#burn mona lisa

[a-fix-of-muses]

Currently Listening To: "Fuse & Flame" by Burn Mona Lisa

[xinu1941-1966]

design：yukimasa OKUMURA 奥村 靫正

William Gibson book covers

Neuromancer / Burning Chrome /

Count Zero /Mona Lisa Overdrive

#yukimasa OKUMURA #奥村靫正 #design #japan #art

[couldnt-think-of-a-funny-name]

God I forgot how fucking good the payoff at the end of glass onion is

[void-pitcher]

i will literally never stop thinking about that one glass onion analysis video that said “i wouldn’t say i’d destroy [the mona lisa] to save a stranger’s life, but honestly? it’s kinda fucked up that i wouldn’t. we should value a person’s life, stranger or not, more than a piece of art.” like that changed something in me. bc our society DOES value art. not new art, not artists, sure, but it values the results. they put the results at a higher value than the artist themself, and if they think the results is worthless? they’ll still value the artist less than the result.

[violeteyedhero]

Glass Onion and the Mona Lisa

(Major Glass Onion spoilers obviously)

I saw a post yesterday that showed the Mona Lisa next to the final shot of Helen sitting on the beach, posed the exact same way, with that same unreadable smile. I think in that moment everything kind of clicked for me, and I think I understand now how it was used as a motif. I poured things out on twitter and I'm gonna do it here too.

So the Mona Lisa is introduced about thirty minutes into the movie, before anything has technically happened. We are shown that Miles purchased it, had it put in his living room (full of volatile hydrogen gas), behind a glass door, and that he can override the glass just to see her face. He looks at it with some awe, but to do something so arrogant and dangerous is not something that you do when you just admire the art...it's a power move. It's a rich man flaunting a priceless artwork and saying, look at me, I don't give a flying fuck about the consequences.

Then, he talks about how he saw it when he was six, and how he longs to be immortalised like the painting. Smash cut to Andi.

Now, I have only a rough recollection of Da Vinci's story, but something that I do recall is this--we still don't know who was the true subject of the Mona Lisa. There were at least two women who it could have been (as well as Da Vinci's male student/lover and Da Vinci himself). There's even still a fair bit of debate as to whether he painted it at all. The truth has long been obfuscated. Only the physical painting by Da Vinci matters to people. The subject is irrelevant.

Not long after this scene, we discover that 'Andi' is not in fact Cassandra, but Helen, employing the rich bitch voice that the sisters created as kids. An elegant, unreadable woman with an ever-changing mood and smile, and an air of absolute mystery. Her character is framed, in the first half at least, as the real-life Mona Lisa.

As the story goes on, you can see how important this parallel becomes. Miles constantly reiterates how he wants to be mentioned in the same breath as the Mona Lisa. In the same way, he wants to be mentioned in the same breath as Andi Brand. He tries to be like her, cheat her, steal from her, surpass her, and take her life from her. He uses the image and money that he gets from being her partner, and uses it to steal her ideas and kill her. He obfuscates her role in the company's founding, takes it for himself.

Andi as a person is dead, but the world doesn't know that yet. For now, Miles gets to keep her image and everything she's built for himself. Not for admiration, but for power. The world just sees her as the subject of his work. Secondary, and irrelevant.

Enter Helen, who steps into her sister's role and uses her image to get to the truth. The others don't know who she is, but Miles should. It's glaringly obvious, but he never thinks to look beyond the glass between them and see who she truly is or why she's there. And he doesn't let go of his need to show off how powerful he is.

Because like the Mona Lisa, the envelope is in plain sight. The last piece of Andi's work is hidden within the Glass Onion, just behind his fake napkin--the one he took credit for.

Miles loses, in the end, because he's so deeply arrogant and idiotic. He plays dirty to get what he wants, and can't help but mount his prizes on the wall. But Helen understands that, at the end of the day, she is a third grade teacher from Alabama, and a black woman against an absurdly wealthy white man. He will not face consequences for this. He won't even be arrested for Andi's murder.

So what does she do? She literally destroys the glass. She annihilates the illusion of his brilliance. She destroys the layers of the onion, shows the rot in its core--his persona, his wonder fuel--and then, she destroys the Mona Lisa. Because it is a painting, something that he chose to put in danger. And the world will see if it is gone.

She brings down the glass barrier, but he destroyed the painting the moment he set foot in Andi's house. And maybe this way, even if he isn't remembered as the murderer of Andi Brand, he will always be remembered as the destroyer of the Mona Lisa. It's a small sort of justice, but it's the only thing that Miles will answer to.

The dust settles, Helen goes to the beach. She ends the story sitting as the Mona Lisa did, her arms crossed, expression unreadable. There's no illusion anymore, no glass between us and the subject. We can look into her eyes. It's a moment where the subject of the art reclaims the narrative, not unlike OJ's ending shot in Nope. The painting may now be gone, but the Brand sisters have been immortalised in a way. Andi is gone, but Helen is alive and true.

[rozecrest]

i am fascinated by a core of both knives out movies being the exploitation of a woman of color, marta and andi. with marta, even as she still works there she’s subject to racist and xenophobic conversation, is masqueraded as part of the family but as soon as she becomes an obstacle to harlan’s fortune they instantly turn on her and threaten, blackmail, harass and insult her character. their affection for her is highly conditional! she is more of a useful constant service than a person to them! with andi, despite her wealth and therefore higher autonomy that marta at the beginning of her film, does the work of bringing the disruptors togethers and inventing the concept that shot them to the top, and is then shut out, and then murdered by miles for doing the responsible thing of refusing klear. though it isn’t named within the film, the image of these people she raised up (largely white, but lionel being a black man choosing misogynoir and self preservation over solidarity is very pointed) lying on her in court, letting her righteous anger be painted as aggressiveness, and paving the way for this white man who was nobody before he met her to steal everything she had and call it solely his own is a VERY familiar image! it’s very clever!

[cherryriposte]

*glass onion spoilers ahead*

i just finished watching so i came onto tumblr to see what everyone else thought and it looks like there’s this prevailing fan theory in which the mona lisa was a fake (cause the real one is painted on wood and the one in the movie was canvas). which really adds another layer (ha) to how much of an idiot miles bron is, but i do feel that it cheapens the ending of the movie a little bit? in the beginning miles bron was talking about the whole “are you willing to break the thing that nobody wants you to break” which in this case is the mona lisa. the mona lisa burning is the commupance of his vanity and ego, it is the thing that will ruin him beyond repair. having the actual mona lisa be destroyed highlights how in attempts to accrue more wealth, power, and prominence, billionaires cause harm that cannot be undone.

[imbalancedphilosophy]

So there’s a little detail about Glass Onion that I haven’t seen anyone talk about

In the movie when Benoit is giving his huge dramatic ‘Miles is actually an idiot speech’ they cut to various instances of him misusing words throughout the course of the story to show us how ‘yeah he’s fucking dumb’

There is however an even more damning piece of evidence for ‘he’s dumb and doesn’t know shit’. Its when he’s talking about the Mona Lisa early on. I distinctly remember that he claims that the reason the Mona Lisa’s expression seeming to change is thanks to Da Vinci developing a painting technique that leaves no lines when painting. I felt jolted when this claim was made because its bullshit.

You see the Mona Lisa’s expression is the product of Da Vinci developing a new technique, but its not something nonsensical like ‘not leaving lines’. To paint the Mona Lisa Da Vinci did extensive study into the field of optics and how the human eye works. He then used what he’d learned through extensive study to create the incredible optical illusion that is the Moan Lisa’s smile. Form what I know he primarily took advantage of two things. 

One was the difference between how things look in your peripheral vision and how things look when you focus on them. When you focus your sight on her face her expression will appear one way, but then as your focus shifts across the painting to take in other details her features shift from the center of your gaze to your peripheral vision, to which her expression is subtly difference. Then as you notice this change and shift your focus back to her face to try to figure out what changed you are back to perceiving her features through the center of your gaze, meaning you are back to perceiving it the way you originally were.

The other big thing was that he painted the mona lisa using an absurd number of incredibly thin and mostly translucent layers of paint. Were talking hundreds of layers of paint that were so lightly tinted light could pass through them much more thoroughly than traditional paints could allow. This use of thin layers allowed him to make his edges softer and hazier to better replicate the way we actually perceive 3 dimensional objects. This also means that he was effectively painting a very flat sculpture in existence. As a result much like how a sculpture viewed from the left looks different the same sculpture from the right, the mona lisa viewed from one angle will appear different from another, but since its a thick painting instead of a actual 3d object the effect is greatly diminished and damn near unnoticeable.

Anyway all this is to say that Miles was such a fucking idiot that even for something so apparently important to him as the marvel that is the Mona Lisa he still failed to truly understand it.

Also there’s something deeply poetic to me about him failing to understand that the Mona Lisa is the result of hundreds of near translucent layers, much like there a glass onion is made of many translucent layers but still allows you to see through to the heart of it. I’m sure there is all kinds of fun metaphor and symbolism to be extrapolated from that but I am tired and my brain is being non-cooperative so ill leave that for all of you to ponder and pick apart as I go pass out

[dazesanddoodles]

i truly and wholeheartedly believe that phillip is a lost media archivist and benoit met him in their late twenties trying to find some obscure unreleased records for a case against a predatory music company

[collectalong]

hey youre gonna have to like. sit through these ones! im testing out the phantom thieves as muses since im getting closer to the extra semester (im on november! dont spoil me or im gonna cry ok!)

no guarantee they'll stick around but i thought eh, screw it, let's have fun, there's no rules here.

so here's a tag dump! since other muses im considering have the same name as one of the pts (P3MC AND MAKOTO LOL), im going to use their pt codenames lmao

[blazeball]

god but i would love to be in the knives out Universe when the news broke on all that. like imagine elon musks ex business partner kills herself and a day later its revealed he murdered an mra twitch streamer on his private island in his glass house that blew up like the hindenburg. and he also destroyed the fucking mona lisa. big day for rich people haters

[fnulr]

GOOD GODS

I loved Glass onion, still prefer knives out but goodness did I enjoy Glass onion

I always love a good dunk on the rich and famous

I felt like I could actually predict what would happen which made me feel smart (yes yes mystery and all but whatever)

So many brilliant performances by everyone involved

DONG!

I'm down for many more Benoit blanc movies

Thank you Rian Johnson for this movie!

[thisworldisablackhole]

Burning Chrome by William Gibson - 4/5

Felt nice to revisit Gibson. Neuromancer was the book that got me back into reading and made me realize how much I love sci fi, and it feels like so long ago now that I wrapped up Mona Lisa Overdrive. I didn't know how interested I would be in reading a book of short stories, but when I saw this copy sitting on the book store shelves I couldn't say no (1987 print, way cooler than the newer versions).

I'm really glad I decided to pick this up. These stories contain some of Gibson's most imaginative writing, but also some of his most challenging. Just like his other books I've read, I found the best way to get through it was to not get caught up in the details. There is just a ton of psychedelic technobabble here that is really hard to follow or even imagine for anyone except Gibson himself. Considering how many times drugs are brought in these stories, I almost wonder if he was tripping when he wrote some of this (or maybe I'm just dumb). I mean, I had to read "Fragments of a Hologram Rose" twice and still have no fucking clue what happened. At least the short story format makes re-reading small sections a breeze, and there is plenty reward in doing so. Gibson is usually good at revealing concrete information toward the end of his stories, so going back to the start with that information can really shed a light on everything else.

"Johnny Mnemonic" and "Burning Chrome" were two of my favourites since I was already familiar with the Sprawl setting, and seeing some familiar characters make cameos was a nice touch. I also really connected with "The Winter Market" because it referenced a lot of actual locations around the city I live in. It was neat to be able to picture exactly where the characters were. Gibson's attempts at Soviet Space Propoganda was an odd surprise but also neat cause it reminded me a lot of Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin in the way that it was simultaneously depressing and absurdly comedic. I found the three collaborations stories in this book to be some of the most narratively coherent—probably the result of having someone else keep Gibson on the rails. All of these stories were good at something though, even if that something was just pure technologic hallucinations.

Despite all of the dense, flashy, and often nonsensical sci fi imagery, a lot of these stories are actually very sad—often leaving you with a stark image of addiction, alienation and loneliness. It made me realize just how much focus and impact a short story can have (and may have inspired me to try writing my own). Getting to really zoom in close on some of Gibson's character studies and strange thought experiments was a delight, even if it was sometimes hard to grasp. Highly recommended if you enjoyed the Sprawl trilogy. It made me really want to re-read Neuromancer and also check out some of the Bridge books.

[wordlessness2470]

AND ANOTHER THING

Helen burning the Mona Lisa? It was a beautiful culmination of tension of heartbreak because when it went up in flames all I felt was satisfaction because she finally found it. The man who killed her sister and apologized for her loss to her GODDAMNED FACE was fine with her breaking the glass. The piano. Even the liquor cabinet was annoying, but I bet it was more because it was inconvenient for him personally than anything that it got a reaction. But when she burned that painting? She finally broke the one thing that got through his defenses, his ‘well I don’t care you can’t get to me IM RICH HONEY ILL JUST REPLACE IT’. She finally broke the thing he didn’t want her to break, and she took all his power with it. It was the closest thing she could possibly get to vengeance for her sister, and I am so here for it

[puppyeared]

OH HUGH GRANT ISHIS HUSBAND

[ketchuplaser]

Hit a yardsale today, made some good finds

All good ones! I have most of them, but it doesn't hurt to get back-ups.

Got these for a dollar each.