Annotation 3: I DRINK YOUR MILKSHA- err, OIL! by Upton Sinclair

OIL!
by Upton Sinclair
@1926, renewed 1954
Penguin Books

The movie There Will Be Blood is 'inspired' by this book.

Inspired, wow, that is a whole new level of adaptation that I was simply not aware of. I shouldn't lie that way. I was aware that inspired works happened occasionally in the past - When F.W. Murnau of UFA was not permitted to adapt Dracula by the then living Stoker family, he was 'inspired' to create a loose and loving copy cat named Nosferatu. Looking at that renewed copyright, and realizing there was no way for Paul Thomas Anderson to make this film a proper adaptation until 2029, he decided to take a few elements from OIL! and tell a similar, yet very different tale. More on that later.

The story of OIL!, as I've discovered is fairly along the lines of the social issues that concerned Upton Sinclair. Novels, you see, were supposed to inform us of great social ills and serve as education into how bad the problem is. I'm told some early novels also supplied solutions, but can there really be easy solutions to political and social unease? Sinclair, for one, does not believe that to be so. His stories have a strongly honest and slightly cynical view of the world, because the 20th century wholly belonged to Big Business, and they are not nice people. In this iteration of the Big Business story, we meet James Arnold Ross, his son who's nicknamed Bunny and Bunny's friend, Paul Watkins. James Arnold Ross, often referred to in the text as 'Dad' is an oil man.

Like most western business pioneers, J. Arnold Ross has his own set of ethics which he scrupulously maintains, unless it does not suit his business goals to do so, of course. After Bunny meets Paul in a Mrs. Groarty's kitchen, he takes his father to the site of the Watkins family ranch, ostensibly to quail hunt. Sure enough, there are plenty of quail available, but as Ross and his son discover, there's an untapped wealth of oil as well.

Upon learning that the Watkins belong to a new and rabidly fundamentalist version of Christianity, J. Arnold Ross and son offer a deal to old Mr. Watkins that he can hardly refuse, but frame the monies in such a way that as they get paid out, old Mr. Watkins is incapable of spending every last cent on missionaries and charities, as he was wont to do. This irritates Eli Watkins - Paul's twin brother, and a rising evangelist in the little town of Paradise Falls, CA. However, as his father signs the deal, there is little for Eli to do about it. As the novel progresses, he becomes a larger and more prominent radio broadcast evangelist, who never really gets his comeuppance. You want him to suffer for his hypocrisy, especially in regards to sex, but he never ever does.

Not so with the Ross family. They become titans of industry, only to get their power diminished when they become part of a large corporate oil empire. As the book progresses, we shift away from the local politics of oil work and strikes and shift into the grander scale of Federal subpoenas, and fleeing the country so as not to testify before congress. All the while, the tone of this book is very folksy. That is to say that Bunny who serves as our narrator, is upbeat in his depiction of events, while his father speaks with the Californian equivalent of the countrified accent.

Horrible events, like murder and corruption are given a light touch, and you almost feel an involuntary giggle at the sheer unabashed evil that grows out of this highly capitalist endeavor of drilling for oil. When J. Arnold Ross takes up with a charlatan of a seance mistress, you actually are rooting for the old man because he has found love again. This is a very strange but pointed book, and distinctly illustrates the views of the radical communists, the capitalists, and the greedy locals who all want their slice of the American Dream, once they realize they have oil lands to lease.

Since the book is protected from adaptation until 2029 (at least not without paying an exorbitant licensing fee to the Sinclair family, ironic no?), Paul Thomas Anderson chose to take a few key events, a few key characters and weave a gripping portrait of an oil tycoon from the turn of the century in There Will Be Blood, the movie loosely and lovingly based off this fine and gripping novel. What I find remarkable about that movie, is its even better than the book! By choosing to economize the narrative, and boil it down to simply the story of J. Arnold Ross (now christened Daniel Plainview), and set the entire series of events from his personal perspective, Anderson creates a highly evocative, enthralling family epic. It feels like a film Orson Welles should have made at the height of his powers. In the film, the confrontation that was always simmering under the surface in OIL! between Eli Watkins and Plainview comes clearly into focus. They are both evil men, with evil agendas. Watkins is more sinister because he wants to control everyone, including Mr. Plainview. Whereas Plainview, who is but an oil man, wants to get a cheap deal on some oil land and plunder it for all its worth and run away with the profits once he's sold the stake off to a big corporation. l

In the movie, your still rooting for Plainview, but wow the denouement there is very highly satisfying. Also incredible are some of the lines from the movie. The book is well written, but there aren't so many iconic lines in the narrative. In the movie the following lines sparkle in one's memory, like crystal pieces:

'Good evening, my name is Daniel Plainview, and this is my son and business partner, H.W.. I'm an oil man, and so I shall speak plainly'

'I abandoned my son! I abandoned my child!'

'You see Eli, it's like so. Your oil is a milkshake, and this, is my straw. When I drilled for oil here, my straw also drank your milkshake. You see? There's nothing left, because I drank your milkshake. I drank your milkshake! I drank it all up!'

And so on and so forth.

I recommend reading the book, as it's a textbook example of how business men operate and their pyschology. But my heavens, that movie was a hand's breadth away from winning best picture at the 2007 Oscars. I highly recommend the movie There Will Be Blood as well.