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Was that \"much-criticized\" a shot at me, or a shout-out?
http://gerrycanavan.blogspot.com...e-nitpicks.html
As I told you shortly after we saw TWBB, I think you've got the movie nailed. Great post.
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no no, everyone seems to hate that scene for lots of reasons, though i guess they're related to yours. there's an assumption of realism applied to the rest of the film that i don't think is actually there, but when the last scene comes up it's like the violation of a trust. the difference is that in that scene it's more than just the cinematography, pacing, and music that tells us we're not watching a biopic or historical epic in the usual sense.
it's also interesting that that's the scene that looks the most like kubrick.
Definitely, the last scene comes across very much like a Kubrick homage. re: realism, I think the fact that the first twenty or thirty minutes are wordless is instrumental in giving the film some of the more mythic qualities you identify -- it's like we're watching a twisted capitalist revisioning of the Book of Genesis, crossed perhaps on some level with Kubrick's Dawn of Man.
\"Book of Genesis, crossed perhaps on some level with Kubrick's Dawn of Man.\"
oh, good point -- if that part's 2001, the last scene is definitely The Shining.
And re: ...he can only relate to those who share his blood. And if his declaration in the penultimate scene is true, no such person exists in the film.
It seems to me that there's a kind of submerged Utopian possibility here, an excess, that the film quite pointedly leaves open. Because it's hard to believe that Plainview is telling the truth when he says his son is adopted, just as we seem to be sure that Plainview has or had a brother, just not one he ever meets. In both cases, the first actual, the second merely potential, a different type of relationship between the individual and collectivity than the one Plainview ultimately damns himself to is figured. His son gets married, after all, and lights out for the territories, wife in tow.
Tie this in with the doubling of Eli and his twin, Paul, who takes the money and runs. As powerful and deterministic as Plainview's doomed trajectory and inevitable-seeming subsumption by Standard Oil appears -- especially in a film that, as you say, seems unable to take its camera-eye off him -- other potentialities of varying types yet remain.
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So, what's the verdict, NCfOM or TWBB?
Considering I had a harder time shaking the intertextuality of the latter, as well as really buying into Dano's histrionic histrionics (among other things)...the former, emphatically.
G C -
well, there's ambiguity to just about every family relationship depicted in the film -- i'd have to watch it again, but i thought daniel's announcement his son was adopted confirmed the suggestions in the opening sequence that the boy was the son of the worker who dies. i thought it worked in basically the same way as the Paul/Eli confusion, where you're told they're twins but you come out of the movie not being quite sure. so there are these rich metaphoric possibilities (the man pretending to be plainview's brother lives on one for a while) but they aren't actually in the narrative.
i think this is part of the uncertainty at the heart of the film -- is plainview a human being or not? are his emotions directed at the boy as his son or as his property? and i think what's interesting is that it's a question that doesn't actually impact what happens at all -- nothing he does is inconsistent with the profit motive, except when forced by social pressure. the raw material for a meaningful biography always exists for plainview but he repeatedly exploits and destroys it. he's not complete -- 'finished' -- until it's all gone. if he has complex emotions they ultimately are never allowed to matter.
Seyfried - i can't pick favorites, but i think if given the choice i'd rather re-watch the coen bros. movie.
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This has been an excellent series on utopia -- congratulations.
\"Hollow monsters\" -- I haven't seen There Will Be Blood, but surely Chigurh fits the description. He regards himself not as a perpetrator of violence but as a possessed man, the passive agent of a demiurgical force that flows through him. You get the sense from No Country that there could be a whole host of hollow monsters out there, channeling these sub- or superpersonal forces into the world. You say this movie review is a digression, but isn't there a distinct dystopian theme to No Country at least? The sheriff occupies the traditional world of individual agency, whereas Chigurh represents the dark side of immanence, of primal gnostic forces let loose on the world without either individual or social responsibility to keep them in check, or at least to hold themselves accountable when mayhem does break loose. The widow of the guy who took the drug money wants to force Chigurh into personal agency, refusing to call the coin toss, making him decide. In the book she ultimately succumbs to Chigurh's view of the world, calling a coin toss she's fated to lose. In the film the Coens leave the scene of negotiation, waiting outside for the inevitable deed to be fulfilled, not wanting to face the futility of their hope that maybe Chigurh will come to the humanistic realization that he's just a good old fashioned bad guy after all.
\"i'd have to watch it again, but i thought daniel's announcement his son was adopted confirmed the suggestions in the opening sequence that the boy was the son of the worker who dies.\"
That's basically what I've gathered. The novel deals with his \"son\" becoming a Socialist (or something like that) and vehemently disgusted for his father stands for.
There's an intriguing thought about Anderson: his disdain for paternal figures. As remarked by a friend of mine, Daniel's eccentric, erratic nuances and behaviors seem like a curious extension of some of the fatherly dysfunctions in Magnolia. While the Capitalist commentary is affixed, Plainview seems to be written in such a recklessly aberrant manner that it almost seems just as logical to attribute this to some seething (Symbolic?) loathe.
ktismatics,
yeah that's a good point about the films having a kind of 'dystopian' metaphysics. one risks, however, expanding the utopia/dystopia binary until it includes everything. gnostic is maybe a little more to the point, though with TWBB the mysterious force is much more clearly tied to a supernaturalized capital. as i write above, i read NCFOM as being driven more by a metaphysical axiom, but i'm less sure 'what it all means.' dark side of immanence is interesting. i would say the end makes chigurh's humanity/inhumanity literally a matter of a coin toss, and leaving it unresolved both forces the question into undecidability and to some extent irrelevance, since he does what he does regardless of our interpretation.
Thanks for the info on the novel, Seyfried, i haven't read it. it's interesting that all overt references to socialism are pushed out of the film version. i can't even imagine the possibility of a mainstream american film with straight-up socialist characters. it would be like farting into the camera (except they actually WOULD do that). i'm not sure what you mean by 'seething (Symbolic) loathe.' if you're getting at like an oedipal thing, i feel like that's so common we as film audiences have been trained to sort of take it for granted.
oh, i found a copy of the screenplay, which if you're willing to take it as the authority, does say that H.W. is the worker(Allman)'s son.
what interests me most about both of these movies isn't that they confound the question of motive in regard to their central villains. lots of movies do that. what they do is artfully foreground the question of whether or not the attempt to attribute psychological motive to these characters is committing a category mistake. they're very 'theoretical' films i think.
you'll notice that all the great psycho killers of yesteryear have recently been subjected to biography -- lecter, leatherface, myers...none of them have been very successful, but it seems like someone has decided any popular property without a history is just asking for a string of cliches (beaten as a child, molested, etc.) in the form of a prequel.
and the great gangster/tycoon films TWBB draws on were always in the form of biography to begin with.
\"one risks, however, expanding the utopia/dystopia binary until it includes everything.\"
Okay, I'll let it go. I suppose my dystopic extrapolation is an inevitable consequence of having read McCarthy's next book, The Road, which is dystopic from beginning to end. (If a 3-part series is a trilogy, what's a 2-part series -- a bilogy? a dualogy?) Taken on its own terms, No Country is amgiguous about the trajectory that Chigurh traces through time and place. The sheriff sees him as a sign of the world falling apart, but then there's that conversation he has with the crippled old partner of his father's, who says there's always been this mindless and pointless spirit of malice interlacing itself through the world.
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