Rian Johnson’s film assumes to show in an unsubtle way how easy it has become for certain billionaires to make people believe that they are brilliant, as the public has accepted to swallow their arrangements with the truth. This article contains some spoilers.
The Glass Onion is the name of a bar, the one where the protagonists of our adventure met, a decade before becoming famous, to investigate the shots and draw plans on the comet. This “glass onion” is also the red thread of the plot of the eponymous film by Rian Johnson, released on Netflix on December 23, 2022.
It is an architectural feat erected by the multi-billionaire Miles Bron in the center of an island on which the plot takes place. At the heart of the glass structure that overlooks his palace, he has placed his huge office and his racing car – even if he cannot use it on site, it “never leaves him”.
Are lies only binding on those who believe them?
The transparent onion is above all the exemplary embodiment of our relationship to the powerful, or rather to what they say. Speech is at the heart of the feature film; these will also be the first clues revealed by detective Benoît Blanc (Daniel Craig) at the end of the film, who dissects the approximate semantics of Miles Bron while despairing of so much ignorance: “ This whole day has been a veritable anthology of dirty expressions and factual errors! “.
There is something fascinating about the gift of eloquence, it gives the illusion of truth. If he dares to say it out loud, it must be true. Isn’t it on this principle that Donald Trump rose to the head of the most powerful country in the world for four years? That Elon Musk has managed to create an image of a defender of freedom of expression, he who has muzzled speech online more in two months than Twitter teams in 15 years?
Sam Bankman-Fried has, in the same way, managed to convince very serious personalities to invest in his FTX crypto platform, playing marvel his partition of badly dressed little genius who could become the next Bill Gates, so highly valued in Silicon Valley. It doesn’t matter what he says, as long as there is the impression that the entrepreneur hides a formidable intelligence behind layers of eccentricity and self-assurance.
And what about Kanye West, multiplying provocative statements for years, before rolling in anti-Semitism once too often and finally being denied by some brandswhom his extravagance has nevertheless so enriched?
” It was right in front of me from the start “, Benoît Blanc lamented several times.
” The film is not very subtle »
Some of the billionaires we’ve carried to the top of the world are glass onions, Rian Johnson tells us: they stand as monuments to sagacity, assure us that their brains work differently, that they’re faster, more complex, and we nod. ” The film is not very subtle, it talks about the big lies and the power structures through which people who want to preserve their interests reinforce these big lies “, confided the director to the World.
Did he plan to caricature Elon Musk in particular? ” It’s a horrible accident! “, he exclaimed in the columns of Wired. “ It’s not about any particular billionaire “, he added to the World. The feature film, written and shot between 2020 and 2021, could not indeed be inspired by the escapades of the new boss of Twitter, who has been discredited with each new tweet he has sent since the beginning of 2022. But Rian Johnson has well aware of the parallels [Le film] is really relevant right now, it’s weird “, he acknowledged.
Glass Onion is one of those films that manages to capture the era at the right time, with the best tone. In the manner of Don’t Look Up, released almost to the day last year on Netflix, It’s not a form-shattering work, but an effective fable that hammers home a single idea for over two hours. What will we do with it?
Glass Onion is available on Netflix since December 23, 2022
