Another week, some more of Flats' dirty commentary.
The State of America Part IV: There Will Be Blood
It is 1903. You are 200 feet in the ground. Your pit is eight feet by eight feet, the only light is coming from the opening far above your head. You’ve found oil, its black death viscosity leaking through the ground: up to your ankles, knees, waist. Gurgling up from the ocean below your feet as buckets descend from the glimmering slicked mouth of the hole. Dip, fill, hoist, dip, fill, hoist. Three buckets at a time. You are peering up into the scarce light as the oil filled pails ascend to be emptied and returned, heavy black puddles falling down into your face, mouth, nose, ears. This is the oil pit. Something terrible is about to happen.
But ah, when it reaches the light… Shimmering gold in the afternoon’s sun. The instant power it brings is dizzying. Drip, drop, money in the bank, roads on the ground, schools in the town, planes in the air, pipelines to the sea. Money. All from nothing. A hole, a deep pit with hell in its veins.
Seeing There Will Be Blood for the soundtrack alone is worth the price of admission. Eerie, haunting, tense and terrifying, the mechanical back beat thumping of the dinosaur oil heads churning the ground inside out against the horrifying tension of the fiddle string at its absolute breaking point, the feeling of dread is unavoidable in the claustrophobically tight, dark, slicked out pits.
Daniel Day Lewis as Daniel Plainview is unstoppable, burning with greed, the black of the oil mixed into his blood, the stains it leaves on his teeth are frighteningly perfect. The young preacher, Eli Sunday, Plainview’s antichrist, mocks up the appearance of good versus evil, until, of course, there is no good left for the oil-greed to consume. The dust and dirt road town preacher channeling God through his hands and abolishing demons with whispering screams puts on a “god damn helluva show.”
And the oil-greed is all consuming. No one is safe once its power has touched you, it will suck you in like your favorite, most feared poison, lift you to the status of Bush’s bosses, and when it runs dry, leave you whimpering in the hellacious pits of a thousand year holy war.
