Guy Beres

It’s probably high time that Daniel Day-Lewis bagged himself another Best Actor Oscar, but the Irish actor’s performance is not just the only thing going for this inspired allegory of a film from Paul Thomas Anderson. There Will Be Blood is pleasingly unconventional in a number of ways. The opening sequence, in which a seemingly interminable time passes without a single word being spoken, is adventurous and in its own strange way, breathtaking. The same can be said for Jonny Greenwood’s jarring score, which positively infests the movie, bringing a lot of character and also some machine-like brutality to events as they unfold. The score infuses an air of modernity within the film, which otherwise revolves around bit-part characters, small towns, religious nutters, and oil companies lead by gregarious thugs.

The story does not flow in a way that is normally expressed in film. The importance of the progression of the story runs a distant second to a focus on the antics of Day-Lewis’ character, Daniel Plainview. It will hardly surprise anyone, even those unfamiliar with the basic premise of the film that Plainview is a quintessential capitalist brute, putting his pursuit of oil wealth before everyone and everything else. He hates people and is individualistic to a harsh extreme. He is obsessive, immoral, and yet charming. He has more than just a slight resemblance to Day-Lewis’ other recent portrayal of a charismatic villain, Bill the Butcher from Gangs of New York. There are moments in this film where the comic mania of Bill the Butcher seeps through into Daniel Plainview’s character here, and although it probably takes away from Day-Lewis’ performance somewhat, you will probably enjoy it too much to care. Perhaps the genius in his performance is the fact that he really does make you empathise with Plainview. Daniel Plainview is obnoxious and ghastly, and does some horrific things, but in some ways his virtues are greater than those of practically all other people portrayed in the film. He is terrible, and yet he is a paragon. Plainview is a fictional manifestation of the greed motive as encouraged by the modern economic world.

Personally I wouldn’t mind soaking up this film again. It’s worth seeing twice - not just for the story, and not even just for Day-Lewis masterfully putting on his evil face. The sounds and the imagery of There Will Be Blood are what sets the film apart as something quite interesting and quite different to today’s mainstream cinematic fare. Atonement was perhaps a more conventionally good film than this one, but if you want to see something a bit different and marvelous in its own strange way, you could do a lot worse than going to see There Will Be Blood.

It has been quite interesting to observe the way the mainstream media has portrayed the ructions in financial markets that are being felt across the world. Over here in the UK, I swear I have seen the same German stock trader splashed on the front page of two different newspapers today, with a slightly different pained grimace on his face in each instance. Each photograph featured, of course, a conveniently placed graph on a screen in the background, showing a jagged line thrusting frighteningly downwards towards a sub-zero abyss (in reality, a drop of 5-10%). Some of the newspapers have gone positively apocalyptic with their treatment of the crisis. Witness The Independent’s front page today: 

Of course, for sheer hysteria, you can’t really go past this Google Ad hosted by Fairfax, predicting the demise of the United States in 2008: 

While it is a slightly disturbing and concerning time to be a shareholder (e.g. probably most of us in Australia with some form of superannuation), it goes without saying that some of the mainstream media outlets are engaging in irresponsible hyperbole, and unnecessarily whipping up fear about the global economy. As Paul Xiradis from Ausbil Dexia comments in this article, what is primarily driving the purges of stocks is fear. Animal instincts have well and truly kicked in. The average trader/punter is not in the position to make a truly learned assessment of whether the global economy is about to tank in a big way, or whether this is just a phase. Quite to the contrary, what we are seeing with the global markets is arguably a mass of instinctual reactions to what is being reported and regurgitated in the media, rather than a considered assessment about how the global economy is trending in the long-term.

One thing, of course, is guaranteed; when the price of the world’s stocks has dropped just low enough, money will return to the markets in a rampaging flood. The FTSE is already showing signs of this reactive trend back up, with a late rally today. It is pretty much certain that if fear is the primary force responsible for the market results over the last few days, than greed will be the force that fuels a restoration of relative stability. Once the smoke has cleared from the cinema that seemed at one stage to be burning to the ground, we’ll all notice a few (charred) fat bastards sitting up the back and waiting for the movie to resume, just so they can get their money’s worth out of the exercise.It’s quite frankly strange and disturbing that the world should rely so much on greed to ensure that global financial markets are stable in short-term timeframes, but I suppose that is modern day, loosely regulated capitalism for you.