Feel free to pick and choose — you don’t need to run every question in one sitting, though you will want to have settled, before you leave, what it means that Paul Thomas Anderson took Upton Sinclair’s furious socialist novel about the theft of California and made it into a two-and-a-half-hour portrait of a single man’s soul curdling into something no longer recognizably human. Same oil. Completely different sermon.

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UPTON SINCLAIR’S OIL!: THE NOVEL ANDERSON LEFT BEHIND
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  1. Oil! The Socialist Epic That Became Something Else
    Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil! is a sprawling, explicitly political work: the story of J. Arnold Ross and his son Bunny, California oil speculators whose rise tracks the corruption of the American West, the suppression of labor movements, the entanglement of oil money with politics and religion. The novel is a socialist polemic, full of sympathy for workers and fury at capital. Anderson used roughly the first hundred pages — the discovery of oil on the Sunday ranch — and then made an entirely different film. Did you feel the film’s departure from its source as a loss, a transformation, or something more like a hostile takeover? And is there a reading in which Anderson’s film is actually more honest about power than Sinclair’s novel, because it refuses the comfort of class solidarity and shows you a monster instead?
  2. Bunny Ross: The Novel’s Hero Who Disappeared
    The novel’s central consciousness is Bunny Ross — the oilman’s idealistic son who is drawn to socialism and labor politics, who represents Sinclair’s hope for a younger generation that might reject its inheritance. Bunny barely exists in the film; the son figure is H.W., who is a child, who goes deaf, and who ultimately becomes the film’s one successful act of self-liberation. Did the novel’s Bunny feel like the better moral anchor for its story, or did Anderson’s decision to eliminate the idealistic heir and leave you alone with Daniel Plainview feel more honest about what oil actually did to the people who extracted it?
  3. Sinclair’s Politics vs. Anderson’s Psychology
    Sinclair’s novel is interested in systems — how capital corrupts institutions, how oil money distorts democracy, how labor is suppressed. Anderson’s film is interested in a single psychology — how ambition becomes pathology, how Daniel Plainview’s drive to acquire and dominate gradually empties him of everything recognizable as a human interior. Did the film’s psychological focus feel like an evasion of the novel’s political argument, or like a different and equally serious claim about what capitalism does: not just to institutions but to the people who win at it?
  4. The Sunday Family: What the Novel Had That the Film Compressed
    In the novel, the Sunday ranch family is given considerably more space — their history, their faith, their specific California context. In the film, they are filtered almost entirely through Eli Sunday, who becomes Daniel’s antagonist and eventual victim. Did the film’s compression of the Sunday family feel like a formal necessity — the story requiring a single adversary to focus its argument — or like a narrowing that lost something important about the community that the oil economy displaced?

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PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON’S FILM: A PORTRAIT OF AMERICAN HUNGER
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  1. The Opening Sequence: Fifteen Minutes Without a Word
    The film opens with approximately fifteen minutes of near-silence: Daniel Plainview alone in the desert, prospecting by hand, breaking his leg, dragging himself to file his claim, beginning to accumulate. Anderson presents this as pure behavior — no explanation, no psychology stated, just a man doing what he does with a ferocity that is almost inhuman. Did this opening establish Daniel as someone you understand or someone you observe? And is there a reading in which the silence of the opening is the film’s formal argument — that Daniel Plainview has no interior that language could reach, only drive?
  2. Daniel Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview: The Performance That Became the Film
    Day-Lewis’s performance is one of the most discussed in American cinema of the past twenty years — a construction of voice, physicality, and sustained intensity that makes Daniel Plainview feel simultaneously like a specific historical person and something close to an allegorical figure. Did the performance feel like a character study — a man you could understand from the inside — or like something more like a force of nature being observed? And is there a point in the film where you felt Day-Lewis tip the performance into something operatic that the film’s otherwise austere realism couldn’t contain?
  3. Paul Dano’s Eli Sunday: The False Prophet Who Met His Match
    Dano’s Eli Sunday is the film’s great formal counterpart to Daniel — another man performing a version of himself for an audience, another confidence artist whose product is belief rather than oil. The film proposes that Daniel and Eli are the same kind of person: both are selling something, both are performing sincerity they may not feel, both are willing to humiliate themselves when the money requires it. Did the film make this equivalence feel like a genuine argument about American capitalism and American religion, or like a convenient symmetry that flattens what is actually different about what Daniel and Eli are doing?
  4. W. Plainview: The Adopted Son and the Film’s One Escape
    H.W. is Daniel’s adopted son, used initially as a prop in Daniel’s sales performances (“just a family man”), deafened by a well explosion that Daniel responds to with striking emotional absence, and ultimately the film’s one character who successfully leaves Daniel’s orbit. H.W.’s final confrontation — telling Daniel through a translator that he is going to start his own business, that he is no longer his son — is the film’s most emotionally direct scene. Did H.W.’s departure feel like the film offering a counterargument to Daniel — that the drive to acquire and dominate is not the only possible response to the American landscape — or like a coda that the film’s accumulated bleakness had already rendered moot?
  5. Jonny Greenwood’s Score: The Sound of Something Wrong
    Greenwood’s score is atonal, dissonant, orchestral in ways that feel borrowed from twentieth-century modernist composition rather than from Hollywood convention — and it creates a quality of dread that the film’s images alone do not always generate. Did the score feel like a formal commitment to the film’s argument — that this is a story about something fundamentally disordered, that the landscape and the people in it are already wrong before the oil arrives — or like an aesthetic choice that occasionally felt imposed on material that could have spoken for itself?

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THE LOOSE ADAPTATION: WHAT “BASED ON” ACTUALLY MEANS HERE
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  1. How Loose Is ‘Loosely Based’: The Spectrum of Faithfulness
    There Will Be Blood is an adaptation that sits at the far end of the spectrum from nearly verbatim to substantially transformed: the source material provided a setting, an industry, a historical moment, and one character type, and Anderson built something almost entirely different on top of them. Did the film’s extreme looseness feel creatively legitimate — a filmmaker using a source as a point of departure for a personal vision — or like a relationship to Sinclair’s novel that the “based on” credit slightly misrepresents? And does it matter, for your experience of the film, whether you’ve read the novel?
  2. What the Novel Gave the Film That Anderson Couldn’t Have Made Without It
    Even in its radical departure from Sinclair, the film owes the novel specific things: the California setting and historical period, the mechanics of early oil prospecting, the Sunday family’s Pentecostal context, the specific texture of the social world that oil money was displacing. Did these elements — the things the film genuinely took from the novel — feel like they carried Sinclair’s political charge into Anderson’s psychological portrait, or did the film absorb them so completely into its own argument that the novel felt like raw material rather than a source?
  3. What Anderson’s Film Refuses That Sinclair’s Novel Offers
    Sinclair’s novel offers class solidarity, labor organizing, the possibility of collective resistance, a son who rejects his father’s values, and a political framework that names what is wrong with the oil economy and implies what might be done about it. Anderson’s film refuses all of this. There is no solidarity, no labor politics, no collective action, no political framework — only Daniel and the landscape and his hunger. Did this refusal feel like a political choice on Anderson’s part — a filmmaker skeptical of Sinclair’s progressive optimism — or like a formal choice about what kind of story he was interested in telling?

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OIL AND AMERICA: THE FILM’S HISTORICAL ARGUMENT
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  1. Early California and the Oil Economy: What the Film Gets Right
    The film is set in the early 1900s, at the start of California’s oil economy—a period of land speculation, displacement of existing communities, rapid accumulation, and the social disruption that followed. Both Sinclair and Anderson treat this moment as a founding scene for a particular kind of American capitalism. Did either version give you a felt sense of what this specific historical period was like — its textures, its possibilities, its costs — or did both use the period primarily as a setting for arguments that could have been made in other times and places?
  2. ‘I’m Finished!’: The Ending and What It Means
    The film’s final scene — Daniel bludgeoning Eli to death in his bowling alley and delivering the film’s most quoted line is a much-discussed ending. It is extraordinary, operatic, and somewhat inexplicable in strictly realistic terms: why does Daniel kill Eli at this moment, after what appears to be decades of successful compartmentalization? Did the ending feel earned — the logical conclusion of the character and argument the film had been building — or like a formally spectacular conclusion that the film’s more austere preceding two hours hadn’t quite prepared you for? And what is the ending’s argument, if it has one: that Daniel’s drive has finally consumed even the performance of self-control, or something else?
  3. Religion and Capital: The Film’s Deepest Argument
    The film proposes a specific relationship between the oil economy and the religious culture of early California: both Daniel and Eli are selling belief — Daniel selling the belief that oil will make you rich, Eli selling the belief that faith will save your soul — and both are performing sincerity as a commercial strategy. Did the film’s equation of capitalism and religion feel like a genuine historical argument — that these two forces shaped early-twentieth-century America in parallel and complementary ways — or like a filmmaker’s thematic convenience that flattened what is actually different about economic and spiritual life?

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PAGE VS. SCREEN: OIL! THE NOVEL VERSUS THERE WILL BE BLOOD THE FILM
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  1. What Sinclair’s Novel Gives You That the Film Can’t
    Sinclair’s novel gives you breadth — a panoramic view of an economy, a society, a political moment, a class of people resisting and being crushed. Name one dimension of Oil! that the film, in its radical compression into a single consciousness, could not replicate and that you felt as a genuine loss: Bunny’s political education, the labor movement context, the novel’s specific historical texture, or something else.
  2. What Anderson’s Film Gives You That Sinclair’s Novel Couldn’t
    Name one thing the film achieved that the novel, for all its political seriousness, could not: the sustained intensity of Day-Lewis’s performance, the physical presence of the California landscape, Greenwood’s score, the bowling alley ending, the fifteen-minute silent opening. Which cinematic achievement felt like the film finding an argument that prose couldn’t reach?
  3. Two Visions of What Oil Did to America
    Sinclair’s oil does something to a society: it corrupts institutions, destroys communities, suppresses labor, distorts democracy. Anderson’s oil does something to a man: it feeds and ultimately consumes a hunger that was already there. These are genuinely different claims about what the oil economy meant. Which version felt more true — or did you find yourself wanting both accounts simultaneously, as though neither the sociological nor the psychological reading alone was sufficient?

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OVERALL ADAPTATION VERDICT: THE SAME OIL, A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FIRE
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  1. One of the Great American Films of the Twenty-First Century: Does the Reputation Hold?
    There Will Be Blood regularly appears on lists of the best American films of the 2000s and is sometimes called one of the great American films of the past thirty years. Does it hold up to that reputation on a first or second viewing? And is there something about its subject — American capitalism at its founding moment, the psychology of the man who wins — that makes it feel more urgent over time rather than less?
  2. What Each Version Does Best
    One gold star for the novel, one for the film. They don’t have to be for the same thing. (Suggested categories: Best Argument That Capitalism Is a Collective Crime Rather Than an Individual Character Flaw; Best Portrait of a Man Whose Hunger Has Consumed His Humanity; Best Use of a Landscape to Carry a Historical Argument; Best Performance of Religious Sincerity as a Commercial Strategy; Best Ending That You Can’t Stop Thinking About Even Though You’re Not Entirely Sure What It Means.)
  3. Recommend: Read, Watch, or Both?
    If a friend had time for only one version — novel or film — which would you send them to first, and why? Would your answer change if they want Sinclair’s political framework and class analysis? If they want Day-Lewis’s performance and Anderson’s formal ambition? If they’re primarily interested in what the oil economy did to California? And is there a case that the film and the novel are so genuinely different in subject and argument that recommending one over the other is almost a category error — that they are two completely different works that happen to share a setting?
  4. Final Club Gut Check
    On the dial from ‘faithful adaptation that honors its source’ to ‘a filmmaker who took a socialist novel’s opening hundred pages and used them to make an entirely different argument about what American capitalism does to the people who win at it,’ where does There Will Be Blood land? And the question beneath the oil: if Daniel Plainview is what success looks like — if this is where ambition, drive, and the refusal to be beaten actually lead — what does that say about the society that made him possible? Did Sinclair’s novel or Anderson’s film give you a better answer? Or did they both leave you sitting with the same image: a man alone in a room he’s destroyed, having finished something he can’t name?

Use, tweak, or mash these questions as needed — your club, your answers.