Disliking Popular Things: "Glass Onion"

Hi, happy 2023.

First things first—my new zine Patience is now available (and my other zine Schatzi is always for sale as well). Both are for sale at Bishop & Wilde, Portland’s own LGBT+ bookstore.

Anyway, I watched “Glass Onion”, and then ugh, I had to write 2,500 words to explain what I didn’t like about it. Some day I’ll have the time to sit down and explain why I was bothered by “Everything Everywhere All At Once” and really just be the crankiest old man in town.

Glass Onion (2022, Netflix)

It’s telling that the full title of this film is “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”. To name a series after the first film in it is an error in at least two ways; first, it signals that someone doesn’t trust the audience to see this film without putting “Knives Out” in the title, so either the audience is stupid or the movie is. (Generally, a mystery series with a recurring detective protagonist shares said protagonist’s name rather than its first volume, eg Nancy Drew, etc). And second, it prompted me from before I even hit play to remember “Knives Out”, constantly reminding me as I watched “Glass Onion” that there was a similar but much better movie available.

When I’ve seen people on social media share their reactions, it has almost exclusively centered on the wardrobes of the various characters, which I thought was a little odd, but it makes more sense to me now that I’ve watched it. I think, unconsciously or not, people are stuck in the same spot as Aretha Franklin when forced to comment on Taylor Swift by a Wall Street Journal interviewer: “Nice gowns, beautiful gowns.”

Some of the film’s issues stem from allusions to, or attempted subversions of, various mystery and crime-solving genre tropes. The first 40 minutes of the film are a slog, and much of the rest of the story is spent explaining why it was retroactively interesting. But the reason the beginning of the movie is boring isn’t solely because it takes almost an hour for the actual premise and anything resembling stakes to be introduced; as we learn in flashbacks later, much of the beginning has Benoit Blanc already working on the case, but this information is being withheld from the audience. This in turn removes the context for what we’re watching along with our ability to enjoy it. It would be like starting an episode of Columbo halfway through when you’ve missed out on who the murderer is; not impossible to do, but not nearly as fun.

“Glass Onion” (and its predecessor) are mysteries where the detective has more information and insight than the audience, so the pleasure for the viewer is in the increasing tension between all the seemingly disparate pieces as they are revealed to us and the eventual solution offered. “Knives Out” played with this by giving us a new sort of detective: rather than a more straightforward interviewer à la Hercule Poirot or an eccentric genius like Sherlock Holmes, Benoit Blanc was at first a cypher to both us and the characters of “Knives Out”...and then he was a total fucking weirdo.

Much in the same way that I believe in a just world, we would give prestigious awards to actors for their physical work (ie: “can convincingly hold a prop gun”), and as such, in this more just world I’ve created, Keanu Reeves would have a Lifetime Achievement Award for dedication to his craft, I believe there should be some kind of honor bestowed upon actors who make, shall we say, strong choices and carry them off without making a mockery of the material. Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc remains astonishing; for the first 30 seconds on screen, I can barely stand to listen to him talk, he’s so absurd, and then at some point, I find I’m absolutely in love with him.

A lot of the character’s absurdity comes from the contrast of having a queer-coded character doing things that coded characters don’t do, and in a genre film that, while a mystery, is not otherwise participating in much of the visual and narrative subtextual signaling necessitated by the Hays Code. Blanc is the protagonist, for one, rather than an antagonist or other agent encouraging deviance. Connecting queerness with villainy and then punishing both was one of the mainstays of the Hays Code, and it created a shorthand for character design that endures. There have been calls from some quarters to “canonize” queerness for characters who are coded as queer; to me, this is uninteresting at best and more than likely reinforces rigid, damaging ideas around gender and sexuality.

I do not need to be told that Benoit Blanc is gay “canonically”; I’ve seen movies like “Laura” up through sitcoms and modern cartoons that still use “well-dressed and talks funny” as a synonym for “queer”. I know the shorthand because I know what a villain is supposed to look and sound like. This isn’t the first time Craig has played with this type of decontextualized coding either; his character in “Logan Lucky” had a similar “queer by the character rules” style of performance to it. It’s disarming to watch and successful because he’s skillful at it.

A great deal of why “Knives Out” works emotionally is because the viewer gets to switch allegiance back and forth between various Thrombey family members and Blanc, laughing at and then aligning with each in turn because nearly everyone in that film is both ridiculous and genuine. We are won over to Blanc’s side as he, and we, get to know the family – knowing them more makes us like them less. But Blanc remains kind of goofy, as does the plot, letting the viewer in on the joke even if we don’t know everything Blanc does. His big-brain detective monologues are memorably bizarre (the “hole in the donut” speech stands out for me), and the entire who-dun-it reveal turns on wordplay. It is a very silly picture.

It’s also a timeless picture, telling a story about grief, family, and betrayal. The situations of “family gathering for a birthday” and “family gathering for a death” are relatable to an audience and provide a strong grounding for the wide range of performances in the film. There are motives—plural—among the players, and each of them is clear, distinct, and powerfully human.

I lay all this out not (only) to remind people how good “Knives Out” is, but to contrast it with “Glass Onion”---which again, is a contrast I wouldn’t feel nearly as inclined to make so directly if not for the fact that they insisted on branding this whole franchise “Knives Out”!

Some of the structural playfulness is still present in “Glass Onion”. Having the assumed victim of Miles Bron escape death halfway through was a very nice touch and another bit of genre subversion that did play out well. The ongoing character note of Bron stealing ideas from people being paid off with him ending up stealing parts of the murder setup from Blanc was another nice choice.

But the setting of 2020 already feels a little dated (although the film has assuredly earned itself a permanent place on undergraduate film studies lists for being a primary source that references COVID-19), and the situation and characters have the feel of a Medium thinkpiece converted into a screenplay. It is jammed with as many Hollywood name-drops and in-jokes as possible, and the industry humor comes off as tone-deaf, self-absorbed, and most troublingly, it doesn’t change from one character to another. I did not get the sense that this was an intentional exploration of the theme that among the wealthy, there is no particular political or social divide (for all that I wish the movie had the guts to drive that point home). These aren’t distinct people with different voices so much as paper dolls to dress up; without the different wardrobes, there is little to set them apart beyond whatever faces the actors pull in reaction shots. Some of the actors seem to only be in the movie to fill the frame and wear an outfit.

A lot of my frustration comes from the fact that almost all of the joke setups and punchlines are cheap gags and don’t offer much to deepen the audience’s understanding of the character or the story. I was pleased that the script seemed content to let the running joke of Bron’s malapropisms stay uncommented since so much of the rest of the humor felt very heavy-handed and obvious, but no, that also got a montage to fully explain it. The movie goes to great pains throughout to make sure you notice its perceived cleverness.

This includes the many, many stunt celebrity cameos. It’s a risk to do it once, and this movie has eight. Now, on the one hand, if you’re a director and you’ve been working a while, it makes sense that you’ve got a lot of connections and friends and you want to use them for whatever your current project is if it seems remotely plausible because you’re enthusiastic about that project. On another hand, shoving a bunch of random cameos into your feature film is building the equivalent of a film journalism baby food factory inside your movie with a conveyor belt at the end where all the listicles come out. I can’t blame anyone for doing it if they have the means; the internet is a ravening beast that requires Content to survive, so it might as well be nonsense content about your movie! If it’s devoid of any artistic appraisal of the work and just mentions the title a few times, even better! Anyway, there are only three of said attention-grabbing cameos that merit discussion (and it truly pains me to call Stephen Sondheim irrelevant in any way, but no, he doesn’t have much business here, even if this is a loose adaptation of his work):

The Angela Landsbury cameo was a cute nod to her long-time role on Murder, She Wrote. I would have liked it more if it was her and three other actors who’d played detectives, but then I’d have liked it even more if that whole scene had been cut. The first third of the film felt like a tour through things Rian Johnson did on his phone during 2020. (I didn’t realize film had fallen so far as a medium as to be looking to a Let’s Play of The Room: Old Sins for inspiration.)

The Hugh Grant cameo made sense because if you’re going to cast a love interest for someone, then absolutely get Hugh Grant, one of the leading men for an entire generation of romantic comedies. However, Glass Onion going out of its way to validate that the queer coding of Blanc is correct, that this type of masculinity is how an audience should “read” queerness in a character, feels like a sinister mistake. Also, I’m a menace who likes things to actually be connected primarily to the plot, and I would have been content to watch 10 movies in this series and never see the inside of Blanc’s home unless the story needed to take place there.

The only one of all the celeb cameos that I didn’t hate at least a little was Serena Williams. It was funny, it was well-timed, and it contributed something to our understanding of Bron’s character. I’ve found myself thinking back on that moment in the film from time to time since I watched it. It was a good moment that played with the audience’s expectations well—a microcosm of what the film seemed to be attempting as a whole, but not as successfully.

On to the characters. It takes far too long to establish how these people know each other, and I was never quite certain what they meant to each other. Having people insist they are friends for two hours doesn’t cut it (incidentally, that’s the same problem with Sondheim’s least popular musical). We’re shown that they have each others’ phone numbers and that they drink together. This is a lifelong friendship?

It was difficult to get a sense that anyone was motivated by anything other than money, and while initially there were some sketches of class and political differences between them, those were all thrown out (along with the pandemic and reality) once the story shifted to the island. On the island, it’s all flashbacks to the past and speculative dreams of the future. The complex web of familial and personal relationships that makes characters relatable—even and especially when it drives them to petty and cruel acts—that gave “Knives Out” its juice has been replaced with an array of characters who live as very few people do (Jeff Bezos/Elon Musk hybrid, Kathy Hochul, Heidi Klum, Andreas Weigend(ish?), Joe Rogan-but-on-Twitch), and who all hung out at a bar and became besties by osmosis. To be brutally honest, with all the name-dropping, drinking, and attention-grabbing clothes, it’s a bit like watching a group of people trying to LARP at an “Absolutely Fabulous” fan convention, and not very successfully.

These are not sympathetic people, we are told that, and by their own actions, we are shown that. And yet the worst the movie can come up with for a clear Joe Rogan stand-in is “lives with his mother and scams people with fake erectile dysfunction pills”? In a movie set in the year of our lord and savior two thousand twenty? Joe Rogan, the vaccine denial guy? That Joe Rogan? Couldn’t come up with any bon mots about that? Or did it have to get to cut make time to name-check Jeremy Renner again? Where “Knives Out” pulled no punches, “Glass Onion” often struggles to make a fist.

There is still a lot of good in the movie, but I felt like the pacing and flow of the thing were off; sequences that built tension like the Mona Lisa’s security system going off repeatedly last for far too long, and again, a great deal of the script is one character or another giving exposition to someone else so that the audience can understand something that’s already happened. Sometimes this is to add additional context and change the audience’s perception of what’s happening, but even in the cases where that occurred, such as when Duke Cody sees his girlfriend sleeping with Bron, I found I simply didn’t care enough about the character for it to have much dramatic impact. Or, as in the case of the reveal of how Cody died, the misdirection of different flashback footage to misguide the audience was another case of something being an interesting twist on a genre convention, but not a particularly enjoyable one.

I’m left with the feeling I have with many M. Night Shyamalan films, or The Usual Suspects, which I know many people like. But I don’t feel that style of storytelling respects the audience very much. And I couldn’t find another place to mention it, but the entire contrivance for gathering everyone together on the island is for them to do a murder mystery dinner (another genre wink), and while it was funny to have Blanc solve the entire thing immediately, a part of me has been wondering ever since if even five minutes of seeing these characters interact all together in the same room to play a game—even as other characters—wouldn’t have opened the door to establish some of the missing emotional pieces between all of them.

I did love the clothes, though, sweetie darling.