I was real excited to see Knives Out. My boyfriend and I had just had a successful little first Thanksgiving together, the air was crisp, and every single film critic had declared the movie a triumph. What a treat we were in for!
It started out okay, I suppose. There were some pretty decent zingers that set up the characters. There were lots of cozy sweaters.
But then it just… went on and on and on, without anything really interesting happening. They told you whodunnit in the first act. Every character but one was, by the end, exactly who they said they were: The Narcissistic Instagram Influencer was a Narcissistic Instagram Influencer. The Shitty Trump Guy was a Shitty Trump Guy. The Nazi Child was a Nazi Child. Daniel Craig’s Southern accent was so outrageously awful, and his detective character was so incompetent, that I knew—I just knew—there would be some kind of reveal that he was not who he said he was. More fool, I.
We didn’t even see most of this characterization in action; we were simply told these things. The most Nazi-like thing the Nazi Child did was… stream video of the Perfect Immigrant being hounded into her car by the shitty rich family? Prominent character features—narcissistic Instagram Influencer, Nazi Child—simply sat there, stagnant, not moving the plot along or even providing any insightful commentary. They provided some easy laugh lines, I guess? Why did we bother having all these characters? They weren’t really part of the mystery.
What a boring, flaccid attempt to critique American attitudes toward race, class, and wealth! It was like Rian Johnson saw an “eat the rich” meme once but knew he couldn’t get lots of money to fund a movie that painted all rich people as psychotic pieces of shit, so instead of going the obvious but more pointed route of having the Rich Dead Patriarch be the architect of his own death and the subsequent hulabaloo over his inheritance, he decided to simply make it a generic revenge fantasy where The Help triumphs over their shitty employers.
It doesn’t help that this movie contains possibly the most one-dimensional portrayal of a Latina immigrant I’ve ever seen. “Look at how perfect this immigrant is!” the screenplay reminds you at all times. Marta—I had to actually look the character’s name up, because she was too bland to remember—is not so much a person as a collection of Guilt-Riddled White Screenwriter tropes. She’s so perfect she pukes when she lies! She makes approximately two decisions throughout the entire movie, but otherwise is simply buffeted by the winds of not-so-casual racism and wealth until she gets all the money. (It’s okay for one person to have that kind of obscene wealth if they’re a really good person who works hard!)
One of the bigger reasons this character is such a complete failure is that she is so generic you could be forgiven for thinking she had been written by the very rich racists the movie excoriates. I mean, Jesus Christ, the movie makes a big deal about the evil rich racists not knowing which country Marta is from… and then never tells us what country she is from! You could change her ethnicity from “nonspecific Latina” to “Eastern European” and absolutely nothing about the story would change. You wouldn’t even need to change her name! Why on god’s green earth did anyone think that was okay?! Did everyone else see a different movie?!
So it made me very happy when Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite won the Best Screenplay Oscar over this thoroughly mediocre nonsense.
There are many, many good things about the movie Parasite. The thing I keep coming back to, though, is specificity. You could perhaps strip this story to its very bare bones and translate it to a non-South Korean culture, but that would remove the beauty, the ingeniousness, that feeling of genuinely not knowing what was coming.
Even more wonderful is that it’s through this specificity that Bong Joon Ho finds the universal. The specifics of the Kim family’s situation—making money from folding pizza boxes! Using English and proximity to American-ness to impress the rich employers!—may not be familiar to audiences outside of South Korea, but there is also an underlying universality at play: Unless you live permanently in that upper economic echelon, you have at so many points in your life compromised your dignity simply to eke out a miserable life. You probably haven’t been driven to murder by the economic system under which you live, but you do hear all the time about people who have. The movie’s message, as some people seem not to have understood, is that capitalism makes parasites of us all.
(This is something Ready Or Not tells us, as well. It’s not quite as much of a triumph as Parasite, but it is still very well done and enjoyable and infinitely better than Knives Out.)
Look. Not every movie has to be about how capitalism is bad or how rich people are racist. That would be boring! But if you are going to make a movie with heavy political themes—like, say, that wealth brings out racism even in the most “liberal” person—well, viewers are allowed to judge both how you conveyed that message and the message itself. And, frankly, Knives Out has a muddled message that it doesn’t even convey effectively.
I am, of course, biased towards Parasite because it has a message that I strongly agree with (capitalism saps the working class of life and dignity and pits us against each other). But it’s also just an incredibly enjoyable movie made by an artist at the peak of his abilities. When Parasite won Best Picture, my boyfriend and I yelped with joy and hugged, because for once something nice happened. The actual best movie I saw last year was given the award for best movie! Terrific!
Maybe that won’t change anything about the world, but maybe it will. I’m fine with clinging to “maybe” right now.