Knives Out. The house is America, and Ransom is Trump. What do I mean by this? What does
this mean for the film? And why might it present a long-term problem for our understanding of this
movie? Boy, am I glad you asked! First? The house is America. See,
Knives Out is broadly a whodunnit. And the heart, the power of the whodunnit is that it s never just
a whodunnit. Agatha Christie knew that, Rian Johnson knows it too and you can hear about
it in the director s commentary. Or, rather, you could, before they took it down. I found all the
relevant excepts in Cult Popture s video on Knives Out, though, so let me play one back for you.
Side note: that s a great video! It s linked below, go check it out! But, yeah. The thing about
the whodunnit is that always happens somewhere, it always binds up all sorts of people, all ranks of
people entrenched in roles and classes, acting out society in miniature. The detective comes in like
a scalpel, splitting open this microcosm, peeling layers back one by once until the
whole thing displays itself like a diorama. Despite what certain folks have you believe,
Rian Johnson is familiar with the mystery genre, the way a classic whodunnit operates,
and while Knives Out hardly plays this format straight, it is still built on this same
foundation. The diorama we see here, though, isn t the England of 100 years back, as in Christie, it
s something a little more familiar. The film doesn t hide this. It whacks you over the head with it,
a few times. There s that whole bit where the Thrombeys argue over immigration, using Marta as a
prop, ignorant to her real story the whole while. There s the surface-level progressivism of Meg,
and the Nazi child masturbating in the bathroom. The Thrombey House isn t just the Thrombey House.
It s also America, the America of the 2010s. A space in crisis, with superficially different
factions of rich white wankers vying for control, authority, all of whom take their power here as a
given, all of whom will do nasty things to defend it, all of whom implicitly take this space as
their birthright despite it being built by well, not them. These Thrombeys are the establishment,
the rich, the powerful and while they re not the only ones in the house we also see in Marta
and Fran a glimpse of a marginalised working class, the ones that keep the house running
they re the ones on top. Or at least they were. Ransom has this insidious appeal. Despite being a
member of this establishment, he pretends to be a threat, pretends to be an outsider determined
to wreck the system, to drain the swamp and this posturing is worryingly successful,
even to the very people he s trying to dispossess. He can make you forget about the way he make the
help call him a different name, forget about his suspect activities, forget about the way he claims
to be all about entrepreneurship, but is really all about daddy s money. Our protagonist Marta is
the marginalised, the poor, the underclass, the minority. The Thrombeys? The establishment? Even
those professing to be on her side, aren t, not really. They don t know her, not accurately, they
don t care about her. She fetches them sandwiches, and she s a tool they use to win arguments. In the
moment, Ransom seems an escape hatch an answer to this gridlock of malicious, toxic posturing.
Soon enough, though, we come to see he s not a solution to this he s an intensification of it,
an extreme version of the others, their worst tendencies materialised. The Thrombeys don t
care about the help? Ransom murders and frames the help. The others are nice to Marta when it
suits them? Ransom tricks her, uses her as a long-running pawn in his power play. She s the
one that ll end up taking the fall. Sometimes it s hard to see when you re being manipulated when
you re desperate, when they re charistmatic, it s hard to tell a con from a helping hand.
The truth doesn t stay hidden. It can t stay hidden forever. By the end of the film, this
front falls away. We see that the would-be saviour to the house s crisis isn t a better option,
an outsider free from this toxic Thrombey privilege in fact he s the most devoted of
all to these xenophobic, quasi-nationalist myths of worth and genetic birthright.
He s better, he was born better, he is owed power and status and all those lies, all those cons,
those gestures of outreach, were cold, calculated moves to accrue and safeguard this power. The
house is the America of the 2010s, and well, you ve all seen the thumbnail Ransom is Trump.
I m not reducing Knives Out to just this. It isn t just a microcosm of Trump-era politics. To take
it solely as a story about Ransom is to downplay Marta s role. Knives Out is an minority s story,
a woman s story. It s also a brilliantly acted showcase for an all-star ensemble cast,
and a really fun new spin on an aging genre. This is just one layer but this is a layer,
and it s the layer I m focusing on for this video. And even this layer isn t just this,
just allegory. The point here isn t simply Ransom is Trump. The point is Ransom loses.
The point is that Ransom loses because of Marta the marginalised, the working class, minority
hero so pure-hearted that lying makes her vomit. The point is that Ransom s lies, his schemes,
his bullshit, it all reached a critical mass and it was rejected. When this murderer is defeated,
the man who albeit indirectly killed Harlan Thrombey, the patriarch, this
imagined founding father, the American Dream made corporeal? It isn t thanks to those in charge,
those with the power, the resources. It s thanks to those without. Justice comes from below.
In our world now, post-2020, the world where Trump lost, narrowly, where the decisive blows
in that fateful election were struck by women and people of colour turning out to the polls
in droves? The heft of this ending is clearer than ever. Ransom s done damage. Killed people,
ruined lives. But it s not too late to stop the damage from spiralling, and in the crucial moment,
Marta s nerve holds. Ransom lashes out, one final strike, but it s a dud. And so off he goes,
heavy with shame and vomit. The swamp is drained, with Ransom in it. When Knives Out was being
put together, when it was released, a sitting president hadn t failed to be re-elected in over
25 years. This was a bold vision, a bold argument for the limits of bullshit, for the limits of
Trumpism. Watching it now, though, reading this ending in 2023 is cathartic. This vision of a
demagogue s defeat is vindicated. The optimism isn t misplaced it s fitting. It s powerful. It
s brave. Or at least, that s how it reads now. In ancient Rome, the most successful generals
would be given triumphs essentially, big parades, where they d just flex their achievements in
public, on repeat, to crowds of adoring citizens. But it s said that whenever this happened,
a key part of the process was the presence of a slave, who d shadow the general, repeating
just two words, over and over, into the hero s ear. Memento mori. Remember, you are mortal.
Remember this triumph will not last forever. There s an episode of New Girl s sixth season,
called Hubbedy Bubby, which aired just a week or two before the 2016 US presidential election,
and which sees two members of the main cast, Jess and Cece, canvassing for Hillary Clinton.
Stay with me, here. It s rarely in the forefront, but throughout the episode, you get a sense there
s never really a doubt what the election s outcome ll be. The main challenge Jess
and Cece face in this episode isn t convincing people to vote for Hillary, the obvious, safe,
non-explicitly xenophobic, misogynist candidate it s finding people who haven t already decided to do
so. She s the obvious pick. It s in the bag, don t worry about it, and New Girl doesn t worry about
it, at all. The whole election becomes little more than a privileged game as the episode ends
with Jess vote going to Winston, her roommate, because she and Cece lost a bet to Schmidt the
show s only remotely right-leaning protagonist, who himself is more bothered about Paul Ryan 2020
than anything else presuming, as everyone else does, as this world does, that Trump s just a
glitch in the system, that business as usual will persist indefinitely. Even the Trump supporters
we see aren t invested in The Donald s success, not really, not even enough to bother voting.
Like a lot of episodes from shows which tried to be topical about the 2016 election,
this one aged poorly and it did so very quickly. A matter of days after Hubbedy Bubby aired,
Donald Trump won the election, and this episode, like so many others, which calmly laughed off the
possibility of a Trump presidency, began to seem like an artefact from a simpler past,
a more na ve past. Fans of New Girl tend to agree that this one sticks out. They call it depressing
to rewatch . It s an episode full of misplaced confidence, but that s not where the rub lies,
not exactly. See, New Girl is a liberal-minded, feminist show rarely explicitly, but this
is really the guiding ethos here. It s about single life in Obama s America. Life s tricky,
and it s a show about people figuring it all out but it s the people that are the barrier to this,
not the all. Jess, Cece, and all their friends live in an OK world. Sometimes life is hard,
but success, happiness, love, satisfaction are all within reach, attainable for all so long as dues
are paid, so long as personal, professional, emotional growth is pursued. It s the end of
history in miniature. The world beyond this little corner of LA is stable, it makes sense,
it follows this liberal logic. But that isn t true, and I think the reason Hubbedy Bubby is so
depressing to rewatch is that we know, and we can never unknow, that the following days saw reality
fall short of this. In retrospect, this episode isn t just wrong, it s cloying. It feels like the
product of a misjudged, out of touch worldview, one that d be consigned to the history books
a few short days after Hubbedy Bubby aired. I don t want to be too harsh on New Girl here
given the production schedules of shows like this, the episode would have been written way
in advance, maybe even at a point where the election s outcome looked like a sure bet.
And I m not trying to say that fiction like this should stay in its lane. This isn t some sermon
against stories getting political. Of course not I have a lot of respect for shows and movies which
go out of their comfort zone to take swings like this, to gesture toward the nonexistence of the
divide between ideology and culture even when those swings miss. It s just a great example of
the way this kind of thing can be a double edged sword. All media reflects the time, the culture,
the conditions of its production, of course, but when contemporary affairs or mores are
this central to the story being told, this kind of direct, purposeful timeliness can cut both
ways. Bringing fiction into direct conversation with contemporary politics means the text is
better able to touch the real, to prompt laughter, thought, or even re-evaluation in the viewer but
it also means reality comes to weigh more heavily on the text. It becomes almost impossible to
mentally preserve that divide even if you want to. So an episode of New Girl becomes a black sheep,
becomes depressing to rewatch, because you can t rewatch it without seeing, painfully
clearly just how wrong it was, how misplaced this faith in the system was, and how gaudy
and presumptuous the episode was, always was. But what does any of this have to do with Knives Out?
Well it s a reminder. Memento mori. At the moment, after 2020, Knives Out stands. Reality hasn t laid
bare the flaws in the film s philosophy not yet, at least. So it hasn t aged badly. It
isn t depressing to rewatch, and it doesn t seem to be some outdated relic from a more na
ve time. It seems astute. You can still buy into it, wholeheartedly. But thinking about
misfires like Hubbedy Bubby is important because like the slave whispering to the general, it
makes us remember that triumph is contingent. The meaning, this meaning it isn t necessarily fixed,
or stable. It can change, shatter, in an instant. Is Knives Out an incisive, pointed exploration of
the limits of Trumpism? The limits of bullshit? The resilience of the marginalised? Or is it a
na ve liberal fantasy? At the moment, it looks one way. But how will it look in 2024? 2028?
We can t say. I can t tell you, not yet. But what I can say is that I don t think we re done with
Knives Out. I don t think the way we understand this film s resolution has settled yet. Maybe it
never will. And I m sure the minds behind Knives Out would have been aware of this problem of
posterity, would have known they were building on shifting sands, asking questions that couldn t be
definitively answered, at least not any time soon. But I think that s fitting. It s a bold move. It s
a bold movie. It s taking a brave stance, and that stance is made braver by the ultimate contingency
of any future vindicating it. But at least for the moment, this finale looks pretty good.
Thanks for watching. This is probably the end of Knives Out, Glass Onion season here on the
channel, but hey, never say never. There s some really cool stuff in the pipeline, so stay tuned,
and I wanna say a few quick thank yous first to everyone who s left supportive comments over the
past few days, during a testing time. If you know, you know. I d also like to thank Mechanist Gamma
and TSD Talks, who helped me out with some Discord moderation amidst an influx of unseriousness,
they re both great creators themselves, check them out and also to Cult Popture for giving me
the go-ahead on reusing those clips. Finally, huge thanks to all my Patreon supporters onscreen now,
especially Ryan Emerle, I m really super grateful to all of you. That s it for now, see you soon!