the cost of ambition

Daniel Plainview drinks everyone's milkshake and dies alone in a bowling alley in There Will Be Blood. The Social Network ends on Mark Zuckerberg refreshing a friend request that will never be accepted. Lou Bloom climbs the ladder in Nightcrawler by filming the people falling off it. You watch someone get everything, and you can see the price being paid long before they can.

The field changes: oil, music, crime, tech, boxing, ballet. Someone wants something badly enough to let everything else burn, and the film watches the burning. Some of them are punished for it. Others just notice, late, what they handed over.