Daniel Plainview: The plunder we call progress

Daniel Plainview begins the twentieth century alone, in a hole, digging silver out by hand. He ends up an oil magnate who has laid waste to everything in his path — partners, rivals, entire communities, the land itself — to extract every last drop. He lies to towns to buy their subsoil cheap, crushes anyone who stands in his way, and confesses without shame that he hates people and cannot bear to see anyone else succeed. And here is the disturbing part: almost nothing Plainview does is a crime. He is a businessman, a pioneer, a creator of jobs and wealth. Critical criminology looks at him and asks its old question — the one Gordon Gekko and Noah Cross already put to us: why is the greatest plunder, when capital signs off on it, called progress?

// The theoryThe harm the law does not call a crime

Critical criminology shifts the question from "why does this individual break the law?" to "who decides what counts as crime and what harm is left out of the code?" Its root is Marxist: as early as 1916, Willem Bonger argued that capitalism is criminogenic — that an economy built on competition and limitless profit fosters selfishness and predation, top and bottom alike. But the law, written by and for the powerful, criminalizes above all the harm of those below (theft, disorder) and leaves out the harm of those above. Gekko showed us white-collar crime; Noah Cross, the impunity of power; Plainview takes the critique one step further — toward harm that need not even be a "crime" to lay waste: extraction, the plunder of resources, the destruction of communities and territories in the name of business.

To name that harm, critical criminology coined a key idea: social harm (what the criminologists Hillyard and Tombs call zemiology, the science of harm). Its thesis is devastating: criminal law captures only a small, biased slice of the suffering a society endures. A thousand-euro robbery is a "crime"; an industry that poisons a region, ruins thousands of families, or leaves a territory barren can be perfectly legal — and cause a thousand times more harm. Plainview is the personification of that legal harm: his is not a crime that evades the law, it is a devastation the law blesses, because we have defined it as wealth creation. Critical criminology calls for looking at suffering as suffering, whether or not it bears the label of "crime."

// The subjectThe emptiness behind the fortune

What makes Plainview a richer case than a simple unscrupulous magnate is that the film does not reduce him to an economic theory: it gives him a soul, and it is empty. His ambition seeks neither enjoyment nor even comfort — it seeks to win, to crush, to be left alone at the top. "I have a competition in me; I want no one else to succeed; I hate most people," he confesses, and in that line there is something no theory of capital exhausts: a misanthropy that precedes the money and that the money only feeds. There lies the honest nuance — and the crack — of reading Plainview solely as "a product of capitalism": he is also a psychological portrait of a broken man whose thirst nothing slakes. But the two readings need each other: the system gave him the perfect stage — a lawless frontier where predation was rewarded — and he supplied the biography. Capitalism did not manufacture his emptiness; but it offered him the only language — accumulate, raze, possess — in which that emptiness could express itself as success.

// The crackNot everything is the system, nor is the system innocent

Critical criminology has cracks it is best not to dodge. The first: not all corporate harm is equivalent to a crime, nor is all profit plunder — you need to point to concrete harms (the town deceived, the land poisoned, the life used as a tool), not a blanket condemnation of enterprise or wealth. Reducing everything to "capitalism is the crime" hollows out the analysis and confuses honest business with plunder. The second, already seen with the theory: in its most naive version, the critical approach can forget the common criminal and their real victims, almost always poor. Plainview should not make us forget the robber; he should make us ask why we pursue the robber with the full weight of the law and invite the one who lays waste to a territory to cut the ribbon on a new refinery.

And there is a caution about Plainview himself: he is fiction, and as such he concentrates in one monstrous man a harm that, in reality, tends to be diffuse and faceless — the harm of corporations, chains of decisions, responsibilities spread out until they vanish. That is, in fact, one of the great findings of the criminology of corporate harm (Tombs and Whyte): that the harm of capital rarely has a villain as sharp as Plainview, and that precisely for that reason it escapes a criminal law designed for individual culprits. A flesh-and-blood Plainview is easy to point to; the hard thing — and the urgent one — is learning to see, and to name as harm, the devastation that bears no signature, the one that dissolves into a board of directors and a balance sheet.

That is why There Will Be Blood ends as it does — with a Plainview who is rich, alone, and monstrous, muttering "I'm finished" over a corpse — and not as a story of punishment: because men like him are not punished by the law, they are honored by it. The film is critical criminology made image: the portrait of how a society can organize its morality and its law so that the greatest of predators dies rich and respected, his harm turned into an estate. Plainview broke no law. That is, exactly, the problem — and the reason critical criminology insists on looking beyond it: because there are lootings so vast that we have decided not to call them by their name, and to call them, instead, wealth.