The title of There Will Be Blood gives an explicit promise of gore, yet blood is absent for almost the entire movie. The film, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, is inspired by the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair. While the adaptation deviates from the narrative of Sinclair’s book, it does share its setting: the Southern California oil boom at the turn of the 20th century.
Daniel Day-Lewis stars in There Will Be Blood as prospector Daniel Plainview, who shifts the focus of his search from silver to oil. He travels with his adopted son, H.W., whose father dies working at Daniel’s first oil well. Daniel uses H.W. to promote his business as a “family enterprise,” but Daniel is clearly more of an “oilman” than a family man. He frequently spikes H.W.’s milk and even sends him away when an oil derrick accident causes the child to become deaf. Daniel is a malicious and brutal central character, yet There Will Be Blood only explicitly enacts the violence that its title suggests in brief moments.
The meaning of There Will Be Blood's title is more nuanced than is typically assumed. It is not until the film’s conclusion, after around two-and-a-half hours, that blood is clearly displayed on-screen. Until then, the signs of violence and tragedy are usually masked, or even displaced, by oil. Daniel Plainview finds the natural resource in abundance but, as the film’s title suggests, it is another liquid that is the truly inevitable consequence of his pursuit: blood.
In the first accident, where H.W.’s father is killed, the wooden frame of the derrick breaks and falls into the oil well. There is a brief splatter of blood as he is struck on the head, but the gore almost instantly vanishes among the oil that is covering both his body and the walls. There are specks of blood on Daniel’s face as he looks at a now fatherless H.W., but the black oil that engulfs his body is the true mark of violence.
The film’s final moments truly fulfill the title’s promise, with Daniel brutally killing the preacher Eli Sunday (played by The Batman's Paul Dano), theatrically hitting him with a bowling pin. Blood spills from Eli’s head onto the polished wooden floor and, following Daniel’s exclamation that he is “finished,” the title “There Will Be Blood” is displayed on the screen to initiate the credits. Blood has finally been shed, as is indicated by the title, yet its awaited presence is undermined by the violence that has been consistently underlying the film’s commentary on themes of self-interest, capitalism, and religion. Not only does oil displace blood as a sign of both vitality and violence, but it inspires indulgence as Daniel triumphantly claims to “drink the blood of Lamb” – seeking basic nourishment from the biblical symbol of Jesus’s sacrifice to eradicate sin.
In a similar tone, shortly before his gruesome fate, Eli follows Daniel Plainview’s cruel demand that he identifies himself as a “false prophet” and denounces his religion, hoping they can conduct business together afterward. Faith, family, and morality are all abandoned in varying ways in the obsessive pursuit of oil. The eventual exposure of blood that is promised by the film’s title is sinister, but what is perhaps more brooding is the fact that violence has defined the entire film, just not always explicitly. In There Will Be Blood, oil acts as the circulating liquid of a generation, and as the defining sign of savagery and violence.
