As regular readers know, I only very occasionally write about movies. One reason for this is that I don’t really watch a lot of movies. Or television, for that matter. I am more likely to unwind with a book.
That said, there are some exceptions. When I do my ironing, I tend to like something to watch. Usually, this is something relatively short. My wife has been re-watching The Good Place with me, and I have found it is my sort of a show. The philosophy jokes are hilarious, but also, it is really smart about ethics and religion and what it means to live well and be human.
Over Christmas break, when we had all the kids home, we ended up watching the second and third Knives Out movies. I had seen the first one, and actually use it for my Wills and Trusts course at our local law school. (Slayer rule!) But I hadn’t seen the second yet.
I won’t say much about the first two movies in this post, other than that they are a welcome revival of the “British Murder Mystery” tradition - a private citizen solves murders through careful observation and investigation, usually outwitting the local cops.
The OG of this genre is Sherlock Holmes, even if he wasn’t truly the first. (It was - depending on your point of view - either an American, Edgar Alan Poe, or a German, E. T. A. Hoffman, who wrote the first modern detective story; and the first British author was Wilkie Collins.)
Because of the elements, the Knives Out franchise is firmly in the British tradition, not the American, not withstanding the American settings and the dubious Southern drawl of Daniel Craig.
One of the things that often gets lost these days is that the murder mystery genre has always been political. Issues of class, race, religion, gender, and more are often explored - and the themes are easy to see, if you look. The reason the politics are often overlooked is that culture changes. Americans of the 21st Century may not, for example, pick up on the class differences in an Agatha Christie novel, or the London versus country aristocracy in a Sherlock Holmes short story.
For the Knives Out franchise, each movie has looked at a facet of modern American culture. One might even say that the murder mystery is used by director Rian Johnson as a plot to hang his social commentary on.
The first movie is all about class, immigration, and race. It left me deeply uncomfortable, because Johnson avoids easy answers. Sure, right wing bigotry is shown as the evil it is, but white liberal condescension is also on full display.
For the second movie, The Glass Onion, it is the billionaire-predator class and the less-rich people who orbit around them that is held up for scrutiny. In particular, Elon Musk - and it was filmed before DOGE.
Again, those movies are beyond the scope of this post.
If you haven’t seen the third movie, you might want to stop here, because there are definitely spoilers. Go see the movie.
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I decided to write a bit about Wake Up Dead Man because it really hit hard for a lot of us who are former evangelicals.
Thanks to the excellent blog of D. L. Mayfield and Krispin Mayfield, I was able to confirm some of the things that I thought might be the case after seeing the movie.
While the ostensible religion involved in the movie is Roman Catholicism, it is clear that it was a thin cover for the evangelical tradition. As one who was a faithful evangelical until age 40, the movie was full of references.
I’m not saying that Catholics won’t get it - anyone who knows their Bible and has lived in the United States will recognize far too much. However, pretty much all the religious stuff will make far more sense in the context of an Evangelical setting.
Just as some examples:
I have played for a lot of Catholic services, and that includes many in a strongly Republican area. I have played for various Mainline denominations too. I can tell you that it would be highly unusual for a priest to freelance a sermon like that, and anyone who did would likely be subjected to church discipline, or at least moved on to a different church.
Likewise, fairly unlikely to happen in a Mainline Protestant denomination. Both because of the totally different hierarchy within the denominational leadership and the different service structure.
On the other hand, this is exactly how tens of thousands of evangelical churches look these days. The sermon as a harangue of “the world,” the cult of personality, the church built by a previous charismatic leader, and so on. An evangelical wrote that script.
While I know that some Catholic priests are fighting the culture wars, they are far more of an Evangelical pastor thing. As I said, even here in a Republican-dominated area, Catholic priests don’t have the long leash to cause a stir of that nature. For one thing, demographics. Catholics are less likely to be uniformly white. Immigrants make up a significant portion of congregations, even in upstate New York.
Finally, the assignment of priests seems to me to specifically avoid using someone local at any given church. Instead, one is assigned who grew up elsewhere, so as to be a neutral in any local factional wars. A priest may stick around for a long time, but I haven’t ever seen one who got his position because grandpa paid for the church.
Evangelicalism is a whole other ballgame, where nepotism is rampant, money talks, and non-denominational churches in particular become personal fiefdoms.
So, with all of that, let me talk a bit about the central tension of the movie.
There are three characters who I believe exemplify the three facets of our current American civil war.
First is the clear villain, Monsignor Wicks. He is the cultural warrior, railing against all things modern, from LGBTQ people to “liberals,” obsessed with “taking the country back” from “those people.”
He is MAGA religion embodied. And hell yes, I know so many people - and preachers - like that. We all do. Toxic religion at its most evil.
It is no surprise that Wicks is a grifter. In it for the money. As a character says after she realizes she has given her life savings over to him in exchange for false promises of healing (also a very Evangelical-pentacostal grift, not a Catholic one):
“To take someone's faith and exploit it for money is the ultimate evil.”
I wanted to talk a bit about the most awkward scenes in the movie, though, as they involve something that I have seen a few times. When the young priest, Jud, first hears confession from Wicks, Wicks leads off with a gross and extended “confession” of masturbation. (And yeah, watching that with one’s teens….fun.)
This isn’t the first time that I have experienced a church leader using their sexuality as a weapon either. There is a certain kind of abusive leader who is eager to let everyone know how sexual he is. (And it is always a he.) Sometimes, this takes the form of a pastor who gropes women in the church. Or has an affair that looks more than a little like rape.
Or repeatedly “confesses” to a porn addiction or masturbation, much as Wicks does here. It has nothing to do with contrition, of course. It is a pissing on the territory, as the movie makes clear. In some cases, it is a means of retribution against a disappointing spouse. Or a way to make one seem more virile.
I will also note here that Wicks is projecting throughout the movie. What he hates most about his mother is the same thing he has done. What he hates most about “those people” is that they are a convenient target on which to project his personal demons.
And thus it is for MAGA.
In contrast to Wicks, you have what I believe to be two different versions of Rian Johnson.
There is the early version of Johnson, until his 20s. I had wondered, but was able to confirm that Johnson is an ex-evangelical, and was, in his own words, a “true believer” when he was young. Jud is that version of Johnson: young, idealistic, eager to heal the world rather than fight it, genuinely thinking he has something he can offer to make the world a better place.
And he isn’t exactly wrong. But he hasn’t yet realized his limitations.
Detective Benoit Blanc is the older, more cynical Johnson, I think. The Johnson who has now left religion entirely. And yet, Blanc isn’t exactly a pure cynic. There is still plenty that resonates for him about Jud, and about what Jud stands for.
There are a few scenes that bear this out.
First is the scene in the church where Jud meets Blanc for the first time.
Fr. Jud Duplenticy: How does all this make you feel?
Benoit Blanc: How does it make me feel? Truthfully?
Fr. Jud Duplenticy: Sure.
Benoit Blanc: Well, the architecture, that interests me. I feel the grandeur, the... the mystery, the intended emotional effect. It's... And it's like someone has shone a story at me that I do not believe. It's built upon the empty promise of a child's fairy tale filled with malevolence and misogyny and homophobia and it's justified untold acts of violence and cruelty while all the while, and still, hiding its own shameful acts. It's like an ornery mule kicking back, I want to pick it apart and pop its perfidious bubble of belief and get to a truth I can swallow without choking. The rafter details are very fine, though. Listen... you want to kick me out, you go right ahead.
Fr. Jud Duplenticy: No, no. You're being honest, it's good.
Benoit Blanc: Telling the truth can be a bitter herb.
Damn, I feel every word of that. And the thing is, I still find so much about Christianity - or at least Christ-following - to be beautiful. There is a lot I still believe, but it is older and largely opposed to organized religion, the hierarchies and superstructure and layers of toxic theology.
The problem is that, like Blanc, I am seeing that the overall result of what we call “christianity” has been, on balance, a force for evil in the world. Not just now - although very much now - but also throughout most of the past 2000 years of history.
Later in that conversation, though, Jud really nails it:
Fr. Jud Duplenticy: You're right. It's storytelling. The rites and the rituals. Costumes, all of it. It's storytelling. I guess the question is, do these stories convince us of a lie? Or do they resonate with something deep inside us that's profoundly true, that we can't express any other way except storytelling?
Do I literally believe in all the stories? No. I don’t even believe that most of them were ever intended to be taken literally. But humans are storytellers, and there is some profound storytelling in the Christian tradition that still resonates with something deep inside that I believe to be profoundly true. The literalism ruins the mystery and the resonance.
There is a great scene fairly near the end of the movie, where Jud interrupts the investigation to take time to pray with a woman whose mother is in hospice. This is a turning point for Blanc, who seems to realize that Jud is filling a highly necessary role in our society. And any society.
This is the part that has broken my heart the most about losing my faith tradition. The world doesn’t need preachers. It doesn’t. We don’t need more lectures. We don’t need more reinforcement of doctrine. In my opinion, the least useful part of any service is the sermon.
What the world needs from its priests, pastors, and ministers, is the pastoral care. The taking time for those who are in need, who are hurting, who need, well, CARE.
When a pastor visits the sick, prays with the depressed, gives comfort to the dying, blesses the dead on their way to eternity - that is what it is about. That is what we need.
Not people to give answers, but to listen to questions and give love.
After the denouement, Blanc seems to have an epiphany. Not a religious one per se - he later says that staying to hear Jud’s first mass, “There is, uh... nothing I would rather not do. Toodle-oo.” But one about being human.
Chief Geraldine Scott: What the hell was that?
Benoit Blanc: Road to Damascus. Scales fell from my eyes.
Chief Geraldine Scott: So what? Facts, schmacks? You believe in God and all this mishegoss is real?
Benoit Blanc: No, no. God is a fiction. My revelation came from... from Father Jud. His example to have grace. Grace for my enemy. Grace for the broken. Grace for those who... deserve it the least, but who need it the most. For the guilty.
The tragedy of this story really is about that. Characters who cannot give others grace, in part because they themselves cannot accept grace. Even Wicks is in this category. For so many of them, they have to look down on others because they cannot live with themselves.
As an ex-vangelical watching this movie, I see so much of who I was as a young man - I too was a true believer, the truest possible! - and also so much of my own pain.
To see what I believed so deeply to be turned into a vessel of hate and violence is devastating. As is my experience of seeing religion slowly destroy much of what was good in my parents, my extended family, and so many of my former faith tradition.
There is some hope, however. The Juds still exist.
As ICE has become increasingly violent and completely unaccountable, a modern Gestapo hell-bent on ethnically cleansing our nation, we are seeing clergy and Christ-followers stand up against them.
It is easy sometimes to forget that MAGA “christians” aren’t the only expression of faith in this troubled country. There still are many thousands who have not bowed the knee to Trump.
As others I know have wondered, perhaps there is a need for secular “chaplains” of some sort. I don’t know exactly how that would look, but we need a replacement for pastors and priests. As religion continues to decline in the United States - and indeed around the world - there will still be a need for some form of “pastoral care” - the helpers and healers who can give care and meaning in life’s most difficult times.
How will we do that? I’m not sure. I am also not sure how suited I am to that role, particularly given how complicated religion is for me. I wouldn’t be able to give answers. But maybe that will be a part of the future for many of us.
Wake Up Dead Man has so much more in it, of course. It is an Easter Egg hunt for anyone raised in the church, particularly the Evangelical or Pentecostal tradition. I enjoyed the cinematography and music as well.
That Tom Waits song at the end, damn. Perfect.
Those are my thoughts and feelings about this movie. It is my profound hope that those of us who still find the old stories to resonate can live out this better narrative, one of love and hope and grace along with our faith.
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