Needed Time

Went and saw There Will Be Blood this afternoon. Tonight I will see No Country for Old Men. Daniel Day Lewis fully deserved his Oscar, and the remarkable young actor who portrays Eli the Creepy Christian was quite good as well. Yes, it was very well acted, a professional quality film with all the fascination of a train wreck.

It is, of course, a propaganda film. We are not always offered crude bludgeoning by the left, or stultifying preachment, the most frequent fare on the great people’s buffet of belief. The meat and potatoes succeed on their own terms in the task of feeding the flock. But with There Will Be Blood we are treated to a real gourmet offering from the propaganda menu.

The beauty of There Will Be Blood is its excellence, the verisimilitude of the socialist alternative universe. We recognize where we are by the villains: a venture capitalist, an Elmer Gantry charlatan, and America. Yes, Upton Sinclair wrote the prototype, the film is based on his novel “Oil.” Our own generation has perfected the tract, with great subtlety and finesse.

Daniel, the protagonist, is the Darwinian independent oilman, lean and hungry, a bestial and ruthless capitalist. We also see his competitors, alpha males, all slick and porcine plutocrats, the big oil syndicate. So much for socialism’s public enemy number one, free enterprise. Meet public enemy number two, Christianity, symbolized by Eli the Creepy Christian. Very nicely done, though, as the actor has a fresh face, a very quiet and nuanced style of delivering his lines. We watch Eli preach to the stolid volk of the “Church of the Third Revelation,” escalating from insinuating intimacy to orgasmic hysteria in such a manner that he could be deluded but sincere, or manipulative and cunning. Okay, you guessed it right, the little punk is a hypocrite of course.

Oh, and the final enemy is of course America, seen in the dirt faced ignorant brethren who live in the town, the glum and downtrodden workers on the oil rigs, the submissive, red knuckled farm wives and abused daughters of the Christian congregation.

Yep. America, land of rapacious appetites, dull-eyed hillbilly snake handlers and beef eating robber barons. There Will Be Blood serves it up steaming hot.