Sometimes, if you spend your time complaining about something long enough, it gets what it rightfully deserves: The number one spot on Netflix. In this case, I’m talking about the hatred that seemed to suddenly proliferate for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery the minute it dropped on Netflix—which was shocking to someone like me, who saw it in theaters twice and absolutely loved it.
The movie is the second in Rian Johnson’s whodunit series chronicling the adventures of detective Benoit Blanc (played by Daniel Craig). The story centers on a group of rich and eccentric friends who were brought together when they were younger and are simply holding on by the thread that is Miles Bron (Edward Norton). What the movie’s success proves, though, is that audiences are tired of seeing the rich succeed.
Watching Benoit Blanc call Miles Bron “dumb” to his face? Iconic. But the movie was also met with a lot of pushback from those who don’t like the idea of rich fraud getting called out. So let’s talk a bit about how Glass Onion has overcome the strange hatred that surrounded it from the moment it premiered on Netflix.
Elon fans got angry
Glass Onion was filmed at the height of the pandemic and long before Elon Musk decided he wanted to be in charge of Twitter (and be very bad at it). So when the movie reveals how big of a fraud Miles Bron is, fans of Musk were upset—and began telling on themselves by suggesting the comparison between the two was intentional. To Johnson’s credit, Bron comes across as a run of the mill tech bro who has masqueraded as a genius for his entire career.
Comparing Miles to Musk is what audiences are doing—not the creatives behind the film. What Glass Onion does poke at is the toxic man-bros like Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan. With a character like Dave Bautista’s Duke Cody, you see those “macho” influencers taken to task, and yet Johnson still makes Cody more likable than any of the real men they’re parodying.
Ben Shapiro learned what a murder mystery was
One of my favorite things about the discourse surrounding the number one movie on Netflix was Ben Shapiro deciding to out himself as someone who doesn’t understand murder mysteries. Shapiro, who thinks he’s some kind of detective, was furious he didn’t have all the clues that Benoit Blanc had going into Glass Onion, and my guy, if you want all the answers up front, then go watch Columbo or something. The point of a murder mystery is to have twists and turns.
Shapiro’s outcry probably actually sent more people to watch Glass Onion—mostly because we love to dunk on Shapiro, but then MAGA fans and Republicans alike were team “why doesn’t the movie tell me all the answers right away?!” and started hating on it for whatever warped reason.
But Glass Onion survived! Why?
The movie is a testament to how cathartic it feels watching Benoit Blanc just rip into Miles Bron. If we could all tell Elon Musk that everything he’s doing is just dumb? It’d be great. Same goes for Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and—well, you get the picture. This movie doesn’t specify which billionaire Bron is based on because he’s an amalgamation of all of them. There’s the Elizabeth Holmes picture, his tech company working in fuel and things (other than cars), and more. He’s just representing the type of billionaires we all absolutely hate to see thriving.
Because they all lie. Musk was going to change the world and refuses to help fix anything. Even his cars are lies most of the time. He lies daily and we’re left with the broken pieces, just like all of Bron’s friends at the end of their trip. So why is Glass Onion still number one on Netflix? Because seeing Bron fail and get left behind by those he had his claws in feels good.
(featured image: Netflix)
