[Marxism] Good critique of "There Will be Blood"

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/031408E.shtml
Bad Capitalists or a Bad System: Hollywood Comes to Blows With Upton Sinclair
By David Bacon
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Friday 14 March 2008

     I was disappointed Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar for "There Will 
Be Blood," not because he's not a great actor (he is), but because 
the movie was such a betrayal of the book on which it was based. 
Movies don't have to follow books. Many don't. But in this case, what 
we missed were the things that made Upton Sinclair's "Oil" a 
politically courageous book for its time. For our time, it unearths a 
crucial part of the hidden history of our own working class movement.

     "Oil" could have been made like "Gangs of New York." That movie 
explored the racial and ethnic conflicts at New York City's birth, 
which so frightened its moneyed class that, at the film's climax, the 
rich shell their own city to prevent the upending of their social 
order. Both movies allowed Day-Lewis full range for the extreme 
violence of his screen persona. In "Gangs of New York," his power was 
magnified by being placed in a (relatively) true social landscape. 
"There Will Be Blood" diminished Day-Lewis by making his portrayal 
socially irrelevant.

     Actually, a good movie made from "Oil" would have been more like 
"Reds," exploring not just social conflicts, but the way they gave 
birth to unions and left movements in much the same period. "Reds" 
was painted on a large canvas, moving from Oregon to the East Coast, 
and, finally, Smolny Institute and the storming of the Winter Palace. 
"Oil" covers the same period, and many of the same political 
arguments. But they play out instead in a concentrated look at just 
one city - Los Angeles.

     Upton Sinclair was not just an author who lived in Southern 
California or wrote about it. He was a political activist who tried 
to change it. He founded the Los Angeles chapter of the ACLU. He went 
to jail with longshoremen in the Long Beach harbor, for speaking in 
defense of their strike. He ran for governor seven years after the 
novel was published. Incredibly, as a socialist he not only won the 
Democratic Party nomination in the depth of the Depression, but 
hundreds of thousands voted for his platform to "End Poverty In 
California." He gave the state's corporate elite the biggest 
political scare they've had in any election before or since.

     "Oil" gives us a history of the city's economic rise, even as 
Los Angeles was becoming the economic epicenter of the western United 
States. But it does more than tell the story of the birth of the 
industry that has come to dominate this country's politics, as "The 
Jungle" did for meatpacking. "Oil" is more politically sophisticated, 
and recounts the growth of the social movements that challenged the 
harsh domination of the oil titans.

     That's what is missing from "There Will Be Blood." The movie 
history is false, where Sinclair's was true.

     "Oil" unfolds as the story of the political education of Bunny 
Ross, and of his love for his father, J. Arnold Ross, an oil 
wildcatter turned tycoon. Sinclair paints his characters in primary 
colors with a broad brush, in the style of the time. Bunny's nickname 
signals his character as a Southern California innocent, always 
motivated by the best of intentions. His father, Sinclair tells us, 
is kind and good. He loves Bunny and spends his life trying to make 
him happy and keep him from harm.

     The two characters are the keys to the political analysis 
Sinclair impresses on the reader. Personal kindness, he says, cannot 
change poverty, exploitation, war or corruption. J. Arnold Ross helps 
poor families as he takes their land for wells. He admires and 
respects his workers, but must stick with the other oil operators 
when they bring in strikebreakers to bust their union and evict the 
strikers from their homes. In a not-very-fictionalized account of the 
"Teapot Dome Scandal," J. Arnold tells Bunny again and again bribing 
politicians, even a president of the United States, is simply what is 
required in order to do business.

     It doesn't matter whether a capitalist is a good person or a bad 
one, Sinclair says. It's the system that grinds one class into 
poverty, and allows another to reap the benefit. J. Arnold Ross, a 
loving father and paternalistic employer, commits criminal acts 
because his social class not only makes it possible, but necessary. 
His pained justification to Bunny for hiring gun thugs is that, if he 
doesn't, the other oil operators will combine against him and drive 
him out of business. Capital operates as a class.

     "There Will Be Blood" turns "Oil" on its head. Bunny basically 
disappears as a character, making only a few appearances to dramatize 
his father's cruelty and corruption. J. Arnold, now a villain and 
renamed Daniel Plainview, expropriates Bunny as a child from his dead 
father, and then banishes him when he goes deaf after a well 
explosion. Plainview's personal degeneration culminates in beating an 
evangelist preacher to death in the bowling lane of his palatial 
home. His violence is treated as a defect in his character, a symbol 
of his evil nature. His crime is personal, not social.

     As a result, the movie is devoid of the social conflict that is 
the book's main narrative. There are no unions and no strikes. Class 
conflict is out. The corruption of politicians becomes the product of 
a corrupt personality, not a corrupt system.

     And, since there is no class conflict, there is no room for the 
novel's main achievement. "Oil" takes Bunny through a process in 
which he learns not only about how the world works, but about how 
people organize to change it. Both the movie and book show the Ross 
expropriation of the farm of the poor Watkins family. But "Oil" 
follows the political radicalization of Paul Watkins - drafted as a 
doughboy in World War I, and then sent with the interventionist 
armies to put down the Russian Revolution. He returns and becomes an 
oil union leader, and then a member of the left wing of the Socialist 
Party. When that party splits in 1919 (a scene dramatized in "Reds" 
as well), Paul Watkins becomes an organizer in the new Communist Party.

     Upton Sinclair, whose sympathies were much more with the right 
wing of the Socialist Party than the left, still draws an admiring 
portrait of the worldly Paul, showing his courage in facing 
imprisonment, and his eventual fatal beating by right wing assassins. 
Sinclair draws out the political differences of the day in his 
debates with Bunny, whose eyes he opens. Bunny eventually has to 
choose whose side he's on. The more he learns about the world, the 
more he rejects his father's class, while still loving him as a 
person. And that class turns against him in the end.

     In "There Will Be Blood" Paul disappears. In his place his 
evangelist brother Eli becomes the main antagonist to Plainview, a 
religious hypocrite pitted against a violent and powerful oilman. It 
is a conflict without social relevance, one the movie hardly bothers 
to explain. In its lowest point, a grown Bunny gratuitously returns 
to announce to his father that he's going to become an investor in 
Mexican oil wells. Sinclair would have torn his hair out over that one.

     "Oil" recounts just a small piece of what is now a hidden 
history of the radicalism of Los Angeles's labor movement before and 
after World War I. In 1903 the city's socialist labor council helped 
Mexican and Japanese farm workers win one of the state's first 
agricultural strikes, just north in Oxnard. The Los Angeles unions 
were then shocked when Samuel Gompers, president of the American 
Federation of Labor, refused to give the workers a union charter 
unless they rid themselves of their Asian members. "Oil" shows the 
fear the oil operators had for the Wobblies (the radical Industrial 
Workers of the World) and their (mostly rhetorical) commitment to 
sabotage in the workplace. In the city's real history, two prewar 
labor leaders, the McNamara brothers, spent their lives in prison 
after a bomb they planted blew up at The Los Angeles Times building.

     This was the most turbulent era for the labor and radical 
movements of Los Angeles. Sinclair describes how the oilmen defeated 
the workers and socialists, and created the "citadel of the open 
shop." Bunny resists, and even makes his father put up money to bail 
out strikers. But he can't stop the class war.

     Sinclair recreates the era's radical spirit, weaving political 
debate, action and romance into a complex tapestry. He was a daring 
author for his time. He describes Bunny's sexual awakening as frankly 
as he could get away with, in an era when books really were banned 
for open descriptions of sex. His women are mostly foils for men, and 
they both seem a little wooden in comparison with the intimacy and 
realism achieved by writers since. Yet, Sinclair gets real drama from 
Bunny's conflict between his youthful lust for his studio star lover 
and his growing desire to make a full commitment to political 
organizing. In the end, he falls for a Jewish Socialist woman who 
clearly is his equal in debate, and greater in her commitment.

     Hollywood today has less of the radical spirit that made "Reds." 
It's not hard for a studio now to reinvent the war in Afghanistan as 
a crusade ("Charlie Wilson's War"), confident that no one will ask 
why Ronald Reagan bankrolled Osama bin Laden and other extremists, 
calling them "freedom fighters," so long as they were willing to 
fight the Soviets. I can't wait to see what they do with Central America.

     But Los Angeles? Hollywood's own city? Working class social and 
political movements get written out of the textbooks all the time. 
Writing us out of a movie made from "Oil" expropriated one of the 
most important works of our own history. I hope the producers don't 
have exclusive rights to the book. Perhaps, a more courageous group 
will make the movie as Upton Sinclair wrote it. 


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