"Think very carefully and with as much detail as possible,
tell us what happened in that half hour." At around the 30 minute mark of Knives Out, Detective Benoit Blanc flips a coin.
It's also the moment the story flips genres. Let's take a step back for a second.
Spoilers!
The first act of the story makes us believe that we're about to watch a traditional Agatha Christie style murder mystery.
We have a confined setting, a large cast of colourful
characters as suspects and an ingenious sleuth here to solve the mystery.
Visually the house looks like the mansion from Clue, a movie that satirizes the tropes of the genre and like Clue, the movie is signalling
to us that it's going to take these familiar genre elements and make them as big and splashy as possible.
We think we have a good handle on the kinds of twists the story will take but then...
Writer director, Rian Johnson throws a curve ball that we're not expected.
He convinces us that we already know the answer to who killed Harlan Thrombey. An
extended flashback tells us that it was his nurse with the morphine in the attic,
but by accident. It's at this point that the movie ceases to be an Agatha Christie
detective story and instead follows the story structure of a different genre: crime stories
Now I know those sort of sound like the same genre and yes detective stories are a sub-genre of crime stories
but even though they have the same subject matter, we're going to think of them as different
genres in this video because they differ on two points.
They have different protagonists and as a result, they have different story structures. In detective stories,
the detective is obviously the protagonist and we see the events from their perspective.
There are
five major beats that these stories hit. In Act 1, we meet all of the characters in a single location and learn a little about
their backstories. Then at the break into Act 2 or sometimes at the midpoint,
a murder is committed. Act 2 follows the detective as he
investigates the crime until at the break into Act 3 he has an epiphany and
realizes who the culprit is. Then for the entirety of Act 3 he explains in detail how the crime was committed and who is
responsible. This formula has been done
so many times and audiences have become so familiar with it, that the murder mystery detective genre is anything but mysterious
A crime story on the other hand is different because it is not a mystery. In one of his lectures,
John Truby, the writer of The Anatomy of Story makes the distinction between the two
genres as such:
"Crime is a broad category of stories that puts less emphasis on detection and more emphasis on the battle between the criminal and the lawman."
In the crime genre, we follow both characters.
It isn't a mystery to the audience who committed the crime even though it is sometimes a mystery for the detective. Crime stories
have a much more fluid structure than detective stories
but we can still identify some similarities. For instance, in a lot of crime stories we're introduced to a character who is
innocent at the beginning, then at the break into Act 2, they commit a crime which makes them extremely
wealthy or powerful as Truby puts it. Throughout Act 2, the
detective tries to catch the criminal and the criminal tries to escape. Until at the break into Act 3,
the criminal makes a critical mistake
and for the rest of Act 3 things continue to fall apart for the criminal. At the end, the criminal gets away with it, is
arrested or dies. Okay. So now that we've got our building blocks for each genre,
let's take a look at how Knives Out weaves them together. Right off the bat, we start with the death of Harlan.
So, we take a moment that is usually saved for the break into Act 2 and move it to the start. Then for the duration
Of Act 1, we do what usually takes two acts for a detective story to accomplish. The authorities interrogate the various suspects
but then Johnson uses those interrogations as a reason to motivate flashbacks to the character introductions,
which was the party that happened the night before the murder.
The party could have been Act 1 of this movie but by putting it in the past Johnson gets us through all of this in
30 minutes. Marta's flashback is the whole first act of a crime movie.
She starts out innocent, accidentally commits a crime and then take steps to hide it. Act 2 of Knives Out matches up perfectly with
Act 2 of a crime movie. We cut back and forth between Marta and Blanc as she tries to conceal the crime.
Act 2 ends with the way a crime movie ends with Blanc catching Marta.
but then the movie pivots into the ending of a detective story. Blanc has his epiphany when he realizes that
Marta is innocent and then delivers a classic Sherlockesque explanation of the crime.
This exact same story could have been told entirely as a straight detective story from Blanc's perspective.
But I think that would have been a weaker film for a bunch of reasons. Firstly by convincing us
we know the crime. A large portion of the audience stops trying to guess who the culprit is
and instead settles in and just enjoys the movie.
Secondly, it freshens up the stale story structure of a detective film and makes the movie extremely rewatchable. Not to generalize too much
but I'm usually not too interested in watching detective stories more than twice...
maybe, but knives out is just so consistently fun that I could watch it a hundred times.
Mysteries can only be solved once but Knives Out offers more than just a puzzle. And that's because thirdly, having two
perspective characters in a detective movie just opens up so much opportunity for comedy.
We're led to believe Benoit Blanc is a brilliant detective but getting to see things from Marta's perspective, while he's
investigating the crime just constantly undermines the idea that he's some great genius and it does all that by breaking one of the core rules
of the crime genre. As Truby states in crime stories,
you want to "make both guys great. Both guys equal. You want to think of a good crime story as a heavy-weight fight.
We want the best cop and we want the best criminal, which is why they must be equal. If one is much better than the
other, fight's over in the second round.
We've got to have to equal titans so that we can have a 12-round
bloodbath." In Nnives Out, Marta and Blanc are equally matched in that they are equally fallible.
Marta is not a criminal mastermind and Benoit Blanc is not Hercule Poirot. It's like watching a heavyweight fight
where both boxers are missing every punch.
"God, you're not much of a detective are you?"
"Well, to be fair...you make a pretty lousy murderer."
I've seen movies use the aesthetics of one genre while following the story structure of another. I've seen movies start with the tone of one
genre
and then switch into the tone of another. Knives Out is the only movie I can think of that starts following the story structure of
one genre, pivots into another and then back.
In my next video,
I'm going to take a look at some of the movies that inspired
Knives Out which includes some Agatha Christie classics like Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. If you want to check out
the original stories then you can pick up Poirot's
Finest Cases which includes both of them and a bunch of other murder mysteries for free with a
30-day trial on Audible, the sponsor of this video. But since Knives Out is very much about class conflict,
I also want to recommend an audiobook on the subject that I really enjoyed recently. In Winners
Take All, Anand Giridharadas takes a look at what he calls the elite charade of changing the world.
It's a really an eye-opening account of how there is often
something quite insidious behind billionaires presenting themselves as the solutions to society's problems.
It's a great read and very of the moment.
If you want to give it a listen
then go to audible.com/justwrite or text justwrite to 500-500.
With a thirty-day trial you can choose one audiobook and two Audible originals for free. Thanks for watching everyone and a big
thank you to my patrons for supporting me on Patreon! Keep writing everyone!