After meaning to watch it for years, I finally got around to There Will Be Blood. It's a solid film with a lot of subtle meaning and I believe there is a lot more to the ending than first meets the eye.
Perhaps the most interesting thematic aspects of There Will Be Blood lie within the ironic parallels between Eli Sunday and Daniel Plainview.
Daniel is a consummate hyper-capitalist. It is his failing to have a real family (despite acting as a father to HW, that is essentially what he is doing; acting) that causes his misery, and his prioritisation of his own personal capitalistic wealth above all else that leads to both his huge wealth and completely hollow personal life.
Perhaps the greatest irony of Daniel's existence is that he murders the man who is posing as his half-brother. He himself has posed as H.W.'s father for many years, and yet he feels he is owed the boy's loyalty even after showing him callous disregard on numerous occasions. Yet he judges someone pulling the same thing on him so harshly as to merit a death sentence, demonstrating shallow emotional insight and hypocrisy.
One of the most interesting insights into Daniel's character is when he is watching a burning oil well, shortly after H.W. is deafened by a gas blast that caused the fire. Aware that his son is seriously injured, Daniel turns to a worker and says "What are you looking so miserable for? There's a whole ocean of oil beneath us, and no one can get at it but ME!"
In that very line, Daniel crystallises his approach to business in a single word. Not us. ME. Daniel has developed such an egocentric world-view that he even believes his workers should inexplicably be as happy as he is when he is making massive profits, because to him the whole world revolves around himself and his quest for oil. He claims several times to want to share wealth with his workers and the community, but in reality he has at this point become a selfish soul who wants only to accumulate vast profits for himself. Even as he says this, he is neglecting his son's well-being in order to focus on his money.
On the other hand, Eli is a consummate hyper-evangelist. He, in many ways, represents everything wrong with organised religion in the same way that Daniel represents many of the problems with extreme capitalism. In one of Daniel's more reasonable and more human moments, he agrees to allow Eli to bless his oil well, despite clearly feeling dubious about it himself and having no religious faith of his own. He does this out of good will (and perhaps also a desire to appear attractive to the community).
Eli responds that his name must be spoken during the blessing. Instead, Daniel blesses the well with the name of Eli's sister Mary in front of Eli and the community (apparently doing this without thinking anything of it, as he still says the other words Eli wanted). This clearly antagonises Eli at the time, as he smiles through pursed lips, even though the prayer was said to God as he asked.
When an accident later occurs at the well, Eli claims it was because the blessing was carried out improperly (the implication being that because his name was not said, the blessing was not "holy"). This shows a real blasphemous arrogance on Eli's part - he considers himself the sole voice and messenger of God's will. Religion is a commodity he thinks he owns. Eli claims that his religious community is his family, but as with Daniel's relationship with money over his son, Eli prioritises his own religious "wealth" above all else, and feels himself superior to his "flock".
Later, when Eli is revealed to have become a shallow radio evangelist interested only in self-promotion, he meets Daniel and breaks down. His focus on the cult-of-himself has resulted in both a lack of money (something Daniel does not experience, with his rational focus on material wealth) but also a similar lack of "soul" to Daniel.
Daniel, gripped by madness, kills Eli at the end of the film after humiliating him. But it's that last line that really throws us back to the duality of the two: "I'm finished."
Thinking of the two characters as two mirror images, Daniel as the materialistic capitalist incapable of human connection due to his own arrogance; Eli as the false prophet, incapable of human connection due to his own arrogance...this last line takes on an interesting significance to me.
What if Daniel has realised his duality with Eli? A man for whom he holds utter contempt? What if his murder of Eli is his own disgusted suicide-by-proxy? He kills the man he has contempt for, because he realises this man is a mirrored shadow of himself. Afterwards, he is just as broken and pathetic as Eli himself was, despite having everything he could seem to want.
"I'm finished" is not merely a statement of legal repercussions or a fourth-wall breaking comment on the film. No, Daniel is commenting on both how he has engineered his own emotional destruction through his mistreatment of H.W. and his annihilation of his own "other self", Eli.
Note how Eli himself is obsessed with money throughout the film. He wants $10,000 for the church; not because he cares for his "flock" or his family, but because he wants money. He asks Daniel for $5,000, essentially trying to trade a "proper" blessing of the well for money. Eli regards the death of an oil worker as a convenience for bargaining with Daniel, in the same twisted way Daniel adopts a dead worker's son in order to conveniently bargain with investors.
Eli's career as a radio evangelist is again designed to trade religious faith for money. In the end, what does Eli renounce his religion for and trade in his dignity to get? Money. The film is not about materialism versus spirituality, it's about the convergence of materialism and materialism posing as spirituality. The greedy oil barons and the greedy false prophets are the same.
In many ways, Eli is therefore a more repulsive character than even Daniel. Because Daniel Plainview says what he means and does what he says. He trades a physical commodity for money, even though he is ruthless and often cruel. Eli, however, trades on falsities and his own ego for cash; he is Daniel, but with a bible instead of a barrel of crude.
Daniel pretends he is a family man to make money. Eli pretends he is the voice of God to make money. Which is more unethical?
It is therefore my opinion that There Will Be Blood is a musing on the duality of capitalism and organised religion; how the two mingle and become indistinguishable when abused, and how neglect of the family and a lack of self-awareness brings an inevitable collapse regardless of material prosperity or religious "faith".
