#(because it was never pointed out just a lot of inferring and vague context clues)

[ishikawayukis]

maybe there is a thing as too many allegories in just one text

[aion-rsa]

Those Who Wish Me Dead Ending Explained

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This article contains Those Who Wish Me Dead spoilers. You can read our spoiler-free review here.

What’s on the piece of paper? Why exactly do Aidan Gillen and Nicholas Hoult want this Connor kid dead so badly? The ending of Taylor Sheridan’s Those Who Wish Me Dead is purposefully vague about what all this killing was about. But as a news crew approaches the young lad, played by Finn Little, it becomes clear he is going to tell a story that a lot of shadowy people wanted to keep hidden.

So what is that story and why did so many people have to die for it? The exact details remain hidden, but if we look at the whole structure of the movie, there are enough context clues to have a pretty good idea of what all the dying is for.

It goes back to the beginning of the film where we see Gillen’s Jack and Hoult’s Patrick pass themselves off as local gas and fire authorities in Florida, ingratiating themselves with the wife of an off-screen district attorney—he’s in the shower—and presumably killing both before planting the bomb. We aren’t shown that they physically murder the couple either, but writer-director Sheridan relies heavily on inference throughout the picture. Case in point: Jack and Patrick debating whether the latter needs to go change his shirt because there is a drop of blood on it. This strongly suggests that they killed everyone in the house, even before the explosion.

In the same vein, you can also hear a baby crying off-screen when Jack and Patrick first enter the DA’s home, which means when Patrick later tells Ethan (Jon Bernthal) he won’t kill him or his wife Allison (Medina Senghore) because she’s pregnant, he’s lying through his teeth. In fact, Jack picks going against the shooter at the end over Angelina Jolie’s Hannah because he’s furious about getting the whole Two-Face treatment with the fire to the face earlier in the movie, and he hopes Allison is holding the deer rifle in the woods.

Conveying motivation through implication applies to most of the characters in Those Who Wish Me Dead, and what they’re dying over. When Connor’s father Owen (Jake Weber) sees on the morning news in Jacksonville, Florida that the DA he worked for died “in a gas leak,” he immediately goes on the run with his son, getting farther than the men who wish him dead could have anticipated. And he gives us just enough to know why he is so scared with his confession to his son.

“I’m a forensic accountant,” Owen tells the boy, “which means I look for things that don’t add up. And I found some. The man I worked for, he was killed today because of what I found. But I still know it, which means they’re gonna come after me too.” When his son protests they should go to the police, Owen insists that the police protection didn’t save the DA. “The case implicates a lot of people, son, people with a lot to lose. Governors, congressmen. We can only trust people that we know.”

It’s a wise choice, although trusting the family that he knows is exactly how Jack and Patrick find the father and son so easily. After breaking into the accountant’s home, Patrick coolly spies a family photo of the pair in Montana with Uncle Ethan and Aunt Allison, thereby knowing they’re going to Soda Butte Survival School in Montana. The killers get there by plane long before Owen drives to his doom on the Lewis and Clark Trail.

Still, from what little Owen tells us, we can ascertain that he is an accountant who specialized in tracing money laundering, embezzlement, fraud, and the type of racketeering where organized crime and politics intersect. While we’re never told which politicians are implicated, it’s a fair bet that there are many in the Florida area caught with their hands in a violent, possibly treasonous cookiejar. One is even tempted to speculate it could involve a former president with a Floridian residence (notably Those Who Wish Me Dead was originally due out in 2020), but that is perhaps just imaginative thinking.

The full weight of the menace, however, is exemplified by Tyler Perry who has a tantalizing cameo as “Arthur,” the laconic heavy who makes an unexpected appearance in Montana to apply pressure on Jack and Patrick for failing to kill Connor in the car wreck. We don’t know a lot about Arthur, but the way he says “we promise absolutes, and unlikely is not an absolute” seems to suggest he’s a crime boss of the highest order.

Yet the way he doesn’t even want to be seen on the same road as Jack and Owen’s car—having Jack be dropped off in a parking lot and walk over an interstate for their roadside chat—suggests Arthur is someone more public than even that. Perhaps he works in a political office, or is at least a fixer hired by one. He provides a brutal form of clean-up and discretion to people in power, while exerting his own influence over them. “I will make them have the stomach for it,” Arthur tells Jack about the prospect of killing a lot more innocent people in this small Western town.

Thanks to Perry’s one scene, we also get a strong idea about why it would be so dangerous for people in power if even Connor with a blood-stained note can get in front of a media camera. He’s more than just a witness to his father’s murder, and a mouthpiece for what might be by then unsubstantiated claims from his dead old man. Arthur explains exactly what’s in that note for us.

“[Owen] was resourceful enough to make it all the way here,” says Arthur, “so assume he was resourceful enough to have duplicates of everything we retrieved from the DA’s office, and assume the duplicates are in the possession of that boy. Assume the worst case scenario, assume catastrophe, and act accordingly.”

While we know the boy is only carrying a note, the note could plausibly include the location of those duplicates, as well as the names of powerful politicians who are implicated. After all, it would take a very big name, at perhaps the highest level, to get Jolie’s Hannah so spooked. She went from trying to convince the child to spend the night in her watchtower to saying, “We’re leaving right now” after glancing at the paper. It appears Owen found the smoking gun, and now it’s firing directly at him and his.

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So young Owen getting on television and sharing his truth with the world will likely have profound implications, creating a situation that is, in Arthur’s words, “untenable” for those who wish the kid dead.

With that said, the truth is we never have to know the full details. The point is conveyed quickly and clearly with that first gas leak explosion in a rich suburban neighborhood: this is information of the most explosive nature. And in truth it is a MacGuffin that gets us into the movie’s conventional thrills about Jolie versus Hoult in a burning forest, with an axe between them.

Alfred Hitchcock popularized the term “MacGuffin,” to refer to the object or plot device which incites the tension and intrigue of a thriller. He also famously shrugged that the MacGuffin is nothing.

“The best MacGuffin is the one that 30 minutes after the movie is over, you have no idea what it was,” TCM host and novelist Eddie Muller once told us. “To me, that represents the essence of the MacGuffin. It’s like you remember everything that happens in the story, but you have no idea what it was that they were after. ‘Like, what was that again? I can’t remember!’”

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So while it’s fun to speculate just how damning that little piece of paper is, what you’ll probably really remember about Those Who Wish Me Dead, if anything, is Jolie’s silhouette surrounded by flames, or the tension of Allison blowing more than smoke in a couple of hapless killers’ faces.

The post Those Who Wish Me Dead Ending Explained appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[howardlinkedin]

“Miss H! Read with accents!”

I take a lot of pride in my voice. I have a very teacher-y voice, and I’m also (to toot my horn) really versatile with how I project it. I enjoy altering my voice to make different octaves and enunciations. Honestly, I could have been a voice actor if I kicked my own behind and went in that direction. Instead I realized my love of corralling children around, and equally falling in love with ornery, bratty, fifth graders. I have a (possibly bad) habit of becoming attached to any child who enters my peripheral and wanting to commit mass shenanigans with them like some kind of chicken who sees wandering baby ducks and thinks “those could be my kids too , heck.” 

Anyway. 

I’ve begun to see a pattern. And it’s kind of a sad one. The majority of children who enter my Den of Learning, they can’t stand reading. They find zero enjoyment out of it. In the beginning of every school year, every class I have held, can’t even stand my giving them a read aloud (where a teacher free-reads a story of their choice to the class). It had baffled me, honestly. 

I get it, not everyone will actively LIKE to sit down and read a book. That’s not what I’m meaning here. What I saw was rather large groups of children who didn’t even hold enthusiasm to reading a good story in class, much less listening to one. Too large of groups. 

“What the double heck?” I thought. “What’s wrong with this picture.” 

And, again, not to toot my own horn, many of my kids throughout the years would come to me explaining how I taught them to enjoy reading. That before me, they dreaded it. I would always reflect, like why? Why me? You’ve had five years of schooling before me (Kinder to Fourth), what happened? What do I do?

I have to teach eleven year olds to inference and locate main ideas in complex texts. I have to teach them to reach higher levels of understanding on vocabulary through context clues and close reading. I have to foster comprehension skills and digging up the theme through murky and vague excepts of novels that many children have never heard of before. Which, as a teacher, this all has it’s importance! But this is not something wholly different from what other teachers in their field in the lower grades have done before. 

So what was it?

Even my boss often asks me this, because my kids score higher than expected or average on state reading tests. The fourth grade teachers get nosey (and sometimes mad) that the kids they had before, whose scores were in the far-below mark of growth. But I literally had no answer further than what every other teacher has learned to do, in terms of teaching strategies. 

I honest to God do not do anything much different than other teachers in my building. We’ve had the same trainings, the same expectations on us as educators from our boss and district. Except, I apparently do. 

Some of you might remember that in the store last weekend, I ran into one of my past fifth graders (they’re now in sixth, moving on to seventh). We hugged, I cried and embarrassed them, waved hello to their side-eyeing parent, and went through the ritual of “who are you”s and “what have you been up to”s. 

“You know, it’s because of you that I learned to love reading so much.” They stated, proud like they just announced they found the cure for cancer and punched a bully in the face at the same time. 

This led into me finally asking “BABE, why? What did I do?” (I seem to always call my baby brat kids Babe out of some motherly, hind-brained instinct it seems.) 

After looking at me like I was crazy (which, many of my kids do naturally). They were in disbelief that I even asked them this. But I’m 100% of the belief that children can teach you anything just as well as they can be taught. 

“It’s because you read with accents.” They said. 

“Accents” being, apparently, what many of my kids call the voices I make when I read. 

As someone who enjoys talking, and reading, and being a general ham, I love to read out loud and create voices for characters as I read. And to be completely honest, I was of the arrogant assumption that everyone did this. 

Every time we would pick up a story, for whatever kind of lesson, many of my kids would beg for me to “read with accents.” or “make voices!” 

“Miss H! Read with an accent!” They would bellow. 

I was stumped. What did that have to do with anything?

“You would always tell us to make voices ourselves.” Which was true. It was fun! Make them read with silly voices! “It taught me how to make them in my head, and it made reading more enjoyable.” 

As awed as I have been by learning this simple, flamboyant thing I do, it also kind of saddened me. 

Because, this ultimatly meant, that after all this time, no one had ever read to them in this way? No character voices? No tone or prosody? Not even at home?

I mean, double heck, I even make a pronounced voice when reading informational texts. 

As a school year goes on, I do notice that my kids pick up certain expression and enunciations when reading. (Basically, they start reading how I do.) Which is not abnormal; when you send long hours with people for long days, you start to pick up some of their habit and traits. I never thought much of it. 

The point of this, is that it truly underlines the importance of reading to your children. And to put effort into it, because if they’re not shown the effort, then how will they know effort with reading? Teachers too, read to your kids with joy and “accents!” 

Teaching children how to read with Voice, in turn helps then generate their own personal voice. And, apparently, helps them find joy in reading. (And as a plus for teachers, you look really good after state tests.) 

I had mulled over this new found fact all this week, and really observed the reactions to my kids in their reading. To their heedless need for me to “read with accents!” And how they copy and try and portray this skill into their own reading. 

Man, it made my heart swell. 

I’m probably gonna cherish that phrase more than ever now. (Though I wonder how I explain this all to my boss that my reading like an obnoxious toon character boosts my kids’ reading scores...)