Ethical Criticism and There Will Be Blood: Autonomism, Moralism, and Immoralist Perspectives

Abstract

The article explores the role played by moral categories in the assessment of an artwork’s overall aesthetic value. By means of close analysis of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 There Will Be Blood, the work maintains an immoralist approach, where an artwork’s unethical attitude may yield cognitive gain to its receiver—or perhaps unsettle their moral compass in an unusual, pleasant way. There Will Be Blood is considered a cinematic masterwork; yet, the viewing experience is complicated by the film’s greedy and self-obsessed protagonist, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis). The article scrutinizes the film’s most notable sequence—the explosion of the oil derrick—to formulate an aesthetic evaluation that manages to assess, simultaneously, formal and moral aspects.