Plainview 2

what mills wrote in response to me:

I tend to resist reducing art into schema that merely describe what are fundamentally political or philosophical issues, partly because to do so makes art more superficial and partly because it’s usually wrong, inasmuch as creators don’t build worlds of human depth merely to symbolize some shallow thesis.

However, I agree with Tim about this movie, despite some of my friends’ misgivings: the character of Plainview in itself, without genesis onscreen, without psychological realism, must be representative, and the complexly exploitive yet symbiotic relationship between him and Paul Sunday makes little sense except as a exploration of the ways that localized, warped Christianity assisted, then was destroyed by, materialism.

I don’t sense that the movie is passing judgment on “religion” or “capitalism,” especially not in a pat political manner. It is simply an allegory of two particularly strange varieties of those phenomena that took root in the expanding American West (and in places like Texas), and how they both collide with and bolster one another.

Key line: “I have a competition in me; I want no one else to succeed.” 

yes… what he said. darn, that mills is smart.