Image credits: Netflix
I don’t think Americans really understand death. More specifically, something I would term “domestic death.” We like our grand war movies—I must confess Dunkirk is one of my favourite movies—but that’s a distant, heroic kind of death that is easily glorified. But that isn’t death; anyone who’s seen death up close knows how miserably grubby and dirty it is.
Death’s on my mind this month. “Take away death, and the British media shrinks to a dot.” This is a line from Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders, a surprisingly svelte murder mystery type of book that is quite tropeish in an indulgent, self-aware way. I know I’m being a bit simplistic of the respective complexities of American and British popular culture, but Horowitz is right. The British are enamoured with death but not in the same superficial way we Americans like to see. Agatha Christie and Midsomer Murders are, of course, fiction, but they’re more comfortable with death up close, and you get a much better impression of the game of attraction and repulsion that surrounds it. It’s a curious coincidence (but a coincidence is never just that, don’t you know) when you realise how American teenagers study Our Town as British teenagers study An Inspector Calls.
The new Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is… not good. While the original movie was amiably mediocre, the Glass Onion is so thoroughly American it ruins everything. It’s not even that clever, and whatever inklings of cleverness it seizes upon are due to its low-handed methodology. A proper murder mystery shouldn’t require sneaky tricks to make things work, but that’s exactly what Glass Onion does. I suppose it’s got its funny moments, but it’s hollow and not especially substantive. Daniel Craig wants us to take him seriously and the idea of death seriously, but nothing about the movie convinces its audience to take anything seriously.
When the first Knives Out emerged, it was quite amusing to watch my peers lose their minds over the idea of red herrings, multiple suspects, and sinister houses. These elements are the bread and butter of a classic British murder mystery, but these elements are so rare in the popular imagination of Americans. We’ve got our little shows like Perry Mason and Murder She Wrote, but those are the quaint old shows our parents reminisce over. None hold a candle to BBC and the like. Even the Canadians have a more nuanced sense of things. None of this silliness with blazing guns and cops. (Me, biased? Never!)
Strangely, though, Americans do excel at a peculiar kind of absurd, somewhat neurotic satire and parody. Stuff like Dr. Strangelove and Addams Family Values. Tim Curry’s Clue is one of my absolute favourites—I watch it regularly—with its chaotic frenzy. There’s also the Cheap Detective and Death by Murder, both insane masterpieces written by Neil Simon and directed by Robert Moore. The former is just a pastiche of other popular movies at the time—Casablanca and co.—but the latter is, much like Magpie Murders, a fantastical metafictional commentary. After lampooning bloated caricatures of fictional detectives, including Christie’s Poirot and Marple, Simon proceeds to criticise their authors for precisely the same reasons I criticise Glass Onion. The low-handed, unfair plot devices of withholding important information from the audience, like not revealing clues and only introducing crucial characters at the last minute.
I know there are nuances—many of which I suspect are rooted in history and how the British suffered so greatly in the world wars—but I wish we would pay death its due, despite our reality TV shows and action movies and awful country tunes. But, perhaps I’m just being selfish and petty because I do so love cracking a good puzzle.
