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This article focuses on Rian Johnson’s murder mystery films Knives Out (2019) and Glass Onion (2022) to explore the chameleonic sartorial choices of their detective protagonist, Benoit Blanc played by Daniel Craig. While in the first film, Knives Out, Blanc displays a conservative look with relaxed tweed suits, in Glass Onion, he showcases a more flamboyant look, with a striped blue and white tan suit, beige linen safari-styled suits and Breton striped sweaters. In this article, I explore how costume designer Jenny Eagan playfully rethinks the detective look, drawing inspiration from films by Jacques Tati and Alfred Hitchcock, to address issues of capitalism, privilege and class combining humour and social commentary. Benoit Blanc’s attire, classic and yet bordering period fashion from the 1940s, presents a vintage dandy sensibility, taking the audience back to a past time. His look, I argue, not only deliberately helps differentiate Craig from his most famous role of James Bond, but also functions as a comforting tool for audiences in relating better with the masculinity of this down-to-earth detective. Despite presenting occasional camp features, Benoit Blanc performs a traditional, rational and intellectually reassuring masculine heroism.

This thesis examines the representation of left-wing political violence in Italian and German films from 2000 to 2010 drawing on postmodernism theory, film genre, memory studies and gender theory. It considers filmic texts and paratexts, historiography and political discourses to offer a comparative analysis of the mnemonic dynamics in new millennial Italy and Germany. This thesis looks at why the experience of revolutionary terrorism in the 1970s reappears at the turn of the new millennium in a cluster of fiction films, which innovate and sometimes challenge previous paradigms. It reads this revival in connection with industrial trends and historical events, such as the end of old ideologies, the early release of former terrorists and 9/11. The memory of left-wing terrorism has found new lifeblood in the new millennium because there are ample resonances with contemporary social issues, such as political activism and global fears of international terrorism. Focusing on eight case studies, I argue that the memory of left-wing terrorism unfolds beyond and across temporal and spatial boundaries, reactivated by present-day occurrences and through contacts with other traumatic memories. The notion of ‘interconnected memory’ is fundamentally conceived as a nexus of multiple meanings, the fruit of past recollections, and movements between different socio-historical dimensions and generational memories. Representational strategies and narrative trends are also explored to shed light on crossnational forms of memorialising political violence and its legacy. The first part analyses how postmillennial films deal with the possibility of forgiveness, here interpreted as an approach to normalise the past through narratives of pacification or exclusion. It highlights the figure of the teenager as a metaphor for the changing memory of terrorism, generational conflicts and the implications of 1970s violence for young generations. Moreover, it discusses the depicti