Glass Onion (Rian Johnson, 2022)

It wasn't my intention to write about Glass Onion on the day that Sight & Sound released the results of their 2022 critics' poll. This event, which happens once every ten years, is always exciting and controversial and results in a predictable flurry of comment on Film Twitter. But this time, one thing I notice is that the poll results are being treated, at least in part, as a referendum on Film Twitter itself. Before the results were announced, there were complaints that too many people voted, and that too many ballots went out to younger, less established critics who made their homes on the Internet, not in print. And of course, this lens is affecting the way the results are being received, with charges of presentist bias, lack of canonical awareness, shallowness of taste, etc. 

But what's especially odd is the way that Film Twitter (whatever that is / was) is seeing itself reflected in these results, and doesn't like what it sees in the mirror. Why are we such a self-loathing bunch? This, I think, related pretty squarely to the divisive reception that has greeted Glass Onion. Not only is its one-week theatrical release a point of contention in itself, something only a filmmaker with Rian Johnson's clout could wrest from the moronic clutches of Reed Hastings. I have seen negative reviews that take issue primarily with the sort of film Glass Onion is: a snarky but ultimately sincere attempt by a dismayed Gen-Xer to use the mechanics of genre to level criticism at the flimsiness of the web-driven world.

"Oh, he's mocking the discourse." "Oh yeah, get that Netflix bag and then shit on fast capital." "Oh look, he even retroactively made his protagonist gay. How woke." The thing is, Rian Johnson is one of us. He knows a lot of us, he reads us, and he even married one of us, for Christ's sake. And like a lot of us, he harbors genuine concerns about the state of our politics, about culture wars and stupid NFTs and the seemingly endless Gilded Age of Internet 2.0. But he also feels marginalized, and isn't sure how to fight these monsters. So he arms himself with irony, the one functional tool that our forebears bequeathed to us. 

Johnson is hardly alone in this. Look at Inherent Vice. Look at Southland Tales. Look at White Noise. But for some reason, a lot of critics hold Johnson to a different standard, and it's not just about the Star Wars money. No, we see our own stymied anger and all-encompassing anxiety in a film like Glass Onion. Except we see it writ large, on the Aegean Sea, and acted out by some of the most beautiful people on the planet. It seems like we hate Rian Johnson because he is the most successful emissary from our circle of dread.

I don't want to get into spoilers, really, but part of what makes Glass Onion so pleasurable is also what, I'm certain, makes it so distasteful to others. It is nothing so unique to argue that the emperor has no clothes. But here, Johnson suggests that that very nakedness is a form of superhero garb. Empty bravado and the inculcated entitlement of the mediocre white man aren't just some kind of deception but are in fact the coin of the realm. If you ask to see the proof, for the brash young genius to show his work, you're only exposing yourself as (a) too dumb to "get it," and (b) a cynic among dreamers ("disrupters"), someone duped by The Man, insufficiently Red-Pilled. 

Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig, with his self-described "Southern hokum") really does face his greatest challenge in 2021, because he is cursed with intelligence. Imagine being a Sherlock Holmes in a world of Alex Joneses? Logic, cunning, foresight, to say nothing of an ethical streak, are deficits in this dystopian Fucknutsland, and when Blanc discovers the truth -- a gaseous core of abject stupidity -- he's not just offended. He's flummoxed, until he and his partner (Janelle Monáe) realize they can only win by feigning stupidity themselves. Miles (Edward Norton) thinks they're all just going full-on Woodstock '99, but they have the upper hand. Because in the material world, empty space is volatile. There's a nucleus in there, energy ready to discharge itself ("Hindenberg!"). Sometimes, the gas lights you.