Themes and Analysis (There Will Be Blood) There Will Be Blood

Dargis recognized the film as a consummate work of art

"The film is above all a consummate work of art, one that transcends the historically fraught context of its making, and its pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic. It reveals, excites, disturbs, provokes, but the window it opens is to human consciousness itself." — Manohla Dargis, The New York Times (2007)

Dargis's assessment locates the film's achievement not in its historical setting or political argument but in its formal ambition — a film that works on the viewer through image, sound, and performance rather than thesis. The distinction matters because many readings reduce There Will Be Blood to allegory (capitalism versus religion, greed versus faith), while the film itself operates at a more primal register.

Capitalism and religion compete for the same territory, not different ones

The central structural argument of the film is that Daniel Plainview and Eli Sunday are not opposites. They are rivals. Both want dominion over the people of Little Boston — Plainview through oil leases, Eli through spiritual authority — and their conflict arises not from their differences but from their identical appetites. Eli's church operates as a commercial enterprise: he offers salvation for a price, stages theatrical healings, and treats his congregation as a resource to be managed.

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

Anderson stages the parallel explicitly. Eli's baptism of Plainview is a humiliation ritual — slapping, shouting, demanding confession — that mirrors Plainview's earlier physical beating of Eli in the mud. Each man forces the other to submit publicly. The bowling alley finale completes the symmetry: Eli, broke and desperate, comes to Plainview for money, and Plainview forces him to renounce his faith before killing him. Religion and capitalism have been fighting for the same congregation, and capitalism won because it had a bowling pin.

Plainview's misanthropy is the film's engine, not its message

Anderson built the film around a character who openly states his contempt for other people. Plainview tells Henry: "I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed." 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.

"I was trying to find something that was 100 percent straightforward, old-fashioned storytelling." — Paul Thomas Anderson, IndieWire

Anderson's description of the film as "straightforward" reveals the strategy: Plainview is not a mystery to be solved. He is a trajectory to be tracked. The film's fifteen-minute wordless opening establishes him as a man who works alone, suffers alone, and claws his way upward through sheer physical will. Every subsequent scene asks whether this man can sustain a human connection — with H.W., with Henry, with the community of Little Boston — and the answer is always no.

The nearly wordless opening operates as a thesis statement

The first fifteen minutes of There Will Be Blood contain almost no dialogue. Plainview mines silver alone in a shaft, breaks his leg, drags himself to an assay office, transitions to oil prospecting, and adopts the orphaned H.W. — all told through physical action, Jonny Greenwood's dissonant score, and Robert Elswit's images of a man dwarfed by landscape. Anderson described the film as "a mixture of western and horror," and the opening sequence establishes both registers: the wide-open spaces of the western, the claustrophobic dread of the horror film.

"We approached it like a horror film, employing gothic shot framing and trying to build tension without a lot of cuts." — Dylan Tichenor, editor, No Film School

The decision to withhold dialogue forces the audience to read Plainview through his body and his environment. By the time he speaks — delivering his oil pitch to a room of landowners — his voice arrives as a performance within the film. He is already a man who has learned to use words as tools, and the audience has already seen who he is without them.

H.W.'s deafness mirrors the audience's relationship to Plainview

When the gas blowout deafens H.W., the film briefly enters the boy's perspective — sound drops away, replaced by a high-pitched tone. This is the only sustained point-of-view shift in the film. Tichenor noted that he "kept asking Paul for more shots of H.W." to elicit empathy for an otherwise off-putting protagonist. H.W. becomes the audience's surrogate: a person close to Plainview who cannot fully understand him, who watches his father's face for signals that may or may not be genuine, and who eventually walks away.

The bowling alley scene completes this arc. When Plainview tells H.W. he was adopted — "You're a bastard from a basket" — he is stripping away the last relationship that gave him any claim to humanity. H.W.'s departure is not a surprise. It is the structural consequence of everything the film has established about Plainview since the opening shot.

The film uses John Huston as a structural and vocal model

Anderson watched The Treasure of the Sierra Madre nightly while writing the screenplay, calling it a "lifesaver" for the project. The influence is structural: both films track a prospector's moral disintegration as wealth accumulates, moving from determined ambition through paranoia to violence. Day-Lewis built Plainview's vocal register partly from recordings of Huston himself — the deep, oily confidence that sounds reasonable even when saying monstrous things.

"The process begins and ends with the writing. If the script is good, directing can be easy." — Paul Thomas Anderson, IndieWire

But Anderson's film diverges from Huston's in a crucial way. Fred C. Dobbs in Sierra Madre begins as sympathetic and deteriorates. Plainview begins as an isolate and never changes — the film's argument is that his misanthropy is present from the first frame, and success merely gives it room to express itself.

The bowling alley finale breaks from the main narrative by decades

The final sequence — set in 1927, roughly fifteen years after the main action — creates a structural problem that the film embraces rather than resolves. The story of Little Boston ends with the pipeline. Everything that matters to the plot — the oil, Eli, H.W., the community — has been resolved or abandoned. The bowling alley scene is an epilogue that occupies the dramatic position of a climax, and it works because Anderson has spent 140 minutes establishing that Plainview's trajectory has no natural stopping point. He will keep destroying until there is nothing left to destroy.

"One of the most wholly original American movies ever made." — Richard Schickel, TIME (2007)