Why 'Glass' Is the First Great Movie of 2019
The rare superhero movie that challenges the status quo
In the first part of this essay, I spoke about how the narrative of Glass focuses on the conflict between belief and doubt, as well as how its setting - a world where superheroes still exist on the fringes of popular culture - made perfect sense with its storyline. Here, I wish to focus on how those two aspects come together to express the film’s central thesis.
Table of Contents
Superheroes vs. the status quo
Together, the narrative’s focus on the conflict between belief and doubt and the film’s setting allow Glass to deconstruct an inherent element of the traditional superhero narrative: the hero’s support of the status quo. There are plenty of articles on this very subject, but the gist is this: superheroes almost always support the power structures and institutions that either maintain or cause the same problems to keep occurring in the world. They don’t address the causes of social inequality or challenge the institutions that perpetuate them, such as the police and the government.
They repeatedly resort to dictatorial vigilante justice, supporting “the law” even as they break it, to stop a “villain” from upsetting the status quo. In turn, superheroes are supported and upheld by the status quo. They need for supervillains to thrive in order to justify their own existence. They also need for the narrative to revert to status quo in order for their stories to continue. Loss of power, imprisonment of villains, even death are often temporary inconveniences that will be undone.
Glass repeatedly challenges the status quo both within the narrative and in terms of the ideology it espouses by presenting a scenario where the very existence of superheroes is itself a threat to the status quo.
By the end of the film, the three big superhuman characters of this trilogy are all dead and none appear to have succeeded in their goals. Mr. Glass lies on the ground bloody and broken, his dreams of social revolution and mass awakening seemingly shattered. David is drowned ignominiously in a puddle of water, having failed to stop the Beast, the pagan god personality of Kevin Crumb, who himself is shot dead moments after regaining control of his body. Both are murdered by faceless, amorphous members of the film’s stand-in for the surveillance state, all because their actions threatened to reveal to the public the existence of superheroes.
Prior to that, they’ve been locked away without any trial or jury inside a panoptic mental hospital outfitted with state-of-the-art surveillance cameras. They’ve been deprived of their human rights, subjected to psychological manipulation, and, in some cases, outright torture. Glass doesn’t make the torture literal, but its analogues aren’t far removed from their real-life equivalents.
The hydrophobic David Dunn is doused in water, his literal Achilles’ heel, in a manner that recalls the waterboarding of POWs. Meanwhile, Kevin Crumb is repeatedly pelted with bright flashing lights that cause him and his alters visible pain and discomfort, bringing to mind the sensory overload methods used to deprive political detainees of sleep. Mr. Glass presumably has been charged and committed to the institution years prior, but his time there was evidently not too different.
When we first meet him, he appears to be lifeless and catatonic, a shell of the erudite man from Unbreakable. The orderlies that attend to him clearly have little regard for his well-being. And like the others, he has to go through a dehumanizing “therapy” session, where the psychiatrist knowingly lies and attempts to get him to recant his beliefs — in himself, in the world, in the myths that are key to his identity. And then that same psychiatrist has him forcibly undergo a lobotomy adjacent procedure meant to remove his superhuman intellect.
The Metaphors of Glass
Glass thus effectively presents an indictment of the surveillance state under the guise of a critique of mental institutions. In the most literal sense, its superheroes function as mistreated psychiatric patients. But they also metaphorically represent political prisoners and dissenters, the marginalized and the subaltern, as well as ancient Gods being gradually killed off by the age of reason and secular society’s refusal to believe in anything spiritual. Against the military industrial-surveillance complex that manages public perception of reality, these superhuman beings are often powerless.
No better sequence demonstrates this than the centerpiece group “therapy” sequence where their comic book-esque color hues — purple (Elijah), green (David), and yellow (Kevin) — are enveloped by the pink hue of the room that matches the outfit of Staple. Alongside the expressive use of color, the cinematography tellingly positions Staple on one side and the three super humans on the other.
On the one hand, this visually communicates Staple’s dominance and the triumph of doubt over belief, of the system over the individual. On the other, it also suggests a rejection or, at the very least a muddling, of the good/evil binary intrinsic to superhero narratives. It’s not coincidental that in the same scene, Staple describes the delusion that all three characters are ostensibly suffering from as a false belief that they are super heroes, despite the fact that two out of three characters before her would be more accurately described as super villains. Both the visual language and the dialogue thus communicate the idea that there is no true distinction between these categories, at least not in relation to an Orwellian state agent like Staple.
And this is long before Staple tells a dying Mr. Glass of how she doesn’t think that “we are particularly evil and we don’t choose sides.” Her ultimate rationalization for her actions is that “There just can’t be gods amongst us. It’s not fair. It has worked just fine for 10,000 years our way.” Staple thus believes wholeheartedly in maintaining the status quo, not because she is evil, but because she is afraid of change and can’t fathom the notion that those whom her organization considers deviant or lesser could possibly become more. In making Staple the film’s true antagonist, Glass shifts audience sympathies to the ones that ultimately threaten the status quo by default, in this case David, Kevin, and especially the titular Mr. Glass himself.
The Role of Elijah
Much has been made of the fact that Elijah is absent for the first half of the film that bears his name. And yet, he completely dominates its second half, ultimately emerging as its true central protagonist, even as he remains driven by the selfish desire to affirm that he has a greater purpose in life, which he now believes to be the creation of superheroes.
This is a notable shift from his characterization in Unbreakable, where he believed his purpose was to literally be the villain to David’s Overseer. Though he may be a former terrorist and his actions in this movie alone ultimately lead to the deaths of numerous people (up to 35 or so if one counts the 20+ personalities in Kevin’s body), his goals are positioned as noble and heroic in contrast to the totalitarian ones of Staple. He is depicted as Staple’s mirror opposite, a staunch believer that seeks to bring about a revolution in human consciousness by inspiring other broken people en masse to believe in themselves and so unlock their own extraordinary abilities.
To this end, he seeks to reveal to the public that superheroes can exist, kicking off a modern myth that is endlessly retold. Upsetting the status quo becomes his life’s purpose, and the film supports his view that the status quo itself is the problem. It is no wonder that, in the one scene where they truly interact, Elijah chastises David for not living up to his potential as a superhero by operating in the shadows and resorting to petty vigilantism.* In effect, David has not done anything to truly challenge the status quo and inspire others.
*Notably, this scene also appears to be the only scene to reprise the classic Unbreakable theme composed by James Newton Howard.
It is because of this, we learn later, that he has remained untouched by the Clover Society for nearly 20 years, as he never did enough to register as more than a blip on their radar. Had Elijah not spurred David and The Beast to action, all of them would’ve likely survived but remained deprived of their powers, while the larger world would remain the same.
Make no mistake: Shyamalan ultimately comes down on the side of Elijah and his ideology, which is why Mr. Glass triumphs posthumously, meaning the sacrifices of David, Kevin, and Elijah himself were not in vain.
The actual ending of Glass reveals that Elijah has turned the means of surveillance against the state, using the footage captured by the hospital cameras to blow the whistle on the events that took place in the hospital, an act that likens him to real-life dissidents like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.
Thanks to Joseph, the footage makes its way to the Internet, revealing both the existence of real life superhuman beings and of the secret society that had them imprisoned and then summarily executed.
A definitive ending to a great trilogy
The final scene has Casey, Joseph, and Mrs. Price watching as the Glass Leaks begin to circulate, suggesting the nascence of a universe populated with superheroes (and/or villains). It’s a hopeful, bittersweet conclusion reminiscent of the endings to both One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and The Matrix (1999).
Like the former, it shows that the death of the main character has served to inspire others. Like the latter, it promises a massive public revelation about the nature of reality that will forever change society and take away the power of its current rulers. This is why the ending of Glass feels like a natural and definitive endpoint.*
*Though I would love to see more stories set in the Eastrail universe, any potential follow up risks undoing or downplaying the significance of that ending in order to tell the same types of stories. Consider how The Matrix sequels pretended that the ending of the first film never happened, reinstating the initial narrative status quo wherein with most citizens remain oblivious to the fact that they lived inside a simulated reality.
In his last voiceover, Elijah says: “Belief in oneself is contagious. We give each other permission to be superheroes. We will never awaken otherwise.”
It’s a statement that describes how mythology can inspire personal beliefs but also how personal beliefs can shape mythology. In effect, he posits that an individual can help change the world and upset the status quo by believing in the self and rejecting the dominant ideology, an idea that is theoretically applicable to anybody, even those that don’t have the potential to literally develop superhuman powers. In an age of normalized mass surveillance, self-censorship, propaganda, and the persecution of political dissidents, I think it’s fair to say that Mr. Glass is right.
Whatever happens next, the Eastrail saga has gone out on a high note with a brazenly political film that radically subverts the narrative and ideological conventions of the superhero movie. I don’t think it’s perfect.
The picture clearly underutilizes David Dunn (though there is evidence that of his many scenes merely wound up on the cutting room floor), and it never seizes the opportunity to have David and Kevin actually interact with one another outside of physical confrontations, leaving their bouts without personal stakes.
But despite these issues, its narrative, world-building, and visual storytelling masterfully coalesce into a single unified whole. And for these reasons, I find Glass to be the first legitimately great movie of 2019.
More Recommended Readings about Glass
Brian Roan is one of the few mainstream film critics that immediately understood what Glass was about narratively and thematically.
Elvis Dutan in an independent blogger that writes as well as podcasts about comic books and their adaptations in other media. He does not a great job of illus-trating the final film’s unrecognized narrative and thematic strengths.
This extensive article by Dag Sodtholt, a Norwegian film critic and General Secretary of the Norwegian Film Critics Association, is primarily a work of formal analysis, focusing on the visual storytelling of Shyamalan and the various narrative, visual, and other references that Glass makes to earlier entries in the series.
Walter Chaw’s review examines Glass from an ideological standpoint. From this author’s perspective, the film essentially constitutes a ‘political satire’ about the post-truth era in American society, and how there are those in position of power whose goal is to simply maintain things the way they have always been.
Though I personally disagree with some of James Slaymaker’s readings of the film’s narrative, I have nothing but praise for his cogent illustration of how Glass “explores the nature of power in a networked information society, shaped by the proliferation of digital devices on the micro-consumer level as well as on the corporate/state level.”
FilmCritHulk provides an extensive take on the film, discussing how it relates to issues of ‘indulgence’ or power fantasies common to superhero films.
But what do you think?
Do you love or hate Glass? Agree or disagree with the points of my defense? Maybe consider rewatching or re-evaluating it? Is the film underrated or are the negative responses to it justified? Where would you rank it among other Shyamalan pictures? Please,