If art holds the mirror up to life, then the meaning of the film There Will Be Blood is that we are in serious trouble indeed: subjects of a drunken murderous capitalism in a life or death struggle with a pseudo-religiosity, a struggle which the former wins. But what this mirror shows us is so appalling that to award it an Oscar and rave reviews is almost an obscenity.
In the film’s denouement the protagonist forces a reverse shahadah from his hapless victim, the minister of the Church of the Third Revelation “I am a false prophet and god is a superstition” and then himself announces “I am the third revelation” i.e. after the Old Testament and the New Testament, before bludgeoning him to death.
To applaud the mirror for showing us such a desperate picture is possibly a more serious sickness than even that in the picture it has shown us. However, even that picture is incomplete. There is a third figure who is not present but ought to be in order for this to be an accurate reflection: the financier.
The age of the rapacious robber barons is long gone, the empires of cash and property they built long since transformed into something else. Read the astonishing Barbarians at the Gate about the RJR Nabisco leveraged buyout of the 70s, which was emblematic of the transformation of American industry from its Protestant work-ethic base, sitting on a mountain of cash, into the scene with which we are more familiar today: lean, mean, debt-based companies, stripped of assets and staff, racing hurriedly to keep ahead of interest rates. The Daniel Plainview of There Will Be Blood is a dinosauric relic from an age that has long gone. He has been replaced by cool speculators who bid up the price of oil on fears of terrorist attacks or war, and who, when things crash all around them, calculatedly wait for the best moment to pick up the most for the cheapest prices, while the rest of us look around for soup-queues. It is in the trillions of dollars of fictitious money that they manipulate in their hedge funds and the derivatives market, many multiples the size of the entire world economy, that a crime is being committed beside which the excesses of the gargantuan Daniel Plainviews of our world will come to look miniscule.
And, my reader will understand, they will only be brought to an end by an act of worship from a purified religiosity, the simple payment of the zakat of Islam in gold and silver coins according to the sunnah by growing numbers of the world’s Muslims will rob them of the base of their power: the deceitful creation of wealth by the repellently simple concept of writing numbers on bits of paper. This purified religion will lead to a new commerce based on paying in gold and silver with contracts void of the usury that is plunging our age over the abyss.