I saw this movie over the holidays with my family and we all loved it. With so many people running around though I missed a few things in my first viewing. I watched again last night and was really amused at how Miles treated Peg. She was just “the help” to him. When she begged him not to make her boss take the fall for using sweatshops (I laughed!) and he didn’t even know her name (or at least acted like he didn’t know her name)… Later, when he’s handing out drinks to everybody in their own stylized glasses he hand Peg her drink in a red solo cup. Miles doesn’t seem to be the kind of man to keep solo cups around so that was an intentional insult on his part. Makes me wonder if he’d tried some moves on her in the past and she rejected him. Or maybe he just realized that she wasn’t fooled by his false charm.
I noticed that as well and laughed out loud. I don’t think it was an insult. It was just that her legitimate favorite drink was beer from a keg or whatever.
I’m kind of blown away by the number of people in this thread who see two men living together in a clearly domestic situation, and think, “Probably his butler!”
Because having butlers is totally a normal thing in 2022, particularly as compared to something so rare and unusual as “being gay.”
Anyway, I got some surprising news about Liberace for y’all.
You’re not wrong obviously. If it was a movie with normal people and not a bunch of weirdos I probably would have assumed differently.
A character having live-in help in this movie really wouldn’t seem weird at all. I really didn’t think anything about it at all, I just laughed at the cameo and then it was the next scene.
I had exactly the same reaction, more “oh it’s Hugh Grant”, than “oh he’s gay”. I mean, who cares?!
Also, it’s basically an updated-for-modern-times version of a 1930s British country-house mystery, a genre in which it is totally normal for people to have butlers. (I think even Miss Marple had a live-in maid, and she was an elderly middle-class lady on a fixed income.)
All the people desperately trying to find a justification for two men living together that’s not, “They’re very obviously and unambiguously a gay couple,” apparently.
On another site I frequent there’s a discussion about whether we need to know more about Benoit Blanc and if we’re owed more about his life outside the mysteries. Not that we shouldn’t, more that his background isn’t the focus of the movie. The draw is him solving the mystery. He’s gay and living with Hugh Grant? Great, but we don’t need to know his whole life story to enjoy the movies.
I haven’t seen anyone doing that in this thread. “I didn’t notice that/That didn’t occur to me/I thought it was something else” does not equal “desperately trying to find a justification”. I see that Rian Johnson says they were a couple so OK, that’s what it was.
That was pretty much exactly how her character was set up. She was kind of a punching bag and you could often catch her in the background sort of in her own world.
You can start at 4:50 when Birdie Jay and Peg arrive. Our first impression of them is Birdie walking towards the rest of the group while Peg is trying to carry all their luggage. And then a bit later on when the group is talking to each other, she’s in the background doing lunges (and Katherine Hahn is right up in front of the camera smelling her armpits).
I do wish she’d been given more of a spotlight, but with such a big cast I know that’s not always going to happen.
Hard disagree, unless the only way to make a queer relationship unambiguous is to have them say something like, “THANK YOU, PHILLIP, MY GAY BOYFRIEND.”
Which, to be fair, is more or less how it was for a long time. Either with campy stereotyping or on-screen signaling. We’re thankfully past that, and can assume that the frazzled man complaining that Blanc has been in the bath for a week is a concerned lover and not an oddly familiar butler.
I agree, she’d make a good sidekick for a main character, but as it stands, I think she’d quickly become a distraction unless she had a more important role to justify the additional screen time or there was at least one less person involved.
Whiskey probably could have been in the background as well, but her role had some relevance to the plot.
Same here. Too short a scene to tack on any meaning about room mates or lovers. If the question was if Benoit was gay or not, I found it was obvious early on, look at his fabulous wardrobe and flamboyant style.
Two men who live together does not automatically engage my gaydar. Should it?
Did you catch the bit later, when we see her writing her name on the cup?
I agree that in a normal show depicting our normal 2022 reality, if we see two men who live together and refer to each other by their first names, the default assumption is that they are a gay couple. It’s certainly not unambiguous… they could be brothers, or just friends or roommates.
That said, Glass Onion takes place in a slightly warped version of reality in which world famous detectives exist, and in which a puzzle box as intricate as the ones we saw could exist. And it also exists, unavoidably, in the shadow of Sherlock Holmes, so we are conditioned to think of genius-level world class detectives living in close-but-not-canonically-sexual relationships with other men.
I mean, yes, I definitely think that Benoit Blanc is gay, both as the most likely explanation for what we saw on screen, and also, now, confirmed by the author. But I don’t think that was so explicit from what we saw on screen that anyone who didn’t immediately so assume was, at some level, stubborn, blind or bigoted.
Yeah, now that you point it out, it’s obvious. I’m embarrassed to admit that i didn’t really think about it, either. I was thinking “the help”, but he’s obviously the roommate who has been doing pandemic baking, and a pair of adults living together are typically partners.
What’s worse, i knew Benoit was coded as gay, because he acts like a gay man throughout the show.
The exception would be if they are college aged, or near college aged. In that case, the default would be roommates for financial reasons. Obviously financially secure adult men sharing an apartment codes to a romantic relationship.
FWIW, Rian Johnson has felt the need to publicly state that the Miles Bron character was not intended as a parody of Elon Musk, but more a parody of a sort of composite of tech moguls. Though it’s certainly unsurprising that it’s been interpreted that way.
As this was indeed filmed before the Musk takeover of Twitter and subsequent fiasco, I found the line from the movie (sorry, just a very rough paraphrase from memory) said by Benoit Blanc to Miles Bron (the billionaire tech tycoon who seems similar to Musk): “I used to think you were a complicated genius. Turns out, you’re just an idiot!”. Perfectly describes the post-Twitter revelations about Musk (or, as he is now (not) affectionately known, “Elmo”!).