So, in a shocking move, Ben Shapiro made a fool of himself the other day tweeting a long, harshly
critical thread about the new Rian Johnson film Glass Onion, and I just wanted to spend a bit of
time digging into how he misreads this film, where he s going wrong here, and why this thread is,
just wild. Because, he s saying some really dumb stuff here, and I think it goes beyond your garden
variety Ben Shapiro bad take. I m going to try not to repeat what others have said on this already
for instance, as all the Quote Tweets have pointed out misdirects and red herrings are the bread and
butter of the mystery genre, you really can t tell a story like this without them, the same s true of
deception on the part of the writer, but that s basic dumb on Ben s part. The common Shaprio L,
poor media literacy, the type of stuff we ve seen from him a thousand times before, but I think his
criticism of this film reveals a deeper thickness on Ben s part, a rarer, more advanced stupid.
The rest of this basic dumb is worth pointing out, too, of course, because it is, at points,
bafflingly, fiercely thick so let s get through that, before we get into the steaming, meaty core
of this idiocy pie. There are signs here that Ben just wasn t paying attention to the film,
like basic factual inaccuracies we find out Miles Bron didn t invite Benoit Blanc just 26 minutes
into the picture, for instance, as soon as we get to the island, not 1 hour 10 minutes in and
incoherent points. How can we have known who the murderer was from point one, Ben, if it took us
half the film to even know who the victim was? And talking of odd points, Moron of a murderer
isn t a common murder mystery trope, it s actually the opposite? This genre is defined by the trope
of murderer-as-mastermind Machiavellian killers flummoxing the police, their crimes so considered,
so planned-out, that, y know, it takes a whole novel, episode, or film for the smart alec
detective to suss it all out. Exceptions exist, obviously, but claiming Miles stupidity here is
formulaic is baffling. Reading this tweet boggles the mind and it honestly scans like Ben wanted
a list of 3 common tropes the film relies on, could only think of 2 tropes in it,
and then just named something that happens as a third for rhetorical effect. It s such an
uncommon beat for stories like this to hit that discovering this fact, that Miles is a dummy,
takes both the audience and the master detective the majority of the film s runtime. In some ways,
this is the central mystery of glass onion the fact that this villain isn t a mastermind,
that he s acted fairly straightforwardly, on impulse. It seems like it should be elaborate,
planned out, but it s only as we, Blanc, and Helen experience these events, these realisations,
that the truth becomes clear. And no, Ben, that isn t Rian Johnson calling his own writing dumb,
that s Rian writing about the way we assume those with power are better, smarter, than us,
the way we give them so much credit for free. Believe it or not, there is a difference between
lampshading bad screenwriting and writing a dumb character, who pulls off a dumb plot,
who nearly succeeds because the characters and the viewers are expecting sophistication,
setting up the film s real resolution relying as it does on this uncoupling of status and
worthiness, this demystifying of wealth, material success, and great man theory.
It seems Ben didn t get this. Ben has a different take on what Glass Onion is
about one less concerned with themes, or ideas, more direct, because later on in the thread,
Ben claims that the central point of the film is that Elon Musk, the real-life, uh, person,
is stupid, and that everyone who thinks otherwise is paid off. Ben builds on this interpretation by
get this criticising the fact that that Miles as a character isn t identical to Elon Musk,
and claiming that s bad writing. I actually love this little 1:2 punch by Ben taking a fictional
amalgamated billionaire caricature, claiming that caricature as a 1:1 direct depiction
of a real person, and labelling textual evidence to the contrary as bad writing,
that s really the pinnacle of media criticism and y know, Ben s right that if this film were
trying to make a point, push a theory, specific to Elon Musk and nobody else, doing so via Miles
someone with an obviously and significantly different life story would be pretty weak,
would be bad writing. But here s the dumb part. Ben doesn t consider for a second, doesn t seem
aware of the possibility that there are other options here, that his initial interpretation
of the film isn t necessarily the correct one. If you ll permit me a little conjecture here,
I promise it ll be relevant later Ben thinks he s smart. Ben thinks he gets storytelling. Ben wanted
to be a screenwriter when he was younger. It seems that Ben has enough possibly misguided faith in
his own skill as a critic that he s assumed his gut reaction to Glass Onion is obviously on the
money. Ben s interpretation doesn t work though, right? This isn t Elon, Miles is different enough
that if the film were an Elon hitpiece and nothing more, it d be a poor one. Ben sees
this failure and because he thinks he s all that, he assumes the film is flawed. In reality, there s
another option Ben s interpretation is flawed. Now, I m sure this is blindingly obvious to
most of you, but if you ve got an idea that a film s trying to say something,
but that idea doesn t line up with the film itself it generally makes sense to at least consider the
possibility that the film is fine and your take is bad. Needless to say, Ben doesn t bother.
The thread ends with Ben saying that the characters shouldn t have done what they did,
and should have done other things instead, and the problem here is tripartite: first,
that this is all grounded in what Ben thinks would happen in a world where the shitheads went public,
and it s hopelessly na ve. Claire would become president for revealing that the power-plant she
greenlit was a health and security risk to countless Americans? Do ya think so,
Ben? Second . the actions they did take are perfectly in character. Even if Ben s right,
all of these things would happen if the shitheads turned on Miles, which, yeah, pretty
big if - They re shitheads. They re selfish. They re cowards. That s the characterisation
we d been given, consistently. They re keeping their heads down, riding his coattails. They don
t want the risk, the confrontation, they just want to keep quietly benefitting. Third since
their actions aren t out of character, the role of the critic is not to argue that they could
have acted differently, to imagine alternative directions the story could have taken it s to
look at the story we got, the decisions we got, and analyse them, not the imagined alternatives.
So Ben s saying a lot of silly things here. He seems to misunderstand criticism on a basic level,
he s just got details plain wrong, and upon finding it impossible to make sense of something,
he s just blaming the thing for his own failure to understand it. As I said up top
nothing particularly new here. But again, there s something deeper something that goes beyond good
critical practice, or the man s understanding of one film so let s work our way there. I want
to start with some mild, qualified praise. Ben is right about one thing. It isn t something he says,
not directly, but it is a thought he seems to have had, and which looks to underpin
some of those tweets. That is this film s structure isn t normal. Ben s noticed this,
and taken it to some pretty dumb places the idea that half of the film is pointless,
that it s just an exercise in deception, etcetera, etcetera, but there is a point here somewhere,
right? For all the valid mockery Ben s faced for complaining about misdirects in a mystery film,
it isn t exactly typical for a film in this genre to be quite this non-linear, to use practically
the entire second act to reframe so much of what we d learnt in the first hour. Don t get me wrong,
flashbacks to recontextualise or thread together details, new angles on the familiar, even beats
like a twin twist or, I don t know, the existence of diaries these are par for the course, but they
tend to happen at the end, not in the middle. These things tend to get pulled out at the climax,
when the jig is up but that s not really how it goes in Glass Onion. No, here, the Helen twist,
the flashback they kick off rather than conclude the rising action in the film s second act.
Fundamentally, of course, the structure is a familiar one. Setup, crisis, climax,
and all that it s just that Glass Onion constructs this sequence in an uncommon
way instead of a linear progression in which we follow characters chronologically,
finding new information as they do, the film is nonlinear. Audience perspective is carefully
directed. Fabula and Syuzhet, the chronology of the story and the film s presentation of it,
aren t necessarily tied here, and the result is that instead of finding new
pieces of the puzzle to compliment and recontextualise the starting handful,
as it were, the most important steps forward in Glass Onion are those same pieces,
found again, but in a different light. The idea of reframing the seen, the way we
look at the plainly visible, the way our sight is clouded by expectation and assumption is at
the very heart of this film. We heard Miles make all those gaffes, we saw him give Duke the glass,
we saw the red of the envelope behind the Fibonacci frame, but we weren t listening,
we weren t looking we were looking for crystalline layers around this Glass Onion,
rather than just looking, really looking at the centre. In organising the film, its narrative
structure this way, in hitting the audience over the head with the fact that these missing
clues had been dancing around in plain view, in tying the story s payoff directly to the basic,
interpretive act of viewing the film, Glass Onion is able to make this central point about wealth,
status, and the way these attributes distort perception ring true on a near-visceral level.
Here s the advanced stupid, then Ben Shapiro is entirely blind to this effect, this remarkable
melding of form and sentiment, because he s already condemned Glass Onion for doing things
differently. Let me explain. Thinking about the way the different segments of the film operate,
Ben s wrong here in that aforementioned common, unremarkable way. The first hour isn t a
misdirect, it s setup, and without seeing these things here, the film can t later reframe them,
and pull them all together. Similarly, it obviously isn t a waste of time. Ben misses this,
seemingly, because he s watching the film with a basic awareness of this genre, how mysteries tend
to be built, what some of the common tropes and contrivances tend to be, and so on he knows what
flashbacks are, what exposition is, the functions these devices might play in a bog-standard
detective story, and the points at which they might be employed. But he isn t willing,
or perhaps he isn t able, to understand a story which uses familiar genre conventions in new ways,
and that s the centre of all this. Ben sees a plot which uses nonlinearity and reveals to get going,
instead of just to tie things up, and seems unable to understand this as anything other than
a technical error. When Andi s murder is added to the mix, he just assumes this is the murder now,
the murder around which the film centres, that the previous death and everything before was
empty misdirection. He s seemingly unaware that the film can be about multiple murders,
or that it can feature multiple murders but be about something else. No, for Ben, this is a
detective story, and detective stories always have an actual murder we re supposed to investigate .
The crux of the matter is that Ben can t conceive Glass Onion might be bucking
the norm intentionally, adopting a slightly non-conventional variation of this mystery
structure, in order to better reflect the story s ideas. Now that s likely due in part to the
fact that Ben, y know, missed the ideas, but given the way he can t understand a nonlinear structure
as anything other than an hour of wasted time, given the way he sees an imaginative, pointed,
and thematically appropriate exploration of perspective as being deceived by the writer?
It kinda seems like Ben just doesn t understand art, doesn t understand that to make something new
means rearranging, iterating upon what exists. Ben doesn t seem aware that in many cases,
the artistic conventions of today are the experiments of the past. No, Ben looks at
divergence from the norm and sees not innovation, but aberration. Failure. Bad writing.
At this point it s tempting to link Ben s blind adherence to norms and conventions,
his abject failure to perceive change, innovation as potentially good, positive,
anything other than transgressive, to his politics, but that feels like a cheap move,
and let s be honest, we all know he s not a Politics Understander already. No, I want
to stay fresh, and link it back to Glass Onion, because there s a really beautiful irony here.
Ben thinks he gets storytelling, that his judgement here is sound, that he s willing
to call out poor quality, leftie films, that nobody else will because Ben, like Miles, like
every other one of these out-of-touch rich pricks, thinks he s a disruptor. He s got his platform,
he likes to posture as some threat to the system, an enlightened scholar saying it like it is. But
like Miles, like these other so-called disruptors? He succeeds because he got a kick-start from
privilege, because his resulting position leads people to assume he will, to assume he s saying
something of value, that he understands films, or culture, or society. He succeeds because people
are so captivated by the Glass Onion s delicate layers that they never think to just look through
the centre, and see a man talking nonsense. The silver lining of all this, of course, is that
these disruptors start believing their own hype, start taking these assumptions of their brilliance
as evidence for it, and that because of this? Every once in a while the layers fall away,
every once in a while people see the emperor s new clothes. Every once in a while, Ben Shapiro
s going to make a thread like this and it becomes as clear as day that he s not a disruptor, that
his judgement isn t sound, that he s not thinking outside of the box, so much as perpetuating it.
These people aren t disrupting anything and we need to stop automatically giving them credit.
We need to look, really look, at who they are, and what they do. Jordan Peterson doesn t understand
Orwell, or Eliot. Matt Walsh doesn t understand fairytales. Elon Musk doesn t understand Twitter,
or politics, or many things, really and Ben Shapiro doesn t understand Glass Onion.
Hey everyone. Thanks for watching. Remember to like, share, subscribe, all that good stuff. This
ll be the last non-Patreon exclusive video of the year, but soon enough I ll be putting out another
Glass Onion video, as well as a long-delayed video on the Lobster King himself. Until then,
thanks to all my Patreon supporters, especially Tig, and happy new year.