Knives Out and the Structure of the Whodunnit
Before we start, there will be spoilers. If you haven’t seen Knives Out or Glass Onion, do it. They’re amazing.
I don’t think I’m unique in saying that I really love a mystery. So many tv shows, films, books, are all about crimes and detectives, and solving a good puzzle. Whodunnits are an incredibly popular genre, and one of the newest big splashes in the genre is Knives Out, and now Glass Onion.
Today, let’s talk about the whodunnit. There’s a particular way that whodunnits work, no matter what type of whodunnit it is, and it relies on a specific relationship with the audience. Knives Out takes these elements and structures, and makes it it’s own while playing with the different ways that whodunnits unfold. So today, let’s dig into the world of the whodunnit and unravel the mystery of the genre.
As much as we talk about the whodunnit as a cohesive genre, there are different kinds of whodunnits. The way a Colombo episode develops, for example, is way different than how Murder She Wrote develops, and yet they would both be described as a detective story. Whodunnit is definitely a strange term to apply to Colombo, because every episode shows us from the very beginning who exactly dun it. But we’ll talk about that a little more in a second.
First, we should appreciate some of the elements of the whodunnit. Whodunnits capitalise on two important facets that are present in all of fiction: (1) all fiction is in some way a mystery and (2) the connection that fiction has to its audience.
So let’s focus on that first one first. All fiction is in some way a mystery. Now, I don’t mean that every piece of fiction has a murder mystery plot buried somewhere deep inside it. What I mean is that the story is set up with a problem that needs to be solved - two people who are clearly meant to be together romantically seem to hate each other from first meeting; an unkempt woman is meant to demonstrate that she’s a princess. These are problems to be solved, mysteries of the ‘how’ saved until the right time to pull them out. Complications add up, while the audience waits for it all to come apart or come together.
But what makes the mystery genre different from others is the second thing: a detailed understanding of how fiction relates to its audience, and a plan to capitilise on this front. The way this works is primarily in the way the stories are strutured. Tzvetan Todorov, a structuralist literary critic and sociologist - amoung many other things - wrote about the structure of the whodunnit as consisting of two different narratives happening in one story. The first narrative is the crime itself, the murder. It tells of the events of what happened, how it happened, who did it and why. The second narrative is the solving of this mystery, sometimes focusing on a detective who is slowly discovering the first story of the murder, taking each piece of the puzzle and fitting it together until it forms a story.
A classic detective story like Agatha Christie’s Poirot, for example, follows the second narrative closely - the one where the detective solves the murder - and through this second narrative we come to learn the first one. We, as an audience, follow Poirot, who - through a series of interviews and detailed studies of locations - unveils to the audience the first narrative of the murder.
The key to this classic whodunnit is the knowledge that each of these narratives are fragmentary and inherently not significant on their own. It’s when they become joined together that the narrative is finally complete and full. Poirot would only be interesting to follow if he was solving a murder, and the murder is only satisfying when we know the culprit did not get away with it. Each fragmentary story leans on the other in order to present one full and complete narrative.
This second narrative, the one in which the detective determines the truth of the first narrative, is tied to the presence of the audience. The audience discovers the narrative at the same time as Poirot - we are living alongside him, gathering all the information in the same way and therefore - theoretically - we are also able to come up with the same solution.
A successful detective story needs to present the story in a way where the audience is able to solve it, but feels unable to without the keen insight of the detective. The story of the whodunnit is crafted with the audience firmly in mind - they are an important character, the silent detective who is also present, looking at everything and in different people’s minds.
But when we have a whodunnit who presents us with a detective, like Poirot, the detective themselves are an important aspect of the narrative. The detective should be an interesting character, one who the reader wants to keep finding out about, and yet should not be the full central point of the story, as they are only one fragment narrative.
As I said before, there are a few different versions of the whodunnit. Poirot, who we keep relying on for examples, is a classic detective story. We follow closely the activities of our detective, who stumbles into or is asked to solve mysteries. We don’t know the other characters until the detective does. We find out about he ins and outs of the relationship of each of the potential suspects as they find out about them, running into red herrings and dead ends as much as we are pointed to the solution.
Colombo is a slightly different beast of the whodunnit. Colombo gives the audience the solution from the very beginning. We know who did it, how and why. The whole first half of a Colombo episode is that first narrative, presented to us in its entirety. The appeal, however, is in trying to figure out where the culprit messed up, how they try to hide their involvement, and how Colombo will ultimately solve the whole thing. Every piece of information uncovered by Colombo is not a nugget for us to solve along with him, but rather a piece of a puzzle for us to guess what will eventually be the culprits undoing.
The Knives Out movies are a wonderful example of contemporary stories which understand the mystery plot structure of traditional narratives, and keep faithful to it while also putting their own spin on the format.
In Knives Out, we are given a whodunnit for our contemporary times, one that builds on the nostaligia and memories of narratives past. It uses the well-trod complicated components of the mystery plot structure of previous crime dramas, but does it in a new and funny way, while never losing any of the components that built the whodunnit the way it is.
We start, of course, with the ultimate important element to start every whodunnit with: the body. Every good whodunnit where we’re not watching it for the detective themselves needs to start with the body. We need to be drawn in from the start, always beginning with the end of the first narrative element of the murder story.
Pretty quickly, we are given the typical mystery trope of the interview. The interview is an important part of classic whodunnits like Poirot. Its the part of the wstory where our second narrative, the one where the detective and audience collectively discover the first narrative, begins to happen. We start to discover the complciated relationships between individuals, get a sense for each of these people’s personalities, and start to question which one of them are truly a nefarious murderer.
Knives Out plays with the interview structure by actively showing us the interviews as they are told, but always from the persepctive of the character being questioned. Each of our victim Harlan’s children, for example, remember being irectly behind him when he blows out his birthday candles. Each one shows a slightly different aspect of the pciture of the evening, each contradiction or different that is either told directly to the detectives, or purposefully hidden, painting a picture to the audience about who this picture is, what their concerns are, and why they may be wanting to lie.
It’s not until the end of the interview structure that we are properly introduced to our detective character: Benoit Blanc. There’s a reason why Benoit doesn’t appear more actively until now. He stays in the background of the interviews, occasionally hitting a key on the piano to punctuate his own thoughts, but for no apparent reason to those present. This is because this is the first Knives Out movie, and the detective is there to solve the crime, not to be the main character. Our main character is, instead, Marta - one of the suspects and the victim’s nurse.
This is one way that Knives Out plays with the audience expectation and participation in a classic whodunnit way. While the story is not being actively written in the Dr Watson type of mystery storytelling, after the interviews the narrative shifts to be more of a Colombo type narrative. The audience feels they know the solution, and follow the character they believe did it. Unlike Colombo, though, we are actively rooting for the culprit to get away with it, though it’s unsure as to why we think this way.
Glass Onion’s structure is immediately different than its predecessor. We already start with the focus around the detective from almost the start - not the full start, though. Glass Onion focuses more around the detective as the primary character - more like Murder She Wrote than Colombo. We don’t start with the body, like we did in Knives Out, but we don’t have to. By starting with Benoit Blanc, we already know what we’re going to get into, in the same way that we see Jessica Fletcher and know what’s going to happen and how interested we are.
Actually, I think Glass Onion is more similar to a Poirot than anything else. Like Murder on the Orient Express or Death on the Nile, we start with a cast of characters and an expectation of murder. We are constantly wondering when it will happen and who would have a hand in it. All the moments leading up to the moment is just as important as the moment itself. Instead of starting with the murder and working backward, we are working forward towards it. That’s not to say that the stories are not still the two fragmentary pieces working together, of course. In the classic case of Poirot, we only see bits and pieces, and the questions are still left unfilled. Like a hole in a donut, you may say. Glass Onion capitlises on this even more by revealing elements of the story at different times, making you think you had all the pieces when you didn’t, and then doing it all over again later.
Both movies, Knives Out and Glass Onion, capitalise on classic whodunnit tropes in different ways. Both have the big gather everyone in one place and to reveal the culprit, but in two very different ways. In Knives Out, it’s to classic reveal the true culprit, but in Glass Onion it’s to comedic effect.
Knives Out and Glass Onion also rely on a particular relationship to the audience, one in which they tease out the ability to delve into and out of the two fragmentary narratives that make up the mystery whenever they please in order to reveal what they want to the viewer when they want to. Instead of playing into the trope to allow the audience to solve things the way Jessica Fletcher or Poirot does, the audience is instead lead to believe certain elements at certain times. The creators of the Knives Out series understand the relationship of the audience in the whodunnit, and actively plays with this relationship in order to allow a new perspective on a classic structure. The same story of Knives Out could have been told differently and more directly, but to a very different effect. Knives Out and Glass Onion both capitalise on the fragmentary nature of the way the whodunnit is structured by presenting the narrative in it’s fragments.
Knives Out also alters fragments by style, modifying the way the audience both interacts with and experiences the story. By changing the way the fragments are shown to the audience, they are also changing the way the audience understands these fragments and how the fragments relate to the whole more cohesive narrative. By changing this aspect of the story, the way the audience understands both fragmentary stories and interacts with them, they are actively altering the way the audience is relating to the narrative as a whole, as the audience’s relationship to each fragment is different and how they then put these pieces together to experience the entire story.
Frankly, I’m looking forward to the different types of whodunnit stories that the Knives Out movies can take on. A Colombo-style with Benoit Blanc would be, frankly, amazing, or a Holmes style where he’s gallivanting out somewhere and then magically appears with the solution that others failed to see. Knives Out’s strength is in it’s reliance on the way the stories have worked in the past, while also not being afraid to alter these elements to fit a contemporary audience.