Look into the Glass Onion and Spot the…

And you’ll notice that the most relatable thing in Rian Johnson’s new movie is Benoit Blanc’s frustration with how STUPID Miles Bron is.

If you haven’t seen the great Daniel Craig in the Glass Onion, here’s the plot: he’s put in the middle murder mystery among the privileged and most connected friends of a tech leader — Miles Bron, and the only real connection they have? Well, of course, it’s Miles Bron! (Yes, I will be taking direct quotes and instances from the new Knives Out movie, so spoiler alert)

It seems that this movie’s central theme is not just a who dunnit, but also serves as a commentary on the society of “disruptors”.

During the obvious climax of this movie, Benoit Blanc starts to go off about what he really thinks of Miles. I mean the guy could have his own true-crime podcast. It was fuelled with frustration and annoyance and this is the moment in the movie I truly started to relate to Benoit Blanc (oh other than when he sucked at Among Us).

Courtesy of his rant, I’m going to take you through how Rian Johnson really got this social commentary right in the world of….I want to say the new generation of geniuses but I also want to call them fraudsters.

“Like everyone in the world, I assumed that Miles Bron was a complicated genius. But why? Look into the clear center of this glass onion: Miles Bron is an idiot!”

This statement sounds so familiar. Is it an entrepreneur that thought a product would work but didn’t? Or one that thinks they are the smartest person on earth but are just really great with their image? Or is it someone who’s in just simple terms, stealing from all the investors to show the growth of a company?

Funnily enough, in the past 4 years — we’ve seen them all.

In the movie, there’s an interaction between Benoit and Kate Hudson’s Birdie, a character so aptly named because she could definitely represent a vast majority of Twitter users, when Benoit uncovers the truth about Miles:

Benoit: “My god! It’s so DUMB!”
Birdie: “So dumb it’s brilliant.”
Benoit: “No! It’s just DUMB!”

This could very well be a Reddit forum or a Twitter thread detailing out a fraud carried out by someone considered the next Warren Buffet. Yes, I do mean the crypto wunderkid — Sam Bankman-Fried. Some of you may know that SBF: he founded FTX, one of the biggest crypto exchanges, was worth $16 billion, and had crafted the most perfect image of the boy genius, till November, when the smokescreen blew up.

To quickly summarise, in the most basic manner, what was the crux of the fraud: it was reported that SBF “borrowed” about $10 billion in FTX customers’ funds for his trading firm, Alameda Research, and put it into his trading firm, Alameda Research.

SBF had a very calculated image: a geek, not a buttoned-up entrepreneur; he played computer games during pitch meetings, and just like other “disruptors”, these out-of-the-box characteristics are what built the impression of a generational genius in this ever-changing fintech world. His scam, unfortunately, did not last long as the company filed for bankruptcy, and reports of $1 billion dollars missing came out.

It’s not just my humble opinion that this was not a smart scam. And this is detailed in the congressional hearing with Mr. Ray, the lawyer handling the bankruptcy for FTX. Mr Ray is the lawyer who handled the Enron bankruptcy and fraud too, which as we all know was a sophisticated piece of work. He believes FTX collapsed because a “very small group of grossly inexperienced and unsophisticated individuals” running the company and says it’s “just old school embezzlement” — I mean come on SBF, your contemporary fraudsters have been much better with their sophisticated scams.

“Oh, you brainless jackass! Your one murder with any panache at all and you stole the whole idea from me!”
- The great Benoit Blanc once he realizes even the murder Miles Bron planned wasn’t smart

I mean, one thing that Mr. Ray does call “complex” is just the ability to find information. SBF was someone who constantly communicated with employees through disappearing messages and told the employees to do the same. They used the software “Quickbooks” to do their accounts. Now, I had no clue what Quickbooks is and why Mr. Ray was so flabbergasted by this, and I did a quick google search:

Small business. SMALL. I think we’re all aware small does NOT mean multi-billion dollars. Also, the company had no independent board. It was literally just SBF. This man is running around in the Bahamas completely unchecked because he always had the persona of harmlessness. The funniest thing is that his parents are compliance lawyers from Stanford (that’s one of the reasons Shark Tank’s Kevin O’ Learly invested!) And he basically said “Oh you know I wasn’t that focused on this side of work, so I didn’t look into things, and I didn’t know things were so bad, plus it was a bad judgment call to take $10 billion dollars of investors from FTX and put into Alameda Research” No? It was…THEFT? LOOK INTO THE GLASS ONION AND YOU’LL SEE HE’S A MORON!?

“His dock doesn’t float, his wonder fuel is a disaster, his grasp of disruption theory is remedial at best, he didn’t design the puzzle boxes, he didn’t write the mystery and voila, it all adds up”
- Benoit Blanc

Now while SBF does emulate many of Miles Bron’s characteristics, he isn’t the best comparison. The most suited for this, especially the above-mentioned quote by Benoit Blanc, is Elizabeth Holmes. Definitely one of the biggest “fall from grace” stories and yes, she was definitely considered a disruptor. A quick recap on her glorious scam: Holmes wanted to do various blood tests through just a few drops of blood. Sounds impossible right? Yeah, yeah it was. And very early on in the journey of her company “Theranos” she was told the same by absolute experts at Stanford. But you know, she was a disruptor! So she dropped out, created the company, and worked very very hard for a couple of years to just realize what the experts told her earlier, was right: this product will never work. But Elizabeth Holmes was not on track to be the “Steve Jobs of the medical world” so why not con investors into thinking it does work? Why not con the whole world into thinking she is a “disruptor”? Oh and also why not put the lives of various consumers in danger?

Holmes was in the business of medicine, without having any prior knowledge of medicine, would put her name on patents she did not write, and worst of all, constantly duped the world of investors into thinking she is changing the facing of medicine work while she became worth billions of dollars. Like Benoit said — “It all adds up”, doesn’t it?

You can also bring up the case of eccentric Adam Neumann, founder of WeWork, another mighty disruptor who was simply an idiot and seemed to know nothing about expenses in a company and would have been just good as a cult leader (I mean, technically he was)

Seeing these examples (and other major fraudsters like Bernie Madoff), you see this common thread - they were able to make their images as out-of-the-box geniuses last very long. They were experts at impression management.

Impression Management as suggested by Erving Goffman, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, (1959) explores ways in which people present an image of how they think their audience wishes to see them in face-to-face interaction; In his writings, “… persons are seen as actors playing parts, giving more or less convincing role performances, colluding with their fellow actors or acting on their own, using the available social scenery to their expressive advantage, presenting characters or social selves, and controlling their role performances in such a way that the image they want to project and to be known by is crystallized in the minds of those in their audience”

Going one step further, you may also notice that all these disruptors would definitely score highly as Machiavellian.

People who are manipulative and willing to fabricate impressions of themselves are known as Machiavellian, or “high Mach” (Christie & Geis, 1970; Leary, 1996). Individuals scoring high in Machiavellianism have a tendency to be calculated and strategic in their actions and are therefore more likely to cheat or lie to attain their goals. Further, Machiavellians may employ skillful strategies to exploit situations and people for their personal benefit (Grams & Rogers, 1990), as they tend to share the belief that there are no moral values that apply to all situations (Leary, Knight, & Barnes, 1986).

Sound familiar?

In various research papers regarding Impression Management, including my college dissertation that surveyed 166 people across different age groups, genders, and personalities (yeah finally putting my college education to some use), there’s a direct correlation between the Impression Management Scale and Machiavellianism.

SBF, Holmes, Neumann, and many more form the image of Miles Bron. A person perceived as a genius who goes out of his way to ensure nothing gets in the way of his image, his goals as a billionaire and a leader, and his theory of “disruptiveness”

“Nobody tried to kill you, you vainglorious buffoon.”

In an interview with The Atlantic, Rian Johnson speaks out about how this movie is “angrier” than the first installment. “The whole movie, for me, is a bit of a primal scream against the carnival-like idiocy of the past six years.” “I hope the experience of watching it doesn’t feel like an angry, hateful thing. But it’s definitely coming from a place of just wanting to scream about a lot of things”

I get where he’s coming from. Many people get where he’s coming from. You constantly see such manipulative, and dare I say, psychopathic people, continue on with their scams, whether the scams are their images or their companies, just to cost billions of dollars to the economies and the consumers, and you know what? After a point, you just want to scream but can’t. Well, at least Rian Johnson and Benoit Blanc could scream for all of us at the end of 2022.