HereAndGone2
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User ID: 4074
HereAndGone2
28d ago
But destroying the painting doesn't achieve anything except destroying the painting. It doesn't prove he committed the murder. It isn't a motive for him to commit the murder. It has nothing to do with the murder. It's just destruction.
HereAndGone2
28d ago
I think the idea there is that it destroys the bad guy's reputation with the public so he can't get away with it or something? But the problem is, as you point out in another comment, the second the real world applies then Burninator Lady gets the blame, not him. She's the one blew up the place, after all. She knew what she was doing. Bad Guy may be a murderer and a vain idiot, but he didn't want the Mona Lisa destroyed. She's just like the paint-throwing activists, except one step worse.
Wikipedia mentions Johnson was raised Evangelical, so he has as much notion of Catholic theology as I do of nuclear engineering. This is the sort of thing that makes me wince when I see it in movies/TV/media; if you take things like the Eucharist seriously, it's very jarring, not to say hurtful if meant to be deliberately mocking.
I suppose in the movie the idea is meant to be that the bad guy treated his wealth like his god and it was his real religion, not whatever he pretended to believe ("you cannot serve both God and Mammon"). I just wish Johnson hadn't used Eucharistic similes.
That "V for Vendetta" part looks like the Reformed explanation of the Eucharist; it only becomes the body for those who truly believe, while for unbelievers it remains only bread (I'm shaky on Protestant theology so I'm probably not getting that right). Consubstantiation not transubstantiation.
The V panel also gets it wrong: it's not "whatever it is now", it has to be bread and wine, so you can't have a Coke and cookies eucharist.
HereAndGone2
28d ago
Ooh, I'm thinking now of Charlotte Bronte's novel Villette where, among other things the deeply Protestant narrator (mirroring the deeply Protestant author) is contemptuous of the Catholic insistence on having girls chaperoned. An English girl, on the other hand, can be alone in a room with a man because they just would not indulge in any hanky-panky. Why not? They just wouldn't, that's all! These Continental girls are all flirts, because they haven't been brought up in good Gospel religion which would give them sound moral values so they wouldn't even dream of misbehaving.
It is true that Madame had her own system for managing and regulating this mass of machinery; and a very pretty system it was: the reader has seen a specimen of it, in that small affair of turning my pocket inside out, and reading my private memoranda. “Surveillance,” “espionage,”—these were her watchwords.
Still, Madame knew what honesty was, and liked it—that is, when it did not obtrude its clumsy scruples in the way of her will and interest. She had a respect for “Angleterre;” and as to “les Anglaises,” she would have the women of no other country about her own children, if she could help it.
Often in the evening, after she had been plotting and counter-plotting, spying and receiving the reports of spies all day, she would come up to my room—a trace of real weariness on her brow—and she would sit down and listen while the children said their little prayers to me in English: the Lord’s Prayer, and the hymn beginning “Gentle Jesus,” these little Catholics were permitted to repeat at my knee; and, when I had put them to bed, she would talk to me (I soon gained enough French to be able to understand, and even answer her) about England and Englishwomen, and the reasons for what she was pleased to term their superior intelligence, and more real and reliable probity. Very good sense she often showed; very sound opinions she often broached: she seemed to know that keeping girls in distrustful restraint, in blind ignorance, and under a surveillance that left them no moment and no corner for retirement, was not the best way to make them grow up honest and modest women; but she averred that ruinous consequences would ensue if any other method were tried with continental children: they were so accustomed to restraint, that relaxation, however guarded, would be misunderstood and fatally presumed on. She was sick, she would declare, of the means she had to use, but use them she must; and after discoursing, often with dignity and delicacy, to me, she would move away on her “souliers de silence,” and glide ghost-like through the house, watching and spying everywhere, peering through every keyhole, listening behind every door.
... “I’ll go; I will be ready in ten minutes,” I vowed. And away I flew, never once checked, reader, by the thought which perhaps at this moment checks you: namely, that to go anywhere with Graham and without Mrs. Bretton could be objectionable. I could not have conceived, much less have expressed to Graham, such thought—such scruple—without risk of exciting a tyrannous self-contempt: of kindling an inward fire of shame so quenchless, and so devouring, that I think it would soon have licked up the very life in my veins. Besides, my godmother, knowing her son, and knowing me, would as soon have thought of chaperoning a sister with a brother, as of keeping anxious guard over our incomings and outgoings.
HereAndGone2
28d ago
What the FUCK was his problem?
Because guys who break their vows are just as likely to be diddling their employer. If they have no loyalty to their wife, why expect them to be any more loyal to you, and not be embezzling/selling corporate secrets/cheating on expenses, etc.?
It's "dishonest in a small thing is likely to be dishonest in a big thing".
HereAndGone2
28d ago
A non-concern today, when hotel employees couldn't care less, and in a pinch you could always find a place where you check in and out online without seeing anyone. No corporate hotel property pries into the business of its customers, and no pajeet motel owner could come close to caring what the YTs do there.
Because due to the sexual revolution, unmarried people having sex is now socially acceptable. Back then, two unrelated people showing up for the afternoon was likely to be prostitution, and the hotel didn't want to get a reputation for tolerating such leading to prosecution by the police.
HereAndGone2
29d ago
Glass Onion ends with burning the Mona Lisa because Teacher Lady has her feathers so ruffled, and I don't think "black woman destroys cultural inheritance of humanity because she's peeved" is that moral a narrative. If you wanted to look at it in a certain light, you could even claim it's racist: black people depicted as resorting to violence because they're incapable of responding to set-backs any other way.
But to be fair, Johnson's Knives Out universe is a very stylised one running on particular tropes and only tangential to our reality. It's artificial and chock-full of artifice, because it's recreating the Golden Age 'body in the library' detective stories where the more baroque the plot, the better, so long as you could be held to have played fair with scattering clues throughout the book (the early Ellery Queen novels routinely had a "challenge to the reader" about 'can you guess/work out whodunnit?' before the final chapter wrapping up the entire case).
HereAndGone2
29d ago
They do. And they turn "her sins are forgiven because she loved much" into "see guys, she wasn't really a sex worker (though there's nothing wrong with that!), she just had a lot of boyfriends whom she really loved, so Jesus says sleeping around is fine so long as you love the guy".
HereAndGone2
29d ago
EVEN THOUGH Rian sort of cheated and [SPOILERS] made a female character a killer this time, she never strikes the killing blow herself. [/SPOILERS]
I'm still convinced the real ending of Knives Out is that the nurse is guilty and she successfully plotted to influence the old man to change the will in her favour, etc. It just makes the ending more coherent and the entire story more satisfying; she played the "me? poor innocent angelic nurse brown immigrant lady?" card so well that she fooled Blanc, who is maybe not up there with Hercule Poirot even if he does like showy dénouements, by using his biases and prejudices, and the end shot is the family knowing she dunnit but unable to prove it. Standing there sipping her coffee out of her "my house" mug to rub their noses in it.
HereAndGone2
29d ago
I'm surprised, too. The last two movies were all over social media I consume, but this one? Not a peep about it. I was very surprised to learn a third movie had been made.
Again, just going off the synopsis, but it made me go "Yeah, this is a movie written by a Protestant" and that seems to be correct:
Johnson also drew from his own religious upbringing in Evangelicalism, with Blanc reflecting his own mixed feelings on organized religion. However, he chose to have the film focus on Catholicism for aesthetic reasons, admitting the churches he grew up in "kind of looked like Pottery Barns" and hence served as a poor visual basis for the film.
The church structure etc. as per the synopsis of the movie makes no sense in Catholicism. Where is the bishop in all this? Who is "Reverend Prentice Wicks, Jefferson's grandfather"? Does this mean his grandfather was a Protestant minister (if he has a daughter) and the daughter then had her illegitimate son who... became a Catholic priest????
Oh well, I guess we should be glad that we're still the movie face of religion, because when you need to show the church, you show the Catholics!
And that's destroying his own stuff, not going out to someone else's house to destroy their stuff.
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