funnily enough the thing i thought was the most unrealistic, clearly depicting my biases, was that i didnt really believe any of the thromby family would actually treat Marta as an illegal immigrant. she is the whitest of her family, barely has any accent, and to be honest for most of the movie i didnt think she was latina at all -i thought she was spanish, as in, from Spain (im a white latina, btw). but then i realized, after a second watch, that if Marta "actually looked latina" -as in, had any sort of indigenous look to her, kind of like Yalitza Aparicio or even like Salma Hayek -then the thrombey family would treat her even more paternalistically, and their outburst at knowing the actual truth about the old mans testament would much, much crueler. also it served as a reminder that even a very white latina with supermodel looks like Ana de Armas playing Marta Cabrera (whos clearly uruguayan 🙄) can be treated as a second class citizen just by virtue of class and social status in the united states. you know, a warning to white latinos watching this movie, so they know their whiteness will only go so far as their funds go. though it could also be that Ryan johnson doesnt know how racial tensions in latinamerica work 🤷🏻♀️
this is why i didn't really touch on the racial dynamics in the film, because as a white american i am EXTREMELY unqualified to even start having that conversation.
@@letstalkaboutstuff its fine, tbh just you acknowledging the fact that ryan johnston is still pretty clearly aware of his own biases and isnt going to "fix racism" with this movie made me feel pretty happy... this movie is extremely well done and i enjoyed it but still i dont particularly like it, as much as i want to. i think my biggest problem (again, as a white latina and as middle of the way as i am between Meg and Marta, social and economically standing-wise) was the insistence of blanc that marta "had a kind heart", or a good soul or i dont remember what, and how she always made the right choices, and everything she did was good and right... it felt so, so similar to Roma, to all those movies upper class white latinos make about their nannies or about "the lower classes", portraying them as saintly, as devoted and self sacrificing... i know the narrative, a lot of film school classmates made the same story over and over. it feels paternalistic to me. and to see that story, with a "nanny" as latina as cameron diaz felt like a weird joke. i dont know, its probably a personal thing. when one gets bored of a certain narrative even when its wonderfully executed (again, Roma) it feels a bit insipid. (if you can, i recommend you watch "Lina de Lima". its a nice little dramedy/musical about a peruvian nanny who has fantasy music numbers 💃🏻 and presents life from the perspective of one of those "nannies" in a refreshing way) anyway. i think your analysis on framing with the introduction interviews with the thromby family members was superb, i love all those little details that are so subtle but work so well to tell us about the characters. the filmmaking here is pretty wonderful, no doubt 🙌🏼 looking forward to your next video!
im glad someone said it because every time i tried to verbalise it it came out wrong its also possible that care agencies working for the rich wouldn't even consider sending a darker nurse to the thrombey hosehold
I was also thinking that if Marta were darker, the Thromby family wouldn’t hire her. “Not because she has dark skin, of course. We’re not racists. But she just didn’t seem like a good fit. Not everyone can work smoothly within our family dynamic.”
The response of the Thromby family to Marta inheriting the entire estate and the response of american film critics to Parasite winning Best Picture map onto each other weirdly well. They were happy to have a foreigner in their midst and show how diverse and not racist they were until the foreigner received the top prize, and then all bets were off.
@@TooFatTooFurious Oh yes Yeah, they didn't like that at all. Or they did, as it fit nicely into their 'degeneration of Western civilisation' narrative. The far-right were never going to be cheering Hollywood Liberals winning any Oscars, so it was easy for them - only a year or so before, Trump was lamenting why movies like Gone With The Wind never got made anymore. (Stg, he'd have said Birth of a Nation if he didn't become physically agitated at black & white films)
I caught that sudden switch from dolly to handheld too and I actually gasped. It really felt like the family were showing their true faces in that moment and the camera... knew.
A fun little detail I noticed about the interview scenes is the peoples position within the donut of knives (which could symbolise Harlan). Linda, Walt and Meg are on the edge/in orbit of it meaning they are fine in Harlan's eyes. Richard and Joni are closer to the centre, with the donut kinda looming over them, as Harlan has his eyes on them and their deeds. Martha, interestingly enough looks like she is actually in the centre of the donut, the camera is at an angle so it is hard to make out, but it would work given his affection for her. Might just be pulling stuff out of my ass, but idk, this movie is awesome and full of neat details.
I already knew I appreciated this film the moment I walked out of the theater but I didn't catch all of these nuanced camera shots and framings- excellent work on this!! I was excited for part 2 and the delivery was worth the wait!!
This was a really amazing dive into this movie! I completely missed so many of these details despite watching it many times. Thanks for making this series! I somehow never really thought about the ending message before, but the idea that the movie has a theme of "trolling" people is supported by the marketing/release of the movie around Thanksgiving, a holiday that is notorious for bringing together politically disparate parts of a family together for some really uncomfortable/heated conversation, often with some making exaggerated statements to get a rise out of their family members. It was released exactly the day before Thanksgiving 2019 and I feel like the ads really played up that angle, that this was a movie kind of exaggerating and ribbing on that family holiday tension with a whodunnit backdrop. Beyond a simple marketing ploy, it would be funny to imagine roping your family into this movie ("they have Jamie Lee Curtis, you love her! also the James Bond guy!") and then having the movie actually ridicule and mock all of the opinions/affectations of your family. So I think the suggestion that it was trying to troll the audience really hits the nail on the head. All that said, it might be held back by making the Thrombeys so decadently rich and spoiled that even rich white liberals who are being targeted by the movie will not see their own reflection, or even the disdain that the movie obviously has for them. I'm guessing they would always resist any satirical portrayal like this and assume they are the good, empathetic rich people, not the supposedly-good-empathetic-but-actually-racist-and-hateful rich people in the movie. I dunno. But there's nothing to lose by exaggerating your position to make a much Cooler ending, right?
What a relief to come across actual thoughtful, educated, original discourse on the youtubes. I don't resent all these teenage shut-ins trying to imitate the discourse they see, and churning out variations on "Captain America is a cinematic masterpiece because it's the first film that made me realize films had themes and meanings and stuff." We all have to start somewhere. But it's instantly clear when someone has fresh perspectives and is willing to dive deep. But I do wish people would stop saying "What can I say about this film/book/comic/game that hasn't already been said?" Either find something new to say, or find something no one else is talking about. Here, you did the former masterfully. Hats off.
clearly, i didn't think about all the specifics at the time, and it's been a good year since i've seen this film now, but you're absolutely bang on about that dynamic change to handheld and how that completely adds to the chaos of that scene
The insight about Blanc not wanting the Thromby's to get the inheritance reminds me of the first Nancy Drew book, wherein Nancy solves a mystery to fuck over rich assholes.
I'm sure I heard someone in another yt video say that according to Fincher, that handheld shot when Marta walks out of the Thromby house was not intended - they didn't have some piece of equipment they needed, so they improvised. I don't know if we should believe that, since it's such a perfect shot! But that's apparently what Fincher said.
Don't know if you were being sarcastic or not, but the family being inconsistent with where she is from is not a plothole. They get it wrong because they never cared where she's from, and she won't correct them because she doesn't want to make them angry.
24:26 THANK YOU that's why i didn't like The Last Jedi because i couldn't see anything in this film but a lukewarm both sidey (still better than the rest of the postlogy)
Autofellatio. LOL. On point. The whole class segment is good... EEEEEEExcept that I don't agree about class interest being like a determinism. Just like large parts of the working class act against their material interest all the time, not all capitalists act in their interests, either. Often it's exactly people with a privileged background who have the time and means to fight for the oppressed class. Marx himself or Che Guevara were two examples of that.
material circumstances are deterministic to an extent. this is not to say that the rich CAN'T work against their own interests, just that they very seldom do. they are always exceptions to these kinds of broad generalizations.
"The Last Jedi is the only Star Wars movie" Until David Filoni can learn to step the fuck up and take the reins of this janky fuckin franchise, this is objectively true.
My brother noticed that Knives Out is harsher on the male characters than the female ones, which also applies to The Last Jedi (to the detriment of the characters of color, I can add); Johnson is still pretty liberal is what I'm saying
i just got recommended the first part earlier today. did the announcement of part 2 create some traffic back to the other video, and the algorithm latched on?
Good series, though imo it might be a good idea to have a google drive link to a version with both parts stitched together or something. Dividing a four-part video into two spereate uploads and then naming each of those two uploads after one of the two parts that it actually contains is confusing and non-cohesive, like having a random paragraph break in the middle of a sentence.
I think it's impossible to ever have a really leftist or communist film, because the process of making a film is an inherently capitalist endeavour, at least in the way it exists right now. Or rather, you could make whatever film you want but film distribution is an inherently capitalist endeavour. So even if a film had unabashedly leftist politics and managed to make it through the entire production process without that being diluted, the very act of widespread commercial distribution would undermine whatever message it had, because that is a capitalist process and a part of the film's cultural context. I think this is a fundamental struggle that all leftist political artists have to confront, but it is especially acute for film because they're so expensive and time-consuming to make. Do you want your art to be at its most politically pure - if so are you willing to risk not being able to share it widely? Because to share it widely it would have to engage with capitalist process and that dilutes its politics. If you don't want to undermine your own politics by sharing widely then you're shirking activism, and while of course artists don't have to activists, isn't the point and potential of political art to be activism? Even with something like youtube videos, which are much more low-budget and accessible to watch and make, one has to engage in capitalist process - the cameras, the editing software, the computers used to upload and to watch, and RUclips itself is ultimately a corporation, part of one of the biggest and most dangerously powerful corporations on the planet today. As a writer and aspiring filmmaker myself this is something that I've been thinking about a lot - is it okay to engage in processes you fundamentally disagree with in order to make art, or does that simply undermine your art and make you a hypocrite?
I think you made a mistake about the analysis of Marta's interview, in the movie it only happens in the afternoon, and the rest of the family is interviewed in the morning. This is addressed in the movie, watch it again.
i have watched the movie over a dozen times, i get that there's time difference but it's not enough to explain the flip of the lighting considering the lack of windows on the other side of the room
I really like this video, but I think singling out Walt as a racist in this movie, particularly as it relates to the shot composition, is not exactly warranted. All of them treat Marta like shit during the birthday party and Richard may try to hide it, but he's just as much a bigot. also, it is kind of a problematic trend in hollywood to cast Spanish actors to play latinx characters, considering the history of colonialism.
I think the interview scene set ups are also set to show what the person is hiding: Richard's had an affair; Meg will steal to protect her lifestyle; Walt is racist It's not that Walt is MORE racist just that he's trying to avoid revealing it
![Knives Out: The Simple Art of Trolling Everyone [CC]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/i_2kzuC3GM0/mqdefault.jpg)
![Knives Out: The Simple Art of Trolling Everyone [CC]](/img/tr.png)
![Knives Out: A Good Story Told Well (1/2) [CC]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ogSyda03yQc/mqdefault.jpg)
![The Labour of Art [CC]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/bGhn1X2FzAw/mqdefault.jpg)
funnily enough the thing i thought was the most unrealistic, clearly depicting my biases, was that i didnt really believe any of the thromby family would actually treat Marta as an illegal immigrant. she is the whitest of her family, barely has any accent, and to be honest for most of the movie i didnt think she was latina at all -i thought she was spanish, as in, from Spain (im a white latina, btw). but then i realized, after a second watch, that if Marta "actually looked latina" -as in, had any sort of indigenous look to her, kind of like Yalitza Aparicio or even like Salma Hayek -then the thrombey family would treat her even more paternalistically, and their outburst at knowing the actual truth about the old mans testament would much, much crueler.
also it served as a reminder that even a very white latina with supermodel looks like Ana de Armas playing Marta Cabrera (whos clearly uruguayan 🙄) can be treated as a second class citizen just by virtue of class and social status in the united states. you know, a warning to white latinos watching this movie, so they know their whiteness will only go so far as their funds go. though it could also be that Ryan johnson doesnt know how racial tensions in latinamerica work 🤷🏻♀️
this is why i didn't really touch on the racial dynamics in the film, because as a white american i am EXTREMELY unqualified to even start having that conversation.
@@letstalkaboutstuff its fine, tbh just you acknowledging the fact that ryan johnston is still pretty clearly aware of his own biases and isnt going to "fix racism" with this movie made me feel pretty happy... this movie is extremely well done and i enjoyed it but still i dont particularly like it, as much as i want to.
i think my biggest problem (again, as a white latina and as middle of the way as i am between Meg and Marta, social and economically standing-wise) was the insistence of blanc that marta "had a kind heart", or a good soul or i dont remember what, and how she always made the right choices, and everything she did was good and right... it felt so, so similar to Roma, to all those movies upper class white latinos make about their nannies or about "the lower classes", portraying them as saintly, as devoted and self sacrificing... i know the narrative, a lot of film school classmates made the same story over and over. it feels paternalistic to me. and to see that story, with a "nanny" as latina as cameron diaz felt like a weird joke. i dont know, its probably a personal thing. when one gets bored of a certain narrative even when its wonderfully executed (again, Roma) it feels a bit insipid.
(if you can, i recommend you watch "Lina de Lima". its a nice little dramedy/musical about a peruvian nanny who has fantasy music numbers 💃🏻 and presents life from the perspective of one of those "nannies" in a refreshing way)
anyway. i think your analysis on framing with the introduction interviews with the thromby family members was superb, i love all those little details that are so subtle but work so well to tell us about the characters. the filmmaking here is pretty wonderful, no doubt 🙌🏼 looking forward to your next video!
im glad someone said it because every time i tried to verbalise it it came out wrong
its also possible that care agencies working for the rich wouldn't even consider sending a darker nurse to the thrombey hosehold
I was also thinking that if Marta were darker, the Thromby family wouldn’t hire her.
“Not because she has dark skin, of course. We’re not racists. But she just didn’t seem like a good fit. Not everyone can work smoothly within our family dynamic.”
Ana de Armas is Cuban
The response of the Thromby family to Marta inheriting the entire estate and the response of american film critics to Parasite winning Best Picture map onto each other weirdly well. They were happy to have a foreigner in their midst and show how diverse and not racist they were until the foreigner received the top prize, and then all bets were off.
wait, I am out of loop here. Were there that many American film critics unhappy that Parasite won best picture?
@@TooFatTooFurious Yeah, there was some controversy
@@TooFatTooFurious Oh yes
Yeah, they didn't like that at all. Or they did, as it fit nicely into their 'degeneration of Western civilisation' narrative. The far-right were never going to be cheering Hollywood Liberals winning any Oscars, so it was easy for them - only a year or so before, Trump was lamenting why movies like Gone With The Wind never got made anymore. (Stg, he'd have said Birth of a Nation if he didn't become physically agitated at black & white films)
I caught that sudden switch from dolly to handheld too and I actually gasped. It really felt like the family were showing their true faces in that moment and the camera... knew.
*laying down on the ground, an endless loop of Knives Out analysis videos showering upon me like the rose petals in American Beauty*
_Effervescent_
Teensy point: Don Johnson bragged about seeing Hamilton at the Public Theater, which is where it premiered before becoming a hit on Broadway
A fun little detail I noticed about the interview scenes is the peoples position within the donut of knives (which could symbolise Harlan). Linda, Walt and Meg are on the edge/in orbit of it meaning they are fine in Harlan's eyes. Richard and Joni are closer to the centre, with the donut kinda looming over them, as Harlan has his eyes on them and their deeds. Martha, interestingly enough looks like she is actually in the centre of the donut, the camera is at an angle so it is hard to make out, but it would work given his affection for her. Might just be pulling stuff out of my ass, but idk, this movie is awesome and full of neat details.
she mentioned that in part 1 of this video?
Nice touch using curio’s music while reading their statement
I already knew I appreciated this film the moment I walked out of the theater but I didn't catch all of these nuanced camera shots and framings- excellent work on this!! I was excited for part 2 and the delivery was worth the wait!!
I feel like i know you from somewhere .....
@@glazelazer8857 👀
This was a really amazing dive into this movie! I completely missed so many of these details despite watching it many times. Thanks for making this series!
I somehow never really thought about the ending message before, but the idea that the movie has a theme of "trolling" people is supported by the marketing/release of the movie around Thanksgiving, a holiday that is notorious for bringing together politically disparate parts of a family together for some really uncomfortable/heated conversation, often with some making exaggerated statements to get a rise out of their family members. It was released exactly the day before Thanksgiving 2019 and I feel like the ads really played up that angle, that this was a movie kind of exaggerating and ribbing on that family holiday tension with a whodunnit backdrop. Beyond a simple marketing ploy, it would be funny to imagine roping your family into this movie ("they have Jamie Lee Curtis, you love her! also the James Bond guy!") and then having the movie actually ridicule and mock all of the opinions/affectations of your family. So I think the suggestion that it was trying to troll the audience really hits the nail on the head.
All that said, it might be held back by making the Thrombeys so decadently rich and spoiled that even rich white liberals who are being targeted by the movie will not see their own reflection, or even the disdain that the movie obviously has for them. I'm guessing they would always resist any satirical portrayal like this and assume they are the good, empathetic rich people, not the supposedly-good-empathetic-but-actually-racist-and-hateful rich people in the movie. I dunno. But there's nothing to lose by exaggerating your position to make a much Cooler ending, right?
Great video! I totally didn’t notice the way the interviews camera angles gave that much character information!
This analysis is so detailed and all ... I LOVE IT
Rian Johnson is a great director, but a really inspired troll.
What a relief to come across actual thoughtful, educated, original discourse on the youtubes.
I don't resent all these teenage shut-ins trying to imitate the discourse they see, and churning out variations on "Captain America is a cinematic masterpiece because it's the first film that made me realize films had themes and meanings and stuff." We all have to start somewhere. But it's instantly clear when someone has fresh perspectives and is willing to dive deep. But I do wish people would stop saying "What can I say about this film/book/comic/game that hasn't already been said?" Either find something new to say, or find something no one else is talking about. Here, you did the former masterfully. Hats off.
If people never said things that had already been said, everything would be said exactly once, and nobody would remember any of it.
@@Pablo360able Hah! Very true. Some people might, but definitely not me.
clearly, i didn't think about all the specifics at the time, and it's been a good year since i've seen this film now, but you're absolutely bang on about that dynamic change to handheld and how that completely adds to the chaos of that scene
Excellent follow up. The commentary was also excellent.
This is my new favorite channel, thank you :)
Amazing Conclusion Sarah
Excellent job! Loved the video Sarah!
This was a lovely video about a lovely film. Thank you for making it.
god i love this movie and now i just love it more
This is probably my favorite video about the politics of Knives Out 🤩
The insight about Blanc not wanting the Thromby's to get the inheritance reminds me of the first Nancy Drew book, wherein Nancy solves a mystery to fuck over rich assholes.
Very strong work comrade.
OMG I love Shrimptin. Nice inclusion
YES
Great video! Loved this series!
this video is so great
So good
these videos just remind me of how much i fucking love this film :))) great video :)
I'm sure I heard someone in another yt video say that according to Fincher, that handheld shot when Marta walks out of the Thromby house was not intended - they didn't have some piece of equipment they needed, so they improvised. I don't know if we should believe that, since it's such a perfect shot! But that's apparently what Fincher said.
listen to the commentary tracks, it was intentional.
Sweet video
Don't know if you were being sarcastic or not, but the family being inconsistent with where she is from is not a plothole. They get it wrong because they never cared where she's from, and she won't correct them because she doesn't want to make them angry.
24:26 THANK YOU that's why i didn't like The Last Jedi because i couldn't see anything in this film but a lukewarm both sidey (still better than the rest of the postlogy)
Autofellatio. LOL. On point.
The whole class segment is good... EEEEEEExcept that I don't agree about class interest being like a determinism.
Just like large parts of the working class act against their material interest all the time, not all capitalists act in their interests, either.
Often it's exactly people with a privileged background who have the time and means to fight for the oppressed class. Marx himself or Che Guevara were two examples of that.
material circumstances are deterministic to an extent. this is not to say that the rich CAN'T work against their own interests, just that they very seldom do. they are always exceptions to these kinds of broad generalizations.
@@letstalkaboutstuff
Agreed. Human behavior is usually not set in stone, so of course there'll always be deviations from a statistical tendency.
you could say a good director can make you see how the world could be....
♫ In spite of the way that it is~ ♫
he had a posca pen
"The Last Jedi is the only Star Wars movie"
Until David Filoni can learn to step the fuck up and take the reins of this janky fuckin franchise, this is objectively true.
My brother noticed that Knives Out is harsher on the male characters than the female ones, which also applies to The Last Jedi (to the detriment of the characters of color, I can add); Johnson is still pretty liberal is what I'm saying
i just got recommended the first part earlier today. did the announcement of part 2 create some traffic back to the other video, and the algorithm latched on?
Good series, though imo it might be a good idea to have a google drive link to a version with both parts stitched together or something. Dividing a four-part video into two spereate uploads and then naming each of those two uploads after one of the two parts that
it actually contains is confusing and non-cohesive, like having a random paragraph break in the middle of a sentence.
yeah i have plans
This was really good but now I’m curious... what was that weird Tintin comic thing??
SHRIMPTIN twitter.com/shrimptins
✊✊✊
Isn't Enc they/them?
i just scanned through the parts where i mention them and i didn't misgender them at any point as far as i can tell?
I think it's impossible to ever have a really leftist or communist film, because the process of making a film is an inherently capitalist endeavour, at least in the way it exists right now. Or rather, you could make whatever film you want but film distribution is an inherently capitalist endeavour. So even if a film had unabashedly leftist politics and managed to make it through the entire production process without that being diluted, the very act of widespread commercial distribution would undermine whatever message it had, because that is a capitalist process and a part of the film's cultural context.
I think this is a fundamental struggle that all leftist political artists have to confront, but it is especially acute for film because they're so expensive and time-consuming to make. Do you want your art to be at its most politically pure - if so are you willing to risk not being able to share it widely? Because to share it widely it would have to engage with capitalist process and that dilutes its politics. If you don't want to undermine your own politics by sharing widely then you're shirking activism, and while of course artists don't have to activists, isn't the point and potential of political art to be activism? Even with something like youtube videos, which are much more low-budget and accessible to watch and make, one has to engage in capitalist process - the cameras, the editing software, the computers used to upload and to watch, and RUclips itself is ultimately a corporation, part of one of the biggest and most dangerously powerful corporations on the planet today. As a writer and aspiring filmmaker myself this is something that I've been thinking about a lot - is it okay to engage in processes you fundamentally disagree with in order to make art, or does that simply undermine your art and make you a hypocrite?
u r so smart :)
p.s. communism forever!!!!
But homestuck already trolls everyone
The pretentiousness in the comments, omfg...
I think you made a mistake about the analysis of Marta's interview, in the movie it only happens in the afternoon, and the rest of the family is interviewed in the morning. This is addressed in the movie, watch it again.
i have watched the movie over a dozen times, i get that there's time difference but it's not enough to explain the flip of the lighting considering the lack of windows on the other side of the room
I really like this video, but I think singling out Walt as a racist in this movie, particularly as it relates to the shot composition, is not exactly warranted. All of them treat Marta like shit during the birthday party and Richard may try to hide it, but he's just as much a bigot. also, it is kind of a problematic trend in hollywood to cast Spanish actors to play latinx characters, considering the history of colonialism.
I think the interview scene set ups are also set to show what the person is hiding: Richard's had an affair; Meg will steal to protect her lifestyle; Walt is racist
It's not that Walt is MORE racist just that he's trying to avoid revealing it
@@carysbebard3690 that's a good take. But in that case, what do the knives respresent?
For a marxist film that was too overtly propagandistic for awards see Sorry To Bother You :)