Anatomy of a Scene: Helen decides when she’s done in the ‘Glass Onion’ finale
It’s fairly easy to deduce who will be the victim/killer in each Knives Out instalment based on the billing, but the series still does an excellent job of spinning you around enough times that each whodunnit scenario is still entertaining.
Predictability often means that there is one best way for the story to end, and Knives Out and Glass Onion don’t bungle their attempts to avoid this.
The second outing uses the fallacy of ‘the stupidly obvious answer was the answer’, after cycling through suspects for most of the runtime, but Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blance and Janelle Monáe’s Helen Brand are faced with the reality that they cannot prove that Miles Bron murdered Helen’s sister, once he destroys the last piece of evidence.
So, left with nothing else, Helen decides to show them all what real disruption looks like.
First, Helen downs a drink and dramatically drops the glass, which is personalised for her dead sister and Miles’s former friend Andi, allowing it to shatter, after which she proceeds to break Miles’s glass sculptures one by one, being very showy about it. Helen, who told Blanc that she doesn’t drink, has been somewhat accidentally dabbling in it the whole film, a pointed detail that has always eluded me, but in this scene, it is the harbinger, where she truly says, ‘Fuck it’, and is about to wreak havoc.
I also have my doubts that Miles’s glasswork collection is of any real artistic value. It’s all a part of his facade, which Helen starts dismantling, one piece at a time. Meanwhile, his circle of ‘friends’ who have all backed his lies in exchange for financial support of their own careers are shocked at Helen’s change in tactics, but then they start also breaking things, venting some of their own anger. It’s a cathartic moment, with the sinister orchestral score growing more chaotic, with some of these people even deserving of the outlet, such as Whiskey and Peg.
However, once everyone else has let off some steam and is laughing in relief, Helen still keeps going. Her physicality as she destroys Miles’ possessions turns from less primly theatrical and more feral, as she smashes a piano and the bar and lights it all on fire, ripping off her blazer to add kindling.
At this point, Miles tries to rein her in, asking if she has had enough, and of course, she has not. Good for everyone else for giving the finger to Miles, but Helen isn’t mad about petty corporate deals: the guy killed her sister, so it’s over when she says it’s over.
This fuels how she goes on to cause an explosion in the building and destroy the real Mona Lisa, another key piece of symbolism in the film. Amid all of Miles’ meaningless luxury, the Mona Lisa is a true oeuvre carrying artistic and historical significance, regarding which even she, earlier in the movie, says, “It really is something”. She still decimates it to prove her point, and because its destruction due to Miles violating the insurance company’s terms will cause his downfall.
The billionaire’s group of corrupt public figures called themselves ‘disrupters’, thinking they were breaking boundaries, when they were mostly laying waste to the world for personal profit, while Helen, on the other hand, truly unleashes herself to disrupt the whole system, showing what the word actually means. Additionally, the final shot of her in the movie is clearly meant to invoke the Mona Lisa, cementing her as both the fire that will burn down an old world and the image of true elegance and intelligence gleaming amongst the ashes.
