“No! It’s just plain dumb!”: Glass Onion
Apr. 19th, 2026 09:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeRogan: we rewatched Glass Onion with our roomies, because I felt a need to read about an idiot tech billionaire getting his royal comeuppance, for SOME REASON.
The movie sold me on first watching with that first opening sequence, where Tech Douche sends a crew of people a puzzle box (trivia-hoarding minutiae stuff: stereograms, knowing the atomic weight of silver, compass directions, etc.) containing an invitation to his private island for a weekend getaway. This sequence perfectly sets up not just the douche (who won’t even appear for a good few minutes), but all the other main players/suspects and their relationships to him. Everything you need to know about these people, you learn in this sequence:
• Douche is fond of overcomplicated stupid puzzles and games that make him look smart (but don’t actually—you later find out he paid someone else to make it). He sees himself (or wants others to see him) as a mastermind.
• Similarly, he REALLY likes making other people play his games, even (especially) if they don’t want to.
• Douche has a crew of friends, who vary wildly in politics, skills, and interests, but all of whom are all too willing to play his games, as long as it benefits them.
• And then you have Helen, who upon seeing the box sent to her, takes a fucking axe to it. You don’t know why she’s so furious yet, only that she is, that she HATES this man and his stupid games, and that she refuses to play them. (She will indeed end the movie by breaking ALL HIS SHIT.)
Helen’s solution of the box is neither intended nor desired by the creators of it, but it works. It isn’t “smart” in the way Douche wants or likes... but they clearly didn’t plan for someone to hack the box apart either. Which leads to the final thing you learn from this sequence:
• Douche relies on people following his rules. He is completely unprepared for someone following their own, someone not deferring to his view of reality... and indeed, this is how he’ll be defeated and how all his shit gets broke.
The douche of Glass Onion is dumb as a stack of shit... but in a way that wealth and race help conceal. It’s easy to see that Birdy Jay don’t got the sense God gave a muffin, she ACTS like the airhead model of pop culture, but Douche has made a fortune (on the backs of other people), he has robot valets and runs a tech empire, so he MUST be smart, right? (Indeed, at the very beginning, you see Lionel mention the ONLY thing Douche maybe did that apparently made money: the idea for the Crypto Kids app, which is bald-faced stupid, derivative, and crooked. Everything else, he provably either stole outright or paid other people to do for him, or it was the “dogs + NFTs = discourse” sort of idiocy that never went anywhere.) He uses the right accent, the right status markers. He does and says enough of the things people associate with being a genius that people either buy it or keep their thoughts to themselves. His “friends” keep backing him up because it benefits them.
Meanwhile, Helen is a black third grade teacher from Alabama with frizzy hair who speaks with a Southern accent (and a lower-class one, not that godawful Louisiana nobility thing Blanc is attempting that ensures I will never like him much). She is clearly way smarter than he is, by far the most sensible person in the movie, but she doesn’t show it in the “right” ways, so people don’t recognize it.
(I have known people in real life who were like Helen, whose clear virtues and smarts were not recognized because they didn’t “look” or “act” right. All my lovers have been of this type. I have also had the misfortune of knowing, far better than I’d like, a mean little fuckwit whose money and skin color allowed him to fake otherwise.)
It’s not a coincidence that Helen’s sister (who DID perform the correct class markers, who relaxed her hair and scrubbed the South out of her mouth and built a tech empire) ends up dead, while Helen survives. Helen’s sister was trying to play Douche’s game, and Douche may be stupid, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be dangerous, powerful, or tricky. Douche’s sole skills are getting people to think he’s smarter than he is and taking advantage of them—he’s very good at both.
Helen’s sister makes the mistake of thinking that because she’s smarter, she is safe. She is not. Helen, however, starts the movie knowing how dangerous and powerful these people are, even if she doesn’t know the exact identity and source of that danger yet. Hell, it’s HER who firsts suggest Douche could be a suspect, only for Blanc to dismiss it because it’s too stupid. (“I’m very bad at stupid things,” he says, and thus he fucks up a lot of the case.)
Someone in the funny books biz, Spike Trotman maybe, once wrote somewhere that overcomplexity is sometimes used to hide inadequacy. She was talking about art, hiding failure by covering it with superfluous flourishes and detail, but it’s true about other things too. The glass onion is the movie’s symbol of that concept: the Douche surrounds himself with overcomplicated fripperies to conceal his vacuity. He PERFORMS at being an eccentric genius, but isn’t. And Benoit Blanc falls for it too, at least for a while! He so badly WANTS a clever mystery, so badly wants the glorious puzzle in his head, that he takes far too long to realize how stupid the whole thing is. Which shows again how intelligence may not be all it’s cracked up to be.
The movie sold me on first watching with that first opening sequence, where Tech Douche sends a crew of people a puzzle box (trivia-hoarding minutiae stuff: stereograms, knowing the atomic weight of silver, compass directions, etc.) containing an invitation to his private island for a weekend getaway. This sequence perfectly sets up not just the douche (who won’t even appear for a good few minutes), but all the other main players/suspects and their relationships to him. Everything you need to know about these people, you learn in this sequence:
• Douche is fond of overcomplicated stupid puzzles and games that make him look smart (but don’t actually—you later find out he paid someone else to make it). He sees himself (or wants others to see him) as a mastermind.
• Similarly, he REALLY likes making other people play his games, even (especially) if they don’t want to.
• Douche has a crew of friends, who vary wildly in politics, skills, and interests, but all of whom are all too willing to play his games, as long as it benefits them.
• And then you have Helen, who upon seeing the box sent to her, takes a fucking axe to it. You don’t know why she’s so furious yet, only that she is, that she HATES this man and his stupid games, and that she refuses to play them. (She will indeed end the movie by breaking ALL HIS SHIT.)
Helen’s solution of the box is neither intended nor desired by the creators of it, but it works. It isn’t “smart” in the way Douche wants or likes... but they clearly didn’t plan for someone to hack the box apart either. Which leads to the final thing you learn from this sequence:
• Douche relies on people following his rules. He is completely unprepared for someone following their own, someone not deferring to his view of reality... and indeed, this is how he’ll be defeated and how all his shit gets broke.
The douche of Glass Onion is dumb as a stack of shit... but in a way that wealth and race help conceal. It’s easy to see that Birdy Jay don’t got the sense God gave a muffin, she ACTS like the airhead model of pop culture, but Douche has made a fortune (on the backs of other people), he has robot valets and runs a tech empire, so he MUST be smart, right? (Indeed, at the very beginning, you see Lionel mention the ONLY thing Douche maybe did that apparently made money: the idea for the Crypto Kids app, which is bald-faced stupid, derivative, and crooked. Everything else, he provably either stole outright or paid other people to do for him, or it was the “dogs + NFTs = discourse” sort of idiocy that never went anywhere.) He uses the right accent, the right status markers. He does and says enough of the things people associate with being a genius that people either buy it or keep their thoughts to themselves. His “friends” keep backing him up because it benefits them.
Meanwhile, Helen is a black third grade teacher from Alabama with frizzy hair who speaks with a Southern accent (and a lower-class one, not that godawful Louisiana nobility thing Blanc is attempting that ensures I will never like him much). She is clearly way smarter than he is, by far the most sensible person in the movie, but she doesn’t show it in the “right” ways, so people don’t recognize it.
(I have known people in real life who were like Helen, whose clear virtues and smarts were not recognized because they didn’t “look” or “act” right. All my lovers have been of this type. I have also had the misfortune of knowing, far better than I’d like, a mean little fuckwit whose money and skin color allowed him to fake otherwise.)
It’s not a coincidence that Helen’s sister (who DID perform the correct class markers, who relaxed her hair and scrubbed the South out of her mouth and built a tech empire) ends up dead, while Helen survives. Helen’s sister was trying to play Douche’s game, and Douche may be stupid, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be dangerous, powerful, or tricky. Douche’s sole skills are getting people to think he’s smarter than he is and taking advantage of them—he’s very good at both.
Helen’s sister makes the mistake of thinking that because she’s smarter, she is safe. She is not. Helen, however, starts the movie knowing how dangerous and powerful these people are, even if she doesn’t know the exact identity and source of that danger yet. Hell, it’s HER who firsts suggest Douche could be a suspect, only for Blanc to dismiss it because it’s too stupid. (“I’m very bad at stupid things,” he says, and thus he fucks up a lot of the case.)
Someone in the funny books biz, Spike Trotman maybe, once wrote somewhere that overcomplexity is sometimes used to hide inadequacy. She was talking about art, hiding failure by covering it with superfluous flourishes and detail, but it’s true about other things too. The glass onion is the movie’s symbol of that concept: the Douche surrounds himself with overcomplicated fripperies to conceal his vacuity. He PERFORMS at being an eccentric genius, but isn’t. And Benoit Blanc falls for it too, at least for a while! He so badly WANTS a clever mystery, so badly wants the glorious puzzle in his head, that he takes far too long to realize how stupid the whole thing is. Which shows again how intelligence may not be all it’s cracked up to be.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-19 08:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-04-19 08:53 pm (UTC)I HATE HIS ACCENT SO MUCH MARIE. I APPARENTLY STILL HAVE SOUTHERN HANG-UPS ABOUT THAT.
EDIT: to clarify, the accent Helen has is a pretty normal Southern accent, but it's definitely not a CLASSY one, and it's a type people outside the South often look down on.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-19 11:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-04-20 12:03 am (UTC)--basically every LBer who was born to this vessel
no subject
Date: 2026-04-20 03:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-04-19 11:25 pm (UTC)That is a really good point.
Yeah, I remember when "multiple intelligences" started trending, and there was a certain amount of bullshit around categorization, but it's really true that intelligence is all one thing. Benoit Blanc, who is very intelligent in certain areas (good at solving certain kinds of sophisticated puzzles) is very bad at dealing with a scenario where the puzzles are a distraction. The Douche, while not smart, is good at manipulating the kind of people who see a game with implied rules and automatically join in and follow the rules without questioning whether they want to be playing this game, and Benoit Blanc has some of that.
(I've been thinking about rule-following and social class, and how in the middle class, and the professional class in particular, you tend to see peak rule-following, because those are the people more likely to experience rule-following as a successful strategy. Below a certain socioeconomic status, rules are more likely to be weaponized against you while being less likely to be enforced in your favor, and the kind of privilege that makes people better at some kinds of rule-based competition was likely never there. Above a certain status, you're unlikely to be held accountable for breaking the rules. People who genuinely need to work for a living, but have the kind of privilege where, if they follow the rules, can live in comfort and privilege doing a socially prestigious kind of work, are more likely to internalize automatic rule-following behavior and even adhere to implicit rules.)