hidden supplement to my next post
Jan. 22nd, 2008 07:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacBackground: Daniel Day-Lewis is an oilman who's taking a fortune out of the ground in the southern California ranching country in the 1910s or so. He has mineral leases on all the land around except for one ranch, which he needs not to drill on but to run his pipeline across. The rancher is a member of a small local charismatic evangelical church, and tells the oilman he can run the pipeline if he'll join the church.
The oilman has no interest in anything but oil and money, and he's had run-ins with the church's preacher, who thinks he's cheating the locals out of their rightful earnings, before. But he does it: he goes to the church, and the preacher makes him confess his sins in a loud voice before the congregation - in particular that he's neglected his son. In otherwise unrelated scenes the oilman has made very clear he considers this nobody else's business. So the oilman humiliates himself in public, but he gets to build his pipeline.
Final scene: It's maybe twenty years later. The preacher visits the oilman in the huge house he's built with his profits. It has a private bowling alley, and they sit down here to talk. The preacher has fallen on hard times, and he's looking for money. He still thinks the oilman owes him some, but he's come to make the oilman an offer. He now controls the rights to that ranch, and offers to sell him drilling rights on it.
The oilman says (I'm paraphrasing), "All right, I'll buy it if you'll confess to me right now that you're a pious fraud and a humbug." At first the preacher refuses, but in a grotesque replay of the sin-confession scene, the oilman goads him to say it louder and louder.
Then the oilman says (again in paraphrase), "Fooled ya! I don't need drilling rights on that land; I already sucked all the oil out from under it with my wells on neighboring land." Only he doesn't say it that clearly.
And then he bashes the preacher's head in with a bowling pin.
The oilman has no interest in anything but oil and money, and he's had run-ins with the church's preacher, who thinks he's cheating the locals out of their rightful earnings, before. But he does it: he goes to the church, and the preacher makes him confess his sins in a loud voice before the congregation - in particular that he's neglected his son. In otherwise unrelated scenes the oilman has made very clear he considers this nobody else's business. So the oilman humiliates himself in public, but he gets to build his pipeline.
Final scene: It's maybe twenty years later. The preacher visits the oilman in the huge house he's built with his profits. It has a private bowling alley, and they sit down here to talk. The preacher has fallen on hard times, and he's looking for money. He still thinks the oilman owes him some, but he's come to make the oilman an offer. He now controls the rights to that ranch, and offers to sell him drilling rights on it.
The oilman says (I'm paraphrasing), "All right, I'll buy it if you'll confess to me right now that you're a pious fraud and a humbug." At first the preacher refuses, but in a grotesque replay of the sin-confession scene, the oilman goads him to say it louder and louder.
Then the oilman says (again in paraphrase), "Fooled ya! I don't need drilling rights on that land; I already sucked all the oil out from under it with my wells on neighboring land." Only he doesn't say it that clearly.
And then he bashes the preacher's head in with a bowling pin.
