Rian Johnson and the Lessons of Subversive Narratives

(Warning: Light spoilers for the following television shows and films; Game of Thrones, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Back to the Future, Looper, Knives Out) 

Part I: The Day Subversion “Died”

I remember when the term “subverting expectations” wasn’t just a juxtaposition of two dirty words. After all, I remember Game of Thrones attracting the attention of just about every boy in class back when I was in High School. Game of Thrones was more or less a fantasy story told to an audience that grew tired of the tropes of fantasy. J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is widely beloved as one the greatest fantasy stories ever told, but if there is one criticism to be had about such a rich legendarium it is that the fact that virtually all of its central characters survive the conflict despite the sheer scales of the trials detailed within is not only unlikely, it’s downright implausible. Of course, fantasy is quite literally designed with suspension of disbelief in mind, but that didn’t stop one nagging question; “how would Aragorn fare in a world that neither granted him divine providence nor favored him in any way?” To put it bluntly, what would a fantasy story look like if its main characters did not benefit from “plot armor?” 

For a time, Game of Thrones delighted in laying waste to everything we once took for granted in more traditional fantasy stories. Oh, you thought this one guy was the main character just because we followed him for the better part of a whole season? Nope; he’s publicly executed by the main villain. Oh, you thought this other character would rise up and avenge the death of your favorite character? Well, watch him get assassinated in the middle of his own wedding. In this world, being good-natured wasn’t a guarantee that you’d come out on top, and being a main character wasn’t a promise that you’d survive to see the next season. In this way the subversion of Game of Thrones scratched an itch we didn’t even know we had, and we loved it for it. 

For a little while, at least. 

Fast forward to the year 2019, the 8th and final season of Game of Thrones, and suddenly the discussion is far more negative. In a mad rush to get the show to some manner of conclusion“subverting your expectations” now means disposing of years of growth and development so that characters can act in ways that are essentially at-odds with who they are just to satisfy the needs of the plot. Intelligent characters make unbelievably stupid decisions, plot threads that weaved their way through consecutive seasons are unceremoniously dropped, events with years of build-up are anticlimactically “resolved,” and morally benevolent characters make heel-turns to become the worst mass murderers their world has ever seen with little to no provocation. The backlash to season of Game of Thrones was so great that it retroactively killed much of the fan interest in the earlier seasons or, indeed, Game of Thrones as a concept. Game of Thrones Season 8 should be taught in every screenwriting course as a cautionary tale of what happens when you use the idea of “subverting expectations” as little more than shock value to burn whatever good will your intellectual property formerly had. 

So let’s talk about “subverting expectations” for a little bit. Is it bad? Good? Has it simply fallen out of style? Is it deserving of the venom that is now attached to its name? 

Like most things in life the answer is… “it’s complicated.” To a good scriptwriter, subverting expectations can and should be a useful tool in their belt, but the important thing is to know when and how to use it. For the remainder of this piece I will reference three of the films of one writer/director who employs heavy usage of the subversion technique; two good examples, and one terrible one. That writer/director is none other than Rian Johnson. 

Yes, the man who “ruined” Star Wars. 

Part II: The Last Jedi, A Film that Doesn’t Work

So let’s get the bad example out of the way first. Star Wars: The Last Jedi is terrible, at least from a writing standpoint. Of course, there are a few mitigating factors that allow us to somewhat sympathize with what happened here. The Last Jedi is the eighth film of a saga that stretches all the way back to 1977 and is the only film in the new “Disney Trilogy” that is both written and directed by Johnson himself. The film is sandwiched by two other films that are directed and (at least partially) written by J. J. Abrams, a man with radically different approaches to both writing and directing. This meant that Johnson not only had to play in someone else’s sandbox with characters that were similarly not his own, but he also had to somehow create continuity with two other films, one taking place before and one taking place after, that he had no direct creative control over. And this was all coming off the heels of Abrams’ The Force Awakens, widely criticized for being incredibly derivate of 1977’s A New Hope and hitting the exact same narrative beats. This meant that it fell upon Johnson to prove that this new trilogy wasn’t just a remake of the classic George Lucas films, but rather a re-imagining of the Star Wars brand for a new generation of fans. 

Johnson’s solution was to toss out logical consistency and continuity while leaning heavily into subversion as a form of shock value. In so doing, he made the exact same mistakes Game of Thrones made at the end of its run. 

Itemizing the complete list of The Last Jedi’s failings would be far too long, so let’s focus only on its subversive elements. The character of Luke Skywalker makes his long-awaited return as a mentor figure to the new protagonist of the series, Rey, since last appearing in 1983’s Return of the Jedi. The problem? Absolutely none of his character is intact. What was once a paragon of optimism so bright that he could still see the good in his villain of a father, and ultimately redeem said father, has now become a hermit so dejected that he abandons his own friends in the face of galactic genocide. Actor Mark Hamill recognized so little in this new version of Luke that he frequently clashed with Johnson’s direction to no avail, ultimately resigning himself to playing the character as if he was someone entirely new, being quoted as saying “maybe he’s Jake Skywalker. He’s not my Luke Skywalker.” And what comes of this new version of Luke? Nothing. He doesn’t redeem himself, he doesn’t take responsibility for what has happened in his self-imposed exile, and he certainly doesn’t make any triumphal return to the franchise. Instead, Luke leaves the Last Jedi with a whimper, dying due to exerting too much energy to provide a minor distraction light years away. This subversion leads only to disappointment. 

Perhaps we’ll fare better if we look at the film’s main villain. Here, The Last Jedi featured an emaciated, grotesque, yet incredibly powerful humanoid alien named Snoke, who enjoys a great deal of power as the head of a radical military regime. Snoke has been in the shadows since the previous film, The Force Awakens, issuing direct orders to the other villains. His true nature, and how he both emerged out of nowhere and seemingly ascended to power so quickly, are questions that were seeded in the minds of viewers from the very beginning of the new trilogy. Given Star Wars’ long history and extensive lore, there were numerous plausible theories that could comprehensively explain Snoke. In the meantime, his role in the story was quite obvious; he was the logical endpoint of Rey, our new protagonist’s, journey. He was the figure in the dark that she would have to defeat, the final “big bad” that would draw her journey to a close and would answer every burning question fans had surrounding this shadowy figure. Again, what was Johnson’s solution? Kill Snoke off at the end of the second act in a “shocking” scene where his enforcer, Kylo Ren, seizes power, answer absolutely nothing about who Snoke was or where he came from, and hand his role over to a petulant man-child who cannot convey his authority through any other means aside from screeching at the top of his lungs. Kylo Ren was such an atrocious choice for a headlining villain of the series that his role, only briefly held at the end of The Last Jedi, was usurped by yet another big bad in the follow-up, The Rise of Skywalker. But as for Snoke? Johnson left him as a corpse, bisected and forgotten, in his own throne room. This subversion also leads only to disappointment. 

Alright, how about some of the subplots? Well, here we have two. The first centers around a character that is widely considered one of the better parts of the previous film; Finn, a former stormtrooper (a member of the evil military) who was emotionally compromised, abandoned his post due to the atrocities he was forced to commit, and formed a strong friendship with series protagonist Rey. The angle of a former foot soldier attempting to atone for crimes he committed while he was “just following orders” in the past is potentially very interesting and something the Star Wars franchise has never really focused on, but unfortunately The Last Jedi squanders this potential completely. A capital ship containing a large portion of the good guys currently finds itself in a cat and mouse game with a capital ship containing the bad guys, and the good guys are losing. Finn’s arc in the film begins with his attempt to abandon the ship in search of his close friend, Rey, but this is seen as an act of desertion by Rose, a newcomer to the series, who detains him and ultimately ropes him into a quest to find a hacker that can stop the bad guys from tracking the good guys. Finn and Rose not only fail to bring back the correct hacker, but the alternative hacker they do find ends up selling them out to the villains, yields no benefits to the cause, and gets a good portion of the good guys killed. So one of our principle protagonists has outright failed in his entire narrative purpose; how does he make up for this? Well, by the time he final battle rears is ugly head, the good guys find themselves once again backed into a corner, this time at the hands of a laser that threatens to blow apart their base and kill them all. This time Finn, instead of fleeing, endeavors to sacrifice himself to ram the laser only to be stopped mid-attempt by Rose. Once again, Finn has failed to be relevant to the main story, and as the laser fires, destroys the base, and potentially kills all his friends, he is forced to stare dumbfounded as Rose justifies her action by claiming “this is how we win. Not by destroying what we hate, but by protecting what we love.” 

And then, if this moment wasn’t tone-deaf and nonsensical enough, she kisses him before passing out. So, to sum up, one of the most promising newcomers in Star Wars lore has his entire character arc defined by failure, gets relegated as a sidekick to someone who spends the film doing little more than virtue signaling, and is denied the opportunity to learn or grow from his mistakes throughout the film by the very end. His role is to do nothing.

This subversion really leads to disappointment. 

Alright, last subplot. While protagonists Rey and Finn are off doing their own things, the crew of the ship stuck in the cat-and-mouse game with the villains has to contend with constant bombardments and a rapidly-depleting fuel reserve. If things keep up, everyone is going to die, but this doesn’t seem to bother the acting admiral of the ship, a woman named Holdo, who simply keeps the ship on course and refuses any challenges to her authority. This greatly angers a pilot on board, Poe, who has a tendency to disobey direct orders in favor of getting decisive results in the fight against his enemies. Holdo’s consistent refusal to reveal any kind of plan for survival to the crew, even in the face of Poe literally begging for the smallest sign of hope, ultimately culminates in an attempted coup where Poe relieves Holdo of her command. The twist? Holdo had a plan the whole time, Poe’s efforts are undone, Holdo dies a hero in a kamikaze attack that saves the majority of her crew and destroys the enemy capital ship, and the lesson Poe is apparently supposed to learn is to respect authority even if it looks like their decision-making is about to get everyone killed.

This subversion is not only disappointing, it’s an overall bad message to take away. 

By now the pattern should be clear; Johnson’s subversions throughout The Last Jedi were done with the intent of keeping the audience guessing as to where the plot was headed, as if the traditional archetypes of the hero’s journey needed to be turned on their head in order to produce a compelling narrative. Characters’ personalities are completely inverted despite the set-up from previous installments. Promised conflicts and resolutions are violently shelved in favor of alternative plot points that come out of left field. The “heroes” fail to fulfill their narrative purposes and learn lessons that don’t make logical sense. 

Good writing is justified by its impact, and few moviegoers left The Last Jedi feeling pleased that the film threw them for a loop. The best thing that can be said for The Last Jedi is that its journey from A to B is unpredictable, but upon reaching destination B the only feeling the writing evokes is sheer, utter emptiness. Playing with expectations alone is not inherently a hallmark of good writing; you have to add something to the experience that a viewer wasn’t expecting to see, and appreciate, going in. 

The reason I began this section with somewhat of a defense of Rian Johnson is because it is evident that he understands how to be subversive in all the right ways, as he has demonstrated as such with his films both before and after The Last Jedi. So while disgruntled The Last Jedi viewers revile Johnson as the man who threw one mother of a monkey wrench into their favorite franchise, and likely rejoiced at the news that further Star Wars films helmed by Johnson are now effectively left in limbo, I could never count myself among that crowd because of one little film of his that holds a special place in my heart. 

Part III: Looper, A Film that Does Work

We all remember Looper, right? 

Right?

Granted, it has been roughly eight years since its initial 2012 release, and back then it did indeed see both critical and commercial success, so it isn’t a faulty argument to claim that Looper simply had its day in the sun and needs no additional fanfare. However, in my humble opinion, there is an element of tragic cruelty that Looper isn’t part of the discourse when themes like time travel or subversive narratives are on the table. 

On its surface, Looper isn’t that much different compared to the average sci-fi action flicks that are concerned with how what we consider to be “crime” will evolve in the future. Will artificial intelligence be treated as if it has the same rights as humanity? How will technological advancements, as we have already seen with the advent of DNA testing, impact how we process and evaluate crime? Will behaviors that we deem to be morally abhorrent in the present retain their connotations in the future? In a radically different futuristic society, who do we trust to be the keepers of the law? If future crime can reliably be predicted in the present, years before it is committed, is it ethical to punish the wrongdoers who have yet to do any wrong? These questions, among many others, are par for the course for the genre Looper comfortably finds itself in. 

Looper, for its part, deals with the second and fifth questions; the questions of how technology will impact crime and whether it is ethical to punish someone before they commit a crime, respectively. Binding these two themes together is a dash of time-traveling shenanigans; indeed, the concept of time travel is fundamental to Looper’s plot line, but it isn’t overly concerned with explaining how the mechanics of time travel work within the film’s world. This is a good call considering even the most beloved of scripts dealing with time travel tend to unravel the more you pluck at the glorified plot-hole that is time travel; even Back to the Future, perhaps the godfather of all time travel films, is not immune to this. After all, one of Doc Brown’s most famous speeches involves his panic over the creation of parallel timelines due to events in the past, and yet within the very same series Marty’s own existence is threatened by the possibility of his parents never meeting due to his interference in the past. Sometimes it really is best not to think too hard on these things. 

As far as Looper is concerned, there are only a few elements that need to be understood in order to grasp the story’s main conflict. The first is that our protagonist, a “looper” called Joe, is in the employ of a crime syndicate in the not-too-distant future of 2044 and is also tasked with killing targets that are sent his way. The second is that these targets are literally sent backwards from the future, that is, from a future that takes place a few decades after 2044, because future technology makes it virtually impossible to hide a body save for sending said body backwards through time. The third and final thing to understand is that, once a looper’s contract is fulfilled and the syndicate wants to cut ties with him, the older version will be sent back to be killed by his younger self, which is the last contract the looper must fulfill. At this point the looper gets a severance package and lives out the rest of his life until he becomes the version that is sent back to die at the hands of his younger self. 

Easy, right? 

Once the film’s first act establishes these rules, one might be under the impression that the film’s internal logic lends itself to a cyclical model of time. It isn’t long before Joe kills “Old Joe,” takes the gold payout, gets married, and tries to settle down. When the syndicate comes to collect Old Joe and send him backwards to his death, his wife is an unfortunate bit of collateral damage. Enraged by this, Old Joe manages to escape Young Joe’s assassination attempt after getting sent back, making both versions of Joe targets for the syndicate. 

The film’s internal logic has already been broken, and yet this is where things get truly interesting. Old Joe has escaped the destiny that Young Joe laid out for him, and now he seeks to further alter the timeline by killing the leader of the syndicate, a man known as “The Rainmaker,” while he is still a defenseless child. For it is the Rainmaker who has, in the distant future, issued death warrants en masse for all the loopers in the future and is indirectly responsible for the death of Old Joe’s wife; killing the Rainmaker therefore removes her death from the timeline. Young Joe, on the other hand, doesn’t care about any of this. His solution is to simply learn the name and face of the woman Old Joe is trying to save so that he will never meet her at all, and then kill Old Joe to fulfill his contract with the syndicate so that they stop pursuing him. Both versions of Joe are the protagonists of their own story and yet antagonists to each other. 

And this is where, for me, Looper stopped being a film that simply used time travel as a cool science fiction background element. Remember; Looper is a film that is greatly concerned with the ethics behind punishing a criminal before he has even committed a crime, but it isn’t until the film’s second act that this question roars into the forefront. The Rainmaker is perhaps the worst mass murderer the world of Looper has ever seen, but when Old Joe travels back to 2044 to kill him, he’s just a little kid in the care of his struggling single mother, Sara. He’s got anger issues and lethal telekinetic powers to boot, but Sara’s love can cut through that and expose the scared little boy beneath it all. Young Joe finds the pair before Old Joe can, and after being told who her son grows up to be, Sara pleads with Young Joe to let him live so that he can grow up right under her influence. The third act is where the theme of future accountability crescendoes, as Young Joe must make a choice whether or not to defend Sara and the child Rainmaker from Old Joe’s inevitable attack. 

There are two hypothetical ethical quandaries that we’re probably all familiar with. The first is the train track problem; a train is out of control and cannot stop. If it continues on its current path it will kill three people. However, there is an alternate track that, should the train be directed towards it, would only result in a single death. You are on a nearby platform in reach of the switch that determines which track the train travels on, and you are also the only person that can see what is about to happen. What do you do? All else equal, and taking away factors like age, sex, race, or occupation of the four potential victims, a pragmatic individual would answer that one death is preferable to three, and most would probably agree. But the question is framed in such a way that you must make the active choice to kill someone, in this case the lone individual on the alternate track, in order to save three other lives. Therefore, the question is really “would you be able to accept the responsibility of having blood on your hands in order to achieve the greatest good in a no-win scenario?” If the train were to simply pow through the three individuals as opposed to the one, you could potentially rationalize this as not being your fault at all, provided you treat inaction to not be a morally abhorrent action in and of itself. 

Here’s another; if you had the power to go back in time and smother baby Hitler in his crib, would you be able to do it? Again, if you were able to rationalize your actions as producing the greatest common good, you might be able to go through with it. But then you’d be committing the otherwise repugnant act of infanticide; the snuffing of the very icon of both innocence and defenselessness. Yet this is the question that is closer to Looper’s core, and the answer is by no means clear-cut. There is a resolution to the Rainmaker arc, and it requires conscious choices to be made by both Old Joe and Young Joe, but the impact of these choices, and what follows from the fate of the Rainmaker, is very conscientiously never shown. Instead the final lingering image is of the choices each Joe made; choices born from their own ethics, and a more powerful image than I was ever expecting to see in a film whose marketing did little more than advertise a time-traveling mano-a-mano between Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis. 

This right here is why the subversive nature of Looper’s narrative works wonders, because the film isn’t actually a time travel story. Not really. At least in the sense that, if you spend too much time picking apart the minute details of how time travel does or does not function in the world you’ll eventually come out with plot holes big enough to swallow the film whole. Yet Looper was subversive enough to hide a plot that centered around whether or not it was moral to kill baby Hitler in what seemed to just be a sci-fi testosterone festival, and it’s precisely because of this that Looper not only rises above its genre, but also remains relevant in my mind the better part of a decade later as I ponder over what makes for a great film twist. 

Looper is what made me retain trust in the writing and directing talents of Rian Johnson despite the travesty that is The Last Jedi. Looper is what made me inevitably see Knives Out, and thank God I did because Knives Out is spectacular. 

Part IV: Knives Out, A Film that Really Works

Knives Out, quite simply, is a masterpiece. In hindsight it’s quite ironic that I find myself saying this because I almost wrote the film off halfway through watching it. The genius of Knives Out comes from the massive risks it takes in telling its story, but unlike The Last Jedi you don’t come out from the experience feeling hollow. 

The premise is about as common an archetype as you’ll ever find in the genre of the “whodunnit.” A rich old man is found dead in his mansion; the police consider it a textbook case of suicide but an independently-hired private investigator simply knows better. The family of the murder victim is interviewed one by one, and it’s obvious that each and every one of them is, in their own way, a uniquely horrible person. It’s not a leap of the imagination to consider that any one of them is the true culprit, if indeed the death is a product of murder rather than suicide, and it’s a setting not unfamiliar to those who have dabbled in the murder-mysteries of Agatha Christie or Dashiell Hammett. In fact, the entirety of the film’s first act is devoted to building the scene, as each family member tells their story of how they relate to each other, characterize their relationship to the murder victim, and explain what they were doing on the night of the murder. 

And then we meet Marta. 

Marta is the only person interviewed who is characterized as ideologically “pure,” especially compared to the conniving and self-centered personalities of the deceased’s family. In fact, Marta is so pure that she cannot help but projectile vomit if she tells a lie. Adding to this is the fact that Marta isn’t even actually part of the family, at least not by blood. She’s the deceased’s nurse, his closest friend, and perhaps his only true confidant. Marta isn’t initially presented as the film’s protagonist, but from the moment she is introduced it is clear that she will be the one driving the plot. She is utilized as a barometer for truth, it is through her perspective that we the audience know the actual circumstances surrounding the mysterious death of the old man in her care. 

Yes, before the first act draws to a close we know the truth behind the old man’s death and Marta’s role in it. For a murder-mystery this is an incredibly gutsy move to make, and it’s part of the reason why I nearly dismissed the film as trying too hard to be subversive. The second act initially feels like we’ve fallen into a completely different film with an completely different premise, as it halts the investigation completely and transitions to a focus on Marta dealing with the aftermath of the death as well as her increasingly volatile relationship with the rest of the family. Whether they are implicated in the murder or not, each one of them becomes an antagonist of sorts to Marta’s personal story. 

Still, regardless of how well the second act is written, it is understandable for one to feel duped at such a jarring transition of focus. But the true genius of Knives Out lies in its third act, in a series of reveals that are so brilliant that I dare not spoil them here. So let it suffice to say that Knives Out manages to do something absolutely astounding; it subverts its own subversion in a satisfying manner. Rest assured that Knives Out is indeed a murder-mystery from beginning to end, and while the investigation may appear to stop in the second act, astute observers that maintain their attention will be rewarded by the time the third act’s revelations roll out. It turns out that it paid not to take the earlier scenes at purely face value, and while what they presented wasn’t necessarily false, it wasn’t the whole truth either. 

The bottom line is that Knives Out does what any great murder-mystery does; it forces its audience to re-examine its preconceptions, rewards astute critical thinking, and laces even its most minute details with imperative purpose. And it does all this while subverting the traditional structure of a murder-mystery so effectively that one has to ask if they’re even still watching a mystery unfold. 

Part V: The Lessons of Subversion

If there is one lesson to be taken from this lengthy lecture on the scriptwriting merits of subversion, it is that payoff is everything. I brought up Game of Thrones at the beginning of this article because it continues to astound me, now over a year since its final season premiered, how quickly such a massive legacy collapsed into ash. Plot threads lovingly crafted over the course of years, once heralded as paragons of good subversive storytelling, are now reviled in retrospect because the audience of 2019-2020 knows that it all amounts to nothing. It’s not a fate I would have ever predicted back when it seemed like the most prevalent topic of discussion in the circles I frequented, and it’s somewhat saddening to see something that people are clearly passionate about burn down so comprehensively. The same sentiment applies to Star Wars. Of course, in the latter example it’s far easier for a writer/director who practically bathes himself in subverting tropes to accidentally make such a major misstep when he’s dealing with established lore and characters with affection from fans that stretch back literal decades. It can be difficult, after all, to play with someone else’s toys “the right way.” 

Tropes are tropes not because they are mandated, but because repetition has shown us the most effective ways of telling stories. Telling a story in a new or different fashion might earn attention from those who have grown weary of the formulaic and mundane, but it is not inherently good writing. It is a means to an end; a way of keeping attention until the inevitable payoff, but it falls to the writer to maintain a sense of logical consistency in the delivery of that payoff. Even George R. R. Martin, the author of the books that Game of Thrones adapted for television, knew that being subversive for the sake of subversion was toxic to good storytelling, and he said as much at a 2014 book festival held in Edinburgh. 

“I’ve been planting all these clues that the butler did it, then you’re halfway through a series and suddenly thousands of people have figured out that the butler did it, and then you say the chambermaid did it? No, you can’t do that.” 

There’s that old saying, “the journey is the destination,” and sometimes it can be true, but I certainly wouldn’t characterize it as a universal truth. If we can look backwards with rose-tinted glasses then certainly the inverse is also true, and if a decent journey fails to be validated by its atrocious destination, then what once may have been in our good graces will only be looked back on with ire. 

And so, at least in the world of fiction, it may behoove us to operate under a different assumption; that subversion is fine, but payoff is supreme.