Broken Bonds and the Modern Subject: Family Estrangement in “There Will Be Blood”
Abstract
In recent years, the psychological analysis of film protagonists has attracted growing academic attention, yet few studies focus on how narrative violence and social context shape a character’s self-destruction. This research aims to analyze the protagonist Daniel Plainview in the movie There Will Be Blood from a psychological perspective, in order to explore why the protagonist in the film eventually became alienated from his family and his self-subject collapsed. In terms of theoretical framework, this paper mainly uses Adler's individual psychology, supplemented by social and cultural psychology, to analyze the protagonist's irreversible tragedy under the internal emotional barriers and external environmental blows. And focuses on the film's text narrative and character creation, the contradictions in Daniel Plainview's personality, and the reasons why the contradictions cannot be resolved, revealing that his unfortunate and terrifying ending is caused by multiple factors. Therefore this study provides a fresh interdisciplinary approach that bridges psychoanalytic theory and film literary criticism. The study finally presents a reflection on this modern tragedy, and also provides a useful discussion for the combination of film literary criticism and psychological theory.
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