Benoit Blanc’s Road to Damascus

On Knives Out and the lead character's sense of justice

There’s several tensions at work in the new Knives Out movie, Wake Up Dead Man — religious belief vs nonbelief / atheism, innocence vs guilt, love vs hate, what a community looks like, what is the true Christian reaction to a sinful world, should a leader be a king or a servant, can a leader be both, since yearning for the position to lead signals an egotism regardless if one models oneself as a servant, what responsibility do we have to our parents and our grandfathers, to our children, to legacy, and what is legacy to begin with, and of course, the foundation question and tension that holds up every other one, what is truth, object fact or a story that a collective decides to believe in? 

Rian Johnson is such a wonderful filmmaker that he manages to hold up all of these tensions in the film and address them with the appropriate level of comedy and seriousness that they all deserve. It is funny that an old woman drops to her knees in the dirt to declare that a farce is a miracle because she desperately needs to believe or needs others to believe that a miracle has happened, and a scene like that has to be played up as extreme and ridiculous, but on the other hand, a lonely woman needing someone to talk to about her dying mother deserves a seriousness and attention that seems to and should cut through the movie, reminding Father Jud, Benoit Blanc, and the audience, what is truly at stake beyond finding out who the killer is and how the murder was committed. 

All the while, the movie feels like a movie. In the sense that it doesn’t yearn for realism and doesn’t try to sell itself as such, in the way that so many films and shows do, even genre ones, in order to feel like serious works of art. Johnson knows that a whodunnit should feel like one, like you’re entering into a different world with different rules, a world where Monsignor Jefferson Wicks feels larger than life, where his speeches are powerful not because he is speaking to some great truths, but because the people in his flock believe that he is, where Blanc is not a silly detective but someone after something of equal worth as Father Jud and anyone else attending the church. When at the end, Blanc has his “road to Damascus” moment, it doesn’t feel cheesy even though the light from the window shines on him to drive in the moment of revelation. 

You can laugh, but you don’t dismiss him, because you’re in his world, their world, and in their world, that moment and the next moment matters. By leaning so much into the genre of these movies, Johnson creates films that are both fun and campy, but grounded in serious topics and tensions that it doesn’t shy away from. The film can laugh at the world because it also laughs at the world, and the intimate moments don’t feel undeserved because it has been earnest from the beginning. 

This tension, this duality of comedy and drama, works so well because it’s especially embodied in the character of Blanc, who Craig plays so delightfully. The accent, the clothes, his manner of speaking, the way that he pokes fun at everyone and everything around him, while knowing that they’re all capable of doing the worst possible things to each other, and the way that he treats a murder like a game to solve, but also as something much more. 

In one of the critical turns of the film, after being swept up in Blanc’s game to solve the murder, Father Jud realizes that he’s behaving the same as Wicks, looking for the “guilty” to judge and punish them, when he should be opening his arms and being with them, and he decides that he’s had enough. He pushes Blanc away and says to Blanc that Blanc doesn’t understand his work, and that to him, the murder and his work aren’t games in the same way that they are to Blanc. 

That moment pointed to a very particular reason why the movie and series works so well. Blanc wasn’t just working to solve a murder, to finish a game that entertained him, he hounded Father Jud, rejecting his rejection, asking, practically beginning him to reconsider and continue his participation in the mystery, because it seems to me that his desires are as deep as anyone else’s in the movie, and that he himself represents a great tension that the films carry, the question of Justice. 

Blanc comes into the case as an outsider, but he’s not objective. His introduction to Father Jud is the two of them arguing about religion, where Blanc states his position which embodies everything from his political to his moral positon. It’s not just that he doesn’t believe in a higher power, but he doesn’t like the harm that the church does to people, and often exploits their vulnerabilities. His actions also embody that morality. He doesn’t work with the police, he can’t because he and the police have different goals. The police want a perpetrator, they want to solve the case, lock someone up, and move on. That’s not necessarily justice, even if it wears the mask of it. For them it’s work, most of the time a game, but not for him. 

In all of the movies, Blanc is on the side of the most vulnerable individual, even if at first it seems like they’re the guilty ones. He immediately recognizes that the structure of the case and the world is built to condemn the one that seems most obvious. He uses his skills, and the notion of truth, to counterbalance power and money. The fun of these movies isn’t in figuring out who the real killer is, that one is made pretty obvious and always comes to no surprise, it is about how Blanc is going to undo the construct that protects the one who did it while shielding the one that is being condemned. 

He doesn’t just solve the cases, he is always solving it alongside someone, the person who has no one else on their side. It’s why when Father Jud goes to turn himself in, and Blanc notices him, Blanc pushes him out of the police station and when Father Jud almost confesses to what he thinks is the truth, Blanc plays the organ to shut him up. 

Just as much as he unravels the mystery, he also keeps the police and the legal system away. He distracts, lies, and sabotages the police. He is their enemy, even if he first arrives like he’s there to help them. He plays dumb, and even at the end, he sacrifices himself, makes himself look like a fool to push them away, even for a moment, for justice to arrive, alongside mercy. Because his intention isn’t about putting a killer away and locking the door, because what he wants is truth, because his goals are more profound than who is guilty and who isn’t, just as father Jud’s mission is, he can create the space for an ending that grounds the film and expresses a better vision of humanity — even within all the carnage, lies, death, and deceit that can before — than simply throwing the perpetrator in the back of the police car. 

Blanc acts as a detective in a whodunnit, but he’s also a shield against the possibility of a police procedural, and the cold way that the force of the state and the legal system divides and diminishes people. In that way, he’s doing the same kind of work that Father Jud is doing. He doesn’t need the Mass, the revelation, or the belief in a higher power. The film and the series work only because not because it’s an entertaining game for him, but because through his actions, as theatrical and ridiculous as they can be, you can see how much he cares for the people that he’s entangled with.