Symbolic Glass House

What secrets lie beneath the layers of a Glass Onion?

People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Nevertheless, in fiction, living in glass houses is very popular, which makes the stone-throwing much sweeter.

Much like The Rich Have White Stuff (and often crossing over with it), it's common for the rich in television and film to have a Big Fancy House or a mid-century modern Cool House, with a lot of big windows and fitting into the style of Minimalism. Expect them to be frequently on the water or secluded. When you see one of these, it's a guarantee that the person inside has secrets and is unhappy and/or dangerous, and the house may be a form of Gilded Cage. Although technically the exact opposite of the Old, Dark House, the inferences are often the same; it's just a modern update with some irony thrown in.

What exactly this symbolizes is broad and the trope only requires it to fall under the designation of Hidden Depths. The inhabitant will almost always be a Stepford Smiler, but they could be anyone from a malevolent Control Freak to a violent predator to simply a sad and isolated figure. The irony of this is that while their house is both Simple, yet Opulent and frequently projects an aura of total transparency, there is more to these folks than meets the eye.

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Examples

Film — Live-Action

• In Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice Bruce lives in a lakeside mansion as opposed to Wayne Manor (which is generally depicted as his home), to convey his loneliness, isolation, and paranoia.
• Beau Is Afraid: Mona's house is a gigantic mansion with large glass panels on most of the walls. Befitting a woman who has suffocated Beau since he was a kid and continues to obsessively watch him including faking her own death so that she could continue to spy on him, and kept the penis monster that's apparently his father in the attic.
• The Beta Test: Laura and Raymond are shown to live in a glass house, from which she chases him and shoots him after finding out that he's been cheating on her.
• In Body Double, both the house Jake stays in and particularly that of his neighbor need to be large and open by design, as Jake becomes a voyeur who spies on his mysterious neighbor getting undressed all the time, but he also becomes ensnared in a mystery as a result.
• Candyman (2021): There are a lot of glass houses and significant glass rooms Played for Horror due to the significance of the mirror to Candyman's legacy, such as the art gallery where Candyman is first unleashed, and the art critic's apartment where Candyman kills her.
• Chloe: The couple live in an all-glazed house with a lot of glass, yet their marriage has gone so stale that Catherine hires an escort (Chloe) to spice up their sex life, only to find that Chloe becomes obsessed with them and their image of perfection.
• Ex Machina: Exaggerated. Nathan's very isolated mansion in the jungle has vast glass windows and huge expanses of glass, to show the way in which it's just a larger form of the glass prison in which Ava (and his previous "robots" before her) are held.
• Ferris Bueller's Day Off: Cameron lives in an all-glass house, which mirrors his bully of a father who makes him miserable.
• Game Night: Brooks' rented house has enormous windows, and he's lying about how he made his money; he's actually a criminal embroiled with the mafia, and he gets violently kidnapped.
• The Ghost Writer: The Langs' house where they are hiding out from a potential war crimes tribunal is a well-glazed gray mansion in Martha's Vineyard (although, in an inversion of California Doubling, it was actually filmed in where they invite the ghost writer to work. Although David is actually not fully faking his affable persona, his wife Ruth is, and she's an American operative who has been working through him for years.
• The Gift (2015):
  • Robyn and Simon's new house in California has a ton of huge windows. As a result, Robyn can see Gordo approaching the house and Gordo knows she's in there, so she feels obliged to answer. There's also a lot of paranoia about whether or not Gordo could be lurking outside those windows.
  • Gordo's house has prominent windows, so that he can watch Simon and Robyn argue, and so that Simon can see him when he waits until Simon has walked back to the house to open the gates. Though it's not actually his house.
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011): Martin Vanger's mansion is a notable exception from the rest of his family's properties for being white, very minimalist, and modern in contrast to their old houses. The irony is that Martin is the person with the most secrets, being a serial rapist and murderer who has a Torture Cellar in his house and has been operating in secret for decades.
• The Glass House: The Trope Namer is the Glasses' enormous, many-windowed Los Angeles mansion that is on a cliffside and where Ruby and Rhett move after their parents die to live with their new guardians, the creepy Terry who makes sexual advances towards the sixteen-year-old Ruby and his pill-popping wife Erin. They both also murdered Ruby and Rhett's parents and intended to kill them in order to benefit financially from their deaths.
• Glass Onion: The titular location is one, and it is just as opulent and absurd as it sounds. The fact that a glass onion is a contradictory concept is relevant, as it foreshadows the fact that its owner Miles Bron is actually an idiot.
• Gone Girl: Desi has a home in rural Missouri that is all glass. Amy uses it against him when she realizes that she's essentially trapped and he has no plans to let her go, by throwing herself down and screaming in front of the glass doors and security cameras to make it appear as though she's being held captive as a Sex Slave.
• Goodnight Mommy: The boys and their mother live in a house with vast windows in the woods when they're dealing with an unexpected death and becoming convinced their mother has been replaced. It gets Played for Drama when the mother almost breaks free at one point to alert the Red Cross representatives who are visible from the window.
• The Ice Storm: The Carvers live in a modernist glass house. There's some emphasis on Sandy blowing up his model planes. They're also an unhappy, crumbling family, where Janey is cheating on Jim, and then Jim cheats on her.
• The Invisible Man (2020): Adrian's house is an enormous beachside mansion with huge windows, suiting a tech billionaire and his girlfriend Cecilia. However, Adrian was extremely physically, emotionally, and sexually abusive to Cecilia. The emotional torment also continues and is shown to get a lot worse after Cecilia figures out that Adrian is not actually dead and moves back to the house in a desperate attempt to appease him and stop him from hurting anybody else.
• The titular The Lake House that Kate and Alex lived in two years apart has huge windows overlooking the lake, underscoring their loneliness and the irony that they can't be together even as they're falling in love.
• Leave the World Behind: The rented vacation home has wide glass windows and walls, and there's a lot of focus on people looking in and out of the windows at each other.
• In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, "genius billionaire playboy philanthropist" Tony Stark owns a sleek, modern clifftop mansion with panoramic views of the ocean below. It is generally a show of luxury, with a bit of 'isolation' in the second film, where he pushes his friends away while Secretly Dying of palladium poisoning and 'exposure' in the third, where the house is the target of a missile strike carried out by gunships disguised as news helicopters.
• Mr. Brooks: Mr Brooks and his wife (including Jane, after she moves back in) live in a house with large glass windows, as established by the first shots of the house. Earl is revealed to be praying inside to avoid his desire to kill, and both he and Jane are or are heavily implied to be murderers.
• The Neon Demon: Ruby housesits in a house like this and persuades Jesse to come and see her after Jesse is nearly raped in her very seedy motel room. Ruby and the models ultimately kill Jessie in a swimming pool there and bathe in her blood.
• The Night House: The house that gives the film its title is a huge, all-windows lakeside property where the protagonist Beth collapses after her husband mysteriously committed suicide there. And also where he murdered numerous women.
• Nocturnal Animals: Susan lives in a loveless marriage in an open-plan, full-windowed house behind a heavy wall. The sterile opulence of her life juxtaposes with the content of Tony's story that she reads, which is about rape, murder, and revenge on a Texas highway, and allows her to become increasingly paranoid about Tony's intentions towards her.
• North By Northwest: Roger climbs up a big house with vast windows which is an archetype of modernist architecture and is the hiding place for spies in search of Eve, who is working with the villains, and he manages to save her from there after he finds out that they're planning to have her killed.
• One Hour Photo: The Yorkins live in a house that has prominent windows across the ground floor, which allows Sy to watch them from his car. They are also unhappily married.
• The house in Parasite (2019) where most of the action is set is a huge, mid-level, open-plan mansion with big windows. Its inhabitants are unhappily married and generally fail to communicate, but its biggest secret is that there's another person living in a hidden room in the basement, unbeknownst to everybody except the servants later.
• The Rage: Carrie 2: The party happens in a glass house, where the glass walls are used to project the video of Rachel and Jesse having sex. It's also used for visual effect when Rachel shuts the doors telekinetically, but everyone can still be seen inside, struggling as they die.
• A Single Man: George lives in a mid-century modernist house with large windows (although the house itself is not depicted as being as large as some of the others), where he tries repeatedly to reach out to people and is nearly Driven to Suicide by the grief for his long-term partner.
• The Burney home in Sleeping with the Enemy is one such example. Martin Burney is a fantastically wealthy man but is horribly abusive toward his wife, until she fakes her own death to escape.
• Thir13en Ghosts: The Basileus Machine is a massive machine created by scholar and occultist Kalina Oretzia as a home and paranormal device. From the outside, it looks like a modernist house covered with windows. From the inside, it's composed almost entirely of sliding-glass doors and hallways lined with runes that is used to imprison the various Vengeful Ghosts he had captured over the years. The heart of the house contains the Ocularis Infernum (ostensibly Latin for "The Eye of Hell"), a device that, when powered by 12 ghosts that follow the Black Zodiac and a human sacrifice representing the 13th one, can give its user the ability to see the future.
• US: Although it's actually a rental home for their vacation, miserable rich family the Tylers are staying in a stylish all-windows house that juxtaposes with the protagonist Adelaide's mom's cozy house.
• When a Stranger Calls: In the 2006 remake, the house is a many-windowed modernist house on a lake. Played with, though, in that the threat is purely external; the killer is hiding inside the house, as The Calls Are Coming from Inside the House has made common knowledge.

Literature

• Baby Teeth: Alex, Suzette, and their sociopathic, murderous daughter Hanna all live together in a minimalistic glass house.
• The Fifth Season: The Sanze emperors are publicly known to be figureheads who can be replaced the moment they become inconvenient. To add insult to injury, the imperial residence is built in a huge amber sphere atop the capitol building, on full display to the city.
  He wanders its golden halls in genteel despair, doing what he is told...
• Gentleman Bastard: The Five Towers are indestructible glass structures that host Camorr's seat of government, including the Duke's personal residence. Non-nobles and other outsiders tend to get horrible vertigo from the uninterrupted view.
• Just Listen: The Greene family lives in a home with enormous windows. Although anyone can see what's going on inside the house from the street, the Greenes are defined by secrets and denial. Both parents want their lives to be perfect and ignore anything that isn't. Grace blinds herself to the fact that modeling makes her daughters miserable. Middle daughter Whitney developed anorexia due to the pressure she was under to fit beauty standards, which she tried to hide from everyone. When the eldest daughter, Kirsten, tried to warn their parents about Whitney's health, they refused to believe her for months. Annabel, the youngest, hides that she was raped by her friend's boyfriend.
• In Throne of Glass, not only the titular throne but the entire upper stories of the evil king's castle are made of glass.

Live-Action Television

• Billions: Axe's corrupt firm has many windows, especially in his office where most of the skulduggery takes place, as does his house.
• Breaking Bad: Walt's former friends Gretchen and Elliott Schwartz, now billionaire corporate executives who (Walt believes, at least) cheated him out of what was rightfully his, have a Big Fancy House with plenty of floor-to-ceiling windows on all sides. This provides excellent visibility to aim Laser Sights at them in the finale, when Walt bluffs them with a pair of laser pointers.
• The Bridge (2011): In the third season, Freddie Holst, a millionaire art collector, has dark secrets relating to his family, such as illegally paying Jeanette to be his surrogate, and is a suspect in the murder. He lives in an all-glass modernistic house with lots of voyeuristic shots from outside. He isn't the killer, but he is the killer's final target and was unintentionally responsible for the situation that drove them to murder.
• The Curse: The "passive homes" that Whitney and Asher build have mirrored walls to remain environmentally friendly. There's a lot of emphasis on the hypocrisy of their vapid narcissism despite their ostensibly good intentions around social justice, and that's before they get cursed, and Asher gets stuck to the ceiling of their house.
• Devious Maids: Most of the wealthy characters live in enormous houses with large windows and have many secrets. Special mention goes to Peri and Spence's house, with has all windows. It gets invoked for drama when Evelyn sees Rosie and Spence having sex through the large windows and uses this information to blackmail them.
• Luther: The villains of Series 5, the Lakes, are both doctors and serial killers who take pleasure in sadistic crimes. Their glassy rural home has a torture cellar.
• The Tunnel: Unethical muck-raking journalist Danny Hillier lives in a beachside glass mansion.
• Enforced by Joe in You. He keeps a big glass cage in the basement of Mooneys' bookstore and in his lockup in LA, where he imprisons his victims for long periods of time. They all have secrets from him.
• In the Black Mirror episode ''Smithereens'', the CEO of the eponymous tech company is shown dealing with the situation from a small but clearly very expensive glass house in a remote desert, which simultaneously shows off his wealth and his superficial embrace of a naturalist lifestyle. For bonus points, in one scene, he deals with his anxiety by literally throwing stones.

Real Life

• The famous "Glass House" in New Canaan, Connecticut was designed and built by world-renowned architect Philip Johnson to serve as his personal residence, and he lived there until his death in 2005 at the age of 98. Today, the building sits on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places; however, Johnson's architectural legacy has been tainted by controversy due to his past support for Nazi Germany, despite being openly gay.

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