The Glass Onion: Simple Answers to Complex Problems

Yadda yadda this review/analysis of a mystery movie will contain spoilers. If you were going to see it, you'd have seen it already what with it being the crown jewel of the internet at the moment, and this giant holiday break to watch Netflix during.

I am not here to bury or praise KO:GO. It's... fine. It's not a terrible, humorless, woke-fest. It's not the greatest movie of the year. It's a mild invigoration of the old murder mystery genre with rather good comedic actors and a workman-like script. It's about 90% as good as the previous Knives Out, and way less ambitious than Rian Johnson's actual murder mystery "Brick." The setting and camerawork are gorgeous but most of the characters are paper thin. I think everyone knows this and those claiming that KO:GO is at any extreme of the quality spectrum are probably selling something. I'm glad I watched it but unlikely to watch again.

(You could say there is some question about whether Knives Out and Glass Onion are really mysteries, given that "what murder is even mysterious" gets introduced late and "who the murderer is" is revealed with half an hour to go, so it's plotting has the pace more of a thriller... but honestly mystery as a genre is all over the map because of how often they are trying to twist the concept. Myself I've watched "Murder on the Orient Express" a dozen times and that certainly doesn't have a traditional whodunnit plot.)

I'm here to talk about *the* central metaphor of the whole movie: the glass onion.

Benoit Blanc spells it out plainly for us (as he does so many other things) : A glass onion has many layers to peel back, but really you could see through it the whole time.

This is not a subtle metaphor: it's the title of the movie, the shape of the mansion, the ornate sculpture in the opening set piece, the name of the bar in the backstory, and the logic by which Blanc determines who the murderer is.

Unfortunately, as a central theme and moral... it's a really uncomfortable one. "The truth is obvious on first glance. Any seeming complexity is just a ruse." That sure is, uh, some lesson to impress on people.

Now to be fair to Johnson/Blanc, it is textually stated that the glass onion is only the message of this movie. Other mysteries would presumably have other lessons (such as in KO1, when the woman who believes from the beginning that she committed the crime, did not.) It's okay for each movie in a series to have a different, pithy lesson that is confined to one episode. (And sometimes in life "look at what you are actually doing, and not the elaborate justifications around it, is a very good lesson to keep in mind. Always be making sure you aren't in the Milgram Experiment!)

But man, even in just this movie the theme sits awkwardly. As has been noted, the characters are largely empty stereotypes (exempting Ms. Brand), with no inner complexity and some secret counter-intuitive reason they would have committed murder: what you see is all you get.

This is epitomized in the very first set piece: 4 long time friends receive a mysterious box, and have a phone conference to decipher it's puzzles to get to the mystery prize at the center. The one pariah sits alone with the box, and after sulking for a few minutes she rips it apart with a hammer and just grabs the prize. "There are complex ways that distract people who are trying to engage, but the direct way just better and more enlightened." the scene is saying.

... but like, where's the fun in that? The friends were having a genuinely good time with their puzzling. Yes we can just bite the tootsie-pop to get to the center, but what are you missing?

(I could go so far as to call this theme an "anti-mystery" since it is antithetical to what the genre is supposed to be "about", but shrug, mysteries have played with "the answer was in plain sight" for a very long time already.)

This also contributes to the widespread impression that this is a particularly political movie. There's only two actually right-wing coded characters: the manosphere streamer and the celeb who says offensive things (and she's just dumb, not ideological.) Otherwise on team rich, there's a billionaire but he could be SBF as much as Musk, and there's a governor who speaks out loudly for climate justice, and a Black young scientist. And a bunch of rich people fighting another rich person is not exactly class warfare. (The victim is more left coded, but only in terms of characteristics not anything they do or say.) But when you add those politically charged stereotypes to a message of "all you have to do is judge someone on what you first see about them" it sure sounds like "crimes are always committed by your political enemies, never by your allies."

These do lack the nuance of KO1's social-justice-college-teen who spouts the right words but turns in the illegal immigrant when her tuition is at stake, but do not a political tract make.

The one nuance that remains, that trace of authenticity, is surprising support for Miles Bron. From Benoit's speech, you would conclude that because Bron is not a brilliant scientist himself, and he hires others to make his puzzles and mysteries and any scientific discovery that isn't dangerously unstable, that he has zero value to base his worth and empire on. It's all just lies and threats and stealing other's work.

Except the talent "find the talent in others and help it grow" is actually a really good talent? The flashback at the bar (which normally I would expect to be subjective and later re-interpreted by others, but I guess not in this movie) mentions how Bron took all these people striving with their dreams, but failing, and launched them into orbits of success. That's awesome! And you think organizing a puzzle game for your friends or hosting a weekend party is easy if you hire other people to write the mysteries? Logistics of party-running is a lot of work! In particular, it's described that both the streamer and the fashion icon were disgraced, and Bron supported them when no one else would, and found them platforms they later rebounded and flourished with.

These are, well, good and admirable skills. His threats and thievery and denial about his own invention definitely are not. But Benoit wasn't saying that Bron is a skilled man who misused his talents to hurt others, he's saying Bron has no talents at all, despite positive depiction of those talents early in the movie.

Double Feature: Hustle, Emily the Criminal.

 

Closing out on all the acclaimed movies from 2022 to make by "best of" list definitive, I watched these two movies near each other and think they make excellent complements you should watch while spending New Year's in your apartment because everyone you'd want to go to a party with has COVID, flu, or RSV.

They're a good match because they have a lot in common:

• Netflix prestige shows
• Featuring a main actor known for their comedy movies, but who are quite good at serious drama
• (If you are like me, you might even watch them anticipating a drama and be surprised at how serious the intro is.)
• An intense "no time to stop and think" flow of action/choices/plot
• Heavy handed display of modern tech and social trends - everyone uses smartphones constantly, there are viral videos and apps, etc.
• Follows characters on the margins of society, who want to reach for the top of the pyramid but due to past mistakes have trouble even getting their foot in the door, and therefore about the winner-takes-all modern economy.
• That "past mistake" in both movies is an "assault conviction 5 years ago."
  

But there they diverge. Hustle is the heart-warming uplifting one, because it's really a sports movie, the kind about being an underdog and having that miraculous win in the final minutes. I don't know the genre, what it lacks in surprise it more than makes up for being effective at evoking the emotions it wants you to feel.

It's interesting the way Hustle overcomes the dystopian marketplace. An idiot billionaire gets his comeuppance and the power of "personal connections to famous people" lets a lot of basketball stars cameo and proves "heart finds heart" or "for the love of the game" or some combination of the two.

As I said, it's about the margins of society - a Spanish construction worker who plays street courts, and is discovered by Adam Sandler (both movies have bearded, charismatic, high-energy men who inducts the neophyte into the demimonde.) In particular, Bo Cruz the basketball rookie labors under an assault conviction that is just at the margin where people can conceivably hire him if they are feeling generous, but have an easy reason to reject them if for any reason the employer wants to. In the emotional center of the movie, Bo admits that he got in an argument with his ex's boyfriend over who gets to keep his daughter that escalated to a fight.

It's a movie about forgiveness. It finds a crime people would actually be viscerally opposed to, but the most sympathetic circumstances for it, for an industry that is frequently plagued by assault-conviction-prone athletes. (Forgiveness when "this man will make me millions of dollars" is tricky ethical territory to try to get into, but that doesn't make "therefore NEVER forgive" the ideal answer.)

It all feels both "gritty" and heart-warming, which matches the showy shots of the scenes all happening in "real Philadelphia."

So then watch and contrast with Emily the Criminal, which watches a driven woman with college loans osmose from the world of temporary gig jobs to gig criminality.

There is a major emphasis in this movie on the way "playing by the rules" screws over most proletariat, especially ones who for any reason are even more marginal. Emily has an assault conviction on her record, and is tormented by HR managers who ask her about her past swearing they don't do a background check, and then when she doesn't fess up to it they reveal they DID do a background check, and now can reject her for her dishonesty. Her hours are toyed with by the caprice of gig-supervisors who mock her for not having the protections of real employment. She has $70,000 in loans to pay off (for an incomplete art degree) and her current payments don't even keep up with interest. She sees her friends who did get a decent career enjoying perks like a company trip to Portugal while she debates moving back in with her step-dad. And when she is offered a dream job... it turns out to be an internship with no pay. (That scene is particularly trenchant, with the employer saying she had it tough getting started too in order to justify not paying people, in a way that highlights how the problems between different generations are different, even if neither is strictly better.)

So getting screwed when playing by the rules, drives her to the criminal lifestyle, which is flowing so smoothly it's just like being a gig contractor.

(My one objection is that her non-degree is in painting. I know that it's to highlight the impossibility of her finding a stable career, but also it reinforces the idea that people who screwed by college loans and the economy are so because they chose frivolous majors. That's not true! People who got "business" degrees or went to professional school for whatever career was in low-demand that year (lawyers, pharmacists) found themselves just as underemployed when the market decided it didn't need any more of them right now.)

When I worked in campaign fundraising, we would just call random people on our list, tell them about our candidate, ask for a donation, and take their credit card number over the phone. And I was shocked this was how it worked since... once we had their number, we could do anything with it. They didn't even know we were a real campaign, ANYONE could call random people, say they were a good progressive campaign, ask for credit card numbers, and then steal thousands of dollars. I was just surprised to see the world work in such incautious way.

I told a friend this and he said "yeah, crime is actually easy, if you do it once. The risky part is that it's SO easy, and if you do it a lot then you will get caught."

That's Emily's arc through the criminal world. Ripping off a couple hundred dollars is amazingly easy.  But the more she gets into it, the more her aggressive side comes out, and she takes increasing risks both for herself and the people around her.

This is when we see the flip side of "living by the rules is screwing you over" which is that living OUTSIDE the rules introduces many new risks. You can be cheated and violently attacked and there is no System to turn to for defense. Multiple times someone turns on her and says "what are you going to do, call the cops?" It takes a certain sort of personality to survive in this wild with no safety net of social order - and we delight in discovering that Emily has that sort of persevering persona. 

At first as the audience we cheer on this girlboss, committing surprising acts of violence in defense of herself and "not letting anything stop her." But we realize like in Breaking Bad, Emily is not an innocent girl "forced" on this path - it comes very naturally to her and part of her wants it. She even eggs her mentor into going farther to take revenge than he can stomach.

And then near the end we get Emily's version of the scene where "she admits the nature of her assault conviction five years ago." 

It was just a guy I was dating and we fought all the time. One day, I just... you know what my mistake really was though? I didn't go far enough. I didn't really scare him. You know, 'cause if I had, he would've never called the police.

And you know, I was just utterly charmed by the likable character's backstory revelation being "they actually did something pretty bad, and do not have a sympathetic reason or are deeply remorseful for it." It is not just that the gig economy has driven someone to desperation, but that this person was looking for a way to "break bad" themselves.

Unsurprisingly, Emily has a much less heartwarming conclusion than Hustle. See them both.

The Menu

There is just so much to say about "The Menu", the horror movie about avant garde dining starring Ralph Fiennes and Anna Taylor Joy. I can't even really spoiler you, because frankly most of the movie is given away in its trailer if not the premise itself.

And you should definitely go see it. But for the few reveals that you still may not know beforehand, consider this spoiler territory from here on.

Sticks the Landing

I've come to irrationally hate a certain phrase in reviews: "it sticks the landing."

"Sticks the landing" is something said about gymnastics performances where the gymnast lands with perfect poise at the end. It refers to the many shows that FAIL in their endings. When we watch a long series (television, or franchise series) we are wondering if there will be a payoff, or it will end in disappointment: with unresolved plotlines, unearned victories, complete lack of understanding the work's themes, or just something that disagrees with our own interpretation of the series so far.

Famous recent embarrassing endings include: SW Rise of Skywalker, Game of Thrones, WandaVision, Enterprise, True Detective S1, some say the Wire or Sopranos, Seinfeld, Battlestar Galactica, and the overall fifth season of Babylon 5, Winter Soldier and Falcon. The fandoms live in dread of these ruining their last memories of the shows they love.

StL means a show has avoided that failure and is... fine. There is no sharp turn off a cliff at the 1 yard line. The villain you expected is defeated, possibly at a high cost including some lives of the main cast, the themes and mood carry through, and basically everything you expected would happen does. It can even be some of the most touching moments and best action of the entire series. It's satisfying AND reassuring.

Famous recent landings stuck include: SW Revenge of the Sith, Breaking Bad, West Wing, Farscape, Fargo seasons, Avengers Endgame, HBO Watchmen, the Expanse, Deep Space 9. I'd even say Lord of the Rings and the Wheel of Time books.

They all were fine, and for being fine, they received lavish praise because they avoided disappointment. And it's about these shows that I hear the phrase "stuck the landing."

I don't think the phrase is wrong. It seems to accurately describe endings that satisfy and don't disappoint, in a way a gymnast's final moment should. It demonstrates a minimal level of skill and awareness of your work.

I just also think that level is unambitious for what a true work of art should be trying for.

There is a third type of ending that is the key to interpreting everything that came before. These are endings that re-contextualize all of the series so far, or are vital to understanding the work. This is fairly common in scifi or fantasy where there is some Metaphysical Secret of the Universe that will be revealed, or crime/mysteries where you find out whodunnit at the end, though it's not universal in either genre. It can just be the revelation of the psychological dynamics of a character that shows this was always going to end as a tragedy, or even just enough emotional pathos that you realize the point was the character's journey and not plot. They can sometimes be confusing to the audience, who expected a neat conclusion and didn't get it.

Recent key ending examples include: SW Return of the Jedi (and redeeming Anakin), the OA (both seasons), Utena, Evangelion, Arcane, Twin Peaks, Star Trek TNG maybe, the Boys S1, For All Mankind S3, the Leftovers, A Place Further than the Universe, Outer Range, the Sandman and Watchmen comics, Station Eleven, all the good Mike Flanagan stuff.

The ideal case is, once you've seen a key ending, you immediately want to rewatch the entire series to see all its scenes again now knowing the proper context.

And while the line between "embarrassing and StL endings" may be fuzzy, and the line between "StL and key endings" is also gray... you probably have noticed whether an ending ends up in "embarrassing or key" can be a hard question. Sopranos and Seinfeld were certainly trying to make a re-contextualizing "statement" about the whole of the show in their final episode... but largely just ended up annoying people.

I highly value a good key ending. It's "informationally dense" telling me major things I didn't already know. And it requires intricate buildup in all of the episodes before for the payoff to "make sense." 

By contrast... StL episodes bore me. If I like your characters and moods I'll probably be fine watching, but I don't actually have to "find out" that they defeat the villain and maybe a main character dies. Lately, I've even stopped watching the final parts of a series because I just don't care. I'll stick around to find out a big revelation but "they did in fact save the day, but at a price" isn't it.

There's a lack of ambition to sticking the landing. It's about serving a product. A key ending would be if the gymnast revealed they were upside down the whole time and bungieing from the ceiling.

And Or

In case you were wondering what the "premiere Star Wars Blog of 2014" thought before making your decision, yeah, you should watch Andor. I think most of you know about it already, and hear it was good. If you haven't watched it, go do that thing. It's worth subscribing to Disney+ for a month. The rest of this post is analysis and highlights assuming you've seen it.

Oh, also a 1970's intro sequence for the show.

The Founder (hint: it's class)

  "The Founder" is possibly the movie most about America I have ever seen.

For one, it's about the creation and rise of McDonald's, which is arguably the "most American" institution this country has given the world. Michael Keaton's Ray Kroc even gives a speech saying that the golden arches should rise to join the church steeple cross and the city hall tower as the iconic spires of American towns. (It's also a movie that mostly takes place in suburbs, highways, and small towns - neither big city downtowns nor rural landscapes feature much in the movie.)

But this "biographical drama" is much more layered than that. It's full of ambiguities and nuances that hit closer to our history than cynical speeches.

The movie follows Ray Kroc, and it shows him as a desperate failure, trying to convince drive-in restaurants to embrace automation, and failing badly. We have sympathy for him (especially as we see how long he has to wait for his food when he does order.) But he's not Willie Lowman who has to do this because otherwise his family will starve - we see he has enough money for a comfortable lifestyle already. He's just too ambitious, he wants more and isn't ashamed that he'll never be satisfied with simply any finite ceiling.

We then meet the hapless McDonald's brothers, who have turned their San Bernadino restaurant into a wonder of efficiency. The idea of 15 cent burgers given to you hot and fresh 30 seconds after you ordered them is portrayed as a miracle.

... one view over the course of the film is to see this restaurant design as genius gee-whiz inventiveness, while Kroc's future mass-production franchising of the design as soul-killing mechanization. But they're both part and parcel of the same arrow - the McDonalds turned food into the "legible" nightmare of "Seeing Like a State", and Kroc brought it to its ultimate fruition. The McDonalds were already, even if only in one restaurant, making chefs into employees who do nothing but flip burgers and serving only 3 menu items because that's what 85% of people order anyway, and killing any variety because that would introduce inefficiency.

One of the all-American points that the characters bring up here, is that drive-thru dine-ins had adult employees serving teenagers who loitered around, and how distasteful that was to them. Whereas the fast-food innovation returns us to the "proper" hierarchy of teenagers serving adults.

At the other end of the movie, there's a nice bit of ethnic-cultural commentary too. One of the original brothers asks Kroc why he didn't just copy the idea and mass produce it without them. And Ray going on an elegiac tear about how "McDonalds" is such a wholesome, all-American name whereas who would want to eat at a place called "Kroc's"?

Keaton is fascinating as the uber-ambitious, class-ambivalent, charming-like-a-wolf Ray Kroc. He is early on drawn to the world of the rich because they can buy his franchises and finance his restaurant. But his pure drive for efficient food production is so incorruptible that he turns on his rich golf friends because they sell fried chicken and biscuits at their restaurants, and do not personally sweep up the trash in front of restaurants when it gets out of hand (which Kroc does.) The best scene in the movie is him angrily yelling on the golf course about a badly done burger (in his hand.) We love his demonic singular drive then.

But the point is that the idle rich can not grow American's dream. Ray then goes looking for the rising middle class, to find men-and-wives with ambition to run a restaurant to the exact specifications he demands. He goes to VFW halls (this is in the 50's, when the age there is much younger) instead of country clubs. He hires Jewish Bible salesmen because they must be really driven. He's all about breaking traditional barriers to exalt the virtues of the middle class - conformity, hard-working, cleanliness. (And at the same time he falls out of love with his socialite wife, for a woman who has as much mercenary passion for business and mass production as him.)

But the things that we love him for, become the things that we hate him for in the second half. The initial inspiration for the McDonalds design, and the iron clad contract guaranteeing no deviation from that design, hold him back as the world presents new ideas for how to make restaurants even faster, more efficient, and cheaper. But the perfectionism of the original owners denies the changes he wants.

So Ray graduates to legal and financial chicanery, to steal the business out from under the hapless original founders. It is, indeed, very American that way. And we wouldn't even fault Ray for wanting to launch his brand independent of them, except for him being so egotistical that he can't just buy them off, he has to claim every idea of theirs as his own. He steals their name, he declares himself the Founder and his first franchised copy as "restaurant number one", and drives them out of business by setting up a McD's across the street from them. Can't have a real story of America without a Big Steal.

Enter Sandman

 

Long and short of it:

If you've read the comics, skip the series as it's a bad adaptation that adds very little.

If you haven't read the comics, this is probably the best television all year because you've never seen writing like this. Watch it.

Spoilers and many thoughts below the cut:

NOPE

Just got out of Jordan Peele's NOPE and am jotting down this quick review. Before I get to any spoilers, let me say: yes it's good and you should watch it. You should especially watch it in the theaters because it is full of beautiful, eerie shots that deserve your total immersion. My one regret (in all of life) is that I did not watch it on IMAX. See an IMAX version of this if you possibly can.

Since the plot of the movie is so swaddled in mystery, basically any further discussion of it is spoilers (beyond, there's obviously UFO imagery.) So, caveat emptor for reading beyond this line:

The Stageplay to Anime Spectrum

 [Note: I feel there should already be a term for this and pre-existing writing on this spectrum. But I can't find it, so I am inventing the concepts straight from the dome. If you can point me towards where this is already talked about, I'd appreciate that.]

Reading a review of Amazon's "Outer Range" I was struck by this quote: https://twiststreet.tumblr.com/post/683478412345720832

I think the thing I like about this Outer Range show is how much you can tell the writers come from writing plays.  All the dialogue– you can just hear it in the dialogue, that there are playwrights in the mix on the show.  It’s the kind of thing you don’t even have to be told– it would not be a hard guess.  I feel like that’s the appeal of the show for me more than the more grab-y outlandish fantasy elements that probably got the show sold: I just want to hear Will Patton talk about his love of hentai, or for James Brolin to explain the origin of the universe in 30 seconds, or whatever else.  Show’s got a voice going…

Emphasis mine. Sadly I can't find the aforementioned speech of Wayne Patton describing the naked ladies he puts on his walls, but it's in Episode 2 and pretty great.

And that made me thinking about difficulty I have been having watching anime lately. 

Anime obviously has dialogue. But very frequently the dialogue is a minimalist point, used to serve contrast to the visuals. We may get a shout of reaction, or one word said over a landscape of quiet melancholy, or one sinister statement emphasizing the pure evil of the villain. Very often we get a "jumps onto the scene" line showing just how badass or determined a character is. An absurdly high percentage of anime dialogue is someone calling out another character's name, and nothing else, and how much of anime (and Hideo Kojima) "interrobang echolalia" - repeating back the last two words of what someone said but with an exclamation and confusion?

Much less often do we get beautifully written monologues or flowing dialogues of a writer showing off both their erudition and the ability of the actor to express these words. If there is a heartfelt monologue in a show like this, it's a voiceover as we watch scenes of others play out visually.

This isn't a matter of translation, since 1. not all anime is like this, 2. fluent speakers would be quick to point out the difference, and 3. American comics are like this too. Some comics have epic monologues of course, but the page design for them is always a little bit awkward... a close in of their face as half the page is filled up with text. No, for comics we much prefer rather than Ozymandias's long monologues, just his moment of saying "I did it 35 minutes ago" as he poses like a ruler over a throne room. It's pointed.

I'm not even talking about all anime, or anime adjacent products, or animated series. Arcane and Avatar the Last Airbender love showing off lengthy dialogue and the performance of the character delivering it. Think of Jinx's tea party or Zuko imitating Iroh.

It's just there is a set of visual media that is not "writerly" when it comes to dialogue. It uses minimalism, repetition, and contrast to create a "mood" for the visuals which are the real emphasis of the work. This includes most anime, many action movies, and a whole lot of avant-garde European cinema. One would even say mega-artist David Lynch falls into this brand. This takes skill and craftstmanship to do well, and many people really like it.

Look at any youtube video of "top 20 best anime scenes" and tell me what they have in common.

On the other end, you have actors who wish they were in a Shakespeare play and writers who wish they were Shakespeare, giving you scenes that are shared as paragraph long quotes or three minute youtube videos. Babylon 5, Outer Range, the OA, Deep Space Nine, and dear god Fargo or anything made by the Coen brothers.

Someone said to call this end "writerly", but there isn't a good definition of that (other than "like a writer") and I am calling as much attention to the delivery by the actor as to the actual text.

It's impossible to say either of these is "better" than the other, since there's a very wide range of quality within each. Spirited Away (anime) is hella better than Season 4 BSG (stageplay), while Knives Out (stageplay) blows out of the water something like Rise of Skywalker (anime.) There's no reason to even advocate a "happy middle" between the ends, since their audiences specifically love the style that show is best representing and want more of it.

It is possible to say what our preference is, and a large part of my recent journey has been realizing how much I prefer the stageplay end of the spectrum. 

everythingeverywhereallatonce

There is so much to say about this movie, it's hard to know where to start.

The filmmaking team of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert go simply by "Daniels" and have been making weird, intense, maximalist videos that blend down-to-earth emotions and larger than life metaphors. A great example is "Interesting Ball" which you can watch here.

... youtube sure chose an interesting screengrab for that embedding.

Anyway.

EEAAO is exactly the film you would expect if you gave these guys an eight figure budget, two and a half hours of runtime, and superstars like Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis. Like if you enjoyed the above short, just go out and see the movie now.

From here on out, there will be spoilers.

***

A tremendous amount of discourse about this movie has been the Asian representation. It has Asian stars, and the emotional story is about a mother who was an immigrant reconnecting with the daughter she disapproved of.

I find the praise very weird, because it certainly isn't the first movie with Asian representation. Yes it stars Michelle Yeoh but she is already a star, it's not like she was lacking public presence before. Why be excited that this random indy A24 movie has Asian actors and relevant themes?

The traditional answer is "because it's a big budget blockbuster that studios invested a ton of money in, a ton of advertising, and will be in every theater in America." Except it's not. It opened on like, 100 theaters, and had next to no advertising. This is not in anyway "Hollywood opening up."

Why get excited then that yet another indy film features this inclusion, when hundreds of other films have been this inclusive.

Because it's really really good.

People are excited that a phenomenally good and ground breaking work of art was also featuring a culture that usually does not get center stage. If people are discussing this twenty years from now as one of the most influential hundred films, they will have to be talking about a movie that is not all white.

***

The word is "possibility."

The concept that connects this entire work, and all their works so far, is possibility. It's even the name of their earlier short, where they follow one lover's argument through different branching paths.

Possibility is... that what you could do at any moment is much larger than you think. In the middle of a fight with your greatest enemy you could get up and kiss him... or comb his hair, or rip off your shirt and stomp on it, or climb the bookcase, or eat your pocket change, or go out the door and leave and... go home, or get hit by a car, or run back in and take a surprise attack on your enemy.

The way people jump to different universes is by using this magic. They do something "weird" that is 100% physically possible, but completely out of expectation. (And the movie has a very pointed speech on what you "can't do" versus what "you're not allowed to do.") If they are weird enough, they set themselves on a different lifepath, and that gives them the skills that path would have in this universe.

Humor is so often the apt use of unexpected possibilities, and EEAAO takes every chance for this type of humor, surprising you while also calling back to earlier elements.

But possibility also means all the closed doors in our past. We had to make so many choices about who to be, that necessitated who we would not be, as well.  The movie is about the way the shadows of those other life paths still live with us.

Possibility is also a metaphor for ADHD. When we have so many possibilities that we can not focus on a single one. Evelyn demonstrates this undiagnosed ADHD early in the movie, and the despair of choice-overload becomes a major theme at the end of the movie. (And becomes a metaphor for teenage depression.)

And lastly, possibility implies just such a big world. Can you actually hold in your mind all the possibility inherent in everything? Trying to do so will drive a tiny human brain mad.

And I don't just mean in the Everything Bagel sense that is the delightful metaphor in the film. But the film itself is... everything everywhere all at once. From the opening shot, every scene is cluttered and has too much going on. The pace never fucking stops, and in fact only accelerates constantly. The maximalism is a carefully crafted style.

(And you can tell the maximalism is intentional from the points where they contrast it, like the white curtained world where Jobu is building her bagel, or the long scene of two rocks just looking out over an austere landscape.)

***

Everything else I have to say is minor, and probably obvious to people who have seen it anyway? The movie crisply takes metaphors - like the ADHD - showcases how the metaphor works, and then moves on without rubbing it down to dust.

I did appreciate how deftly it dealt with the uber-themes of chaos versus order. A meta-narrative we see in so many stories is the forces of harmony and order staving off the collapse and destruction of the system. We can call this the conservative narrative. And the alphaverse characters early on show just this justification - since Jobu Topaki, your children don't listen to you and your institutions are crumbling and your coffee tastes wrong. To preserve the harmonious order you need to kill the Outsider. And if that means killing your own children, it's because the Outsider has "infected" your children and is now a monster that lives in them. (This perspective of course, is represented by the older generation.)

All of that is bunk, but of course, many many stories tell that tale (Thor, Transformers, almost every Disney movie) and I wasn't going to be too upset if EEAAO told this narrative as well.

But no, they utterly smash that narrative. The chaos is not "in" your daughter, it is your daughter. You can not and should not kill the chaos, you need to love and embrace the chaos. You need to become the primordial chaos. (This narrative is also fairly common to be clear - remember Captain Marvel? - but this movie did an excellent representation of it, from the moment Jobu stepped off the freight elevator and showed her fighting style.)

There's so much more to say. Every character you see is revealed to have a private story of their own going on with different universes once you pay attention to them (while paying attention to everything else on the screen.) Quotidian items are littered throughout the beginning - phone calls, circular mirrors, bagels, a karaoke machine, spinning circles - that acquire heavy meaning the longer the film goes on. You will laugh and cry at the same time.

***

Media this movie either references, or is so similar that if you loved that you should watch this: the Matrix, Wong Kar-Wai, Homestuck, Ratatouille, the OA, Turning Red, Crouching Tiger, James Acaster, Rick and Morty, Azathoth, Egirls, everything everywhere.

The Batmans

 A riddle: What is and is not a Batman movie? The Batman, apparently.

Yes. There will be spoilers.

In some ways it's very easy to say this isn't Batman - or rather, it's a dark crime thriller with various stock tropes, that someone decided to stick a label on as Batman characters. You have an autistic alt-right serial killer. Let's call him the Riddler. You have a morally gray badass woman who swims in the world of sex and drug trafficking and is looking for revenge for her mother and kidnapped friend. Let's call her Catwoman. And of course you have the emo trust fund protagonist who wears too much eyeshadow and journals to himself, looking intensely vulnerable. That's our Batman. He fails to save the city from a disaster that kills thousands, but at least he finds himself. You can imagine a lot die-hard fans would complain about in this movie.

And yet, there was so much about this epic that felt reminiscent of previous Batman outings. The strings and sort of art-deco depiction of Gotham as a full character on its own, reminded me a great deal of the Tim Burton movies (Batman '89 and Batman Returns), especially with scenes like "Bruce Wayne goes to a funeral of a high profile victim, and it gets crashed by the supervillain." The corruption stories were like the ones that drove the plot of Dark Knight, but even deeper and darker. And of course the explosive finale was very similar to the world-shaking twist in Dark Knight Rises.

Is it good? Yes. Did it really need the three hour runtime? Well none of it is wasted at least. Stuff is always happening that couldn't be easily cut without changing the whole story.

But move beyond that two thumbs up or down emptiness, what is the movie saying? 

On the most obvious level, it's a morality play about corruption and current politics. The rich, from the Mayor to Thomas Wayne, have failed to shepherd this city and even their good gestures (like a philanthropy project called Renewal) are cynically used to entrench criminal power. There are two responses to this: the atavistic rebellion of put upon white men, from the Riddler to Bruce Wayne, who just want to punch back at who hurt them and nothing more. Renewal is impossible, so instead let's let in the violent tides of change (literally) and see what's left after everything is swept aside.

(QAnon style conspiracy theorists are less dismissible when there really is an underground sex-trafficking club that all the politicians go to. Of course it's only been a recent thing that believing the government is run by a cabal of satanic pedophiles is specifically right-coded.)

And the other side is two Black women trying to fix things in a reasonable manner. Bella Real is running for mayor, and while in any true noir the candidate of hope would ALSO be in hock to the crime lords, she seems the real deal. And Selina Kyle is the only one getting vengeance for the sex-trafficked innocent woman, while the cops and Bat focus on rich and powerful (and guilty) politicians who have been murdered. 

Selina gives the most fascinating scene of the movie, where she wears contact lenses and ear pieces for Batman to investigate a sex club, so he has to do his job through the eyes and abilities of a woman. Yes, she can look at any man (to get a solid ID) but if she does so the man may look at her and she'll have to play along - instead of just aloofly leaving and using his intimidating physical presence. She can find out a lot of information he can't, but at a real cost in opportunities. It's clear this Batman had never considered the perspective he is forced to deal with.

But what's the lesson here? Don't just go along with The System. But also don't try to burn it to the ground. Wait for some hero to come along, vote the bums out, and trust everything will get better? This seems like a message from 2008 not 2022.

Away from the plot, there are two more abstract things that stuck with me:

1. Sound. This movie has a dominating score and sound editing, and those aspects are definitely part of the experience. I can't talk about sound engineering well, I can only say pay attention to this one. When I saw it I sat right next to the speaker in a Dolby cinema and so the sound overwhelmed me frequently, shaking my eardrums uncomfortably. But that unpleasantness was certainly thematic to the moments.

2. Strength. Superhero movies are often about very dexterous acrobatics, where the skilled assassin dodges all attacks and delivers one killing blow. Or if the movie is saying a hero is strong, then a bullet or other major attack bounces right off them with no effect. We are rarely shown what it means to be "strong" in the sense of your punch mattering more, but also not being an unstoppable force.

The two examples I think of for strength in cape movies are the subway station fight in Matrix 1 (with those after-image fists slamming into concrete and bellies) and Daredevil('s ability to take a punch and keep going.)

This Batman was raw and brutal and strong. He beat criminal's heads in (well after they were defenseless.) The Batmobile, in its one overly long chase scene, roars with an jet engine that is barely restrained, and pushes cars and trucks off the road. Everything in the fight and car scenes is designed to give you the feel of thrumming power under the seat, where justice will be achieved but punching for it hard enough.

A Post-Post-Modern Defense of Analysis

 Scott Alexander wrote a review of Don’t Look Up, and then tongue-in-cheek defended it with:

Look, there’s a weird game called “movie criticism”, where you take a movie as a jumping-off point to have thoughts on Society or the Human Condition. In the real world, people watch movies because they’re funny, or they have cool action sequences, or because the lead actress is really hot. But the rules of the “movie criticism” game say you have to ignore this stuff and treat them as deep commentary. I agree this game is not as fun as, say, Civilization IV: Fall From Heaven. But I have deliberately limited the amount of time I play that game for the sake of my sanity and my career, which means I need to play other games, and the “movie criticism” game seems okay.

Which is funny because Scott is funny. But also I’m one of the people clearly skewered in this explanation. (Also my wife is playing Civ VI right now, so I guess that makes a new gender dichotomy - are you the spouse who writes to a movie blog or the spouse who plays Civ VI?)

So, really, why write abstruse analyses of movies? Is it just apophenia? Can we actually defend this from first principles? Is there anything we are *actually figuring out* or are we just having entirely subjective fun here?

Especially when we talk about themes. Someone says a movie is really about recovering from grief, or the unbearable weight of responsibility, or how we change ourselves for capitalism and -- maybe it's supported by the text but who cares. You might as well collect the first letter of each page of a novel and talk about what message can be read into that random noise.

What makes art good is a question that can't really give an objective answer to. No matter what you say, someone else can say "well I don't think that's good" and what can you say then?

What makes art powerful though? What makes it popular and impact the culture and people talk about it years from now?

... I could say "what makes money?" That somewhat is a solved problem. The advertising budget for a movie + the prior reputation of its inputs (franchise, actors, maybe director) can predict box office numbers really well. And even if MCU films for adults are only 90% formulaic, the CGI cartoon movies for kids that make half a billion dollars (Secret Life of Pets, etc) *are* 100% formulaic. So we're not talking about just money.

Sure, "cultural relevance" and psychological impact are vague quantities we can argue over, but hopefully we can agree they have *some* objective existence. If we are saying Shakespeare and Jaws and Miyazaki *mattered*, I'm not wholly incapable of defending the claim.

(We could go the entirely symbolic-social cynical route and say all of them are only widely appreciated because the existing order told them to exalt them but... I have enough dignity to not believe that. There was something *good* there that had an impact in the Real we could not ignore anymore than the Soviet politburo could ignore Chernobyl.)

We make thousands of movies every year. And dozens of them have actors and writers and directors and technical artists who can claim to be among the best on Earth. Plenty of skill and quality go into these dozens. But which ones will *stick*? Which ones will the audience love and have "long legs" as the box office analysts say and will be in memes next year and in best of lists next decade and studied by schoolchildren in a century? What will be Avatar the Last Airbender versus... James Cameron's Avatar?

So there, we have a question about objective qualities that is difficult and deep and we can look into.

Here's a follow-up: why do we watch more than one movie?

If all you want is say, witty actors and flashy swordfights and swelling music and good jokes, why haven't you just found your favorite example of this, and watched it over and over?

We do this with many of life's pleasures. The best sushi we find... we keep going back to. Porn has repeat value, for sure. You probably have a song you've listened to more than a hundred times.

But there are some forms of art where our joy declines precipitously the more we've already seen it. Videogames, books, movies. Sure there are some beloved examples we visit again every so often, but nothing ever matches the excitement of the first time we saw it.

Let's just fiat that our brains need something new for a reason we can't explain. Okay, but then how new?

If I just took the plot of Die Hard, and had actors of the same rough charisma as young(er) Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman, and wrote the same style of jokes but slightly different punchlines, and shoot the action scenes again... would that satisfy our cravings? Why would it matter that critics would say it's just Die Hard again? We liked Die Hard! Why do we need new plots and new twists and new characters?

(Sometimes we don't, but more often we do? Even remakes have an entire meta-structure of how much needs to be changed for the remake to be "fresh.")

So now we have two serious questions: what makes a work "powerful", and what unites all the art we personally like even as we want it to be eternally different?

Well one theory is themes. 

What is the underlying theme of a work? How much clarity does that theme have? How much does the artistry support that theme?

The great hypothesis of reviewing is that the above three questions determine a lot both about the lasting power of a work, and whether individuals who are attached to those themes will like this work?

It might be true. It might not. There's some correlation we can make, but it's loose and it never really proves causation anyway. But, for the sake of this particular form of art, let's accept it as true. 

(What would Die Hard be without the subplot about his collapsing marriage and the cop who couldn't use a gun? 95% the same, or would its heart be ripped out?)

So first we can analyze the acknowledged great works on these metrics. What are there themes, and how much does the artistry support them?

From that we can ponder: what themes resonate with audiences (even the audience of I), and what film-making skills support them?

The next leap is to say: what art will be successful? Using the hypotheses we've come up with about which themes are resonant and what supports them, can we look at two movies by famous actresses and say "this one will be remembered, and this one forgotten?"

(You can even say "this movie that was forgotten just never got seen by people and if more people knew about it, then it would stick in memories and impact the culture." A not practically verifiable hypothesis, but still theoretically about something objective.)

And now the whole door is open. You argue about what theme a movie really has, for the purpose of determining if it will impact the culture, and as evidence you can say how much it resonated with you personally if you also care about that theme.

Don't Look Up (What This Movie Is About)

 After I published my best of 2022 list, I also saw the Matrix (bad) and Station Eleven (good) and the discourse topic du jour "Don't Look Up." I don't really have anything to say about the first two yet, but Don't Look Up is... surprisingly good.

Which you know, is unexpected for a moralistic allegory about climate change. And it's certainly been criticized on that front, for being more concerned with political allegiance than being good art.

I'm sympathetic to the above point of view. There's certainly a lot of people who will insist you like tone-deaf art as the price for being their political ally. The key to understanding this film is that it's not about climate change, and then you can realize how good it is.

DLU presents a challenge to us Barthe-ian believers of "the author is dead" in that the authors - writers, directors, actors - are all very much alive and clear on what their movie is about and saying so on Twitter. And yet, it's really not.

Matt Yglesias agrees that the political situation around climate change simply does not look like what is depicted in the film, whereas the metaphor the allegory is using is actually important and tracks with how it's discussed in the film as well.

I'm going to go further and say the movie isn't really about existential risk or any governmental policy at all, because DLU is not a movie about solutions. Climate change is really a term for a broad coalition of allies and policy changes aimed at responding to the effects of pollution.

Don't Look Up is about the importance of being sad in a particular way.

You see this most clearly in the early parts of DLU - their first meeting with the President and their first appearance on the web show "Daily Rip" (RIP, get it?) They've waited all day to talk with the President, and fumble at the start trying to impress how important this is and the President bluntly says "What's your ask?" like someone who gets a million requests a day and it all comes down to how much it's going to cost her. And the good guys' politico mumbles something about NASA plans and the conversation deteriorates from there. Same for the first talk show appearance. It's a huge breakdown for one character and a major plot turn in the movie, but there's still no discussion of "what are you asking people in power to do."

(We later get a major plan in response to the comet, but not in this scene. Most of an hour of a movie passes before there is any discussion of "what can we do.")

Now, I could believe that originally there was more discussion in the movie of what measures to take and the science of dealing with a comet, but that got cut before it's boring compared to the struggles of human emotion. But that rather reinforces the point then.

What is emphasized in all these scenes is "how people should be reacting to the threat of the end of the world." Our protagonists are breaking down and freaking out and taking this incredibly emotionally. The rest of the world is being satirized for not caring enough. Maybe they find a dumb way to deny it, or maybe they airily acknowledge the threat, but regardless they are far more interested in empty political scandal or celebrity gossip.

(Side note to mention how central "male desirability" is in this movie. Leo DiCaprio's schlub scientist is played up as a surprise viral sensation with meme-able daddy hotness. The woman President is embroiled in scandals over trying to put her nude model boyfriend on the Supreme Court. Even the celebrity scandal revolves around one singer not being able to get over her celebrity boyfriend who cheated on her.)

Now the people who do care correctly go through a variety of metaphorical scenarios for this. We know of the intended interpretation that is for the "caring" to be in the form of a political movement that can't get the rest of the country to agree with them because they are too stubborn and contrarian. (In fact one thing DLU captures is the horror of being a subject of political polarization: even when half the country supports you, they do so in unhelpful and annoying ways that make you feel just as bad. All the viral video sections about Dr. Hotty are reminiscent of the radio call in show at the start of Hancock this way.) But they are also depicted on the far end of the spectrum of universality as being like a small cult that is convinced everyone is going to die and their friends and family don't want to argue with them so they are "polite" and even pretend to go along - but of course polite pretending is at great dissonance with someone really believing they will die.

But the other end of the spectrum of universality is even more important, and it is this: we are all going to die. Whether in six months or sixty years, death is inevitable. When people first truly realize this, it often freaks them out. Death will be forever and all our striving before then is meaningless. If you are a person really thinking about this, then everything everyone else does all the time seems like ephemeral distraction just to ignore that fact. And that's what comes across in DLU: the universal experience of existential terror and wondering why the rest of the world isn't as crippled by it as you.

It's easy to say "yes, this fear of death is a metaphor for how our generation feels about climate change." But I prefer to say "an insipid piece of propaganda actually managed to be a solid metaphor for how humanity approaches death."

***

Anyway, the major theme of the work out of the way, we can see the rest of the movie is... a lot of small details and creative bits that support this theme and are funny on their own. Things I loved:

• The three star general who cons the scientists out of snack money in the White House (and how one scientist just can not get over that, even as catastrophe unravels around them.)
• The news anchor who has an apocalypse kink.
• The split path between "working with power and losing your soul" vs "rejecting power and becoming a fringe element of society."
• The chief of staff son of the President. Every line Jonah Hill has in this movie is some new twist that sums up a character beat beautifully, from wanting to bang his mom to his rambling litany against the educated elites, to being left alone after his mom has launched off on a lifeboat spaceship.
• The Garden of Eden ending and bronterocs.
• The other ending, where the main characters die. The whole movie has mocked the rest of the world for being concerned with shallow banal life instead of the world ending, but in the final moments at the comet actually hits, even our scientists are arguing over what makes good apple pie and coffee, as the shockwave rips through their walls. We know they know and are trying to focus on what is good in life instead of the oncoming death.
• The way a woman who is reacting honestly to the terror of the world suddenly becomes dismissed as a BPD girl with crazy eyes.
• "Okay, I guess it really is all over in just minutes. You wanna fuck? Or shoot each other?" "I... just want to drink and talk shit about people."
• The "Don't Look Up" movements and the "Look Both Ways" opportunistic consumerism.

The biggest element to discuss among these is BASHLiiF and the movie's depiction of an antagonistic establishment.

This is one of the places where DLU goes off the rails as a climate change analogy. In order for the proper horror narrative, our plucky scientists have to face enemies on both sides: those uneducated rabble who are too distracted to see any threats, and the overeducated establishment too confident in themselves to listen to anyone else. We get the latter in the form of BASHLiiF the Facebook analogue and its genteel effeminate CEO and his panoply of scientists who soothingly reassure "don't worry, we big brains have this all handled, and are going to make a ton of money off of this." They even have a CGI presentation for the White House, reminiscent of John Hammond's "we spared no expense" animation in Jurassic Park.

Of course the fatal flaw of the establishment extreme is that they don't listen to anyone who offers criticism or correction, and instead deluge the critics with all the unrelated things they do know that make them feel so much smarter than you. This is all very stock villain stuff and fine, but what does it relate to in our political world regarding climate change?

Yes you can of course list various corporations or the iconoclastic scientists who will say we don't have to worry about global warming. But they are much, much smaller fry than this sort of "consensus so overarching it can't imagine opposition" that this type of villain is.

You know who BASHLiiF really looks like? Theranos (topical news point, since Elizabeth Holms was just convicted yesterday.) 

Theranos is much closer to the sort of thing that was "Look we are Science! No don't look at our actual numbers, just be in awe of how many establishment figures agree with and supports us. We've set up some good looking press photo ops for you that actually mean nothing." But of course people like Holmes and Biden wholeheartedly endorse climate justice.

The mention of COVID is really fortunate. Because the movie was conceived before COVID, and yet filmed during that crisis, and it can't help but to be shaped by that crisis. And COVID really is a better match to the analogy of DLU than climate change (which Matt above notes.)

Particularly the horror of "it's coming right now!" "oh no it isn't." The movie captures the feel of February 2020 for all the people who were reading news out of China and realizing this was going to be us soon, as the rest of the news was focused on the Democratic primary or whatever else. And of course the little snark where the President announces their new plan and the stock market goes up.