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Prof. Steven Shaviro posted on his blog a few days ago a brief meditation on Daniel Day-Lewis’ (now Oscar-winning) performance in There Will be Blood, responding to Salon’s rather scathing review of said performance. Quite a fascinating post really, and one which linked to and generated a number of very interesting comments. Definitely worth taking a look, particularly for those of us who aren’t satisfied with just enjoying a wonderful movie like this, and insist upon analysing it theoretically (with reference, of course, to M. Deleuze).

While reading his post and the resultant comments, I was left hesitating between the implicit claims being made by Shaviro and by commenter LB: isn’t there a much more productive and Deleuzean way of thinking about Daniel Plainview’s character? One which doesn’t neatly fit into the category of ‘nonpsychological subject’ or Homo Economicus, or that of ‘disillusioned but still-sentimental misanthrope?’ And so, instead of getting started on this stack of semiology papers I’ve got to mark, I decided to write up a little dilettantish critique of Day-Lewis’ performance in response to these interesting theses.

What can we call the affective state of this fictive Homo Economicus but a state of disaffected misanthropy, in which a preexisting assemblage of desires (BwO) recognizing the inadequacy of bourgeois sentimentality seeks to channel all of its drives according to the imperatives laid out by capital? On this interpretation (perhaps more in line with the sentiments of Shaviro than LB), Plainview is neither wholly unsentimental, nor an unfortunate victim of the curse of capital. To decisively propose either reading seems foolish. There is something strange about DD-L’s calculated affect, but a ‘non-psychological’ subject or pure homo economicus is simply a convenient fiction, and I credit Paul Thomas Anderson’s characterization with a bit more verisimilitude than that.

The quote Shaviro provides from American Stranger’s blog seems particularly perceptive, especially in the light of Deleuze & Guattari’s thoughts on masks and faciality (visagéite) in Mille plateaux. Plainview adopts the mask of the tycoon in order to achieve his desires for fortune: this is a mask which (as we all should know from our own experiences with an increasingly media-friendly batch of tycoons) demands far more calculation than sincerity. And so DD-L’s extremely calculated affect, his ‘heavy cloak’ of technique is very appropriate here. Following the formula of D&G (which in its original context rather tellingly refers to the ‘despot-god’), Plainview’s mask “does not hide the face, it is the face” (MP 115). The mask of the disaffected and calculating tycoon does not simply conceal a hidden reserve of sentimentality, nor does it define Plainview’s character in its entirety. Instead, the film clearly dramatizes the mechanisms by which the mask of the tycoon gradually supplants the naive and uncalculating sentimentality of Plainview-the-father (more apparent in the early portions of the film) and replaces it with the calculating, amoral emptiness of Plainview-the-tycoon. Neither the tycoon-mask nor the familial mask is Plainview’s ‘real’ face, but rather each mask corresponds with certain possibilities and impossibilities for Plainview-the-individual. The familial mask is warmer and more impassioned, while the tycoon mask is colder and more calculating; likewise, it seems that both masks correspond with certain movements of territorialization and deterritorialization, with family carving out a territory which is constantly deterritorialized by capital. Nevertheless, neither mask, it seems, corresponds with “Plainview himself” (insofar as this term has any referent at all).

It seems that Shaviro is quite right to question the rather staid critiques put forth by Salon: Day-Lewis’ calculated, ‘obvious’ acting is not a deficiency, but precisely what his character demands. But I’m not sure why he would claim that “even Plainview’s rashest and most impulsive acts, like the murders he commits, are crimes of calculation, or at least of mechanism, rather than crimes of passion.” Plainview’s murders are clearly not ‘just’ crimes of calculation; indeed, I’m not so sure that a murder can ever be purely calculating or mechanistic. (NB: I’m about to spoil the ending for you, if you haven’t seen it.) His first murder corresponds with a resurgence of the tycoon-mask after a period in which it gets tentatively replaced with a brother-mask: Plainview seems to let his guard down somewhat when he meets his ‘brother,’ slipping into a familial mask which was apparently discarded once he sends away his now-’useless’ deaf son. But when he finds out that this brother is an impostor, the disaffected tycoon-mask (not without its own cold and sadistic passions), demands that he slay this witness to the less-guarded fraternal mask.

Likewise, it seems that if Plainview were really as calculating and cold as the visage his tycoon-mask presents, he would not be so threatened by Eli Sunday the impassioned preacher. The dialectic of these two characters turns on the question of passion, and it shows up the inadequacy of any reading in which one character is purely ‘calculating’ and the other purely ‘passionate.’ On the surface, this reading works just fine: Eli seeks salvation for his people through charismatic religion; Plainview seeks only to work out a calculated bargain with these same people, trading their rights to the land for the right to a (tiny) share of the capital sequestered beneath it. Eli is therefore the impassioned foil to the calculating Plainview. But it’s not even close to this simple: both characters must ultimately compromise their values, and their masks are decisively shattered by the end of film. Perhaps this even happens at the beginning: either Eli leads Plainview to the oil on his family’s farm (hiding behind a pseudonym, the identical mask of his ‘twin’), or it’s the work of a real twin brother. In either case, it is someone who shares Eli’s face, someone who hides behind an identical mask, that brings Plainview to the Sunday ranch in search of oil.

More significantly, however, the two most compelling scenes of the film are the scenes in which Plainview and Sunday’s masks are shown for what they are. In the scene where Plainview is baptized and humiliated by Sunday, we can see the depth of Plainview’s passion straining against the tycoon-mask he has adopted for himself as he is forced to shout again and again: “I have abandoned my boy!” In the comfort of his own calculating world of capital, Plainview can sustain the mask of the tycoon without contradiction: he sent his son away simply because the oilfield was no place for a deaf child, because a boarding school could offer him far better care than he, etc. etc. But when he is forcibly dragged out of this world and placed in the charismatic sphere of the church, the essentially non-calculating thought at the basis of his calculating mask is laid bare. Without his impassioned, irrational desire for wealth, Plainview could never sustain this calculating visage: he would have given it up for the sake of his child. Plainview-the-tycoon is in no way ‘purely’ calculating, but is sustained by an underlying passion for calculation. This is what Eli hopes to lay bare in his baptismal ceremony, but although he draws out the passions which underly Plainview’s calculating nature, the tycoon-mask is too firmly entrenched: Plainview-the-tycoon returns as soon as the ceremony is finished, and he sees the entire drama as simply a means to an end.

But this is not the only resurgence of the passions of Plainview, the drives of his body-without-organs which forever transgress the limits set out by one mask or another. Somewhere, subconsciously, this character ‘knows’ exactly what happened in the church, and will never forgive Eli for subverting his mask in this way. The last scene of the film only makes sense in this context. In the baptismal sequence, Eli, finding himself in a position of power over Plainview, attempted to lay bare the passions which sustain Plainview’s calculating mask; in the final sequence, Plainview, finding himself in a position of power over Eli, seeks to lay out the fundamentally calculating quality of Eli’s passions. While Plainview was forced to admit the essentially irrational quality of his calculating greediness, Eli is forced to admit the essentially calculating quality of his faith by admitting that his God is nothing more than a useful fiction. This is of course an essentially Hegelian contest, in the master-slave sense of a struggle for identity: the impassioned, pious thinker seeks to exert mastery over the calculating one by showing that his mode of thought is more fundamental, and vice versa. The contest, however, makes clear that neither term of this opposition is wholly separate from the other, but in fact contains the germ of the other within itself, as its vital or animating force. Plainview, alone in his mansion, desperately seeks to prove the value of his own mask by showing up Eli’s disguise. And he’s far from wrong about Eli: why else would Eli have sought to publicly humiliate Plainview in front of his congregation, except as a calculated move to undermine (in the eyes of the people) Plainview’s mode of thought and buttress his own? Eli clearly has no qualms about supporting his faith through calculation (which makes me think that Eli and his ‘twin’ are one and the same character). But Plainview’s calculating qualities are clearly only made possible by an underlying passion. After all, the last scene presents is no public humiliation for Eli, but simply Plainview’s irrational desire to prove to himself the superiority of his own way of thinking. This scene shows Plainview desperate to sustain the calculating mask of the tycoon, but his desperation is anything but calculating. Eli proves his fundamentally calculating nature by his willingness to admit that God is nothing more than a fiction; but in this epic struggle for recognition, this admission is profoundly unsatisfying to the impassioned Plainview. As in Hegel’s formulation of the master-slave dialectic, the recognition of mastery is attained by the forced submission of the slave: Plainview’s mastery, the mastery of capital and calculation, is at long last recognized by Eli. But this recognition can bring no satisfaction to the master, since it depends upon the recognition of the slave: the mastery of capital demands the submission of the passions, but it is nothing without these passions and their submissiveness. And so, in a final act of desperation, Plainview seeks to decisively abolish the passions, to affirm the joint dominance of capital and calculation once and for all by murdering the man of faith.

But bludgeoning a man of God to death with a bowling pin has to be about the furthest thing from calculated: the vicious bludgeoning with whatever heavy object is ready-to-hand is perhaps the archetypal crime of passion (cf. of course Cain and Abel). The last scene dramatizes the fact that calculation is always sustained by passion. We might, like Shaviro, be quite uncertain as to whether Plainview will ever be punished for his misdeeds. But Plainview-the-tycoon is far from victorious in this combat. In the submerged violence of his face-to-face encounters with Eli, and in the accomplishment of this violence in murder, Plainview’s existence is revealed to himself as absurd. (I would love to expand more on these connections with Levinas, but this is getting far too long already.) Plainview has long confused the disaffected and calculating mask of the tycoon with his own reflection, and even come to accept it as his true face: archetypal méconnaissance. With the death of the impassioned Eli, he finally comprehends the truth that ought always to have been in plain view. Behind the rationalizing mask of the tycoon, there is no rational subject, no unified ground of economic calculation, but only an assemblage of irrational passions. And so Plainview’s ambiguous final words are his most profound, and his most sincere. In shattering Eli’s mask and his face, he has finally slain his specular double, his passionate foil, and so he might finally considered homo economicus, a being of pure calculation without passion: so he says, “I’m finished,” implying that his project is finally accomplished. This accomplishment, however, can only be attained at the expense of his subjectivity (cf. Levinas’ reading of murder), in a combat which subverts the very mask it seeks to support. These last words might therefore also be read as an implication that Plainview has finally metamorphosed into a pure mask of capital, or the homo economicus referred to by Shaviro. Thus, at the end of the film, Plainview has become a space of dissimulation bereft of any independent subjectivity: a mask which conceals no face, but only an infinite regress of disguises. And so Plainview’s last line of dialogue is to be interpreted as the unutterable “je suis fini” in opposition to the possessive finitude of the subjective “j’ai fini.” These are not the words of a subject of enunciation – “I have finished!” – but the utterance of a mask which conceals no subject, a mask whose ‘I’ is itself ‘finished.’