Tuesday
Julia, my mother and I went to see the thoroughly enjoyable Knives Out on Sunday, but because I applied Samuel Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes and Anne Sexton’s “Cinderella” to the ending, I left slightly dissatisfied.
Did I just let literature mess up a pleasurable film experience, I ask myself. Is this better living? I think my reservations are warranted, however. There are spoilers ahead but nothing regarding the crime.
In the movie a very wealthy mystery writer disappoints his execrable family, who have been mooching off of him for years, by leaving all that he owns (this after a death that may or may not be suicide) to his deserving and very likable home nurse. The film sticks it to the entitled rich (think of the Trump family, or Trump himself) and lets us know that the American Dream is alive and well for deserving immigrants like Marta. We are assured that one really can come to America with nothing, work hard, be virtuous, and end up with millions.
My reservation about the film is not the one voiced by the narrator of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones:
There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.
Fielding’s observation doesn’t keep him from rewarding virtue in his own novel, and we pretty much expect it from Knives Out as well. Virtue rewarded is an integral part of the genre so we make allowances.
Given how central to the film is the theme of wealth’s corrupting power, however, one worries about Marta. Will she remain a good person? While she is too nice to taunt the racist family members who have been ejected from the house, the inscription on her coffee cup inadvertently does so as she looks down at them from a balcony: it reads “my house.”
Perhaps we enjoy the moment because they are privileged bigots who thought they were entitled to wealth they have not earned. It’s Trump’s nightmare of people south of the border taking over. But will she make better use of wealth than the family has?
Samuel Johnson is pessimistic. In his exploration of “the vanity of human wishes,” he poses a question: How do you make a needy but carefree traveler unhappy? His answer: Make him rich:
The needy traveler, serene and gay,
Walks the wild heath, and sings his toil away.
Does envy seize thee? crush th’ upbraiding joy,
Increase his riches and his peace destroy,
New fears in dire vicissitude invade,
The rustling brake alarms, and quiv’ring shade,
Nor light nor darkness bring his pain relief.
One shews the plunder, and one hides the thief.
And then there’s Sexton’s cynical take on the American Dream, captured in her reflections on the Cinderella story:
You always read about it:
the plumber with the twelve children
who wins the Irish Sweepstakes.
From toilets to riches.
That story.
Or the nursemaid,
some luscious sweet from Denmark
who captures the oldest son's heart.
from diapers to Dior.
That story.
Or a milkman who serves the wealthy,
eggs, cream, butter, yogurt, milk,
the white truck like an ambulance
who goes into real estate
and makes a pile.
From homogenized to martinis at lunch.
Or the charwoman
who is on the bus when it cracks up
and collects enough from the insurance.
From mops to Bonwit Teller.
That story.
In her revised Cinderella, Sexton expresses doubts about happily-ever-after:
Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after,
like two dolls in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice,
never getting a middle-aged spread,
their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.
Regular Bobbsey Twins.
That story.
We the viewers want to believe in “that story” for Marta. History cautions us, however, that the great American Fantasy is invariably followed by the Great Disillusion. To be American is to ceaselessly dream and to ceaselessly wake up.