The Will To Blood & Madness

The second and fourth words in the title of "There Will Be Blood" encompass the arc of the film for me. It is a story of sheer will, the mania of forward motion without end, and how this must inevitably lead to rupture. The plot doesn't matter so much as the characters, an oil prospector and a would-be prophet. The disheveled, mustachioed look of Daniel Day Lewis's character by the end of the film reminded me of Saddam Hussein, and with the important exception of context this could be his story too. It is the story of a personality type, one destined for a greatness and a madness that are inextricably linked. Mania, properly channeled, is charisma. Someone who's mastered their mania can achieve fantastic ends. But it is the nature of mania that its mastery is almost impossible. It is difficult to "switch off" mania, which is also its power. It bleeds authenticity. We take maniacs seriously because they take themselves seriously. It's not an affectation, it's in their blood. And we are interested in maniacs because, to some degree, it's in our blood too.

There is one scene in the film that reminded me of someone I once knew. In this scene, the oilman, Daniel Plainview, confronts a rival businessman at another table in a restaurant. He is driven to achieve social mastery, humiliating the other man by getting him to call himself a fool and drinking his drink. The power and weakness of the Plainview character are the same: he has no regard for social convention, only his own will to domination. The other man backs down because to him projecting an image of domination is not worth a potentially violent showdown. He is thoroughly civilized while to Plainview civilization is only a thin veneer. Yet this small act of barbarity is an example of why Plainview has achieved success. He gets the power he wants because, when it comes down to the core, most people prefer other things to power. They prefer comfort, stability, family. Plainview is offered a million dollars for his property, but rejects the offer, making explicit his reasoning: he would have nothing to do if he retired, he would be a man without purpose. Plainview is not ruthless to achieve an end, a life of money and leisure; he is ruthless because ruthlessness is in his blood.

The second major character in the film, a young evangelical preacher named Eli, reinforces the link between will and madness. As in business, the key to being a charismatic religious leader is never to be the one to blink. If you blink, if you hesitate, if you make clear you question yourself, other people will question you too. The mass of people want to listen to someone who believes, because they themselves are so full of doubt. If they are not capable of complete and total belief, they will gladly submit to one who does for the promise of meaning that is offered. That desperation for meaning is a matter of life and death, as incidents such as the Jonestown massacre make clear. Eli does not have the economic or political power that Plainview has, but he has power over people's souls. This power, in a pivotal scene in the movie, allows him to put Plainview in a position of submission and humiliation. Plainview and Eli speak the same language in different contexts, believing in the same power of self-fulfilling illusions that is at the basis of religion. In a church or at a business meeting, the principle is the same: will your illusions into authenticity.

Such sheer, unbridled will ends in madness and bloodshed when it is not anchored in some stability of the soul. It can succeed in the short term but it can never be happy with success. I mentioned before how I knew someone a bit like Daniel Plainview. This person wasn't talented enough to achieve anywhere close to the same measure of success, but in social situations his similarly intertwined strength and fatal weakness became obvious. His strength was that he brushed aside civilized trappings to really engage people, grab their attention and achieve social power, but this was also his weakness. At a certain point, having engaged people, one must disengage from this level of intensity for reasons of both personal sanity and social belonging. Yet he was incapable of disengaging. He made people uncomfortable. His aggressive intimacy was a prelude to alienation, his will to master everyone ending in his own deserved isolation. The urge to dominate can get someone to the top of the mountain, but just as surely it will pull them back down to the bottom: to finish, in history's most extreme example, by suicide in a bunker. Will is in the blood, and both are only made visible when they are spilled.