There Will Be Blood
A tale of wooden machines and iron men. I mean “men” in the physical sense only, closer to soulless ghouls capitalising on hard working people. Standard Oil is not even the main villain.
Daniel is just a regular greedy prospector, looking for silver. He works alone, so when he breaks a leg falling into a hole, he needs to drag himself out of it and into the forge that confirms his prospecting panned out.
He moves on to oil, with a larger crew of workers, always underlings, never partners. They find oil, but one of the guys stays down in the hole after getting hit with a wooden plank, while Daniel gets way by miracle. The work is done, Daniel can start winning real money now, buying up lands before the big boys. He adopts the dead guy’s kid, it makes it easier to buy up land.
Just as he opens up another well, he is visited by an hard-ass guy that promises him a juicy oil field close to the surface, for 500 bucks, cash in hand. Daniel begrudgingly gives him the money, and threatens him if this is bogus.
But Daniel is smart. He gets there with his kid, pretending to hunt quail, and he finds the oil seeping on the surface! Now he is properly rich! He says so to the kid, they will lowball this dumb farmers and build generational wealth.
The old man farmer is a pushover, but his older son negotiates harder. He wants a lot of money for his church, and keeps pushing and pushing. But he gets nothing but contempt for superstitious bullshit from the hyper capitalist, only empty promises. After buying the cornerstone land, he buys up the surrounding properties, since his goons arrive on the train after a few days. There is only one holdout, he will let him cook.
And so they start drilling, with a big rig and all. Eli Sunday, the elder son from the original property starts his church nearby, proselyting among Daniel’s workers, but it’s all under control. Daniel’s kid follows the work closely.
As the kid is watching the drill, it hits a gas pocket and the oil gushes forth, blowing him away. The kid hit his head and cannot hear anything now, but Daniel takes a couple hours to attend to the massive fire that build up, it needs a lot of dynamite to close up the hole.
The kid cannot hear anymore, and the local doctors can’t do anything, so he sends him away to San Francisco to a special school. This is under false pretences, he gets on the train with him but leaves at the last minute. There is oil do drill, he can’t worry about trifles.
After that, his “half-brother” shows up, or someone that passes the smell test. He stays on for work, and moves up to right hand man right away. He is present when the Standard Oil people try to buy him out for a million dollars and he outright refuses.
His preference is to skip the railroad and their extortionate rates (owned by Rockefeller’s Standard Oil too), and build a pipeline to the sea, selling to Union Oil. Alas, the snag is that holdout homestead he ignored for a while. His price is simple: be baptised on their church. He accepts public humiliation for that pipeline, including screaming he abandoned his child! The priest won this round, slapping him around like a maniac.
The prospects the pipeline himself, with his “half-brother”, but he doesn’t pass further identity tests. That random guy confesses him true brother was his friend, and died of TB, so he assumed his identity. Daniel does not hesitate to shoot and bury him in a shallow grave.
And that’s how Daniel became a rich man. His kid returns from the big city talking ASL, befriends and eventually marry the original farmer’s little daughter, and Daniel builds his manor near the sea as he wanted.
As a kid of epilogue, the son wants take the wife and leave for Mexico, get away from his father and branch out on his own, but the now old and frail Daniel reneges him, and tells him the truth: he is worse than a bastard, he just adopted him because he needed to buy lands for cheap, and bringing a boy along was advantageous. He no longer has a son, only a competitor.
The priest also fucked up somewhere and returns to Daniel to ask for money. Since this is based on an Upton Sinclair novel, it is fitting that it ends with the priest groveling to the capitalist, reneging on his fake faith, and gets whacked anyway. I drink your milkshake! DRAINAGE!
I would be willing to bet Daniel and Paul are named so because Daniel Day Lewis is such a method freak he kept fucking up the takes. And HW is a reference to Bush Jr, another Texas oilman.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.