DAVID KLEINMAN

core, viscous, frigid, and slow. Loneliness, I thought, my exhale collecting in a white cloud and streaming up through the air. That was loneliness: a night where I’d insisted on staying outside to play long after the snow had stopped drifting down through the sky, the slow and sudden capture of the atmosphere by sunset and by stars, the pale streetlight leaving an orange patch at the edge of my driveway, the sight of nobody else.

This was my first memory of experiencing something bright, joyful, and communal in low light and solitude; it's my first memory of feeling lonely. And I remember it now, at a time where I can think of the correct word, when I can see its amorphous shape behind my closed eyes, can remember it elsewhere, piece it together or apart, or try to talk it out and away. That childhood night, standing in orange-lit snow at the edge of my driveway, I did not know its name. I had no choice but to feel it.

Standing at that intersection just outside Brown’s campus, in a process that was both similar and had somehow occurred in reverse, I put a new word to another thing not unknown but still not yet learned. I put a word into my younger self who did not yet have the tools to pick it apart, to know it in any way outside of its pure existence.

*** What do we call the new acquisition of something already intuitively known? And does this knowledge transform the nature of feeling it? It's a learning process that feels sort of like a revision. It paves the way for specificity and power, for redefinition, for intellectualization or dismissal. Discovering a word can deeply validate a feeling, allowing us to connect through shared experience. Or, it can create the possibility for misunderstanding through generalization—a single term can never truly describe the same experience across different bodies. The English language provides an extremely limited set of words to describe our emotions, which arguably encompass our most human experiences. This is partly why I love the work of poetry: It tackles the language of feeling, and therefore of connection. Sometimes I find myself at the edge of a stanza and feel, despite my frustration with not really knowing what the author describes, that I do know it in this unnameable way–that I would “know” it vocally or concretely if only there were a word out there to describe it.

I try to find a word that describes this simultaneous learning and knowing of a word. It may exist in some niche corner of academia, or deeper in the internet than I am willing to search, or maybe in another language. It's a word I would love to know—the moment of learning a "new" word, the thrill or regret of its existence in a form that can be shared. The moment of either its unlearning or its unfolding.

Hey, That's My Knife! knives out and the horror of new england fall BY DAVID KLEINMAN ILLUSTRATED BY IRIS XIE

The moment I knew that Knives Out would be my topic of conversation for weeks wasn’t the first time I heard Daniel Craig’s dulcet take on a Southern accent, or the ending twist, or even the appearance of Chris Evans’s oversized raglan sweater. It was when our heroine finds a toxicology report with the little emblem in the top corner that reads “Norfolk County, Massachusetts”—also known as the place I’ve lived for my entire life. While I’ve been joking to people that the movie is based on my life—I’m the knife, I tell them, not the Thrombey family’s neoconservative teenage alt-righter, Jacob—it really is true that the film captured the essence of southern Massachusetts extremely well, boiling it down to one incredible throughline: a sense of being trapped. I’ll be the first to say that Knives Out probably wasn’t intended for me. From the film’s focus on Ana de Armas’s expert portrayal of a child of undocumented immigrants to its skewering of “wellmeaning” rich white suburbanites regardless of their position on the political spectrum, Knives Out isn’t exactly marketing its humor to reasonably wealthy cishet white men (and the film is made immensely better by this). Moreover, without giving too much in the way of spoilers, every piece of the film is clearly designed to make fun of murder mystery moviegoers, or at least the tropes of classic murder mysteries. The fact that the film’s victim is a mystery writer and that the main set piece is literally a bullseye made of knives, however, didn’t dissuade me from putting on my Sherlock Holmes hat. I assumed every single fact of the case was a lie and looked carefully for the ways I could be being deceived. I eagerly awaited the parlor room scene that would reveal everything I thought I knew to be an elaborate ruse. I wanted to have every single expectation subverted, and in a sense, that’s what I got. Knives Out made a point of tricking me— not into thinking I knew what was going on, but into thinking I didn’t. I constructed elaborate theories, and when the movie showed me that I’d been given the pieces all along, I had to ask myself—why did I so badly need a mystery to solve?

Norfolk County, Massachusetts includes several towns and even some cities, and among its lesserknown communities is my hometown of Sharon. Sharon is the quintessential commuter town, smack dab between Boston and Providence, originally a resort town for the rich colonial families that wanted to escape the hustle and bustle of the city. In its current state, “sleepy” doesn’t do it justice—one could more easily call it “exhausted.” The characters of Knives Out seldom leave the family’s big, beautiful manor, and I can tell you firsthand that it’s for good reason. In that neck of the woods, there’s extremely little that would get you out of the house. Because I went to a private school (like I said—I’m undeniably the butt of Knives Out’s jokes) and therefore didn’t interact as much as I could have with the community, my view of the town might not be the most accurate—but that means I have

the exact same knowledge of the area that the spoiledrotten Thrombey family does. I was looking for familiar landmarks throughout the film, and I could swear I saw a train station I once commuted from to take ballroom dance classes with my then-girlfriend, but it could really have been any MBTA stop in the county. That’s sort of the point: There just aren’t that many landmarks in Norfolk County that allow you to distinguish one town from another. It’s generic; it’s standardized.

It was a stroke of genius to have the film take place in the autumn, because that’s when the melancholy feeling that haunts suburban Massachusetts is at its most powerful—things aren’t as beautiful or lively as one would expect, but they are stereotypically rural New England, which is to say: quiet. You can hear a twig snap for miles, and you’re much more likely to see a car passing through to break your terrifying isolation than a person who might actually be attempting to experience the world around them. The trees are beautiful, but no one who lives here actually cares enough to get outside and experience them. That’s why the claustrophobia of Knives Out resonated so powerfully with me that at first I didn’t even notice it: That’s just what New England is like in the fall. Unless, like young Meg Thrombey, you’ve got friends nearby and a way to travel some distance to them, you’re going to be stuck inside with your family.

To again attempt to explain something without spoilers, the one great reveal of Knives Out is that a character you thought you could trust is the closest thing to the crime’s mastermind. Like I said earlier, this is hardly a twist; learning that this character is evil just means everyone else was right about them. As I thought about this, I realized that, though the knives may be out, no one in the Thrombey family has a way out. For sure, they have all the privilege that money can buy—and some it can’t—but Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc refers to the family as “a pack of vultures at the feast, knives out and beaks bloody,” and no noise in the deathly quiet Norfolk County is going to drown that out. They know what monsters their family members are, and with the film’s aforementioned great reveal, we come to recognize that they know what monsters they themselves are, too. As much as the film lampoons mystery as an escape from dealing with real-world socioeconomic injustice, the Thrombeys clearly hope that patriarch Harlan’s death and even the subsequent whodunnit will serve as an escape from themselves. The twist is that we knew how horrible each and every one of them was from the very beginning; nothing was hidden, nothing was secret.

The horror of suburban Massachusetts isn’t what you don’t know, but what you wish you didn’t.