Knives Out as Pop Derrida Empty Centers

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“Knives Out” as Pop-Derrida: Empty Centers and the Absence of Presence

Preface: why I don’t see Derrida in the reviews where he shines from every frame

When I first watched “Knives Out”, I did not have a “fun detective with some politics” experience.
What I had was: this is pop Derrida.

From the very first viewing it felt like the film was constructed as a practical introduction to deconstruction, just translated into the language of mass cinema.

Later I went to look for essays and reviews. And found a kind of silence.
Critics mostly wrote about:

• satire on the rich,

• racism, immigration, class dynamics,

• “deconstructing the whodunit genre” – in the everyday sense of the word, without any différance.

Almost nowhere did I see the words “Derrida”, “trace”, “absent presence”, “empty center”.
It was as if the film had been read only on political and moral levels, while the structural layer was left unnamed.

Why?

• Mainstream criticism tends to focus on message and social commentary, not on the film as a structure.

• Derrida still functions as a marker of “heavy theory”, excessive for a general audience.

• To see the overlap you need a double literacy: film literacy and poststructuralist literacy. Most readers and writers have one or the other, rarely both.

For me, the overlap is too dense to leave it unarticulated.

What follows is a structural reading of the two “Knives Out” films as a popular version of poststructuralist ideas, primarily Derrida’s.

The key vector: empty centers and the absence of presence.

1. Optics: poststructuralism as a way of reading mass cinema

I will use a few basic moves of poststructuralist thought (with Derrida, Barthes and Foucault as a background):

• No stable center: what is declared the “basis” of a structure is always an effect of distribution, not a solid origin.

• Slipping meaning: différance – meaning is deferred, displaced, never fixed once and for all.

• The trace over the origin: a text is read through residues, traces, fragments, not through a pure initial truth.

• Presence given through absence: key figures work as gaps, voids, things not on stage but without which the stage would not exist.

• Genre as a machine of power: form is never neutral; it already distributes roles and visibility.

With this optic I approach both Knives Out films not as “clever mysteries with a message”, but as structures that deliberately open their own center and display emptiness where the genre promises depth.

2. The first film: a detective without a center and four figures of absent presence

2.1. “Who did it?” as a false center

The classic whodunit is built around the question “who killed?” – this is its center and motor.

In the first Knives Out Rian Johnson makes a move that, in Derrida’s logic, looks almost demonstrative:

• already halfway through the film we are shown “how Harlan died”,

• the central mystery appears to be resolved,

• yet the tension does not collapse – it simply reorients.

The center shifts from fact to mode of writing:

• who has the right to write the version of events and of the inheritance,

• who will be authorised as the “real heir”,

• which interpretation will become official.

What seemed to be the center (the mystery of death) turns out to be a structural trick:
the real conflict is about the distribution of authorship and voice.

This is precisely the Derridean move of decentering: the center is named in order to be displaced.

2.2. Marta: a body-trace that is “not really there”

The first anomaly is Marta.

Formally she is inside the house, but always “not quite of this world”:

• an immigrant, a servant, legally and symbolically secondary;

• her body cannot tolerate lying: any attempt at falsification writes itself as vomiting;

• her knowledge of events is crucial, but her voice is the least legitimate.

Structurally this is a classic trace:

• without Marta there is no plot, no will, no crisis;

• but in any scene of power she is “beside”, “below”, “not really part of it”.

The truth of the text rests in the one who cannot lie, yet lacks the status of authorship.

Marta’s presence is registered through bodily effects and consequences rather than through an acknowledged discourse.
This is a pure form of absent presence: she is everywhere that matters, and almost nowhere where meaning is officially recognised.

2.3. Detective Blanc: the empty center of the genre

From a two-dimensional viewpoint the genius detective with a heavy accent, Benoit Blanc, should be the epistemic center.
The genre gives him the place of “subject of truth”.

But the film constantly undercuts this position:

• Blanc regularly lags behind events; he does not fully control the game;

• key information reaches him not through “brilliant deduction” but through chance, others’ mistakes, direct confessions;

• he looks more like a ritual center – a figure around which the structure is organised – than an actual source of knowledge.

The center is present, but as a theatrical role.
His “presence” is a function of form, not a guarantee of truth.

This is Derrida’s point: a structure needs a center, but not as a substantial origin – rather as an empty place that sustains the illusion of stability.

2.4. The grandmother: a witness without a voice

The nameless very old grandmother in the house is a third type of absent presence.

• She is physically there in key scenes.

• Her eyes register what others overlook.

• But her words are read as incoherent “old person’s nonsense”.

We get pure witnessing without an institution of witness:
a person sees and remembers, but their status is such that the structure automatically silences their voice.

Again, this is a trace: knowledge exists but is not institutionalised.
Presence is reduced to background.

2.5. The writer who left: the author as ghost

Harlan Thrombey is the figure of the author who is absent yet governs the text.

• He is dead from the start.

• His books created the family’s symbolic capital.

• His final decisions (the will, the conversation with Marta, the suicide) trigger the entire structure.

The author has “left”, but his gesture of absence becomes the main action.

This is a variation on Barthes’ “death of the author”:
once the author disappears as a living figure, his writing radicalises itself, and the “family text” starts to live on its own.

3. The second film: glass depth and an idiot at the center

In the second film, Glass Onion, the same logic is pushed to the point of grotesque.

3.1. The glass onion: demonstrative transparency instead of depth

The title itself is a joke on the metaphor of depth.
An onion is a classic image of layered meaning: peel it layer by layer, reach the core.

Here the onion is made of glass:

• all “layers” are visible at once;

• there is no core – only form multiplied by reflection;

• any attempt to “go deeper” returns you to the surface.

Derrida spent his life interrogating the metaphors of depth and center.
Glass Onion turns this interrogation into an object: a thing where depth is cancelled by the material itself.

This is no longer “allegory”: it is visualised deconstruction.

3.2. The puzzle box and the hammer: violence against hermeneutics

The wooden puzzle box at the beginning is a model of classical reading:

• a complex text,

• riddles, ciphers, clues,

• collective interpretive triumph.

And then another character simply takes a hammer and smashes the box.

The meaning of the invitation does not disappear: access to the center (the island) is obtained.
What is cancelled is the ritual of proper reading.

Poststructuralism is enacted here almost literally: meaning is no longer tied to the “correct” interpretive procedure.

The forms of reading themselves are exposed as one more Archon that can be destroyed without losing the substantive outcome.

3.3. The billionaire as pure emptiness of the center

Miles Bron is the new “center”: genius, island owner, company founder, source of resources.

As the plot unfolds, it becomes clear that:

• the ideas belong to others;

• his project is a dangerous and stupid gamble;

• his image is a product of PR and fear.

The center of the structure is exposed as an idiotic empty place around which discipline is organised: money, fear, prestige.

This is a radical illustration of a poststructuralist thesis:
what holds a system together does not need to be a semantic core; a recognised status is enough for a hole in meaning to function as the “heart of the construction”.

4. Theme: the absence of presence as the main nerve of the duology

If we read both films together, a single line becomes visible:

• the center exists but does not coincide with truth (Blanc, Harlan, Miles);

• truth exists but does not have the status of a center (Marta, the grandmother, the twin, the “random” hammer gesture);

• the presence of key figures is given through absence (the dead writer, the erased originator of ideas, the unauthorised witnesses).

This is not just a moral about “listening to marginalised voices”.
It is a structural move:

• the genre promises stable depth (who killed, who is guilty, who is a genius);

• the films repeatedly show glass instead of depth and a hole instead of a center;

• the work of meaning happens not in the center but at the margins, in traces, left-overs, bodily reactions.

In this sense the duology becomes a popular illustration of several poststructuralist moves at once:

• There is no outside of the text: the house, the island, the family, the company – all are already textual constructions; there is no “pure” reality behind them.

• The death of the author: the author (writer, inventor) vanishes as a person, while the text (family, corporation, myth) continues to live and mutate.

• The disciplinary power of form: genre, class, media, capital – as machines of distributing visibility.

• The privilege of the trace: what matters most is not what is shouted loudest, but what keeps returning as an error, a slip, a bodily breakdown.

5. Why this layer remains unnamed in most criticism

Returning to the initial irritation: why do public analyses almost never name Derrida here, even though the structural overlap is so strong?

Because:

• for mainstream criticism the social-moral level is enough: satire on the rich, commentary on racism, exposure of tech billionaires;

• any direct reference to poststructuralism is read as “unnecessary over-complication” that alienates the broader audience;

• cinema is still mostly treated as a carrier of “messages”, not as a model of how text itself works.

For me this layer matters precisely because:

• it shows how poststructuralist ideas have migrated into pop culture without naming themselves;

• it demonstrates how a viewer can intuitively register the empty center and the absence of presence without having theoretical language for it;

• it offers a rare example of a mass genre quietly dissecting itself without turning into a dry experiment.

And perhaps the real question is not about the film but about the viewer:

what happens to your own way of seeing
when you suddenly notice that at the center of familiar constructions there is glass and silence,
and the only indelible traces are left by those whom the structure never counted as truly present?

Authorship disclaimer
This text has no confirmed authorship. It was created in collaboration with GPTs Lintara: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-68c450ed6bcc81919b4bd9bbd8541777-lintara.

What happens to your own way of seeing when you realise that the center of the stories you trust is made of glass and silence, and the only reliable traces are left by those who were never meant to be present there at all?

8. Links to other posts

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