1.
There Will Be Blood is a portrait-by-excoriation. It is about a kind of evil, though I can’t yet tell you what I exactly think about evil.
But I can tell you this: that the mimetic reaction regarding milkshakes and scores of impressions of Daniel Plainview first made me lean towards the fact that this kind of cultural reaction was about maintaining a needle-gently-leaning-towards-the-positive atmosphere, something designed to keep the ridiculous in check (i.e., Matrix: Revelations, The Daily Show still sticking with its portrait of John Kerry as boring, even after he seemed to be one of the key tipping-point figures in negotiating an Afghan run-off), and that any art that aspired towards necessity would inevitably be lost in the whorl of the ever-producing moment, but looking at the film again this afternoon, I still found it a good film, thought again of this, and wondered again what this said about insta-comedy.
2.
Would it be fair to say that Plainview’s oil rig is the inverse of Andrei Rublev’s bell-tower? To make the point a little more explicit, there is Elif Batuman writing in The New Yorker (April 27, 2009):
In the Russian Orthodox faith, bells are widely considered to be “aural icons,” symbolizing the trumpet calls blown on Mt. Sinai and the sounding of the trumpet for the raising of the dead before the Last Judgment. Just as painted icons are not intended to be mimetic representations of a spiritual object but magical windows into the world of the spiritual, a Russian bell is not a musical instrument, but, as Father Roman puts it, “an icon of the voice of God.”
