Ben Shapiro really spent the holidays just furious that Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery deceived him. Yes, a murder mystery dared to trick its audience. Shapiro was also not happy that it took the movie an hour to get to a second murder and that he could not solve it quickly. It’s almost as if Glass Onion happens to be a good movie that does the murder mystery genre right and leaves you guessing until the very end!
But thinking that way would require Shapiro to use his one brain cell, and that’s too much to ask. He was BIG mad at Glass Onion this holiday season. And you know what the logical thing to do is when a movie makes you mad, right? It’s to write a very long Twitter thread outing yourself as someone who doesn’t understand how the structure and character arcs—or anything—in a movie work.
It’s doubly funny if you remember that Shapiro is a failed screenwriter. Please note that there are Glass Onion spoilers below because Ben Shapiro just tweeted out plot points to make whatever this nonsense point is:
This thread is truly and honestly the funniest thing I could have possibly gotten for Christmas. Shapiro is so angry about the misdirect in the movie—and he’s not the only one who considered Andi and Helen being twin sisters to be a plot hole, as if identical twins don’t famously look exactly the same, and as if this group of people wouldn’t suspect anything. Shapiro was so mad that he just kept calling Glass Onion lazy, and … Ben, Benjamin … watch the f**king movie before speaking because—my god—the actual film explains all of this. His problem is that halfway through the movie we’re shown the reality of the situation and it is completely different from what we thought we knew.
It’s exciting. It recontextualizes what we’ve already seen, and makes it so we want to go back and rewatch to see what we’ve missed. Shapiro thinks it is “lazy” because he didn’t figure it out, but it’s honestly that simple because there is nothing lazy about it.
A lot of people on Twitter have also been outing themselves as people who do not know how murder mysteries function. They’ve all been tweeting some variation of “I don’t typically agree with Ben, BUT” over the fact that the murders we’re seeing happen (and are revealed) later in the film. It’s called a slow burn and it is very much a staple of the genre. This “misdirection” that has Shapiro so mad? It’s featured in many classic murder mystery stories! It’s almost as if writer and director Rian Johnson was honoring his love of murder mysteries and—GASP—Agatha Christie by doing this!
Imagine being actively deceived by a writer
![Helen (Janelle Monáe) and Benoit (Daniel Craig) sitting on a bench in Glass Onion](https://www.themarysue.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/tumblr_53773e8ebf12ec2cd5f7c53fb1728ad0_87b4cdc7_540.webp?w=540&resize=540%2C267)
My personal favorite part of Shapiro’s rant is that he’s so mad that he’s being “deceived” by the writer. It’s almost as if that is the function of any sort of mystery story out there! Think about it: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t lay out the case for you right from the start. He wanted you to see how Sherlock Holmes figured it out.
In murder mysteries, the audience is going on a journey with the detectives. And yes, Glass Onion does reveal details that only Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc knew later in the film so you have to play catch-up to figure it out, but that is—shockingly—what happened with the Disruptors! With the exception of Miles Bron, all of the other characters were also under the impression that Helen (Janelle Monáe) was Andi. We were in the story with them.
People using only one brain cell (like Shapiro) probably thought they were in Benoit Blanc’s shoes and completely forgot about how, in Knives Out, we were not in any one character’s perspective. Honestly, I think that Shapiro never watched Knives Out—or any other murder mystery, for that matter—prior to watching Glass Onion, and was shocked to learn that there are characters meant to make fun of right-wing figure heads.
If only Ben Shapiro watched Knives Out and saw himself represented as Jacob Thrombey.
Ben Shapiro can’t solve a murder mystery
What sane person logs onto Twitter to share this much anger over a movie that is harmless?
The reality is that Ben Shapiro saw an opportunity to hate on a movie that many love because it does make some very liberal points. The ultimate message of the movie is that tech billionaires are maybe bad and those who uplift them and let them get away with this stuff are equally as bad! It’s that simple! And if that is somehow a bad message to you, then that’s all I need to know.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is on Netflix and you should watch it just to make Ben Shapiro big mad that his thread is doing nothing but getting him mocked on Twitter.
(featured image: Netflix)
Published: Dec 27, 2022 12:31 pm