SPOILER WARNING: Book Vs. Film is a column comparing books to the film adaptations they spawn, often discussing them on a plot-point-by-plot-point basis. This column is meant largely for people who've already been through one version, and want to know how the other compares. As a result, major, specific spoilers for both versions abound, often including dissection of how they end. Proceed with appropriate caution.
• Book: Oil!, Upton Sinclair, 1927
• Film: There Will Be Blood, adapted and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007
For me, one of the biggest similarities between Upton Sinclair's Oil! and Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood was that I seriously enjoyed them both, and yet I haven't recommended either one to anyone I know, because both are slow, grim, and difficult, the kind of things that would make my friends and family come back to me afterward, ranting "What the hell were you thinking?"
Admittedly, I enjoyed them in pretty different ways, because they're wildly different artistic artifacts: Both are sprawling and ambitious, but the film is lean, driven, and intense, while the book is baroque, broad, and stylistically dense, but packed with crowd-pleasing fluff. They're also vastly different in content. It's important to note that Anderson didn't set out to put Oil! on film. In his A.V. Club interview with Josh Modell earlier this year, he likens the book to a "really good collaborator" rather than a source. Examining the two versions side by side, it's easy to see what he meant: It's like the book occasionally chimed in as he was writing, suggesting a character name or a scene, but otherwise leaving him alone to work from historical sources, current events, and his own imagination. While it's possible to read Oil! and see where some of Anderson's ideas originated, the two works don't have all that much in common, and weren't meant to. In fact, on the broadest conceptual level, I think they wind up as precise, mirrored opposites. But we'll get to that later.
Upton Sinclair is often referred to as a muckraker, and not just because of his most popular, widely read book, The Jungle—though that book is an excellent example of his advocacy writing, with its harrowing accounts of gross, unhygienic practices in the meatpacking industry (which did prompt government investigation, public outcry, and lasting change) and equally harrowing accounts of the toll the industry took on its workers (which did not). It's sensationalist and manipulative, throwing readers into extreme situations in which beleaguered good fights entrenched evil, with all the melodramatic emoting of an early silent film. Sinclair wrote for the working class, and while his writing style is complicated, his characters generally aren't. They're Heroes or Villains, and they're trapped in provocative situations that stridently demand sympathy or condemnation. And those situations are heavily based on research and reality.
Oil! is cast in the same mold as The Jungle. It starts out by introducing readers to the oil industry, circa the dawn of the 20th century, and winds up introducing them to socialism, by showing them exactly how flawed, corrupt, and evil capitalism is, in scene after scene after preachy-ass scene. Sinclair knew his audience wouldn't sit still for a 550-page sermon, so he works the sermonizing into a story full of violence, movie stars, sex, emotional travails, and nonstop villainous evil. Possibly the biggest surprise for There Will Be Blood fans who haven't read the book, though, is that the film's protagonist, oil man Daniel Plainview, isn't the villain. In fact, while Sinclair shows him to be as bad as any in the oil trade when it comes to stifling the workers, buying off the government, manipulating and browbeating the media, and bribing everyone in sight, he's left as a somewhat baffled and sympathetic figure, wily as hell but forced to such awful measures by a corrupt and corrupting system. Over and over, he points out that while he might like to be more honest, he just can't afford to be. If he doesn't mirror the behavior of the big oil conglomerates, they'll eat him alive. Try to imagine the film's protagonist (played by Daniel Day Lewis, in a larger-than-life, Oscar-winning performance) offering up such excuses for his behavior. Or any excuses, really.
In brief, There Will Be Blood is the story of Daniel Plainview, a self-made oil millionaire who fights all his life to get everything he wants—oil, money, power—and in the process, breaks all his human ties, discarding everyone and everything in his way. In other words, it's the Great American Capitalist Success Story, but it points out that financial success may mean utter personal and moral failure. After a long, wordless sequence covering the decade in which he goes from solo silver prospector to small-time oil prospector to independent, successful oilman, the dialogue finally kicks in with Daniel addressing a meeting of small landholders who want to lease their tracts to him for oil drilling. They argue virulently, and he walks out with his 7-year-old son H.W., telling the locals' spokesman that he wouldn't take their lease as a gift.
This scene comprises one of only two direct parallels between the book and the film. The movie version of this scene is brief and to the point; Daniel gives a speech about his qualifications (which is taken almost verbatim from the book), listens to them fight for a minute, and then walks out. The book version of the same scene is a 25-page side trip that explores many of the specific characters involved, and lays out what they want, and what all the issues are in their arguments. They fight before the oilman (in the book, his name is J. Arthur Ross) arrives, they fight in front of him, they fight after he leaves. And eventually, their arguing results in delays, and their land being split up and exploited, and no one making a profit at all on what could have been a huge payout. Conveniently, Sinclair brings that scene up again more than 400 pages later, and has a character explain, in detail, that it's all symbolic of the way countries squabble among themselves in world affairs: How lack of cooperation over petty greed results in no one getting anything, because more money winds up being spent on the competition for resources than is actually made on gathering those resources.
And this is pretty much how the book goes. A fun game to play while reading Oil! is "What Does This Symbolize?" Or more sarcastically, "What Is This Scene Telling Me About The Glories Of Socialism And The Evils Of Capitalism?" Like so many puzzle games, Oil! conveniently has the answers located right there in the book: Sinclair tends to eventually explain, directly and pointedly, what many of his sequences really meant. For instance, a big chunk of the book is given over to a strike among the oil workers at the Ross family's Paradise oil field. J. Arthur Ross sympathizes somewhat with his workingmen, in part because he was once one himself, and in part because he's a bridge character between the workers and the bosses, someone meant to illustrate how hard it is to buck the system. But in particular, he sympathizes because his son (in the book, J. Arthur Ross Jr., generally known as "Bunny") makes him sympathize.
Where the movie is largely about the oilman, sometimes seen in relationship to his son, the book is largely about the son, sometimes seen in relationship to his father. Bunny—whom Sinclair tells us over and over and over is a naïve young man, not versed in the ways of the world, and still trying to figure it out—is the audience avatar, the one who needs to be gradually brought around to understanding just how bad capitalism is, and who needs Sinclair's symbolism explained to him. For instance, when his old friend Paul comes back from a harrowing stint working for the U.S. Army in Siberia, and reports on his experiences, and explains what that whole long business earlier in the book about the strike was supposed to teach all of us:
All this was so different from what Bunny had been taught that it was hard for him to adjust to it. He would go off and think it over, and then come back with another string of questions. "Then Paul, you mean the Bolsheviks aren't bad people at all!"
Paul answered, "Just apply the rule—remember Paradise! They were workingmen, like any other workingmen on strike. A lot of them have come from America—got their training here. I used to meet them and have long talks—all kinds of fellows, that had been all over this country. They are people with modern ideas, trying to dig the Russians out of their ignorance and superstition. They believe in education—I never saw such people for teaching; everywhere, whatever they were doing, they were always preaching, having lectures, printing things—why, son, I've seen newspapers printed on old scraps of brown butcher paper, or wrappings our army had thrown away. I learned Russian pretty well—it was just the sort of thing our strikers printed at Paradise, only of course these people have got farther in their struggle against the bosses, they see things more clearly than we do."
Bunny was staring, a little frightened. "Paul! Then you agree with the Bolsheviks?"
Paul laughed, a grim laugh. "You go up to Frisco and talk with the men on that transport! That army was Bolshevik to a man—and not only the privates, but the officers. I guess that's why they brought us home. There was mutiny in Archangel, you know—or maybe you don't."
"I heard something—"
"Let me tell you, Bunny—I've been there, and I know. The Bolsheviks are the only people in that country that have any faith or any solidarity; and they're going to run it, too—mark my words, the Japs will get out, the same as we did. You can't beat people that will die for their cause, the last man and the last woman."
Said Bunny, timidly, "Then it isn't true what we've been told—I mean about their nationalizing the women?"
"Oh, my Lord!" said Paul. "Is that the sort of rot you've been thinking?"
"Well, but how can we know what to think?"
Paul laughed. "Come to think of it, I met some women that had been nationalized by the Bolsheviks—as school-teachers. They taught the men in their armies to read and write, and made every man swear to teach ten others what he had learned. I saw a couple of dozen such women, in a cattle-car on the trans-Siberian railway, without a single blanket, nothing but blocks of wood for pillows, not even a bucket to serve for a toilet. They had several cases of Asiatic cholera among them, and they'd been that way for ten or twelve days—prisoners of war, you understand, waiting until they got to Irkutsk, where they'd be shot without a trial. And on the other hand, Bunny—here's the truth, I was in Siberia eighteen months, and never saw an atrocity committed by a Bolshevik, and never met a man in our army that had seen one. I don't say there weren't any; all I say is, I met men that had traveled all over Russia, our people as well as natives, and the only Bolshevik atrocity that anyone knew about was the fundamental one of teaching the workers they had a right to rule the world. You can set this down for a fact about the Russian Revolution, all the way from Vladivostok to Odessa and Archangel—that where the 'reds' did any killing or executing, the 'whites' did ten, and a hundred times as much. You never hear about any 'white' atrocities, because the newspapers don't report them—they are too busy telling how Lenin has murdered Trotsky, and Trotsky has thrown Lenin into jail."
Incidentally, that blatant sarcasm at the end, underlining just how much the media sucks, is one of the things I enjoy about reading Sinclair. He's just so outraged. And he's so delightfully snotty about it. He's constantly pointing out one facet of society or the other, in increasingly mocking, derisive terms, and then snorting over it—as when Bunny grows up and spends time as "the young oil prince," hanging out with other members of his social class, who are so bored and jaded with life that they spend all their time not just playing golf and polo and tennis, but studying those sports, and organizing tournaments and leagues, "and talk[ing] about their play just as solemnly as if it had been work." Ultimately, Bunny dismisses the idle rich, given the ridiculous amount of care and effort they put into "all sorts of complicated ways of hitting a little ball about a field!" Sinclair loves his exclamation points mightily, and he generally uses them at the end of paragraphs and chapters, to indicate how ridiculous the world is. His shocked amusement is meant to be contagious, and it largely is, though it's a little harder to get into it when it comes in blatant bursts of propaganda—or counter-propaganda—as in the excerpt above, which is meant to help deprogram all those poor American-media-fed bastards who have been hearing bad things about the Bolsheviks.
- Comments