Time-Image and subject crisis: A Deleuzian reading of There Will Be Blood

This article mobilizes Gilles Deleuze’s cinema philosophy to argue that Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood dismantles the western genre’s narrative conventions, exposing capitalism’s corrosive temporal logic. Through a close reading of the film’s transition from Movement-Image to Time-Image – and finally to Death-Image – I demonstrate how Anderson stages an ontological crisis: sensory-motor action collapses into contemplative paralysis, and linear progress fractures into fragmented temporality. The Death-Image, as Time-Image’s limit-case, marks both the protagonist’s existential exhaustion and the systemic failure of the economic order that produced him. By mapping these Deleuzian concepts onto Plainview’s trajectory, the film reveals capital’s grand narrative as a self-annihilating structure. Ultimately, There Will Be Blood interrogates not just ambition and alienation, but the very possibility of agency under capitalism’s temporal regime.