There Will Be Blood has no clothes

Dreadful. There Will Be Blood is just dreadful. It derives from a novel by Upton Sinclair, so in fairness it could only ever have been dreadful. There Will Be Blood presumes to be some searing indictment of oil and capitalism and America, but what it achieves is a reprise of Gangs of New York and Bill "The Butcher" Cutting; just another bombastic, braying, murderous madman, just another Daniel Day-Lewis psychopath picture.

Oil doesn't make "Daniel Plainview" a psychopath, much less America and its exchanges for goods and services. I defy anyone to watch that ordeal-by-cinema and tell me that Daniel Plainview would've been any more decent a human being had he not got into the oil business. Make him poor, make him a subsistence farmer, make him East Indian, and Daniel Plainview would be every bit as much a psychopath. It wasn't oil or capitalism or America that compelled Daniel Plainview to bludgeon the helpless pastor to death with a bowling pin. There Will Be Blood proves nothing more than that the Daniel Day-Lewis character is a psychopath.

There Will Be Blood is not an enjoyable two-and-a-half hours; it's meant to be unsettling, and there's no fun in a movie engineered to upset. Heaven forfend that Hollywood in the 21st Century produce a "serious" film that doesn't leave the viewer despairing of living. "Seriousness" in Hollywood since circa 1968 is too much measured by un-enjoyable-ness. But if a film isn't enjoyable then it had better achieve something of import, and There Will Be Blood is pointless.

The picture is presented with the affectations of the "sweeping historical epic" and "indictment of American society" or "portrait of the evils of oil" or some such rot. And the elite swallowed it as ever: eight Oscar nominations including Best Picture, and best film of the 2000s per prominent publications. But then, this was 2007-8, when those same elites were head-over-heels for another fancy nullity, this one running for president of the United States. They were unanimous about him, too; uniformly worshipful and uniformly wrong. It was some reassurance to read at Box Office Mojo that notwithstanding the accolades and awards, coinciding with its run in theaters, There Will Be Blood at the time of this writing worked out to Number 1,429 in all-time domestic box office receipts. You might say The Dark Knight drank There Will Be Blood's milkshake.

There Will Be Blood is shot artfully, and I'd be the first to commend its sort-of cinematic style, which doubtless will be aped transparently until its succession by some more novel trend. And Daniel Day-Lewis is a fine actor, particularly if you find indulgent bombast becoming in an actor. Though there must be a million actors who could've played a more real Daniel Plainview in a more true portrait, but those actors weren't in the right place at the right time or didn't attend the right school or don't know the right people, and so they toil in oblivion. But presentation and style don't make a film great any more than they make a president worthy of carving into Mount Rushmore. 

The critics who venerated it and the industry insiders who decorated it were responding to the "great film" trappings and elite prejudice-affirmation in the picture. The Wikipedia entry on There Will Be Blood stipulates that the industry didn't cotton to the script: "the studios didn't think it had the scope of a major picture." The studios had it right the first time. And there you have it: strip away the "great film" affectations, and those same industry insiders who later would elevate There Will Be Blood to the pinnacle of human achievement dismissed that same film as pointless.

And when a "jury" of the American Film Institute inserts the most turgid rote-leftist ideology into a single-paragraph assessment of a movie, then one gets the idea that the politics of the film figured more than a little in the support for it by the establishment. AFI pronounced There Will Be Blood "a true meditation on America." Only if you imagine a cartoonish psychopath to be a precis for America, which of course is precisely how America is caricatured by radical, hard-Left America-haters, of which the American film industry has more than a few.

More from the AFI "jury": "The film drills down into the dark heart of capitalism, where domination, not gain, is the ultimate goal." Again, the only thing that film "drills down into" is the "dark heart" of a cartoonish psychopath. I can only guess that it's not to venture out too far onto a limb to pronounce that anyone associated with the composition of those words is not hard done by capitalism, and that my income in this year would strike them as an impossibility or a joke. But in their alternate universe, the decadent elite are the noble crusaders against the "dark heart of capitalism", and some impoverished nobody alternately shivering and sweating in a cheap apartment at a malfunctioning laptop would be part of the "system" that needs tearing down, if those elites believe in all the "right" things and that nobody is an unreconstructed believer in the goodness and greatness of America.

The Daniel Day-Lewis character is a caricature -- unreal, unbelievable, and unhinged -- and There Will Be Blood is a cartoon. I have no doubt that leftist elites imagine Daniel Plainview and the corrupt pastor character to be representative of oil-men, businessmen, pastors, and Americans more generally, and the universally congratulatory reviews of those elites confirm as much. But the leftist elite deal in caricatures. They know nothing of business or Christianity or indeed of America; they have set themselves apart from the reality of the world and are interested only in stereotypes and caricatures to affirm them in their ignorance and prejudice and contempt.

What the leftist elite mean by "challenging our assumptions" is of course "challenging your assumptions". They're not iconoclasts; they mean to replace your icons with their own. The salt-of-the-earth, all-American folks who actually do things are the ones to be pilloried, scorned, and damned, while all the hatreds of the elite are stroked and sanctified, even as they preach reverently about "challenging our assumptions" and "afflicting the comfortable", etc, etc. ad nauseam. There's no-one more self-righteous than a godless leftist elite.

If they weren't blinded so by their prejudices from seeing the movie plainly, those elites might recognize it to be too cartoonish to be a serious or understanding portrait. What do they teach in Creative Writing 101, about the danger in single dimensions? Villains without redeeming characteristics and flawless heroes make for an unreal story and a tedious one. Some conventions are useful, and that's one of them; any story that relies on this kind of Soviet poster cartoonery won't hold up, and makes a dreadful, dreary picture even on the first showing.

It might have been the better way, to dispense with the weighty and solemn self-seriousness of the movie and come at it as a burlesque. A very slight tweaking could have made a joke of the picture. "I drink your milkshake" is a fine line, and might've made a good departure point for reworking the movie as a comic enterprise. That line and the Daniel Day-Lewis character were taken up by Saturday Night Live at the time, and formed the basis for an entire sketch. An English film team especially might've concluded that the script was too cartoonish to make a properly serious film, and developed and expanded the cartoonish elements to make a romp of the thing. But these dreary moviemakers presumed to make a "big", "serious", "important" film. And when a caricature isn't put up to make the audience laugh then it'll surely make them groan. So if There Will Be Blood is not a roaring spoof, the Daniel Day-Lewis character can only be a psychopath. If Daniel Plainview isn't someone's idea of a joke, then all that's left is psychopathy.

Try this on: give Daniel Plainview a dog; make it a little one, and sweet, and with a silly, cutesy name. Then have Plainview dote on the little dog with equal force to his abuse for human beings. And then tweak the script and direction very slightly, so that Daniel Day-Lewis comes off more mad than malevolent. Every menacing word and turn of the head go from disturbing to hysterical. When it may be said of a movie that a little tweaking might convert it from "sweeping epic" and "indictment of society" to comic romp, then what you've got hold of is not the weighty picture that There Will Be Blood presumes to be.

The bias of The Chronicle-Herald, or, the job description of Canadian Press "Editor-in-Chief"

(UPDATE: Expanded since first posted. A chapter and part of the introduction from an over-long and long-overdue post which I'm far from finishing, in lieu of the rest of it. I'm afraid this can't be of much interest for a general readership, but it needs putting on the record.)

Obama and the 2009 NATO summit according to The Chronicle-Herald.

This was the solitary example offered by Scott White, the "Editor-in-Chief" of Canada's newswire monopoly, as proof that "virtually all" of the news in a little Chronicle-Herald Opinions page article of mine had "been reported", presumably by his Canadian Press or by the Associated Press in the United States, which is sluiced through the Canadian Press under an absolutely typical Canadian arrangement whereby an Upper Canadian outfit headquartered in Toronto is granted exclusive rights to distribute a superior American product to its captive market in the provincial hinterlands like Nova Scotia. They call it "Confederation".

Now, if you'll be good enough to bear with me, in my little op-ed I concerned myself with the coverage of Obama's first 100 days in The Chronicle-Herald specifically, which is why my very second sentence read, "If all a person knew of Barack Obama's first 100 days as president was what he read of them in this newspaper, it would seem to be a very charmed young presidency." In case that and the other references in the article weren't clear enough, I explained again in my reply to an accusatory e-mail from this Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly that "I read the paper every day. The paper I write for, The Chronicle-Herald. I know what it has reported on Obama and what it hasn't." And I was referring to points of scrutiny and skepticism, which is why the summation of my list in the article -- which I'd have thought was fairly obviously a list of points -- read, "Why should these points, and many more like them, have to be made by some obscure contributor to The Herald's Opinions section?" Again, if my little article wasn't clear enough, I continued in my reply to this man's e-mail, "Anyone who depended for their coverage of the Obama administration on that newspaper would have been oblivious to those points and many more."

Whereupon the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly carried right on declaring that "virtually all of the stories" I cited "have been reported", period, and I was pronounced "wrong" -- only this time it was in print on The Herald's Opinions page. Now, I've had published negative feedback since a few months after I started writing little letters to the editor. Most of it angry, much of it nasty, and some of it personal. And not only letters, but quite lot of 800-word op-eds, too. I've always appreciated that it came with the territory, and after I finished reading The Herald that morning, I shrugged and had a fried bologna sandwich. But this demands revisiting. I know The Chronicle-Herald and have been meaning for some time to document some part of its near-daily abuses, in what its "News Director" and editors choose to print, and at least as much in what they determine their readers needn't be exposed to. Those conspicuous omissions -- the "sins of omission", as Matt Drudge has called them. And so I might as well start from what is for me the beginning. I've made a thorough search of the very useful Herald Archive for the period of Obama's first 100 days, and this is what I've turned up.
I made the points among the many in my little op-ed that Obama had failed in the object of his first NATO summit to rally the allies to muster their troops for Afghanistan, coming away from the Continent with commitments for more of the accustomed noncombat tokens as opposed to fighting forces, which are after all what is called for in a shooting war and which he and his party had claimed such support would have been forthcoming -- that some mythical European cavalry would have ridden over the hill to save the day -- if only the president of the United States had been less cowboy and more Continental, i.e., if only George W. Bush had been replaced by a president exactly like Barack Obama. Then I asked rhetorically why these points and many more like them had to be made on the Opinions page of The Chronicle-Herald. But according to the very Editor-in-Chief of the national newswire monopoly, all of this had apparently been made quite clear in the coverage which I had somehow overlooked at the time, and particularly in a Canadian Press dispatch from a correspondent who'd been sent specially to Strasbourg in France to cover the summit. 

(UPDATE: Ah ha. I uncovered with some effort a Canadian Press dispatch from the conclusion of the said NATO summit, uncarried in The Chronicle-Herald per The Herald's Archive and picked up in papers few and far between per my latter-day testing for it elsewhere. That report to its credit -- and I do credit it, sincerely -- made and if I say so myself vindicated half of one of the twelve points listed in my op-ed, that Obama had failed in the object of his first NATO summit to wring combat troops out of "our European allies", although I didn't see where that fine reporting carried on to observe as I did that Obama and his lot had sworn for years that a president with a "D" appearing after his name would've had those Continentals fighting and bleeding for our Afghan cause. So there it is: the report was out there, somewhere, making half of one of my dozen points admirably, only not in the only newspaper I'd concerned myself with.)

And lo and behold, there was in fact a Canadian Press dispatch datelined Strasbourg, in the April 4, 2009 edition of The Chronicle-Herald, under the Herald headline of "NATO faces new challenge; Afghan law which curbs women's rights makes mission tough sell".

I read the CP report elsewhere, and in fact it did get around to the only practical business of the NATO summit -- in paragraphs 26 and 27. Paragraph 26: "Several European countries made a show of announcing more support for the Afghan mission on Friday, but the numbers were small." A fine bit of reporting, even if it did come at paragraph 26. Better late than never. Only, that paragraph never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald.

Paragraph 27: "Britain said it would add 'mid to high hundreds' to the 8,000 troops it has in Afghanistan. France promised more police trainers and civilian aid, and Belgium said it will add 65 soldiers and two more F-16 fighter jets." Another fine bit of reporting, even if it never did get around to that other point in my little op-ed, that Obama and his party had sworn Europe would put up and pitch in if only the president were less like Bush and more like Obama. But half is better than none. Only, that paragraph never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald.

Again, that entire passage of two paragraphs never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald. The Herald version was abridged to 564 words. Of course, the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly wouldn't have known that the dispatch of his man in Strasbourg hadn't made it in one piece to the readers of The Chronicle-Herald, and clearly he didn't heed the explanations in my article itself and in my reply to his e-mail, that I was referring to the coverage in The Chronicle-Herald specifically and that my concern was not so much stories covered as points made. But the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly pronounced against some nobody contributor to the Opinions page of a Nova Scotia newspaper, by name and in print, and brandishing his fancy title and invoking his office, despite that the one bit of evidence he offered for his case never appeared in the newspaper in question, denying the plain meaning of that nobody's words, and despite that to this day, that nobody has declined out of professional courtesy and Christian decency to name him or his reporters in print, where more people than a few might actually read it.

Of course, there was more coverage of the NATO summit in The Chronicle-Herald than that Canadian Press dispatch. The Herald ran an Associated Press report datelined Strasbourg on everything you ever wanted to know about Anders Fogh Rasmussen, headlined "Dane chosen as new NATO boss". (NATO "boss"? Anyone who knew anything about the office of NATO secretary-general would never accuse him of being "boss" to very much more than his secretarial staff.) And The Herald devoted an entire news item to an AP report on the protests against the NATO summit, headlined "Police quell protesters' first try".

Finally the Herald Archive turned up an Associated Press story, also datelined Strasbourg and published on the same day as the aforementioned Canadian Press report, under the optimistic Herald headline, "Obama pitching for help today". In all the news sections of the Chronicle-Herald, in all the reports making any mention on the 2009 NATO summit, a single sentence in a single story was the closest The Herald came to reporting Obama's failure:

"But the European public has no stomach for more intense military involvement by their nations. So Obama is unlikely to get additional help in the way of either major combat troops or new deployments to the toughest areas of the fighting in southern and eastern Afghanistan." That's a good start at reporting, or at least it would have been. Beside the fact that this was not a report of what had been but a reporter's expectation of what would be, and was discountable as such -- Obama was still "pitching for help today", after all -- and beside the fact that the blame for Europe's resistance to throwing in with us was put on "the European public" -- acquitting Obama -- even that much was negated by the preceding paragraph, which was the most inexplicable Pollyanna-ism: "Obama seems likely to win fresh commitments at Saturday's 60th anniversary NATO summit. He can expect more civilian aid and small troop increases for training Afghan forces and providing security for upcoming elections." ("Obama seems likely to win fresh commitments"! Gimme an O! Gimme a B! ....)

And that was it. A single sentence in a single story, indicating only that Obama was "unlikely to get additional help", preceded by a preemptive acquittal of Obama for any shortcomings plus some cheerleading that Obama "seems likely to win fresh commitments" which gave precisely the contrary impression, under a Herald headline of "Obama pitching for help today" which gave no hint of Obama's imminent failure, and without recalling the claims of Obama and his party that it'd be different if only a man like Obama were in the White House. The question of combat troops for Afghanistan was the one and only story of any practical significance in the 2009 NATO summit. And this was the first NATO summit since the 9/11 attacks and the start of the Afghan mission at which the president of the United States was not George W. Bush. "NATO tells Obama 'no' on Afghanistan; New president, no 'change'" ought to have been the headline, the lead paragraph, and the bulk of the story.

Nowhere in the news sections of The Chronicle-Herald was there any final report that NATO had told Obama "no", and nowhere in The Herald's news sections was the point in my op-ed made, that Obama and his party had sworn for at least half a decade that "our European allies" would have been wading into the melee with us, to spill their blood and treasure by our side, and fight and die for our cause in Afghanistan, but for that "cowboy" Bush and his "unilateralism" which was "alienating our allies" and all the rest. Now the Continentals had their very dream candidate for president of the United States, and still they declined to fight. The 2009 NATO summit was the final repudiation of six years of theorizing and politicking by Obama himself, his party, and indeed also the international press. Is is remarkable that all that didn't warrant a mention somewhere in the news sections of The Chronicle-Herald, and was left to me over on the Opinions page.

But it was worse than that. The Herald carried an Associated Press report at about this time, unrelated to the NATO summit, which mentioned a new allied commitment for Afghanistan and positively went out of its way to credit Obama personally for it: "Australia plans to add 450 soldiers, increasing its force to about 1,550, Prime Minister Rudd announced Wednesday, saying Obama persuaded him to increase the deployment during discussions last week." Now, Australia is of course not a NATO member nation, it's certainly not one of "our European allies", and in fact it and New Zealand were the lone Western nations to stand with America in Vietnam, so this is something apart from the NATO summit story, but here was the AP in The Chronicle-Herald crediting Obama personally with an allied commitment of 450 troops, while there was no corresponding report in that same paper of Obama's corresponding failure of persuasion with those European allies who were the foot-draggers, and the ones in need of persuasion according to Obama and his crowd themselves.

(That AP report included the only reference I could turn up in the Herald Archive over Obama's first 100 days to Britain's disappearing-ink commitment of 700 extra troops, promised at the NATO summit, to be withdrawn again after a few months. But Britain is America's greatest ally and foul-weather friend, whose support was so taken for granted that it was discounted when the president was named Bush, so that's also in a different category from what is meant by "our European allies".)
Indeed, the AP dispatch reported "the United States and other NATO countries now have some 70,000 soldiers in Afghanistan -- a record level." Anyone would think from reading that AP report that the Obama ally-rallying was going swimmingly. But how much of the increase to 70,000 came from those "other NATO countries"? So far from reporting Obama's failure, that AP dispatch in The Herald actually left just the contrary impression.

And it was worse than even that. Not one month before the NATO summit, The Chronicle-Herald reproduced an Associated Press report, albeit left to The Herald's Metropolitan edition, which referred to "President Barack Obama's policy to bring more European allies on board to fight the Taliban-led insurgency," and added to that bit of fantasy this bit of editorializing: "Biden said the Obama administration will be keen to engage NATO allies in global security discussions, marking a departure from the last eight years when Washington often was on a go-it-alone course that upset its European allies."

So The Chronicle-Herald was quite happy to report that it was "Obama's policy to bring more European allies on board to fight the Taliban-led insurgency", but when, a matter of weeks later, that was shown to be less "policy" than "fantasy" -- or if it was a "policy" then it was shown to be a failed one -- The Herald declined to make the point. And The Herald was happy to pass off as matter-of-fact newswire copy that it was the Bush administration's alleged "go-it-alone course that upset its European allies", but when, just weeks later, it was finally proved that those "European allies" hadn't been "upset" so much as unwilling and unable, and it turned out that supposed presidential "go-it-alone-ism" hadn't entered into it, The Herald again declined to make the point.