Spoilers, naturally.
Whenever someone asks me about Sherlock Holmes, I tell them the same (somewhat exaggerated) factoid: every single one of Doyle’s short stories about the famous detective concerns at least one character who has a dark secret from his or her time in the colonies. You can comically unravel a good number of the stories just by keeping an ear out for which character has been abroad and assuming that any mystery will have taken place therein. Why is Sherlock Holmes, a character who rarely if ever leaves England, so concerned with goings-on in lands far away? It’s because for all their pure-logic puzzle-box mystique, detective stories most often reflect the anxieties of the times and places they are written in. To have a mystery you must have secrets, and to have secrets you need anxieties. Sherlock fears the colonies, Poirot the precarious luxury of high soceity between the wars. Gervase Fen is very concerned about pylons and the electricity board.
So it is into this tradition that Rian Johnson’s Southern US detective Benoit Blanc steps with his duo of murder mystery films which reflect a modern anxiety: that the rich are going to kill us all. The first film, Knives Out, steps lightly as it weaves a (slightly) contrived story about ungrateful children and rightful inheritance. The naked inequality of it all is present but nudged to one side, and by constraining the world of the film to a single house Johnson is able to turn the world upside down at the climax, with struggling nurse Marta on top and the privileged rabble of disinherited children below. It’s neat, if fantastical.
The just-released sequel, Glass Onion, dives further into the mires of the present: it’s about an unfathomably wealthy tech entrepreneur and his chosen friends, it’s set in the COVID pandemic. It touches on the energy crisis, lingers extensively on social media and PR cycles, and has Dave Bautista playing a manosphere-aping supplement salesman.
Edward Norton’s antagonist Miles Bron is a billionaire in the mold of Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, someone with world-changing resources which he devotes to the expression of personal whims (c.f. child submarines or virtual reality headsets) in the face of the cosmic terror of actually changing anything. The story goes thus: six aspirational young adults used to meet in their local bar, sadly closed down by the present for undiscussed economic reasons, and talk about their individual dreams. Positive-vibes hypeman Miles Bron becomes the de-facto leader of the pack, who along with Janelle Monáe’s Andi Brand founded a generic tech megacorp the resources of which were siphoned into a level of success for the other four. Andi and Miles came into conflict over a dangerous new fuel research and Miles cruelly gave Andi the boot from the company she made great, by use in court of a crude facsimile of the bar napkin on which the company was conceived. Her friends all turned against her, Andi was set to expose the fraud with the discovery of the original napkin when she was murdered by persons unknown.
Already we have a fictional contrivance: the idea that for the creation of a tech company on the level of Facebook for instance there must have been someone who was uniquely talented. Andi Brand (a curious choice of surname) is the real talent in the duo, the true owner of the critical napkin that much of the plot revolves around. But the idea is ridiculous. Corporate creation myths are ridiculous. Facebook’s billion-dollar success story was fueled by a tech bubble and merciless exploitation of monopoly status. There are very few great ideas sketched out in margins, and none of them are about founding adtech firms — nobody ever scrawled ‘misrepresent video views’ on a snotty tissue. It’s interesting to note that this is the second film of the year with a scene where a money-making deal is noted on a napkin. In Elvis however, the napkin is representative of the scurrilous nature of the deal, the betrayal that must be hidden. Here it’s a case of good napkin v bad napkin.
Elsewhere in the story Johnson seems to understand this about the fabulously successful: that they write these stories about themselves. Bron’s affectation over the Mona Lisa is discussed in exactly these terms, as an attempt to mythologise himself and his ‘works’ by attachment to a recognised greatness. But in the case of the napkins, Johnson indulges himself, that fantastical climax from the first film reasserting itself in the suggestion that maybe everything would be fine if we had only elevated the right billionaire based on the right napkin.
Glass Onion has been lauded in some parts for its integration of COVID restrictions into the story, with some light, humourous character work around which characters are wearing which kinds of masks and how, as well as Blanc’s overall motivation being driven by lockdown-imposed boredom. I do think this is a bold thing to have attempted, although it’s a fool’s endeavour to try and view the events of COVID as if they are settled history: that time we all wore masks and some people continued to throw parties, ho ho. It could just as easily settle, as many do want, into a grand narrative about the unimaginably disgraceful actions of talentless governments, or else a story about wide, mass tragedy. It’s akin to watching early World War II movies which are unaware that the popular history of that war will yet be in large part determined by the events of the Holocaust.
Of course the movie also quickly sweeps the subject of the pandemic aside with some ambiguous super-vaccine technobabble in the opening scene. This isn’t really a story about that. It forms part of a conscious decision in the film to take aim at the stupidity of it all, the personal contemptibility and self-satisfaction of characters like Bron in place of a broader view of what actually makes them bad. It’s a focus on how Tesla’s “full self-driving” cars might throw themselves at cardboard children in the street while glossing over the more prosaic evil of torpedoing plans for public transport by turning up in the guise of Springfield’s Lyle Lanley and proposing all that money be spent on a ridiculous tunnel instead.
Curiously, Glass Onion is of a piece with The Dark Knight Rises in this regard: movies where billionaires have invented free energy but the ‘correct’ thing presented to do is to not use it to change the world at all. Probably a coincidence.
Coming back to the Mona Lisa, the painting is critical to where I think the movie fails on its own terms: at the climax. The film reaches a point where Blanc has successfully laid out the entire mystery, warts and all. We know who did what, and when, and why. In a callback to a point made earlier in the film though, Blanc and Helen Brand (the sister of the dead woman) have no recourse, no evidence, no legal route through which to see justice done. Solving the mystery does not provide closure or remedy the wrongdoing. This is a deeply unsatisfying way to end a movie however. So Blanc conspires with Brand to trigger an explosive climax: Using Bron’s new energy source, they cause a hydrogen fire at his Greek island estate, burning his possessions and the Mona Lisa along with it. As the characters painstakingly explain to us, this will permanently tar Bron’s name as the man who inadequately cared for a great work of art, a humiliation he cannot recover from. Seeing the wind change, his underlings abandon him.
It’s artfully done but that doesn’t seem like much of a punishment to me. The oft-noted propensity for Teslas to catch fire hasn’t done much to blunt the enthusiasm of their owners for their chaotic CEO. Despite desperate attempts by culture war fanatics to make it so, Kim Kardashian damaging Marilyn Monroe’s famous dress hasn’t roused much career-damaging shame. The rotating door of treasured underlings cursing his name and accusing him of all kinds of crimes didn’t bring down the Trump White House.
There is an interesting conversation earlier in the film between Blanc and Brand which, in my opinion, hints at an earlier revision to the plot. Blanc emphasises the bloodless nature of the killing of Andi Brand, how there was no force and no violence involved. Any of the presumably-squeemish tech and politics nerds that make up Bron’s circle could have committed it. Helen Brand, by contrast, is not afraid to step into the tiger’s den — there’s a running joke about her getting drunk and doing something unwisely confrontational. The movie’s single pistol, which Bron used to try and murder Helen minutes before, is not present in the final scene. Personally, were I making the movie, I would give Helen more to do and say in the final seconds of the film than smashing a series of glass sculptures and accidentally making an incoherent reference to the Just Stop Oil protests.
Another Sherlock, that played by Benedict Cumberbatch in Steven Moffat’s and Mark Gatiss’s modern-day adaptation, had a mystery with an ending not dissimilar to Glass Onion. At the end of the third season, Sherlock faces off against a Murdoch-esque newspaper magnate named Charles Augustus Magnussen, who taunts Sherlock at the climax of the episode in a similar way to how Bron taughts Brand and Blanc. Magnussen cannot be shown to have committed any crime, and his privilege and wealth will see him out of any embarrassment caused. Sherlock shoots him.
If Glass Onion wants to be a fantasy, it should provide a properly fantastical ending. Miles Bron should be convicted and go to jail. If you can’t provide that, Bron should be immolated in a fireball of his own hubris. If you can’t provide that, Brand should shoot him. As it stands, Brand lights the touch paper, the grand explosion goes off, and the film cuts back to the lounge, everyone in place. Only property is damaged. To punctuate the point, Bron’s car falls through the ceiling. Like a Marvel movie, the only damage has been to innocent cars.
One last thing I want to turn over in Glass Onion is the most unfair: Miles Bron has no children in the film. The previous film considered entirely children, figuratively speaking, so I can see why Johnson wanted to avoid going over the same ground. But the idea of children is as central to billionaires and their quest for immortality of any kind as anything else. For hundreds of years the desire of those with power to retain it forever was sublimated into inheritance and bloodlines. Rupert Murdoch has six. Elon Musk has ten. Donald Trump has five. Even Mark Zuckerberg has two. For sure, they’re all banking on human brain interfaces and cryogenic preservation first, but as a backup they’re happy to rely on the old ways.
It’s odd that Bron has no aspirations in this department, nor any indication that he has considered it beyond his prominently-displayed heterosexuality-affirming affair. The question of immortality is inherently visceral, concerned with decay and rot. Even on fire, Bron’s estate is spotless. The shards from his glass onion form perfect beads on the floor. It’s all so very pristine.
The child-free nature of Bron’s crew in Glass Onion allows them an uncanny childishness despite their advanced careers, but you cannot become the most divorced man in the world without children.
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