Page 50 - Sharp Winter 2023

MAN WORTH LISTENING TO
HEART OF GLASS
GLASS ONION DIRECTOR RIAN JOHNSON ON HIS NEW SEQUEL TO HIT DETECTIVE FILM KNIVES OUT
By Justine Smith
T.S. ELIOT ONCE WROTE THAT EVERY GREAT DETECTIVE STORY relied on the idea of fair play. In theory, Eliot believed, an attentive reader should have a fair shot at guessing the culprit. He outlined a few rules to even the playing field: no occult phenomena, no disguises, and the motives of our
criminal must be “normal.” In era, however, do the rules still apply?
With 2019’s Knives Out, director Rian Johnson created his own iconic detective in Benoit Blanc, the charming but bumbling southern gentleman portrayed by Daniel Craig. Classic in style, but concerned with the questions and conditions of modern life, the film was a runaway success. Now Blanc is back to solve another mystery.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery opens amid the frenzy of the early pandemic. The all-star cast, including Kate Hudson, Dave Bautista, Janelle Monáe, Kathryn Hahn, and Leslie Odom Jr., is invited to a weekend on a Greek island to play an elaborate murder-mystery game. Their fortunes soon sour, however, as they find themselves trapped on an island with an actual murderer.
A playful filmmaker, Johnson flirts with expectations. He threatens to break
with tradition as he seeks to stump the audience. And, when it comes to the idea of fair play, it will be up to the audience to see if Johnson plays according to the rules of the murder-mystery genre with the latest Blanc adventure.
Rian Johnson sat down with SHARP to talk masculinity, language, and star power.
This film explores many different types of mas- culinity. Two central characters, Miles and Duke, explore different facets of what we might call “toxic masculinity,” whereas Benoit Blanc rep- resents a more positive interpretation. What does positive masculinity look like?
In this film, Blanc is maybe the only beacon of actual positive masculinity, where there’s strength and confidence but also a desire, first and foremost, to “do no harm.” There’s a willingness to listen. Blanc is a good listener, and that’s part of his job. Opposed to trying to project his own image, he’s hearing and seeing people in contrast to the other characters, especially Duke [Dave Bautista], who is maybe a caricature of toxic masculinity. Then, of course, there are layers to Duke that are revealed, and not necessarily good ones. There’s a reason that Blanc is the moral centre of the movie.
One of the things I love about the film is a kind of playfulness with language, with many made-up words inspired partly by internet-speak and the tech industry. How fun was it for you to play with language?
I’m fascinated by how people talk in real life. I think quote-unquote naturalistic dialogue is a thousand miles away from how people act. People talk in very weird ways, and the human brain is trained to hear fragments, idioms, and weird mixtures of things and interpret them. It’s also a tool to help define each character. The first movie I did was this detective movie, Brick. The entire thing was born out of my love for Dashiell Hammett’s language and weird Orange County surfer slang, melding those into bizarre idioms.
BTS STILL: JOHN WILSON/NETFLIX © 2022
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