You guys know this is a movie, right?
I mean, I’m guessing that if Darren_Garrison thinks that the act in question “should be literally a capital crime in the real world”, then he also thinks it should have the same consequences in the universe of the movie.
I do not personally happen to share that viewpoint, but I don’t have a problem in general with people being mad at in-movie universes for not meeting moral expectations that the real-world universe also fails to meet.
I’d trade the Mona Lisa for taking a potentially apocalyptic fuel off the market.
I’ve tried twice to get into this show and just can’t.
I find that viewpoint both ridiculous and somewhat satirized by the movie. It may be that you’re not so much the movie’s target audience as its target, which cannot at all be a fun feeling.
I remember a thread on here a while back on the topic of destroying art in which Bricker and a couple of other of the boards more right wing alumni argued that the right to destroy was inherit in the ownership of art (or anything) and as such in the hypothetical where a billionaire bought Michaelangelo’s David and ground it to fine dust they were completely within their rights to do so and anyone who objected was a pathetically envious freedom hating crypto-communist (I paraphrase only a little unfairly).
I argued the other side. I said that in fact the rest of us had a real and important interest in the continued existence of great art, an interest that couldn’t be over-ridden just because someone held legal title. That when David is ground to powder, or the Mona Lisa is burnt, I have lost something important that can never be replaced and - because this was Bricker I was talking to - that any legal system that does not recognise my interest in great art being preserved is a legal system that has failed to serve the people.
So I see where @Darren_Garrison is coming from. Destroying the Mona Lisa is a terrible, shocking, catastrophic act, and one that has real costs not just to Miles but to all of us.
That’s why the ending works! If she’d just totalled Miles’ car or destroyed his big glass house or taken away some mere possession of his she would have done nothing. He’s a billionnaire! He can replace stuff. But he can’t get another Mona Lisa, and being the guy who caused the destruction of the Mona Lisa is devastating to him precisely because it’s such a honking enormous deal to destroy the Mona Lisa.
At the beginning of the movie, Miles talks (idiotically) about the “infraction” point - everybody is happy for you to break stuff that doesn’t work, but the true disruptors are those who will destroy the things that people don’t want destroyed. Miles thinks he and his buddies are true disruptors but of course they’re not - as they all demonstrate they love the system that exists and will perjure themselves (or murder in Miles’ case) to preserve both it and their place in it.
Helen is the true disruptor. No-one wants to destroy the Mona Lisa. The default position re. destroying the Mona Lisa is that it’s a very very bad idea and you shouldn’t do it. But the system (and the cronies’ attachment to it) won’t let her bring Miles to trial and face actual justice (the point where, as Benoit says, his jurisdiction ends). So she passes the “infraction” point. She tears Miles’ world apart by doing something unthinkable. Something genuinely terrible of global magnitude that can never be undone. That’s the point.
In another of those ways that film can sometimes be weirdly prescient without intending to be, some folks were burning artwork in 2022 as part of the NFT craze.
I never heard any followup on whether this guy was charged by Mexican authorities.
Great analysis.
And the destruction wasn’t just retaliatory, but precautionary: it was ensuring not just that Miles would face consequences but that it would be impossible to hush up the dangers of this fuel source and its association with the catastrophe.
Man, you are killing it in this thread! These are some dead-on takes on the film!
Also, the French government will probably go all Rainbow Warrior on his ass for losing their national treasure.
Almost no-one. I, personally think it’s a waste of wood and paint. I am obviously a minority opinion.
And just this weekend, rioters in Brazil ransacked a museum and irreparably damaged a number of works.
Bron being super into the Mona Lisa is, I think, also a dig at Bron’s character. Pretty sure that’s his favorite painting because it’s one of the few he can name.
I don’t hate the painting, but I did have a feeling at the end of the movie of, “Lucky it was only the Mona Lisa.”
Think of the loss to world if it had been the original “Dogs Playing Poker!”
Oh, the humanity!
And the Hindenburg didn’t explode like the Glass Onion did.
Indeed! She needed to act on that scale - she was put in a position between doing something monstrously iconoclastic or eating Miles’ shit.
Only through acts of great symbolic violence can we seize power back from the frauds and bootlickers who have purloined it. That’s not me saying it, that’s the guy who made Brick, so…
Why did Duke smile when he received the notification of Andi’s death? (I know what Blanc says.)
Shouldn’t he have been confused and troubled?
Well, that’s the only one I arrived at independently, but thank you.
I’m trying to work out: if I heard that someone had destroyed a piece of art to successfully bring a murderer to justice, would there be some specific pieces of art which would make me think it was a bad choice? “It’s sad, but people get away with murder all the time. Those waterlilies aren’t about to repaint themselves.” Do I think there should be art I hold that high? I honestly don’t know.
I don’t think we actually see him getting the news and reacting. The smile is the fake act he’s putting on to blackmail Miles.
IIRC, her being dead meant Miles could put Duke on his news show (blackmail?).
His “this changes everything” was a change from ‘you can’t be on my show’ to ‘you have to be on my show so you don’t tell anyone I killed her’.