'Glass Onion' is 'God's Not Dead' for Liberals
The insulting dishonesty of the latest 'Knives Out' movie
Glass Onion is God’s Not Dead for Liberals
Before you start furiously typing your angry responses to the title of this post, let me defend myself. As I watched Rian Johnson’s latest entry in the Knives Out franchise, I found myself laughing and appreciating the clever dispensation of justice on the movie’s antagonist. And the performances! Without exception, the performances were sensational. And I hope they keep making these movies.
But as soon as the movie as over, I felt duped. In fact I felt that Rian Johnson was guilty of being every bit as hollow and empty as he accuses his film’s villain, Miles Bron (Edward Norton) of being. The movie’s joke is that Bron doesn’t simply live in a glass onion, his whole being is a glass onion, see-through and empty. Well, frankly, Glass Onion is a glass onion too.
I know that this Substack is called “UnTaking” and I’m supposed to be resisting “hot takes,” and the cultural addiction to what Philip Roth once called “the ecstasy of sanctimony.” In general I try to limit my writing about movies to expository essays, avoiding judgment or critique. In this case, however, my exposition of Glass Onion overlaps heavily with the work of critique. I’ll try and do better next time.
First, given that I loved Knives Out so much, and that I found the character of Benoit Blanc an exhilarating breath of fresh air, I probably went into Glass Onion with unrealistic expectations. Especially since Rian Johnson has too often proved himself to be more interesting in cleverness than depth. Honestly, this movie made me like The Last Jedi less because of this trait. Johnson would rather slay sacred cows than create them himself, even if the sacrificed beast is his own.
Knives Out was a fantastic modernization of the classic Agatha Christie comedic whodunit. So knowing that this was why there was interest in more Benoit Blanc films, Johnson decided to show us how much contempt he has for us. The biggest insult this postmodern mystery film performs is the absence of…oh…a mystery. Johnson has baited us with the promise of more of Blanc’s crime-solving genius, then switched it for an extended exposition of an elaborate con he ran with his partner. One can almost hear the writer-director say “so you like mysteries, huh? Well you’re stupid, so no!”
But the precociousness over substance is only part of the reason for Glass Onion’s crass emptiness.
The other temptation that Johnson is unable to resist is the urge to score obvious political points with Liberal Twitter. And Glass Onion seems to have been scientifically designed in a lab to rack those points up. And this leads me to the title of this piece.
The scathing political critique of Glass Onion only works if you assume your political other is as one-dimensional and cartoonish as the characters in this film. Bron and each of his friends are precise manifestations of how Liberal Twitter characterizes its political other. Each is a stand-in for a real-life target of sanctimonious online rage. There’s a Joe Rogan, an amalgam of MTG and Lauren Boebert, another amalgam of everyone deemed a Privileged White Woman Celebrity, and of course Elon Musk. Because, remember, we’re supposed to pretend that Twitter was all bubblegum and roses before he and his Napoleonic ego bought it.
The problem isn’t that those real-life people aren’t mostly silly, it’s that Liberals ascribe their failings to everyone on other political spectra. They just become shorthand for how stupid everyone not like us is.
The characters are all reduced to caricatures. They behave as stupidly as we’d like them to. They are motivated by the obvious things we thing motivate them. And they are so very easy to hate. And Benoit Blanc is diminished in the process. He has been reduced from a hilarious, quirky, brilliant detective, to a stand-in for the Liberal Twitterian who can only quote-tweet Rachel Maddow with a resounding “THIS!”
This is because they are not honest portrayals of actual humans. They are synthetic representations of people we don’t like, designed to make us feel sanctified and generally good about ourselves.
In essence, Rian Johnson has ripped a page out of the Evangelical creative playbook.
In the 2014 movie God’s Not Dead, a film that intelligent people rightfully scoff at, Harold Cronk and Sreehari Purimetla employ the same dishonest storytelling tactics that Johnson has here. Kevin Sorbo’s ridiculous secular academic antagonist is what conservative evangelicals imagine an atheist philosophy professor is like. And Shane Harper’s deified, faithful student is a fantasy of the well-mannered, put-upon evangelical living, righteously oppressed, in public. Both are exaggerations of reality to the point of outright lies.
I don’t need to go into the details here about why God’s Not Dead is an odious film, due to its obvious moral dishonesty. I just want to point out, to all my fellow liberals who justifiably hate that film, that Rian Johnson has made his own version of it, and it should be treated with just as much embarrassment that I, as a Christian, feel over God’s Not Dead. If the only reason you like Johnson’s film over God’s Not Dead is that you happen to agree with its politics, then you are missing the point. If you agree with Johnson’s politics, you should be disappointed with the dishonest and childishly simplistic way he presents them. We’re all worse because of this movie.
And the whole burning the Mona Lisa was just stupid, by the way.
All that said, I will definitely look forward to future Benoit Blanc films because I’m hopeful that all involved will come to their senses about the mistakes made with Glass Onion. Benoit Blanc is amazing.
A really well thought out critique, Danny! I too was laughing quite a bit while watching but upon reflection, it was pretty heavy-handed in its satire and didn't pack the same sort of subtle yet spicy political punch like the first one did.