ARTS & CULTURE On Strange Titles: Peeling Open Glass Onion

Bret van den Brink

main stages. In the first revelation, the glass onion is physically represented in the film as the glass dome on Miles’ Greek villa, wherein his office is located. At this point, the glass onion serves to illustrate the vapid gaudiness of the tech billionaire. The second—and most important—revelation, in the dénouement of the film, discloses the symbolic meaning of the glass onion. Being masterminded by the idiotic Miles, the film’s mystery is no mystery at all; the crucial piece of evidence, Andi’s napkin, is located in Mile’s office, the flamboyant centre of the villa, precisely where one should immediately suspect it to be. A glass onion, thus, is a symbol of something in which people seek complexity (in the layers of the onion) where none exists (because the layers are all transparent).

Editor’s note: The following article contains spoilers for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery to immediately understand something strange, and so at the stage of expectation, strangeness “arouses wonder” but at the stage of retrospection, when one begins to understand the meaning of the strangeness, strangeness arouses “aesthetic imagination.”

Ilove a strange title. Titles are rather important, as they are often the first bit of an artist’s work conveyed to the audience. A title forms one’s expectations in approaching a work of art, and in retrospect, one will use the title every time one refers to it. When considering a work of art, the title thus plays a crucial role in the interpretative dialectic between expectation and retrospection.

With these brief prolegomena, I may now approach my given topic: the 2022 film Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, written and directed by Rian Johnson. This Agatha Christie-esque mystery, set during the COVID-19 pandemic, centres on detective Benoit Blanc’s undercover investigation of the doings of tech billionaire Miles Bron. The acting, setting, and music are all quite good—I was thoroughly entertained throughout—and at the end, I was near to tearing my hair out whilst my inner aesthete shrieked banshee-like as the Mona Lisa went up in smoke. My main concern here, however, is the film’s ever-so-strange title.

The quality of strangeness, meanwhile, can be quite impactful in a title: a strange title evokes curiosity and lingers in the memory. More radically than these virtues, strangeness is an aesthetic quality in and of itself. According to Owen Barfield in Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, “The element of strangeness in beauty . . . arises from contact with a different kind of consciousness from our own, different, yet not so remote that we cannot partly share it, as indeed, in such a connection, the mere word ‘contact’ implies.” Strangeness is a gift imparted from the meeting of two minds, where their differences create something utterly unexpected and peculiarly wonderful. We are unlikely

Before one understands it, the strange title, Glass Onion, surely “arouses wonder,” as Barfield would have it. Wonder awhile—picture, if you will, in your mind’s eye, an onion wrought of glass. It is lovely, is it not? It is delicate, fragile, and intricate. It is fashioned layer upon layer in so mysterious a manner as to nearly defy explanation. Yet, as all the layers from its outermost skin are visible, with light dancing a stately sarabande between them, so too is the centre visible. Perhaps it is a microcosm of the Ptolemaic cosmos, with its concentric spheres of crystal, whose gyrations produce the musica universalis. Perhaps I read too much Renaissance poetry.

Through gradual revelations in the film, understanding transmutes wonder into aesthetic imagination. The revelations occur in three

I would not consider it extravagant to describe Johnson’s conceit of the glass onion as inspired, were he to have invented it. He, however, did not. Rather—and this is the third revelation— the conceit was invented by the Beatles, whose song “Glass Onion” played over the film’s end credits. Johnson’s use of the conceit in his mystery is nonetheless ingenious. The Beatles’ song is cheekily about people who over-analyze the band’s lyrics, particularly in the manner of a conspiracy theorist. Hence, the song (and, by extension, the film) raises the thorny issue of how an audience ought to respond to a work of art, and it suggests that sometimes one should take a work of art for what it appears to be, rather than seeking out hidden meanings where none exist.

Or, perhaps, the symbol of the glass onion suggests that the troublesome murders and the injustices that spur them could all have been avoided if only the characters attuned the music of their souls to the music of the spheres.