In Defense of M. Night Shyamalan’s "Glass"
Belief, Doubt, and the World of "Glass"
There was a time when I was very much on the “Shyamalan sucks” bandwagon. Since approximately 2004, audiences and critics had been saying that Shyamalan was a terrible filmmaker who made movies based on increasingly dumb twists. I initially bought into this narrative without having seen much of the director’s post-Signs output, such as The Village (2004) and Lady in the Water (2006).
Around 2016, however, I began revisiting Shyamalan’s works and gradually came to realize that much of the vitriol thrown at the once popular auteur was undeserved. By the time I saw Glass in January 2019, I had become a full on convert. Perhaps because of this, my impressions of the conclusion to the Eastrail 177 trilogy, which began with Unbreakable (2000) and continued with Split (2016), were completely at odds with the picture’s dominant cultural and critical reactions.
Glass initially seemed poised to cement Shyamalan’s cultural comeback, but then the reviews started flooding in and the RT score capped at a paltry 37%. Whereas I loved the film’s bold storytelling choices, a lot of other folks, even stalwart Shyamalan defenders, seemed to outright hate them. What I’ve found is that Glass is another Shyamalan film that has been largely misunderstood and misread by the mainstream, especially when it comes to the film’s story and its position on comic books.
Responding to this, my article discusses the reception of Glass, what it’s really about, and why it constitutes a legitimately great film. Due to length issues, I’ve broken it down into two parts. This first part discusses the film’s setting and the common misreadings of its plot and intentions. Part two will then outline its central thesis.
Table of contentsGlass is about the conflict between belief and doubt
At the core of the negative reception of Glass is the expectation that it should be a full-on superhero movie that depicts a clash between good and evil, as represented by the hero David Dunn/The Overseer (Bruce Willis) and the villain Kevin Crumb (James McAvoy) or, more accurately, his alternate personality, The Beast.
For the first 20 minutes of its running time, the picture appears to deliver on this expectation, only to suddenly pivot into a different direction: just as David and The Beast are about to really face off against one another following a brief scuffle, a flash of light ends the fight prematurely, and so denies us the long awaited showdown. The Ratched-like psychiatrist Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) enters the proceedings and locks up both hero and villain alike in a mental institution that also houses Elijah Price/Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson).
The intentionally jarring plot turn signals the transformation of Glass from a low-budget Superman vs. Doomsday into One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The pace slows down, the settings become much more claustrophobic and intimate, and the big action showdown we’ve been waiting to see since 2017 gives way to an existential and ideological battle delivered mostly through dialogue.
A LOT of critics and viewers feel that Glass falls apart at this point and dismiss the entire middle section in the mental hospital as just a boring and unnecessary distraction from the “real plot,” which should be the hero vs. villain story centered on David and the Beast. The problem is that the “real plot” of Glass is the one that takes place in the mental hospital, and the main conflict is not between good and evil, but rather between belief and doubt.
Nearly every scene and every character action in the movie thereafter is driven by this conflict, as Staple attempts to convince David, Elijah, and Kevin that they are not superhuman beings, but rather mentally ill people suffering from a delusion of grandeur. But though Staple appears to mean well, her approach seems closer to psychological manipulation than therapy.
She breaks down her patients’ defenses by making them recall their foundational traumas, poses leading questions and proposes entire scenarios that rationalize and explain the mythic aspects of their identities. And she doesn’t even deny them being capable of what appear to be great feats, but rather rejects the notion that their abilities are rooted in anything supernatural or outside the bounds of the ordinary.
Belief: The Source of Superpowers
Detractors are likely to cite all this as evidence that the film is needlessly trying to convince the audience that its characters aren’t superheroes, when the previous two movies in the Eastrail trilogy established otherwise. From their perspective, this is only done for the purpose of misleading the viewer and so has neither dramatic stakes, nor real function in the plot.
But this perception is incorrect, for it ignores the very simple fact that superpowers in the world of the Eastrail trilogy are directly tied to belief.
Split had explicitly established that those who suffer from trauma “are what they believe they are.” The Beast personality of Kevin Crumb functions as living proof that such individuals can unlock “the potential of the brain” through their suffering and will their thoughts into reality. Split never made any direct references to comic books, whereas Glass openly defines The Beast as a comic book supervillain, in the process linking belief to superpowers as a whole and retroactively altering the mythology of Unbreakable, which portrayed them as innate traits.
For all intents and purposes then, David, Elijah, and Kevin in the context of Glass are victims of trauma that overcame the limitations of normal human beings through their beliefs. In other words, they are superhuman because they believe themselves to be superhuman. And their very existence, in turn, is proof that anyone, who has been subject to trauma, has the potential to unlock or develop an extraordinary ability.
If belief is indeed the key for those who have experienced trauma to manifest superpowers, then it logically follows that doubt would be the key to suppressing them. When you take this into consideration, it becomes evident that Staple’s “therapy” is not meant to convince the audience to doubt that its characters are superhuman, but to convince the characters to doubt themselves, and in the process, effectively strip them of their abilities entirely.
One could fault Shyamalan for not spelling these points out explicitly in the context of the film itself. But the writer-director made the choice to use the preceding film as narrative shorthand, so it is upon the viewer to see Split and keep in mind how superpowers work. This brings us to the second major misconception about the film or, more precisely, its setting, which directly informs its narrative and vice versa.
Glass is intentionally set in a world, where comic books are still niche
When Unbreakable came out in 2000, it heavily implied that there were no big budget mainstream Hollywood film adaptations of superhero comics in its world, a factor that only bolstered its depiction of superhero comics as part of a cultural niche.
In the real world, of course, comic book adaptations had already gained some popularity on film and TV. The Batman film franchise had a consistent presence in the 1990s, and there were many animated TV shows based on the likes of Superman, Spider Man, X-Men, etc. For the most part, however, the world of Unbreakable seemed not too far removed from our reality, in the sense that superheroes were nowhere near as ubiquitous as they are today, when film adaptations are a regular part of the mainstream viewing experience.
Glass, on the other hand, seems fairly removed, in that the world introduced in Unbreakable apparently hasn’t changed. Though the film opens with a video blogger doing a “Superman punch,” comic books largely remain at the fringes of the mainstream, and the most we see of adaptations is towards the end, when a TV screen shows an episode of the 1960s Batman series.
Many critics can’t accept the fact that Glass is set in a world, where super-heroes are not part of mainstream culture and the average person has little to no understanding of comic book narrative conventions, and so view it as a fundamental flaw. In the process, they overlook how the comic book movie-less world of Glass is directly determined by the power system and storyline of Split, not to mention how it factors directly into the belief vs. doubt conflict.
After all, belief is key for people with potential to unlocking or manifesting superpowers. Logically then, the more potentials or, as the Beast calls them, “the broken,” believe themselves to be capable of something extraordinary, the more super heroes and villains should exist.And yet, even though super-beings can exist, there only seem to be three of them — David, Kevin, and Elijah. As far as we know, there haven’t been any heroes before David, nor any since.
Based on all this, few of the broken have managed to evolve, meaning that few have come to believe themselves to be capable of extraordinary feats. Why? Why do so few individuals believe in themselves? Why is it that in the two decades since David became the Overseer, there apparently haven’t been any new super-beings until the coming of The Beast? Why does the public at large remain unaware that superpowers are real? As Split has demonstrated, after all, the psychiatric community treats Dr. Fletcher’s idea that victims of trauma are able to develop abilities with skepticism.
Comic Books and Self-Awareness
Glass presents the viewer with two answers to these questions. The first is entirely implicit: there simply aren’t enough potentials reading comic books, which are akin to sacred texts that allow their readers to achieve a sense of enlightenment and come to a greater understanding about the world they inhabit and how it works. In Glass, we learn that Elijah possesses his own power: an extraordinary intellect that he apparently gained after suffering a life-threatening experience at a carnival as a child. Elijah was able to become a super-villain because he read comics, because he was privy to stories about mythic beings with extraordinary powers and came to believe that they are real. In essence, he unlocked his potential by gaining self-awareness.
We see a similar journey to awareness in the stories of Casey and Joseph, both of whom begin researching superhero comics after Staple assures them that David and Kevin are merely deluded, ultimately realizing that the reality they inhabit indeed follows the conventions of comic books. Comic books then constitute one of the means through which myths and beliefs spread throughout the world and connect individuals to a collective belief in the extraordinary, impacting reality in the process.
So, if comic books and/or adaptations in the world of Glass were as mainstream and influential as they are within our reality, then there would be far more individuals believing in the extraordinary and, therefore, far more potentials would’ve become superheroes. That so few people seem aware of superhero conventions in Glass then is a reflection of the fact that the film’s reality is bereft of superheroes and vice versa.
The institutional forces
Towards the end, Glass presents a more concrete answer to supplement the first by establishing that there is a secret society that consists of individuals in position of monetary, political, institutional, and military power dedicated to preventing the existence of superhuman beings by manipulating public perception of reality and maintaining the deception that superhuman beings cannot possibly exist.
When such beings arise and threaten to make public the notion that the extraordinary is possible, this organization sends its inquisitors to prevent the counter-movement from taking off. Their agents either brainwash the heretics into believing that they are only ordinary people, suppressing their powers, use a surgical procedure to remove their abilities by force, or outright murder them if the other methods don’t work.
This is what the viewer is meant to realize when the film arrives at its controversial final act, where both Kevin and David are brutally killed under the orders of Staple, who is revealed to have been the film’s true villain all along.* Detractors were quick to pounce on this as a quintessential Shyamalan plot twist, a betrayal of the preceding films and a deeply unsatisfying turn that sullies the film as a whole.
*This directly mirrors the ending of Unbreakable, which forced the viewer to completely reassess the motives and actions of Elijah.
Certainly, the climax is not at all fitting for a conventional superhero narrative. But it is an intrinsic step in the conflict between belief and doubt that the film is depicting and a completely organic extension of the world established in the Eastrail trilogy.
So, the fact that the world of Glass seems to be behind our reality in its attitude towards comic books and superheroes isn’t a flaw — it’s the point. The niche status of comic books, the absence of superheroes and superhero movies, the general lack of (self-)awareness — all of that makes sense in a reality, where there are powerful institutional forces and organizations in place to maintain the ideological dominance of the “normal” people and suppress the dissent represented by superheroes.
[Continued in part 2…]
Really great stuff as always. Thanks for that. Definitely going to think through some of what you brought up.