Make Every Word Count: Life Lessons from Knives Out
(Obligatory notice that this article contains spoilers for the Rian Johnson movie Knives Out. I won’t tell you whodunnit, but if you haven’t seen the movie yet this will give away some details.)
The reviews are true: Knives Out is a fantastic movie. It takes all the tropes of a murder mystery that you love and mixes them up to create something that is both familiar and brand new.
We saw it last night, in a full theater with gasps and laughs from the crowd around us. As the theater emptied, we sat and spent time talking about how our predictions matched the ending, what we noticed, and some of our favorite jokes.
(Mine was Blanc seeming to call Richard on his lie of seeing Hamilton at the Public. The donut speech is also particularly delicious. Pun intended.)
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the movie — both in terms of what Johnson does with storytelling (I write fiction) and in terms of what he is saying with the story itself.
For example, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the actress cast as the Latina nurse passes as Caucasian. I think that’s a deliberate choice to show the more subtle forms of racism that characters like the Thrombey family have.
