There Will Be Blood is difficult to watch and an uncomfortable experience during most of the pivotal and climactic scenes. It is stark, powerful, and some of the power of all that comes from the sound design. Which is brilliant. The film opens with twenty minutes of no dialogue essentially, little sound (except for one big one, which I won't give away). In a sense, the discomfort of the film comes from the use and non-use of sound; the faraway sounds when a scene is far away, evoking deafness, or the blithering cadence of preaching, or the complete lack of any musical cue when something huge is about to happen. It just happens. Suddenly.

I thought I read an article that said this was on purpose, but now I can't seem to find it. I think it is brilliant, denying an audience used to musical hints (think of how thrillers have music that stops right before the scary scene, for example) and jarring them over and over with these sudden loud sounds. And fire and explosion. In between it all, the rhythmic, cyclic sound of pumping oil. The movie works because of the combination of the visuals, the incredible acting of Daniel Day Lewis, and the startling sound.

Which reminds me of Steve Martin's thoughts on being funny, wherein he outlines his beliefs and techniques for humor. Martin noticed, when watching Jack Leonard, that sometimes Leonard crack an audience up into raucous laughter by simply slapping his stomach. "One night," Martin says, "I noticed that several of his punch lines had been unintelligible, and the audience had actually laughed" without knowing what the joke was.

So Martin decided to deny his audiences these cues, to force them to build and build tension, until they were forced to release it at whatever time they could. "But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation," he says-- "This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told..." He removed the formula from his comedy.

There Will Be Blood does the same. It forces you to release all that tension and buildup of suspense, fear, nausea, disgust--- the emotions of seeing the descent of a human being. With no comforting cues to guide you.