nic

game? designer??

  • they/them

various credits on:
The Banished Vault
Arcsmith
John Wick Hex
Quarantine Circular
Subsurface Circular
Vienna Automobile Society
Sun Dogs

 

P&P microgames:
In the Court of the Skeleton King
The Garden
Tallships

 
Chicago



shel
@shel

I really loved Glass Onion, I did, I wanna say that up front. However, despite the incredible power performance of Janelle Monae, I think Knives Out is still the stronger movie and it's due to one big reason.

Both movies are about tearing down rich assholes and highlighting how they'll do bad things to cling to wealth. Everyone in Knives Out is clinging to Daddy's estate for money they never earned. Everyone in Glass Onion is clinging to Daddy Musk's investment portfolio for their success.

But the awful rich people in Knives Out are actually potentially relatable to a good deal of people in the audience. Every left leaning person who went to a liberal arts college with the help of their family was made vastly uncomfortable being confronted with the question "would you sell out the staff to save your inheritance? What if you'd have to drop out of college, saddled with student debt and no degree to show for it, if you didn't act in the interest of your rich asshole relatives over the interests of a marginalized woman of color. Would you really stick to your professed values?"

In Knives Out, every character is confronted with the fact that their wealth is not earned and it's actually quite precarious and easy to lose; and all these Massachusetts Democrat Liberals are positioned to ask themselves what they'd do to keep what they have, or believed they had, and they all answer it with "anything."

Furthermore, a lot of them have enough complexity to them that they do feel like human beings you could know even if you hate them. They have clear emotional wants and needs besides money in addition to wanting money. Near the end, some of them even do put personal beef with relatives over financial ties. They have emotions.

In Glass Onion, The Shitheads are in the untouchable class of rich people. They are not rich people who could humbly identify as "upper middle class" when that's not really the case; nor could they ever truly lose their status as rich celebrities. They all have the ability to leave Miles' clique and they'd lose vacations on private islands but they wouldn't lose their standard of living. Lionel could easily get a job at another company. The Manosphere guy has his own audience he has built. The Governor of New York can surely get hired by consulting firm or lobby group. And our Celebrity Influencer character clearly has suffered plenty of controversy and bounced back fine. She has the money.

None of these people are in the audience. I mean maybe they'll watch the movie but they're only going to be one individual person probably watching it alone. The vast majority of the audience can point at these people and say "I'm not like them" which is the weakness of Glass Onion. A lot of people watching Knives Out could not say that they aren't like the rich people on screen. Glass Onion doesn't make anybody uncomfortable. Everyone hates this class of rich person, even really rich people.

Anyway that's my take.


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in reply to @shel's post:

While i sort of agree, I also have to say that like. This movie is openly, loudly saying "ultra rich Geniuses are fucking idiots" which... we've all been on twitter, we know how people get about elon. There's a huge cult of personality around guys like him, and we've watched it dissolve over the past year; i honestly wonder if this movie would have been more against the grain had it come faster before we watched the cult dissolve in the face of "oh right these guys ARE idiots" as it has recently as almost all normal people stopped pretending that elon was anything except the world's biggest asshole

This is a good point. They started production of this in 2021 during the big Rise of Musk Hype where he surpassed Bezos as the richest dude. Now he's kinda pathetic seeming

this was my thought also! i like shel's point but i think they weren't meant to be relatable to us. instead we're more in benoit's shoes, learning and reminding ourselves that these people and institutions are hollow clusters of sycophantic weirdos obscuring the obvious by just ignoring and denying the simple truth: that those with money and power are vicious stupid thieves who did nothing to deserve it. the fact that some gross dumb weirdo is rich and successful does not in any way suggest a hidden truth of 5D genius behind their actions. everyone close to them pretends otherwise only out of self interest and suckup expediency!

this pattern plays out so often it's really a timeless truth that will hold up tremendously.

Yes all of these people have fallbacks but it's something they truly do not realize until the end when they can finally come to terms that their lies made Miles what he is at the beginning.

I would posit that Glass Onion is much more a joint realization of Benoit and the audience of just how stupid the ultra-rich can be and how they are sustained by each other's willingness to lie and prop each other up.

And, to the movie's disadvantage, that realization is not as relatable as the MA democrat rich family that you can find in colleges, coffee shops, charities out and about. This type of population, the ultra-rich only hang out with each other.

I think the thing i got from glass onion is more like...one, as people have already commented, the willingness to call these people out as just stupid and lucky and not actually intelligent at all, but also two: it takes these people who do seem so completely untouchable and gives me this gut feeling of like. Oh, these people can actually be torn down. Like, practically, none of us are going to show up to Elon Musk's estate and [ the thing that happens at the end of the movie ] but i think the very explicit note at the end of the movie of "the system isn't going to do anything about these people....... But You can" was very affecting to me. And i think replacing people's constant feeling of "everything is fucked and there's nothing i can do" with just a moment of "well...maybe i Can do something" kind of rules.

yeah; i think that the point of "you may not be able to get justice in the exact way that you want - but you do still have the power to fuck him over :)" is a bit poignant given how unjust the justice system gets once wealth is factored in