Note: This piece is concurrently being run on the Oddly Specific Pop website, where I am a contributor. You can visit it at oddlyspecificpop.com
There was a moment while watching Rian Johnson’s masterpiece whodunnit, Knives Out, where I gasped out loud. Ok, well, there were several. You’d likely guess one of them, which we’ll get to, but another was one that happened on the way to that Big Moment.
The smaller moment I’m referring to happens when Don Johnson’s Richard Drysdale has a public conversation involving Marta (played by Ana de Armas), the nurse for the patriarch of the family, Christopher Plummer’s Harlan Thrombey, whose death is the impetus for the whole affair. The conversation starts off banal if spicy: gathered under one roof, we’ve been made aware that the clan, like any family in America, holds members who exist across the entire political spectrum. There is even a mention, at one point, of one member of the family being a literal Nazi. (Again, more on that later.)
The conversation centers itself around politics, of course, and winds its way to immigration. Richard is clearly on the anti-immigrant wing of the spectrum but fancies himself different from the Nazi in the group. We might call this the “George W. Bush” or “Paul Ryan” wing of the right: polite in its xenophobia.
He makes this distinction by pointing out that Marta, who is an immigrant from an undisclosed part of Latin America, is one of the “good” immigrants who he champions: someone who did it the “right” way and works hard, contributing to the American project. He motions Marta over and proceeds to place Marta in the middle of the increasingly tense conversation, eventually showing his endgame: wanting to get Marta to affirm his beliefs.
Lots of things are at play in this moment: power dynamics, the all-too-familiar experience of someone trying to use your membership in a marginalized class to co-sign their bigotry, the dehumanizing experience of the entire thing. But what it means over the course of the film is that it makes clear the fractures within the family.
Fractures that disappear entirely when the the twist is revealed: that the inheritance each member is expecting due to the death of Harlan won’t be coming. More, the inheritance is being left to Marta.
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Johnson’s film works as a fantastic comment on class politics broadly and at the hypocrisy of the wealthy class specifically. Throughout the entire film we are treated to each family member going back on their principles and abandoning anything resembling decency in search of retaining what Johnson makes clear via a terrific monologue delivered by Chris Evans’ Ransom Drysdale: a reality that caters to every single entitled whim of the Thrombeys.
In fact, Evans goes a step further by explicitly expressing that entitlement by noting that the wealth that belongs to their family is their birthright. A wild statement - that cleverly stands in contrast to the opening sequence that shows every single family member going through pains to talk about the various things they are doing to prove they are “self-made” people - that would probably have been the moment of the film if not for the other moment that made me gasp.
It was, like the Marta conversation, one rooted in racism. But this one wasn’t a conversational piece that slowly ratcheted up. This was the exclamation point at the end of the sequence, despite being played as a throwaway line.
It’s when the alleged Nazi - played by Jaeden Martell - becomes an avowed Nazi by focusing his anger at Marta over the lost inheritance by screaming out a racist slur. He calls her an anchor baby.
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The thing I’ve long felt about displays of overt racism or bigotry in fictionalized media is that it can’t be gratuitous or exploitative. It’s got to have meaning.
Because, otherwise, it’s just traumatic for the people in the audience for whom those slurs might affect. And then it changes the experience of watching a film in a way that one can’t help: I can’t change my identity, for example, but the film’s characters will unleash language that attacks that identity. My experience will be entirely different from those who don’t fall within my social class. It is a rendering of a division by the filmmakers that becomes explicit in the viewing. It implies that this piece of media isn’t intended for me.
I thought to myself that as much as I’d been enjoying Knives Out, I would need to be careful about my recommendation. That if I were to recommend it to others, that it’d have to go out with a warning about the racist language. Especially because some of that racist language was wrapped in jokes. If the crowd wasn’t clued in or if you managed to, as I did, watch this film in a town that might be inclined to empathize with - or to support - anti-immigrant politics, then the experience of watching this film would be a bit difficult given crowd reaction to the scenes.
What becomes plainly evident, though, is that those moments aren’t meant for us to align with the perpetrators. We’re supposed to empathize with Marta and see these incidents as a work of horror.
Or, rather, how you receive those jokes says more about you than it does about the film. And the amount of laughs sprinkled in among the horrified audience of the theater I watched it in, seemed to affirm that I was among mixed company; among people who did find humor in acts of racism and did not, instead, see them as a warped, funhouse mirror reflection of humane interaction.
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By the time we get to the use of the slur, we’d been telegraphed both that the protagonist of the film and its heroine is Marta. And that the entire Thrombey family is a set of villains.
When the slur is allowed to hang in the air - with the collective gasp of the audience members truly stunned over this vile display - the lack of recrimination from the family only serves to confirm everything we’d learned about them. That they’d lied to everyone, including themselves, about everything - down to their own decency.
Because even as that slur was cast, Marta had already been betrayed by the supposed left-leaning family members. She’d already been subjected to condescension and patronizing attempts at empathy. She’d already been used as a pawn to excuse one family member’s racism.
And so the final nail in the coffin, as it were, was this moment cast out there. It could have toppled the whole thing over - a Christmas tree over stuffed with racist and xenophobic imagery bowing under the weight of that final, major racist star at the top.
Rian Johnson’s incisiveness and clear intent not to have these moments overtake the film prevents that. And rather the pieces serve the broader rhetorical point: that the only solidarity these people, being stand-ins for the top economic class, are able to carve out, is solidarity among each other.
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The reveal in Johnson’s critique of class politics is stunningly timely. There’s no way he could have foreseen when drafting this script that, leading up to its release, America would be swept up in a series of moments that would serve to underscore his argument.
That Bill Gates would stop just shy of indicating that he would unleash another four years of a Donald Trump presidency on the rest of us in order to avoid the likes of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Julian Castro who all seem bent on insuring that the wealthiest 1% pay their fair share in taxes. That in order to maintain a hold on their wealth, self-billed genius billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg would refuse to scale their products back despite clear evidence that its mere existence is threatening our democracy. That the same chilling entitlement that was present in Ransom’s monologue is animating Jeff Bezos’ quest to literally own everything, ethics be damned.
Knives Out, then, serves as a perfect piece from which to dissect and better illuminate the things that are standing as hurdles towards progress; towards a more just reality. It would sit comfortably well with Get Out’s critique of racism in America, or Us’s own critique of how wealth and privilege work. It seems to be in conversation The Last Black Man in San Francisco, if not necessarily in tone, at least in what it has to say about the people left behind in America’s conception of economic progress.
This film is a worthy addition to a canon that points to inequity and illuminates the hidden realities of the people struggling under this system. The people whose stories often don’t get told because the gatekeepers have a vested interest in preventing their stories be told, or simply don’t care to. The people that American wealth more broadly, and the wealth of the 1% specifically, allows to remain hidden.
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For all of this, I still struggled with the instances of overt racism throughout the film. Not because it was exploitative, as I’ve explained, but because watching acts of racism is a difficult thing. And, I presume, isn’t something most people would willingly subject themselves to.
Much of my time spent watching Knives Out was curled up and tense. Not only because the whodunit part was well crafted - which it is - but because the acts of racism appeared early and often. I didn’t expect that angle of the film and each micro-agression added up, almost to a climax, that ends with Martell’s Jacob Thrombey lobbing the slur at Marta.
It was that payoff that made everything that came before worth it. That made the racist invectives seem thoroughly thought out and carefully considered.
Because the work here wasn’t concerned with landing the jokes for the sake of punchlines. They were using the humor as a way to force people, hopefully, to reckon with the horror of that racism hiding in plain sight - even among people who have presented themselves as allies to you.
There is a lot to be said about the areas that were problematic - one of the sources of the racist “jokes” was how the family could never sort out where Marta’s country of origin was. There’s a terrific essay by Monica Castillo which delves into this specific issue. Now, I’m not Latinx, so I can’t speak to the dislocation that those incidences of racism might rise, but part of why I thought those moments worked was because as a Filipino immigrant, the experiences were relatable. People have tried to pan-Asian everyone with “almond-shaped” eyes into an amorphous section of the globe, usually East Asia.
So in those moments, I was able to import the same experiences of people saying casually, “You know, I have a cousin-in-law who’s Korean” or “Man, I bet you love karate” or “Hey, (insert anti-Asian but non-Filipino specific slur of choice).” More, watching them build into the looming tower of racist and wealth-backed terror was something to behold.
This film isn’t going to be for everyone. And I do believe it’s important to note that racial element is going to put people of color off for reasons that matter very much to them.
But if this film was about treading those spaces carefully and thoughtfully, while making incisive and necessary critiques about social class, then I’d say it’s quite the achievement. One might even say Johnson was trying to balance its ambitious premise on a knife’s edge - and got away with it.