Nostalgia, Knives Out and Rian Johnson | Reflective Nostalgia and Storytelling

Spoilers. Duh.

The third instalment of Rian Johnson’s Benoit Blanc series, Wake Up Dead Man, was released at the end of last year. While I did research and re-watches for a future video essay on that movie specifically, I came to really understand something fundamental to these movies more generally. Rian Johnson’s creation of Benoit Blanc is nothing short of extraordinary. As a massive fan of the detective genre, Johnson just gets it in a way many seem to fail to nail. He’s recalling and returning to this classic sense of detective fiction, but without resorting to some kind of short hand glance. He doesn’t overly rely on the genre to do the heavy lifting for him.

Rian Johnson clearly loves classic detective stories, as am I. As you maybe are. And when we, as lovers and scholars of fiction, see something well crafted and well told, we feel the need to try and dissect it. Maybe this is because we want to understand our own entanglement, maybe we want to replicate, But we find the beats, the common strands, the types of characters and settings that make it all tick.

But the thing is, sometimes writers will replicate these things but something will feel off. Like it’s just trying to be something it never was. And that’s because it’s not necessarily about pulling apart strings of content that make a thing, but rather in understanding the story as a whole, with its context and function and deep inner dimensions. Pulling it apart reduces it to a spreadsheet of facts and bits. But seeing it not only in its presentation but also in what its doing with this presentation, we can see the true workings of a piece.

So, this understanding is going to be doing double lifting for us today. Not only is this how I think Rian Johnson goes about his writing, but also this will be how we come to understand Rian Johnson’s work. This intention on more than just presentation is how Rian Johnson understands classic detective fiction, most notably Agatha Christie. And it’s also how w will understand how Rian Johnson uses his own, and our, nostalgia - because he did not just replicate the nostalgia but truly understands its replication.

Despite each movie being a very different in feel - in colour, in vibe, in setting - there are connective threads between them all. Of course, one such thread is our detective Benoit Blanc. Like all the classic detective series, like Poirot or Marple, he moves through stories without dominating over them. Our setting and story structures feel like classic Agatha Christie. The first iteration of this series starts with a beautiful shot of an eccentric country house, where a murder took place far away from other social touches. The second film replicates ideas like Death on the Nile or Murder on the Orient Express - when we are introduced to a large network of characters, our detective being put on a place outside of anyone’s consideration, and we wonder just when the murder will happen.

Rian Johnson utilises these active beats and classic presentations of the genre, appealing to our nostalgic interests in detective stories. Even some of the background elements draw us into this. Marta’s mother is watching Murder She Wrote. The reading list at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude includes classic authors like Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr. Not only does Rian Johnson use his own nostalgia to inform his writing, he directly points us to these elements, too.

In fact, this reading list, with two Agatha Christies, Carr, and even Poe, points heavily to the inspiration of the writing, from unreliable narrator, to weapon substitution, and setting. He doesn’t hide the nostalgia of the Golden Age detective, he shows it to us outright, appealing to us who feel the same. But he uses nostalgia in a fascinating way. Johnson uses classic detective tropes, elements, setting, and ideologies to reflect on the act of yearning itself, the appeals society has to times of the past, and sometimes of the a future. Rian Johnson is actively using his nostalgia and nostalgic writing to fight nostalgia itself.

Before we focus on these movies, we should first talk a little more about nostalgia itself. Etymologically, the word is a combination of “nostos” meaning homecoming, and “algos” meaning pain. Nostalgia became an important more literary trope fro the Romantics, but has remained an interesting and important human emotion for as long as we could describe it as such. We all yearn for something - easier times, a home we cannot go to, an innocence long ago lost.

We typically think of nostalgia as something like the longing for the “good old days” and has come to be representative of everything from political movements to video games. For some, nostalgia as a general concept embodies a cognitive blanket for declinism. The world is terrible and only getting worse, and the only hope we have is to remember fondly when things were easier and simpler.

However, nostalgia is very complicated, and people spend their entire careers studying just one single aspect of it. We’re not going to get too in the weeds today, but I did think it important to talk about two forms of nostalgia, as described by Sveltlana Boym in her book The Future of Nostalgia.

Boym describes two particular types of nostalgia. Restorative nostalgia is what we often think of when we talk about the nostalgia of the “good ol’ days”, especially when nostalgia is practised by political groups. Restorative nostalgia is a type of nostalgia that we fight to return back to. This is the “Make America Great Again” thing - the attempt to actually return to the times we are longing for. Here, people we are feeling nostalgic for a different time are actively trying to force modernity back to a different time period. They want to create the space we are longing for actively in the here and now.

In contrast, though, there’s Reflective Nostalgia. Reflective nostalgia lives in itself. Those who feel reflective nostalgia are aware there is no going back to the place or time they are nostalgic for, for one reason or another. Boym herself describes this type of nostalgia when she fled her home in the Soviet Union, and then later returned when it was Russia. Things were different - the homeland she fled was no longer in existence.

In reflective nostalgia, the nostalgia is understood as a cognitive lie. If we long for the times when we were younger, because of the simplicity of the times, we may recognise what what was “simple” wasn’t necessarily the time, but the fact we were young and less prone to know what was happening around us. The connection is to the innocence of childhood, which is impossible to return to. For those who feel reflective nostalgia, we understand we can never go to where we want, it can never be built again or returned to - because it was a lie to begin with.

Reflective nostalgia is marked by a knowledge of itself as nostalgia, and a knowledge that nostalgia is all it will ever be. It’s a nostalgia which lives in the yearning itself, rather than in the obtaining of the thing.

As a myth specialist, both forms are inherently so fascinating to me. Both forms of nostalgia are essentially cultural narratives, spun by a community or an individual in order to cope with our own human need for something else. In one, we want to actively create the reality of our mythic past - in the other, we simply enjoy the story of it. But understanding nostalgia as a myth is important - and by myth, I don’t mean something fake or unreal, I mean an important cultural narrative. These narratives have massive power, and we have actively seen how they can be manipulated to control a populace.

Rian Johnson’s movies are not immune to the forceful power of nostalgia. He is, admittedly, nostalgic in the creation and execution of these movies. Johnson has talked openly about his love for the classic detective genre, and how he grew up reading Agatha Christie. He appeals to the Golden Age of Detective stories, seeing a nostalgia in a time he never even lived in, and which - perhaps - only ever existed on the page.

Johnson, however, lives in reflective nostalgia. Despite actively recreating a classic detective story - perhaps the best I’ve seen in decades - he is not trying to recreate a mythic past. Despite dabbling in his own nostalgia, he uses his own art with his own reflective nostalgia to demonstrate a kind of weariness of the powerful. He shows in his work that his nostalgia is exactly what we experience it as - a fiction.

So, yes, let’s talk about the surface of Benoit Blanc and these series of movies. I’m being purposefully vague here because they were called “Knives Out” series for awhile, but Johnson has disliked this and is re-titling the series. So I’ll just say it’s the Benoit Blanc series for now, in line with Agatha Christie’s own descriptions of her many detectives. Anyway, Johnson openly has an appealing to these type of Golden Age detective stories. He fits all the same beats, following similar atmospheric expectations. The very first shot we get of this whole series is of Harlan Thronby’s mansion - a 1920’s home that makes us immediately feel like we are back in this nostalgic literary form. Each story unfolds in a familiar way, with our closed circle of suspects who all seem to know each other and whose secrets interweave to make us wonder who the hell dun it.

Benoit Blanc himself is the perfect detective. Like his muse Agatha Christie’s detectives, Benoit Blanc is not our main character. We never really follow him specifically. Like how Poirot is not told from his point of view, neither are the Benoit Blanc films. But the detective of classic detective stories are never just detectives - they fit a very specific role and vibe. I’ve talked about this in another video, which I’ll link for you, but in summary, the detective is an outsider. And Blanc is, definitely, an outsider. His Southern accent is barely even acceptable as Southern, and its outright odd form over-emphasises his otherness. He’s downright out of place in the 1920s New England mansion, and doesn’t vibe with the billionaire private island, and while aspects of the accent may fit the Southern Gothic vibe of the third movie, his - at this point - known queerness sets him as a continued Other. Poirot is an immigrant refugee. Marple a spinster. Detectives are underestimated. Colombo seems scattered and simple. Poirot is written off as foreign. Marple just a woman. And Blanc is a goofy gay Southerner.

But there’s another element to the films that I think are important -= they all focus on the idea of presentation as set against reality of function. This is classic for detective stories, but Rian Johnson loves to explore it. All three movies play with the concept of presentation - the story as we perceive it. We get told a narrative, and for one reason or another, what we are told about it is inherently wrong. This is laid on top of itself multiple times in Knives Out. With Marta’s story overlaying Ransom’s. Glass Onion shows us the stupidity of people, the bases of narratives and the ease in which fooling can happen if we just say things a little different. And Wake Up Dead Man has unreliable narratives, and stories which are being told for specific purposes, the power of the story on display in full force.

The movies we are watching, which tell these stories and show the complicated nature of stories, are also actively showing us something while doing something different. The presentation of the art is nostalgic, a re-creation, an appeal to what was once. But the function of the story, what it’s doing when we are distracted by the nostalgic narrative, is something completely different.

My favourite example of this in Knives Out is when Ransom shouts that Marta would be taking his “ancestral family home”, which Blanc blanches at, explaining that Harlan bought the mansion in the 80’s from a Pakistani business man. The nostalgic narrative of the deeply rooted real estate was immediately removed, the narrative presented as just a narrative, the nostalgia revealed as false.

The yearning and expectations of the narrative of the self-made billionaire is what was removed in Glass Onion. When Miles Bron, a tech billionaire, is revealed not as brilliant and savvy, but as dumb and simply controlling, the entire cultural yearning uprooted. The narrative of the conniving and imaginative powerful billionaire who is able to orchestrate a beautifully elaborate murder for the sake of a detective narrative is removed from us, destroyed before our eyes in the face of the reality: some people are dumb and lucky.

Wake Up Dead Man plays on the cultural narrative of the frailty of older women, which anyone who reads Miss Marple would already know is false. But the narratives are also built on the setting of the church, the backdrop of the controlling and powerful priest who ruled with an iron fist. And yet, in the midst of this setting, there is another priest who puts everything he needs on the back-burner to help someone he’s never met.

Rian Johnson uses nostalgia, but particularly the reflective knowledge, in order to point the finger at restorative nostalgia. Each antagonist is shown as someone who appeals to this restorative view - Ransom with his ancestral home, Wicks and his need to build an old-time religion. He shows how this restorative nostalgia is inherently false, a misrepresented narrative which doesn’t exist. It’s a fiction, as much as his movies and his detective, an unreality that can only live on the page.