We talk a lot about how race and gender grievance are offered to white men to distract them from exploitative working conditions that are in fact universal, and this piece is a beautiful example of how the work of that distraction gets done.

this is an experience that I understand deeply, as I imagine many other people who are not white men can as well, and in the hands of a different writer it might serve as a foundation for solidarity rather than bitterness and implicit permission to participate in a reactionary political project

...but the narrative doesn't yield to it. blanc pops in/out and solves the mystery, that's never in doubt. he's a dapper little guy who is emphatically not traumatized. there's a return to an older model of detective fiction that's less discouraged about the possibility of repairing what's broken

then you see even more despair in detective metafiction/the latin american neopoliciaco, where the existence of truth itself is thrown into question. what's interesting abt knives out is that rian johnson is very directly commenting on a political moment rife w this kind of despair...

in classic detective stories, the world is out of order and the detective arrives to set it right. in noir/hardboiled, the world is out of order and the detective increasingly realizes over the course of the story that it's impossible to set things right ("forget it jake, it's chinatown")

that’s what we call Impact

the DC policy apparatus had years of warning about the need to change its approach under these circumstances, and almost everyone has chosen to just carry on as usual and pretend it’s not happening