainview's three acts of destruction follow a single logic

Each of Plainview's most destructive acts — killing Henry, abandoning H.W., murdering Eli — follows the same pattern: someone enters his orbit, serves a function, and is destroyed when that function expires or the person develops autonomy.

Henry provided companionship. When Henry turned out to be a fraud, the companionship became intolerable and Henry was killed. H.W. provided a sympathetic face for business negotiations. When H.W. developed his own ambitions, Plainview disowned him: "I took you for no other reason than I needed a sweet face to buy land." Eli provided a rival who gave Plainview someone to compete against. When Eli arrived broke and desperate, the competition was over, and Plainview killed him.

The pattern is consumption, not rage. Plainview does not destroy people in fits of passion. He uses them until they are empty, then discards them. The milkshake metaphor applies to every relationship in the film, not just the oil beneath the Bandy tract.

"I'm finished" is the only honest thing Plainview says in the last hour of the film

Plainview's final line — spoken to his butler after beating Eli to death — operates as both practical statement and existential confession. The killing is done. The competition is over. There is no one left to drain. The line is flat, exhausted, delivered while sitting on a bowling lane next to a body. It is the only moment in the film's final act where Plainview is not performing — not for landowners, not for Eli, not for H.W. He is speaking to the one person in his life who has no function except proximity, and what he says is the truth: he is finished.