Glass Onion is a treasure trove of riches, with secret cameos, clues even Benoit Blanc
missed, and easter eggs and call-backs to the first Knives Out, including a hidden wheel
of knives!
Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers, I'm Jan and I've been re-watching and pausing the Knives Out
sequel to uncover all the killer details and things you might have missed.
Spoilers ahead of course, so take care.
When we first meet Blanc in the sequel, pause and you can spot a book called "Cain's Jawbone",
which is one of the world's most complex literary murder mysteries.
The book contains just one hundred pages, all in the wrong order, which have to be rearranged
to solve six murders.
Since its publication in 1930 only three people are known to have solved it.
With its extreme complexity, it certainly seems like the type of puzzle Blanc would
relish solving, very unlike the mystery he eventually solves in Glass Onion.
It's so dumb, it's brilliant.
No!
It's just dumb!
The book's disordered pages might also be a nod to how the movie reveals its story out
of order, with flashbacks to different periods as the plot and its various twists are revealed.
The design on Miles's puzzle box invitation card is reminiscent of the evil eye commonly
found in Greece and around the Mediterranean.
The eye can be considered either a curse or a protective symbol against those who'd wish
you harm, and I think it's interesting that Miles also has these huge circular installations
in all of the guest bedrooms, with the blue one in Dukes' room specifically reminding
me of the image on the invites.
Given that Miles kills Duke and threatens his other friends to get them to support his
launch of Klear or take sole responsibility for a sweatshop, the eyes on the invitation
definitely feel like more of a curse from the billionaire than a protective symbol.
When the so-called Disruptors arrive on the island, Miles is playing the Beatles song
"Blackbird" and he even claims the guitar is the original owned by Paul McCartney.
Serenading me with my song!
On the guitar Paul wrote it on.
However, there's a clue that Miles may be lying about this as, if you go back and pause
the scene, notice that he's playing a right-handed guitar, whereas Paul McCartney is left-handed.
Although McCartney did sometimes play a right-handed guitar, I suspect this is a hint that Miles
is really a phoney and the guitar is a fake, as we'll also later discover is the case when
it comes to the origin of his business empire.
Also note how he just dumps the instrument on the sand, which is a little odd if it really
is an original Beatles guitar.
Either way, it all goes to show that Miles is more concerned with ego than authenticity.
You probably noticed some of the crazy artwork in and around Miles's mansion from the billionaire's
shirtless portrait inspired by Fight Club, a film which starred Edward Norton alongside
Brad Pitt; to the mural of Kanye West dressed as a Roman
Senator; all of which are a commentary on the type
of person Miles likes to imagine himself to be.
But hidden in the bathroom where Blanc and Helen conspire are a couple of paintings with
some secret symbolism.
The one behind Blanc is "Icarus" by Matisse, referring to the Greek legend of the boy who
flew too close to sun.
Like Icarus, who was warned the sun would melt the beeswax in his wings, Miles too was
warned about his unstable hydrogen technology which ends up blowing up his mansion and melting
the Mona Lisa.
Appropriately, the body in the painting also resembles a chalk outline from a murder scene
and the red heart could be a nod to both the red square in the Fibonacci spiral that gives
away the location of the red envelope, and also the spot on Helen's chest where she's
shot later on.
Meanwhile, the painting behind Helen is "The Absinthe Drinker" by Degas, which feels humorously
fitting as right at this moment she discovers she's been getting drunk on Jared Leto's hard
kombucha.
This isn't a drink.
This is some funky health stuff.
No, you give me that.
That's 9% alcohol.
Leto's kombucha is a fictional creation for Glass Onion, but later on you can see it's
called "Red Planet", referencing the name of the actor's real-life band "Thirty Seconds
To Mars".
The glass statues which Helen and the others end up gleefully smashing also have some hidden
easter eggs according to Rian Johnson.
This circular one resembles the memorable wheel of knives from the first movie and it's
Peg who eventually ends up smashing that piece.
When Miles reveals he hired Gillian Flynn of Gone Girl fame to write the plot of his
murder mystery weekend, it's a shout-out to the plot of Agatha Christie's "Dead Man's
Folly" where a wealthy man asks a mystery novelist to stage a Murder Hunt for him.
And Miles deciding to kill Duke, after he tries to blackmail him over keeping quiet
about the breaking news of Andi's death, is very similar to how in Christie's novel the
murderers kill someone who's blackmailing them over a previous murder.
And the fact that Miles mispronounces Gillian Flynn's name...
I hired Gillian Flynn to write the whole thing.
is in keeping with the many malapropisms he spouts over the weekend.
That's the infraction point.
When Blanc and Miles are discussing the famous detective's surprise arrival on the island,
Blanc says…
Mr. Bron, I've learned through bitter experience an anonymous invitation is not to be trifled
with.
That's a call back to the first movie, where Ransom hired Blanc anonymously in order to
try and pin the murder of his grandfather Harlan on his nurse Marta.
When Daniel Craig arrives at the pool all covered up, this feels like a deliberate joke
about his debut as James Bond in Casino Royale and that shirtless scene at the beach where
he emerges from the water, much like previous Bond girl Ursula Andress.
I think Blanc's clothing is a very deliberate choice especially given the contrast with
Whiskey's swimming pool moment shortly before.
There's a clever call-back to the first movie in the scene where Blanc and Helen discover
Serena Williams is available for training in Miles's private gym.
Pause the moment here and notice that the renowned tennis player is reading "Gravity's
Rainbow", the novel that Blanc mentioned in the first film when explaining his approach
to detective work to Marta.
I anticipate the terminus of Gravity's Rainbow.
I haven't read it.
Neither have I. Nobody has.
But I like the title.
Rian Johnson has said that Agatha Christie has been a huge influence on him and the Knives
Out movies, so when Miles spikes his own drink with pineapple juice and passes it to Duke,
this is a hat-tip to "The Mirror Crack'd" where the killer adds poison to her own glass
before handing it to her victim.
Angela Lansbury starred as Miss Marple in that movie and makes a cool cameo in Glass
Onion as one of Blanc's famous friends who discovers he's the imposter in the game of
"Among Us" they're playing.
I saw you go in the engine room.
You're the Imposter.
We all know it.
This is a fun bit of foreshadowing for Blanc's role in Glass Onion.
Also, notice how in the game Lansbury is suitably named "MSheSolved", a nod to her iconic role
as Jessica Fletcher in "Murder, She Wrote".
Composer Stephen Sondheim, who also cameos in this scene
Sorry, Blanc, you're thrown out of the airlock.
It's a no-brainer.
co-wrote the whodunit movie "The Last of Sheila", which Rian Johnson pays homage to in Glass
Onion's set-up where the Disruptors arrive on the dock.
Also in the scene is Natasha Lyonne who will be starring in Johnson's upcoming detective
series "Poker Face", and former basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is co-author of
a series of mystery novels starring Mycroft Holmes.
There's another Agatha Christie-esque moment in Glass Onion when Helen uses Jeremy Renner's
hot sauce as fake blood and when Miles also uses fake blood in his murder mystery, both
of which remind me of Death on the Nile, where red ink is used to fake having been shot.
Now, because like Blanc, many of us expected a densely-layered mystery in Glass Onion,
the movie has fun laying out a lot of red herrings, one of the biggest of which is the
mysterious character Derol...
I'm not here. ...who keeps popping up, saying he's not doing
anything...
Hey.
Not here. ...and in the end he really isn't.
He's played by actor Noah Segan, who was also Trooper Wagner in the first Knives Out movie.
According to Rian Johnson, Derol is based on Kato Kaelin, an actor who was staying at
O.J.
Simpson's estate on the night of the 1994 murders, and Derol performs a similar role
in Glass Onion.
Noah Segan regularly appears in Johnson's movies, and in Derol's room you can spot an
easter egg on his surfboard to the midnight tunnel symbol from the director's first feature
film Brick.
Another regular Rian Johnson cameo in Glass Onion is Joseph Gordon-Levitt who's the voice
of Miles's ridiculous hourly dongs.
Dong!
You know I got Phil Glass to compose that?
I got Phil Glass to compose that.
Philip Glass is a famous composer known – suitably enough
– for his "music with repetitive structures".
And it's entirely in keeping with Miles's stupidity and vanity that he would hire someone
like Glass to compose something as inane as a gong sound.
By the way, Gordon-Levitt has appeared in some form in all of Johnson's films and in
the first Knives Out he was the voice of the detective in the murder mystery series that
Marta's sister was watching.
You crushed his skull with a forklift and burned his hands off to erase the fingerprints!
Glass Onion is clearly set during the pandemic, with some amusing details like Birdie's Lana
del Rey mask, and Ethan Hawke's brief cameo credited as "Efficient Man" who delivers a
mysterious shot of something.
Is that some kind of disinfectant or…
You're good.
A nice detail is that when Hugh Grant opens Blanc's door he has a jar of sourdough starter
in his hand, a nod to the bread-making craze during the first lockdown.
Now, Miles had personalised glasses for everyone including himself, but Birdie's long-suffering
assistant Peg only gets a generic red plastic cup.
But an interesting little detail you can spot if you pause just here is that Peg has written
her name on the cup herself, not wanting to be left out.
When Helen ransacks everyone's rooms looking for her sister's red envelope, as she tips
out Duke's toiletries you'll see he has three boxes of Viagra, a wink to how he infamously
got banned from Twitch for selling pills that supposedly contained rhino horn;
pills which obviously didn't work as he doesn't use them himself.
Zero rhino in those pills.
When Miles reveals he's got hold of the real Mona Lisa, he talks about how her enigmatic
smile changes each time you view her.
Her smile's there, then it disappears.
Is she happy?
Is she sad?
Is it something else?
This might be a little stretch, but this could also be referencing the first Knives Out where
Harlan's portrait changes from its serious demeanour early on, to a smiling one at the
very end after his killer's been caught.
And a really nice detail is how the very final shot of the new movie is set up with Helen
sitting perfectly poised, which feels very Mona-Lisa-like.
The Beatles song "Glass Onion" plays over the movie's final credits and there are several
layers of meaning to this particular song choice.
Similar to how the Glass Onion sequel is purposely full of red herrings, John Lennon deliberately
wrote the lyrics to the song Glass Onion to poke fun at anyone who'd over-analysed the
meaning of famous Beatles songs, so it's full of lyrical call-backs such as "The walrus
was Paul".
Rian Johnson has also revealed that there are Glass Onion lyrics hidden in the glass
artwork in Miles's mansion.
I spotted these glass flowers referring to the "bent-back tulips" line and I think this
is a hat-tip to "Lady Madonna".
By the way, Johnson came up with the film's title when he decided the story would be about
a billionaire living in a transparent building then looked for a song with the word glass
in it, and the Beatles track was the first he discovered.
Now, there are also more hidden clues that give away the multiple twists in Glass Onion.
One I missed until some of our amazing movie lovers pointed it out on my last video is
that although Helen's made up to look like her twin Andi, there's a subtle difference
as Helen's hair parts on the right, whereas Andi's parts on the left.
And if you want to discover all the other clues and secret symbolism in the movie, tap
here to watch my "Clues You Missed" video.
There's also a link in the video description.
So, what other easter eggs or cool details did you spot in Glass Onion?
Let me know in the comments below.
Tap here to discover all the clues you might have missed to the movie's big twists.
And if you enjoyed this video, do leave a thumbs-up, I really appreciate it.
Thanks for enjoying Glass Onion with me and hope you have a marvellous movie-loving week!
Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers!