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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.
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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