The Long Take: Shattered Glass Onion
[Spoilers below] I'm not angry. I'm just disappointed. [plays Komm Susser Tod]
In 1997, Hideaki Anno released The End of Evangelion, a movie played out as an alternate ending to his iconic anime Neon Genesis Evangelion. The End of Evangelion is flawed, if not fascinating because the franchise - from the TV shows to the Rebuilds - embodies the creative and emotional struggles of its creator. While the animation proved to be influential to the form, the storytelling is often dense, and anyone who is dedicated to the lore will find parts of it frustrating. Anno’s struggles with depression are well-documented and it often interfered with his creativity to the point that it ultimately meshed into his narrative. In the film, he lashes out at the otaku - who he once was, as a passionate fan of Gundam anime - that sent him and the production company Gainax, death threats. This played a significant part in the acclaim that The End received, as a lot of people were sympathetic to his emotional response to the reaction from irrational people perceived to be anti-art. Personally, this is an excuse for The End of Evangelion to become less proper and wallow in its own nihilism; an endpoint in which everyone in the conversation, takes a dogmatic standpoint of the art and art itself.
I only mention this, because as I watched Glass Onion, if Rian Johnson has ever been subjected to a similar situation to Anno, I suspect that this was part of the motivation to make the Knives Out universe. Before that, he directed The Last Jedi, which remains polarizing among Star Wars fans. As people talked about the film, it became less about the quality of the product (yes, it’s a product put out by Disney, even if it still believed in its director’s strong aspirations) and more about how the reaction to it is part of their identity. If you think SJWs are ruining movies, you make a five-hour video where you discuss this with your friends, even when you don’t think it through. If you think the alt-right are whiny babies, you make impassionate Twitter threads about how Rian Johnson is an angelic victim, even when you happen to interact with him while he was directing Looper. Knives Out seem to bring everyone together, with both sides embracing whatever it was that they enjoyed about the film.
I am perhaps one of the few people on the planet who doesn’t just dislike the film but believe it to be a bug in the fledging state of modern-day Hollywood. You can thank Johnson and Knives Out for the uptick of whimsical murder mysteries being as popular as they were in the 1980s but adds an edge to it that I think is unsubtle and often delusional.
I wonder whether my hatred for Knives Out was irrational because it had little to do with the storytelling, which had a few twists that are about as clever as it thinks it is and was very functional. Much of my venom was aimed at its politics, which portrays a wealthy white family, whose members’ individual beliefs are so insufferable in delivery, it made me want to throw something at my screen. And maybe, that was Johnson’s point, as it concludes with the poor illegal immigrant inheriting everything that the patriarch is giving to her and the family being worse off, with the young, but a rebellious son being found for his murder. For many fans of Knives Out, it was the smallest thing you can get angry about. But it is a distraction, not a red herring that puts itself front and centre by the end of the film that would make you go back to what you’ve missed. The minutiae of Johnson’s ideology inflates, resulting in a film that is more predictable and caricatured than it should be. If it did anything substantial, it was cementing the West’s indulgence in wealthy elites getting their comeuppance, and it continues with Glass Onion.
While Glass Onion had the same level of tortuous praise that Knives Out had, it had its own backlash that I did not predict. I’m going to address two criticisms that went viral but fixate on the ‘whats’ of the effort. Justin Murphy tweeted about the staleness of the satire of wealthy people as a “Caviar Cope”, accusing The Menu and The White Lotus of catering to “35-year-old PhD dog-moms with sub-zero net worths” and not targeting the 50-year-old billionaires that enjoy it. Ben Shapiro partly claims that the film has bad politics because the film would have you believe that it is targeting Elon Musk and his Twitter acquisitions.
In those aspects, both are wrong. The Caviar Cope that Murphy mentions has been the kind of satire that existed for many decades, hailing back to Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game in 1939. Shapiro is wrong in the idea that Musk, the person, is not represented properly in Glass Onion. Although Johnson did acknowledge the relevance that Musk would have had in enhancing the film upon its release, he did not have him in mind when writing the screenplay. However, Shapiro isn't wrong to say that the film is torturous to sit through.
Glass Onion repeats many of the same problems I had with its predecessor but has newer issues as well. It is set in May 2020, which meant that much of the world is under lockdown from COVID before the Summer riots set in. Our characters involve Birdie (Kate Hudson), a fashion designer who is having a party with no social distancing, much to the chagrin of her long-suffering Gen Z Assistant Peg, Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn), a hypocritical governor who is running for the Senate. Then there’s Duke (Dave Bautista), the anti-feminist content creator living with his mum and Lionel (Leslie Odom Jr), the head scientist working for Miles Bron (Edward Norton), the billionaire living alone on his own island, who through Johnson’s eyes, does not deserve to have so much wealth because he is stupid. Bron invites them, along with an ex-friend Andi Brand (Janelle Monae) and Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), both of whom possess awful Southern accents and the charisma of a Legacy Checkmark complaining about Bari Weiss columns on Twitter. Much like Marta, the immigrant servant in Knives Out, the viewer should have no good reason to be sceptical of Andi, because she was screwed over by Miles Bron. They founded a company, and got rich, Andi rejected an environmentally dangerous proposal, left, and tried to claim back her assets by saying she was responsible for making this network more successful, lost and eventually died. Andi is the Noble Savage, all virtuous and nothing interesting. It would be an understatement to say that the rest of the characters are caricatures, but the problems don’t end with their characters.
Suppose you want to know the problems in more detail. In that case, I recommend that you check out Akash Shetye’s review and Film Colossus (which Shapiro mentioned in his thread about Glass Onion), analysing the many mechanical deficits in a lucid manner. But I want to address the other problems no one thought about, and the core of it is that much of the film is very dull and lazy.
Glass Onion is sprinkled with pop culture references and cameos. With Jared Leto and Jeremy Renner receiving a shout-out, with the latter actually playing a role in the plot, we see appearances from Jake Tapper, Yo-Yo Ma, the late Stephen Sondheim and Serena Williams. Benoit Blanc is introduced by playing Among Us on Zoom. If there’s a purpose to any of these blink-and-you-miss-it moments, it's to ensure that you recognize some of their names and that they’re in on the joke (I’m very sure that Jared Leto laughed at the umpteenth joke that he takes acting super seriously). But these are less poignant, reminiscent of the Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer joints made in the late 2000s where they take a recent movie, reference it and make them have a pratfall every minute. The difference is that Glass Onion is so satisfied with being middle-high-brow and unfocused.
The visuals are just ugly, looking exactly like the polished sheen you expect from a movie abiding by the quality standards that Netflix demands, being emitted from your 4K devices. It’s brightly lit, unnecessary close-ups don’t achieve its goal, and the setting is less distinguishable and more garish than the Sicilian villa in the second season of The White Lotus.
Speaking of which, let’s go back to the point about the Caviar Cope. Justin Murphy includes The White Lotus as an example of that genre, along with Succession and The Menu. While The White Lotus doesn’t exactly fit, all of the efforts honestly attempt to explore the complexity of its characters compared to Glass Onion. Glass Onion overlaps with other entries released in 2022 that could qualify as Caviar Cope like Bodies Bodies Bodies and Triangle of Sadness. It has the moment where the setting blows up and the virtuous migrant (Triangle of Sadness), as well as the planned whodunnit mystery game in Bodies Bodies Bodies. Say whatever you will about any of them, but at least they don’t begin with the bare bones of what their genre and audience demand.
Let’s also dwell on the moment that Glass Onion is set in. We have seen a current slate of movies that have COVID-19 as a backdrop, from Kimi to Songbird to The Bubble, all of which have been underwhelming because they are, in their nature, serious issues that many are still processing being put under a cheaper framework. Like those movies, I mentioned the scene in Glass Onion where Birdie is holding a house party when she is not supposed to, because of the restrictions at that time. Are we supposed to dislike her, based on the memory of that moment? Then there’s a scene in which everyone arrives with stylized masks, and Duke the influencer doesn’t wear one, and neither does Birdie or Miles. Are we supposed to judge them, based on the temporary norms they are supposed to follow?
Johnson also has a reputation as the subverter of expectations, which is why the critical praise for him is quite high. This isn’t to say that much of it isn’t deserved or that he’s void of any talent, since he did direct two of the greatest Breaking Bad episodes. Brick was pretty creative for a debut feature, in which the premise is almost an exact copy of The Maltese Falcon. And yet, the thin dimensions of each character, the fact that the twist relies on the worst cliche imaginable - that Andi has a vengeful twin sister- in Glass Onion’s middle had me questioning that idea. If that is supposed to be a twist in the audience's expectations, then it would have been mind-blowing once Lydia Tar tells Adam Gopnik “cancel culture is real” from the beginning of Tar. It’s a copout disguised as figuring out the hard truth.
Fans of Glass Onion will defend the film as a hill to die on, so they will have other reasons to like it more for the benefit of their personal agendas. Some will believe that Rian Johnson is misunderstood by whiny fanboys and Hollywood executives who refuse to engage with his work. Others will weaponize the movie against its critics’ character, while another faction of moviegoers will take it out against someone they think Glass Onion is depicting, even if it wasn’t on Rian Johnson’s mind when he made this. But more importantly, whatever happens in Glass Onion would complement their beliefs about the world, and they are more than willing to mention it in reviews and interviews. Whether it’s seeing billionaires buying and acquiring worthless things, alternative media influencers potentially radicalizing your kids, vapid fashion models who have creatively peaked, or cheering on the angry woman of colour girl boss wrecking your home. All of these aren’t new ways to respond to any film, but as Rian Johnson evolved from being a man of mystery with Brick and Looper to a culture war talisman beginning with The Last Jedi, it feels quite desirable to place your opinion into his creative mind, that acts as an automated blank slate for streaming services and blue checkmarks. If this is part of Johnson’s critical faculties, why should I care?
I am confident in saying Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is the worst movie I have ever seen. There are bad movies that are worse than Glass Onion, in terms of its production, but most come and go. There are movies with terrible politics like My Son Hunter and 4000 Mules and are blatant about it, but I can accept that they’re aimed at a few people and not me. This one is a special class in that it goes out of its way to actively hate you, catering to a wider audience of normies and elites and having the expectations you bring to a high-budget streaming film, which is to say, not a lot. It is smug, manufactured and miscalculated, reflecting the current malaise that Hollywood is struggling to break. There’s a quote from Benoit Blanc telling Birdie “it’s a dangerous thing to mistake speaking without thought for speaking the truth. Don't you think?” I agree with the second part.