Glass Onion Isn’t Mocking Elon Musk — It’s Mocking the World That Created Him
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The post Glass Onion Isn’t Mocking Elon Musk — It’s Mocking the World That Created Him appeared first on Consequence.
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.]
Central to Glass Onion is the character of tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton), whose invitation to a small Greek island is what kicks off Rian Johnson’s new whodunnit. When Miles’s friends — his “beautiful disruptors” — arrive at Miles’ island with an unexpected plus-one in the form of legendary detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), all they’re expecting is a long weekend of relaxation, with a promised murder-mystery game to keep things lively.
But the real murder mystery to be solved isn’t the Gillian Flynn-penned romp that Miles has planned, but the unexpected death of MRA lunkhead Duke Cody (Dave Bautista). There’s also the reveal that days earlier, Miles’ former business partner Andi Brand (Janelle Monáe) was also found dead, leading her twin sister Helen (also Monáe) to enlist Benoit’s help in finding out who was responsible.
Miles, it turns out, was the murderer in both cases, which Benoit Blanc reveals with disgust because Miles’ other crime is being painfully, painfully dumb. It’s something Norton plays brilliantly, giving long speeches about “infraction points” and “the full reclamation of everything I’ve achieved up to now,” while his employees and allies freak out over his obsession with an “eco-friendly” fuel source that could literally blow up the world. But despite the character’s innate surety, Miles’ idiocy cannot be suppressed, even as he uses all the trappings of being a straight cis white man with money to appear otherwise.
Which makes the arrival of Glass Onion eerie timing, because at this moment, the Internet is getting to watch another straight cis white man with money be revealed as not the brightest. What Glass Onion is really all about is subversion — subversion of quirky clue-heavy mystery box stories, for one thing. But it’s also got its knives out for the Miles Brons of the world, including one tech billionaire who has been in the news quite a bit recently.
Since the film’s arrival on Netflix on December 23rd, people have been using Elon Musk’s Twitter to debate the connections between Miles and Musk (that is, when Twitter has been working). Johnson has acknowledged the similarities in an interview with Wired, while also clarifying that “there’s a lot of general stuff about that sort of species of tech billionaire that went directly into it.” This is to say, it’s not meant to be a direct riff on Musk — instead, Musk is just part of a trope that he happens to define very well right now, a man with too much confidence and too little talent to back it up.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (Netflix)
Let’s use the stock price of another Musk-owned company to track what it looks like, when the financial world starts to catch onto that sort of thing: On September 12th, when Glass Onion made its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival, Tesla’s closing stock price was $304.42 a share. When I saw it on November 11th, two weeks after he officially took over Twitter, the stock price was $195.97. On its theatrical release date, November 23rd, it was at $183.20. As of writing this piece, it’s currently $122.29, and expected to get lower in the weeks ahead.
Those declining stock prices aren’t due to the release of Glass Onion, though, because Glass Onion didn’t expose Musk’s incompetence. His own sloppy and inconsistent management of Twitter over the past two months, conducted on a global platform with massive media engagement, did the job for him. It’s not a new pattern for him, as for years, he’s been making big impossible proclamations and revealing himself as a “child king” who needs to be managed internally by his subordinates. But Twitter’s prominence as a social media platform has revealed his flaws as effectively (if less efficiently) as a Benoit Blanc monologue.
However, as Johnson has indicated, it’s too simplistic to say that Glass Onion is only talking about Musk. There are dozens and dozens of Miles Brons out there, in politics, entertainment, medicine, and finance — take, as just one example, the big wide world of crypto. What happens to the Miles Brons of today is that eventually their cons get revealed as the half-baked and flimsy concepts they are. The problem is that it rarely happens fast enough to avoid real damage being done to people and systems alike.
There’s a troubling thing that happens when you exit childhood — you start to realize that the adults in charge sometimes don’t have the slightest idea what they’re doing. It’s painfully apt that Glass Onion is set in May 2020, a time when we were all coming to realize that the pandemic wasn’t going to be over in a matter of weeks, that the numbers tracking daily new cases and deaths weren’t about to get any smaller. That the adults in charge had no idea how to fix this — or maybe some of them did, but other adults were choosing not to listen.
It’s natural to be drawn to confidence, to want to trust in leaders who say they have big ideas and better solutions for the problems that plague us all. But in our eagerness to find and exalt those leaders, it might be better in the long run, for humanity, if we spent more time scrutinizing those leaders — listening not just to the timbre of their voices, but whether or not the words they’re saying actually make sense. Like Miles’ Banksy-designed island dock, sometimes a thing can be beautiful and also be a piece of shit. Glass Onion, above all else, reminds us to look for that.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is streaming now on Netflix.
Glass Onion Isn’t Mocking Elon Musk — It’s Mocking the World That Created Him
Liz Shannon Miller
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