The following contains spoilers for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, now streaming on Netflix.
In the wake of a global plague, a band of weary travelers comes together from diverse and notable walks of life. Although they're converging toward a common destination, whatever prize they're promised matters less to their shared narrative than what each of them reveals, about both the broader society they inhabit and their respective roles within it, along the way. This is the plot of writer-director Rian Johnson's 2022 film, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. It centers on a circle of celebrity acquaintances of a technological billionaire who accept his invitations to flee from peak COVID, in May of 2020, to his private island retreat in Greece, where each one attempts to court his favor under the guise of solving a murder mystery that he's staged.
It also summarizes author Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, which he wrote from the late 1380s until his death in 1400. The Black Death spanned the late 1340s through the early 1350s, and its effects were still being felt in England when Chaucer began writing about a group of London pilgrims engaging in a storytelling contest en route to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral, with the winner due to receive a free meal at the Tabard Inn at Southwark upon their return. Through their characters and the tales told by those characters, Johnson and Chaucer sought to dissect their societies via scathing satire.
Glass Onion Subs Tech Bros and Social Media for Feudal Lords and the Church
Glass Onion and The Canterbury Tales are acutely class-conscious, as their casts illustrate the inequities of social stratification, with working-class professional servers tending to the needs and whims of their more privileged patrons. But their respective societies distinguish themselves by the ecosystems within which those social classes operate. Chaucer populates his tales with several tradesmen whose commerce depends upon the favor of feudal estates, as well as a host of clerical figures whose influence draws from the cultural dominance of the church.
Fast-forward several centuries, and Johnson depicts buzzword-spouting tech sector "founders" like Miles Bron wielding the same virtually unchecked power as the feudal lords of old. Likewise, the thoughtless Tweet storms of hedonistic fashionista Birdie Jay, as well as the promotion of misogynistic hate speech and snake oil pharmacology by streamer and influencer Duke Cody, demonstrate how mobile devices have made social media the new shared cultural shrine.
Within those societies, Chaucer and Johnson call out the corrupt and hypocritical. Chaucer's Prioress, Madame Eglantine, strives to portray herself as benevolent in intent and refined in comportment, but she betrays herself as a snobbish yet ignorant social climber who indulges in secular luxuries. Johnson's Connecticut governor turned U.S. Senate candidate, Claire Debella, pays lip service to popular liberal politics such as clean energy, but she continues to support Miles' "Klear" even after its environmental and health hazards have been confirmed.
Whiskey and The Wife of Bath Offer Complicated Feminist Commentary
Whatever their societies' cultural differences, both Chaucer and Johnson also object to the timeless inequities of economics and gender. Countless academic debates have raged regarding the relative degrees to which Chaucer's Wife of Bath perpetuates the era's sexist tropes versus advancing a nascent medieval form of feminism. What's textually true either way is that the Wife of Bath is both explicit and unapologetic in espousing an ideology of "sexual economics," using marriage to sell her body in exchange for the titles and inheritances she gains via her husbands. Compare this to divisions within modern feminist discourse regarding sex workers and other women who have been described as selling their sexuality for fame and/or financial gain.
Johnson presumes his audiences' passing familiarity with this cultural context by introducing the character of Whiskey, Duke's girlfriend and streaming assistant. Like Birdie's long-suffering personal assistant, Peg, there's an economic dimension (and disparity) inherent in Duke and Whiskey's relationship. But like the Wife of Bath, whom Chaucer critiqued for what he typified as a commoner housewife's craving for extravagance, Whiskey is willing to commit the self-abasement of not only echoing Duke's "men's rights activist" agenda but also sleeping with Miles to buy Duke broader media exposure with her body. Still, just as it's hard not to read a certain amount of admiration into Chaucer's depiction of the Wife of Bath as intelligent, assertive and capable of attracting not only five eventual husbands but also a much younger man, so too does Johnson show Whiskey receiving two sympathetic pep-talks from Helen Brand, the schoolteacher twin sister of Alpha creator Andi Brand.
For all the vices evinced by the other characters in The Canterbury Tales and Glass Onion, Chaucer and Johnson contrast them against figures of virtue. Between the three of them, the smart, hard-working Brand sisters and master detective Benoit Blanc manage to fulfill the roles of The Canterbury Tales' Knight and narrator, the latter of whom most scholars believe is meant to be Geoffrey Chaucer himself. Since both The Canterbury Tales and Glass Onion employ so many Rashomon switchbacks between different characters' perspectives, they arguably share a narrative need for plot explainers who are effectively beyond reproach, as Benoit Blanc is held to be.
At the same time, while both Blanc and Chaucer's Knight are ostensibly portrayed as chivalrous gentlemen of honor and accomplishment in their fields of expertise, Daniel Craig has not been above exaggerating Blanc's accent and mannerisms to the proportions of caricature. Monty Python comedian and historian Terry Jones similarly suggested in his 1980 book, Chaucer's Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary, that Chaucer's contemporary readers would have recognized his account of the Knight as "a verray, parfit gentil knyght" to be an ironic description of the Knight as a mercenary. This balances both Johnson's and Chaucer's satires, showing that even the heroes are subject to critique.
To see how it echoes the themes of Canterbury Tales, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is now available to stream on Netflix.