HERE BE SPOILERS!
No, not those twins.
These are “The Twins” from The Book of Boba Fett. Not to be confused with Sugar and Spice from this season of RuPaul’s Drag Race. You can tell which set of twins is which easily: there’s no way either of the Hutts would have done such a bad impression of Miley Cyrus during the Snatch Game. They would have both done, as Hutts always do, Truman Capote.
Because this is a Rian Johnson stan account, I would like to inform the readers of Ahch-To Baby that I fully recommend Poker Face. It’s a throwback: a warm-hearted murder-of-the-week (that’s a thing). It feels kind of like watching Touched by an Angel (now that I’m writing it, that title does not hold up) or Highway to Heaven and wait were those the same show? Anyway, instead of being built to hook viewers with cliffhangers, this is just a good hang without all the cliffs.
As a writer, I know I have turns of phrases or favorite go-to devices that show up in my work. It’s rarely conscious, it’s just a byproduct of having particular taste. That’s why it’s fun becoming familiar tropes of my favorite writers.
In Poker Face, we see a few of Johnson’s go-to storytelling preferences. One is just to recontextualize what we know. You will get a piece of information up front and then you’ll receive additional information that completely changes your perspective on it. In The Last Jedi, you find out right away that Luke Skywalker holds himself responsible for the Kylo Ren, it’s not a dramatic reveal. The real reveal is how each character describes the incident. The question isn’t really what happened, but how to interpret it.
That’s also true of Knives Out and Glass Onion: we get a lot of information up front, and then we go back and get a different angle on the events that we watched transpired. The story is less told out of order than told twice. That’s the Poker Face formula and it works like a charm(ing Natasha Lyonne).
I also found it fun that Knives Out features a character that is unable to lie, and Poker Face’s lead is a character that cannot be lied to. By placing these restrictions on the characters, Johnson forces the story to grapple with these rules, and allows for other sleights of hand. The question is often not who is lying but why. While you’re focusing on that verbal cat and mouse game, you may not be looking for key details in plain sight. Details like a seemingly innocuous episode of Benson; or what Ransom Drysdale’s real first name is.
This is all to say, I hope Rian Johnson makes more Star Wars, but if he doesn’t, I am here to like and subscribe whatever he releases in this Agatha Christie phase.
These three and their very tall dog.
We have more Star Wars storytelling on offer than ever so it’s nice to remember that if you just watch A New Hope and that’s it? You really get the whole thing, the complete thought, in just one film.