The Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery - Emotional Intelligence and Manipulation

What binds people together in friendship?  Is it common interests, education, or shared love of local sport teams?  Is it simple proximity to one another in a neighborhood or shared experiences in school?  I really want you to think long and hard about that question.  Is the friendship a consequence of mutual goals working together to achieve those goals?  I am sure that if you looked across the spectrum of your life you would discover people you considered “friends” that drifted in - and out - of your life.  There are some that have been there through thick and thin while others drifted away - so much so that one day you realized…they are gone.  

So what happens when a movie challenges the notion of why you call somebody “friend” - you end up with a murder mystery called The Glass Onion:  A Knives Out Mystery.  A group of friends are summoned by a clue box to attend a murder mystery dinner on a private island owned by - you guessed it - the wealthiest friend in the group.  But this is all a set up of sorts - one friend is dead but mysteriously shows up to the gathering…along with Benoit Blanc (played by Daniel Craig), the greatest detective known.  And what we discover as the each character is introduced and their back story told, what binds these people together as “friends” is anything but friendship.  There is power, control, and a very healthy dose of money flowing from the owner of the island, Miles Bron (played by Edward Norton).

However, what you don’t expect, but find out very quickly is that Miles Bron is not smart…let me state that another way:  He lacks intellectual capacity.  The reason I say this is because Miles Bron is smart but in a very different way - he possesses emotional intelligence…He manipulates relationships, says what people want to hear, knows the buttons to push to get people to do what he wants all while being, well, a little dull.  The sad thing about this movie is that his friends actually know this about him.  Yet, they are all caught in his web because they need something from him - money for a political campaign, support on social media, smoothing out public relations for a fashionista, and so on.  He works his friends - if you want to call them that - for his benefit and gain.

It’s really not all that different than Lot in the book of Genesis.  Go and read Genesis 13-19.  It’s really not that many chapters.  Take a look.  Lot finagles land out of Abram (only later to be rescued from the angry former tenants); he’s rescued by God when hellfire rains down on Sodom and Gomorrah (only to have his wife turned into salt); and let’s not even begin to talk about the bizarre relationship with his daughters.  But as you read through those chapters consider for one moment:  Lot possesses emotional intelligence and uses it to manipulate the situations he finds himself in - not unlike Miles Bron.

So I return to the question I initially asked:  What binds people together?  What defines your friendships and why have they lasted?  Maybe this is a gentle nudge or a warning - love your friends and treat them as you would want to be treated; in fact, treat them better than you expect to be treated.  In so doing you will demonstrate humility and the best kind of emotional intelligence of all.