Glass Onion s a pretty good film, right? But this video isn t a review. You don t need
some guy in your computer telling you it s another big W from Rian Johnson. You know
that already. I do want to talk about it, though because there s one aspect, one thing
this film does, which I ve not seen many people notice just yet and I think it s pretty neat.
That s the way Glass Onion tells you its central point from the very start before we meet Miles
Bron, before we get to the island. I m on about the opening puzzle box sequence because
this whole thing is heavy with foreshadowing. I am going to spoil the whole film, totally,
though, so if you ve not seen it yet, hey! Go watch it! Then come back. I ll wait. Alright,
are you back? Pretty good, right? So I do wanna get into that opening sequence, but
before I can break down how it encapsulates the film s meaning, we need to establish what
that meaning is. Now I m sure many of you picked up on all
this yourselves, and to be honest I discussed a lot of it in that last, weirdly well-perfoming
Ben Shapiro video, so I ll try to be quick, but: in a nutshell, Glass Onion is about glass
onions. The film s built around this titular metaphor, spatialised in Miles house, for
the way we sometimes struggle to see things, to just look at the plainly visible. The idea
of sophistication, the assumption of beautiful, crystalline layers, to be fawned over, teased
back one by one, obscures the fact that the onion is glass that there s nothing stopping
us from staring straight to the centre, and seeing nothing there, seeing lack, seeing
the keenly visible absence of what was assumed. This is the lens through which Glass Onion
approaches the tech sector, the strange culture of hero worship that s grown around it, and
the way it all spills over into adjacent corners of society influencer culture, millennial
politics, and all that. All this is centred around Miles Bron, who s a Musk/Jobs/Zuckerberg/SBF
type character, the billionaire head of a tech empire, and is embroiled in a series
of messy scandals first some legal weaseling to give himself full control of Alpha, then,
as the film goes on, a murder or two. He s a suspect here, obviously, but not the main
one, because (Miles Bron isn t stupid). The case doesn t crack open until Benoit Blanc,
detective extraordinarie, finally opens his eyes to all the hints that ve been dropping
in front of us abandons the layers, the filigreed edges of the glass onion, and sees, nakedly,
the thing at the centre. This film isn t a moralistic one, not really,
but the takeaway here is hard to miss. There s a sort of mirage created by wealth, material
success, and the trappings of this status. Everyone knows life is different for the rich,
the same rules don t apply to them, etcetera, etcetera but because of the way we take this
for granted, the way we ve been fed this idea that they re above us because they re better
than us, bolder, more creative, smarter we automatically run our perceptions of the Miles
Brons of the world through this absurdly generous filter. You see dumb stuff, and you recontextualise
it as troubled genius. You see a Rothko, and you re so dazzled wow! This guy has taste!
That you don t notice it s upside down. And while the film is interested in the specific
neuroses and failings of tech celebs, the point of the film, the central thrust, this
idea of the glass onion, it isn t limited to this specific type. Guys like this are
the primary genre of dude the film uses to explore these themes of perspective and status,
but crucially, the key observation being made here is wider than them status does not equate
in any direct way to ability, worth, or genius. That is, boiled down, Glass Onion s main point.
It s got other points, too, but this is the most central one. Now let s talk about how
we re shown this from minute one. The film opens with each of these successful,
influential people, these so-called disruptors, receiving an intricate puzzle-box from Miles
and when all these puzzles are cracked, metaphorically or in Helen s case, literally, an invitation
to the Greek murder-mystery getaway is revealed. This seems an appropriate way to open the
movie, right? A little mystery, a set of inscrutable riddles to be analysed, puzzled over, solved,
before these big shots are admitted to big shot island. It s a bit of eccentric fun Miles
is the type of person to just do weird stuff like this, we re told but implicitly, it also
seems to suggest a trial, a qualification of sorts. On some level, this is a type of
test, to earn a weekend in paradise while the rest of the world s slowly going mad in
Zoom group calls. It s not formal, there s nothing stopping the squad from teaming up,
but given how clear this film is about the way Miles sees these disruptors as visionaries,
like him - in making this task the prerequisite to the disruptors actually getting, accepting
their invitations, Glass Onion frames this opening ritual as a justification the praise,
prominence, and place afforded to Bron s inner circle. Luxury is for the deserving, the bright,
the bold, those few who are better, who s essential betterness allows them to make the
world theirs and at least for Miles, one layer of these puzzle box invitations seems to be
the way they quietly confirm this. These guys they must be brilliant. Not just anyone could
solve these, right? Well, let s think about these puzzles. What
are they, really? They re not logic problems. Apart from maybe that one missing tile puzzle,
there s nothing here that really tests reasoning, or anything similar. No, these puzzles rely
far more on simple recognition than anything resembling brightness. And mostly? On the
recognition of things considered classy, smart, or esoteric. The chess endgame. The fugue.
The atomic number, the morse code. If we are to understand this puzzle-box opening in the
way outlined above, then it doesn t seem to work in the way Miles intended. We re not
seeing brilliant people prove their brilliance on an intellectual level, through a quick
show of wit we re seeing high-status people playing a high-status game, spotting the cultural
signifiers of the sophistication, the class they re performing - and barely succeeding
at it. It s a quiz no different to the countless Zoom quizzes being held all around the world
at the very same moment except it s not on celebrities, or sports, or movies, it s about
cultural capital. This is a sociological term coined by Pierre
Bourdieu. Put simply, it s all those little things, those intangible things, which to
a room full of high society types - might mark the son of an Ivy League professor as
different, more sophisticated, than the son of a plumber from Brooklyn. He d get the highbrow
references, he d know the proper attire to wear to, say, a ball. He d know which of the
knives and forks to use during a fancy meal, what all the different types of wine glasses
are for. It s knowledge, but it s also the awareness of which knowledge in particular
is valued by the dominant culture. Bourdieu argued we can see this process in higher education,
for instance that many university programs presuppose the possession of this cultural
capital, which a minority of students actually possess, usually those from high-class backgrounds.
Higher education is often seen as meritocratic the best candidates, the brightest candidates,
are assumed to succeed, regardless of background but the headstart cultural capital gives to
some students undermines the meritocracy here in a near-invisible way. The same principle,
writ large, operates everywhere. If you re raised speaking the language of power, familiar
with a society s legitimate, dominant culture, the etiquettes and cultural touchstones of
the elite, countless doorways are opened to you ones which remain closed for your less
advantaged peers. Knowing this stuff puts you in an exclusive club but if you start
off outside this circle, and then you make it big or, in this case, if you ingratiate
yourself with someone who does - you re gonna feel the need to overcompensate, to show the
world that you know all the right things, that you like all the right art. That s why
so much of Miles house is dedicated to displaying the products and ephemera of high culture.
He knows it s important that he s seen to know it, to appreciate it, even though, especially
though he doesn t actually understand it - and this performative sophistication is exemplified
by the various tests in the puzzle boxes. But that s all they are. They don t test for
intelligence, they test for how many signifiers of intelligence have been memorised. Not riddles,
but references. The cultural capital the puzzle boxes are testing for is a little less highbrow,
a little more STEM-minded perhaps than what Bourdieu was talking about, what Miles Bron
s interior decoration suggests, but it plays the same role, it signifies brilliance, and
its cultural capital all the same just maybe in a different currency. So the completion
of these puzzle boxes doesn t qualify the disruptors, the shitheads, doesn t justify
their status, not really. There s no true, intrinsic merit being shown here. All this
accomplishes is a buttressing of this self-reinforcing, mutually-dependent linkage of cultural capital
and worth, in the eyes of those such a linkage would prove worthy. We could even view this
as a microcosm of the role Bourdieu claimed cultural capital played in education the creation
of an illusory meritocracy by the way these touchstones of sophistication are privileged,
the way the mere recognition of them is implicitly held to show brilliance. This is all empty,
though and Glass Onion knows it, tells us that, by having Duke s mum be the one to kickstart
the recognition game. She s no disruptor, she s not in a position of power, she s not
held by anyone to be one of the greats and yet without her, none of the others would
have been able to muddle through. That s big bigger than it might seem at first
glance, because what Glass Onion s showing us, in no uncertain terms, is that all these
systems the rich, the high-class, have devised for marking themselves as better, smarter,
more capable than the rest of us are to borrow a phrase hokum. Either Duke s mum is just
as special as the rest of these clowns, in which case the system s busted, because she
s not uber-wealthy and successful, or none of them are special, and the system s busted
for the way it privileges them and allows this privilege to be passed down, justified,
by cultural smokescreens like this. What this boils down to, then, is quite impressive indeed:
Glass Onion, a film centred around pulling the curtain back, throwing into sharp relief
the fact that those in positions of power aren t necessarily more complex than they
seem, aren t automatically brilliant simply because of those positions, and above all
that the assumption of this complexity, these sophisticated, crystalline layers distract
us, stop us from just looking and seeing that this specialness doesn t exist? It shows us
all that, puts it right in front of our nose, in the opening sequence.
Doubtless, you could take these ideas way further. You could dig into this performative
sophistication, the prop-like use of culture, you could bring in the way the film uses the
Mona Lisa, the immense, invisible power that painting wields over the world, over the viewer
even I m sure there s a good deal of fascinating analysis to be done there. But this video
s about that opening sequence and the way it so efficiently, so obviously shows us the
answer - before the film s even posed a question and the way this move is just so Glass Onion.
Hope you ve enjoyed watching, and let me know what you thought below! Feel free to like,
share, subscribe, follow me on twitter, all that nonsense, and if this video does even
a third as well as the last Glass Onion-y one did, I ve got another take on this film
I wouldn t mind sharing. Otherwise, stay tuned, should be some cool stuff coming in January,
and big thanks as always to my Patreon supporters onscreen now (especially Tig).