Peeling Back the Tech Broligarchy's Glass Onion

Warning: Contains spoilers for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Story (2022)

Five people are on a Zoom call, clearly concerned over their corporate leader’s latest decision. The camera focuses on a Black man in lab coat—Lionel Toussaint, as we find out later—who keeps fending off his colleagues’ arguments. “How do you argue with genius?” Lionel says, lifting up a pile of faxes of ideas scrawled on napkins. “Remember CHILD equals NFT? We all laughed, but then the ‘Krypto Kidz’ app paid for this building.”

This is the second scene of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Story, which first premiered three years ago tomorrow at the Toronto Film Festival. It’s the successor to Knives Out, director Rian Johnson’s 2019 breakout murder mystery hit. In my estimation, Glass Onion does not measure up with its predecessor as a film, though it comes close. But it’s Glass Onion’s biting commentary on the increasingly right-wing and politically involved tech industry’s moral and intellectual vacuousness that has stuck with me long after I first saw it.

When the film first came out, many critics and filmgoers made an instant connection between Miles Bron and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. Played by Edward Norton, Bron is the allegedly genius billionaire referred to in the scene described above and the owner of the titular Glass Onion island getaway, which he had built to demonstrate his (dangerously explosive) “fuel of the future.”

It’s a good comparison, but I want to take it one step further. Not only is Bron a useful stand-in for the historically unpopular Musk, he also represents the entire tech broligarchy that has thrust itself upon the rest of society through AI and collaboration with the Trump administration. To me, no other film represents today’s tech bros as accurately as Glass Onion.

The film itself takes place almost entirely at Bron’s island retreat and revolves around an ensemble cast of colorful characters: Bron himself, private detective Benoit Blanc, Connecticut Gov. Claire Debella, fashionista Birdie Jay, scientist Lionel, men’s rights YouTuber Duke Cody (plus tag-along girlfriend), and Bron’s estranged business partner Andi Brand.

Bron represents the ever-growing tech behemoth, while his guests—portrayed at least initially as close, old-time friends of Bron’s—each represent a modern-day estate of American life. Claire (Kathryn Hahn) clearly represents elected officials; Lionel, (Leslie Odom Jr), represents academia; Birdie (Kate Hudson) is Hollywood and the glamour sector; and Duke (Dave Bautista) is new media and influencer culture.

Early in the film, Blanc asks Bron how the group came to be so close, and Bron launches into a ham-fisted explanation about how each is a “disruptor,” implying that disruptors gravitate towards each other because of their natural instincts and talents. This early, it’s easy to take Bron at his word; we have little other context besides a few scattered clues throughout the script.

But Birdie tells Blanc a different story: That once upon a time, she had Bron eating out of her hand saying he was lucky to even get to talk to her, but now it’s the other way around. It’s a quick line from an insecure character who had already shown jealous tendencies, and you can be forgiven for not reading much into it. But the line also works as analysis of the modern-day relationship between tech nerds and Hollywood.

Big tech is well on its way to taking over Hollywood.

When I was growing up in the eighties and nineties, Hollywood actors were stars that everyone looked up to. Movies led by big stars made millions. Now it’s movies featuring flashy CGI and popular intellectual property, like Marvel comic characters, that bring in the cash. 

“There are no movie stars anymore,” Marvel star Anthony Mackie, who now plays Captain America in the MCU, said in 2019. “Anthony Mackie isn’t a movie star; The Falcon is a movie star. And that’s what’s weird. It used to be [different] with Tom Cruise and Will Smith and Stallone and Schwarzenegger. When you went to the movies, you went to go see the Stallone movie. You went to go see the Schwarzenegger movie. Now you go see X-Men.”

A look at the highest grossing films of all time is a who’s who of computer generated graphics. Avengers, Avatar, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars. And then there’s Titanic. Now there’s plenty of CGI in Titanic, but it was the actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet who carried the film to the heights it reached.

We used to consume celebrity gossip about our favorite pop stars, models, and actors, tracking fame from the A list to the D list. And even the D list didn’t usually include rich computer nerds; the tech moguls of the '90s would have felt as lucky as any of us to interact with the real stars. But now, big tech is well on its way to taking over Hollywood. To get anything made these days, it feels like you have to convince some tech guy to fund it and distribute it.

Martin Scorcese and Richard Linklater are among the many directors who have complained about the growing influence of tech companies in the movie-making business. In a longer essay about Federico Fellini for Harper’s in 2021, Scorcese described how the word “content,” now used ubiquitously throughout multiple creative sectors, has come to describe almost everything online:

As recently as fifteen years ago, the term ‘content’ was heard only when people were discussing the cinema on a serious level, and it was contrasted with and measured against ‘form.’ Then, gradually, it was used more and more by the people who took over media companies, most of whom knew nothing about the history of the art form, or even cared enough to think that they should. ‘Content’ became a business term for all moving images: a David Lean movie, a cat video, a Super Bowl commercial, a superhero sequel, a series episode. It was linked, of course, not to the theatrical experience but to home viewing, on the streaming platforms that have come to overtake the moviegoing experience, just as Amazon overtook physical stores.

Indeed, even Johnson’s Knives Out series is beholden to tech company Netflix. Johnson and Netflix head Reed Hastings have regularly feuded on how long the series’ movies get to run in actual theaters before being snatched and stashed away on the streaming platform. And Hastings has been very open in his wish to eventually replace movie theaters with streaming services. While Netflix has always been at the pivot point between tech and entertainment, its streaming service helped launch us into the streaming age.

Today, tech giants like Apple and Amazon have full-blown entertainment divisions and are making their own productions.

Birdie Jay was right: Today, Hollywood has to beg for the attention—and more importantly, the dollars—of the tech sector. And celebrity news frequently includes the exploits of the Bezos, Zuckerbergs, and Musks of the world. Microsoft’s Bill Gates’ divorce from his wife Melinda French Gates even briefly became fodder for celebrity gossip rags a few months ago.

Bron, it turns out, didn’t make anything of his own. He’s the perfect metaphor for what AI wants to do to society.

It’s an interesting aside, but if Glass Onion were that simple, it would only be good, not great. Without spoiling too much, eventually Blanc reveals to the cast that Bron is not only not a genius, but rather an absolutely clueless “idiot.” To prove his point, Blanc refers to Bron using made-up or incorrect words throughout the getaway weekend; stealing a throwaway line from Blanc as inspiration for attempted murder; mixing up the Ionian Sea with the Adriatic; and installing a “piece of shit” dock that can’t accommodate the island’s tides. The eccentric puzzle box that opened the movie, we find out later, was designed by not by Bron, but by his “puzzle guy.” The murder mystery Bron had planned for his friends was written by author Gillian Flynn, and even the “hourly dong” sound that resounded across his little island was composed by someone else.

Bron, it turns out, didn’t make anything of his own. He’s the perfect metaphor for what AI wants to do to society.

Looking around at the modern tech industry, it’s hard not to see that it’s being run by a bunch of suspiciously similar figures. They’re all pushing every flavor of AI into every piece of tech we use every day, no matter how useless AI is. And it is useless. Google murdered the greatest knowledge-seeking service the world has ever known in favor of sponsored search results and, more recently, its useless “AI” that tells you it’s a good idea to put glue on pizza or smoke while pregnant. Musk is using his AI service “Grok” to let the chuds who use his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) to have their own anime girlfriends (who look suspiciously like Musk’s ex Grimes).

But perhaps the worst of the bunch is OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

Altman, as far as I can tell from casual observation (such as watching a few of his product announcement videos and reading a sampling of his blogs) has no real talent other than spinning stories that tech journalists can get excited about. For the last five years, Altman has repeatedly claimed that his company is just a few years away from fully cognitive AI, called artificial general intelligence (AGI), which would be a genuinely remarkable technological breakthrough … if it were true. And Altman’s schtick isn’t even new; Some people in the development sector have claimed to be just a few years away from AGI for three decades now.

Altman is a snake oil salesman. And his product is dangerous but not because it’s going to become intelligent and dominate humans.

OpenAI has already been at least partially responsible for several alleged deaths because of its chatbots. The company has been accused of encouraging troubled folks into committing suicide. One particularly difficult-to-read story popped up a few weeks ago in Reuters about an older man with dementia being convinced by an OpenAI chatbot to come for a physical visit in New York City, during which the man tripped and fell and eventually died. Records of the man’s conversation with the chatbot reveal that he was clearly deluded over whether the woman the chatbot was roleplaying as was real.

I have no doubt that there will eventually be genuine uses for AI, but it’s clear even now that it hardly works the way its pushers in the media claim it does. AI searches and analysis are frequently filled with wrong or just plain made-up data. According to a Columbia Journalism Review study released in March, AI search engines cited incorrect news reports about 60% of the time. Real artists and writers are being hired to fix errors made by AI for companies who thought they were getting a cheap replacement for previously expensive processes.

Nonetheless, the U.S. economy today is being propped up by investment money flowing into AI projects. According to a FactSet report from June, 210 out of the 500 companies in the S&P 500 cited AI in their most recent earnings calls with investors. Also, the top 10 most highly valued companies in the S&P 500, all driven by AI-related investment, make up 40% of the index’s total valuation.

It’s a bubble that’s ready to pop.

I emptied out my own small investment account from a relative’s inheritance when I saw a report several weeks ago that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, was freezing hiring in its AI division. (Note: I am not a financial advisor nor am I licensed to give financial advice.)

AI’s harms are well documented, its uses few, and nothing it actually can do justifies such outsized investments—other than the fact that a lot of people are willing to really believe in the genius of AI’s superbackers. But what if these tech bros aren’t geniuses? What if they’re all just Miles Brons?

Glass Onion eventually reveals that actually all of Miles’ friends initially disliked him, but that his money set each up for success. Claire won her seat with Bron’s money. Duke landed on YouTube with Bron’s help after he was banned on Twitch. Lionel secured a job in research and development at Bron’s company, and Bron was an angel investor in Birdie Jay’s viral sweatpants company. In return, each of the characters do favors for Bron, such as lying in court on his behalf.

Helen’s story shows that it really is we the people who have the wherewithal and ability to disrupt the status quo all on our own.

It’s not until Andi Brand’s twin sister, Helen, a teacher (perhaps even a union member) who had been impersonating Andi (who is revealed to have been murdered before the gathering), destroys Bron’s sitting room that we learn the truth. Bron’s guests initially watch, shocked, and then join in before Helen essentially explodes the house with Bron’s cool new “invention,” solid hydrogen burned for energy. It’s a literally, and scientifically dangerous idea, and it turns out this substance was at the root of that argument in the first scene.

“This rich people shit is weird,” Helen tells Blanc partway through the film. But despite only impersonating her wealthy sister amongst a group of so-called disruptors, it’s Helen who is the only one capable of changing the dynamic. It’s her ability to investigate her sister’s murder, playing it cool in a life-threatening—and rather absurd—situation that wins her the day.

In the climatic scene, when Helen starts smashing Bron’s glass statues, the others join in, enjoying the thrill of rebelling against Bron’s authority and control over their lives. Even Bron himself smashes his own wine glass, thinking that the destruction wouldn’t affect him personally. The destruction continues, with Helen smashing a glass piano (as Birdie Jay hesitates, noting that she thought it was Liberace’s). But all this isn’t enough for Helen, who launches a piece of Bron’s solid hydrogen fuel into a fire and makes a beeline for a switch that will open the fireproof case housing the actual Mona Lisa, causing it to be consumed in the conflagration.

Here is Helen, disrupting Bron’s world in a way that will damage high society at large, and we see everyone try—unsuccessfully—to stop her. These efforts serve as an apt metaphor for liberals who constantly preach that protest must always remain nonviolent, even as police constantly escalate violence against demonstrators, peaceful or otherwise.

But Helen’s story shows that it really is we the people who have the wherewithal and ability to disrupt the status quo all on our own.

When it comes to dealing with our own versions of Miles Bron, their tyranny and control over our institutions won’t end until us regular folk, the workers, the rent payers, band together and threaten them in ways that they fear. I don’t mean violence necessarily—threats to their reputation, money, or social standing are among many options. But whatever we do, we should remember that we have real power over these tech broligarchs, so long as we exercise it collectively. If we fail to do that, the idiocracy will win. But that’s a movie for another day.

This piece was edited by Andrea Grimes and copyedited by Chrissy Stroop.

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