rewatched the first knives out recently and it got me rotating thoughts about blanc’s implied father issues, so this and your brief allusion of harlan in one of your resent posts has me on a new headcanon; the both of them, i.e. Police Detective Daddy Blanc and Multimillionaire Author Harlan Thrombey, were maybe possibly a pair of corrupt shitbags actually.
It brings me no pleasure to lump harlan in as a Bad Guy cos what little we get to see of him on screen makes for a very endearing character, but on this recent viewing his act of leaving everything to marta read to me less as one of philanthropy and more as an end-of-life crises last minute decision than anything else. Like the more time he spent with her the more her irrefutably sincere-hearted kindness rubbed off on him until he went “oh shit oh FUCK I’ve spent my whole life being a capitalist pig and raising two new generations of capitalist pigs and if I don’t do something NOW all this wealth is gonna go to them to continue the cycle meanwhile my Best Friend Marta the Goodiest-Two-Shoes to ever Good is probably gonna get forgotten and left to scrape by in minimum wage nursing until she likely dies on the job”. And personally I quite like this as a thing for a character! I like the way it makes for a quiet message of ‘it’s never too late to do a good thing, even when you’ve been doing bad your whole life’ (obviously a message we see in the story of Martha’s character as well!). My reasons for thinking he was potentially a former bad guy are: 1. I couldn’t help but notice the “There’s so much of me in that kid” line when he was talking about ransom, and 2. his books were likely pro-cop given that one of the cop side characters was a huge fan of his work. And it’s that latter point that brings me to Daddy Blanc who I theorise was one of those ‘it’s Us(the law) versus Them(the criminals)’ kinda cops, Capital C Conservative, Capital T Traditional kinda dude, married to a Very religious woman, and maybe was Very picky about what he liked in a fictional representation of a detective which is why him liking harlan and his work “says a lot”.
Maybe our boy Benevolent Blanc, was being quietly driven away from his mother by her bible-thumping when he was young, ended up hanging out more and more in his fathers shadow, finding something of a reprieve in the notions of Logic and Data and Facts, maybe even on the way to becoming another corrupt cop himself until, I dunno, either a gradual shift where his fixation on the truth lead him to butt heads with colleagues who were in it for a conviction, or a big dramatic movie plot worthy Event happened and it caused him to become rightfully disenfranchised with the whole system. Either way there’s this residue of comfort and nostalgia left on the thing whether he likes it or not. So yes, he works with cops, tho it does appear to me to be very bare minimum and utilitarian, he cooperates for the sake of access to evidence and witness testimony, and I like to think that it’s Very Deliberate on his part that he Only ever shares his conclusions at the last minute when he has every piece and knows a way to prove it that ensures the good stays winning
… anyways sorry for the mini essay in ur inbox, I might not be the first person to think this, or maybe there’s a bit of lore I missed that collapses this lil tower, but oh well! it’s near 1am my time and I got an early shift tomorrow so I think I’m gonna leave this with u n scarper ✌️ I look forward to whatever writing you’ve been cooking today! k byeeee !
oh i love this analysis thank you for sharing
