In Defense of a Sociopath: My Thoughts on Daniel Plainview in “There Will Be Blood”
I like movies like There Will Be Blood (2007) — ones where there are no heroes. Depictions of the past that are all grit with very little romanticization. And I love just about anything made by Paul Thomas Anderson, who always makes such detailed panoramas of his characters’ worlds.
Before I started There Will Be Blood, I googled it. I also googled the name of its main character, Daniel Plainview (played by Daniel Day Lewis), and found that several of the top searches for him labelled him a sociopath.
Is Daniel Plainview a sociopath? one asked.
Daniel Plainview: The most notorious sociopath in cinema, another seemed to answer.
On Youtube, one comment argued that There Will Be Blood is a movie about two villains: Plainview and Eli Sunday (played by Paul Dano).
In short, I was prepared for a compelling villain— for Plainview to be like Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa in Inglorious Basterds or Kevin Spacey’s John Doe in Se7en. But that’s not at all what I got.
One of the first notes I made about There Will Be Blood was that if Plainview is a sociopath, he’s one of the most charming and convincing ones in cinematic history. I wrote this somewhere around the point when he calmly tells Paul Sunday (also played by Paul Dano) that if there was no oil in Little Boston, he was going to “take more than [his] money back.” Then, he asks, “Is that alright with you?”
At this point in the film, Plainview is a successful “oil man” whose painful, dirty journey to wealth has been punctuated by bodily injury, mental exhaustion, and the voluntary adoption of a baby boy whose father dies prospecting for oil. By the time he becomes rich and powerful, the audience sees Plainview not as emotionless but as a man whose battle with the land has hardened him into a sharp businessman. His Machiavellian attitude is borne from necessity.
Indeed, the first shot of the movie is comprised of two still mountains. The scoring is that which we might hear in a horror movie, when the murderer is introduced or when we see him commit his first crime. This characterization harkens back to the American mythology of the “wild” West being a place where the land fights against the white settler. In many ways, There Will Be Blood is a horror movie about the land, with whom its victims ironically fall in love. The first time Plainview injures himself, the camera even settles back on those twin mountains, as though nature itself had conspired against him.
The Business of Religion and the Religion of Business
You might think I’m digressing. Yes, the West is harsh to Plainview and his fellow prospectors, but what does that have to do with whether or not Daniel is a sociopath?
I argue that the world around him is what turns Plainview into the oft-unlikable character he is. When he makes his way to Little Boston to dig for oil, he buys up settlers’ land and asks, “Can everything here be got?” to which his local contact says, “Sure.”
We are reminded that this is America — early America — and that everything in this country is for sale. This is the foundation upon which our nation was built. About forty minutes into the film, we witness the West being built upon capitalism and religion, each fundamentally dependent upon the other while also diametrically opposed. It is no coincidence that Daniel owes his oil rig to a pastor while that same pastor owes his church to Daniel. And when Daniel lifts his oily hand to the sky after he’s struck oil for the first time, it is an unmistakably religious experience. Baby H.W., who Plainview adopts, even has his head anointed with black oil as though it were Holy Water.
And when H.W. eventually loses his hearing when the rig in Little Boston catches fire, Plainview sprints to the scene and carries H.W. away from danger, screaming, “Oh, God!” as though the heavens have betrayed him. It’s obvious, in fact, that Plainview loses any faith he might have had after H.W. gets hurt, because he beats Eli Sunday when the latter visits him, asking why the Holy Spirit couldn’t heal his son.
The most obvious evidence that Plainview isn’t a sociopath is this deep love he holds for his son. At the end of the film he claims that he adopted H.W. because he needed a face to garner sympathy in his business deals — and this is also implied early in the film — but I don’t buy that theory. Yes, Plainview took advantage of the pathos that H.W. inspired, but he also showed tremendous affection to H.W. throughout his infancy and childhood. He called H.W. his business partner, confided in him, and refrained from beating him even when H.W. tried to kill him.
Plainview also appears genuinely troubled when H.W. loses his hearing and when he has to send H.W. to boarding school. When Eli Sunday forces him to shout that he’s abandoned his child, Plainview is wracked with guilt and unwillingness. If he was really a sociopath, this statement would not have been difficult for him to utter, just as the decision to send H.W. away would not have been so challenging to make.
When Plainview has his questionable religious experience, Mary Sunday hugs him from behind and their embrace lingers with obvious affection, reminding us of the soft spot he has for this object of H.W.’s romantic love. At this point, Daniel has already halted Abel Sunday’s (Mary and Eli’s father, played by David Willis) habit of beating Mary for not praying, and he’s dedicated Little Boston’s oil rig to her. One can argue that his relationship with H.W. is strictly related to business and appearances, but the same cannot be said for Plainview’s relationship with Mary. He loves her at first because of how much his son loves her, but by the second hour of the film he develops a legitimate attachment to her. Organized religion, we know, has betrayed them both, and that shared experience most clearly binds them together during their embrace at church.
And yet…if Daniel Plainview loves his son so much, one asks, then why does he disown him so callously during the last half hour of the film?
It’s important to contextualize the heartbreaking moment that Plainview tells H.W. he is an orphan: H.W. approached his adopted father to tell him that he was moving to Mexico to start his own oil company. To Plainview, this decision to become “the competition” is a grave betrayal. Modern audiences may find this difficult to understand, but to Plainview, his business is his religion. It is his entire life — the thing he has chosen to give his life meaning and that he has sacrificed for. After such a harrowing, personally unfulfilling life, the oil business is the only thing he has. So for his son — his deepest love — to threaten this in any way seems to him as though H.W. is the one who disowned him first. H.W. even says that he is going to Mexico to get away from his father, even though he is supposed to be the one person who loves Plainview unconditionally.
The Blood in “There Will Be Blood”
I think the biggest reason viewers deem Plainview a sociopath is because he commits two major acts of violence: He kills the man pretending to be his brother (played by Kevin J. O’Connor), and then at the very end of the film he bludgeons Eli Sunday to death. While I do not condone violence and I certainly don’t approve of murder, I argue that these killings are far from acts of sociopathy.
When a man shows up at Daniel Plainview’s house claiming to be his estranged brother, he is suspicious at first, but warms up with surprising speed. He opens up to this man, admitting that he hates most people and that he no longer wants to be in business alone. Although Plainview’s vulnerability doesn’t sound or look like what you or I might say to a close confidante, it is vulnerability nonetheless. Daniel, who has worked tirelessly at keeping up his impenetrable emotional wall, finally lets someone (other than his child) in, only to find out that he has been duped.
When Plainview learns the true identity of his business partner — and that his real brother has been dead all along — he kills the man not because he feels nothing, but because he feels too much. The world has taught Plainview already that there is no room for grief and sadness, and that anger is the most actionable means through which he can work through (or avoid working through) such soul-crushing disappointment. After all, he’s already admitted that he is an angry, envious man, and this deep betrayal by the man he thought was his family only proves his suspicion that his fellow humans are only worthy of contempt.
If Plainview is callous, it is because life has been callous to him. If he is a monster, it is because the land, this country — that unforgiving adversary — has made him this way.
Finally, in one of the most violently satisfying scenes in cinema, Plainview has it out with Eli Sunday in the last ten minutes of the film. The latter comes with a business proposition and Plainview peels away Eli’s layers of bravado until his financial desperation is laid bare, and after two and a half hours of watching Sunday’s religious pride and condescension, we finally watch Plainview gain the upper hand.
Plainview agrees to the deal that will save Sunday on the condition that he says he is not a prophet, and that God is a superstition. It’s important to note that Plainview doesn’t ask for any public announcement, and instead insists that Eli tell him this directly. “Say it like you mean it, say it like it’s your sermon,” he says, and as an audience we know that this request is about control and the infliction of pain. It is an act of pointed retribution for the time Eli Sunday forced Plainview to say he abandoned his son: Sunday made Plainview betray himself — he cracked Plainview’s soul that day — and now the favor is returned.
In his eccentric yet oddly lucid rant, Daniel Plainview says, “Every day I drink the blood of lamb.” Here, he stops resisting and becomes the villain that traditionalism and religious extremism beg him to be. Sunday has been calling him a sinner, a vehicle of evil, for the duration of the film and now Plainview frightens him by becoming just that.
Paul Thomas Anderson knows that he made this film for a modern audience — an audience with an abstract regard for religion, but that partakes in spirituality when and if convenient rather than making it a focal point of life. Generally speaking, we do not respond to the exorcism-like sermons, the screaming, the self-hatred, or the “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” brand of spiels. We are not supposed to like Eli Sunday with his belief that he is the smartest, the purest, the most worthy of saving. We are meant to be disgusted by the greed and self-interest he has veiled in religion.
And so we feel some semblance of satisfaction here when Plainview reduces him to tears. We sympathize when Daniel says, “Did you think your song and dance and your superstition would help you Eli?” because we resent that people like Eli who think they are special, who think that God favors them over the rest of us who, like Plainview, have to live and die by the principles of work and money. Who have to get their hands dirty to survive.
There is a reason Paul Thomas Anderson chose to have a close-up on Daniel as he beats Eli to death: To show the gore rather than the reason behind it is to miss the point.
We’re Scared of Daniel Plainview Because We ARE Daniel Plainview
Like it or not, Daniel represents everything that we have turned capitalist America into. He has survived through sheer grit, unglamorous and difficult, because that is what you need here if you come from nothing and want to become something. To be mad at him, to hate him, is to hate ourselves and what we’ve created.
People like Plainview built everything we love about this country. Religion, business, sweat, and murder built the West — the shiny plastic fantasy of Southern California (recall the nod to this at the end of the movie, when Sunday says Bandy’s grandson is moving to SoCal to become a movie star), the romanticism of Manifest Destiny, and the glamour of the fabled oil barons and their debutante daughters. They were all borne by excess and extremism.
Daniel is a difficult character not because he is evil (mind you, I’m not saying he is good, either) but because he represents the inconvenient reality that everything we know is dirty. Corrupt. Or, at least, its origins are. He is a reminder that there are no good guys or bad guys and that the true story is never simple.
So he’s not a sociopath. He has not committed a single sin the audience is justified in holding against him — except perhaps pulling that comfortable wool from our screwed-shut eyes.
