“Wake Up Dead Man” and the Whodunnit Renaissance

0:05This is Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Nomi Fry. I'm Vincent Cunningham. And I'm Alex Schwartz. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. Hello, my friends. Hey. Hello. Hello. Hello. What a warm, cozy December day to discuss murder. So right now, the big, flashy new entry into the Knives Out series is out in theaters. The first Knives Out came out in 2019. I remember it well. I went with my parents and my husband to see it. That's so cozy. It was cozy. That movie was a huge success. It was one of those movies that everyone was talking about.

0:47And then Netflix wound up paying a truly incredible$465 million for the next two Knives Out movies. So that's Glass Onion, which came out in 2022. And the film that's now in theaters, which is called Wake Up, Dead Man. You're the only one on stage with a Monsignor at the time of his killing. You're the only one at that church who hated his guts. The spirit really moved him today, huh? So, tell me. What the hell happened? So, once again, there's a bit of a seasonal excitement around this movie. And it did get me thinking about murder mysteries. Because this format has been going strong for a little while, and I do feel like it's hitting an absolute fever pitch.

1:32I mean, do you guys have the same feeling I do when you just turn on a streamer of choice and poke around in there to see what's on, and it's just like murder mystery, murder mystery, murder mystery, murder mystery? Yeah. It's like everything starts with a body nowadays. It's true. This trope is just like everywhere, whether it's like Big Little Lies to these Knives Out movies. Maybe The White Lotus. That's pretty salient in my mind. The White Lotus. It's everywhere. Mike White's hit. Yeah. Vincent, have you noticed this too? Absolutely. I think White Lotus is the big one, big little lies. The whole Nicole Kidman is kind of a big presence in this new wave of the perfect couple being a recent example.

2:18It's happening. Yeah, there's a whole subgenre of this that's just Nicole Kidman dealing with murder. Dealing with murder. But today, we're going to look at audiences' seemingly insatiable hunger for murder mysteries. It's not a new thing, but it is having a moment. We will talk about the new Knives Out. I want us also to look back at the origins specifically of the whodunit format. Back to people like the queen, Agatha Christie. And we're also looking at how this new era of mysteries is updating that classic genre. We hear a lot these days about cozy murder mysteries. I recently heard the term millennial whodunit.

2:55And yes, people will put millennial on the front of anything, but we're going to talk about what that could mean. So that is my question. Are these new mysteries different from their predecessors? I do want to know, but one thing is for sure. The whodunit formula continues to hit. So that's today on Critics at Large. Why can't we get enough of murder?

3:21So before we get started, the world of mysteries is vast, my friends. It is large. And I do think we should give ourselves some parameters here so that we don't completely lose our minds. Tell me, what exactly is the mystery format we're talking about today? What are some aspects that we're here to discuss? Well, we're talking about the kind of murder mystery where there is a sort of cloistered quality to the cast of characters. There are only a few people who could have done it. and each of the characters in this kind of thing stands to gain or seemingly stands to gain something from the death of the person who has died.

4:02And therefore, this genre kind of, the way it moves, I think, is by swinging the audience's suspicion from one character to another, building sort of structures of suspicion, letting them kind of rise to a crest and then making it kind of switch off onto somebody else. Red herrings abound. Anything to add? Yeah, red herrings abound. There's usually, there's often a character of a detective, a sharp, you know, intellectual character who treats this very human drama or even tragedy as a puzzle to be solved. Yeah, I think the charismatic detective is a key. If we're talking about whodunits, I think a real aspect of the whodunit is that it encourages the reader or the viewer or the listener, perhaps you're an audio whodunit fan, to try to play along and to try to see if you can put together clues that the creator is leaving for you along with the inevitable red herrings.

5:05I mean, I'm thinking of some very classic detective figures like Hercule Poirot from the world of Agatha Christie, who has most recently been incarnated by Kenneth Branagh in a series of movies. And as he says in the movies, whenever people try to call him Hercules, it is Hercule Poirot. He's a Belgian perfectionist with a very showy mustache. Also, Miss Marple, kind of the opposite in the Agatha Christie world. just an ordinary English woman, not a detective at all, but who has some very perceptive powers that leads her to solve a slew of crimes that always seem to be popping up. Yeah. So is this a genre that either of you has historically been into?

5:47Are you a whodunit fan? Do you not touch the stuff? I like it televisually and maybe in cinema as well. It seems to me more of a collaborative medium in terms of viewership. Like, it's the only kind of movie that I really am fine with people talking over that I'm around because they're like, look at him. Look at that. You know, it becomes a way of watching. Everybody's kind of talking, being like, this guy did that. And also just that kind of suspense doesn't accord with what I'm interested in from prose fiction. I don't know why. But interestingly, yeah, I like these kinds of TV shows, but there are lots of the classics of the genre in terms of novels that I just have not ever desired to jump into.

6:31But maybe today will change my mind. I kind of want to send you a little packet. I'm down. Like a little Christmas packet. And your birthday is coming up. It is. That's true. It is the season. Here's an idea. Yeah. Here's an idea. Much like Jesus. Much like, you know. Vincent was born. And who did that? In the month of December. Who did that? Who did that? Who did do that? Who done that? Who done it? Nomi, are you into this like a part of your— I'm more of a noir girly. Sorry, I hate when people say girly. Which I like more than the whodunit because what interests me about crime is more the texture and the psychology rather than like, hmm, the candlestick has like, you know, the thumbprint.

7:19an errant thumbprint. And could it be the secretary who, you know, I'm more interested in like, what is wrong with these people? What is wrong with this person? What is wrong with a society that has made them corrupt or made them desperate or whatever is the case? All right. Let me just defend the whodunit for one second. No, no, no. I'm not saying, you know, I just want to defend the whodunit. I think these are good points. They're strong points. The robust points. Well, thank you. Thank you. Well, of course. I must commend it. But I do think that some whodunnits may give you a little bit of what you like.

8:00If you want to look at humankind's brutishness and their nastiness, just take a look at a book like And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie. Once Upon a Time Called Ten Little Indians. Thank God that's over. Oh, my God. Let's just. It's done. We don't like that. We're moving on from that. Anyway, it's a bunch of really kind of not great people who are gathered together on an island. And at the very start, they are told by a record played by a ghostly hand that each of them has committed a murder in the past and now they are all going to be killed. No. And one by one, so they are. And each of them has – it just makes me think of what you were saying, Naomi, because each of them has committed a crime.

8:43Some of them feel bad about it. Yeah. Most of them don't. This is very, like, I Know What You Did Last Summer. Totally. Coded. Totally. Or is I Know What You Did Last Summer and then there were none coded. Ah. I think you'll find. There's the rub. Well, I think you'll find that this is one big old archetype. So with that, let's get us to the big, splashy new entry into the whodunit genre. We're talking about Wake Up Dead Man. It's the third installment in the Knives Out series. I think it's also being called at this point the Benoit Blanc Mysteries because he's the detective. The Blanciverse. It's out in select theaters now.

9:21And if it's not you, don't panic and don't kill someone. You can stream it on Netflix. Thank God. Soon. December 12th. It's coming right up. It's directed by Rian Johnson, who also directed the first two Knives Out, created them. And it stars Daniel Craig alongside a star-studded ensemble cast. I think we should say it's led by Josh O 'Connor because he's basically as important as Daniel Craig in this one. Now that we've said that, Whomst Among Us wants to give me a little brief summary and don't reveal. I won't. Okay, go for it, Vincent. It takes place in a ruined, misbegotten, half-abandoned Catholic parish in upstate New York.

10:07priest, having gotten into a physical scuffle with another priest because he's a former boxer who had a sort of ruinous thing happen to him during his boxing career. Now he's a priest. This is Josh O 'Connor. Now he's come to be the associate priest in this parish, which is run in authoritarian fashion by this monsignor who gives every Sunday sort of fascistic right-wing sermons so nasty in their tone and content that new people that come to the parish always just like get up and walk out. And so this feller, Monsignor Wicks, played by Josh Brolin, he's lording over a very small flock of parishioners, the sort of remnant who, as a badge of pride, really stick around even through this person's crazy mania.

11:07It's a total cult of personality. This wretch of a person in the middle of a mass after giving his homily is stabbed. We don't know by who. We don't even know how it's possible. It's a small room. And of course, Joss O 'Connor, who hates and has expressed by now his hate for this priest and his methods and his sort of perversion of the gospel or whatever is the chief suspect. Enter Benoit Blanc. Who are you? I probably should have led with this. My name is Benoit Blanc. I'm a detective. I've taken an interest in the murder of Jefferson Wicks. You're a detective, so you're with the police? No, no.

11:51I work in a private capacity. Everyone thinks I did it. I didn't do it. But in my heart, maybe I didn't. And the way it happened was some kind of miracle. And I don't know. I'm lost. I don't know. Would you allow me to help you?

12:11What? Your lips are cracked with dehydration. You haven't slept all night. You're spinning out of doors by the stadium pant legs on your knees in prayer. What I see is not a guilty man in torment. But an innocent man tormented by guilt. Let me help you. How? This was dressed as a miracle. It's just a murder. And I solved murders. I do declare. I do declare. Or something. Sorry. And then, yeah, and then we're off to the races. We find out, you know, reason after reason after reason that each parishioner has, you know, might have reasons to have an ought with him. And then it's a fucking gallop to the finish.

12:59Oh, yeah. It's a gallop. It's a gallop. It's a bit of a gallop. I mean, is it a gallop, though? Well, is it a gallop? So let's... That's a question. Well, let's get into it. Was it a gallop for You Know Me? Was it more of a slog? Was it somewhere in between? It was somewhere in between, I would say. I really loved the first Knives Out when it came out in 2019. I remember being surprised by it because it seemed at that point at least kind of an old-fashioned genre, though of course updated. What I liked about the first iteration and what is now this series was that it was quite economical. Like it was – it really was kind of like the classic like there's a home and there are these several characters.

13:46You know, each of them really did have a reason to kill this patriarch. And it really was unclear who had done it. But the solution to the puzzle was elegant, I remember. It was elegant and, I'll repeat, economical. I don't know. It just, everything, it was kind of like a beautiful puzzle box, you know. And with this one, it had a bunch of things to recommend it. I think Josh O 'Connor is great. I like the character of Benoit Blanc. You know, I think he's a fun character. I think it does give me a kind of like cozy feeling. And I do like that in this day and age, we have these characters we return to that we can kind of depend on to be a voice of reason.

14:32Would you say that you see Benoit Blanc as a strong leader? The kind who you are always seeking? Oh, my God. Yes. I do think that if you need a strong leader, Benoit Blanc could be your guy. I might. This movie is kind of about strong leaders. It is. Totally. It is. And I did enjoy, so I did enjoy the ultimate takeaway, which I would say we have these two, well, we have several potential strong leaders. We have the bad strong leader, which as you say, you know, it's Monsignor Wicks, who's like a complete madman and like a bad person. Yeah. We have the man of, the good man of God, which is the Josh O 'Connor, you know, Father Judd character.

15:11We have the pure intellect of Benoit Blanc, who's another contender to the strong leader. And, you know, I did enjoy that things were put to right. I do enjoy that. I do enjoy that. I did feel like, again, I'm returning to the term economical. It wasn't as satisfyingly economical as the first installment. It was two and a half hours of kind of like both too fancy with the plot and not finally drawn enough with the characters. I mean, props. I think it's one of the hardest things to do probably in a kind of whodunit mystery to make it kind of like snap. To make the plot all work. To make the plot all work.

15:54I'll say it if you don't want to. It could have been two hours. Get it down. Get it down, Ryan. I'm sorry. I usually don't like that note, but I agree. I mean, it was just, it just, which is why I asked about the gallop or the trot or whatever you said. I could have used less complicated tap dancing with a plot. Well, Marian Johnson has said that this was like maybe one of his hardest ones to put together. Yeah. He was like banging his head against the wall trying to figure out how it works. And partly, I think, and we should know this, this is, as it is actually explained in the movie, in a kind of metatextual way, this is, according to Benoil Blanc, and I think this seems true, the hardest type of mystery to solve because it's a locked room mystery, right?

16:39Monsignor Wicks goes off into the, everybody sees him go off into the side room, you know? Nobody goes into that room. Suddenly there's a clunk. And next thing we know, the man is dead. But who could have killed him? Who could have done it? Because he was alone in that tiny room. And this is what Benoit Blanc says. He's like, it's like, it's impossible. You know, like there's, and partially because of the religious themes of the movie, a certain kind of blind faith, this may be part of the structure of the film, where it's like, here is a crime that's beyond the rational. And of course, his whole world view depends on, we can use reason to solve problems.

17:22It sort of throws a new kind of wrench into the scenario. So what were your feelings about the movie, Vincent? Or thoughts, since we're in the realm of reason? Well, you know, I enjoyed, listen, And I'm going to like anything or like experiencing anything with like sort of like this ecclesial backdrop. I was thinking of you when I was watching. I was like, oh, Vincent will probably understand this on that level way more than me. I like that about it. And interestingly, you know, setting it in America is such a strange thing for this kind of film. because the sort of social types, the class types, and of course like the priest even as a sort of representative of a rival kingdom of sorts, you know, seems to me super European.

18:19I was hunting down this quote as I was reading it. Henry James in his book about Nathaniel Hawthorne was talking about the difficulties of writing as an American. And one of the things he says, right, is that here's the things that we don't have, that America doesn't have, these European sort of mainstays that make fiction possible. And I think this is really important for the mystery. He's like, there's no state in the European sense of the world, et cetera, et cetera. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, no manors, old country houses, parsonages, et cetera.

18:59Now, of course, as in the fullness of time, America would take on many of those characteristics. But the idea of there being places where a different kind of authority rules, a different kind of authority supersedes others, even money. You know, a church is where all of a sudden this kind of despotic figure can take, arrogate unto himself more power than you would think in any other milieu is strange. And like for this to be, I don't know where upstate, but you know. I know. It's happening in like Kingston, New York. I don't even know where they are. Yeah. Like I could see, I could see, you know, what you're saying, Vincent, is making me think about like, okay, I could see this sort of thing maybe more in like a mega church.

19:41You know what I mean? Like a Joel Austin type or something. The righteous gemstones. Yes, exactly. Whereas here I'm like, who are these people really? Does this, what is this place? Yeah. It seemed that was a weird thing about it where it's like, you know, the the social setup that one would need for this to actually happen may not really exist. It may not be like indigenous to the setting. Yes. But what I really liked was the Joshua Connor character. I kind of said that he was miscast in the in the mastermind. So let me say I think he's perfectly cast in this. He's got this sort of earnestness, but also this kind of haunted, hunted Raskolnikov energy that just works perfectly as this.

20:26I have sinned before and the church is my my refuge and my redemption. And therefore, I have a deep point of view that puts me at odds to the reigning ideologies of the place. I just thought that was really well done. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I did inconveniently fall asleep. and at what point do you remember at what there's just a long middle you know the setup of these movies is you have to meet all the characters and quite a cast of characters they are i mean we get carrie washington as a skeptical lawyer who becomes more and more bitter as the movie goes on we get andrew scott he was the hot priest before josh o 'connor was the hot priest in this exactly and he's very funny and i did feel that this and jeremy reiner who becomes significant as an alcoholic doctor, and best of all, Glenn Close as Martha Delacroix.

21:18She was pretty great. I thought she was excellent. So, yeah, there's just kind of a long middle where things seem unsolvable, and I did tune out a bit. I'd say keep it to a tight 120. Keep it to a tight 120. Get us in and get us out. Keep us in suspense.

21:37When we are back, more on Wake Up Dead Man. Wow. This is Critics at Large. That's really good. From the New Yorker. Wow. My bad. Really good.

22:04Wired has always put a microscope on the people, power, and forces shaping our world. Uncanny Valley brings that same fearless reporting straight to your feed. Is Doge finally over? Will AI actually democratize American healthcare? Each week, Wired journalists from across the newsroom are going to unpack where politics, technology, and Silicon Valley collide. From conversations with tech leaders across Silicon Valley, internet fandom investigations, and government crackdowns on rigged gambling, we're taking you all over the news cycle, going straight inside the priorities, pressures, and power plays driving today's biggest decisions.

22:42Uncanny Valley tackles the questions keeping you up at night and helps make sense of the future taking shape right now. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

23:02All right. I would like us to talk a little bit about Rian Johnson. who directed the Knives Out movies, who created them, came up with them, and is being credited as this, I was going to say renaissance-er, reviver, let's say, of this, of the whodunit genre. I did read, I don't know if you guys read, but I read our colleague Anna Russell's excellent profile of Johnson, which she wrote for The New Yorker, and it came out earlier this month. It's called, Rian Johnson is an Agatha Christie for the Netflix age. So the argument is right there. And one thing that really struck me as interesting was learning that when Johnson started making a mystery, decided he wanted to do a whodunit, a lot of people thought he was kind of nuts and that this was a really outdated, fusty form, that it was popular in the 70s and 80s.

23:56Of course, there was Murder, She Wrote, which went on for a very long time, stuff like that. But people really thought, we're over it. Who's going to go for this old-fashioned thing? And then Knives Out came along, and it turned out everybody was just really eager for it. So did you guys get a sense, or do you have a sense, either from the profile or just from watching the movies, of how Johnson is approaching the form and how it might be a bit different from the way it's been done before? Well, I think, you know, and we've talked about this a little bit earlier, but the bones are the same, right?

24:36We have like a limited cast of characters, a murderer, and the detective character, right? So this is like the same as like Death on the Nile or something, right? It's like that hasn't changed. What has changed is that, and I think this might be true in general for the kind of reinvigoration of the forum in recent years, like post-Johnson even, is two things. First of all, the insertion of present-day political issues and skirmishes. And the second thing, and this might be kind of as true of Glass Onion, the second Knives Out mystery, maybe less true of this one, the kind of like lifestyle porn aspect of these new whodunits.

25:29If we're thinking about something like Big Little Eyes or White Lotus, all of which adhere in a lot of senses to the classic format of the whodunit mystery. But part of the enjoyment of them isn't just the kind of like puzzling out of who is the murderer, but also the environment in which the murder and the detective work is taking place, which is usually a very wealthy community of power and leisure. And I think that is something that has helped smooth the reentry of this older form. Yeah, kind of concurrent with that. It seems like he's also using it, using the form as a way to investigate not only money, but manners, I guess.

26:26Yeah. That there's a way of. Mores. Even if you think about the sort of maybe the symbolic setup of this most recent movie, it's kind of about in a moment of fading, crumbling institutions. What is it like to lead the rump or something like that? You know, what is it like to lead an organization or something like that in decline? And you might think of that as a quintessentially American problem of the moment, at least. I do think that there is a really earnest engagement on Johnson's part to use this as a form to sometimes, you know, with a lot of humor, really investigate what it's like to be alive right now, which I think is cool.

27:15Yeah. Is Rian Johnson smuggling an issues movie to us in the form of whodunit? I think this is a legitimate question. In a sense. Yeah, I'm wondering, like, it's not the first time that issues of a social nature are brought up into murder mysteries. Of course, because these murder mysteries, part of the delight of them is their use of tropes and their use of types. And I am thinking about something that Miss Marple, Agatha Christie's Miss Marple once said. And I quote, she's talking about, you know, the fact that since the Second World War, people feel a big sense in England of unease and a sense of alienation from each other.

27:56And she says, you could blame the war, both the wars or the younger generation or women going out to work or the atom bomb or just the government. But what one really meant was the simple fact that one was growing old. And I love that. Yeah. That everyone's feeling disoriented, everyone's feeling suspicious because, of course, another part of the whodunit is just suspicion, the climate of suspicion. I do wonder, you know, when we think about the idea of these mysteries being comforting, I think a big part of the comfort is finding types that we recognize. And maybe in this day and age, it's the kind of people we meet in a Knives Out mystery.