There Will Be Blood (2007)

There are innumerable ways of removing large-scale politics from films. At the simplest level, the writer [may] literally erase a political plotline completely from the script. A striking example of this is the movie There Will Be Blood, [described] as being “based on” the novel Oil!, published in 1926 by radical activist Upton Sinclair, one of the so-called “muckraking” journalists of that era. The novel contains a powerful critique of capitalism, described at one point as “an evil Power which roams the earth, crippling the bodies of men and women, and luring the nations to destruction by visions of unearned wealth, and the opportunity to enslave and exploit labor”. One of the central characters in the novel is a man called Paul Watkins, who was radicalized as a young man, and who becomes active in organizing labor on the oil fields of California in the 1920s. He and his political friends are constantly harassed by the police. In the end, the police raid a political meeting, Watkins and others are brutally beaten, and Watkins dies a few days later.

Now, anyone who has seen the movie knows that this entire story has been excised from the plot. Both Paul Watkins as a character, and the political plotline that had been central to the novel, have been erased from the film. Instead, Paul’s brother Eli, an evangelical preacher, becomes the main antagonist of the oilman Daniel Plainview, setting up an entirely different tension concerning God and “superstition” rather than capitalism and exploitation.

— Sherry B. Ortner, Not a History Lesson: The Erasure of Politics in American Cinema (2013)

The film has a visionary quality: it starts out as a punk-Western and ends up somewhere between expressionism and myth. The mode of the novel is socialist realism.

— Edmund Gordon (London Review of Books)