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The political messaging of this movie was awful. It felt like Rian Johnson watched Get Out and wished that he could make that movie, and that influenced the script here. However, since Johnson has no concept of how white racists are perceived by minorities he isn't capable of producing an honest, revealing script like Get Out had and instead relies on hacky cultural signifiers don't reveal anything beyond the fact that Johnson was clever enough to observe them. What's worse is Johnson's need to absolve white people for being racists. Imagine if in Get Out Daniel Kaluuya's character had a nice white friend to give him advice about how to deal with the mean racists, or if there was a member of the family that felt bad about lobotomizing black people, but Kaluuya gave that person a big 'ol hug at the end of the movie to fix everything. It would be loving insulting, and that's how I felt watching this movie. It's because Rian Johnson is like every "white guilt" liberal, who wants to feel the alleviation of guilt without having to actually feel guilty. As long as there are worse racists out there, Johnson believes, fallible white people can be forgiven for their mistakes without doing anything to deserve it. Johnson wanted to create a good follow-up to Get Out, but instead he made the movie from Bradley Whitford's character's point of view. The mystery itself was good, but the problem is that it does what a lot of scripts do nowadays and heavily foreshadow every single twist. Plummer's character literally explains the main twist of the movie in exacting detail. How could anybody not see the ending of the movie coming?
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Dec 3, 2019 21:09
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Obviously I know Marta's the protagonist. My point is that the script has her forgive Meg, who conspired to report Marta's mom to ICE so that she could get tuition money, and Blanc is there to have a nice white person in the movie. Like, Blanc could have been played by Lakeith Stanfield and their roles could have been consolidated, but there is a very specific reason why that is not the case.
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Dec 3, 2019 21:22
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Babysitter Super Sleuth posted:I'm pretty sure Marta doesn't forgive Meg, she's just not going to cut her off from finishing her education in retribution, because Marta is a fundamentally kind person. She gives Meg a big hug and says, "It's okay." She may not give Meg her tuition money, but Meg doesn't actually have a claim to it.
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Dec 3, 2019 21:48
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Look, you guys can argue all you want about the context, but on the screen, Meg gave a half-hearted apology and Marta hugged her and said, "It's okay." If that isn't forgiveness, I don't know what is. Furthermore, it may not have been in Marta's character to call out Meg, but Marta's character is written by a white guy. She exists to forgive Meg for what she did, and what Meg did was messed up. I don't mean this in an academic way, as an intellectual thought experiment or whatever. There are real, historical parallels to what Meg did. In the Jim Crow South, white people sought the aid of the KKK and racist government officials to steal the land from their black neighbors, eliminate business competitors, and enrich themselves. Germans under the Third Reich did the same to their Jewish neighbors. It's not an exaggeration to say that what Meg and her family threatened to do - turn someone in to ICE to extort Marta out of her inheritance - is the same as what those people did: use racist terrorism to satisfy their greed. The impulse to see a kindhearted victim of racism not do what they can to see justice done upon their terrorists is genuinely disturbing. edit: The final shot of the movie might be intended to be a devastating own on the Thrombys, but in reality Marta has simply refused to offer them charity. They have no claim to the money or the rest of the inheritance, and so Marta has deprived them of nothing. pospysyl fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Dec 3, 2019 |
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Dec 3, 2019 23:05
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Guy A. Person posted:You don't know what forgiveness is. I'll put this to you: what idea is that sequence of events trying to convey? I can see the argument that it's showing Meg trying to coerce emotional labor out of Marta, but that doesn't really work. For one thing, Meg doesn't know that Marta's there to confess and give up the inheritance. For another thing, that idea isn't reinforced at all through the rest of the movie. Meg is presented fairly straightforwardly as an ally to Marta until her betrayal. Meg doesn't do anything else to manipulate Marta into giving her attention at all. My complete read on the situation is that Marta is willing to forgive Meg because she feels guilty about killing Harlan. That forgiveness, though, is never reversed when she finds out that she was innocent. The hard gaze shown in the last scene is shared between Jamie Lee Curtis and Marta, Meg is not the focus of the scene. That encounter between Marta and Meg is the last we see of them, and therefore how the relationship closes. quote:Edit: Sorry that was flippant, but in your second paragraph you go onto parallel Meg's actions with historic racism, but those actions were also written by the same white guy who wrote Marta's. That's why the context becomes important. I don't think Johnson actually realizes the historical parallels.
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Dec 3, 2019 23:27
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Sorry, when I say that Johnson is a white guilt liberal that wants to write a movie about racism but can't, I'm only basing that on the fact that he wrote a movie about racism that was bad. As for his political persuasion, I can only base that on this movie, his tweets, and his interviews about the mean chuds that didn't like his previous movies.
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Dec 3, 2019 23:35
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Timeless Appeal posted:Dude, Knives Out is a movie about race that can be unpacked because it was written by a white dude. Now who's psychoanalyzing who here? I'm not trying to cudgel or own anyone. I'm trying to do two things: 1) share my perspective on the movie and 2) try to convince people that what was depicted on the screen is the text of the movie. We can't have a substantive discussion without first agreeing on the text, and perhaps we'll never clear the hurdle. And as for the implication that I'm trivializing important topics to demean someone, I take offense to that. Part of the reason I have the perspective that I do is because I'm Latino. To an extent, the movie is about how I and my family are treated. I'd like to think that the reasons I dislike how racism was portrayed in the movie are not intrinsic to my perspective as a Latino, which is why I haven't brought it up. I imagine my perspective on the messaging of the movie might be different to Ana de Armas or Rian Johnson, but I don't think that makes me wrong. Guy A. Person posted:To answer the bolded question: Meg sees herself as a non-racist in contrast to her openly racist family, who in a moment of weakness did something bad and genuinely wants to be forgiven to reconcile her view of herself. In their earlier phone conversation, you can see her begin to rationalize her decision with her talking about the "fairness" of the will; she thinks she was ultimately justified but still doesn't want to be seen as just another racist member of her family. I actually like this a lot. pospysyl fucked around with this message at 23:57 on Dec 3, 2019 |
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Dec 3, 2019 23:54
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