For the last decade, one bad guy has been dominating film: the tech bro. Since Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, you’ll have noticed him everywhere.
There's Samuel L. Jackson in Kingsman: The Secret Service, Taika Waititi in Free Guy, Oscar Isaac in Ex Machina, Mark Rylance in Don’t Look Up, and loads more besides. They’re not new. Athleisure wardrobe, God complex, heart of a bastard. Instinctively, we hate these guys.
Glass Onion’s Miles Bron is another. Edward Norton plays the Alpha Industries co-founder with a mixture of quasi-spiritual solemnity, a particularly fragile kind of self-belief and sick-making smugness that feels very familiar. But Rian Johnson’s film says something different with its own tech bro bad guy.
Firstly: Miles definitely smells like Elon Musk. He’s got the Musk musk. I know we’ve all spent far more time than we’d have liked to in Musk’s orbit lately, but it doesn’t feel like an accident of timing; most pointedly, Miles’ Alpha Industries has a space exploration wing. Being so specific is unusual, and Johnson found writing around it quite hard.
"The fact that Bron’s a tech billionaire – which made a lot of sense for the story – became an obstacle in the writing,” Johnson told Deadline. “Because, I don't think I even have to say the names, there are some obvious, real-world analogues. And the instant I started thinking about any of them too specifically, it got so boring so quickly. And so, disconnecting him from that, and trying to build him as his own kind of clownish character, became a challenge."
"My take on this was really to know that Miles is a character cut from a very specific species," Edward Norton added. "They’re all around us these days, and they’re really getting lionised. So, for me, the job was with Rian to pick and choose the perfect characteristics to send up a particular type of person."
For “a particular type of person”, read “a particular person”. It’s slightly disconcerting that Glass Onion was written quite a long time before Musk bought Twitter, called for the prosecution of Anthony Fauci, oversaw a flood of previously (and rightly) banned cranks and charlatans returning to the platform, flirted with conspiracy theories and started banning accounts that tracked his private jet. But it really was.
It was Facebook/Meta/creeping irrelevance’s Zuckerberg who talked about moving fast and breaking things, but that spirit of recklessness in the name of some higher calling feels like it’s become owned by Musk in the last six months or so.
That’s the bit of him that’s captured most clearly in Miles. He’s so hopped up on his own genius and hung up on his legacy he’s willing to the entire world into a bomb with his magic but nowhere near safe fuel, Klear. Fire up the Hindenburg. Let the cranks back on Twitter. Safety is for nerds.
Like I say, there have been a lot of tech bro bad guys in the last 10 years, and most of them have an Icarus-style fable comeuppance. Riz Ahmed did a specifically Muskish turn in Venom as Carlton Drake, a man obsessed with jumping ship from this ailing world and colonising the stars. He got hoist by his own rocket-petard in the end.
But Glass Onion goes somewhere a little different. Yes, Klear destroys him and the Disruptors. On top of that, though, there’s subtler Musk mockery and satire here, and it’s built into the finale through the people who cling to him.
There’s would-be senator Claire, men’s rights grifter and Twitch streamer Duke, vapid influencer Birdie and beaten-down scientist Lionel. All of them rely on his patronage to nudge their own careers along, driven more by fear of being left behind than a sincere commitment to Miles’ increasingly incoherent worldview.
More than that, they nod at the different groups which tend to make up the power base of the bro-stocracy. There are always idealists who want to believe that this boy wonder is going to be the one to really change the world. There are always politicians glad to piggyback on utopian visions while overlooking eye-popping tax arrangements or sketchy business practices. There are always credulous and/or cynical talking heads keen to get caught in someone else’s updraft as long as it helps them shift their own tat.
And, quelle surprise, it turns out that this group of old friends all have their hands on each other’s throats the whole time. That’s where the cautionary tech bro tale takes a turn. Usually, they get a straightforward whoops-a-daisy-my-invention-has-killed-me kind of comeuppance.
But it’s not Miles’ ego alone which destroys him. It’s the realisation among his enablers that propping him up just isn’t worth their while anymore. They look from one to another, and realise that despite his promises of a future built on Klear, they had the power all along.
Quite how much power any of us have over technocrats who operate like pan-global city-states is a moot point. But Glass Onion is a reminder that they need our credulousness to get to the top.
