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I watched the new Knives Out movie, and while the mystery plot was fun enough, my enjoyment of the movie was severely hampered by politics. I saw the previous Knives Out movie so I knew what to expect, but I do feel like this just went above and beyond. Minor spoilers to follow.
My wife was disappointed that I let politics ruin a good movie for me, but really, I think that the filmmakers honestly don't want you to view this movie as just a fun murder mystery without the context of politics. The movie is all about making a heavy handed political statement.
The movie just seemed like a pulpit for Rian Johnson to talk about how much he hates Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and various other people. I almost feel like the entire plot is really the secondary goal. The main goal of him making this was to implant and grow a brain worm in the audience that every famous rich person is connected, really part of a cabal that got what they got through no talent of their own, took advantage of individuals and the world at large, contribute nothing, and are evil, vile, worthless, and bratty pieces of shit.
Nowhere in the movie do they ever display the slightest amount of sympathy for anyone besides the detective and the poor black woman who was taken advantage of (major spoiler:or her secret twin sister ). I guess this movie really makes me feel like in order to write good compelling characters, you really have to love them, or have the capacity to love them, or maybe just respect and understand and empathize with them. Rian Johnson clearly does none of this, and his utter contempt for them just seeps through. He comes across like a high school kid writing screenplays to take pot shots at people he hates.
I don't know, I really can't believe that this movie has gotten so much praise. It really irritates me, and just seems like lazy complaining.
Other minor, non political gripe:
The movie came to a screeching halt when they decided to have the entire 3rd quarter of the movie as a flashback. I think small flashbacks are great in mystery stories, but the decision to have over a half hour told in flashback made me feel like it was dragging, and made me want it to just get back to advancing the plot.
Johnson has apparently set his particular calling card as a director to be "All extremely rich people are simply irredeemable fuckups and only obtain their wealth by luck; the only people who are trustworthy, empathetic, or heroic are the salt-of-the-earth working class." No comment on the fact that the working class also correlates with Trump support in the U.S.
He even shoehorned that into STAR WARS of all things.
Which is... FINE, but he ends up making the rich characters into blatant, openly incompetent fuckups, and not just subtly ineffective, nor does he add any other facets to their character. So when he doesn't give them any moments which might allow the viewer to empathize with them and he does minimal work to humanize them, the ultimate effect (to me) is that it feels smug and nasty.
And likewise, I don't even buy that they 'lose' in the end. The irony here is that Johnson wants to have his cynical cake and eat his idealistic ice cream too. That is, he posits a view of the world where rich (but incompetent) people dominate most industries and use their influence to pull the wool over everyone's eyes. There's no way for the common man to strike at them in a way that will matter.
Then, enter Benoit Blanc, who can outmaneuver the rich dummies, see through their deceptions and machinations, and use their own blackened souls against them to arrange for their downfall, then handing that off to the enlightened everywoman to enact the final, decisive blow. Johnson works very hard to make his 'good' ending irrefutable and irreversible.
But to believe that you'd have to ignore the rest of the message that wealthy, connected people are able to use their influence to manipulate outcomes. In this world, shortly after the movie ends, all the wealthy assholes are going to hide behind expensive lawyers, bring in PR firms to spin the story, and while yes they're almost certainly financially ruined for the short term, I rather doubt they will end up serving jail time or losing 'everything.' Okay, the billionaire will probably serve a LOT of jail time for murder (but maybe not) so that's something. But in order to believe that the 'bad' people 'lose,' you have to both believe that all of them were 'bad,' and that they have fully 'lost.' And I wasn't convinced of either by the end. And that's because of the world Johnson set up for us, not my own cynicism!
He wants to push forth the idealistic vision that a smart, educated, clever interloper like Blanc, who champions all the 'right' ideas too, can assist an underprivileged, exploited commoner to win against connected, wealthy idiots through sheer effort and persistence when the stakes are high enough. But then he has to end the movie before reality ensues and the world he posited reasserts and reverses most of the alleged gains.
Side note, whilst I get that destroying the Mona Lisa as a cultural artifact to get some revenge is an iffy message, I think the core idea that the Protag had been extensively and personally wronged by the villains and thus wouldn't give a damn about destroying a mere physical possession was completely valid. A human being was killed, and you're more outraged at the destruction of a tiny little portrait?
That might be one of the few truly interesting points the movie makes.
Also, the real 'twist' wasn't one that the viewer could have reasonably guessed in advance, I think, so I find it a bit bad faith to hide so much from the viewer, rather than merely misdirect their attention so they miss or misinterpret the clues. There were NO clues as to the switcheroo, so the audience was just left in the complete dark until the flashbacks, which recontextualized everything. And that was neat, but a bit unbecoming of an actual mystery story where the audience is looking for clues. But then again, with modern genre-savvy audiences it may have been impossible to fool them if there were any clever clues hidden in plain sight, so perhaps this was the only way to pull it off.
All that said, I still enjoyed it. I don't think one can effectively deny Johnson's pure technical skill as a writer and director.
P.S. people keep saying he's targeting Joe Rogan and Elon Musk specifically, and I see why, but that seems more based on the particular cultural moment rather than the intent when he wrote or even directed it.
The billionaire asshole is much closer to a pastiche of Steve Jobs and other tech founders than Musk in particular. Especially since Musk, of all Billionaires, is not the one who would spend gratuitous amounts of money on a private island with a giant architectural abomination on display. As far as I know, he doesn't own an island, or even a yacht. So 90% of the 'critiques' in this film would roll off him anyway.
The redpill manosphere streamer character also doesn't really fit Rogan. Rogan of course didn't 'lucky break' his way into prominence, he had a lengthy career as a comedian and hosted mainstream TV shows before starting his podcast. And by and large he is known for being a genuine and empathetic guy rather than loudly spouting any particular ideological viewpoint. And given his deal with Spotify, he wouldn't need to cater to some Billionaire's whims to maintain his platform. So again, 90% of the 'critiques' in the film would roll off him.
I genuinely don't think these were the targets Johnson had in mind when writing. He wrote much more generalized sendups of a given cultural archetype and viewers projected the current pop culture bugaboos onto it.
References to Orwell are a bit gauche in the present era, so perhaps something a bit more in step with present sensibilities:
Hate, properly coordinated and judiciously wielded, remains an efficacious tool. You point to differences between the portrayal and the real persons as evidence to them not being aimed at the real person, but how does one distinguish between accurate detail meant to identify, versus deceitful detail meant to vilify? Does Ben Richards in the excerpt above assume that they've got the wrong pictures, because neither image faithfully depict himself or his wife?
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Well except this is the same "you value property above people?" arguments made in the riots from antifa to BLM, and who has to clean up the mess after the glass-smashing? The ordinary people that the glass-smashers claim to be representing.
I can understand wanting revenge for the death of her sister, but the way it was set up was that all of them joined in the glass-smashing, and it really was only, in the end, destruction for the sake of destruction. They had all been too afraid, for various reasons, to stand up before, and the only thing they could do was be aimlessly, pointlessly, destructive.
Have you ever read the Ray Bradbury story, The Smile? That's what the idea of destroying the Mona Lisa came off as to me; destroying something that is the common heritage of all humanity just for an easy own of the Bad Guy. And making the Bad Guy sympathetic in that moment, because this is something that has meaning to him. Were it just "I'm so rich I can have the real Mona Lisa hanging on my wall", then he'd be no better than any of the rich assholes who buy great art and stick it in a vault because it's an investment that will appreciate over time until they can sell it on for a higher price than they paid for it. If it were some piece of trashy modern art (like something by Jeff Koons) that Bad Guy only bought because his investment manager advised him to do so, then go right ahead.
But this is something that apparently is meaningful to Bad Guy, something that he appreciates for its beauty and inspiration. So by destroying it, Helen has impoverished the world. And she has acted in the same spiteful, hairless ape way the Bad Guy did: one primate kills another in order to hold on to the things it has gathered together, its status in the pack. Then a bunch of rival primates turn on the former alpha and take him down, in a display of shit-flinging destructiveness. Helen is motivated by the same basic, instinctual drives that caused Bad Guy to do what he did, and nobody comes out of this looking like the better person.
Johnson's choice of the Mona Lisa is interesting, too; he could have picked some trashy modern art (if Helen wanted to burn a Basquiat, I'd have handed her the accelerant myself) but he didn't. I don't want to be reading too much into it, but I do think that there is something there about the choice of "old master art that the privileged white guy cherishes being destroyed by the Strong Empowered Black Woman".
To conclude with a quote from the Bradbury story:
Ray Bradbury, God rest the man, was a genius talent. Rian Johnson is a currently popular Hollywood hack.
While I agree that Miles Bron did value the Mona Lisa for sympathetic reasons, the ultimate reason it is destroyed is because of his own selfishness. He created the back-door to the Mona Lisa's security system just so he could look at it without glass, he put the Mona Lisa into a giant compound that was one accident away from going up in flames. What if he had the Glass Onion in normal operation mode with 50 people, and he decided to look at the Mona Lisa without glass just as a cook starts an oil fire in the kitchen? He put the Mona Lisa into an inherently risky situation in the first place, and it blew up in his face (literally) because of that.
While I do think there is something a bit dubious in destroying an important cultural artifact as an act of revenge against an otherwise untouchable murderer, I think the fact that the destruction is only possible because of said murderer's own selfishness and hubris is an important point.
For the plot purposes, it needed to be "one accident away from going up in flames" to prove that the wonderfuel was as dangerous and bad as deceased sister said it was. On the other hand, having his exotic habitat fueled by the dangerous bad wonderfuel means that he did believe it was safer than alleged; in this instance, he did put his money where his mouth was and had skin in the game. If he had sold his wonderfuel as safe, clean and green but secretly had his house powered by something else, then he could be accused of knowing it was dangerous and/or being a hypocrite.
So Johnson undercuts his own plot because he needs Things To Happen in order to make it all work out in the end. And I still think "person who deliberately commits arson" is the one with the ultimate blame. Or if I burned down your house, is it really your fault for not making sure it was as perfectly fire-proof as physically possible, even to the extent of withstanding an arsonist?
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Fair... except that destroying the Mona Lisa isn't directly demolishing the livelihoods of your fellow citizen.
Likewise, the glass-smashers weren't acting out in a response to a harm that was inflicted on THEM PERSONALLY. So there's a much tighter justification available to Helen.
Right, but in the circumstances that Johnson managed to contrive, her position was basically "let the villain not just get away with murder, but thrive for his complete theft of wealth that was properly Andi's... and that he committed murder to maintain... or force him into a position that he can't readily wiggle out of."
Indeed, there's perhaps an argument that if Andi was the true genius behind Alpha's success, and thus the Billions of dollars in wealth at issue would have, by law, passed to Andi's only surviving heir Helen, that her actions at the end were her own attempted reclamation of wealth that she would have received anyway had it not been for the thief's actions.
If we accept the premise that Helen would have been rightfully entitled to everything Andi rightfully owned after Andi wrongfully died, then her act of destruction at the end was really only destroying things that were hers by right anyway. A way of preventing the thief from keeping the benefit of his ill-gotten gains, which historically has been an oft-used tactic ("If I can't have it then you can't either"), and destroying the Mona Lisa was her way of making it stick.
What was her other option? Go for a long-shot legal solution (that had already failed Andi) and then accept the eventual loss and ignore that her family's entire legacy was stolen out from under her?
Exactly. It's hairless apes turning on the fallen alpha and they all of them are not any better than he is, in the end. And Helen gets some excuse for wanting vengeance for her sister, but is it really worth burning the world down for that?
Nope. Destroying things that don't belong to you (and if I'm correct, the Mona Lisa was on loan, not permanently owned by Bad Guy) is not justified in this case, because it makes Helen as greedy as the rest of them: this should have been my sister's and so it should have been mine!
She put herself in the wrong, because in reality all Bad Guy has to do is call his private security, or the local cops, about "Hi, there's this crazy woman smashing things up in my house, yes thanks please come quickly". Even afterwards - she burned his house down, that's attempted murder on her part (if his lawyers are anyway competent) as well as "Your Honour, would my client have his own home powered by this new energy source if he really knew or believed it was dangerous?"
Well, it's a silly movie that is meant to be a piece of stylised fun, not anything deeper. But I don't think smashing shit up is goign to achieve anything, except leave you all walking with splinters in your feet.
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After watching this movie, I think his calling card may be instead, trying to make the least timeless movies possible. This movie is so dated already. Looking at the entire first act which just has lazy COVID commentary after commentary. He doesn't make films with a lasting message.
In general, I thought the plotting was really lazy, and not worth even being set up like a murder mystery. See what I say here:
https://www.themotte.org/post/253/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/47269?context=8#context
I sort of feel like Johnson is not a great screenwriter, just flashy, and pulling wool over people's eyes with simple lazy tricks.
This is all a part of how I think Johnson is trying to implant brain worms. It's not the truth he's written, but people will walk away from this feeling like they understand Joe Rogan and Elon Musk better, even though they're just watching fictionalized versions of them. They'll feel inside like they can just write them off as well-connected lucky backstabbers. Whether the characters are actually similar in deep ways to Rogan and Musk doesn't matter, because they're the first people who will come to mind for the general populace when they see this movie, due to their cultural prominence.
I hard disagree. Brick and Looper are two of the better-written movies of the last 20 years. He has a good ear for dialogue and gets good performances from his cast. He was absolutely the wrong man to write and direct a Star Wars movie, but the sequel trilogy was doomed from the beginning due to structural problems with the story JJ Abrams and Kathleen Kennedy decided to tell.
Johnson’s problem is that he views himself as an auteur. He definitely makes his best movies when he is constrained by budget or a script supervisor who can put the kibosh on his desire to make “art” instead of telling a good story. He crawled up his own ass when making Star Wars and the fan reaction basically guaranteed he would stay there out of stubbornness. I wish he would come out again and make some good niche movies that weren’t full of swipes at the kids on Twitter who were mean to him for “ruining Star Wars.”
All of a sudden I got this image of Ben Stiller playing a Johnson-style director who wants to be the next Kubrick but really is the current Michael Bay (his movies are trash but they make reliable box-office returns). Anyone want to cast the script supervisor who is competent but exasperated at having to wrangle the guy into making the next instalment of the trashy-but-high grossing series instead of the arty-farty movie he wants to do? It's supposed to be CGI-heavy SF schlock with the baddie aliens invading Earth, but he wants a scene where the aliens destroy famous global landmarks (okay that is doable) but with heavy-handed social commentary e.g. tying it in to BLM protests (no way). Picture our Helen-type character above doing a Black Power salute and a long lecture on reparations and 'we built this country' while the aliens death-ray Mount Rushmore or something.
Kevin Hart, dead serious. He's got the range to from straight-man studio exec role to full Eddie Murphy-esque "what'ch you talkin' 'bout fool!?" in the space of a sentence, and if we're doing a proper send up of modern Hollywood I think it would be fun to have some privileged white guy going on about how he's "the voice of the oppressed" while an actual representative of "the oppressed" is like "dude, STFU, if we don't get peoples butts in seats we aint getting paid".
Didn't Kevin Hart play a promoter in a boxing movie with Stallone playing not-Rocky? I remember his character's line about getting another boxer a part in Hangover 4 during the credits.
If he did it's slipping my mind, but that's exactly the sort of vibe I was thinking of.
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The tricks work, however, that much is clear. And he's got a knack for dialogue that sounds natural even between characters with very different 'voices.' He likes his witty dialogue a bit too much but isn't as grating in this tendency as, an apt comparison, Joss Whedon (who has a few cognizable calling cards of his own).
He's not as visionary or innovative as Denis Villeneuve in terms of visuals, but almost any randomly selected screenshot from either Knives Out or Glass Onion (and many from The Last Jedi, Too) are at least artful and aesthetically pleasing.
Upon thinking it over, it would have been a better mystery if Helen had recruited Blanc while already in the guise of her sister and Blanc wasn't in on her plan from the start. Then we could have a moment, at the same point in the movie as the flashback, where Blanc has the realization, reveals the true situation to the viewer, and then solves the murder in short order. Thus there'd have to be clues to her real identity available to both Blanc and the viewer.
I don't think that I personally could write this version of the film satisfactorily, but I realized it makes Helen's triumph even more earned since she was able to fool the famed detective for far longer than the rest of the cast was, and didn't need him to help her along at every step.
Because when you take the movie we got, you could absolutely conclude that Blanc is basically Helen's crutch throughout the entire process, and that seems a bit condescending.
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Death comes to all men, soon or late, but the good things we make can last much longer than any human, and can provide their goodness to many people across deep time. It is not a question of whether things are more valuable than people, but rather a question of how that value expresses itself. It is not unreasonable for a human to die to preserve an object, if that object is of great value to many others. Gratuitous destruction of such artifacts is one of the more telling marks of barbarism.
Well this gets into my other conversation on the topic.
If we care about the object for the good it provides other people, then surely the solution is to create an extremely convincing forgery and just... never disclose that the original was destroyed.
Much larger deceptions have been enacted throughout history for the purpose of maintaining the symbolic importance of a given relic or person.
And I don't think you would be able to convince the person with a dead sibling that she should refrain from violently enacting revenge on the killer even if it destroys a single cultural artifact... provided that it is the only real way to enact such vengeance.
I certainly wouldn't feel comfortable telling someone "no, your loss isn't great enough to justify destroying this cultural artifact just to hurt your sister's killer." Scale it up to something like, I dunno, The Sistine Chapel or the Statute of Liberty, where the true value is mostly bound up in the physical structure itself (and would be hard to recreate) and I start to agree.
At least part of this is due to the fact that a painting can be more easily 'replicated' than a building, especially one as meticulously studied as the Mona Lisa.
Has this ever successfully been done? I mean, I suppose we wouldn't know, but I sort of doubt it. Trying to convince people to value the common heritage of humanity seems a more practical option, and if one could develop and deploy a system to make such forgeries practical, it seems to me that the most likely outcome would be corrosive skepticism in such artifacts, not the preservation of their value. We value the mona lisa because it was touched by the hand of a master, and has passed down through time to us in a way that leaves us confident that it is real. If you can fake such things, how do you keep the capacity for such fakery from becoming common knowledge? Is this one of those plans where you lie even harder to everyone who notices you're lying? Don't those plans involve losing your hat?
For certain variants of 'successful.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knoedler#Art_fraud_scandal_and_closure
https://www.insider.com/cases-of-faked-and-forged-artwork-2019-1
It seems entirely plausible that a single work, if faked convincingly enough, could probably be passed along for an indefinite amount of time without being noticed.
Interestingly, this starts to dovetail with the AI art debate. Do we care more about art that is actually the result of a human mind guiding human hands? Is that art more valuable?
I do think we can find more value in a work that has a traceable connection to our distant history, and that a version of the Mona Lisa that has, e.g. flecks of Leonardo Da Vinci's skin flakes in the ink from the painting process is more 'authentic' than a mostly-identical copy done by some other guy who is still alive.
On the other hand, I think that there are examples where fakery has even more drastic consequences, epistemic and otherwise, than merely replacing human artifacts that we are at least certain did exist at one point:
https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease
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Ah, but is he known as that by Rian and his class buddies?
I am perfectly willing to believe that they genuinely believe that Rogan is a roided out misogynist manosphere dudebro, because it's very easy to believe unflattering things about the people you perceive as enemies.
Perhaps, but I can offhand think of like a half-dozen guys, Andrew Tate being the current version, who would also fit this archetype to almost a T.
The big one that really belies the Rogan comparisons is that Duke starts out as a gamer nerd type, then evolves into the wannabe Alpha. Rogan never had such a transition.
Rogan does enjoy multiplayer Quake, to the point where he had to swear off the game because it was consuming too much of his time.
Which Quake, specifically? 1, 2, 3, Live, or Champions?
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Interesting. Did he get fame as a Quake player?
I don’t think so, it’s just something he’s talked about many times on the podcast. He and Jamie used to have some gaming machines in the studio and would play far too much.
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This is a torture versus dust specks argument. The Mona Lisa benefits a huge number of people by a tiny amount each.
So would you accept an outcome where it is never publicly revealed that the Mona Lisa was destroyed, a very convincing forgery is put on display in it's place, and everything continues on as before, with the broader public none the wiser?
People are still, presumably, getting the same benefits from what they believe is the actual Mona Lisa.
It sounds like, morally speaking, this is what you think SHOULD be done to prevent all those dust specks from hitting people's eyes.
No, because I think blissful ignorance is a flaw in utilitarianism and people only benefit here because of blissful ignorance.
It's not a flaw so much so as utilitarianism never claiming to provide omniscience.
If there are deontologists keenly feeling a disturbance in the Force, as a billion art aficionados cry out in pain, then I've yet to meet them.
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So what is the moral harm in the lie, if we assume we cannot un-burn the Mona Lisa?
I will grant for this conversation that we'd prefer the Mona Lisa not be destroyed. But once it is done, you are not in favor of avoiding further harm that would result from people knowing it was destroyed?
Because once it's gone, no amount of money can retrieve it, nor will punishing the parties who destroyed it bring it back.
So what possible benefit is there to publicizing the fact of it's destruction?
Because then people would know the truth. I can't stress enough how unimpressive arguments for noble lies always seem from the outside. The truth makes a powerful enemy and you are forever committed to opposing it once you justify lying. There are some toy examples like the Nazis at the door while you harbor a Jewish family you know they'll kill where lying is worth it but that's using lying as a weapon to fight an enemy you're too cowardly or unable to use more lethal weapons against, it is not a lie that you are deploying on your own people.
I do not consent to reality being fabricated around me because some people I dislike think it is the best for me. These people are my enemies.
That poses the question on the other end, though, if destroying the Mona Lisa was worth it if it serves to expose the ignoble lie that Miles, and not Andi, was the one who created the Billion-dollar company.
You should therefore, at least, empathize with Helen's position where she was literally standing there watching people fabricate a reality around her which wasn't even the best for her in any way. A bunch of enemies conspiring to fool everyone else in order to keep their status quo.
This seems like the ultimate issue with the "torture vs. dust specks" comparison, though. Which principles are we committed enough to that we could justify destroying a priceless cultural artifact? Destroying the artifact causes small discomfort to millions or billions, but not destroying it leaves one person in extreme despair.
If the argument is that we should never destroy cultural artifacts then okay... but does that mean it is okay to allow thieves and murderers to lie their way out of punishment, and to maintain fabulous wealth in exchange for such a principle?
I have not watched this movie so I can't comment on this.
Sure, if that was happening I oppose those people.
The question of whether it's worth it to destroy an artifact for some unit of utility and the question of whether it's justifiable to lie about it to mitigate that utility loss are very different. I don't have a strong opinion on what someone would need to trade the Mona Lisa for in order for it to be reasonable. Consulting the market value of the Mona Lisa($900 Million at last sale but probably much more) and givewell's estimate at the cost of saving a marginal life $4-20k seems like quite a few lives if one were to naively do the math, not that I think that is a very good idea but it's the kind of maneuver you commit yourself to when you try to base everything in the utilitarian arguments. And it's totally useless at comparing something not so easily quantified like the value of truth to a society.
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You're analyzing it using utilitarianism containing the very flaw I pointed out.
The harm is caused by the Mona Lisa being destroyed. Telling people makes them aware of the harm. The fact that people are more upset when they know of it than when they don't doesn't mean that letting them know about it caused the harm, and counting it as though it did is a flaw in utilitarianism.
How?
I'm confused as to what actual loss is sustained by the burning of the Mona Lisa vs. some piece of random art that was not world famous.
Because the main reason the Mona Lisa is important is because of it's fame/notoriety to other people.
And that fame/notoriety isn't diminished by it's destruction.
People value the existence of the Mona Lisa. Destroying it destroys something which people value.
It is a flaw in utilitarianism that utilitarianism fails to count people's preferences being frustrated as a loss when they don't know that their preferences have been frustrated.
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If you're measuring class by income, then no, not really.
Why would I do that?
A Journalist making 30k a year is less 'working class' than a plumber making 60k a year, no?
Yet journos are 90+ percent Anti-Trump whereas Plumbers are almost certainly a majority in favor of Trump.
Income alone is probably not a good indicator in this instance. College education, for instance, is probably a strictly superior 'class' marker in that sense.
It's a fair assumption because you specifically counterposed the rich to the working class, no?
Yeah, although I'm specifically talking about 'rich' as in 'top 1%' sort of rich, which is the type Johnson is writing as his villains, not the mere upper-middle class bourgeois.
I note that Johnson is very careful to use particularly downtrodden/sympathetic types in depicting his protags. The in-house nurse/caregiver in Knives Out and the elementary school teacher in ALABAMA of all places in Glass Onion. So it is an open question as to how he'd depict more blue-collar laborer characters.
My guess? He just doesn't write in such characters since it muddies the waters too much.
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It's not such a terrible fit for Star Wars; in the first movie Luke was a
dirtwater farmer, and the only rich person outside the Imperial hierarchy we saw (or didn't see, Special Edition be damned) was crimelord Jabba the Hut. The next rich person we see is an Imperial collaborator (Lando), though he is later partially redeemed.Correct, that would be Larry Ellison (though I don't know about the architectural abomination part).
It's a terrible fit for Star Wars.
In Star Wars, the richest person is the Emperor who became rich by using a powerful government to take control of the galaxy and extract their resources violently via taxes. It is quite clearly illustrated in the movies that private sector institutions (Jabba's mafia, Jawa traders, Cloud City) are entirely subservient to the Empire. For example:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6_P1eWl77vo https://youtube.com/watch?v=q8irC6QMH9A
Johnson's "military industrial complex except pure capitalism ignore government" story doesn't fit this.
Lets consider the explicit historical parallels:
The Empire is drawn from Rome story wise and Tsarist Russia/Soviet Russia/Nazi Germany in terms of imagery/musical themes.
Lucas has also cited a real life American politician as inspiration for Palpatine. Said politician is famous for anti-Soviet rhetoric and left wing economic policies (wage/price controls, restricting "windfall" profits, rationing goods, wealth transfers).
The First Order is more explicitly Nazi in it's imagery.
How does one get Rian Johnson's story to remotely fit either the actual movies or any of the historical inspiration?
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Princess Leia?
By the time we see her, Princess Leia is a captured spy and has no obvious wealth, despite the title.
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??? I think it's pretty heavily implied that Princess Leia is rich, via such lines of dialogue as, "She's rich..."
Luke claims she's rich to interest Solo. But if she ever was (which seems likely), her wealth was blasted to atoms with Alderaan and would have been confiscated in any case.
He does end up getting paid, though.
She wrote him a check drawn against the First Bank Of Alderaan.
Kidding aside, Senator Leia Organa almost certainly had above-the-board digitally intragalactically available bank accounts on Coruscant and Alderaan, along with direct access to Mon Mothma and her Rebel Alliance money. Mon‘s people probably paid Han the bounty for returning Leia.
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My impression of Luke is that his background was middle class, rich enough to go for jaunts on speeders and to own droids. Being a farmer doesn't necessarily make you poor. Though the economics of Tattooine seem a little bizarre given that Shmi had her own cozy two bed terrace despite being a literal chattel slave.
Is a farmer rich if he owns a tractor? It would depend where on Earth you are siting the movie; a farmer in a Third World country probably is, but for a farmer in the developed world it's just normal machinery that is needed for doing the work.
Droids are everything from fancy units to basic machines, and used for labour. I don't know if they're at all regarded as "people" even though some of them are sentient, there seems to be no problem with owning, buying and selling them (then again, flesh-and-blood people can be owned, bought and sold). "Going for a jaunt on a speeder" seems to be the equivalent of "driving the truck into town to go to the movies/pub/hang out with my buddies".
Luke is a farm kid on a backwater planet, whatever his position in the local class hierarchy is, in wider terms of the Empire (certainly places like Coruscant) he's a shit-kicker.
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Its really hard to tell class from old movies...
Housing and shelter didn't used to be such scarce resources, it used to be something groundhogs could provide for themselves.
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If we frame Star Wars as mostly about plucky underdogs overcoming insurmountable odds, there's some congruence of message there.
I think the issue is that he had to go to the next level with that whole Canto Bight sequence and imply, straight up, that the only reason the First Order can prosecute a war is because it buys weapons from these war profiteers, who are explicitly only in it for money and thus wish to drag things out as long as possible. It's not enough for the First Order to just be an unambiguously bad force, there has to be some rich people 'behind the scenes' making money off their existence.
And as mentioned, Johnson makes them irredeemable, rather than as with Lando people with warped but extant moral compasses who might still do the 'right' thing.
And add onto the 'reality ensues' issue Johnson has: in that film, everything the protags did during that sequence will be reversed immediately.
Did Lando even have a warped moral compass? From his perspective:
Lando is currently a productive and contributing member of society who is also responsible for the lives and livelihood of his many employees. The Empire shows up immediately before an old criminal buddy is set to arrive. Vader tells him to cooperate in arresting one of the guys (not his buddy) or else they will conquer Cloud City (stick), but will otherwise leave him and all his people alone (Carrot). Vader lies to him about the fate of the others and does not reveal that Han will be given to Jabba.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=q8irC6QMH9A https://youtube.com/watch?v=6_P1eWl77vo
Here's what Lando does after he figures out Vader lied to him:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ojoz7qO8XP8
It's not clear to me what Lando should have done differently.
I don't think we even know that we know that Lando knew why the Empire was after Han, right? Like, the man was a common criminal, and the imperials might just be running a typically heavy-handed regular police operation. He obviously didn't find out about the whole "ritual torture to lure a guy for a magic duel" thing until later.
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If we look at the whole of his history then I'd say his compass doesn't point 'true north' in much the same way that Han's doesn't. Remember Han was gonna just abandon the Rebellion after completing his job, and probably only came back because he wanted to bang the Princess (and felt some guilt or something, I guess).
Hard to say. Resign his post so as not to be a 'Collaborator' and attempt to warn Han not to show up?
The fact that he has no reason to care about Luke is valid, but also not a complete excuse.
Maybe seek some additional, tangible assurances that the deal won't be altered rather than going with a handshake verbal agreement. Lando of all people should expect double crossing.
I'm not saying he shouldn't have taken Vader at his word, but is it fair to say that when the head of the Waffen SS shows up in your town demanding cooperation, you should maybe be a little bit less than fully compliant, and assume something sinister is afoot?
This also doesn't take away from Lando's heroism in the end, because he still did genuinely risk his life in an act of defiance.
Resign his post, get arrested, Han shows up and they get captured when their ship lands ("they showed up right before you did"). Vader loses his dramatic entrance but still accomplishes ihis mission.
Seek tangible assurances from a guy he has absolutely no leverage against? (A point illustrated by the second clip I linked.)
Near as I can tell, the best thing Lando can do is cooperate until he gets the opportunity to actually do something that might work.
This hinges on just how much Lando trusted Vader to keep his word.
It sure looks like Lando didn't choose to resist until it became clear he was going to get screwed either way.
If he warns Han not to show up Vader doesn't accomplish the mission.
I could go into a long discussion on the strategy of refusing to comply with 'evil' vs. going along until the best opportunity to defect arises.
But we wouldn't have much of a story if Lando took the former option, so in the context of the movie, I'm willing to concede the point.
Yeah a fair bit is contingent on stuff like "how feasible was it for Lando to send a message to Han" and "exactly how bad is it all of Lando's people if he resists" - all of which is off screen. (Near as I can tell the answer to the latter is "very bad" given Lando's warning that everyone needs to GTFO.)
But given Lando's later actions (rescue Han/blow up the death star instead of running off and continuing his career as a con man), I'd suggest he's probably a decent enough guy who was put into a tough situation where all choices involve the Empire harming someone.
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