Thanks to Roy for paying attention to Lileks’ continuing mental degradation. Roy wisely realizes that Lileks really is the true representation of the asshole who leans conservative, kind of hates himself for it because even he can tells he’s something of an asshole, and then doubles up the grumping in an effort to drown out the voices inside telling him that it doesn’t have to be this way. Or that’s what I’m telling myself is his disfunction this week.
Anyway, there are few things worse than when Lileks thinks he’s being clever, except of course that it’s also slightly awesome because it gives you a glimpse into the mind of someone who devotes 75% of his waking hours to rationalization. This review of “There Will Be Blood” tells us much about the mindset of a conservative who has replaced grumping with actual thought.
It kept my attention, and I enjoyed watching it, even though I felt myself disengaging from it by degrees in the last hour. Let’s just not tell ourselves that it’s a mark of great artistic insight to have the character get more insular and nasty as he gets richer, shall we?
Oooooh, insightful. Next he’ll be complaining that lovers in movies look starry-eyed, or that death causes the characters grief. Perhaps the rich in movies are portrayed as nasty and insular for a good reason? Hell, Lileks isn’t even rich, but being comfortably middle class has turned him into a person that hunkers down in his home, fearful that post-modernists and hippies are going to kick in his door for an interracial love-in. There are a few rich people who are good and kind, of course, but movies talk either in characters or symbols, and since “There Will Be Blood” was a film heavy with symbolism, it would have been, what’s the word?—moronic for the character that symbolized wealthy capitalists to be anything but power-hungry and crazy.
Look, mega-wealth is irrational, and yet it’s the source of 95% of the political problems we have nowadays. It doesn’t make sense that people who have enough money to live in the lap of luxury should want more all the time, and should do everything to cut taxes and cut corners and tweak the market to get rich quick and cut corners to the tune of something like the Enron scandal. And that’s what they do. The logic of mega-wealth is the sort of thing that only springs from nastiness and insularity, a total lack of perspective.
26 Responses to “In a world where we’ve seen Dick Cheney and Ken Lay, Daniel Plainview is a pussycat”
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From a literary perspective, stereotypes exist for reason: they’re true enough to introduce large concepts in a short amount of time.
Having not seen There Will Be Blood i can’t comment o specifics but form what i gather the film is about a man who becomes obscenely wealthy at the expense of everyone and everything he loves. Big, wide themes here.
If the super capitalist had a heart of gold and used his wealth only for good that would be a lame movie. Unless he dresses up like a bat and fights psychos, then it’s just awesome But then only because said billionaire is driven by personal demons in which case we’re back to the same concept. Wealth creates an extreme circumstance. What the character does with thse circumstances drives the plot.
So yeah, the super rich dude fucks up his life. Sorry that doesn’t fit Conservative Mythology but, life and art are in agreement: nice conservatives are more unreal than unicorns.
Go easy on Lileks, Amanda. I’m sure he thinks Mr. Potter was the protagonist in “It’s a Wonderful Life” as well.
Conservatives are just really, really bad at interpreting a lot of art. Personally, I enjoy their discomfiture when I explain that, no, really, “Born in the USA” was not all that patriotic.
“>Lileks isn’t even rich, but being comfortably middle class has turned him into a person that hunkers down in his home, fearful that post-modernists and hippies are going to kick in his door for an interracial love-in.
Meanwhile I sit at home eagerly waiting, but do I ever get any hippy/post-modernist door-kicking love-in action? No. It’s not fair, not fair, I tell you!
“f the super capitalist had a heart of gold and used his wealth only for good that would be a lame movie. Unless he dresses up like a bat and fights psychos, ”
I have to say, it really is awesome imagining TWBB suddenly veering off in that direction. Although I’m seeing less bat-mimicry and more smearing oneself with crude . . .
Interestingly, the
World Socialist Website review sort of says the same thing:
Hmm… I have to say, I didn’t get the idea that Plainview was growing more and more nasty as the film went on — I got the impression it was always how he was.
The most implausible thing to me is that by the time he gets to the Sunday ranch, he’s already such a violent sociopath — assaulting Eli Sunday, threatening Standard Oil representatives with death, murdering the guy who claimed to be his brother, and his character is basically unchanged over the next 20-something years when Eli visits him during the Great Depression. Given that we’ve seen his brutal temperament in 1911, and his brutal temperament after 1929, it seems logical to infer that he spent at least 18 years doing what we’ve seen him doing on screen — responding to incredibly mild provocations with death threats, killing people with little apparent reason, etc. How does he last that long? Perhaps we’re meant to infer that incidents like the ones that we see on screen are rather rare, but given that it seems like the events provoking the incidents were rather insignificant, I don’t see how he could go for over a decade without it happening more. Given that he wasn’t exactly subtle about planning his crimes to be deniable (I mean, threatening bigshot corporate representatives with death in a public restaurant?), I just don’t see how he was supposed to get away with all that.
There are lots of movies about happy, sweet, wealthy people. They seem to make up the majority of our movies, in fact. Cinderella style stories feature wealthy men who “rescue” poor women from crappy circumstances. People in movies seem to have an unending flow of cash, and couples only seem to have financial problems if they need a reason to fight to kick off some breaking-up-couple theme.
So why exactly does Lileks feel the need to point out some of the few movies where the rich are seen as bad?
Wait: are post-modernists and hippies different races???
“Constant pressure, constantly applied.” Lileks’ corporate overlords have instructed him to defend them against EVERY possible, nay, CONCEIVABLE slight so as to prevent the smallest seed of insurrection from blooming on ready soil.
(and dang I hate typing the TEN freekin’ letters of “blockquote”–21 letters including the end tag– can’t it be shorter??? like “bq” or something??)
“[Plainview’s] responding to incredibly mild provocations with death threats . . . it seems like the events provoking the incidents were rather insignificant . . . ”
and
““Constant pressure, constantly applied.” Lileks’ corporate overlords have instructed him to defend them against EVERY possible, nay, CONCEIVABLE slight . . ..”
Huh.
“…Lileks isn’t even rich, but being comfortably middle class has turned him into a person that hunkers down in his home…”
To be fair, he does make an expedition to Target on a regular basis. Maybe daily. Or more. Probably has a favorite cashier from whom he gets his “cab driver” kind of journalistic reactions. Because there’s nothing more “authentic” or “on the street” and “in touch” than asking a poor person his opinion when that poor person is working for you or working for a tip, which, luckily for Lileks, would’t be accepted at Target.
That’s “wouldn’t”, though “would’t” is probably acceptable for some poets, semi-literates, hurried drunks, and the error-prone.
I bet he was really upset that in “Enchanted” the prince is kind of a dip. At heart, lileks is fanatically, bootlickingly, cringingly, authoritarian and even crypto-monarchist. There’s no way in hell, aside even from his natural cowardice, that he wouldn’t have been a tory during the revolution. Or that he wouldn’t have been poor white trash and supported the slave owners during the civil war.
aimai
Wait a second, haven’t we seen this story onscreen before?
Did he get all twitchy about it being one of the top 100 American movies since forever, too? Or was it okay because it came from Ye Goode Olde Dayes?
–Lileks, a word in your shell-like ear - Rosebud.
Lileks. man. There’s a tragedy. He was absolutely hilarious until 9/11. Then something in him snapped, and he’s been a conservative douchehound who wouldn’t know funny if it fish-slapped him ever since.
Add another name to the rolls of the dead from 9/11: James Lileks’ soul.
…Let’s just not tell ourselves that it’s a mark of great artistic insight to have the character get more insular and nasty as he gets richer, shall we?…
While we’re at it, let’s just not tell ourselves that Sinclair Lewis was a Horatio Alger protege.
I’d love to see Lileks’ take on Elmer Gantry.
Conservatives are really bad at interpreting REALITY. (Cue the bad puns on art imitating life/life imitating art/conservatives imitating compassionate human beings, etc, etc.)
Well, in the very beginning of the movie he was portrayed as a common miner who could have died in a hole in the ground, but through perseverance and ingenuity made himself a fortune, basically, the kind of guy the American Myth is built on.
(I think when you combine the depictions of Sunday and Plainview, the message of the movie is basically “This is your God”)
If any transformation occurred, it was in the first half hour during the jump in time from when he adopted HW and when they were sitting in that townhall in 1911.
So yea, it’s very likely that any transformation that occurred was only in the minds of the audience (not that that can be diminished in our post-modern world).
In TWBB, Daniel Plainview is revealed to be a bastard long before he strikes it mega-riches. It’s not wealth that turns him into a bitter, crazy, alcoholic with a violent temper. It’s greed.
The qualities that made him a hugely successful oilman–ruthlessness, ego, competitiveness–ultimately alienate everyone.
Plainview doesn’t do well when he leaves the oilfields for a leafy baronial estate. But I think that has more to do with the fact that his life loses direction now that he’s given up the constant hunt for new reserves.
Putting all my comments together:
Ms. Marcotte raises a question:
It doesn’t make sense that people who have enough money to live in the lap of luxury should want more all the time, and should do everything to cut taxes and cut corners and tweak the market to get rich quick and cut corners to the tune of something like the Enron scandal. And that’s what they do. The logic of mega-wealth is the sort of thing that only springs from nastiness and insularity, a total lack of perspective.
which Ms. Bayerstein answers:
The qualities that made him a hugely successful oilman–ruthlessness, ego, competitiveness–ultimately alienate everyone.
Plainview doesn’t do well when he leaves the oilfields for a leafy baronial estate. But I think that has more to do with the fact that his life loses direction now that he’s given up the constant hunt for new reserves.
The super-wealthy oftentimes are able to be super-wealthy precisely because of their psychological make up.
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Or that he wouldn’t have been poor white trash and supported the slave owners during the civil war. - Aimai
I’m not so sure that poor white trash supported the slave holders during the civil war. Ever hear of a place called “West Virginia”? Or President Andrew Johnson?
Read C. Vann Woodward’s famous book on Jim Crow … or, if you are like me and impatient about such things, do what I did and just read/listen to MLK’s speech on the subject. It gives a bit of an indication of when and how many of the “poor white trash” became racist.
I’m also not sure if Lileks would have been a Tory in the revolution. Although, in general, a lot of the conservative movement nowadays is pretty much revolutionary-era Toryism (and not the good, Samuel Johnson kind, either … a lot of us liberals would have been that kind of Tory!) … the American revolution was bourgeois enough that Lileks woulda been behind it (although many so-called conservatives today are actually anti-capitalist, not so former commies who would have been loathe to support a bourgeois revolution). What would have caused Lileks to soil himself and regret even supporting the revolution for what it “unleased” would have been Shay’s Rebellion.
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(and dang I hate typing the TEN freekin’ letters of “blockquote”–21 letters including the end tag– can’t it be shorter??? like “bq” or something??) - Eric
That’s why I used italics instead.
I know! So sad. The Gallery of Regrettable Food and the Art Frahm Collection were mainstays of my Internet goof-off list back in the halcyon, pre-blog days of college. Nowadays I can’t even point people to the reason people actually used to like him, since he pulled all the good material to put in his stupid book that I won’t buy because he’s everything that’s wrong with America.
@Julian Elson #5
I think you’re right about Plainview’s character arc. He doesn’t get nastier. He was always like that. When we see him again after a 20-year time lapse, he seems to have gone to seed. When he was out prospecting actively, he had productive outlets for his sadistic impulses. He had traitors to unmask, enemies to vanquish, competitors to humiliate.
Having amassed the fortune, he finds himself with little to do but brood about that punk preacher who got the better of him all those years ago.
The last thing Plainview says to his valet, after the climactic final confrontation is, “I’m finished.” And he is. He has finally, definitively, resolved the last piece of unfinished business from his glory days.
Charlequin: Did you ever see the section dedicated to The Gobbler, the motel designed to honor the turkey? That was genius. And now it’s all turned to hateful, mediocre crap.
Foo.
Lileks is just a bitter man, clinging to God, Mother, Country, Apple Pie, and all other sweet illusions even Rockwell couldn’t hide in.
Movies that feature the well-to-do to wealthy acting all cute and delightful?
How about every movie ever made by Richard Curtis.
If the super capitalist had a heart of gold and used his wealth only for good that would be a lame movie.
As Hippie Killer notes, it’s not like movies like this are at all hard to come by in America. Nor for that matter is it hard to find rags-to-riches stories, where the levers of money and power by which one rises to the top in America are portrayed as essentially benevolent (and occasionally full of Horatio-Alger-ian “Kindly Old Rich Benefactor” characters).
The funny thing is, I’m told that the anticapitalist/socialist elements in There Will Be Blood are toned WAY, WAY down from the book version.
I haven’t seen There Will Be Blood, but Magnolia and Punch Drunk Love were rife with characters that were not true to life. At best they were caricatures of the worst dregs of humanity, which at this point seems to be PT Anderson’s specialty. I don’t blame any reviewer for not finding Anderson’s characters believable.