The Politics of the "Knives Out" Movies

And the problem of predictability

“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”, the Sequel to 2019’s “Knives Out”, came out on Netflix over Christmas and got a lot of traction on social media for it’s endless celebrity cameos, satiric portrayals of current events and veiled lampooning of prominent public figures.

It’s a detective story/ whodunnit in the Agatha Christie mold, and follows in her footsteps in that she often crystallised the social types of her day as touchpoints for her readers. Christie is one of my heroes, and I’ve greatly enjoyed the movies with some small reservations.

Touching on current affairs, social types and public figures in 2022 means something very different in than it would have in 1922 (or ‘32, or ‘42…) when Christie was writing; today it means that your work is a shot in our ominpresent, oppressive culture war. What are the political themes of these movies?

(Spoilers ahead, so go and watch the movies if you haven’t already. Although, side note, I never listen to spoiler warnings, do you? Literally never. Anyway: spoilers.)

The core story of both Knives Out movies is of a pure-hearted, determined and beautiful woman from a racial minority battling against entitled white men seeking to make her a pawn in their games, and deprive her of her just desserts.

In Knives Out, angelic (she literally can’t lie) Dreamer nurse Ana De Armas is framed for murder by rich kid Chris Evans, who tries to play her off against other members of his family to swindle an inheritance which is rightfully hers. The inheritance is a metaphor for America, with the family representing dissolute, greedy and stupid white americans, and De Armas the new wave of immigrants to whom the country belongs by moral right.

This isn’t an arcane reading, at the end of the movie Evans states the theme directly to De Armas, saying “we allowed you into our home… welcomed you into our family. And now you think you can steal it from us. You think I'm not going to fight to protect my own, our birthright, our ancestral home?”

In Glass Onion Janelle Monae plays twins - one is a brilliant entreprenuer scammed out of her company by glib tech-bro con-man Edward Norton. The other is an earnest, gentle primary school teacher who investigates her sibling’s death only to be tricked, gas-lit and brutalised by the same priveleged white man.

Proximity to Liberal preferences and faithfulness to those ideals is what indicates whether you’re a good or bad in these movies. Self-identified or implicitly Liberal characters can be bad, but they’re bad because they fail to live up their ideals. People we identify as illiberal are bad people with bad ideas.

In Knives Out, Toni Collette plays a parody of Gwyneth Paltrow, whose daughter smokes pot and is studying a “crypto-marxist postdeconstructual feminist poetry theory” degree in Unversity. Both characters stand up for De Armas against their racist relatives and we are invited to think better of them to that extent, though when pressurised they push her under the bus to get at the money. Nevertheless it is the superficially “Liberal” type characters who are allowed that depth and the extent to which they fail to live up to those ideals that makes them bad.

Inherent identity charactertistics always trump express political preferences however, so whiteness, and particularly the intersection of white and male, is almost a 100% guarantee that a significant character is a wrong ‘un and vice versa - distance from those qualities makes you good.

In Glass Onion, Democratic Senate Candidate and climate activist Kathryn Hahn and scientist Leslie Odom Jr. are theoretically bad guys, having participated in the plot to rob Janelle Monae. But both have the benefit of being portrayed as good, normal people who had a single moment of weakness rather than as cartoons, and the villainy of their backstory sits awkwardly with how we actiually experience them in the movie. Their identity chacteristics and political alignment are a kind of moral plot-armour.

On the other hand, With the possible exception of Chritsopher Plummer in Knives Out, all of the significant white male characters in both movies are straightforwardly bad guys.

An exception to this is the detective himself, Beniot Blanc, played by Daniel Craig. This was rectified slightly in the most recent movie by implying that he might be gay, introducing Hugh Grant as a room-mate of uncertain personal significance. Implying that Blanc holds the right set of moral credentials allows us (or really, the movie’s creators) space to continue thinking of him as the good guy and not feel too guilty about it.

This approach is redcutive in it’s own way - non-white people in particular are pure souls and don’t get to be morally complex, or villainous, except when they have been corrupted by the proximity to the combined toxins of whiteness, maleness and/or illiberal ideas (in order of toxicity). There is only one truly bad non-white significant character in either movie, Dave Bautista in the Second one, and that’s ok because he’s a Joe Rogan-surrogate / MRA/ Twitch streamer.

I’ve enjoyed these movies. They’re full of deft and revealing character moments that have nothing to do with politics. In Knives Out, they want to communicate to us that both Jamie Lee Curtis’s character and Toni Collette’s are effete snobs, but that Curtis is much smatrer than Collette. So in successive scenes we have Curtis saying to Blanc: “I read the New Yorker story about you”, then Collette saying “You’re Benoit Blanc? I read a tweet about a New Yorker article about you!”

The movies are full of great performances (Collette and Curtis are both fantastic) and their nature as puzzles means they stand up very well to multiple viewings, successive rewatches revealing hidden details you missed the first time round. Watching Glass Onion again it’s fun to note Edward Norton steal people’s ideas in real time and cloak his shallowness and stupidity by allowing everyone to assume he’s a genius just because he’s rich.

But the nature of making a movie that plays with social types and current affairs is that you are reliant on identifying the recurrent cliches and tropes that are ripe for mockery and subversion. It’s a slight shame, though not surprising, that the creators of the movie can only see types, tropes and cliches that fall on the other side of the politico-cultural fence. The ones that fall on their own side are invisible to them, and as likely to be perpetuated as subverted by these movies. For all their undeniable qualities that makes me like them a little less.

Let’s get back to Agatha Christie for a moment. She was above all a craftsperson, so let us look at this as a structural, technical problem. The Knives Out movies are mysteries - that means they are asking you to look at a group of people and decide who the good ones and the bad ones are, and why. The moral framework of these movies works in direct opposition to that, because you can literally sort the good and bad people by eye. Certain people can never be the villains and certain people must always be; and always for the same reasons. The two movies are sufficiently well made that I'm confident that writer/ director Rian Johnson can get on top of it in advance of a third installment. He can think of it as a little mystery to solve.