When Eli is throwing out the Evil

Ok....show me some evidence from the film proving that Eli and Paul are intended to be the same person.

I mean, that's a pretty big open opportunity there, since people have found evidence that The Shining was really about Kubrick faking the moon landing, so you can be convincing about anything if you find evidence in the film.

There is the one scene...just one where Eli...not Plainview as you said, but Eli pours three drinks at the end of the film that could be construed to mean Eli and Paul are the same person. And you'll notice Eli drinks the first and begins to drink the second...without switching personalities mind you.

Anything else?

So how did this go?

Eli has an alternate personality that he trots out every once in a while. Clearly his family knows about Paul, he screams about Paul and what Paul did to his father when he attacks him, so there's this boy who pretends to act like someone else sometimes, a fictional twin brother, but the community and his family trust him as their preacher and don't view him as a crazy person. Back then. OK sure...let's keep going with that.

Then Eli switches to his Paul personality, who seemingly is at odds with Eli, even though they occupy the same mind, travels all the way to to find Daniel to perform a ruse in which he offers information about his homeplace to an oil man in exchange for money, to hopefully bring him to that community so his family can make money off selling their land.

All with the goal of what? Are you saying Eli's Paul personality took up this responsibility because he knew it was the only way to get the resources to grow his church, but, for some reason, wouldn't bow to the capitalistic influences of the world. Then what happens? Paul turns back into Eli and then Eli, with no memory of what happened, returns home?

And then, Eli, who so abhors capitalism that he needs an alternate personality to carry out his capitalistic ventures (we'll ignore the fact that he's the one who negotiates for the price of his father's land) turns into an utter capitalist by the end of the movie, rendered penniless by the Great Depression.

Then, for years and years and years, all the time Daniel has known him, he never switches back to the Paul personality.

And then, for that to work, you have to assume Daniel understands all of this, and that there's a deep subtext to his apparent fiction he spins about Paul's fate as an oil man at the end. That's a lot of reaching for a film so grounded in reality.





Or, we could say Eli knew he'd need two drinks to beg Daniel for money, so he poured three glasses for the two of them instead of bringing over the bottle, and that Paul and Eli were twins who hated each other.

What you don't seem to understand is that Eli and Daniel represent two sides of the same coin. They're foils. Daniel hates Eli so deeply, because he knows their methods of deception are extremely similar. The way Eli riles up the church is equivalent to the way Daniel sells a town on drilling for oil or building a pipeline, and it reveals something Daniel hates about himself, likely because Daniel's father was probably some kind of jesus-crazed preacher, who didn't practice what he preached. A false prophet.
And Daniel is just as much of a false prophet, coming to these towns on the fringes of society and promising schools and progress and delivering nothing but wealth for himself. Just as Eli is just as much of a capitalist as Daniel is, constantly looking for angles that will grow his church and, consequently, his power and influence.