Misogyny and Masculinity in There Will Be Blood: Daniel Plainview

Daniel Plainview is not just a man who builds an oil empire — he is a searing study in how toxic masculinity and misogyny fuel an addiction to power that ends in utter isolation. This piece reads Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood through the lens of misogyny and masculinity in There Will Be Blood while offering practical takeaways for film students and writers.

Spoiler warning: This analysis discusses major plot points and scenes from There Will Be Blood (2007). Read on only if you’ve seen the film or don’t mind spoilers.

Misogyny and Masculinity in There Will Be Blood — Introduction

Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007) interrogates early American capitalism, religion, and masculine identity. Critically, the film stages misogyny and masculinity in There Will Be Blood as structural forces: women are marginal, and male honor is defined by domination. Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance, Robert Elswit’s cinematography, and Jonny Greenwood’s score together dramatize a man whose sense of self is bound to conquest rather than relationality.

To deepen that reading, this essay adds contextual background on turn-of-the-century oil culture, practical scene-analysis steps, comparative case studies to orient film students, and concise recommendations for writers aiming to portray power dynamics honestly.

There Will Be Blood movie summary: power and isolation themes

This There Will Be Blood movie summary centers on how power and isolation themes cohere around Daniel Plainview. He rises from prospector to oil baron, adopts H.W. to manufacture a family persona, and progressively severs ties— emotionally and physically—while battling Eli Sunday for moral and civic dominance. Key beats include the opening mine rescue and negotiation, H.W.’s accident (and resulting deafness), the escalating humiliations between Plainview and Eli, and the final bowling-alley confrontation that completes Plainview’s spiritual and social ruin.

Placing the film in historical context sharpens its stakes: the American oil boom created sudden fortunes that outpaced existing civic institutions, and the film dramatizes how masculine ideals—self-made success, frontier toughness, control over land and labor—became conflated with moral worth. This era’s social Darwinist currents, boosterism, and religious revivalism are the backdrop that makes Plainview’s trajectory both plausible and tragic.

Misogyny and Masculinity in There Will Be Blood: Daniel Plainview character analysis

At the heart of any Daniel Plainview character analysis is the way masculine ideology structures his choices. Plainview’s masculinity is performative and exclusionary: he valorizes toughness, control, and self-reliance while dismissing vulnerability and partnership. Misogyny appears not only in the film’s sparse female cast but in how feminine influence (domesticity, care, interdependence) is framed as a weakness Plainview must reject. As a result, misogyny and masculinity in There Will Be Blood are twin engines of the film’s tragic architecture.

Expanded example: consider Plainview’s interactions with Mary Sunday and other female figures. They are brief, functional, and often edited out of the moral ledger. When H.W.’s mother appears in the narrative, her role is instrumental—centered on caretaking and removed once Plainview’s public self-demand requires privacy. This repeated sidelining of women functions as a narrative technique that reproduces the structural misogyny the film critiques.

How misogyny operates in the story

Women are narratively peripheral and often unnamed, which both reflects and enacts the world Plainview builds.
Domestic roles are instrumentalized (H.W.’s mother, Mary Sunday), reinforcing that emotional labor is invisible and disposible in Plainview’s moral calculus.
Plainview’s “family man” performance is strategic; when intimacy demands equality, he rejects it.

Case study: The H.W. episode. H.W.’s accident is doubly symbolic: it removes Plainview’s emotional anchor and illustrates how masculine ambition externalizes harm. The event is staged as a cost of progress—an implicit critique of the industrial logic that sacrifices caring structures for profit.

Daniel Plainview psychological profile: addiction to power and isolation

This Daniel Plainview psychological profile frames his behavior as overlapping narcissistic traits, antisocial tactics, and a behavioral addiction to dominance. He displays grandiosity, entitlement, manipulative charm, and escalating risk-taking—the kind of pattern social psychologists link with power-focused motivation. Importantly, we avoid clinical labels; instead, we use these categories as interpretive tools to explain narrative function.

Narcissistic pattern: fragile self-esteem dependent on external dominance and recognition.
Antisocial pattern: routine deception and ruthless economic exploitation.
Addiction framework: each conquest temporarily soothes but increases appetite, producing withdrawal-like rage when thwarted.

Expert insight: social-psychological research supports this cinematic portrait. As summarized in the Harvard Business Review piece linked below, scholars find that increased power can blunt empathy and perspective-taking—phenomena we watch Plainview enact as his empire grows (see externalLinks).

Cinematic techniques and Daniel Day-Lewis performance

Anderson’s craft choices make the character study tangible:

Performance: Daniel Day-Lewis conveys interior hunger through economy of gesture and vocal modulation; silence often communicates more than speech.
Cinematography: Robert Elswit’s framing isolates Plainview within landscapes and interiors, literalizing his social withdrawal.
Score: Jonny Greenwood’s dissonant motifs sound like anxiety given orchestral scale; they mark moral rupture and loneliness.
Mise-en-scène: trophies, oil rigs, and the cavernous Plainview house register spoils of conquest that double as monuments to absence.

These elements together turn psychological interpretation into sensory experience: we see, hear, and feel Plainview’s contraction away from others.

Practical observation for cinematographers: watch how windows and doorways are used. Plainview is often shot through apertures or reflected in surfaces—visual metaphors for his insularity. For sound designers, note how Greenwood’s score alternates between invasive and absent, mirroring the ebb of empathy.

Key scenes for teaching power and isolation themes

Opening mine rescue/negotiation — establishes transactional human relations.
Adoption and the line “I have a competition in me” — family as performance and instrument.
H.W.’s accident and aftermath — loss of the last tether to intimacy.
Baptism encounters with Eli — public rituals become arenas for domination.
The “I drink your milkshake” monologue — consummate act of symbolic consumption and the emptiness of absolute victory.

Step-by-step scene analysis guide for students:

Identify the power dynamics at play (who controls the frame, who speaks last).
Note what is omitted—which characters or voices are missing (women, laborers).
Chart physical space: who occupies center, who is relegated to margins.
Listen to sound: where is music present or absent and what emotional work does it do?
Cross-reference period context: how does historical culture (oil boom, religion) shape interpersonal stakes?

Applying this method to the final bowling alley scene, for example, reveals how props (the private trophy room, bowling lanes) and ritualized solitude stage Plainview’s moral death.

Comparative analysis: There Will Be Blood and similar films

Comparing There Will Be Blood to other cinematic explorations of masculine ruin helps to clarify its specific claims about misogyny and masculinity. Two useful comparisons:

Citizen Kane (1941): Both films depict self-made men whose private emptiness contradicts public success. Kane’s loss of personal intimacy echoes Plainview’s—but Anderson foregrounds masculine aggression and religious rivalry more explicitly.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948): Greed fracturing group bonds provides a parable family for Anderson’s narrative. Where Sierra Madre isolates greed as a corrupting force among equals, There Will Be Blood ties greed to masculine performance and the erasure of women.

These comparisons show how misogyny and masculinity in There Will Be Blood are not merely personal flaws but cultural logics made cinematic.

Misogyny and Masculinity in There Will Be Blood — conclusion and takeaways

There Will Be Blood stages misogyny and masculinity in There Will Be Blood not as incidental shading but as structural cause: Plainview’s toxic masculine script produces his addiction to domination and the consequent isolation. For filmmakers, writers, and critics, the film is a masterclass in aligning character psychology with formal technique. For viewers, it is a cautionary tale: triumph built on erasure of others yields only a hollow throne.

Practical tips for film students and writers

Study how Anderson uses negative space to externalize interiority.
Track prop-symbol relationships (wells as womb/void; trophies as hollow monuments).
Use silence and score to imply emotional states rather than explaining them.
When writing characters of power, show cost—relationships fray as status rises.

Step-by-step for writers portraying toxic masculinity:

Establish the performance: show how the character enacts masculine norms in public.
Introduce relational stakes: a partner, child, or confidant who demands reciprocity.
Escalate conflict between ambition and intimacy.
Use symbolic incidents (accidents, betrayals) to literalize abstract costs.
Deny easy redemption: let the arc demonstrate system-level consequences, not just individual failure.

Actionable recommendations for directors:

Stage scenes so domination is shown through micro-behaviors—interruptions, camera angles, space control.
Avoid explaining misogyny away; instead, let formal elements (editing, sound) reveal its endurance.