The Gods That Walk Among Us

Title: Glass Onion

Rating: 5 Stars

I was going to title this blog Eat The Rich, but then I checked and realized that I’d already titled three previous posts with that title. I guess that probably says something about me, so I decided to change it up a bit.

For those totally out of the loop, this film is part of the Knives Out universe. It’s a pretty loose universe. About the only thing connecting the two is Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), a strangely accented expert detective of some Southern heritage. Since the director / screenwriter Rian Johnson has a multi-picture deal with Netflix, there will apparently be a series of Knives Out films. I’m guessing that this will turn out to be this generation’s equivalent of Agathe Christie’s similarly accent challenged detective Hercule Poirot.

In this film, billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) has assembled what appear to be his close friends and fellow ‘disrupters’ to a weekend vacation. He promises that the entire week will be spent playing a murder mystery where he himself will be the murder victim (all in good fun, of course).

His invited friends include the swollen men’s right advocate social influencer Duke (Dave Batista), the former supermodel and now fashion designer Birdie (Kate Hudson), the state governor Claire (Kathryn Hahn), and Bron’s lead researcher Lionel (Leslie Odom Jr). Also invited but who no one expected to appear is Bron’s estranged ex-business partner Andi (Janelle Monae). Even more unexpected is the appearance of Blanc, who Bron did not invite. Someone apparently made a copy of Bron’s invitation and sent it to Blanc.

As Blanc investigates, he discovers (as usually happens in such mysteries) that all is not how it seems. All of these people owe their fame and position due to Bron and they all, to one level or another, resent it.

Now, from here on out there will be spoilers (it’s kind of hard to talk about this film without a bit of spoilage), so if you want to watch it with no hints of how the film unfolds, you should probably stop reading now.

Blanc, realizes that Bron, by inviting people that he thinks are his friends but that actually might mean him harm, has put himself in danger. To alleviate that threat, Blanc, to Bron’s obvious annoyance, effortlessly solves the planned murder mystery, which was supposed to last the entire weekend, in mere moments. Bron doesn’t believe that anyone would want to hurt him until Duke drops dead after drinking what is apparently poison from the glass meant for Bron. In the ensuing chaos, Andi is shot dead.

Now Blanc has two murders to solve and still needs to keep Bron out of danger. Of course, Blanc will not let us down.

As a mystery, it’s cleverly plotted with many twists and turns. The characters are interesting and well acted. The rating of any film in which Daniel Craig adopts a Southern accent immediately improves. All of this alone is enough to give the film a high rating.

What gives it an even higher rating is the socio-political statement that it makes. One is that wealth corrupts. The other is that there is zero correlation between wealth and intelligence.

Let’s discuss the first one first. Wealth corrupts. Claire is a progressive, smart governor that is completely beholden to Bron. To stay in his good graces, she’s willing to approve a potentially dangerous power plant in her state. Lionel is clearly a brilliant scientist, but his job now pretty much appears to manage whatever insane idea Bron dreams up. Knowing that Bron’s energy idea is potentially very dangerous, he’s not willing to risk his position to stand up to him. Duke is willing to sexually offer up his girlfriend to Bron if that means that his videos will be promoted on Bron’s media channel. Birdie’s willing to take the blame for a sweat shop manufacturer that was created by Bron. All of these people, no matter what their initial idealism might have been, have allowed their values be corrupted by Bron’s immense wealth.

This isn’t real groundbreaking stuff. Where the film excels is showing exactly how, beneath the suavity, new age philosophizing, and intellectual pretensions, that Bron is an idiot. He simply is not a smart man and he has no judgement or discernment. He regularly misuses words. His glass onion house is an architectural monstrosity. His beautiful boat dock is essentially nonfunctional. His art objects are almost breathless in their tastelessness. His one of a kind prized car (this does not appear in the film but I read about it elsewhere) is a real car but one that no real exotic car purist would ever consider owning. Basically, he’s an idiot fraud that is so far up his own asshole that he doesn’t even know it.

In this film, Blanc plays the little boy who calls out the emperor wearing no clothes. In his own way a brilliant genius himself, he is manifestly offended by this brain dead poseur that stands naked before him.

Why this is important is because that is the time in which we now live. We worship billionaires. If someone is successful in one area, then that means that they must be brilliant in all areas. We breathlessly await their pontifications on any and all subjects.

That is how we ended up with a man becoming president despite having quite literally no experience or expertise or even a grade school level understanding of how government works. Acting like a successful businessman for several years on a reality television show was enough to convince many that he possessed superior intellect. People thought that Trump was playing five dimensional chess when he was actually just playing checkers by shoving the pieces up his nose.

Now we have Elon Musk. Considered some kind of super genius because of PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX (SpaceX was the only company that he actually founded), he has acolytes that think that he can do no wrong. Apparently getting a random idea to buy Twitter, he later tried to back out, but eventually was pretty much legally compelled to purchase it. Now running Twitter, advertisers are abandoning it in droves. He’s trying to drive revenue with a subscription service. Hmm, let’s see, a company whose whole economic model relies upon content creators voluntarily offering up their content for free now wants to charge those content creators to continue to offer up their content for free? Well, good luck with that. I’m not saying that Musk is as dumb as Bron. What is apparent is that skill running a company like SpaceX might not translate to the completely different business of running a successful social media platform.

What was most amazing to me was when Musk’s text messages were published as a result of a legal discovery process. He was surrounded by people telling him what a genius level visionary he is. By giving him exactly the kind of feedback that he wanted to hear, they all were clearly angling for their turn at the cash trough.

This is the timeline that we live in and Glass Onion does a great job of capturing it. Glass Onion and Don’t Look Up should be locked away in a time capsule for future generations to understand the truly stupid time in which we’re currently living.