Faith and Industry in “There Will Be Blood”

The clash between Eli Sunday and Daniel Plainview, between religion and industry, steeple and oil derrick, might come down to something like the difference between a gift and a skill. Eli calls himself a son of the hills of Little Boston, an inheritor of land and legacy, a member of a family, and of a faith imagined as a family. Daniel calls himself an oil man, but only after reciting his resume as proof that he’s earned the title. He tends flocks of derricks, not people, and he leases both land and family to strategic, rather than communal, ends. Yet ultimately, each lacks what the other has. What is a gift without control or discipline, a skill without purpose or meaning? And is there a difference between a gift and luck? Wes & Erin discuss Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 film “There Will Be Blood.” For more analysis, check out Way Too Close on YouTube: https://youtu.be/J3usJ4fqOJU Upcoming Episodes: Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Julius Caesar.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. The clash between Eli Sunday and Daniel Plainview, between religion and industry, steeple and oil derrick, might come down to something like the difference between a gift and a skill. Eli calls himself a son of the hills of Little Boston, an inheritor of land and legacy, a member of a family and of a faith imagined as a family. Daniel calls himself an oil man, but only after reciting his resume as proof that he's earned the title. He tends flocks of derricks, not people, and he leases both land and family to strategic rather than communal ends. Yet ultimately, each lacks what the other has. What is a gift without control or discipline, a skill without purpose or meaning? And is there a difference between a gift and luck? Today we're discussing Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 film there will Be Blood. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, when I had suggested that we watch this film, I was having trouble deciding between this one and no country for Old Men, which came out in 2007, which filmed in the same place. I don't know if you read about the story where the oil derrick burning down, that whole scene was actually causing problems for no country because they were filming so close together that the smoke was getting into the no country for Old Men shots in the background. And, you know, I know there's a lot of conversation about these two films being possibly the two greatest films of the 21st century so far. So I was wondering which. Which you think is better. 2:12 Wes: Hmm. Well, it's been quite a while since I've seen no country for Old Men, so I would have trouble saying I don't remember no country for Old Men well enough. 2:21 Erin: As much as I love There Will Be Blood, I think actually I prefer no country, strangely. But I thought this one would be, in a way, more fun to talk about. I mean, did you look at all at Oil, the Upton Sinclair novel? You know, this is, I guess, a bit more of a free adaptation, or it's just an adaptation, really, of the first hundred pages of oil. Not an adaptation in the way that no country is of its source material. 2:47 Wes: Yeah, I did look at Oil and it's loosely based on it departs pretty quickly. 2:52 Erin: But, yeah, so I thought. I thought, in a way would be easier to do because I think with no country would have to be continually looking over our shoulder at McCarthy if we were to just cover the film. But I don't know. I mean, the older I get, the more I like, the more I like There Will Be Blood. And I do wonder if it's actually more fun to watch. Like, the performances are so fun to watch, and it's so funny. But I don't know if you would agree if you found this particularly funny or what's your experience with the film, because I've seen it now quite a few times, including just recently on the big screen, which was great. Art House theater was running it. So about a month ago, I saw it on the big screen for the first time since it came out. What's your experience? 3:34 Wes: Well, it had been so long since I had seen it. I only had one memory of the film, and that was a memory of Eli killing Daniel at the end. 3:45 Erin: Oh, whoa. 3:47 Wes: I think I reversed it. 3:49 Erin: Wow. 3:49 Wes: Imagine coming with a gun and killing Daniel. So I think, you know, when I first saw it, I thought it was brilliant. Like, it didn't have the huge. A huge emotional impact on me. And I think that's because of the darkness of the Daniel character and the fact that, Right. He doesn't change very much, except that he just sort of drills in, so to speak, into his existing character structure, which involves a lot of envy and anger, and just deepens it and deepens it and deepens it. You know, it's almost. I was just thinking, now, is there something tragic about it? I mean, he's sort of. You know, I wouldn't call tragic in the sense that he's very focused on achieving this destiny of his, which is to kind of flesh out his envy, as he puts it. He's an envious man. He's angry. He hates people. He wants to get away from people, to have enough money to get away from people. And that's his project, and that's what he does. So there's no redemption. There's little hints of what might be redemptive, for instance, in his relationship with his son. But it always goes sideways. That, for me, subtracts from the. Or it doesn't subtract from the emotional impact. The emotional impact is just unpleasant. 5:08 Erin: You know, you don't admire him at all, though. I mean, I'm interested in the idea. This idea of envy. 5:13 Wes: And, I mean, he is very handsome. I'm just kidding. 5:19 Erin: I just looked at you with disgust. 5:21 Wes: He's got a good. He's got a good job. Oh, you don't think Daniel Day Lewis is handsome? 5:25 Erin: I think Daniel Day Lewis is handsome. I think Daniel Plain Lewis. Daniel Dayview. Daniel Days Inn, the hotel magnate. 5:44 Wes: That's great. 5:46 Erin: I think he's a little oily, actually. No, I mean, that whole opening sequence is. You know, you're on his side at first. That whole opening sequence is so incredible. I love that. You know, almost no dialogue and just him and the silver mine. You've got to admire him. 6:04 Wes: No, so I look at all that retrospectively now in terms of his larger project. Yes. But in the beginning, he's someone who is willing to put all this physical work and also to sacrifice life and limb, potentially. And he hurts his leg, of course, and has a permanent limp from it. To do what? To get rich, I think. And I. Yeah, you have to admire the sort of determination, I guess, in a way. But one of the very early scenes is of him prostrate in that office as another person is counting the silver for him. And it's a very nice visual image of the idol he's sort of bowing down to. He's prostrate before this project of becoming rich, and he's made lame by it. 6:54 Erin: Yeah, you know, it is about getting rich. Right. But I think there's also something deeper at work there which maybe speaks to the idea of oil. You know, I know we talked about gold in our episode on the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. And of course, we also have silver here as kind of a foil foil to oil. I think getting rich for Daniel might be proof of a kind of competence or dominance, domination, but it's. It's almost a kind of a side effect or. Or proof of his success on a business level. So I think that that's why when he gets rich, he doesn't know what to do with himself anymore. Or he's ultimately hobbled by that more than he is hobbled by, you know, the work itself, though literally. That's not true. But, you know, this idea of being envious. I mean, he also needs people. You know, I was thinking about the setting of the film often and the fact that it starts so relatively late in the history of Western expansion, you know, so we have. We have a person who hates people, who sees other people as competition, and yet who also has to build his entire business model around rhetoric and manipulation and sort of selling yourself and your qualifications to an audience because you're not Just one man out prospecting in the middle of nowhere. You have a continent filling up, so you have land already owned by people. You know, you have the Sunday family, for instance, on their ranch that they own. And we have people, you know, like. Like the camping trip is such a great symbol of this, right? Like the fact that Daniel takes HW On a camping trip. That's their excuse. You know, they're camping and quail hunting, so they have their little packs on their backs. That is so interesting to me that we are now at a point in time where you could be going out in California just on a camping trip and not because you're a pioneer who's doing this because of, you know, some kind of compulsion to move into the west or for necessity, maybe. So we have this, you know, immediate confrontation here between this lone oil man and a lifestyle which. Which is about kind of not really being part of the community. And then the most successful of those oil men are the ones who can bridge that gap with society, I think. And obviously, this is why HW is so important to give the appearance of the family business. So. So he needs them, and he's sort of reliant on them. And part of his skill is about this manipulation, both the rhetoric and ultimately what that comes down to is lies and strategizing in a way that kind of is using and manipulating people. That ambivalence, that envying them but also needing them, goes right to the heart of his character. I think it's why he's ultimately so obsessed with family, why he becomes attracted to the idea of Henry, his brother. Because I think there's something that Eli has that Daniel is actually quite attracted to, though he doesn't maybe see it that way. 9:52 Wes: Yeah, his motive. Right. So I said, you know, getting rich. He's focused on getting rich. And yet there's another motive that goes beyond that, and that is, you know, I've called it envy. So these are the lines from the movie where his brother says no. He says to his brother or his supposed brother, are you envious? Do you get envious? And this, by the way, is one of the. Maybe the only time we try to see him confide in someone or get them to confide in him. So there's almost none of that in his life. And then Henry says, I don't think so, no. And then Daniel says, I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people. Henry says, that part of me is gone. And then he says, work and not succeeding. All my failures have left me. And then Daniel says, I just don't. I just don't care. And he says, there's times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money so I can get away from everyone. What'll you do about your boy? I don't know. Maybe it'll change. Maybe it'll change 10:57 Erin: Daniel Plainview. We have to do that. 10:59 Wes: Maybe. Yeah. I don't know how to. 11:01 Erin: I'm an oil man. 11:03 Wes: There you go. That's great. That's a great impersonation. 11:06 Erin: I do so many lines from this movie. He completely failed to alert me to the recent panic in our economy. 11:17 Wes: That's great. So there's that central. So he knows, right. He's not someone who doesn't know that part of himself, that envious part of himself. Now, one might say, well, what he really envies in others is the capacity to connect. It's actually capacity for some sort of community. I think that is the part that he doesn't quite know about himself. But otherwise he's very conscious of his envy. And he has a certain project which is to dominate people because he hates them and to be able to maintain some sort of distance from them. And, yeah, as you're pointing out, he uses the idea of community to sell himself. And he sees this little boy that he's adopted as just a means to an end. But it's not entirely cynical. I think we get hints of the fact that this relationship, it's a real relationship in the end, he doesn't fully connect with hw. His temperamental hatred overcomes that connection in part because in a way, his pride is injured by HW's injury. He can't deal with the fact of that injury. And that's a pivotal moment in the movie where any redemptive possibility in that relationship is lost at the very moment that he's hitting oil kills off the redemptive possibility of that relationship with hw. But the other important thing that you're pointing to, I think, is that he puts himself in the place of being someone who can provide for a community. Right. So he's in Little Boston, Right? There's no bread. Let's look at his speech real quick. To my mind, it's an abomination to consider that any man, woman or child in this magnificent country of ours should have to look upon a loaf of bread as a luxury. We're going to dig water wells here, and water wells means irrigation. Irrigation means cultivation. We're going to raise. Raise crops here where before it just simply wasn't possible. You're going to have more grain than you know what to do with. All right, so this looks a lot like Jesus, you know, one of Jesus's miracles. And he's put himself into direct conflict with Eli here. Eli was supposed to do the blessing, wanted to do the blessing. And Daniel stepped into his place and said, look, my material providence is better than your spiritual providence. It's part and parcel of the envy and the competition that's in him. He can't have Eli being the one who's going to provide in some way for these people. He's got to be the one. Now it puts him in a kind of constructive position with regard to others and he does have that in him. When he says there's going to be no more hitting for Mary, he has certain constructive impulses that are evident here, but they all seem to get co opted by envy. Anyway, I'm not sure if I'm joining this up in the end. I forget where you got at the end of your comment. 14:05 Erin: The idea of his ultimate desire for connection or his reliance on people ultimately. 14:09 Wes: Okay, yes. So he's also relying on people, which is something he hates and doesn't really want to do. But he's got to have workers. 14:17 Erin: Yeah. And he has to use other people's land because he doesn't have any. I mean, I think this is central too to the ambivalence within oil itself as a symbol. I'm interested in Daniel and Eli as oppositional in terms of this idea of what you earn and what's just given to you. Things we, we do and don't earn. And I think Daniel is obsessed with what you earn, that is with like acquisition on the basis of skill, of not having anything and then getting it. Whereas Eli is interested in the idea of a gift. You know, he's the faith healer. He's interested in faith, period, which is about grace, which is fundamentally something that you don't earn. He is a pastor and therefore a maker of people to join this faith family. You know, the faith is conceived of as a, as a family and he can make more family members. Daniel believes that he gets his worth out of earning things and doing things himself. Therefore that makes him better than other people who might just luck into things or just inherit things, you know, things that we can inherit our family or land or faith or whatever. And I think this is oil too. Like oil has this duality to it where it's about. It's certainly on the one hand about luck and you can strike oil. Some people strike it, some people don't. Some people have the gift. Right. Some people have oil underneath their land like the Sundays do, and some people don't. But we also get the idea that some places that have oil don't know how to get at it. Right. And Daniel himself introduces this idea, you know, okay, oh, you have oil here. Well, how are you going to get it? You know, it's. It's in the ground. How are you going to get it out of the ground? He repeatedly asked this question. So you can have this as a gift, but it's also about strategy about acquiring that oil, about getting it out of the ground, about management and managing of the people that own. You know, if you don't believe in land as a representative of a kind of a legacy or an investment in a place or being a part of a community, which I think land all represents, then part of your skill and your management and your acquisition of the oil is about convincing somebody to lease you their land. So I think that kind of duality is inherent in the acquisition of the oil itself. Right. You can't just, you have this deposit and you may know it's there, but you still can't get at it because you don't have the resources to do so. Insofar as we can say you either have oil or you don't. It's like Eli, right? You either have faith or you don't. You either have the gift to heal or you don't. But insofar as you can say that, you can either get at it or you can't. It's like Daniel in that you need the skill, the resources kind of stored up over year. Right. Because he uses the silver money ultimately to get into oil too. So it's like this long planned out, long thought out kind of strategy about being able to even have the resources to think about getting the oil out of the ground. 17:14 Wes: Yeah. But will God look favorably upon his offering? Anyway, we'll get to Cain and Abel later, but I thought a bit about Treasure of the Sierra Madre as well, and I think it's a good maybe compare and contrast for his particular motive. Because it sounds like you're pointing to the sort of industriousness in his character. Is that right? 17:37 Erin: Okay. 17:38 Wes: All right. So the hard work and that. So it had me thinking about Howard's speech in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. And really he's trying to convince the other two. He's trying to get them worked up about going on an expedition, but he's doing that by saying all the wrong things. Saying how gold makes men crazy and people blow one fortune trying to find another. And prospecting is like gambling. It's physically dangerous. If you do it alone, it's too lonely. But if you do it with others, it creates this kind of paranoia and these violent rifts between people. And that's his elevator pitch. And it gets the others excited. What they're excited by is that it is in a way like gambling in one sense, because you can go from nothing to everything very, very quickly. And as you point out, it involves an element of luck. But on the other hand, it's not just abstract, like tossing a coin or something. It's not abstract and it doesn't involve no work. You get to do work and you get to do physical work. And to be in contact with the land and all of that stuff. There's almost a wholesome element to it. If it weren't for the fact that it's exploitation of the land and trying to scoop out the resources that are in the land. So I think in Treasure of the Sierra Madre there's something about the promise of this highly risky contact with both the physical world and the social world, right? So mining is physically dangerous and then there's the danger of paranoia. So there's social risk that you put yourself in this extremely risky situation and then if you succeed, you transcend those worlds. As with Daniel, you don't have to be around people or you're in a position where you have power over them and can control them. And the same thing with physical work. You wouldn't have to necessarily do any physical work anymore. And there's kind of an abstractness in the power that comes with being rich. So it's a physical project. It's not like the boredom of office job or even being a stockbroker. I guess being a stockbroker is exciting, but it's not the same physically risky thing. But you get to acquire riches without the tedium that necessarily the tediousness involved. So there's that again, that element of the excitement of gambling. But with Daniel I don't see much of anything of that. With him it's almost like self punishment from the very beginning. That's the kind of vibe I get from him. He's self hating and self punishing. It's grueling. He's doing it. There's no exciting prospect or fantasy that's leading him on except for domination of others and revenge against others and envy and all that stuff. And the point isn't even necessarily to get over his envy. It's just to deepen it. As I said, it's kind of to drill down into it. To drill down into his own character and to make it more and more what it is. More and more bitter, more and more empty. And that's what you get. Even his mansion in the end, right? That's just a place of squalor. You can't imagine him really enjoying the luxuries that go along with being rich. And he's at the saloon with Henry. There's no indication that he's even interested in women or any of the things that money might help him get. The only thing that seems to interest him is the grueling, laborious project of getting there. So now the question is that you have me thinking about. Yeah. How does that compare or contrast to industriousness where people are just. They work hard because, I mean, there are many different reasons. Obviously, they could do that. They might work hard just simply because they love the work. They might work hard because they're ambitious or because it alleviates anxiety for many, many different reasons. But. But in his case, I'd link it, again to envy. It's definitely industriousness, but it's tainted with that, I guess, in my view. 21:59 Erin: I know we've talked about this in the Treasure of the Sierra Madre episode as well, but you've gotten me thinking about this interesting duality inherent in any kind of treasure seeking, in which we might say that there's a strange conversion to work inherent in the mechanism of the real work, the reality of the work which was undertaken to escape work. So if that makes any sense. Right. So the fantasy is you strike it rich, you never have to work again. What happens is you have to work so hard to get the means by which you never have to work again, that what might end up happening is you're converted to the desire for work. Suddenly having the riches and not knowing what to do with yourself is a far scarier prospect than always having another mountain to climb and, you know, something to dig up or. Right. So I think that what happens over the course of this. Because they are two incredibly grue, both gold and oil are incredibly grueling and dangerous and difficult things to acquire. I think what happens is you then get people becoming addicted to the chase, to finding the deposit somewhere new, to the excitement of what that means, and also to the satisfaction of the work itself, which then renders the fruit of that labor beside the point or even ultimately destructive. Because once you are In a life of leisure, you have no way of exercising that whatever. I mean, if it's an addiction, it's a sort of positive one. I suppose you could become a workaholic or whatever, right? But that addiction may be to something like excitement and pride in being able to accomplish something. You know, I should say that during the filming of There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson watched Treasure of the Sierra Madre every night. You know, so it was constantly on his mind. I think the differences here. Okay, so I've already kind of maybe made this distinction, right? But oil is newer. Oil is about sort of. We've reached a certain point in the Industrial revolution where the acquisition of oil is occurring in tandem with the car and various other things that make its acquisition more. I mean, it was always sort of useful, right? And it was always around, but particularly pertinent. And so it's a sort of a. Later. We're talking about drilling in this film. In a continent which has already been filled up. Gold is kind of, you know, you go into the middle of nowhere or you try to find the places that people haven't been already to try and get the gold. But the initial gold rush was at a very early stage in Western expansion, before all of those deposits were extracted and there was nothing left. Oil is required by and also demands more engagement with society, I think, than gold does. Gold panning is technically something you could do by yourself, right? I mean, you get a higher return if you have a group of guys, as they do in Treasure of Sierra Madre, than you do if you just by yourself in a river. But you could technically do it by yourself. And it is something which can be dangerous and difficult if you're going off by yourself into the wilderness to do it. But it doesn't require, I think, an infrastructure the way the oil industry does, which, again, is that something that kind of is necessitating a community. So the work for Daniel is about scratching, I think, two kinds of itches. The oil work is both about doing something really difficult and physically demanding, and also getting to cheat other people, basically getting to manipulate them, like getting back at people. So the engagement with society that oil is necessitating is distasteful to him, but it's also giving him an outlet to get out his anger and aggression against people with these tactics of manipulation and, you know, selling. Selling the land out from under. Under people's feet and taking something right from under their nose. That is a big part of the appeal for him as well, that kind of engagement, something like revenge Maybe, yeah. 25:54 Wes: I think there's something about, in particular about the subterranean element here that is attractive to him. It starts out with silver and then moves on to oil. And I think we know why you can't do the milkshake trick with silver. His envy. He wants to take things away from people. He doesn't want them to have it. That's part of the envy. And there's something really neat about oil, which is drainage. You don't actually have to be right above the oil deposit in order to get at the oil deposit. So you can stick your straw right into someone else's milkshake and drain it without them even knowing it. And then they find out that they've been depleted after that. That is a perfect picture of a very sneaky kind of envy where you. It's almost something vampiric about it where you suck someone dry without them knowing it. And then when they're finally aware of it, yeah, they're desiccated, they're dry. And they don't have what's theirs. He has what's theirs. So, yeah, there's something in particular about going underground. And something that's liquid again, that can be drained out from another is almost as if it were their blood. That's really important. 27:21 Erin: That helps me understand the difference really well. Because I think ultimately in Sierra Madre, you know, the idea of management there of the gold is really about self management. I think it's. It's about, like, how do you deal with the goal? I mean, you know, there's this envy and this paranoia that comes with it. But I think ultimately what that comes down to is like controlling your own mind so that you don't get out of control and have that mind, that paranoid mind affect, you know, the actual state of things. Whereas this is a very different. This is much more inherently about other people's minds or control of other people in this envious way that you're describing, which is, I think, very different from personal greed and the desire to sort of gather to oneself everything that is out there in the world. Right. This is about reaching out and taking from other people. You know, I think it's also about stealing from people in this. I love this way that you're describing of like sucking their blood. It's very similar, I think, to the dynamic of water in Chinatown as well, where. Where we have this. You're stealing the future from people too. You know, you're. You're controlling the future. And I think oil is very much, very much functioning in the same way. Oil is about what. It's about finding it and then putting in your car and driving to the next destination where you can find more oil, you know, so there's sort of like a perpetual motion machine element to extends, I think, in kind of two directions. It's about the past because it's about vast deposits of decayed creatures millions of years old. But it's also. It's finite and it's consumable, but it's sort of abundant with possibility because it could be put to so many different uses. I think water. Water sort of works in the same way where it has that duality. It's. It's sort of a finite resource in a way, because it's consumable and it could become tainted and stuff like that. But it's also sort of an infinite ecosystem. So it seems like Daniel's domination is both personal and general over people. He's draining the oil from your particular land that you are trying to sell in order to humiliate you. And he is also taking all the oil for himself in a way that is symbolic of sort of an entire community or even a country's future. So he gets to play God in this way that is about more than like, personal vendettas. It's like a vendetta against all of. All of creation. Just as he doesn't. He's not interested in women because. Because he's not interested in. In creation that he hasn't stolen. Right. Or he's not interested in water and blood. 30:09 Wes: Right. Well, the envy, the envy, is that there are many forms of envy that would come along with that. Right? The envy of her procreative ability and the fact that she, as a woman, would have something that he wants that is always going to be outside of him, even if he's in relation to it. He needs to be more than in a relationship. He needs to suck it out, suck out the essence and keep it for himself. That's not related, that's not relational. 30:39 Erin: You're making me like him a lot less than I did going into this. Not that I liked him, but you know what I mean? Like, I thought, you know, there's something. Something to admire about him. 30:49 Wes: Well, that's a good question. I mean, is there anything that one might admire in the. In the manner that, you know, you would admire a tragic hero for all his villainous. Some of them are villainous, I guess. So Some tragic heroes you might. You might admire for their villainous traits or for their other flaws, because there's supposedly some element of greatness to them. And then the question is, is there an element of greatness here and is there something tragic about it? And I think the initial comment I made about the tragic thing here is it's a little bit oblique to that in a way. Why is that? I don't know. Do you have something to say about that? Yeah. Is this tragic? Is he great? 31:29 Erin: You know, my idea is he's missing half of himself and Eli is missing the other half. Right. Together they would be one perfect person. Maybe, I don't know. But the half of him that he has is somehow less distasteful to me than the half that Eli has, you know, because he's so controlled. I mean, that starts to slip with the whiskey drinking. Right. But he is so much in control and he has so many skills and such a. Such a work ethic. I mean, he does such a heroic thing at the beginning of the movie, dragging himself all the way into town from this mine that he was just working by himself. I can't watch that and not think every time, even though I know what's going to happen to him. Like, wow, this is a spectacular person. 32:15 Wes: Yeah. 32:15 Erin: That takes so much. What does it take? I don't know, it takes so much discipline or something. What's the right word for that? It's just skill. I just keep coming back to skill. 32:24 Wes: Well, there's industriousness and there's hard work and again the willingness to sacrifice his body and just the sheer amount of physical exertion involved. But again, I think of this partly in terms of self punishment and the desire to punish others. And then also I haven't been able to articulate it, but there's something doesn't rise to the level of tragic hero in this. Is there a greatness? Yeah, it's hard for me to want to say that there's something great about him. 32:57 Erin: Well, I think ultimately his. He's small minded in ways that I think you've articulated well. You know, all of this. If there is greatness there, it's put to such warped and twisted and small minded ends. 33:08 Wes: Yeah. One might say of someone, they had huge ambitions, but there was hubris or something like that. And his ambitions in a way are huge, but they're also not. They're very narrow. 33:21 Erin: Well, he wins in the end, but he, you know, so he doesn't have huge ambitions which are. Then, you know, usually the second half of that sentence would be but he failed. But he didn't fail. So it's, it's more about the manner that he went about acquiring and it's. Though oil, I think, has this huge symbolic weight to it. What his actions are actually about is going family by family, strategically across the area that he wants to, and getting these innocent or naive farm people who don't know about this industry, who are just. Just uninformed, to sign their land away to him. Right. And that, I think there's an ugliness in that. Like it takes industry to go. To go, you know, family by family to do that. But ultimately, yeah, it's a. It's a bit of an ugly thing. And we discover over the course of the, you know, the first third of the film what a liar he is and how manipulative he has to be to do this effectively. So it sort of like requires selling his soul in a thousand tiny little ways every day. In the end, he gets everything, I mean, everything according to a certain standard of fantasy. 34:31 Wes: Brings me back to the contrast you're making between oil and water. Because water is sort of a paradigmatic example of something that belongs in common to the community and has to be managed at that level. And it's elemental, it's necessary to life. Right. And it's one of the ancient elements, according to the ancients, one of the basic building blocks of the universe. Oil, on the other hand, is not that, unless you compared it to the element fire. Right. Aristotle puzzles over the pre Socratics and their elements because where do you get motion from? Where do you get force from? It's not a very dynamic picture of the world. Unless you say that fire does that. And if oil is of course, what does that, it lights these fires that can run these machines and. And produce ultimately all sorts of technology and really transform the world. But it's not necessary as such to life. It's really techne. It really is technology and it amplifies and transforms life in these radical ways. So when he takes away, what he does is he provides water to the community. Again, he's sort of like a Jesus stand in. In that sense. He really does these things for the community. He provides for the communal, the material aspects of the communal good, which he wants to supplant the spiritual aspects altogether. He wants them to eclipse the spiritual aspects. But in doing that, that's not what interests him. He's not interested in necessarily taking that stuff away from people and maybe immiserating them or pauperizing them. Exactly. He wants this particular stuff. He's going to prevent them from being rich. He's going to take away that possibility from them, he's going to take away any possibility of them competing with him, of being rivals. But he doesn't necessarily just want to kill them off entirely, as far as I can tell. And then again, the thing that he's interested in, this substance, you could argue this is another thing that should be part of the common good. It should be a communal possession, maybe the way it is in some Middle Eastern countries, But in this case, it's just, does your land happen to have it? Okay, you're lucky you're rich now or you don't have it, you're not lucky, you're not rich. And the whole milkshake and straw thing points to this idea that, well, does it really matter that it's under someone else's land? Is this anyone's in particular if it can be accessed from over here? It points to this weirdness of not treating it as maybe a communal possession, given all the potential that it has to not only transform an individual person's life in the sense of making them rich, but in the sense that it's going to transform the world. It's going to radically transform the world. So that's power that he's at. He's not getting at the good, but he's getting at power. 37:37 Erin: Yeah. You have me thinking about luck and what luck would mean under these circumstances. Because I wonder if there's a distinction we can make then between the gift of oil and the luck of. Or a certain kind of luck. I mean, to me, you're lucky if you can actually make use of it. Lucky would be you have land that has oil under it and a derrick falls from the sky, and you have a way of getting it out right? Instead, I think the idea of the gift is like, okay, you have this land and you may have oil, but you may not know how to what to do with it. Luck is something which is. Which is sort of quick activating. It's something which is a true fluke that comes with a reward instantly. You know, a gift is something that has to be. It's just something you're given and you just have to. You then have to do something with it. You know, it's like you're given a Lego set and then you have to put it together. Or gift is your family. You're born into a family, but you have to tend to that. You have to. You have to nurture those relationships. You can't just say, I mean, to a certain extent you can. That's the whole mother thing, right? To a certain extent, you could say I'll. I could do whatever I want and I'll still have a mother. That's true. But you can't actually, with most relationships in the family, you can't treat people however you want and then. Or like, try to kill them or shoot them in the head. Okay, he's not really family, but you can't. You can. You can't do that. And then. And then still expect that gift to be something which will give you something. I don't know if that's right, because my idea of Eli is of someone who, in theory, he's a faith healer, which is something to me and probably more to you is something suspect. Right. But if he has this gift, he has to control it properly and use it properly and give it the proper. Whatever you might call it. Cultivation seems like the wrong word, but something. He needs a control. And ultimately what we find by the end of the film is that he's. He doesn't have that ability to control the gift. Right. He squanders the gift. And that's why he's. What's the word? It seems like he's. He's tried to become, you know, a radio personality and one of the. One of these like Aimee Semple McPherson kind of figures who uses this in a mass media kind of way and then. But has no self control and then destroys himself. 40:01 Wes: Well, he lacks the discipline that Daniel has. So maybe that's the point where we admire Daniel and we definitely don't admire Eli. Although it's not apparent in the beginning, it only becomes apparent in the end, I think how lacking in discipline he is and how susceptible he is to temptation and even lacking in integrity in the end, where he's gonna renounce God in order to get some money. But is that what you were getting at? 40:30 Erin: Yeah, yeah. And admiring Daniel, to go back to that. I mean, I think I also. I think it's this yearning spirit to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Right. You get back onto the ship and you go back out even after you just got home, after, you know, being away for 20 years. There's something about that that I really love. That's maybe what I admire in Daniel, and that's what makes the ending so tragic, is that he's achieved a level of success that means that he can no longer go out and do the striving and do the work. But that love of work, even if what the work constitutes sometimes is pretty ugly, the physical components of it and those which require strategy, that are not about manipulation and that labor and the desire to keep laboring and keep working at something. I mean, there's a very good chance. I'm also attracted to the self punishment element of that. But there's something, I think that. Which is very admirable in that like you're never. You're never just resting on what you have. You're never just self contented and lazy. That drive, I think is what I admire in Daniel. 41:38 Wes: Yeah, I think the way I look at his industriousness and discipline. There's not a big dream there. There's not a big ambition. Because the ambition is just to want to get away from people. I mean, there's not even like an evil ambition. I'm going to take over the world and do evil things. And he's definitely not a do gooder. I'm going to do all kinds of good things. If I can do this or I'm going to. Once I have all this money, I'm going to. What does he say in Treasure of the Sierra Madre about dames? 42:12 Erin: Get the dames. Rings on the fingers of swell dame. 42:17 Wes: Swell dames. Yeah. So there's not even some sort of fantasy of pleasure seeking or love or. There's only one little narrow focus. So like when he gets the mansion, I mean, I think he talks to his brother at one point about the house. What does he say about that? Or talks to Henry about it. We get the sense that there might be some sort of ambition to have a nice house. Right. So there's the house in Fond du Lac that John Hollister built. Do you remember it? I thought as a boy that the most. It was the most beautiful house I'd ever seen and wanted it. I wanted to live in it and eat in it and clean it. And even as a boy I wanted to have children to run around in it. And then Henry says, so there's a real. Right. That's an aspiration. That's the aspiration he has as a boy. He doesn't have that aspiration anymore. And Henry says, you can have anything you'd like now, Daniel, and you should. Where are you going to build it? Then? He said, here maybe near the ocean. Would you make it look like that house? I think if I saw that house now, it'd make me sick. And then Henry goes into wanting to get, you know, get some women. And then they have that unpleasant time. Well, Henry's enjoying himself with the ladies, but Daniel is not. And then Henry is going to have a really bad time. Shortly after that, he's going to pay for his sins. But anyway. But. Yeah, but my point here is that there's no. That kind of aspiration is actually gone. One might think that that would be the typical kind of motivation behind all this industriousness and discipline. Even if there's workaholism and love of the work itself. And in a way, I don't. Again, because of the self punishment aspect and just his general character, I don't get that feeling of, oh, he loves the work. And I just love being outside and in contact with mother Nature. 44:11 Erin: Oh, I think he does. 44:13 Wes: He wants to. But I think he envies Mother Nature as well. He wants to take. He wants to exploit nature and take what's in it. Yeah. 44:23 Erin: Yes. No, I'm just. Yeah. I don't think he. I don't think he loves Mother Nature. I think he gets excited by the oil coming in. I think there is. I see the love of the work. I see it when they go on the Sunday property. 44:35 Wes: But it's to me, it's like addictive, hateful. It's like it's a fulfillment of hate. Like. 44:40 Erin: Yeah, well, you're revealing to me. You're revealing to me why I. Why I think in a way he's so noble is because there is no. 44:48 Wes: His motives are very. 44:50 Erin: His motives are pure. Exactly, exactly. In that there is no motivation. The motivation is more work. Like, there's no pleasure. That. That seems to me to be the purest thing of all. In other words, I'm not doing this so that I can be rich. I'm not doing this so that I could have a nice house. I'm not doing this so that I'm going to get a lot of pleasure from it. I'm. I'm doing it. And then when I'm done doing it, I'm gonna do it again and I'm gonna do more. Just like I said with the oil thing. That's what oil is about. Oil is about getting more oil. Oil is about finding more oil. Even the silver he gets in an oily way. He uses the silver to get to the oil. Silver and gold are ends in and of themselves, as we've talked about in the Sierra Madre episode. You know, it's about putting rings on your fingers, showing how much wealth you have in silver and gold. It's about wealth and greed itself. Oil is about working to get more oil. Oil is about going somewhere. You're always going, going, going. And that is. That is very interesting to me that there is no end. 45:49 Wes: Yeah, that's. Yeah, well, Put. I mean, I think the way I would put it is he. He's an empty person. And there's a way in which he's not. He's not just trying to fill himself up, right? He's not just trying to take what's in the earth and put it inside him in some way psychologically. He's just trying to expand his emptiness over everything else. He's trying to create emptiness in the earth by removing the oil. He's trying to be above others and away from others. So to create all this negative space that is his psyche, to push it out into the world as much as possible. 46:25 Erin: You have me thinking about the crisscross at the heart of Christianity or any religion in which there is a promised afterlife. Right. That's the reward, in a way. I mean, it always seemed to me as a kid, heaven shouldn't exist because your motives are always going to be tainted, you know? So Daniel reminds me of that, maybe that. That impulse in myself to be suspicious of heaven. So the idea is, the way you get out of that is that you're doing something for the people around you, hopefully. Now Daniel isn't doing that. He's manipulating them. But he has HW to do things with and for. And he has this promise. I mean, maybe it's just. Ultimately, it's just about being a big man and getting other people to admire him as they. As he thinks they should so that he could give out the. You know, he can irrigate the land and give out the bread. But so long as he had this relationship with H.W. he had a way. There was not emptiness. At least he's showing the kid how to do it, too. So he's doing something for someone else, helping them in some way, even if it's just educating them in this, yeah, complicated and interesting kind of knowledge. 47:32 Wes: So, yeah, maybe let's start with that relationship in part two, then. That relationship. His relationship with Eli. Yeah. That relationship in particular has represented a possibility for redemption that doesn't come to fruition. 47:47 Erin: Okay, so we'll talk about Daniel's relationship with H.W. and Eli and Henry in part two. Thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. 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