There Will Be Blood's Title
Understanding Director Paul Thomas Anderson's Latest Film Title
Mar 19, 2008
The meaning behind the title of the Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 film There Will Be Blood is immediately elusive. The movie is not particularly violent nor does it hold an impressive body count by modern standards. So why the title?
Most obviously, the title equates blood with the literal subject of the film: oil. In an essentially apolitical historical epic, this association may be a subtle way for filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson to take a modern political stance without tainting his actual film with contemporary issues. A complementary interpretation is that the title stresses the inevitability of the action. Because there is oil, because there is capitalism and evangelicalism, because of Daniel Plainview and everything that takes place in the movie; the finale WILL be bloody. It is a powerful deterministic statement on Anderson’s part, about the consequences of greed.
A Biblical Reference
There Will Be Blood most nearly quotes from Exodus 7:19, as God relates his plan to Moses, “that there may be blood throughout all the land of Egypt.” God asks Moses to plead to the Pharaoh for the Israelis’ freedom, but also intends to make the Pharaoh refuse, so that he will have an excuse to strike down against Egypt. Though traditionally destruction is viewed as a last resort means to an end, God’s plan seeks destruction for its own sake. This association may be an indictment of Plainview as a sociopath who desires the death everyone around him. More intricately, God’s lust for destruction is analogous to Plainview’s lust for money; desire for something which should be a means, not an end, but which Plainview values above all else.
An Allusion to The Shining
Anderson has stated that his film is a horror movie, and in that context, the title is one of various allusions to Kubrick’s The Shining. Instinctively, the image There Will Be Blood’s title brings most to mind is the famous bloody elevator from Kubrick’s masterpiece. The first shot of Anderson’s film is an ominous landscape, accompanied by the soundtrack’s violently dissonant strings; much the same way The Shining’s opening is staged. And Daniel Day-Lewis’s almost comically over-the-top explosion at the film’s finale is in many ways reminiscent of Jack Nicholson’s cartoonishly malevolent performance in Kubrick’s film. By using his title, among other techniques, to compare his film with a horror classic, Anderson manages to make a statement about the horrifying and evil nature of the people populating his film.
