Glass Onion and Rian Johnson's Benoit Blanc as Agatha Christie pastiche

[cimorene]

Rian Johnson's Benoit Blanc movies are smarter, more deeply understanding adaptations of and conversations with Agatha Christie than any of the recent Agatha Christie adaptations released since the end of Agatha Christie's Poirot with David Suchet (The ABC Murders miniseries, the one that changed the ... everything about Poirot, 2018; Ordeal by Innocence miniseries, the one that changed the murderer and the motive, 2018; Murder on the Orient Express, 2017 movie by Kenneth Branagh; Crooked House, 2017 movie with Gillian Anderson, Christina Hendricks and Glenn Close; The Witness for the Prosecution, 2016 miniseries that I think also changed the end?). I said this when Knives Out came out and it's true again!

But I'm thinking about it now because I'm seeing a flood of reactions and content across social media related to Glass Onion and once again, I'm marveling that most of the reactions are evidently from people who don't know that Benoit Blanc is a Christie pastiche!

It's not a secret at all obviously, and Rian Johnson is quite open about it constantly, as is ... everyone else involved. But I keep seeing time and again all these statements that just... well, missing that these works are primarily Christie pastiche obviously leaves them perfectly possible to enjoy, but it leaves out an entire genre of context. There's so much "Obviously, yes, they're dealing with groups of rich assholes, because it's a Christie pastiche, and that's the format of all the most spectacular classic golden age detective stories, not just Christie's" and "Yeees of course he did, because it's a Christie pastiche" and "Oh my God, of course he's queer, he's Poirot!" It reminds me of all the mainstream readers who engaged with Harry Potter when it first came out without, like, asking a librarian or a bookstore clerk or checking Wikipedia and assumed she'd invented YA fantasy and all its tropes, the British boarding school novel, and/or the combination thereof.

It's not like Poirot is obscure. Not that I would call Enid Blyton or Diana Wynne Jones obscure, either, but the ITV Agatha Christie's Poirot is an extremely internationally successful show that ran for decades quite recently and still reruns! Generally, everyone usually seems familiar with it, but I suppose the issue is that they're not famiilar enough to necessarily recognize the bits. And even people who like Poirot haven't usually watched and rewatched and read it as much as I have (as previously mentioned on this journal, it's a longtime favorite show and I have a Tumblr sideblog called maisouipoirot dedicated to screencaps of it... although I haven't updated it in... a few years? because the DRM on the discs makes my computer unable to read some of them).

I was very happy that they gave him Hugh Grant as his husband, because the casting so clearly underlines that he's Hastings (or the Hastings type) even with so little of him onscreen. He deserves it, was my feeling. And like Granada Holmes's choice to quietly eliminate Watson's marriage(s), it feels more in keeping with canon than the actual details of the books. Blanc isn't quite Poirot, of course - he's a more laidback version, with an infusion of the witticism of Peter Wimsey or Albert Campion (minus the British class overtones).

Comments

[yvannairie]

I think it's quite nice for The Yankees(tm) to finally have a silly little man of a detective that they can call their own, but it's also sort of miserable to realise how many of them apparently just haven't ever dealt with detective fiction of this style in any depth. And it's true, most of the detective imports I'm used to watching are, if nothing else, very British and very hard to divorce from the cultural milieu of England And Continental Europe.

It kinda makes me think of a criticism I saw a while back about how "detective stories are boring now because all of them are cops" and... I mean, sure. If you're only watching American productions or co-productions. Off the top of my head the only Finnish detective who is a cop that pops to mind is Maria Kallio, and the cop-ness there is an important part of the character, that series was a police procedural far more than it was a murder mystery.

[cimorene]

Well, ACTUALLY, in the Golden Age we yankees had contemporary detectives. Philo Vance is the one I've talked about the most here because it's remarkable how much contemporary success he had - runaway bestseller, household name, string of movies with big Hollywood stars - and how little cultural imprint he left after the fact. The books, or at least the first few of them, are quite enjoyable too, but you totally see why they were comparatively forgettable when you read them. I've read lots of since-comparatively-forgotten Golden Age stuff though, and there were other sleuths to choose from.

The mystery (book) genre is very GENRE and not all that mainstream, and I think this has been the case from the beginning. Horror and science fiction and fantasy have been brought far more to mainstream attention through tv and movies in the past fifty years or so, while the long-running series of detective novels are typically the sort of things you learn about only after you, well, 'get into mysteries'. My mom read mysteries when I was a kid, so I have some familiarity with them - the more contemporary ones, I mean - from back then, before I concentrated firmly on my interest in the golden age. There are lots of modern mystery fans in a more noir-ish, PI-based line, and lots in a more (awful, IMO, but obviously not theirs) "cozy mystery" style which tend to title puns, outrageous coincidences, no bleakness whatsoever, and implausible thematic links that get less and less plausible as they solve more crimes (thematic like 'gardening' or 'catering' or 'professional writer' etc. Murder, She Wrote and Rosemary and Thyme are the obvious tv references for this subgenre). Tony Hillerman is acclaimed for his Native American murder mysteries, set on a reservation. And of course there's that series with the female pathologist detective.

[yvannairie]

OH MAN HOW DID I FORGET ABOUT BONES it was one of the best shows on TV for me for the longest time, it had such a strong cast and I don't even remember why I dropped off of it other than. A deep feeling of betrayal I can't really place.

Also, you're right, I've legit just never heard most of these names and my mom is intensely into mysteries specifically and has read multiple Italian and Spanish mystery series' she's found translations for that I don't even remember the names for. The one I do remember is Montalbano, and that's also a cop detective story. I'm so used to American media ubiquity I'm legit caught off-guard by never having heard of Philo Vance.

EDIT: also, something I forgot to say -- we had a good laugh with a friend who also grew up watching Poirot mysteries about how it's nice that the eccentric little dude detective can be openly queer now. What a wonderful world to live in that this is the future we have arrived at :D

[cimorene]

Bones was getting gradually more intensely jingoistically patriotic and more uh, generic American law enforcement in its ideology when Wax and I stopped watching. I don't think there was a specific moment... we probably stopped at the end of a season? I think it was like, before they got married, but perhaps the season when they decided to.

But I'm not talking about the books Bones was based on, actually. I think I tried to read one of those but I didn't find it readable enough. There's a series where the protagonist is the coroner/medical examiner for a county - I want to say it's by Patricia something.

[waxjism]

You're thinking of Patricia Cornwell.

[cimorene]

Philo Vance was a detective written by "SS Van Dine" (penname of art critic Willard Huntington Wright) contemporaneously with Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers' early work, the 1920s-30s. William Powell, a big heartthrob of the era, played Vance four times from 1929-1933, although he apparently hated the role because it was a bit one-dimensional. His popularity declined after the 1930s as taste turned to noir, but he was a household name in the 1920s.

John Dickson Carr, writing in the 1930s to 1950s, was also quite popular in his lifetime and is considered one of the greats of the classic or "English" style Golden Age mystery by many in the mystery genre apparently, and most specifically the master of the locked room mystery. I've reviewed one of his books only in the last year, and I wasn't impressed by it at all - it was like a parody of Poirot made as gothic novel as possible, investigating the mysterious murder/disappearance of Henry Houdini years before at a fantastical rumored-haunted castle in Germany that's literally shaped like a skull in the company of a world famous violinist and a famous mystery novelist - this novel also features secret passages, secret rooms, is-it-or-isn't-it-suicides, and a victim running out of the mouth of the skull castle set on fire and along the castle battlements to plunge to his death. So I mean, obviously there's a lot going on there and it's not purely BAD, just very very schlocky, but the execution was extremely underwhelming, even if I was fully on board with a protagonist who was just vaguely a parody but not very funny. That was the main thing, though, that it should have been funny and wasn't. However, that was like... his second year of publication, so maybe I'll give one of his later works a chance.

[yvannairie]

Oh, I know the name "Van Dine" from Umineko! The rest of this is new to me, though :Dc

[cimorene]

Hold on I have to wiki something.

Okay, yeah, that makes sense, and WHAT I didn't even know what a visual novel was.

Although it made a BIT more sense when I read the first few sentences like "murder mysteries, people trapped on an island" than after I skimmed down and got to stuff about witches.

[yvannairie]

Umineko is extremely wild, but one of the central plot elements is whether or not the murders are real, and what exactly happens on Rokkenjima Island on the day of the massacre. The characters named after Roland A Knox and Van Dine are used in-universe to represent a perspective where a good mystery cannot involve the supernatural, so they're sort of... heroic antagonists, pitted against the villainous protagonist (who is a witch, trying to get away with murder by magical means). Umineko is really interesting from a narrative theory perspective, one of the themes it wrestles with is fantasy vs mystery, the expectation of explanations and the role of the audience in building those expectations. I like it a lot -- but it is also quite over-the-top with the tone and the gore, and deals with all sorts of familial abuse in the main narrative (the author is a former social worker and he's got Opinions(tm)). Both Umineko No Naku Koro Ni and Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni are mysteries that can be solved, but whether or not they're "fair"... XD Well. I always found that extremely debatable considering aliens are apparently real in Higurashi.

[cimorene]

Ah yes, Van Dine is also extra famous for writing an essay - maybe actually a book? - about the "rules" of writing mystery novels! You can read a summary of the rules online, but they're kind of what you would expect from familiarity with golden age fiction, only it's really the strictest version - not everyone even adhered to them back then. But the idea of his strand of mystery writing was that the genre is about creating a puzzle for the reader to solve, so the rules have to do with making it fair for the reader. They disallow the supernatural, and deliberate "twist" writing is usually out, because they require that the reader knows all the clues that the detective knows, that kind of thing. (Personally, if I'm reading a mystery that clearly belongs to the genre and it suddenly introduces the supernatural without warning and goes - you know - "Surprise! Maybe a ghost did it!" or like, "He did it but he was possessed and now we've exorcised the ghost and it's fine!" - I always consider that cheating the genre myself, and I've discarded more than one writer for doing it.) I know there's another famous source of that kind of rules list, so maybe Knox is the guy who wrote it.

I won't say you CAN'T have a supernatural mystery - I think I've seen the effect carried off with success. But I will say that it doesn't really feel like a mystery if you never know whether the laws of physics were broken or not - more like some sort of thriller or horror story. Of course, if you know there's a witch involved and what sorts of things she's up to, it might be possible to make it work, I suppose (work and still read like a mystery, I mean). I'm sure Van Dine would be offended to find himself in one!

[(Anonymous)]

We watched Glass Onion with the kids and then the next day watched See How They Run, which is VERY explicitly Christie...not pastiche, but something (it's set around the theater production of The Mousetrap). It was kind of amusing watching them back to back, partly because of certain similarities in cinematic choices, partly because of how they are reacting to Christie. Glass Onion is, I think, a much better movie.

[laurajv]

Goddammit, that was me, why the hell was I logged out? I logged in this morning already!

[cimorene]

That looks interesting! I'd have to read the play first though...

[princessofgeeks]

The new internet is full of people banging out reviews and personal impressions of media with utterly no research whatsoever. It's so fucking shallow. I'm no academic, but even by former journalism standards it's just sad. The relentless drive for twice-a-day content, every day, all the time, the absolute need to be first.... makes for awful writing. Information-free content.

[cimorene]

That is certainly true, but I guess that even though I found their opinions a bit second-hand embarrassing, in principle there's nothing wrong with sharing your superficial reactions to a movie on your Twitter or Tumblr in a few lines, and that does account for some of them. They don't know the context, but they also don't know that they don't know it, and there's no general expectation of doing research before sharing your reactions or shower thoughts. However, there are plenty of longer posts that probably should've checked Wikipedia or something first, too.

[princessofgeeks]

I'm speaking totally about pro reviews, not individual fans giving their impressions. I agree that there's no expectation of research if you are an individual posting on Twitter or Tumblr. But there are so many reviews or posts on pro sites that are just awfully shallow and obviously not researched at all.

[cimorene]

Yeah, I've seen that... Wax likes reading reviews after she watches something and I'm often backseat reading, going, "Oh, come on!"

[laurenthemself]

To the point where I keep waiting for the Agatha Christie authorial self-insert character to show up.

(oh no now I've invented them and in my head they're non-binary and their name is Apple Twist)

[cimorene]

I was definitely thinking that I hold out hope for the author insert to appear in a future instalment of this universe.

[whimsyful]

Rian Johnson's Benoit Blanc movies are smarter, more deeply understanding adaptations of and conversations with Agatha Christie than any of the recent Agatha Christie adaptations released since the end of Agatha Christie's Poirot with David Suchet I've heard some really good things about Hugh Laurie's Why Didn't They Ask Evans, but yes, it's pretty sad to see how disappointing most of the Christie adaptations have been. I get the sense that a lot these adaptation writers feel the need to justify their adaptation through "improving" on the source material by making it darker/more shocking or whatever, without really understanding or respecting why her works have stood the test of time. Whereas Johnson clearly has a great deal of love for Christie and knows both her strengths and weaknesses (i.e almost everything dealing with class and race) intimately and can riff off them, but also he doesn't have the shadow of the tremendously well known and respected Suchet adaptations hanging over him.

I think the other part of it is simply that the US is much less interested in Golden Age fair play mysteries than, say, Japan, where Detective Conan movies regularly top the domestic box office, universities have mystery writing clubs whose members go on to publish successful works in the genre and they broadcast mystery shows where the viewers are invited to call in with their solutions. I'd be really curious to read some Japanese reviews of Knives Out and Glass Onion to see if they discuss the obvious Christie influence more.

[cimorene]

feel the need to justify their adaptation through "improving" on the source material by making it darker/more shocking or whatever, without really understanding or respecting why her works have stood the test of time

I'm not sure quite why, but Sarah Phelps, who has written the BBC's recent miniseries, actually deliberately DID set out to make it grimdark! She claims to think this is "more honest" than Christie herself, whom Phelps reads as having been like, secretly grimdark but concealing everything in a layer of subtlety in order to get it past the censors (she doesn't understand what subtlety actually is, obviously). I touched on this in my review of The ABC Murders: Review: The ABC Murders with John Malkovich (getting Extra Transformative with Christie).

[cimorene]

Oh, also, I just found out by searching IMDB for Agatha Christie - I don't know why this didn't occur to me before? - that there's a long-running French anthology show of Christie stories called Les petits muertres d'Agatha Christie, a recent Swedish show called Agatha Christie's Hjerson about the fictional protagonist of Ariadne Oliver's novels, and recent Japanese adaptations of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side, A Murder is Announced, and 4:50 from Paddington.