*Spoiler warning for Knives Out. If you haven’t seen Knives Out, do yourself a favor and go see it before reading.*
Rian Johnson’s neo-Agatha Christie murder mystery Knives Out is one of the great cinematic delights of 2019. But amid the veritable onslaught of secret doors, donut metaphors, scenery-chewing performances, and other wonderful moments, one character stuck out to me: The smug, entitled grandson Ransom Drysdale-Thrombley, played by Chris Evans.
It’s a major challenge to recast an actor known for a role as iconic as Captain America. Other directors have gone to great lengths to distance Chris Evans from Steve Rogers. In Snowpiercer, for instance, Bong Joon-Ho gave Chris Evans a scruffy beard, a grimy face, and a beanie. Johnson, on the other hand, leans into the Captain America connection with the clean-cut, pomaded Ransom. Why?
Throughout his filmography, Johnson questions and destabilizes the power structures that underlie those genres. In Knives Out, he plays with the structure of the classic murder mystery by centering Marta Cabrera, the Latina nurse, in defiance of the genre convention that “the help” plays a peripheral and unimportant role. And Marta wields power. After her initial moment of confusion when she first receives the inheritance, she embraces it, ending with a scene where she sips coffee on the balcony while literally looking down on the privileged white people.
Johnson also plays with the star-studded cast by contrasting them with their other well-known roles. Daniel Craig’s character, the gentleman sleuth Benoit Blanc, both evokes and counters his previous role as James Bond: He has an accent but not the one you’d expect; he’s debonair but also dorky; he seems to have everything under control at one moment and seems to have no idea what he’s doing at the next.
But nowhere is this destabilization more obvious than in the character of Ransom.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is built on power structures. It released 20 movies in a row before giving a solo film to a character who wasn’t a straight white man. Within the films, power structures tell us who to side with. Steve Rogers may initially be a shrimpy working-class kid, but he’s selected to become Captain America because he presents a good face as a handsome all-American white boy. Thor is a hereditary ruler. In Spider-Man: Homecoming, the villain is a working-class man who got screwed over by corporations and the government. But the best example of all is Iron Man, the wealthy, handsome son of a self-made millionaire, who fights to keep his property out of other people’s hands—a close parallel to Ransom’s background.
Let’s take a closer look at a specific scene from The Avengers. During the Battle of New York, Captain America leaps into the midst of a group of baffled police officers and begins giving them orders. When one of the police officers asks “Why the hell should I take orders from you?”, Captain America responds by punching a bunch of aliens, and the police officers, chastened, hurry to do what he says. In theaters, this moment evoked cheers from the audience.
A more critical examination of the scene reveals that the police officer’s question is completely reasonable. Captain America has never commanded anything larger than a squad; his knowledge is 70 years out of date. But the movie vindicates him by making his plan go perfectly, thus sending the message that you’re wrong to question self-appointed white male authority figures, because they’re the best people for the job. (Tony Stark is similarly vindicated for keeping his property to himself in Iron Man and Iron Man 2: When other people get their hands on his technology, they misuse it.)
Back to Ransom. After Marta receives the inheritance, Ransom swoops in, heroically driving her away from the conniving relatives and presenting her with a plan that solves all her problems. Like Captain America, he’s a confident self-appointed leader. Like the police officer, Marta and the audience are both expected to recognize his authority and go along with his plan. Except for one thing: He’s the villain. His entire plan is an elaborate attempt to frame Marta as the murderer.
Johnson plays up this tension by saturating Ransom with “good old American boy” signifiers: Cable-knit sweaters, classic cars, cookies and milk. Chris Evans gazes at Ana de Armas with such limpid blue eyes that no one could be faulted for putting a few screencaps in their “I’ll be in my bunk” folder. Yet, at the same time, Ransom’s actual behavior clearly communicates his selfish, amoral nature right from the start. He tells the other characters to eat shit, manspreads all over the set, and doesn’t like dogs. As in real life, the down-home white boy signifiers can easily outweigh wildly inappropriate behavior in the minds of the public. Johnson forces us to confront why we’re so willing to overlook a little attempted murder if it’s done by a cute white guy in knitwear.
(A quick aside here on the character of Benoit Blanc. Blanc is himself a white man and the person who unravels the case, so it’s tempting to see as an affirmation of white male authority figures, in contradiction to Ransom’s character. But one important fact belies this interpretation: Benoit was hired by the villain. Had he never been involved, the correct verdict would have stood and the correct person would have gotten the inheritance. The presence of the white male authority figure, rather than correcting the course of the story, actually destabilizes the story and nearly prevents justice from being done. It is Marta’s female-coded traits that are key to revealing the truth.)
I believe Rian Johnson deliberately crafted the character of Ransom to look as similar as possible to Steve Rogers as a way to confront the power structures that underlie the “all-American white boy hero” archetype. In Johnson’s universe, white guys aren’t automatically heroes, wealth doesn’t rightfully belong to those who already have it, and it’s an extremely good idea to ask someone who tries to put himself in charge “Why the hell should I take orders from you?”