In the last couple of weeks, I've revisited what I believe to be the 2 most important American films of the new millennium. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and There Will Be Blood. Both films paint a picture of America at the turn of the 20th century and portray its neurotic adolescence as a nation through central characters making soul destroying decisions that irrevocably alter the course of their lives, and by sub textual extent, the destiny of the country that birthed them.
There Will Be Blood (TWBB henceforth) is a towering achievement in individualistic film making. I've never been much of a Paul Thomas Anderson fan frankly. I found Boogie Nights to be exhausting and unnecessarily slimy. An ugly story not worth telling. Punch Drunk Love was well shot and made amusing use of Sandler's volatile man child-persona, but ultimately felt like a minor, floundering work. Never seen Hard Eight and everything I've ever read about Magnolia has made me run in the opposite direction. Point being, all of that was mere prelude to the startlingly assured becoming PTA underwent crafting TWBB. It's a film of undiluted vision, free from committee tampering and popular concession. In the hands of lesser film makers, that's a recipe for flailing indulgence, but TWBB manages to miraculously be about a million things. It understates its case and overstates its rage. Like the North American man's understanding of God and his terrestrial proxy the father figure, it is distant, vengeful, spiteful, self loathing, greedy and entirely full of itself.
Plainview and Eli are two sides of the same coin. Two men who want power and wealth and are willing to put on an act to attain it. The difference between them is Eli, the preacher, the "spiritual" man, wants his fame and wealth to lead to a prominent place among his fellow man, glad handing and accessible to all. Plainview, the unrepentant capitalist, want to use wealth as a means to forever escape his fellow man, who disgusts him so wholly, he only longs to crush them in competition. Plainview is pragmatic and represents progress. He represents strength and the steroidal heart beating in the chiseled chest of manifest destiny. Eli represents duplicity and weakness. He represents the cowardice of clinging to false prophets and is all the more reprehensible for how quickly he would sell out his publicly cherished "beliefs" when push comes to shove. Politicians and religious leaders are nothing more than pop culture figureheads, true power lies in the hallow boardrooms of behemoth corporations and shadowy conglomerates. And you know what? Just like Plainview, those corporations FUCKING HATE US. They are disgusted by us and treat us like cattle who need their minds made up for them. And for the most part, they're right. We are weak and never get anything accomplished outside of gossipping and paying lip service to popular causes.
The final scene, when Eli pleads with Plainview for a handout and gets his head caved in for the effort, is indicative of organized religion's influence over the future of this nations affairs being brutally murdered by the true world power. Wealth. When Plainview says, "I'm finished!", what he's really saying is that the relevance of superstitious, childish belief systems is finished. Us babbling, idiot masses like to think we have a voice and that our traditions are respected by our corporate overlords, but if you've bothered to read anything or watch any of the 489 documentaries detailing corporate malfeasance released in the last couple of years, you know that is folly. You are well aware how much a human life is worth. Plainview and his rise to power, his intractable determinism, IS the industrial revolution and the 21st century it wrought. Poor old Eli with his collapsed cranium, is the antiquated notion of Billy Graham bending the ear of the President. Not only are those days gone, they were a scam to begin with.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is an entirely different animal. Where TWBB tells the story of our masters, TAOJJBTCRF is intimately concerned with us, the average, simple minded shithead that actually populates the space between the coasts. It is about little people with big dreams, warped minds and gigantic holes in their hearts. It's about people who want more than anything to be important, to be noticed, and upon achieving recognition, find it to be as dispiriting and hollow as anonymity was. Casey Affleck turns in what is indisputably the most under rated performance perhaps ever. His Robert Ford is a jittery, lilting media junkie in an age when consumption of media required a great deal more effort and participation than today. He forces himself into the life script he read and endlessly re-read by candle light. You've met people like him, he makes you uncomfortable when he's onscreen and his attempts to ingratiate himself with the cadre of bad men and outlaws he so desperately desires to emulate is wince inducing. You see this needy, despicable behaviour paraded on every reality television show, youtube video and supermarket tabloid cover.
Brad Pitt's Jesse James is the quintessential model of despondent, aloof, paranoid celebrity. His violent mood swings and deteriorating mental state give this constant sense of unravelling. It's the same feeling we get watching flavor of the week pop stars go through the public paces of relationship problems, drug addictions and ultimately hospitalization or death. Pitt couldn't have been a more perfect choice and he plays it beautifully. You sense the natural charisma that sets him apart from his fellow man, but there's something sinister and self destructive constantly threatening to take it all away. His Jesse James is Cobain, Ledger, Hendrix and Lennon.
The film tackles the cult of celebrity and how it mangles common folks ability to manage expectations of their own lives, all the while burning out and callously discarding those we cyclically elevate then consume as a means to sate our unending hunger for self worth.
I find it fascinating that these two films found a way to address the institutionalized sickness of the American existence by going back to the beginning and laying bare the rotten foundations of our collective mental illness. I have little faith that anything can be done at this point to step back from the brink of cultural apocalypse, but I suppose I find solace in seeing the strings in any case.
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