There Will Be Blood . . . that comes from Oil!

Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, by a horse length the best film of the year, is based—loosely, somewhat, halfway—on a 1927 novel by American writer and public intellectual Upton Sinclair called Oil!, with the exclamation point. Sinclair was a socialist novelist (the crass qualification!) whose most famous work, The Jungle, described the revolting reality of work in the Chicago stockyards, circa early-20th century. The novel stabbed the meat industry in its side; sales fell. To placate the capitalists, and to the benefit of American workers, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. It led to the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration.

Will the Oscar-worthy movie spur government to action? Doubtful, extremely. But it will say something about Oil! (Or, is that oil!) Why Anderson decided to change  the name of the book, well, likely because he only used half of it. In a interview, he said, "So with There Will Be Blood, I didn't even really feel like I was adapting a book. I was just desperate to find stuff to write. I can remember the way that my desk looked, with so many different scraps of paper and books about the oil industry in the early 20th century, mixed in with pieces of other scripts that I'd written. Everything was coming from so many different sources. But the book was a great stepping-stone . . . The book is so long that it's only the first couple hundred pages that we ended up using, because there is a certain point where he strays really far from what the original story is. We were really unfaithful to the book. [Laughs.] That's not to say I didn't really like the book; I loved it."

The story of an oil baron in the textured American west, heartbreakingly shot in sandy tans and brumblebush greens, colored by a nihilistic and loudmouthed preacher and a baby, whiskey-drinking infant, and then deaf and angry son—when you think about it, there are all kinds of cheap metaphors to be drawn. That's what happens with great movies, they stand out like real life: you quote them, you worry about them, and you turn your weary eye to the future.

If you haven't seen the movie yet, little sympathy. Don't read any further. The last scene, shot in the Doheny mansion, a glorious California abode regularly shopped out to Hollywood, bears witness to the murder of the preacher on the left lane of a bowling alley in the house. Oil killing religion? No, hardly. How the scene narrows your view of what's to come is that the long room can't be any wider than 15 feet. Successful, and mad, oil prospector Daniel Plainview has bought this palace, more than anything anyone could ever need, and what has put him there, his luxuriously lucrative grounddredging, ultimately funneled his unfulfilled rage into a narrow tunnel. There's nowhere to go but down the bloody alley of murder.

Killing for oil (!), that sounds more familiar. But, after all, it's just a movie based on a book from a long time ago.  Mr. Anderson, that is all you were thinking, right? The rest of us, take note.