Film Review - There Will Be Blood

Everybody, soon or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences.

Robert Louis Stevenson.








There are moments in human history where you an see the end of one age and the start of another.

In Odinism their exists the concept of the mystical moment when a higher form is born, a moment of qualitative change and punctuated equilibrium.

That concept is expressed by the rune Dagaz, and it is the rune of dialectical change.

The Film 'There Will Be Blood' is an elegaic epic, the like of which rarely comes along in these days of PC cinema and chick flicks.

The film depicts such a moment of change, the transition from the old world to a new world.

Yet this momentous process of civilisational change began as it always did with one man. True individualsts like Daniel Plainview, alone in the bowels of mountains working deep within dark, hand hewn mines drenched in sweat and lit only by a single candle as he struck against the rocks with their picks as they sought the hidden seams of gold and oil in that subterannean world.

One palm blistering second at a time.

One stiff minute after another stiff minute.

Painful hour after hour.

Back breaking day after day.

Agonising week after week.

Silent month after month.

Slow year after year spent alone at the pit face in the hot, musty darkness seeking to tap a ripe vein swollen with sweet crude oil, seeking that sudden surrendering of the earth to the drill in a shuddering, frenzied moment of penetration that sends oil and water erupting from the earth and gushing forth into the daylight in a fountain as black as midnight.

Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview deserved the oscar for best actor, and though the performance of Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh as the psycho in No Country For Old Men deserved best supporting actor, the best supporting actor performance should also have gone to Paul Dano as Paul / Eli Sunday or Dillon Freasier as young H.W. Plainview.

The scene where Eli Sunday exorcises the devil from an arthritic old woman is brilliant. It is both shocking and moving.

Daniel Plainview is the sort of man who builds nations. From the first scenes in the film that for fifteen minutes are completely silent where we meet the character as he is slaving away on his own in the middle of a mine looking for gold to where he crawls with a broken leg through the wilderness to the mining camp to sell his mined gold - we get to know a man who has a destiny and a will to power that cannot be checked.

The film has scene after scene of such simple beauty.

One scene is Daniel and his step son H.W driving a car in the desert along the railway tracks of the Old West, the emptiness of the landscape and snow capped mountains stretching into the distance behind them as dust clouds tumble and roll from the wheels, then they suddenly pull into a small town of wooden houses that appears out of nowhere.

This one scene manages to illustrate how the Old West of the 19th century gave way to the oil rush that was the basis of the 20th century. The railways track represented the technology of the 19th century, the car the future of the 20th century and the desert that though appeared empty hid beneath the grounds riches as then unimagined.

The desert deceptive in its its dowdy rags of rock and bush, hid amidst its penury a treasure disguised in the strangest form. Black tar ribbons that ran amidst the dust and sand clagged rocks oozed oil springs, the petrified blood of primeavil forests, the flora of aeons compressed into liquescent hydro-carbons and rivers beneath the rocks.

The scene where Daniel and his oil team are waiting for a well to come in are awesome. The banshee birth cry of a new well, whose amniotic fluid bursting forth from the earth ruptures the ear drums and deafens his son H.W, is also the birth cry of a New World.

The sudden pillar of fire erupting into being as the oil ignites then sears the night with its diabolical flame is suggestive of the evil that will be unleashed in this new age - a world of warships, tanks, jet fighters and mass invasions all made possible by oil.

This film captures the essence of evolution and hence concerns a moment of birth, and also of death. It is a film about the passing away of one era of human existence, the Pre-Oil Era and the transition into a new era that of the Oil Age. It was oil that made the possible the war of ideologies that defined the Twentieth Century, for all forms of human society, politics and economics were and still are almost totally dependent upon oil. Oil is the essence of all advanced human societies present upon the planet today. All forms of human social, economic and political organisations above the subsistence level are almost entirely dependent upon it. The pyramid model of the oil extraction, refining and supply process is the template for most economic, social and political models of the 20th century.

It is the need for oil that has driven musch of the geo-strategic imperatives of the 20th century. It was oil that filled the tanks of the Russian T-52 tanks, it was oil that enabled the B-52 strategic bomber to bomb Russia, it was oil that powered industry, lit homes and ran trains. From the oil was formed the fertilisers that fed the increased population, that formed the pesticides that killed the blight upon our crops and that filled the petrol tanks of our cars.

The modern world and all forms of supply and demand systems can only exist due to oil. When the oil runs out, then unless mankind has in place alternative forms of energy production systems to sustain the present level of social complexity, and facilitate the expectations of its growing populations of future wealth and prosperity through increased economic growth, all then modern civilisations will either suffer internal social collapse or embark upon the final stage of their existence which is perpetual Eco-Conflict and resource wars.

The end result will either be a slow and sustained drift back towards the Middle Ages, constant low level wars around the world or a single global apocalyptic conflict.

Oil sustained the growth of the 20th Century, but the growth of the 21th century cannot be sustained by the amount of oil there remains.

Earth, air, fire, water are the four elements that merge into oil. Oil comes from the Earth. It is born first from water. It gushes forth into the air as a jet of water, then oil and finally it bursts into furious fire.

But this energy is meaningless unless it is utilised in pursuit of higher evolution. Instead we built the Plastic Age and mindless Consumerism and International Global Cpitalism, and squanderd the energy that was given for us in order to evolve to a new higher level of human existence.

The Fifth Element in Alchemy and the Mystical Traditions is either Love or Wisdom for the Higher Human.

In this case the Fifth Element was replaced by a far more base one, that of greed, and that is why the 20th Century was such a debased and murderous era. With the energy we gained from oil, we wasted it on killing each other in the names of profit and ideology.

The opportunity given to mankind to use the oil in order to transition him from the stage of reliance on fossils fuels to an era of sustainable renewable energy was squandered.

Instead mankind sucked the oil up from the ground like a junkies syringe sucks up the smack from the spoon. Man got greedy.

It is fitting that this film appears as we are about to enter the era of Peak Oil and therefore seeks to act as a testament to the experience of those great men who gave birth to the modern world with their picks and shovels, their sweat and blood and their dreams and greeds.

Today we watch the globalist economic world order toppling like dominoes from one nation to the next, the tendrils of greed that encompass the planet ensuring that each nation falls with the next.

The global petro-dollar recycling system and the credit based false economy it created is now seen to be nothing but an illusion dreamt up by overpaid assholes in banks and boardrooms in order to ensure their bonus payments were sickeningly large.

Millions upon millions of working families now face homelessness, poverty and social exclsuion unseen since the Great Depression.

Expect to see tent cities on the outskirts of our towns and millions of homeless British people being thrown out of their houses when they cannot afford their mortgage repyaments and cast onto the streets. Only then will they awaken from their state of somatised consumerism and realise that there are no more council houses to give them as the immigrants and asylum seekers have them all.

There Will Be Blood is a film that marks the end of an age and the start of a new age.

Today we are witnessing this process in action.

It is an awesome moment, when the wheels of history come off and a civilisation careers off the tracks and crashes.

Today Babylon is burning and the idol of Mammom is seen to be false god, but in this fall comes the promise of rebirth.

Nationalism awakens and with it justice.