“LIKE ME, the esteemed film scholar George Toles thinks that Paul Thomas Anderson didn’t really come into his own as a director until he made There Will Be Blood (2007), his fifth feature film.”
“But as I read Toles’s intriguing new book on Anderson — part of the increasingly influential “Contemporary Film Directors” series published by the University of Illinois Press — I began to realize that he and I value the film for very different, perhaps even incommensurable reasons.”
“A film that had me thinking about history and geopolitics had him thinking about psychology and personal trauma. What had me thinking of Walter Benjamin — “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” — had him thinking about Freud, and not necessarily the Freud of Civilization and Its Discontents, either.”
“In Toles’s account, There Will Be Blood mines “the buried emotional core” of its ruthlessly single-minded protagonist, the heartless oilman Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis). For him, the film is an intimate portrait of one man’s “jammed consciousness.” But I still see it as a broader indictment of the ideologies that have shaped modern American society as a whole: capitalism, evangelism, industrialism, and, of course, violence. I want to punch Daniel Plainview in the face, or put him in prison. Toles wants to put him on the analyst’s couch. Did he and I see the same film?”
“Toles views all of P. T. Anderson’s work as a filmmaker through a psychoanalytic lens. His book — which, unlike much academic film criticism, is full of literary shine and sparkle — surveys almost all of Anderson’s cinematic work to date, but it focuses primarily on three of the director’s later films: Punch-Drunk Love (2002), the aforementioned There Will Be Blood, and The Master (2012).”
“Inherent Vice (2014), an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel of the same title, arrived in theaters too recently to make it into the manuscript, which is a shame, partly because the film challenges some of the assumptions Toles makes about the arc and coherence of Anderson’s career; but also because a Distinguished Professor of English who has spent a career working with the filmmaker Guy Maddin — a mad genius whose films, like Pynchon’s prose, freely mix history, myth, and fantasy in ever surprising ways — would be just the right person to parse the meaning of a Pynchon/Anderson mash-up.”
“If you have ever seen a Guy Maddin film — some of which Toles either wrote or co-wrote — you will have a sense of what to expect in Paul Thomas Anderson. Close attention is paid to psychosexual dynamics, and to how they determine not just conscious thoughts and actions, but also subconscious drives, desires, and feelings.”
“Mother figures and father figures loom large, especially in inescapable fever dreams of memory that shuffle between feelings of guilt and shame on the one side and euphoric ecstasy — or release, if we want to be more graphic — on the other. Those long, dark winters in Winnipeg, where Maddin lives and where Toles teaches at the University of Manitoba, must leave a lot of time for introspection. Maybe too much time.”
“Martin Woessner is associate professor of History & Society at The City College of New York’s Center for Worker Education.”