subversive Daniel Craig friends with subversive Rian Johnson

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straightup
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subversive Daniel Craig friends with subversive Rian Johnson

Post by straightup »

Like peas in a pod. Craig is creatively involved in the films he’s in (which is most evident with QOS and NTTD) and obviously loves being in Johnson’s Knives Out. The main character there, Detective Blanc, played by Craig, is an obvious surrogate for Johnson’s self-image. Blanc’s story parallels Johnson’s involvement in The Last Jedi, the notoriously subversive Star Wars installment. Blanc/Johnson promises to be unobtrusive and simply do his job in the background, but can’t help but effortlessly set things right, wow everyone with his insight, and rile up the hypocrites he gleefully exposes.

Johnson has a disturbing tendency to glorify suicide. A major character, always an older white male, kills himself in all his movies except his debut Brick, although that movie ends with the protagonist getting pussy-guilted, so it’s not inconceivable he goes kills himself after the credits roll. It’s a dark film.

In The Brothers Bloom, a con artist takes a bullet for his younger brother.
In Looper, the main character kills himself to prevent his future self from hunting down a supervillain when the supervillain is a kid, in the hope that the supervillain has a good childhood and doesn’t actually become a supervillain. By the way, there’s an entire class of people in this movie whose profession mandates that they kill themselves at some point.
In The Last Jedi, watered-down master jedi Luke Skywalker kills himself to set a good example for kids in the rebellion, or something.
In Knives Out, the patriarch and breadwinner of a large family cuts his own throat to deflect suspicion from the poor maid who apparently gave him a lethal dose of drugs by accident.
In No Time To Die, the main character’s inability to ever touch his wife and child again is implied to push him into choosing death, as otherwise the plot beat of him getting infected with those particular nanobots would be pointless.

The necessity of suicide is always iffy at best, even in-universe. Can’t wait to find out what older white man heroically kills himself in Knives Out 2! I’d bet it’s Ethan Hawke’s character. Or is Johnson going to subvert my expectations?

No wonder Craig and Johnson seem get along, given their modus operandi of infiltrating established franchises, dismantling them from within, taking potshots at the past, making mopes of cherished heroes. Real spy work, that is. They’re both cuckoos.
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Re: subversive Daniel Craig friends with subversive Rian Johnson

Post by Kristatos »

Welcome to the forum, straightup. Interesting theory, though I would make a distinction between the the trope of the heroic sacrifice, and someone simply killing themselves because they are depressed. Coincidentally, I recently read a memoir by Pat Mills, writer of the Celtic barbarian fantasy strip Slaine, where he says that he is allergic to the "heroic sacrifice" ending, preferring his heroes to win against a seemingly all-powerful adversary.
"He's the one that doesn't smile" - Queen Elizabeth II on Daniel Craig
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