In that excerpt, the person doing most of the talking is Paul—the same guy who only appears in a single scene of There Will Be Blood. In the film, shortly after the scene with the squabbling lease-holders, a gawky teenager named Paul Sunday comes to Daniel to sell information about his home ranch, where he says there's oil. Daniel Plainview and H.W. investigate and meet the Sunday family, including Paul's religious-fanatic twin brother Eli. (Both Paul and Eli are played by Paul Dano.) Daniel buys the land fairly cheap and goes into business there. He also manages to start a feud with Eli, by publicly and purposefully snubbing him after Eli attempts to insert himself into the well-opening ceremony. The rest of the film veers into a lot of areas—particularly Daniel's relationship with H.W., with other oil companies, and with a long-lost brother who turns up unexpectedly—but it keeps coming back to the enmity between Daniel (who seems to represent capitalism in its rawest, most eye-gouging form) and Eli (who represents religion, in its most hypocritical, self-serving form). And the film concludes with the decisive end to that enmity.
In the book, Bunny first meets Paul during the squabbling-leaseholders scene. When the film begins, his character hasn't been born yet; when the book begins, he's 13 years old and eagerly learning his father's trade, largely by observation. So he comes along and witnesses his father's meeting, but is lured away by Paul, a boy about his age, who has run away from his religious-fanatic family, and is off to make his way in the world. Bunny is hugely impressed by his pride and independence—he refuses to take money from Bunny, because he doesn't want charity—and when Paul leaves, Bunny prevails on his father to go up to the boy's family farm and look around. Paul had suggested that there might be oil on the land, and Bunny has an idea that if there is, Ross will buy the land, and Paul's poor family will live rich and content and happily ever after.
So eventually they check out the land, which leads to the one other scene in the film that comes directly from the book—the first meeting between the oilman and the rural, backward family living on the oil-rich land he wants. Again, here, Anderson takes his dialogue directly from the book, as Ross/Daniel takes his son up to the farm, asks about local conditions, pretends to be hunting quail, pretends to be religious in order to avoid uncomfortable questions when Paul's brother Eli starts asking if they're saved, and generally buffalos the family into giving up their land cheap.
And from that point on, the two works pretty well part company completely. Just a few specifics:
• The film largely centers on the conflicts between Daniel and Eli. In the book, Ross and Eli remain relatively cordial, at a distance. Eli rises in the world in the book as well in the movie, becoming a popular and successful preacher, but there's no bad blood between him and Ross in the book. At one point during a recession, he even turns up to ask for some money, which Ross cheerfully hands him, thinking that Eli may come in handy politically in the future. Eli in the book is clearly meant to symbolize religion as another corrupt institution—he's clearly preaching abstinence, yet fucking around on the sly with his parishioners—but while he turns up repeatedly throughout the book for a paragraph or two of updates, he isn't much of a character.
• Paul shows up for one scene in the film, sells out his family, and is gone for good, to who knows what fate. In the book, Paul remains an active and central presence, and the face of Socialism—and later, Communism, as he becomes radicalized. While Bunny remains naïve and soft-hearted throughout much of the book, Paul becomes more and more vociferous, and more of a teacher of truths, as he's portrayed in the book excerpt above. He's frequently jailed and assaulted throughout the book, as an illustration of how hard unionizers and reformers have it in our corrupt America; Bunny spends a good chunk of the novel defending him, bailing him out, and listening to his tragic stories about how everyone's being duped about what's really going on in Russia—and in America as well.
• The business about Daniel's brother in the film has no parallel in the book; in the book, he has an extended family, including a dotty mother and a selfish high-society daughter who's always scolding Bunny for being social poison by going on and on about "the workers" instead of quietly enjoying the comforts of high society. Ross isn't nearly as vicious a character as Daniel, and his inability to get along with people, even his kin, is never a factor.
• In the film, Daniel eventually tells H.W. that he's "a bastard from a basket," unrelated to Daniel, and only adopted to evoke people's sympathies. It's one of his last breaks from humanity. In the book, Bunny is clearly Ross' son. The mother is even alive, though she's a selfish, grasping bitch whom Ross has divorced; Bunny occasionally, uncomfortably visits her, and she tries to get money out of him, but she's only mentioned a few times in the book.
• In the film, H.W. is deafened as a child, leading to his break with his father. This doesn't happen in the book; they remain close throughout their lives, though he's constantly trying to redeem his wily capitalist dad. H.W. eventually marries Mary Sunday, whom he grew up with; Bunny remains deeply attached to Paul and Eli's sister Ruth Sunday, but it's never a romantic relationship. Her first concern is always for Paul. Bunny instead marries a good Jewish Socialist, a girl who's furthered the cause for hundreds of pages of hardworking dedication, while he himself has been off learning about the world by having an affair with a Hollywood starlet and plumbing the depths of the movie industry's prejudices against the working class.
Incidentally, H.W. Plainview in the film is one of its big mysteries. He feels more like Paul Thomas Anderson's weapon against Daniel and tool for revealing his nature than like a character; he rarely speaks throughout the whole film, and he rarely betrays what's going on in his head. Which makes it more than a little baffling when he takes extreme actions like trying to set his uncle on fire. By contrast, the book mostly takes place inside Bunny's head. It's written from a third-person semi-omniscient perspective, covering a lot of ground in broad strokes, but it sticks fairly close to Bunny and what he knows and feels and thinks. As the audience avatar—the naïve kid who just wants everyone to be happy, and doesn't understand why workers and bosses can't just cooperate and get along—he's a nice guy, emotional and empathetic and kind, and he gives the book most of its shape, as he tries to educate himself in the miseries of capitalism and the intricacies of socialism, and find a middle path everyone can agree on. Again, compare this with Daniel's uncompromising straight-ahead charge in the film, which feels more like a cautionary tale than a cooperative educational one.
All in all, most of what Anderson takes from the book is some character names; a certain amount of Daniel/Ross' snaky, determined, driven smarts; a time and setting and a lot of detail about the oil industry; and a couple of specific scenes, with dialogue attached. (He takes some of the imagery, too; the oil-well fire is in both versions, and is fairly similar in both, except that Bunny isn't hurt in the book.) The film goes on to follow Daniel's increasing degradation and desperation as his emotional life falls apart. The book goes on to educate Bunny—and the reader—in World War I history and the ways of the capitalist world, with reams of specifics about how capitalists manipulate the government and shut out the little people, manipulate the media and shut out the truth, and manipulate the workers by force-feeding them propaganda about the evil Commies who are coming to steal everything they own.
But in the end, the two versions have something in common: They both stand as symbolic attacks on capitalism as a corruptor, and on the pursuit of money without morals as a sure way to destroy your soul. There Will Be Blood has been widely read as a very current analysis of the relationship between Dubya-era government (as represented by a profiteering oilman) and religion (as represented by an alternately meek and greedy, corrupt sellout)—how the two have used and abused each other, and how the current administration has ultimately made its hypocrisies clear. But if it's meant as metaphor, it's broad enough to be interpreted in other ways, and there are arguments going on all over the Internet right now about which of those ways is best…
…or, alternately, whether its meant as metaphor at all, or it's ultimately meaningless. Some of the essays I've been reading about it recently are highly suspicious of Anderson's skills and his motives, because he's been so opaque in the past, with things like the rain of frogs in Magnolia. I've seen a number of suggestions that There Will Be Blood is an emperor with no clothes, and that Anderson is just making up shit as he goes along. Which would make the movie fairly uninteresting to me, actually. Which is why I haven't done too much digging into what Anderson has had to say about it. I enjoyed Magnolia until I watched a making-of documentary where Anderson flat-out admitted that he didn't have a plan, or a complete script, when he started shooting, and that he only wrote as much of it as he did because he'd exiled himself to a remote cabin, and then got trapped inside it for days, hiding to avoid a snake outside sunning itself on a path. It's hard enough to trust a filmmaker who wants to take you down weird roads without explaining himself; it's harder to trust one who freely admits he has no damn idea where he's going.
But that brings us back to where we started, with the way in which Oil! and There Will Be Blood are, to my mind, exact opposites: I think Oil! works better as narrative than as metaphor. Sinclair wants for every bit of it to function as a teaching tool, getting across a frightfully important (and generally stridently underlined) message. And yet it's at its most interesting when it at least seems to just be telling a story about people—specifically, people in the oil industry at the turn of the century. It's packed with fanatical levels of detail about oil prospecting circa 1910; it's similarly detailed about the lives of the rich and hateful in that era, and how they amused themselves through Prohibition, and how government and business were run. Sinclair is a funny, barbed writer, and an excellent storyteller, and Oil! was, for me, a lot of fun to read. And yet he keeps spoiling it by saying "By the way, the strike? A parallel for the Russian Revolution. Get it now? Do you get it now? DO YOU?"
But the exact opposite holds true for There Will Be Blood; it works better as metaphor than as a literal story. As narrative, it's often mesmerizing, in large part because of Daniel Day Lewis' snarling, vivid performance. But it's also lumpy and uneven, exquisitely slow and measured toward the beginning, and abrupt and lurching toward the end. As a story, it's more than a little baffling; as metaphor, it's viciously incisive, and every scene seems meaningful. In the end, both versions are saying similar things. But Sinclair might have done better to tone down the preaching, and Anderson might have been better off putting the attention into his characters—all of them, not just the brilliantly rendered Daniel Plainview—that he put into the political imagery hidden under his literal story.
Next week in this space: The launch of Nathan Rabin's new monthly book feature.
And in two weeks in Book Vs. Film:
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