1901: An Oil Odyssey
On Tuesday There Will Be Blood was released for home video. That sentence is becoming something of an anachronism thanks to the internet but it’s still a decent enough excuse to talk about one of the most original and memorable movies I’ve seen in a long time. It is, to say the least, an odd picture, but to my mind it is the first movie I’ve ever seen that invites honest comparison to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
One was made in the past about a time in the future which is now also the past, the other was made in the present about the past, so it’s not an immediately obvious comparison, but I think it’s valid. I was thinking this in the theater in fact. The very opening scene of Blood is a dialogue free exercise in human will. Daniel Plainview, our anti-hero, scratches his living from the dirt in an anarchic and - forgive me - Hobbesian world. As the mining sequence continued I was instantly reminded of the “Dawn of Man” opening to 2001. Both Plainview and our primitive ape-ancestors (who, like most movie apes look suspiciously like guys in costumes) are alone in a harsh environment and speaking is neither necessary nor useful. It is man against nature, struggling to establish some kind of control over a hostile world.
The structures of the movies are similar as well. Both lurch forward in time when it suits the story’s purpose and the onus is on the viewer to have seen everything worthwhile. Strauss’s “Blue Danube” would not have been out of place with the haunting imagery of the flaming oil gusher sequence. Though I’ll admit I’m stretching my comparison a little here, both films end with the protagonist alone, having mastered the world that had been so hostile to them at the beginning of the film. There are, obviously, big differences between isolating oneself in a mansion and floating above the Earth as the star-baby, but at the conclusion of both films the mastery of the main character cannot be denied.
This is certainly not a precise comparison, There Will Be Blood takes us into the Earth while 2001: A Space Odyssey doesn’t even use the Earth as a setting for most of its runtime. But in the way both movies conserve their dialogue, in the way both movies linger over beautiful but terrifying images, in the way both movies show human will pushing the limits of technology, there are similarities that are too striking to be ignored. Deliberate storytelling is a rarity; it can seem slow but it also dares you never to look away lest you miss something as important as it is fleeting. While life would suck if all movies were like that, There Will Be Blood was a refreshing and stunning movie worthy of being talked about for decades, just like 2001: A Space Odyssey.
