KNIVES OUT: Love It If We Made It

Rating: 🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪
[TRAILER]

War has been incited and guess what?
You’re all invited
And you’re famous
Modernity has failed us

Someday, two-hundred-or-something years from now, the future populace of academics, intelligentsia, and thinking folk will look back at the things we do now—the horrid, racist, homophobic, patriarchal, and all-around transgressive things we do now—and reflect on them thusly: “Well it was a different time.” This is unacceptably inevitable.

What a macabre doom that we may only be as good as our weakest efforts. Or perhaps it is our best efforts that define the outcomes of our weakest? (Be so kind as to indulge that convoluted latter notion for me.)

We need to make art that disavows our contemporaries and ourselves of the moral relativist alibi. We owe it to each other to create cultural artifacts that shine an iPhone flashlight on the haughty nose of our illusionment. We gotta generate that which guts our guilty grandeur for its gory gaucheness.

I posit as one example of this: Rian Johnson’s whimsically charming whodunnit, Knives Out.

I didn’t really love the trailers for Knives Out. There was too much of that weird CGI nothingscape with floating knives that signaled to me a flaccid snore with little plot and less to say. What we ended up getting from Johnson, fresh off The Last Jedi, was a fascinatingly tight and poignantly snarky glimpse into our own IRL dark timeline.

Fun fact: when I first saw the title The Last Jedi, I thought to myself, “Isn’t there already one called The Last Jedi?” There isn’t, but it feels like there is.

This has been The Fun Fact Corner.

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Knives Out is about the Thrombey family. The patriarch has just died in an apparent suicide, but that’s definitely not the whole story. And basically all of the Thrombey clan is suspect. It feels old fashioned because it is.

But also, it’s NOT.

We’re first clued into this idea in an early scene where the pseudo-liberal audience-surrogate Meg greets protagonist/nurse Marta outside the family estate. Meg reprimands her shitty uncle for asking Marta if she’s with “the help.”

Shortly after doing this, Meg vaped. It looked so fucking stupid that I squirmed in my seat. Then, I shoved my own vape as far as possible into my pocket as I vowed to blow some Blueberry Dream Cloud in Rian Johnson’s smug little Ed Sheeran-ass face next time I dream about having dinner with him.

Meg occupies the left end of the political spectrum displayed by her family. At the other end is her cousin, an alt-right neo-Nazi boy with an all-time punchable face. The adults have their particular positions, but—being the privileged bourgeoisie they are—they ultimately occupy middle ground. (Somewhere between Biden and Romney, I would say.)

Status quo kind of folks.

This is pretty apt for a household whose wealth was—like America—built on story and myth. In the film’s climactic scene, as Ransom (Captain America) harangues at Marta about family birthright and shit, Benoit Blanc (James Bond) reminds him that the house in which they reside has not belonged to the family for that long. It was sold to them by a Pakistani businessman.

The Thrombeys make a lot of dumb assumptions about heritage. They keep referring to the country Marta’s parents emigrated from, and whether they ever guess correctly, the film never clarifies. (To wit, Ana de Armas is Cuban. Cuba is never mentioned.)

I have to assume that this is intentional, to allow for Marta to reflect the experience of many Latin nationalities. As illustrated in the film, the transgressions of white folks homogenize the struggles of others. The amoral plunder of Africa has done enough to allow for Beasts Of No Nation to have a geographically obscured setting. I don’t know. We probably could have gotten there and also allowed Marta more verbal agency and character definition. While Marta does literally get the last laugh in the film, it would have been nice if this particular thread had been tied up as well.

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While I was watching the scene which referenced a “Pakistani businessman,” I was reminded of Kumail Nanjiani’s SNL monologue, in which he talked about the aftermath of The Big Sick and subsequently receiving Go Back To India tweets. “I’ve never been to India,” he says in the monologue. “Are you just hoping I have an awesome vacation soon?”

Kumail is not the only person to be mistaken as an Indian person by buffoonish Euro-Americans. We’ve been doing that since 1492. I know Johnson isn’t playing off the Kumail-connection here, but the decision to have Blanc be specific about the nationality of the businessman feels intentional. As if even the “last gentleman sleuth” is still capable of fitting his entire racially insensitive foot in his mouth.

Fun fact, though: In 2012, before he was famous, Kumail was working a red carpet event for San Diego Comic Con (lol). He was conducting interviews, one of which was with Rian Johnson, who was there to promote his new film Looper. Kumail had been having a stressful day. He mistakenly says to Johnson, “can’t wait to see the remake of Total Recall.” They had a laugh about it afterwards. None of this is salient to the rest of this piece.

This has been The Fun Fact Corner.

As a self-avowed absurdist, I just want to recognize that there are also less politically fraught laughs throughout the film. The best of these has to be the scene where Blanc says “donut” about 20 times over the course of a minute. The accent Daniel Craig uses for Blanc has received some mixed reviews. Personally, I loved it and I will love it forever. If nothing else, it sets up the joke “CSI:KFC,” and I am thankful for that.

Okay. Back to the thematic shit:

Before the revealing of the will, horrible father Walt tells Marta that the family will “take care of her.” (They’ll give her some money.) But then, after Frank Oz tells everyone that Marta will be receiving all the money, Walt shows up at her home and threatens Marta’s family with deportation. It’s funny what the concept of losing control does to white people. (Says the white guy trying to distance himself from his reality and public privilege.)

Here’s young Frank Oz to distract you for a moment.

Whiteness isn’t a thing of which you get to absolve yourself just because you have anxiety. But art created by white folks over the years has often accomplished just that. White politeness is not an acceptable mask for dereliction of moral duty.

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Despite my aspirant Gen X aesthetics and perfunctory snark, I never really liked The Simpsons that much. I know the anime about a family set in a stateless town called Springfield is a great show, but it just isn’t for me.

I did however laugh way too hard at one moment in The Simpsons Movie:

The EPA decides to cover the entire town of Springfield in a large glass dome in an effort to contain a (probably metaphorical) toxic event. Upon the dome is projected the head of the EPA, Russ Cargill. He gets the crowd’s attention, and then this exchange takes place:

Russ Cargill: “Springfield has become…”

Man In Crowd: “Woo! Springfield!”

Russ Cargill: “...the most polluted city in the history of the planet.”

I love this joke so much. It works because people repping their city is the most predictable behavior known to man.

Kumail Nanjiani opens his only standup special, Beta Male, with this bit:

Kumail Nanjiani: “I used to live in New York. In Brooklyn.”

Several People: “Woo!”

Kumail Nanjiani: “Oh really? That was not my reaction. I was fucking terrified. Scariest place I’ve ever been in, and I grew up in fucking Pakistan.”

Several People: “Woo!”

Kumail Nanjiani: “Really? Woos for Pakistan? Alright.”

Look. I’ve been sort-of an escapist my whole life, and I still am. Tell me your book/movie/thing has a wizard in it, and I’ll immediately think about getting another mythologically inspired tattoo.

Escapist things have themes. But, they’re often themes about the nature of existence rather than specific hot-button issues. Religious zealots decried Harry Potter as the work of the devil, but it wasn’t because of Harry’s belief in the power of friendship or his acceptance of mortality.

You could make the case that Knives Out is a Trojan horse of a political statement. It’s a good time at the movies with your favorite stars, some mystery, some comedy, and most importantly: Chekhov’s Enormous Circle Of Knives.

Knives Out: There’s been a murder…

Me: Woo!

Knives Out: ... of American exceptionalism!

But I woo at that too. Even if the news is unfortunate, it’s nice to be seen. As a society, I want us to make more art about what is actually happening today. In fact, I’d love it if we made it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04l95wBTkaA