668
Certainly, he was long-suffering. The movie begins with him
in a mine shaft, hacking away at rock with a pick and scrab-
bling through the shards on his hands and knees, looking
without success for a glint of gold or silver. When he fell
down the shaft and broke his leg, he climbed out by himself.
These powerfully discouraging scenes, which take up the
first twenty minutes of the movie, include no dialogue what-
soever: Plainview’s struggle was a solitary one.
This provides a motivational clue. Plainview hated
everyone—with the exception of his son.“I see the worst in
people,” he declared.“I’ve built my hatreds up over the years,
little by little.” He crushed enemies not because he craved
wealth but because he could not abide their getting the bet-
ter of him. Which raises the larger question: Were the obses-
sions of Daniel Plainview characteristic of the industrial and
financial magnates of the age?
Plainview,“born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin,” was based
on California oil magnate, Edward L. Doheny, himself born in
Fond du Lac. The son of a poor Irish immigrant, Doheny left
home at a young age and prospected for gold and silver in
New Mexico. He had little luck. His wife and children went
hungry; she became an alcoholic and committed suicide. In
1891 Doheny gave up prospecting and went to Los Angeles
to find a job. One day he spotted a man with a cart whose
wheels were coated in tar. Doheny asked what had hap-
pened, and the man mentioned a tar pit at the corner of
Patton and State Streets, near what is now Dodger Stadium.
Doheny acquired the oil rights to the area and began
digging, shoveling dirt and tar into buckets and hauling it to
the surface. At the depth of 155 feet, he was nearly killed by
toxic fumes; then he studied a diagram of an oil rig and built
a crude derrick. He used a sharpened eucalyptus tree as the
drill. At 460 feet, he struck oil. Within a few years, he had builtI
n 2008 Daniel Day-Lewis won the Academy Award for his por-
trayal of Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood, a movie about
wildcatting oil exploration in California in the early 1900s. Day-
Lewis portrayed Plainview as a remorseless predator who lied
with fluency and cheated with sincerity. He coaxed and coerced
property owners into granting him oil leases on his own terms.
When he didn’t get what he wanted, he lashed out in violence.
When a man claimed to be his long-lost brother, Plainview
responded with cautious hospitality; but when he learned that
the man was an imposter, he put a bullet through his head.
Day-Lewis’s Plainview fixed his coal-black eyes onto peo-
ple like a fighter-pilot locking onto a target. His unctuous
voice, punctuated with a crisp, formal diction, bored through
opponents like a lubricated drill biting through rock. A
reviewer for the New York Timescalled Day-Lewis’s perfor-
mance “among the greatest I’ve ever seen.” Day-Lewis filled
Plainview “with so much rage and purpose you wait for him to
blow,” the reviewer added. The movie makes a strong case for
adding Daniel Plainview to a rogue’s gallery of fictional capital-
ist obsessives: Herman Melville’s Ahab, Orson Welles’s Citizen
Kane, and Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko (“Greed is good”).
By the usual conventions of Hollywood, the evil Plainview
would be vanquished by a white-hatted hero. But in There Will
Be Bloodno good guys ride to the rescue because there were
no good guys:Everyoneis after money. The problem was that
Plainview scarfed it all up, leaving none for anyone else.
In the absence of a conflict between good and evil, the
movie turns on the question: What made Plainview so bad?
RE-VIEWING THE PAST
There Will Be Blood
Edward L. Doheny, California oil magnate. Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview.