The Player Film Analysis

In the 1992 movie The Player (Robert Altman), the main character Griffin Mills, a wealthy movie executive, murders a writer, David Kahane, whom he believes to be terrorizing him after not producing Kahane’s movie. Griffin represents the kind of entitlement seen in Hollywood, he makes demands he has no right to be making, he cheats on his girlfriend, and the worst offense : he walks into Bicycle Thieves only to catch the last 5 minutes, and then has the audacity to suggest a remake where the message of economic disparity would likely be erased. While being questioned by the police in his office, Griffin is surrounded by old movie posters The choice in posters is very deliberate - the titles and subjects of all of these movies revolve around murder and prison, the …show more content…
In the movies “M”, “King Kong” and “Murder in the Big House” the antagonist is brought down, the person who committed the crime faces justice. In “M” both the mob and the murderer are arrested by police, in King Kong, Kong is defeated and in “Prison Break” the protagonist gets revenge on the man who killed his brother in law. What makes The Player different, is that Griffin is not brought to justice. While Griffin doesn’t blame another man for the crime he committed or expose another murderer to redeem himself, he allows another man to go to prison when he is falsely identified in the lineup. He is able to shut down the possibility of ever being pinned for the crime when a writer threatens to tell the police unless Griffin makes this writer's movie. The “Hollywood Ending” in the movies Griffin displays means that the bad guy is in jail or dead, and the good guy is alive and with his girl. The choices of movie posters are meant to contrast reality and fiction, fiction being that life is tied up in a nice little bow, and that bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people, and reality being that bad guys can easily get away with things if they are corrupted by the morals of