Patreon Letter: 2nd December 2019 (Patreon)

Hey!

Jackson here with a quick Patreon letter. The schedule has kinda fallen apart for this year with the increases Beach Houses and some real intense bad brain shit nd I feel awful about it. I've been promising the Death Stranding letter for what feels like a decade, and it's still coming, I've just kinda psyched myself up about it and am struggling getting all my thoughts in order. By way of an apology we have a special Voip Life hitting this Friday that will be avaliable for all $5+ subscribers! 

And also, today I went to see Knives Out, so I thought I'd just write my thoughts down while they were fresh in my mind, give you a nice letter to tide you over. Don't know how long it will be, probably pretty short, I'm just gonna give you the takes as they come. 

There will be full spoilers for Knives Out, so consider yourself warned! 

Okay! So off the bat: Knives Out is pretty fun, Daniel Craig does the world's dumbest foghorn leghorn voice for the entire movie and frankly that's what cinema is all about. You cannot argue with that. He's far and away the best part of the movie, both comedically and also in the more touching moments. The film's best scene is when he talks to the family's oldest member, the mother of our 85 year old victim - nobody knows how old she is, and she is basically ignored by the entire family - and he just has a really sweet monologue at her, the first person to console her on her son's death. It's good stuff, Craig's a great ridiculous detective figure and knows how to play that type of cartoonish persona in the more tender moments. 

But while the movie presents at the start like it's going to be about him solving a who-dunnit it becomes a much more interesting film at the start of the second act with a fantastic reveal: it shows you the death. Just straight up shows you it exactly, and the circumstances are that our victim, Harlan Thrombey, was accidentally injected with a lethal overdoes of morphine by the only person he truly cares about, his nurse Marta, whom he has left his fortune to. To ensure she won't be implicated, he devises a fairly complicated scheme where she will loudly announce her departure, return, pretend to be him so he's seen alive before the police's "time of death," while he cuts his own throat in a staged suicide to cover up the cause of death. To make things more complicated, if she tells a lie, she throws up, in a strange-but-sure-why-not plot development.

This narrative twist is with no uncertainty, fucking genius. It's the best decision the movie makes. The whole first act, you think you're here for a whodunit, and then suddenly the movie becomes about watching the only likable person in a den of vultures try to outwit a genius detective who sounds like foghorn leghorn. And she can't lie. You thought you were getting a Poirot sendup, but you're getting idiot's Death Note. It's Christmas.

For a good 45 minutes, this is what the movie is and it mostly rules. Unfortunately it does not keep this up all the way to the end. 

This is where we have to come to the dark truth at the heart of this often fantastic movie, the hole in the centre of the donut if you will: twitter dot com has rent poor Rian Johnson's mind in twain.

Nobody should be surprised at this, considering he himself has tweeted about how the backlash to Last Jedi is in part due to those pesky russian bots, but it has bled into this film in ways both major and minor that really detract from the overall experience. One of the teens in the family is an "alt-right troll" and the other is a "cryptomarxist," just to give you a baseline. But obviously it isn't the fact that the movie has politics, or even that those politics are too online online that really drags the film down: it's that it ends up approaching these very serious themes with kid gloves and leaves so much opportunity to dig into them on the table. It's relatable, but it's not incisive. It's an epic claback. It is some real hopepunk bullshit.

To be clear: it is a movie about race and class in america where the victory is that a poor immigrant nurse, whose mother is undocumented, inherit's a rich guy's fortune because she's the only one pure and nice enough to be worthy of it. As far as I am aware, Rian Johnson himself is not a poor immigrant nurse whose mother is undocumented, he is a rich white guy who writes and directs movies. Now, it may have got yelled at by idiots on the internet, but if we want to talk about class in america: his last one made over a billion dollars. His next movie should probably not be fetishising the moral purity of the undocumented poor. Maybe racists shouldn't be so racist about them (because of how nice and kind they are, not because of yknow, their humanity and the fact that America is a colonial settlement that has no right to borders of any kind).

So that all sucks, obviously. But while it clearly sucks on a moral surface level, I think I'm more interested in the way that mindset closes off storytelling potential. The movie rests on the edge of being a film about Marta needing to, overnight, become as hardened and heartless as this awful family to beat them at their own game and walk away with all their money. Instead, Marta completely fails to beat anyone at their own game, and winds up with the money because she has no self interest, calls an ambulence on someone she thinks has evidence to convict her of murder and deport her mother, and through plot magic this ends up being the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory key to the fortune. So we never get the mind-games between her and Craig, we never really get to see her engage with the machinations of the plot, she's just bewildered, terrified and above all nice, and for this she is rewarded. Which is fine and I guess makes you feel good as the movie ends on a literal sipping tea gif as she kicks the whole awful family out of what is now her mansion, but it is not how the world works, and I expect more from my movies then liberal fantasies from rich white people about how selfless and hardworking poor immigrants are.

In the interest of balance I will now say that the politics are not the worst, it's not West Wing bad, there's one part I liked which was - despite the fact that this parody of a 50s agatha christie family talks entirely in epic quote tweets - they are polarised and arguing about whether you should hate undocumented immigrants or not and things get heated. They call each other nazis, communists, whatever it's all to play for, they almost come to a fistfight. And the second they learn that Marta has the fortune that's it, they all close ranks, they are a rich family first and foremost and rich people class solidarity will always beat trivial things like being a nazi. That bit is good.

But by the end it leaves a sour taste in its mouth. For all the good moments, for the pretty good mystery, for the incredible second act and even for the foghorn leghorn voice, the ending and thesis of the movie are too repugnant for me to forgive and look past. I'll leave you with this: early on in the movie, someone quotes the "immigrants, we get the job done!" Hamilton line and one of the cops jokes back. This is unambiguously a joke on these two people, on the idea of Hamilton as a hollow signifier of the politics from white people who suck ass. It is the "I'd have voted for Obama three times" line from Get Out. Yet, with the conclusion being what it is, Knives Out just does that exact thing earnestly. Immigrants do truly get the job done, Rian Johnson declares, all the way to the bank. They're just so hardworking. And that's tea.