The latest episode of “Poker Face” solidifies it: Rian Johnson’s work as a visual storyteller is fundamentally conservative.
Johnson, infamous among fanboys for “The Last Jedi,” is probably best known for the “Knives Out” films. The writer-director’s latest project — a foray into the world of streaming — fleshes out some of the conservative ideas in Johnson’s work, ideas he probably isn’t even aware rebuke leftist arguments. And it might be the best thing he’s done so far too.
Millennial ‘Columbo’
“Poker Face” is a new show on Peacock about a wandering amateur sleuth with an infallible (but unexplained) ability to tell when someone is lying. The journeyman detective is named Charlie Cale, and she’s wonderfully portrayed by the idiosyncratic Natasha Lyonne, best known in recent years for Netflix’s “Russian Doll.”
Each episode follows a case of the week, wherein Charlie solves a murder through the use of her special lie-detecting ability, simple logic, and personal sense of justice. It’s essentially a detective show in the tradition of “Columbo” but where the whodunit structure is inverted into a “howcatchem.” This means the audience knows whodunit from the beginning and gets to see how the detective “catchem.”
Of Johnson’s six feature films as a writer-director, three are whodunit stories. Though people may not think of it this way, the detective genre is inherently conservative. Most of the greatest detective stories involve murder, a violent revolutionary act that’s usually about an imbalance of power or stolen property. Either way,
