Blood and Oil 3 comments

By Brian Volck

I didn’t see Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood until it came out on DVD, and now I can’t get the images out of my mind—a sure sign the movie’s gotten under my skin. Much has been written already about the film, including Jessica Brown’s delightful contribution to this blog.

Commentaries elsewhere explore the movie’s interplay of capitalist ambition and religious showmanship, but much in this latter group seems superficial, lacking theological depth.

Here’s what got me thinking about this: early on in the movie, the man we take to be HW’s biological father anoints the infant’s forehead with oil from the new well. It’s a few seconds in a nearly three-hour-long movie, and the oil in question is petroleum, but a liturgy wonk like me was immediately taken with the pseudo-sacramental implications.

Hebrew religious tradition reserved anointing for priests, kings, and prophets, and olive oil was used throughout the ancient Mediterranean to treat the sick and bury the dead. Christians incorporated anointing into liturgies for the sick as well as what the West calls the Sacraments of Initiation and the East names the Sacred Mystery of Chrismation. Among the liturgical significances of anointing in initiation is that, having been sealed by the Holy Spirit, the person is now admitted into full communion with the Body of Christ.

I doubt Anderson had such high-church theology in mind, but I’ll see where it takes us, however hard that might be for moderns. In a time when religious life is often considered hopelessly retrograde and patriarchal, for example, it’s difficult to understand how destabilizing to traditional social structure the seriousness with which early Christians took their incorporation into Christ’s Body could be.

Gospel admonitions to love Christ before family and epistolary advice to Christians with pagan spouses suggest the practical difficulty early followers may have had with this, and few moderns appreciate the political significance of young women vowing lifelong virginity when the imperial order expected them to produce the next generation of soldiers and leaders. Washed in the Blood of the Lamb and sealed with the Spirit, the new Christian was often cut off from biological family, and spiritual kin to persons who may not, in fact, be blood relations. Before the West took its fateful turn toward the self, the essential religious question was not “Who am I?” but “Whose am I?”

So it is in There Will be Blood, which is full of ambiguous blood ties within pale modern substitutes for real communion: Daniel’s oil company and the emotive therapeutic religiosity of Eli’s church.

Daniel (the Hebrew name means “judged by God.”) presents HW as his son and business partner—and in several scenes displays real fatherly affection for him—only to reject him as a “bastard in a basket” when HW’s plans to drill for oil in Mexico make him, in Daniel’s eyes, a competitor.

In an early scene, Daniel tells prospective lessors how he encourages his employees to bring their families along, yet all we see are grown workmen emerging from tents on their way to the derrick. Daniel buries the man (a corporal act of mercy) killed putting in that derrick, but there’s reason to suspect sense his interest in perfunctory and superficial, as much a show as his hijacked “blessing” for the well.

Henry, presenting himself as Daniel’s half brother, briefly becomes a confidante—only to Henry does Daniel confess his misanthropy—but suffers unforeseen consequences, his final words including the plea, ”Daniel, I’m your friend.” (Note also how HW’s attempt to burn Henry in his bed exposes the fault lines created by this new claimant to blood kinship.)

The Sunday family is similarly fraught with blood-tie confusion. In what seems a late casting decision, Paul Dano appears both as the birthright-selling brother Paul and the oily showman/preacher Eli (the name means “my God”). In time, Eli usurps his father’s role as patriarch—physically attacking him after his beating at Daniel’s hands—and becomes Daniel’s “brother by marriage.”

While Eli’s Church of the Third Revelation (which revelation would that be?) features a cross, we hear not one word of Scripture spoken there and Jesus’ name only in the context of Daniel’s humiliating baptism. Eli pastors a congregation largely older than he, “healing” their ailments with showy exorcisms rather than observing the Letter of James’ admonition to anoint the sick with holy oil.

Yet Daniel himself brutally “baptizes” Eli in oil when the preacher comes calling for cash, beating Eli as he screams “aren’t you a healer and a vessel of the Holy Spirit?” In the rivals' final encounter Daniel, declaring "I am the third revelation," repays his humiliation in full, despite Eli’s plea: “I need a friend.” As the only significant blood in the film pools on the bowling alley floor, Daniel cries out “I’m finished,” in crude parody of Jesus’ “tetelestai” in John’s passion account.

I could go on, but I hope I’ve made my point. Daniel’s company and Eli’s church are mere simulacra of communion, and the resulting ambiguity of blood ties leads not to reconciliation but estrangement and violence. And so we find ourselves, in a largely post-Christian age and economy where one’s “religion” is often chosen for best therapeutic fit, a highly privatized, individual choice rather than communion in a body of strangers one learns to call brother and sister. In the end, like Eli’s skull, our hopes to find blood ties in such atomized society are likely to be crushed.