‘There Will Be Blood’ is Hilarious and Not Boring
Paul Thomas Anderson’s modern satirical epic is way funnier and less ‘pretentious’ than you may remember.
WTF, There Will Be Blood is trending on Twitter.
It’s the latest random-ass movie/pop-culture thing to draw everyone’s attention for a few minutes/hours/days/lightyears while we’re all stuck at home scrolling through our phones and scouring major streaming platforms to deter our minds from the current pandemic and looming apocalypse.
This particular Twitter brawl erupted from a new Guardian piece in which writer Elle Hunt (please don’t @ her, I’m sure her mentions are absolutely fucked already) argues that There Will Be Blood isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Needless to say, Film Twitter was quick to retort.
This is my personal favorite:
Now, here’s where I and many others will sympathize with the piece in question: it sucks when overzealous dudes ruin something for everyone else. As a man of my generation, for whom There Will Be Blood was, as Hunt describes, “the first auteured film they ‘discovered’ for themselves,” I’d like to formally apologize to all the women I may or may not have recommended this film to, I guess. But as many fans of There Will Be Blood have already pointed out, the entire argument of the Guardian piece seems to be made in bad faith, perhaps in a misguided attempt to call out the mythical “film bro” for being legitimately annoying.
Roxana Hadadi summarized the whole thing best:
What struck me most in reading this opinion was a sort of sadness—because There Will Be Blood is one of my absolute favorite movies, and is up there with Killing Them Softly and the second season of Fargo and Syriana as a piece of pop culture that absolutely gets American greed and capitalism and exceptionalism exactly right [...] Film bros can ruin things. They can be exhausting! [...] But to then feed into the image of film bros as the only people who like these movies is doing a disservice to other fans, too, and again is just perpetuating a limiting, exclusionary cycle. It’s almost like presenting any group as a monolithic series of “bros” erases the women and the POC and the WOC who like those things and support them and agree with their ideas. Huh. Isn’t that weird?
Now that we got that out of the way, here’s my (lower-stakes) two cents:
There Will Be Blood could and has been called many things, but what I can’t abide is the inference that it’s boring. ‘Cause it’s funny as fuck.
Paul Thomas Anderson has a relentless sense of humor that’s at the forefront of all of his films, and There Will Be Blood is no exception. Take Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance, which contains just as much Yosemite Sam as it does John Huston. There’s also that final scene (you know, the one where Day-Lewis and Paul Dano run around and jump and scream like looney tunes), which resembles the slapstick violence of Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 more than it does the deadpan, slow-burn viscera of No Country for Old Men. Point is, the satirical humor of There Will Be Blood is integral to its expose’ on capitalism's twisted, toxic-masculine psyche, which isn’t really covered in all the “pretentious stuff” that film bros like or whatever.
But hey, don’t take my word for it. And don’t let men tell you what to like and what not to like. Just consider watching There Will Be Blood, ‘cause honestly, it’s a fuckin’ blast.