Rian Johnson, 2019        #9, 2019 Skandies

So here’s the thing.  When you’re writing any kind of fiction, you might have a very detailed outline to work from, but as you get down to turning that outline into sentences, you still have count­less details to fill in.  Where do those details come from?  I obvi­ously can’t speak for all writers, but I tend to fill my stories with details that hold some kind of personal significance.  To pick an example pretty much at random⁠—in the second edition of Ready, Okay!, I needed to get Allen out of town for a bit, so I combined a couple of noteworthy moments from my own time in high school: the OCJEA Write-Offs, where I won a trophy for editorial writing, and a trip to Sacramento that the principal of my school, John Seeland, had taken me and two other students on to visit the state senator who had established the school’s computer science magnet program.  Here’s an excerpt:

On the flight to Sacramento I couldn’t sleep because of a toddler who warbled “E-I-E-I-O!! E-I-E-I-O!!” at the top of his lungs for the full eighty-two minutes.  Mr. Hearsea then treated us to a sumptuous brunch at Denny’s, and I tried ordering my very first cup of coffee ever to keep me awake through the afternoon, but even after I’d diluted the coffee to homeopathic quantities with cream and sugar, it was still too bitter for me to take more than a couple of sips.  So on we went to the South Building of the Collier Towers to check in at the Write-Offs.  There were some opening speeches in the auditorium and then we were sent off to our separate events. Entertainment was in room 208.  Our assignment was to spend half an hour watching a video of a one-act play and then write 350 words reviewing it.  I took my seat, and as soon as the proctor turned down the lights, I felt my eyelids growing heavy.  The next thing I knew, the lights were back on, the projector was off, and the people around me were rustling their papers getting ready to begin their articles.  If I’d caught even thirty seconds of the video I might have been able to fake some­thing, but no such luck.  So instead I wrote a detailed critical analysis of the 1981 TV movie The Harlem Globe­trotters on Gilligan’s Island.

After we had all reconvened in the auditorium, Mr. Hearsea took us to the next stop on our itinerary, which for some reason was a train museum.  He then took us to dinner, where the vegetarian options on the menu were fried zucchini, fried mozzarella sticks, or fried potato skins.  I was feeling pretty fried myself, so when we checked in at our motel, I elected to stay there and watch TV while everyone else went to the evening social back at the tower.

None of the above was part of the outline I’d roughed out before beginning this section.  Here’s where the details came from:

• “E-I-E-I-O!!”:  Got this kid on a flight when I desperately needed some sleep.

• Denny’s:  When I was on the debate team, we stopped here for breakfast on the way to tournaments a time or two.

• Coffee:  A doctor once recommended I try drinking a cup of coffee when I felt a migraine coming on.  But even after I’d diluted it to the point that the my drink was basically a few drops of coffee floating in a melted candy bar, it was still so bitter to me that I threw it out after two sips.

• Collier Towers:  These do not exist in the real world.  In the 1960s, state senator Randolph Collier proposed replac­ing California’s neo-classical capitol building with a pair of glass towers, which is one of those fun tidbits of what-if history that I can’t resist incorporating into stories when­ever I can.

• South Building, Room 208:  My dorm room, freshman year.

• The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island:  I watched this a million times in the years after it came out.  I don’t think I realized at the time that it was a much more recent production than the series was.

• Train museum:  Mr. Seeland took us here after our visit to the Capitol.

• Fried zucchini:  Growing up in Orange County, my brothers and I were frequently taken along on our mother’s trips to the mall, and often these would end with a meal at a chain like TGI Friday’s or the Claim Jumper.  After I became a vegetarian, pickings at such places were slim.

Obviously a lot of the above had no significance to anyone but me, but it didn’t need to⁠—like, the “E-I-E-I-O!!” bit works as a more specific version of “loud child on plane” irrespective of whether it’s a real anecdote or a pure invention.  Some are obscure; the eight people in the world who get the Collier Towers reference will surely love the Mike Curb refs I dropped into my current project.  But a lot of people my age watched The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island⁠—and probably not a lot of people not my age did.  Similarly, in my current project I have some characters watching a VHS tape from 1987, and I needed a commercial to come on; I’ve had quite a few jingles from 1987 stuck in my head for the past thirty-seven years, but the one I went with was “My name’s Ice Cream Jones! I’m bringing the kids my Ice Cream Cones! A crunchy new cereal for breakfast⁠—with the great taste of ice cream cones!”  I know that’s not as esoteric as the Collier Towers⁠—in fact, one of my friends from the interactive fiction world uses “Ice Cream Jonsey” as his online handle.  Unsurprisingly, we were born two months apart.

So here I am watching the next movie on my list, and I immedi­ately get hit with one hell of a one-two punch.  We open in the home of one “Harlan Thrombey”, and it could not possibly be a coincidence that his name is just a few letters away from that of the title character of Choose Your Own Adventure #9: Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? by Edward Packard.  And then up pops the movie’s title card, as seen above, and what font is it in?  The exact same one used in the Pocket Books series of Agatha Christie paperbacks, which I devoured in junior high⁠—I bought and read over a dozen of them, all with this font.  (I naturally rejected all other editions, because the typefaces didn’t match.)  So it seemed like I was in for a mystery, but not just any mys­tery⁠—a mystery pitched squarely at me.  And that was before the movie had the cops reviewing security cam footage on TRS-80 monitors⁠—the exact monitor I learned to program BASIC on in 1981!⁠—and it was before the characters started dropping Danica McKellar references.  I began to wonder⁠—was this guy exactly my age?  So I looked him up.  It turns out the answer is no.  He’s older than I am.  By fifty days.

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In fact, I think that Knives Out is elevated by its ending, which speaks the subtext to what strikes me as just the right degree: the conversation among the characters is still literally about the events of the story, but the parallels to the real world are clear (and darkly funny).  A few days ago I wrote that Under the Silver Lake captured the tenor of the times with its focus on conspiracy theories; among the real-world conspiracy theories with a huge following, I cited the flat Earth, anti-vax fearmongering, and Pizzagate.  In my outline I had a fourth example, but dropped it for length and because it seemed to have outgrown the label of “conspiracy theory” as it is now the central plank of the Repub­lican Party platform and the chief message of Fox News’s prime time programming.  This is the Great Replacement Theory.  It comes in a couple of flavors.  The sanitized version is that Demo­crats want an open immigration policy in order to let in hordes of swarthy foreigners who will receive near-instant citizenship, vote for Democrats, and turn America socialist.  One problem with this theory, as I have pointed out in the past, is this:

Even setting aside the conservative nature of the cultures those immigrants tend to come from, what sorts of people decide to move to the United States rather than somewhere else?  The xenophobic answer is that immigrants want to come to the U.S. and live off our sweet, sweet welfare pro­grams… but why would they then choose a country whose welfare programs are depressingly meager?  Duncan Black once had a running bit about the popular notion on the right that there is some sort of secret “good welfare” that only “those people” have access to, but again, that’s a xeno­phobic fantasy⁠—our social safety net is hardly what the U.S. is known for outside the U.S.  Our reputation is that we’re the developed country without the safety net, the low-tax haven where “haves” from countries in turmoil can flee with their wealth, where entrepreneurs can start busi­nesses without a lot of regulations getting in the way, and where pay is low enough that those hardy enough to try to live on it will find plenty of scutwork jobs available.  If you’re looking for a robust welfare state, go somewhere else.  But if you’re looking for a shot at getting rich⁠—if not immediately, then at least over the course of a couple of generations⁠—this is supposedly the place.  Doesn’t it stand to reason that a country with that kind of right-leaning ethos would attract right-leaning immigrants?  […] I had plenty of classmates whose families had fled communist regimes in Vietnam and China.  Those families did not make 1980s Orange County markedly more liberal.

But again, that’s the sanitized version.  Dig into conspiracy theo­ries and you’ll generally find that they wind up rooted in Nazism, or Nazism’s forebears.  The version of the Great Replacement Theory we saw on display in Charlottesville is that a cabal of Jews want to let in enough swarthy foreigners to outnumber the pure-blooded Aryan Volk who have been keeping the Jews at bay, diminishing Aryan power to the point that the Jews can take over and implement the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  Many who endorse the sanitized version of the Great Replacement will disavow this one, but they’re too tangled together to fully sepa­rate them… and not just because the mainstream version, as represented by the man soon to be the three-time nominee of the Republican Party⁠—hard to get much more mainstream within the party than that!⁠—now echoes Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric about immi­grants “poisoning the blood of our country”.  Even before that, the arguments of seemingly anodyne voices contending that to allow high levels of immigration would “transform the land­scape” and that we needed to “protect our civilization” raised some questions with uncomfortable answers.  Some might be surprised⁠—and, I suppose, others not surprised at all⁠—to learn that I do sympathize with these concerns in some contexts.  For instance, the phrase “Great Replacement”, in its original langu­age, came from France.  France prides itself on being a secular society.  If you’re a French citizen and you don’t want religious people coming in and chipping away at the wall between church and state, I think it’s fair to say that if you don’t believe in laïcité, you can’t move to France.  In 1979, Sweden famously banned cor­poral punishment of children; for forty-five years, spanking your kids has been illegal there.  If you’re a Swedish citizen and you don’t want people from societies where beating children is part of the culture coming in and flouting this law, I think it’s fair to say that if you don’t believe in absolute non-violence toward those in your care, you can’t move to Sweden.  These are articu­lable and admirable values.  And a polity should be based on shared values, a shared sense of what constitutes a good set of laws to live by, or it is no longer a polity but rather a disputed territory. 

The question is, what is it that the not explicity ethnofascist promulgators of the Great Replacement Theory think they need to protect from being replaced?  I guess you might hear some cry “The Constitution!”, though bring up anything from the emolu­ments clause to the bar on insurrectionists holding office and you’ll soon find that to these people “The Constitution!” is more of a shibboleth than an actual document that reflects their poli­tical ideals.  You might also hear some answer “Capitalism!”, though again, outside of academia and lobbyist meetings, this tends to mean “capitalism” of the “Keep your dirty government hands off my Medicare” variety.  Then you get into culture-war stuff, with its dire warnings that American culture is on the verge of being snuffed out.  But what is American culture?  To judge from the rhetoric from the cable pundits and the House floor, it’s some combination of shootin’ guns, drivin’ F-250s, and eatin’ Big Macs… and how does immigration threaten this, exact­ly?  Well, it’s the Great Replacement, you see, and football gets replaced by soccer, and country and western gets replaced by mariachi music, and at Christmas glazed hams get replaced by tamales, and oh dear, it sure does seem like we’re back to ethnic grievance, doesn’t it?  Isn’t the threat that America might be­come a society in which the numbers no longer work in your favor, that an accident of birth won’t be enough to assure that you have a permanent underclass beneath you?  This is what I meant when I said the supposedly separate stripes of the Great Replacement Theory were tangled together⁠—you end up with this huge blurry area where people insist, I’m not a Nazi!  I’m not one of those goons with a tiki torch and a polo shirt chanting about “blood and soil”!  I’m just saying that these immigrants have the wrong sort of blood to be allowed on our soil! 

One of my favorite moments in Knives Out, and apparently a favorite moment for many, was the bit in which Harlan Throm­bey’s oldest grandson discovers that Harlan has left his stately manor to Marta, and he rages, “You think I’m not gonna fight to protect my home, our birthright? Our ancestral family home?”  To which the detective points out, “Ha ha ha ha, that is hooey! Har­lan, he bought this place in the ’80s from a Pakistani real estate billionaire!”  And this is an inflection point at which the movie drops the pretense of being just a piece of genre entertainment.  This is a movie about the Great Replacement.  This bit in particu­lar is about the absurdity of claiming the right to a patch of soil based on blood.  Harlan’s two youngest grandchildren are meant to represent the polarization of the Millennials and Zoomers: the granddaughter’s ensconced in a liberal bubble, while the grand­son’s a Nazi.  The Nazi grandson calls Marta an “anchor baby”⁠—but she’s been here for nearly thirty years, and he’s only been here for sixteen.  But put that aside and accept for a moment the oldest grandson’s premise that ancestry confers a right to a piece of land.  Marta’s family has been here for, again, a bit under thir­ty years.  The Thrombeys have been here for, what, a hundred?  Two hundred?  They do live in Massachusetts, so maybe they came over on the Mayflower and have been here for four hun­dred years.  Meanwhile, the Massachusett people who gave the state its name have lived in the region for twelve thousand years.  So, yeah, by these lights a Mayflower descendant does indeed come off as the equivalent of someone who declaims about his “ancestral family home” when his grandfather bought it in the ’80s.  But the thing is, I don’t accept the grandson’s premise.  Again, the detective tells Marta that she wins not by playing the Thrombeys’ game well, but by playing her own⁠—doing what she thinks is right.  The “land acknowledgments” popular in liberal bubbles strike me as playing into the ethnofascists’ game.  The idea that genetic markers should play any role in the apportion­ment of land?  Fuck that noise.  If you grow up in a place, you’re from there.

In any case, yes, the awful characters do parallel awful people out here in the real world: there’s the heir who prides herself on building a real estate business of “her own”, starting off with nothing but a small million-dollar loan from her father (though, in the movie, unlike real life, that amount isn’t a lie).  There’s the heir who becomes a “lifestyle guru” with a scammy snake-oil business.  But they also explicitly discuss the politics of the day, from Donald Trump (“He’s an asshole, but maybe an asshole is what we needed!”) to the Great Replacement itself (“We are los­ing our way of life and our culture! There are millions of Mexi­cans coming!”)  In these scenes, the film is basically planting a flag saying, “Hey, you know that bit at the end when the Throm­beys are standing defeated on the driveway while Marta stands on the balcony sipping from a mug that says ‘MY HOUSE’ on it? Read that allegorically!” 

And what I particularly love about that move is that Knives Out has the courage to make a claim you rarely hear in this debate.  Because the Great Replacement Theory does get plenty of push­back.  People claim, correctly, that it’s racist conspiracy-monger­ing.  They claim, correctly, that the statistics don’t actually back it up.  What I rarely hear anyone dare to claim is that replacing what the pundits call “Real America” would be good.  Too bad, because it would be!  “The Constitution!”  is a framework for a dysfunctional and unrepresentative government; there’s a reason that no other developed countries use our system.  “Capitalism!” is an economic system that inflicts abject misery on ten thousand so that a thousand can live in comfort, a hundred can live in luxury, and one predatory psychopath can spend his days doing coke on a superyacht.  Gun nuttery, the internal combustion engine, twangy songs about good ol’ boys fightin’ crime (even though crime is higher where the good ol’ boys live)… to Replace all of this would be indeed be Great.  And Knives Out is bold enough to say, here’s a character we’ll call Marta Cabrera.  She’s not from any particular alternative culture⁠—a running joke in the movie is that everyone ascribes a different country of origin to her⁠—but, yes, she’s here to take over the manor from these failsons and other assorted cretins, and this is a happy ending.  Why?  Because she’s better than they are.

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