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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.
More evidence for my theory that Rian Johnson is secretly a crypto-conservative who makes movies that skewer woke liberals, and only pretends to be woke so that he can get them made in Hollywood.
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Rewriting that movie so its a parable about immigrants scamming Boomers out of their fortunes and/or scamming this country's generous welfare system would be hilarious and topical.
And yeah, the clear biases shown by Blanc SHOULD be a weak spot of his, but instead its basically him being aware of the rules Rian's universe works under.
As I said, 'Airtight Moral Victory.' Blanc's approach isn't so much putting together the clues to figure out what series of events happened, he solves the MORAL narrative of the case and then the rest of it clicks into place around that. This seemed ESPECIALLY true in the third film.
And even funnier, the fact that in EVERY movie, the protags needs a high IQ white male to actually fix things while they, the downtrodden, do almost all the dirty work is absolutely patronizing if you think about it for more than a minute. He tried to undercut that with this film. The final Blanc film should absolutely have Blanc himself being the murder victim and the out-of-depth protagonist manages to solve it all on their own for once.
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).
>”Humanity? That’s the white man’s cultural heritage and no one else’s.”
sjw_hitler_combined_speechbubble.jpg
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I can steelman that one. If your sibling was brutally murdered, and your response is to freak out and break some 'property,' is that really morally objectionable? Are we genuinely weighting the continued existence of the Mona Lisa (of which there are many copies, its not some hidden gem) over a human life at that point? Its a thought worth weighing, at least. I think one can sympathize enough to see why from the sibling's perspective a piece of artwork is not worth preserving over the life of a loved one.
And yet, it is also pretty hard to believe the point "genius black lady invents something which is stolen by mediocre white guy" since that's something that has probably never happened in all of history.
The concepts in Glass Onion were actually really good and were probably dragged down by the Johnson's absolute need to get his message across at all costs.
Yes, of course it is. The Mona Lisa didn't kill your sibling, so taking your grief out on that thing is attacking a party (the public, who has a desire to enjoy that cultural artifact) that is not guilty of the crime you suffered. That is very clearly morally objectionable.
This line of argument really only applies if destroying the Mona Lisa will prevent the human's death, or bring them back to life. If it won't (and I'm not under the impression it would, though I haven't seen the movie), then there's no grounds to invoke the "human life versus work of art" calculus. The human life and the work of art are not in tension in that case, so destroying the art is just throwing a tantrum.
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It’s worth a great many human lives by most reasonable measures
Can we quantify it? How many family members would you sacrifice to preserve it?
I think people's moral intuitions will diverse pretty aggressively on this.
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That's not what is being compared though, rage over the loss of a human life is what is being compared to a priceless painting, not the life itself.
But even then, on various videos of Just Stop Oil and similar protesters defacing works of art, you'll find plenty of commenters whole throatedly supportive of slitting the protestors throats.
I'm just saying, is it not at least sympathetic for someone to have a crashout and destroy stuff (even irreplaceable stuff) because their loved one was killed? "My brother/father/daughter was killed, you think I give a shit about your painting right now?"
Hell, its a common trope is 'revenge rampage' movies for the protagonist to kill dozens of mooks on their way to taking out their rage on the person they hold responsible for killing their loved one.
This is usually cheered. If killing a bunch of henchmen to get at the person who murdered your kin is sympathetic/justified, how is burning up a painting not just a little sympathetic/justified too? What are the actual bounds of 'acceptable' behavior to enact righteous vengeance?
vs. the Just Stop Oil folks who are doing it deliberately as a cry for attention.
No. People have endured far, far worse with more dignity. By the sounds of it this is entirely gratuitous and achieves nothing.
There is also the fact that, when you get right down to it, there are billions and billions of people and very few precious works of art. Yes, most of them are special to someone but if we acted like every person was as precious as their mother/father/brother etc. thinks they are then society would be unable to survive.
(This is an assertion, of course. I can't make an argument for my moral intuitions, I can only describe them.)
On a lighter note, are you aware of the story about Edward James Olmos and the model ship from Battlestar Galactica?
I have not.
His character is the admiral of the titular battleship, under huge stress, and releases this stress by very slowly and carefully building a model ship in his rare time. Said model ship is a beautiful and very intricate historical galleon; it appears in pretty much every scene where the admiral is being introspective in his quarters.
Avoiding spoilers, a Bad Thing Happens to the admiral and he loses someone he cares about. Olmos is a rather improvisational actor and completely aces his character's reaction: he roars, takes the ship in his hands, lifts it up, and smashes it to smithereens on his table, the admiral wrecking years of his own work in grief.
The cameras cut, everyone high-fives... and then the director points out that the real-life prop for the model ship was on loan from a national museum. It's very old, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars... and Edward James Olmos has just smashed it to match-sized bits.
Thought you might find it amusing as a case of life imitating art.
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The henchmen, in most such stories at least, are pieces of human garbage and the world is made a better place with each one the protagonist kills. The priceless work of art being destroyed is a permanent loss for humanity and its culture. The problem with your steelman here is that it presupposes that all human life is equally valuable, or at least that no humans are net negatives on humanity.
I love the scene in Citizen Kane when Kane destroys the shit out of his room. It's very visceral and conveys the emotions he is feeling exceptionally well. So I appreciate it as a story-telling device. But morally, in real life, it is purely destructive behavior and a sign that someone is unable to control their emotions. It doesn't make me think more highly of Kane's character when he goes on a destructive rampage.
As the loss of the protagonist's loved one is to them. This seems to be the message dissonance. Saying you'd sacrifice a particular human in exchange for preserving a particular work of cultural significance will disgust a significant portion of the population.
I'd point out that we're almost never given any background on the mooks to know one way or the other. Hence that Austin Powers gag. Its very much something you're just not supposed to think about. The Mona Lisa is a very legible artifact since we know its background and 'importance' so the film can exploit that fact to give you an emotional reaction you WON'T feel for random henchmen #23. But if it was revealed that random henchman #23 is a recovering drug addict who really needs money to pay for his daughter's heart surgery (leaving aside that he could just set up a gofundme) then it might make us feel bad about all these dudes dying. Of course, killing them in self defense is still 100% justifiable in my book.
The problem with the rebuttal is that it presumes that every single work of art is of practically infinite value... but in reality you gotta draw the line somewhere. How many randomly selected humans (or, shall we say, randomly selected countrymen of yours, so there's a CHANCE its your family members) would you sacrifice to preserve Michelangelo's David?
The world may be tangibly poorer if the Mona Lisa is destroyed, but its actual impact on human life is negligible.
Like, I'm not arguing that burning the Library of Alexandria WASN'T a grievous loss for humanity, or that we shouldn't want to preserve cultural heritage. Just... taking the position that we should be MORE upset by the destruction of a piece of classical art than the unnecessary death of a human being (and for argument's sake, assume they were a net-positive human) seems suspect. I'm not sure how you can draw any bright-line moral rules around that assumption.
What if they volunteer?
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Zero. But mooks working for a crime syndicate? Quite a few, recovering drug addicts doing it to pay for a kid's surgery be damned.
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