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Cross-posting from Small Question Sunday (with some addendcums) upon suggestion: Maybe I just missed it, but a little surprised to see no discussion of Knives Out, Wake up Dead Man on the forum given the culture war angles of the previous two (immigration, tech billionaires). Disclaimer - I haven't seen glass onion. I will avoid major spoilers but minor spoilers may be included. I wouldn't read if you haven't watched it yet and want to.
Wake Up Dead Man certainly seems to be set up to skewer the church, and conservatives, with characters including a sci-fi writer-> substack blogger who is paranoid of the "libtards", a failed right-wing politico, who is attempting to build a following through youtube videos, and Monsignor Wicks, the bombastic preacher who exclaims that he must "fight" the decay in the country as an excuse for his own failings.
However, despite this, I was drawn to the film by the character of Father Jud - a young priest who killed a man in a boxing ring before coming to the priesthood, he is a compassionate character who pushes against the excesses of Wicks while nonetheless being devoted to Christ and to his faith. He offers eloquent verbal parries to Detective Blanc's (the main character in the Knives Out series, played by Daniel Craig) rationalist, atheist worldview, and takes his vocation seriously.
One of my favorite scenes involves Blanc and Jud working to try to find a clue which involves Father Jud calling a construction company and getting their receptionist. There's the standard comedic setup of the super-talkative receptionist who won't let him ask the question they need an answer to, but the whole scene shifts when she asks him to pray for her (link here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=7VHPrO3SX5A). It's a really beautiful portrayal of pastoral care and prayer, and played straight. It seems to impact Blanc as well.
The sacrament of confession also plays a role and is highlighted in its entirety, a scene that happens due to Blanc's realizing that the moment calls for personal grace more than his grand reveals.
Father Jud seems almost more apolitical than political to me despite his opposition to Wicks and the other more conservative characters - he comes across as much more above politics than taking any particular political stand.
It seems like Rian Johnson has had a history of being religious but fell away from the Church at sometime in the last few decades.
Anyway, curious to hear what others thought of it.
I managed to enjoy the movie 'in spite' of Johnson's politics being present because I went in knowing and expecting them so it wasn't like ordering a bowl of soup and being surprised there's a fly in it. I knew that the fly was part of the chef's specialty so I can just kind of 'eat around it.' Good performances, solid cinematography and good editing choices. A script that's too full of itself but is 'clever' and has decent dialogue moments (like the scene you alluded to).
Unfortunately that managed to sort of ruin the movie's twists because now Johnson's habits have made it easier to predict whodunnit and why.
Female Characters are generally 'good.' Poor, working class characters are ALWAYS heroic in understated ways. Characters that espouse right-wing views (even if they clearly don't believe them) are not good. Any tropes/cliches will always be subverted, even at the expense of the plot.
Those four rules by themselves get you approximately 90% of the way through the mystery.
EVEN THOUGH Rian sort of cheated and [SPOILERS] made a female character a killer this time, she never strikes the killing blow herself. [/SPOILERS] He really has an aversion to making his 'good' characters ever do anything that might make them less likeable. Likewise, he doesn't let his bad characters have any moments that might make them seem 'cool'.
I can actually envision this guy's writing process, he probably goes through like a dozen drafts refining the script to make sure there's no way an icky right winger is ever proven right in the slightest, that they're humiliated and sufficiently hypocritical to make it impossible for viewers to pretend they're 'better' than the protags, and finally to make sure nobody can criticize the protagonists' actions at any point, there's always some justification baked into the script. And to his credit, he's good at it, you don't get people pulling a "Thanos did nothing wrong" argument with his movies. He wants to make an airtight moral victory. In this film the Fire-and-Brimstone clergyman is [SPOILERS] an impotent drunkard scamster with an illegitimate son, and the reverence of his followers is entirely unearned, which they come to realize.[/SPOILERS] In GLASS ONION the hypersuccessful billionaire has to be shown to be stupid, petty, tasteless, secretly hated by everyone and not even deserving of his own success in even the tiniest way, it all has to be stolen. YET, as I mentioned at the time, I'm not sold on the idea that his defeat is complete and irreversible at the movies' end:
This was also how The Last Jedi played out. SAME FREAKIN' RULES. See how they elevated Admiral Holdo, deflated Poe Dameron and Luke Skywalker, and made the entire First Order leadership out as incompetents. And Mary Sue'd Rey harder than ever.
I think he screwed up just a little this time, in that while the 'victim' in this case was a bad guy (in contrast to the previous two movies) he didn't manage to make it seem like they deserved to die. A whole line of humiliations is inflicted on him, some contemptible decisions were shown, but all-in-all killing him was objectively indefensible.
But the mystery needs a dead guy to happen, so whatevs. That part was clever enough for me, although I could spot the one way the plan as portrayed could have failed in any 'realistic' setting. Red herrings were set up and executed well. Characters don't behave in stupid ways to make the plot move. And its mostly logically consistent except that one time (you're telling me a guy happened to be recording a baseball game, on broadcast TV, and that a particular device was powerful enough to interfere with the signal?).
Although Kudos to Rian for actively incorporating modern tech into his stories. Rather than trying to pretend cell phones don't exist or ignoring that they can solve most plots instantly.
Anyway. I grew up on mystery novels and shows. I've read Sherlock Holmes, Encyclopedia Brown, Hardy Boys, and more since I was very young. And I'm slightly pained to say that the entire Murder Mystery genre is played out and practically dead by now. It has been years since I saw a mystery resolution that actually made me go "WOW." And that mystery was in fact... KNIVES OUT. And thus I can credit Johnson with trying very hard to revive the genre with a fresh approach. But much like the actual corpse in this film, Johnson can only give it the illusion of resurrection, its still very much dead and no amount of mortuary makeup alone will solve that.
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.
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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