Rhode Island College Digital Commons @ RIC Honors Projects Overview Honors Projects 2018 There Will Be Oil: The eleC bration and Inevitability of Petroleum through Upton Sinclair and Paul Thomas Anderson Sarah Mae Fleming
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.ric.edu/honors_projects Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons, and the Other Film and Media Studies Commons Recommended Citation Fleming, Sarah Mae, "There Will Be Oil: The eC lebration and Inevitability of Petroleum through Upton Sinclair and Paul Thomas Anderson" (2018). Honors Projects Overview. 142. https://digitalcommons.ric.edu/honors_projects/142 This Honors is brought to you for free and open access by the Honors Projects at Digital Commons @ RIC. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Projects Overview by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ RIC. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. There Will Be Oil: The Celebration and Inevitability of Petroleum through Upton Sinclair and Paul Thomas Anderson Sarah Mae Fleming English 492 Undergraduate Honors Thesis “Godspeed! Pope given a Lamborghini, replete in papal gold and white.”1 This BBC news feed and the attendant video went viral in a matter of moments providing a glimpse of the intricate relationship between western culture and petroleum. Pope Francis blesses the custom Lamborghini, before it is sent to a charity auction. Excess, consumption, capitalism, petroleum, religion, culture—all combined during a blessing of an expensive automobile by the pontiff. This short video gives witness to how oil quietly soaks our world. I started this project with the intention of conducting a Marxist study of the novel Oil! (Upton Sinclair, 1927) and the film There Will Be Blood, (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007) in the context of American Westerns and their relationship to capitalism.