What are you looking so miserable about? There’s a whole ocean of oil under our feet…no one can get at it except for me!
Daniel Plainview
“There Will Be Blood”, from writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson, is the story of ruthless oilman Daniel Plainview and his descent into madness. We follow Daniel from his silver mining days as a young man all the way to his elder years as a successful oil baron locked away in his empty mansion. The entire movie is a brilliant piece of cinema, but one scene always seems to grab my attention each time I watch it.
Everything is going smoothly in Little Boston. Daniel has acquired the land and the crew he needs, and the oil derrick is up and running. And, of course, this is exactly where it all goes horribly wrong. Natural gas causes an explosion, destroys the derrick, and deafens HW. This is hardly the first time we have seen Daniel having to deal with an accident, but this one somehow feels different from the rest. He has been injured and has seen men die on his watch. This time, though, it truly feels like a disaster.
In a similar way to how the sound of the train from my previous post about The Restaurant Scene, sound plays a huge role in this scene. The noise of oil derrick overpowers everything else when the explosion occurs. This is heightened when we get HW’s perspective, as everything cuts out and muffled. The contrast is so stark that it grabs your attention. The sound design and editing is thoroughly brilliant. The score adds to the jarring effect of the scene. The off-beat percussion that permeates the scene is entirely unnerving. It adds an even greater sense of urgency to an already desperate situation.
One of my favorite part of this scene, is that during a few shots, director Paul Thomas Anderson and cinematographer Robert Elswit used a specially modified camera from 1910 that gave the shots a “vintage look – desaturated, low-contrast, [with] vignetting and low-resolution” (American Society of Cinematographers). I specifically love this wide shot of the derrick on fire while Daniel and company look on. The vignetting around the edges gives the shot a warm feeling, almost as if the camera (and therefore, the viewer) can feel the heat from the fire. There is a reason “There Will Be Blood” won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography in 2008.
Finally, I think perhaps the most important part of this scene comes when Fletcher asks Daniel , “Is HW OK?”. We get a very telling answer from Daniel. He never even looks away from the fire while giving a simple and almost insincere “No he isn’t”. This is the first inkling of the tension between father and son that we will see throughout the rest of the movie. We know that Daniel is ruthless, and that (in his own words) he has “a competition” in him, but this is something different. From this point on, it is clear that Daniel will always choose himself over anyone and anything else…including his son.
Between the sound design, the beautiful cinematography, and the character insights, “Oil Derrick Trouble” is a masterpiece of a scene within a masterpiece of a film. You can watch the entire Oil Derrick Trouble scene below. As always, though, I highly recommend checking out the full movie. “There Will Be Blood” is brilliant, It is my favorite Paul Thomas Anderson film and perhaps the finest performance of Daniel Day Lewis’ career.
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