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This is going to be a rant. I'm going to go on a couple of tangents, because really it's about how the backlash against Rian Johnson is an indictment of the past twenty years of trends in media and fandom. I'm going to try and keep it as spoiler-free as possible for the actual film. I mean this article kind of assumes you, the reader have seen the film anyway, but just to be safe. OK, here we go!
People keep getting mad at Rian Johnson because he's trying to make us think. He's trying to make people actually think about their biases and assumptions and the things they've been culturally conditioned to accept. This is probably the main reason why people got unreasonably mad at The Last Jedi (as if Being Performatively Mad About Star Wars isn't almost an international pastime at this point, and a full-blown industrial brand on YouTube.)
People saw the first Star Wars in 1977 and liked it because it was good, but also because it provided escapism from the collective trauma of current events, including the Vietnam War (like the later war in Iraq, an engagement we really had no business being engaged in) and it made us feel good.
But when people say that the first trilogy wasn't "political," they're missing all of the symbolism George Lucas says he put in deliberately conflating the Empire with Nazis. He says he specifically based Palpatine on Richard Nixon. Actually, he said Palpatine IS Nixon:
The last two films in the Prequel Trilogy were commentary on post 9/11 American politics and the Iraq War. "This is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause." This is how something like the Patriot Act gets support and gets passed in a country that claims to love freedom. With thunderous applause.
People loved the first Matrix movie when it was a fresh, clever new twist on sci fi and action films that made people feel smarter and maybe a little more spiritually enlightened after seeing it. They hated the sequels for actually trying to make them think.
And I think that's our problem, right there.
People also slammed The Rise Of Skywalker for seeming to recapitulate, to pull back from the ideas that Rian Johnson had proposed in The Last Jedi. But honestly, what's more spot-on to current events than a new generation of fascists radicalized by the literal ghost-clone of Richard Nixon?
Reactionaries hate it when media creators refer to or call out current events, because it generally means that a light is being shined on their own shitty behavior. I'm not slamming escapism, but what Reactionaries want is mindless, distracting eye candy; empty, soothing pabulum. Bread and circuses. Especially if it appeals to nostalgic, fascistic (idealization of an imagined past era which existed before the current progresses in civil rights and social equity, along with the exaltation those at the upper levels of the white male dominated patriarchal hierarchy as being literally superheroic and entitled to dominate everyone else on the planet) or nationalistic impulses.
Because despite whatever they constantly claim about leftists, reactionaries and fascists themselves crave safe spaces and echo chambers where they get a constant stream of reassurance and praise that they're the bestest, the smartest, the most deserving, the top of the social hierarchy - and that they are that way because of some intrinsic quality, without the need for any actual effort on their part. Narcissistic supply. Cut that off for a second - or heck, allow even a hint of anything that uplifts anyone else but them - and they scream bloody murder.
Which finally brings me to Glass Onion. Reactionaries hate Glass Onion, ya'll. And they can't wrap their minds around it. Ben Shapiro is out here throwing a tantrum over it because it "tricked" him somehow. "Glass Onion Explained" videos are all over Youtube.
Yes, it's been awhile since Whodunits have been popular. Entire generations have come up since they were in regular circulation. Maybe two of the most recent Sherlock Holmes adaptions come closest. But the 2009 and 2012 films starring Robert Downey Jr as the title character start off with us knowing who the perpetrator of the crimes are; the question is how they committed those crimes, and if Holmes and Watson can stop their Evil Master Plan in time.
And Youtuber Hbomberguy did a whole video about all the ways the BBC Sherlock series isn't the best example of the genre. But I'm looking back at the last two decades, and I'm wondering if there's been a dearth of media designed to inspire people to think.
And it's sad really, because all of the reddit threads about Game Of Thrones theories alone prove that some people are trying to think about media anyway, even if said media turns out to be as transparent as the Glass Onion itself. Or as someone on Reddit said during season 8: the real twist in Game Of Thrones is not that the showrunners did things that the audience didn't expect, but that they did so in the dumbest way possible, particularly when the showrunners "ran out of books." And this was even before the season finale.
And of course I'm going to take an opportunity to slam Jowling Kowling Rowling, because why not: when I think about what literature was the most popular and influential during the 2000s and 2010s, Harry Potter is near the top - and the fact that the first couple of books started out as whodunits, and her more recent books penned under a pseudonym derived from gay conversion therapy originator Robert Galbraith Heath are whodunits.
I'm not even going to bring up that the Harry Potter books were intended to be books for children (even though I just did) because there are other "childrens' books" that do actively promote readers' contemplation and examination of the world around them. "Read Another Book" was a whole movement even before the full extent of JKR's bigotry was revealed. The linked article dates the phrase back to 2016, but I remember it going all the way back to Livejournal.
The narrative in Harry Potter employs the symbolism of a struggle against fascism, and the symbols of feminism in her blatant self-insert character Hermione; but JKR just misappropriates that symbolism in a series that ultimately supports the status quo of the white patriarchal hierarchy - much like JKR herself. Because no matter what political merit badges she tries to pin on, the fact is that she's a bigot and she wants the whole world to not only accept her bigotry, but applaud her for it and tell her how brave and powerful she is for saying bigoted things, just like the Birdie Jay character from Glass Onion.
Better bloggers than me have pointed out the ways that JKR expresses casual racism, thinly veiled bigotry (or as one pundit put it, "the only reason why the character Seamus Finnegan wasn't named Paddy McCarbomb was probably because there were editors willing to tell her "no" back then,") antisemitism, (how much of a victim is JKR really, if pressure from herflying monkeys supporters forced Jon Stewart of all people to have to walk these observations back?) Fatophobia (she's pretty overt about her fatophobia) classism, and elitism (the characters exist in a literal magical world of privilege, excluding the "muggles" outside.)
The most recent film in the franchise contains a narrative where a not just Queer-coded but expressly Queer-within-the-narrative villain is opposed for wanting to "come out" to the world at large. And of course they tapped Mads Mikkelsen as their guy to portray this character after having to shitcan Johnny Depp for being a douchebag - because these days, when you need an actor who can project Queer Subtextual Pathos so hard that even The Straights up in the nosebleed section get it, Mads Mikkelesen is your guy. And I mean this in the best way possible.
Seriously though: how bad is it that JKR has damaged her own brand so completely that not even Mads Mikkelsen can save it?
Look, I was a fan of Harry Potter too. I read the books and saw the films. I took part in the fandom because it was ubiquitous and a fun community activity on Livejournal in the aughts. the Trifecta of Harry Potter, Lord Of The Rings, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer was to early 00s-era LJ what "SuperWhoLock" was to Tumblr in the 2010s. It was hard not to get caught up in the enthusiasm over it. And I'm not trying to slam anyone who still likes it.
But for a lot of people to become and stay fans even back then, the act of taking part in it required not looking too hard at the aspects of it that indicated that maybe Jowling Kowling Rowling had some shitty opinions that informed her narrative. To not look into the Glass Onion, so to speak, but to turn one's brain off and just go with the flow, like we were being encouraged so much to do all throughout the 00s. Until JKR put those shitty opinions on blast 24/7.
And if you're wondering what this has to do with the Glass Onion film at this point: I'm wondering if there is some way the ascendancy of her material has actually actively discouraged things like media literacy; I know that correlation =/= causation and she's probably part of the problem and not the main culprit, but doesn't it seem like media literacy in general has suffered in the past 20 since her books and films because popular? That her books primarily started out as whodunits, her post-Potter books are whodunits, and yet so many people now seem to be struggling with the tropes and concepts of a basic whodunit story?
But it's mainly that JKR herself is one of the Shitheads. In her malignancy, she's somewhere between Birdie Jay and Miles Bron himself. She's one of the people we exalted and held up as a "genius," along with Joss Whedon, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk (that comparison should be obvious, even though Glass Onion was in the can before Musk even tried to buy Twitter and finally outed himself as an idiot for the whole world to see) Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump, and any of the other countless people we've held up as cultural gods since the turn of the millennium.
And no I'm not trying to proclaim Rian Johnson a genius; just because he's trying to call attention to this phenomenon doesn't make him a "genius," it just makes him observant. The problem is, the impulse to elevate people as "geniuses" is there because we want someone else to solve the problems of the world, to the express the things we don't have time in our daily lives to put words to, to make the tech we use and the media for us to consume that makes us feel smarter and good about ourselves for having consumed it.
A lot of people seem to want media that makes them feel smart without necessarily having to make them think about aspects of our society they'd rather not think about.
There was a phrase from a decade or so ago that was making the rounds when Keeping Up With the Kardashians and Jersey Shore were making the rounds: "Stop Making Stupid People Famous." At the time, people who were saying this were being accused of elitism: and yes, there was more than likely an element of bigotry to the criticism of the cast of Jersey Shore, who are predominantly of Italian or Latin descent.
But starting around the time of the George W. Bush Administration for some reason, it became elitist all of a sudden to call dumb things dumb. You were just one of those insufferable intellectuals or "smug liberal elites" if you said that. Ann Coulter in particular whined about this during the early 00s even though she regularly accused other people she disagreed with of being "stupid" with impunity, and still does.
There's something that smacks of anti-intellectualism about the way we deify "tech bros" in particular - I think it's the idea that these guys are "geniuses" without being intellectuals. They just have this special magic called "genius," and we're just supposed to fall down and worship them for it. Except they don't and we don't because they're not "geniuses" - and in many cases they're showing that they're not clever or even smart. They're just Shitheads who have built a brand and a mythology around themselves. We have to be able to call them out on it.
And with this new movie, Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig may have just made it okay to call dumb things dumb again - and I for one couldn't be happier about this, because it's about damn time.
A thought which has occurred to me a lot over the past year or so is: we've taken a wrong turn somewhere in the last twenty years. A lot of wrong turns, actually. Maybe it was when we just numbly accepted that George W. Bush was president no matter what the Florida recount eventually would have said, and Bush was gonna Bush and that meant War in Iraq no matter what. Maybe it was just numbly accepting that Trump was President, and that Trump was going to Trump. Maybe it was back in 2008-2009, when we followed Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey into what appeared to be the future of social media. And now here we are.
If so, I wonder a lot of the time what a course correction would look like - because the way social media worked in the 2010s has very much influenced politics, and vice versa. Everything wrong with social media is very much comorbid with a lot that is wrong with the world's political situation. Facebook has been used to literally assist in genocide. And people (like Vladimir Putin) putting their thumb on the scale of social media algorithm is quite literally the reason we got Trump. And Putin's government sabotaged and eventually took over Livejournal in the late 00s because it was such an effective tool that was being used by Russian dissidents to organize against him.
So maybe the "course correction" looks like Mastodon. Maybe it looks like a return to longer-form blogging like I'm doing here. But whatever form it takes, it has to include knocking these so-called "geniuses" aka "Disruptors" off their pedestals and calling them out for what they are - Shitheads. And telling them NO as often as possible.
There was a bit of dialogue in the new Star Wars series Andor, about how people in that storyline have gotten used to using technology that the Empire has created and branded as proprietary, and have forgotten how to use technology that they could take apart and repair themselves. I think about this a lot.
I can and have gone off on rants about the fact that even just basic technical knowledge is often labeled "genius," (even to the point of Apple tech support being called "Apple Geniuses.") I want to tell people with this mindset the story of a naïve dumb crunchy goth-hippie in the late 1990s who distrusted everything technical because they were raised on a steady diet of media like 2001: A Space Odyssey, I Have no Mouth And I Must Scream, Colossus: The Forbin Project, Westworld, and Logan's Run, along with other nightmare scenarios of a computerized dystopian future. Maybe that hippie used the early internet to connect with other weird hippies, but computers themselves were a scary black box to that hippie.
Then that hippie was recruited right out of community college to work on a helpdesk for CompUSA, and had to learn how computers worked in a hurry because that Dumb Hippie bought a car they couldn't really afford, and working a minimum wage job at the cinema wasn't going to cut it anymore. Suddenly, computers and tech were no longer a black box or a scary future nightmare scenario. Suddenly, computers were a fun hobby and tech was my livelihood. Because that Dumb Hippie was me.
And if I was able to pick up basic technical proficiency that quick, I promise you it's not "genius" and you can do it, too. And maybe there's a lesson here about "learn how the things that make the world run work. Learn about the things that scare you." But I still regularly get comments like "you've been in the tech field for 20 years? You must be a genius!" No. No I'm not. And neither is Elon or Mark or Jack or Jeff or any of the other "tech gods" of the last 20-30 years or so. They're Shitheads with at least a basic knowledge of how tech works, and good PR (well, until recently, lol.)
A lot of the time these days it seems like the Computerized Dystopian Future did happen, but in the dumbest way possible.
So what are my thoughts on Glass Onion, the film? It's a blast and I loved it. Seeing Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc is like witnessing the best career reinvention ever. I loved all his Bond films - except for Skyfall, for reasons which were totally not his fault, and has more to do with my own background in tech, and the fact that Bond Girl Severine was just fridged just to demonstrate that Silva is a despicable and evil bad guy.
I know this is kind of a "thing" with a lot of of the Bond films - Bond seduces the villain's girl, the villain then retaliates by murdering their girl in some horrific fashion (dogs, sharks, etc) but this was a trend that I was hoping that the rebooted Daniel Craig Bond Franchise Universe would get away from.JUSTICE FOR SEVERINE (Yes I realize that Solange in Casino Royale and Agent Strawberry Fields in Quantum Of Solace could both be considered to have fallen victim to the "first Bond girl always dies" trope - but the fridging of Severine just feels...worse and more egregious, gratuitous and horrible, somehow? Somehow even worse than that one guy blowing up from explosive decompression in License to Kill? Whoever is doing the Bond films next, if by chance you are reading this; can we please not do this anymore? Can we specifically refrain from doing this trope?)
BUT! Casino Royale remains one of my favorite films of all time and definitely my favorite Bond film. And I'm loving the Knives-Outiverse and I'm hoping Rian and Daniel make a dozen of these. Glass Onion rocks.
Current mood:
People keep getting mad at Rian Johnson because he's trying to make us think. He's trying to make people actually think about their biases and assumptions and the things they've been culturally conditioned to accept. This is probably the main reason why people got unreasonably mad at The Last Jedi (as if Being Performatively Mad About Star Wars isn't almost an international pastime at this point, and a full-blown industrial brand on YouTube.)
People saw the first Star Wars in 1977 and liked it because it was good, but also because it provided escapism from the collective trauma of current events, including the Vietnam War (like the later war in Iraq, an engagement we really had no business being engaged in) and it made us feel good.
But when people say that the first trilogy wasn't "political," they're missing all of the symbolism George Lucas says he put in deliberately conflating the Empire with Nazis. He says he specifically based Palpatine on Richard Nixon. Actually, he said Palpatine IS Nixon:
According to J.W. Rinzler’s The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, when asked if Emperor Palpatine was a Jedi during a 1981 story conference, Lucas responded, “No, he was a politician. Richard M. Nixon was his name. He subverted the senate and finally took over and became an imperial guy and he was really evil. But he pretended to be a really nice guy.”
The last two films in the Prequel Trilogy were commentary on post 9/11 American politics and the Iraq War. "This is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause." This is how something like the Patriot Act gets support and gets passed in a country that claims to love freedom. With thunderous applause.
People loved the first Matrix movie when it was a fresh, clever new twist on sci fi and action films that made people feel smarter and maybe a little more spiritually enlightened after seeing it. They hated the sequels for actually trying to make them think.
And I think that's our problem, right there.
People also slammed The Rise Of Skywalker for seeming to recapitulate, to pull back from the ideas that Rian Johnson had proposed in The Last Jedi. But honestly, what's more spot-on to current events than a new generation of fascists radicalized by the literal ghost-clone of Richard Nixon?
Reactionaries hate it when media creators refer to or call out current events, because it generally means that a light is being shined on their own shitty behavior. I'm not slamming escapism, but what Reactionaries want is mindless, distracting eye candy; empty, soothing pabulum. Bread and circuses. Especially if it appeals to nostalgic, fascistic (idealization of an imagined past era which existed before the current progresses in civil rights and social equity, along with the exaltation those at the upper levels of the white male dominated patriarchal hierarchy as being literally superheroic and entitled to dominate everyone else on the planet) or nationalistic impulses.
Because despite whatever they constantly claim about leftists, reactionaries and fascists themselves crave safe spaces and echo chambers where they get a constant stream of reassurance and praise that they're the bestest, the smartest, the most deserving, the top of the social hierarchy - and that they are that way because of some intrinsic quality, without the need for any actual effort on their part. Narcissistic supply. Cut that off for a second - or heck, allow even a hint of anything that uplifts anyone else but them - and they scream bloody murder.
Which finally brings me to Glass Onion. Reactionaries hate Glass Onion, ya'll. And they can't wrap their minds around it. Ben Shapiro is out here throwing a tantrum over it because it "tricked" him somehow. "Glass Onion Explained" videos are all over Youtube.
Yes, it's been awhile since Whodunits have been popular. Entire generations have come up since they were in regular circulation. Maybe two of the most recent Sherlock Holmes adaptions come closest. But the 2009 and 2012 films starring Robert Downey Jr as the title character start off with us knowing who the perpetrator of the crimes are; the question is how they committed those crimes, and if Holmes and Watson can stop their Evil Master Plan in time.
And Youtuber Hbomberguy did a whole video about all the ways the BBC Sherlock series isn't the best example of the genre. But I'm looking back at the last two decades, and I'm wondering if there's been a dearth of media designed to inspire people to think.
And it's sad really, because all of the reddit threads about Game Of Thrones theories alone prove that some people are trying to think about media anyway, even if said media turns out to be as transparent as the Glass Onion itself. Or as someone on Reddit said during season 8: the real twist in Game Of Thrones is not that the showrunners did things that the audience didn't expect, but that they did so in the dumbest way possible, particularly when the showrunners "ran out of books." And this was even before the season finale.
And of course I'm going to take an opportunity to slam Jowling Kowling Rowling, because why not: when I think about what literature was the most popular and influential during the 2000s and 2010s, Harry Potter is near the top - and the fact that the first couple of books started out as whodunits, and her more recent books penned under a pseudonym derived from gay conversion therapy originator Robert Galbraith Heath are whodunits.
I'm not even going to bring up that the Harry Potter books were intended to be books for children (even though I just did) because there are other "childrens' books" that do actively promote readers' contemplation and examination of the world around them. "Read Another Book" was a whole movement even before the full extent of JKR's bigotry was revealed. The linked article dates the phrase back to 2016, but I remember it going all the way back to Livejournal.
The narrative in Harry Potter employs the symbolism of a struggle against fascism, and the symbols of feminism in her blatant self-insert character Hermione; but JKR just misappropriates that symbolism in a series that ultimately supports the status quo of the white patriarchal hierarchy - much like JKR herself. Because no matter what political merit badges she tries to pin on, the fact is that she's a bigot and she wants the whole world to not only accept her bigotry, but applaud her for it and tell her how brave and powerful she is for saying bigoted things, just like the Birdie Jay character from Glass Onion.
Better bloggers than me have pointed out the ways that JKR expresses casual racism, thinly veiled bigotry (or as one pundit put it, "the only reason why the character Seamus Finnegan wasn't named Paddy McCarbomb was probably because there were editors willing to tell her "no" back then,") antisemitism, (how much of a victim is JKR really, if pressure from her
The most recent film in the franchise contains a narrative where a not just Queer-coded but expressly Queer-within-the-narrative villain is opposed for wanting to "come out" to the world at large. And of course they tapped Mads Mikkelsen as their guy to portray this character after having to shitcan Johnny Depp for being a douchebag - because these days, when you need an actor who can project Queer Subtextual Pathos so hard that even The Straights up in the nosebleed section get it, Mads Mikkelesen is your guy. And I mean this in the best way possible.
Seriously though: how bad is it that JKR has damaged her own brand so completely that not even Mads Mikkelsen can save it?
Look, I was a fan of Harry Potter too. I read the books and saw the films. I took part in the fandom because it was ubiquitous and a fun community activity on Livejournal in the aughts. the Trifecta of Harry Potter, Lord Of The Rings, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer was to early 00s-era LJ what "SuperWhoLock" was to Tumblr in the 2010s. It was hard not to get caught up in the enthusiasm over it. And I'm not trying to slam anyone who still likes it.
But for a lot of people to become and stay fans even back then, the act of taking part in it required not looking too hard at the aspects of it that indicated that maybe Jowling Kowling Rowling had some shitty opinions that informed her narrative. To not look into the Glass Onion, so to speak, but to turn one's brain off and just go with the flow, like we were being encouraged so much to do all throughout the 00s. Until JKR put those shitty opinions on blast 24/7.
And if you're wondering what this has to do with the Glass Onion film at this point: I'm wondering if there is some way the ascendancy of her material has actually actively discouraged things like media literacy; I know that correlation =/= causation and she's probably part of the problem and not the main culprit, but doesn't it seem like media literacy in general has suffered in the past 20 since her books and films because popular? That her books primarily started out as whodunits, her post-Potter books are whodunits, and yet so many people now seem to be struggling with the tropes and concepts of a basic whodunit story?
But it's mainly that JKR herself is one of the Shitheads. In her malignancy, she's somewhere between Birdie Jay and Miles Bron himself. She's one of the people we exalted and held up as a "genius," along with Joss Whedon, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk (that comparison should be obvious, even though Glass Onion was in the can before Musk even tried to buy Twitter and finally outed himself as an idiot for the whole world to see) Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump, and any of the other countless people we've held up as cultural gods since the turn of the millennium.
And no I'm not trying to proclaim Rian Johnson a genius; just because he's trying to call attention to this phenomenon doesn't make him a "genius," it just makes him observant. The problem is, the impulse to elevate people as "geniuses" is there because we want someone else to solve the problems of the world, to the express the things we don't have time in our daily lives to put words to, to make the tech we use and the media for us to consume that makes us feel smarter and good about ourselves for having consumed it.
A lot of people seem to want media that makes them feel smart without necessarily having to make them think about aspects of our society they'd rather not think about.
There was a phrase from a decade or so ago that was making the rounds when Keeping Up With the Kardashians and Jersey Shore were making the rounds: "Stop Making Stupid People Famous." At the time, people who were saying this were being accused of elitism: and yes, there was more than likely an element of bigotry to the criticism of the cast of Jersey Shore, who are predominantly of Italian or Latin descent.
But starting around the time of the George W. Bush Administration for some reason, it became elitist all of a sudden to call dumb things dumb. You were just one of those insufferable intellectuals or "smug liberal elites" if you said that. Ann Coulter in particular whined about this during the early 00s even though she regularly accused other people she disagreed with of being "stupid" with impunity, and still does.
There's something that smacks of anti-intellectualism about the way we deify "tech bros" in particular - I think it's the idea that these guys are "geniuses" without being intellectuals. They just have this special magic called "genius," and we're just supposed to fall down and worship them for it. Except they don't and we don't because they're not "geniuses" - and in many cases they're showing that they're not clever or even smart. They're just Shitheads who have built a brand and a mythology around themselves. We have to be able to call them out on it.
And with this new movie, Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig may have just made it okay to call dumb things dumb again - and I for one couldn't be happier about this, because it's about damn time.
A thought which has occurred to me a lot over the past year or so is: we've taken a wrong turn somewhere in the last twenty years. A lot of wrong turns, actually. Maybe it was when we just numbly accepted that George W. Bush was president no matter what the Florida recount eventually would have said, and Bush was gonna Bush and that meant War in Iraq no matter what. Maybe it was just numbly accepting that Trump was President, and that Trump was going to Trump. Maybe it was back in 2008-2009, when we followed Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey into what appeared to be the future of social media. And now here we are.
If so, I wonder a lot of the time what a course correction would look like - because the way social media worked in the 2010s has very much influenced politics, and vice versa. Everything wrong with social media is very much comorbid with a lot that is wrong with the world's political situation. Facebook has been used to literally assist in genocide. And people (like Vladimir Putin) putting their thumb on the scale of social media algorithm is quite literally the reason we got Trump. And Putin's government sabotaged and eventually took over Livejournal in the late 00s because it was such an effective tool that was being used by Russian dissidents to organize against him.
So maybe the "course correction" looks like Mastodon. Maybe it looks like a return to longer-form blogging like I'm doing here. But whatever form it takes, it has to include knocking these so-called "geniuses" aka "Disruptors" off their pedestals and calling them out for what they are - Shitheads. And telling them NO as often as possible.
There was a bit of dialogue in the new Star Wars series Andor, about how people in that storyline have gotten used to using technology that the Empire has created and branded as proprietary, and have forgotten how to use technology that they could take apart and repair themselves. I think about this a lot.
I can and have gone off on rants about the fact that even just basic technical knowledge is often labeled "genius," (even to the point of Apple tech support being called "Apple Geniuses.") I want to tell people with this mindset the story of a naïve dumb crunchy goth-hippie in the late 1990s who distrusted everything technical because they were raised on a steady diet of media like 2001: A Space Odyssey, I Have no Mouth And I Must Scream, Colossus: The Forbin Project, Westworld, and Logan's Run, along with other nightmare scenarios of a computerized dystopian future. Maybe that hippie used the early internet to connect with other weird hippies, but computers themselves were a scary black box to that hippie.
Then that hippie was recruited right out of community college to work on a helpdesk for CompUSA, and had to learn how computers worked in a hurry because that Dumb Hippie bought a car they couldn't really afford, and working a minimum wage job at the cinema wasn't going to cut it anymore. Suddenly, computers and tech were no longer a black box or a scary future nightmare scenario. Suddenly, computers were a fun hobby and tech was my livelihood. Because that Dumb Hippie was me.
And if I was able to pick up basic technical proficiency that quick, I promise you it's not "genius" and you can do it, too. And maybe there's a lesson here about "learn how the things that make the world run work. Learn about the things that scare you." But I still regularly get comments like "you've been in the tech field for 20 years? You must be a genius!" No. No I'm not. And neither is Elon or Mark or Jack or Jeff or any of the other "tech gods" of the last 20-30 years or so. They're Shitheads with at least a basic knowledge of how tech works, and good PR (well, until recently, lol.)
A lot of the time these days it seems like the Computerized Dystopian Future did happen, but in the dumbest way possible.
So what are my thoughts on Glass Onion, the film? It's a blast and I loved it. Seeing Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc is like witnessing the best career reinvention ever. I loved all his Bond films - except for Skyfall, for reasons which were totally not his fault, and has more to do with my own background in tech, and the fact that Bond Girl Severine was just fridged just to demonstrate that Silva is a despicable and evil bad guy.
I know this is kind of a "thing" with a lot of of the Bond films - Bond seduces the villain's girl, the villain then retaliates by murdering their girl in some horrific fashion (dogs, sharks, etc) but this was a trend that I was hoping that the rebooted Daniel Craig Bond Franchise Universe would get away from.
BUT! Casino Royale remains one of my favorite films of all time and definitely my favorite Bond film. And I'm loving the Knives-Outiverse and I'm hoping Rian and Daniel make a dozen of these. Glass Onion rocks.
Current mood:
