Re: The Glass Onion

The first idea is that the mystery genre is like a glass onion:

Well, I keep returning in my mind to the glass onion. Something that seems densely layered, mysterious and inscrutable. But in fact, the centre is in plain sight. And that is why this case has confounded me like no other. Why every complex layer peeled back has revealed another layer, and another layer, and come to naught. And that was the problem right there. You see, I expected complexity. I expected intelligence. I expected a puzzle, a game. But that’s not what any of this is. It hides not behind complexity, but behind mind-numbing, obvious clarity. Truth is, it doesn’t hide at all. I was staring right at it.

There’s a big glass onion on the fancy private island that represents the mystery put on by the rich white guy. The second idea is that real disruptive genius means destroying a system people are invested in:

Okay. If you want to shake things up, you start with something small. You break a norm or an idea or a convention, some little business model, but you go with things that people are kind of tired of anyway. Everybody gets excited because you’re busting up something that everyone wanted broken in the first place. That’s the infraction point. That’s the place where you have to look within yourself, and ask: Am I the kind of person who will keep going? Will you break more things? Break bigger things? Be willing to break the thing that nobody wants you to break? Because at that point, people are not going to be on your side. They’re going to call you crazy. They’re gonna say you’re a bully. They’re gonna tell you to stop. Even your partner will say you need to stop. Because as it turns out, nobody wants you to break the system itself. But that is what true disruption is, and that is what unites all of us. We all got to that line, and crossed it.

Then they blow up the glass onion. It’s a metaphor! I imagine the writer was stroking himself as he dwelled on this perfectly consistent proof of his own disruptive genius. The movie is therefore about how murder mysteries are hateful, and the people who like them should be destroyed (we’ll get into the racial angle later). More concisely, “The game is stupid: break the game.” Hence the parallel between busting up the puzzle box with a hammer at the beginning (like cutting the Gordian knot) and destroying the glass onion at the end.

A repetitive theme is calling mysteries stupid and shit, and the island itself where the murder mystery is conducted is called Pisceshite Island. Daniel Craig repeatedly remarks that Clue is “a stupid game” and the stupidity of the final reveal takes center stage in his speech. Therefore the plot holes and misleading revelations were intentional. To quote Edward Norton:

You will have to closely observe the crime. Consider what you know about each other. Know that across the island, I’ve hidden clues. Some may be helpful, some may misdirect. That’s for you to determine. But if anyone can name the killer, tell me how they achieved the murder, and, most importantly, what was the motive, that person wins our game.

The point of showing incorrect clues is to subvert the mystery genre, which prides itself on logical consistency (we’re getting closer to the racial angle). For example, in the flashback when Daniel Craig has dinner with the twin she says “I don’t drink.” This was an intentional misdirection, because earlier in the movie she’s shown quite clearly stumbling around drunk at the island. This point is hammered home by having the twin lady who doesn’t drink act like a functional alcoholic for the rest of the movie. Other than being drunk all the time, when she gets nervous or anxious she’s shown reaching for a whiskey. She’s also significantly more functional while drunk, and Daniel Craig even remarks on this at one point.

I think maybe you should take up drinking. You’re just killing it.

And at the end Daniel Craig gives her another shot of whiskey for liquid courage to burn everything down before he leaves to watch it burn down from the outside. It’s not merely inconsistent, it’s rubbing the inconsistency in your face.

There are other clues like this that are meant to lead to dead ends, because the point of the movie is that logical mystery stories are stupid, and they deserve to be destroyed. And if you (the viewer) like them you also deserve to be destroyed. Others have complained that the writing was bad, but it’s actually very good because every note reinforces the overall theme: logic is stupid. What people are reacting to is that the message is bad. The medium by which the message is communicated is actually quite brilliantly crafted.

The message of The Glass Onion was nihilistic, and therefore contradictory*, we can agree on that. But the medium conveyed the message in every artistic detail, and reinforced it in a layered manner with perfect internal consistency (to the message “mysteries are stupid”). We would be hard-pressed to come up with improvements that would communicate the intended message more strongly or more artfully, because our improvements would be focused on things like making the story well-crafted, which goes against the message of the movie. Our improvements would be directed toward a message that’s more palatable to our sensibilities, like “murder mysteries should have qualities X, Y, and Z.”

Now, it’s Hollywood and ogres have layers (like onions) so there’s also a racial angle. Making the story structure bad was an intentional shot at white men because they want good story structure. The intentionally bad storytelling served the movie’s thesis perfectly. You may recall this flyer from the Smithsonian:

The racial angle is that the mystery genre is a cultural product by and for white men with too much time and money on their hands, and that’s why it deserves to be blown up. Dave Bautista stands in for white lower class men, which is why he had to die. Edward Norton stands in for white upper class men, which is why he had to be utterly humiliated and his legacy destroyed (after he kills Bautista). Daniel Craig was the Jews, brilliant, subversive, bored, and friend to the civil rights movement. Leslie Odom Jr. was the Uncle Toms of the world, the white women were Karens, and Janelle Monae was WAKANDA GIRL GENIUS.

And the last bit I’ll note, to tie together the racial angle with the “disruption” angle, is that it becomes necessary to the narrative to burn the Mona Lisa. Why? Because that’s European heritage, the “system” that everyone is invested in and everyone is shocked when you destroy it. So the racial thesis of the movie is that rich white men are the system, they don’t deserve what they have, they’re just stupid and evil and in the past they got unaccountably lucky by getting successful on the backs of WAKANDA GIRL GENIUS. And because they like mystery games, we must destroy mystery games to begin our endless war of vengeance. Generalizing the idea, they like cultural artifacts like the Mona Lisa, so all of their culture must be destroyed in a big, stupid, black girl tantrum.

At the end Daniel Craig asks Wakanda Girl Genius if she’s ready to go back, which she doesn’t answer because it’s meant to seem ambiguous because you could interpret it to mean back to Wakanda or back to a peaceful life. But it’s not ambiguous because the only interpretation that’s consistent with the movie’s thesis is back to the world of white people, where she can continue her forever war of burning down European civilization at the behest of the Jew.

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*The problem of consistency of course arises when the message is nihilistic because nihilism is self-refuting, which is a rather elementary philosophical point that never gets any traction with modern audiences due to racial political reasons I don’t need to get into to support the points above. As has been observed before, any statement to the effect “There are no true statements” is self-refuting. Regardless, that is the preferred philosophy of our ruling class, and they make the movies. As Devon Stack explains in his video on The Believer, Judaism and nihilism are ultimately the same thing.