From The Last Jedi to Glass Onion, Rian Johnson keeps murdering the past

“Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.” —Kylo Ren, The Last Jedi

Benoit blanc murder mystery – Early in the investigation Glass Onion: The Knives Out StoryMiles Bron (Edward Norton), tech-billionaire archetype, shows off his most valuable acquisition. In the center of the atrium of Miles Bron’s island compound is the original, which is surrounded with other museum artifacts and priceless art. Mona Lisa. Miles added a secret switch to his protective screen that allows him open it. The painting was on loan from France. The first time he shows off this feature to his guests, it’s pretty clear that the Mona LisaThe room is doomed. As they wobble on the pedestals that are scattered around the room, each piece of art seems doomed.

“It’s Chekhov’s glass trinkets, basically,” writer-director Rian Johnson told Marc Maron on the WTFPodcast about the set-up

[Ed. note: Spoilers follow for pretty much every Rian Johnson film, including end spoilers for Glass Onion.]

Image courtesy of Netflix

At the end, you will see the Mona Lisa has been so thoroughly torched that there isn’t even a chance for a Cecilia Giménez Ecce HomoThe restoration level. The foreshadowing over the painting’s fate doesn’t just come from the security-override button, though, or even the uneasiness brought on by the careless arrangement of the other delicate works of art in the room. It was obvious that the painting was in imminent danger due to Rian Johnson’s movie. In Rian Johnson movies, it is always a target.

In Johnson’s movies, the past often acts as an obstacle for the protagonists, and the only way for them to achieve their goals is to dismantle or destroy it in some way. In Glass OnionIt is the Mona LisaAs a symbol of that past, he stands in. Miles wants to use the painting as a backdrop as he unveils a new type of volatile fuel, hitching his own legacy to another man’s immortal masterpiece. Instead, a betrayed figure from his own past (Janelle Monáe) exposes the Mona LisaThis fuel ignited a flame that would eventually burn Miles to the ground, making him a murderer and fraud. The seeds of his destruction are in the history he’s trying to cover up, but the means to that destruction involves literally destroying a piece of history — burning it to cinders, the same way Miles burns the evidence of his past lies and theft.

Johnson’s 2012 science fiction film Looper carries out the “burn the past” theme through a time-travel plot. The film depicts various victims of crime being sent back in time to their past and then killed by Joe Gordon-Levitt, the main character. The killers are aware that eventually, they’ll age out of the game, and they too will be sent back in time and executed, to tie up loose ends. When that time finally comes for Joe, and he’s ordered to kill his future self (Bruce Willis), Past Joe hesitates. Future Joe escapes, intent on revising the future by killing the Rainmaker, a mass-murdering future crime lord who he blames for his wife’s death.

You can see the plot twist in this story straight from The Terminator, Young Joe realizes that Future Joe’s interference with the past is the reason the Rainmaker exists to begin with. Joe ultimately sees that he’s the obstacle in the past that’s preventing progress. He isn’t going to change — if he was capable of that, then Future Joe wouldn’t still be running around on his murderous path. Joe understands he’s stuck on a track he can’t escape, and during his window of clarity, he, too, solves the problem by destroying the past. He turns his weapon on himself and erases Future Joe from existence entirely — a solution only available in a time-travel movie.

Image: TriStar Pictures

Johnson’s next feature film, Star Wars: The Last JediAgain, he is confronted with an inexorable cycle of violence and death rooted in the past but set within a new world. Luke Skywalker, the original Star Wars character, is now living in exile and has second thoughts about Jedi Order’s necessity or worthiness, considering their systemic failings as well as their role in increasing intergalactic conflicts. His own attempt at rebuilding the Jedi had been such a disaster that it turned his own nephew, Ben Solo (Adam Driver), to the Dark Side, putting him on an accelerated path to becoming the galaxy’s newest dictator. Luke and Ben — who erased his own past by taking the name Kylo Ren — both spend the majority of the film trying to convince newly fledged potential Jedi Rey (Daisy Ridley) that the Jedi’s time is over.

Rey resists them, finding it obvious that she can learn from the past while forging her own future, free of Luke’s cynicism and Kylo’s bitterness. Johnson likely recognized that Rey grew up as a scavenger, someone who wouldn’t make the mistake of discarding old things without first harvesting anything from them that was still useful. So he used that aspect of Rey’s character to point the franchise in a fresh direction while still maintaining its more essential elements.

“[The Last Jedi’s] heart is with Rey,” Johnson said after a Directors Guild of America screening of the film in 2017, “which is not any of the extremes of throwing away the past or trashing the past, and also not the extreme of holding the past so dear that you become imprisoned by it, but the balance of shedding what you don’t need, and building on what you do.”

Image: Lucasfilm/Disney

Johnson introduced themes into Star Wars Universe as a comment on Star Wars itself. Luke was like Star Wars. He had been made a prisoner by its past. He found himself repeating the same mistakes his predecessors did, which left him in the same situation they wound up in — exiled and helpless. He’s about to double down on his failure by destroying the sacred Jedi texts when Force Ghost Yoda steps in and burns down the ancient tree that houses the books.

It looks at first like another Rian Johnson moment in which the past is thrown into flames. But it’s all for show: Yoda knows Rey has already left with the books, but he uses their supposed destruction to encourage Luke to stop dwelling on the past, and to do something useful with it instead.

“The greatest teacher, failure is,” he tells his old student. “Luke, we are what we grow beyond.”

Luke is able to focus his attention on the past and confront them, rather than running away from them. He finally comes out of hiding to confront Kylo Ren (and the First Order) publicly and according to his terms. He doesn’t fight them or engage with them physically, but he does show he can take anything they throw at him without being affected. His actions allow the Resistance time to flee to fight another day. This ripple effect inspires other galaxy citizens to take on their oppressors and create a brighter future.

And then he dies, because in Johnson’s view, it was necessary to put that part of Star Wars’ past aside as well, if it was going to have a future.

Michael Arndt, screenwriter, recalled his early drafts days of working as a copy editor. The Force Awakens, “It just felt like every time Luke came in and entered the movie, he just took it over. […] Suddenly you didn’t care about your main character anymore, because, Oh fuck, Luke Skywalker’s here. I want to see what he’s going to do.”

It was necessary for the franchise not to repeat the same story with the same characters in order to grow. Rian Johnson concluded that the only way to make Star Wars series progress was to cut off its closest ties to the past. Let go of Luke. Johnson’s chapter ended by attempting to pass Luke’s legacy on to someone outside the family bloodline.

Johnson revisited that same idea in 2019’s Knives are Outa place in which Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), a highly successful mystery author, passes his legacy onto Marta de Armas, his nurse. This bypasses his greedy family. All of Harlan’s relatives have been spoiled and coddled by his vast fortune, and they all have complicated legacies with him, mostly leading to them wanting him dead. In leaving his fortune to Marta, he destroys all his family members’ schemes and hopes and orders them to start over, without the entitlement and power of wealth. He gives Marta, along with her mother, an undocumented immigrant woman, a new start free from the legacy of their pasts.

Evidence of Johnson’s attraction to dismantling historical conventions and destroying the past — physically and viscerally as well as symbolically — can be found as early as 2008’s Brothers BloomHe was doing it as an iconoclastic gag, blowing up Barbie dolls. The film he made last night keeps this thread going in an unforgettable way. His latest film is The Mona Lisa burning is a horrifying moment for art lovers, but it’s a prime symbol of an idea that’s become a minor thread of obsession running through Johnson’s works. Miles Bron’s obsession with the artifacts of the past is revealed in Glass Onion — the moment this secret criminal ties a precious artifact to his own symbolic legacy — the question stops being whether the painting will be destroyed, and becomes “When?”