Has Rian Johnson Executed the Ultimate "Subvert The Audience's Expectations" Move By Filming a Whodunnit Mystery That Has No Whodunnit and Isn't a Mystery?

Forgive me for dwelling on this, but I can't not post this.

I noted yesterday that Roundhead Rian Johnson's new film is a "middle finger" to Middle America and Trump voters, and it's "not even subtle" about it -- according to SJW "movie reviewers" raving about it.

RedState collected some of the most zealous NPC "reviews:"

"KNIVES OUT is a fun 'f*** you' to rich white Trump voters, wrapped in a crafty Agatha Christie package. VERY pro-immigration. And none of this is subtle. Enjoy it in a crowd," said film critic Tomris Laffly.

"Congrats to [Rian Johnson] for writing the most telenovela of films. KNIVES OUT is a total blast and a total takedown of privilege, gringos, and perceptions through a genre that’s very missed," said film critic Yolanda Machado.

"KNIVES OUT is a ton of fun: a slippery, stylised murder mystery, littered with zingers, that also operates as a satire of Trump's America. I also enjoyed the Baby Driver reference," said Nick de Semlyen of Empire Magazine.

"KNIVES OUT is a total delight from start to finish. It's also a scathing indictment of American greed in the Trump era. I’ll have more on that when the movie opens in November," said Matt Goldberg of Collider.

"One of many things I love about Knives Out -- it takes DIRECT aim at the MAGA crowd," said Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com.

But is it actually a movie? Or is it a Twitter Snapback in the form of a movie?

You need to know Roundhead Rian's Twitter history to get this. The Last Jedi pissed off half (or more) of the Star Wars fanbase by being more an SJW identity politics manifesto than a Star Wars film.

Roundhead Rian took to Twitter to attack his critics. I don't know if Rian Johnson himself called his critics the usual litany of NPC put-downs (Nazi, man-baby, incel), but many of his SJW allies did.

He's been in a long Twitter Beef with critics since.

This writer at Uproxx, who of course loved the "movie," interviews Roundhead Rian. They seem to agree that the movie is motivated from spite to win the old Twitter Beefs.

I felt there were scenes in this movie that had some spite behind them. Like from you about the internet. There's an edge.

Yeah. Although I wouldn't frame it as like for me personally.

You have a literal Nazi in the movie who learned to be one from the internet.

That's not really unique to anything I went through. That's kind of anyone who's on the internet these days. And, for me, it was that and all of the stuff in the movie that has a little more bite to it in that way.

Great, a movie about the SJW Unicorn that proves all of their fantasies to be true, a Nazi radicalized by Steven Crowder videos.

Now let's get to the whodunnit-without-any-whodunnit part.

Below, the interviewer, who has seen the movie, tries to avoid spoiling the movie, but notes that something happens early that tells the viewer to not bother trying to figure out who the killer is.

Doesn't that suggest that the movie just shows you the killer? Or shows you the killer concealing crucial evidence? Maybe making a joke about that as the killer does all sorts of suspicious things the audience sees but the dumb detective doesn't?

Which would be fine -- I guess -- but then, I don't get all the claims that this is an ingenious movie. Do they just mean the Trump jokes and Twitter Jerkstore Comebacks are ingenious?

So, this is a surprisingly tough movie to talk about because so many things I want to ask might tip off the ending?

I know. I'll just stare with a blank face.

So I'll word this carefully, but there’' something you do pretty early in the movie that stops the audience from trying to figure out who the murderer is, which also allows the audience to relax and have fun.

So, I love whodunits. But I also do kind of fundamentally agree with Hitchcock that with whodunits, it's just one big buildup to a surprise. That's the anti-Hitchcock movie. And he always thought that just doesn't work great for a film. So, for me, you take kind of a Hitchcock approach to the meat of the movie and still have all the pleasures there of a traditional whodunit. And so the various machinations in the movie were all attempts to kind of do that.

So he's saying he agrees with Hitchhock that just building a movie around a mystery with one big answer doesn't work, and he found a "technique" to avoid that.

Well, Columbo did too. But that never had the structure or tropes of a whodunnit. Columbo had an intuition about the killer from very early on in his investigation, and all of his questions were directed around proving his suspicion.

I think if you showed who the killer was in the show but then had Columbo pointlessly question a bunch of people we know for a fact aren't the killer, it would have been boring and listless. Instead, Columbo focuses almost exclusively on the actual killer from the start.

Well, this particular technique worked. I stopped trying to figure it out.

Yeah, that's the thing. God, it'll be so much more fun to talk about this when we can actually talk about the movie.

Maybe he's figured out some completely new "technique" to stop the audience from speculalting about who the killer is that isn't just having the killer, say, hide critical evidence from other people (so that the audience sees the suspicious action but no one else does).

But all I can think of is some method of just showing "This guy is the killer."

Anyway, I thought this was interesting because Roundhead Rian Johnson is now infamous for elevating "subverting the audience's expectations" above actually satisfying audience expectations. "Subverting expectations" is now a stock phrase on the internet, and it's not meant in a good way -- it's meant to mock Johnson and The Last Jedi.

Did he make a movie intended to be the Ultimate Twitter Comeback, by making a movie sold as whodunnit which "subverts expectations" by not containing any actual whodunnit material?

I can see this idiot doing exactly that.

Update: Christopher R. Taylor suggests a halfway clever idea:

40 My guess is there's no actual killer and the movie is just spent using different ways to bash Rian's perceived enemies.

That first part would actually be halfway clever, if it's revealed that what looks like natural causes really is natural causes, but everyone thinks it's a murder, so everyone starts plotting against each other and backstabbing each other due to suspicions and worry each will be blamed.

Might be kind of funny to see a "One day ago..." flashback where the evidence suggesting a murder turns out to be a convoluted, improbable Rube-Goldberg-like chain of events. Like the old joke about someone committing suicide by stabbing himself in the back 40 times. Well, that couldn't happen, but what if there were some comedic sequence showing how it was possible for someone to accidentally plunge a knife into his own back?

I mean, it could be funny. Not super-funny. But like "oh that's funny" funny.

posted by Ace of Spades at 03:20 PM

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