There Will Be Blood — A perspective on the demoniac

krsna · July 28, 2008

There Will Be Blood

BY: BHAKTA WALLACE DORIAN

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Jul 27, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA (SUN) — A perspective on the demoniac.

While most movies that Hollywood churns out are trash in the truest sense of the term, there are those brilliant films that come along that transcend a given genre and catapult it into what I call an ocean of emotional complexity and revelation. The famous classic, “Citizen Kane” by the late Orson Welles, is another example that comes to mind when dissecting the old adage that

“absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

“There Will Be Blood”

directed with panache by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Daniel Day-Lewis, who received Best Actor Award in 2007 for his role as Daniel Plainview, delivers a haunting, gargantuan performance. I couldn’t help but think Mr. Lewis would make a great demonic king in one of the Krishna stories.

The film, very dense in it’s evocation of late 19th and early 20th century America, tells a compelling tale of greed with the coming of the “oil age”, that moves head-on like a locomotive and crashes with evangelicalism and religion, albeit, not in it’s purest form either. The full plot-line of the story can be

found here

.

From a Krishna conscious perspective I couldn’t help but think of the many so-called “Eli Sundays” that may be hiding behind a cloak of religiosity and false pretense that so many devotees have read about over the years on various websites.

Be that as it may, what I especially liked about the film is Mr. Lewis’s portrayal of a man obsessed by self-hate and greed that immediately brings to mind what Lord Sri Krsna tells Arjuna in (

Bg. Texts 13-15 Chapter 16

):

"The demoniac person thinks:

“So much wealth do I have today, and I will gain more according to my schemes. So much is mine now, and it will increase in the future, more and more. He is my enemy and I have killed him; and my other enemy will also be killed. I am the lord of everything, I am the enjoyer, I am perfect powerful and happy. I am the richest man, surrounded by aristocratic relatives. There is none so happy and powerful as I am. I shall perform sacrifices, I shall give some charity, and thus I shall rejoice.”