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RT
There Will Be Blood and The Emperor’s New Clothes
February 1st, 2008
What are you to do? It seems like all your friends and all the critics like Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood and it has amassed an impressive 8 Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Director. Yet when you watched the film you found it boring and without meaning. So what did you miss? What is it that you don’t get? The answer is nothing. Believe me when I tell you that what the critics like about There Will Be Blood is a case of The Emperor’s New Clothes.
For those who don’t know, The Emperor’s New Clothes is a short story by the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen. It is about an emperor who cares too much about clothes and hires two swindlers who promise him the finest suit of clothes from the most beautiful cloth. This cloth, they tell him, is invisible to anyone who was either stupid or not fit for his position. When the swindlers report a suit of clothes has been fashioned, the Emperor allows himself to be dressed in their creation for a procession through town. During the course of the procession, a small child cries out, “But he has nothing on!” The crowd realizes the child is telling the truth and begins laughing. The Emperor, however, holds his head high and continues the procession.
Now I don’t believe that Paul Thomas Anderson is out to con anyone with his films. To me, the overrated director of Boogie Nights and Magnolia desperately wants to make a movie that means something. The problem is that Mr. Anderson has nothing to say, but he still wants to be taken seriously as an artist. So what does he do? He makes movies that look like art and sound like art in the hopes that audiences and critics will mistake his films for art. And to this extent, he has succeeded.
How has he fooled the nation’s top critics you may ask? He’s fooled them because very few of the nation’s film critics actually have a background in film. Many of them are English or Journalism majors and some of them are just lucky men and women who are able to earn a living off their love for movies. How does this come into play with Paul Thomas Anderson and There Will Be Blood?
During the Jacobellis v. Ohio case in 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said that pornography is hard to define but that “I know it when I see it.” The same thing can be said of art. Most people wouldn’t know how to define or identify art. Nor would they be able to tell you succinctly and specifically why they thought a particular movie is good.
This is where the problem lies. On some level, the film critics who have not studied film, nor have ever made a movie, feel guilty about earning a living criticizing movies. They feel a need to justify their job and position. By being able to point to a movie and champion it; to say, “this is art” allows critics a chance to put themselves on the line and become part of a film’s success or failure.
Sometimes, the critics are right and everyone is happy. Other times, the critics are wrong and bored audiences are left scratching their hands in confusion thinking “I don’t get it” or wondering “what is the meaning of X“. This tends to happen when critics find movies that are “cinematic” and “different”.
Man y directors, such as Paul Thomas Anderson and the overrated Martin Scorcese, have developed and honed a method of filmmaking that relies on elaborate camera moves, dramatic imagery and a bombastic use of sound and music to create movies that look and feel like art but are ultimately as empty and soulless as the latest entry in the Friday the 13th or Rush Hour series. The critics recognize that this type of stylization is only possible with movies and embrace this way of filmmaking as “cinematic” without realizing that this method is all style and no substance.
Many film critics seem to fall in love with movies that are “different” as they equate “different” with original and modern. The problem with this line of thinking is that it doesn’t take into consideration that the reason that things are classical is because they work. It brings to mind the stories of a modern architect in New England who was tired of designing houses with slanted roofs. Instead, he designed flat roofed buildings that looked better and stood out because they were “different” from traditional slanted roof buildings. When winter came and the snowstorms hit, the flat roofs on these buildings caved in from the weight of the snow. The architect hadn’t taken into consideration the function of the slanted roofs on buildings.
There Will Be Blood is a movie that is very “cinematic” and very “different”. With its intrusive musical score and constantly roving camera, Paul Thomas Anderson doesn’t so much construct scenes to create a story as he does film short expository story bits to transition between set pieces. The critics are wrong about this movie and don’t you go around joining them and praising The Emperor’s New Clothes. No, set your friends straight and send them over to the Moose.
Buy the Moose a cup of coffee.
February 1st, 2008 at 9:34 pm
What I can’t understand about a basically great movie like There Will Be Blood is how it could descend into utterly campy humour toward the end, with a rotten, abrupt and unsatisfying ending.
Day-Lewis, of course, is superb. He is absolutely believable in his depiction of a hard-driving, win-at-all-costs turn of the century oilman, loved by nobody. His performance is larger-than-life in a way that few actors could ever hope to match. It is, as other reviewers have said, a towering performance. It’s also classic, even if bits and pieces of Day-Lewis’ Bill the Butcher character from Gangs of New York comes through from time to time.
One thing that makes this movie so fascinating in parts is the way it so accurately portrays the tenor of the time and life in the small towns that dotted the Texas landscape then – lots of ‘hellfire-and-brimstone, gimme that ol’ time religion and pass me the whisky while you’re at it’.
The interplay between good and evil is powerfully represented and you can’t help but feel that Daniel Plainview resembles no one so much as the infamous Simon Legree, while Eli, the seemingly gentle preacher, tries to rescue his flock from what appears to be perdition.
Later, and most interestingly, we learn that Eli and Daniel are both birds of a feather and competitors – just grifters playing for different teams. The resulting friction leads to a fairly explosive ending which is then destroyed by Plainview’s abrupt and meaningless “I’m finished” comment.
February 3rd, 2008 at 9:37 am
Honestly, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Everyone I know who’s seen the film loves it. But of course, your word is final, and just because you don’t seem appreciate it, it must be overrated trash, right?
February 4th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
This movie has a lot to say, in fact. About family, about faith, about ambition and greed and big business. About emptyness and madness. This movie is brimming with interesting ideas and conclusive thematic statements. But enough baout that. If it didn’t work for you, that’s fine. But if we may, could we see your expert credentials, please? As if a degree in a particular field makes one necessarilly intelligent about that field. I know a lot of people with art degrees who don’t know crap about art. I know a lot of people with theatre degrees who can’t act worth a damn. Your framed diploma can’t make you have taste. Sad, sad, sad.
February 7th, 2008 at 8:15 am
You are a self promoting idiot. There Will Be Blood is one of the best movies made.
At any level of film making it excels.
February 10th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
I think this is the wrong movie to put that title on. The movie that every critic loved this year that was real crap was The Golden Compass. Save for the little girl and maybe Nicole Kidman’s character, the movie was horrible because of how horribly acted, produced, and edited it was. The CGI was XBOX 360 at best.
I think the achilles of your argument is that you actually “agree” that it was a well made film, but look, something doesn’t have to be art to be great. You can call N’Sync and Backstreet Boys what you will, but they still sold way more records than real, artful musicians that made quality records.
In being a critic I feel like it’s quite all right to just say, “look, I didn’t get it.” But you can’t say something isn’t art because you don’t think it’s art. Opinions aren’t facts, and there are a whole lot of films that have been released recently that deserve a hell of a lot less praise than they ended up getting. There is on the flipside a film like Michael Clayton, that critics loved and nobody watched – twice.
February 10th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Jason, I think he went to USC. I’m sure that counts for something, agree with him or not.
February 13th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Why don’t you tell us what you actually didn’t like about the film instead of this useless, ininteresting and pretentious crap/essay on american critics ?
Prove your point instead of telling us what to think.
February 17th, 2008 at 10:24 am
Let me guess, No Country for Old Men was also an overrated piece of crap with out any meaning? I think you should find new hobby, since you couldn’t be more wrong.
February 19th, 2008 at 9:06 am
hi. i’m writing a review for a magazine and just thought i’d have a look on the internet for other opinions.
if you didn’t like the film, that’s fine, but you really should explain why. the same applies if your going to make a sweeping statement about about all of anderson’s work.
i agree that scorsese tends to be overrated, but find it hard to sympathize with your opinion when you don’t elaborate and just attatch cliches such as ‘emperors new clothes’(everyone knows what it means, and it doesn’t really apply if you going to say anderson was never good).
it just makes you seem arrogant and a little bit thick, which i’m sure you aren’t, but would like to see proof of this.
the oscars are relatively easy to discredit as ridiculous (forrest gump won best film, in the same year pulp fiction and fargo were nominated), but it’s off topic relating to the merits (or lack of) in There Will Be Blood.
Hope to see a more focused post in the future!
February 20th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
The title is a play on “No War for Oil”, no blood for oil. There will be blood, oil and war.
I think the last scene is Biblical with Daniel representing “our elder brother” the Jews, Paul representing the apostle Paul, who started a false religion, Eli representing the modern Christians who are seduced by show business lifestyles, and thelast family with oil representing the Arabs/Muslims. Eli wants Daniel to help him steal “the Arabs” oil, but Daniel/Israel has already stolen it. Daniel exhibits the everday Israeli/Jewish viewpoint towards group competition. “I’m older than you, I’m smarter than you, and I can kill and laugh about it.”
February 23rd, 2008 at 10:37 am
“This movie has a lot to say, in fact. About family, about faith, about ambition and greed and big business. About emptyness and madness. This movie is brimming with interesting ideas and conclusive thematic statements.”
Such as? I have searched in vain for someone to explain waht these “interesting ideas” and “thematic statements” are. PT Anderson’s fans all claim he has so many profound things to say, but they never get around to explaining what he actually HAS to say.
This is the hallmark of all “emperor’s new clothes” movies. Detractors are accused of not being smart or perceptive enough to see what is there, yet the defenders fail to explain what is there. If they can’t articulate what is there, it’s because there’s nothing there. It’s been a long time since Boogie Nights and Magnolia, and I’m still waiting for someone to point out these supposed incredible depths. But nobody ever has, and likely, nobody ever will, because those movies were overrated from the start. Those of us who saw those movies as empty stylistic exercises have no reason to change our minds until somebody, somewhere demonstrates something to the contrary.
Nobody has to take it on faith that Shakespeare, for example, is a great artist, because essays and books written about his work are often brimful of fascinating ideas and themes inspired by the plays. Shakespeare’s ideas set off chain reactions inside the minds of his commentators. (He’s not only witty in himself, he is the cause that wit is in other men.)
With Anderson (and other overrated pseudo-geniuses), EVERYTHING has to be taken on faith, because his admirers cannot or will not go beyond dogmatic assertion. That just ain’t good enough. As of now, I’m sticking with the Emperor’s New Clothes theory.
September 18th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
Thank you, thank you, thank you for this article. Ever since seeing this film in the theater, I’ve been looking to read a review written by someone who actually possesses the capacity for indendent thinking, and to call this movie out for the torturously plodding, pointless, inane bore-fest that it is. Oh, and did I mention THANK YOU??