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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.
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).
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.
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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