Looking through a Glass Onion : Transparency and Digital Media in the COVID Era

Abstract: This essay examines Rian Johnson's satirical film Glass Onion (2022) to elucidate the breakdown of social solidarity in the COVID era. The film is a classic house mystery set on a private island estate crowned by a glass onion dome. It follows a group of friends assembled by a tech billionaire to play a murder mystery game that goes tragically awry. The film critiques the self-serving ideologies of the digital media industry, which elide liberal-democratic conceptions of transparency with disintermediation. Its setting on a literal island during the pandemic further reveals its aim to show how this authoritarian ideology of transparency contributed to the social division and proliferation of misinformation in the COVID "infodemic."