How ‘Glass’ Retcons ‘Unbreakable’ to Fit the Lore of ‘Split’

On the evolution of superpowers in M. Night Shyamalan's trilogy

Jul 23, 2024

In 2019, M. Night Shyamalan released Glass, a crossover sequel to his postmodern ahead-of-its-time superhero movie Unbreakable (2000) and its stealth sequel Split (2016), which begins as a standalone thriller only to eventually reveal itself as a supervillain origin story. What almost nobody talks about is the fact that Glass pulled off what is for the most part a very effective feat of retconning, altering the narrative events of Unbreakable to realign them with the continuity of Split.

Screencap: Mr. Glass examining a lens he removed. Image courtesy of Universal.

Doing so was necessitated by the fact that the first two installments in what is now called The Eastrail 77 Trilogy introduced two radically different internal mythologies, each explaining in their own way how and why superhuman beings exist.

In this article, I want to show exactly how Glass achieves this and in doing so retroactively rewrites the first film’s narrative. To this end, it will be necessary to outline the internal superpower systems of both Split and Unbreakable.

Table of Contents

Unbreakable: Superpowers as Innate Abilities

Screencap: Elijah explains his theory. Image courtesy of Disney.

“If there’s someone like me in the world, and I’m at one end of the spectrum, couldn’t there be someone else - the opposite of me - at the other end? Someone who doesn’t get sick, who doesn’t get hurt like the rest of us? And he probably doesn’t even know it. The kind of person these stories are about. A person put here to protect the rest of us. To guard us.”

-Elijah Price

Unbreakable focuses on the relationship between David Dunn (Bruce Willis), who mira-culously survives a fatal train derailment without any injury, and Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), a seller of comic book ‘artworks’ that was born with a genetic disorder that makes his bones prone to breaking. It is through Elijah that the film communicates a great deal of information about how and why superpowers work.

Believing that comic books stories have a basis in reality, Elijah proposes that David survived his incident because he may, in fact, be a real-life superhero (though he never explicitly refers to David with this term), who was born (or “put” on Earth) to protect mankind.*

*This implies that David survived the train derailment because some higher power (possibly God) willed it so, and that his destiny or purpose is to save people by fighting the forces of evil.

Moreover, he posits that David’s superhuman imperviousness to injury is tied to some universal balance involving Elijah himself, with the two complementing one another as antithetical existences. From this perspective, David exists because of Elijah and vice versa. The former was born unbreakable and is more than human in contrast to the latter, who was born broken and so is less than a normal human.*

*Interestingly enough, this suggests Elijah and David may have been born at the same time though the film never confirms nor denies this possibility.

As the film progresses, more and more evidence appears that seems to corroborate Elijah’s theories. David recognizes that in addition to his apparent invulnerability, he seems to have an immense level of strength and a form of extrasensory perception that allows him to see people’s sins by touching them.

Nonetheless, David still has doubts that he could be something more than a normal human. A key reason is that he almost drowned in a swimming pool as a child. Elijah, however, claims that his near-drowning is actually the exception that proves the rule, in that a hero typically has some kind of weakness, comparing water to Superman’s kryptonite. He adds that he himself has a similar problem with water, which he takes to mean that he and David indeed exist in a binary relationship.

“Century Comics 117. That’s where this group, the Coalition of Evil, tried to ascertain the weakness of every superhero, because they all have one, just like you. Your bones don’t break. Mine do. That’s clear…. You don’t get sick. I do. That’s also clear. But for some reason, you and I react the exact same way to water. We swallow it too fast, we choke. We get some in our lungs, we drown. However unreal it may seem, we are connected, you and I. We’re on the same curve, just on opposite ends….”

By the end of the film, David recognizes that Elijah was right about pretty much every-thing. He has never been injured, except for the one time he almost drowned. All this seems to corroborate that he is indeed a superhero and that Elijah, in turn, is his anti-thesis, a point Elijah embraces by defining himself as a villain in the film’s ending.

From all this information, we can infer that in the world of Unbreakable, superpowers are innate abilities that certain individuals are naturally (or rather, supernaturally) born with. This means that such people are simply ‘special’ or ‘chosen’ or ‘gifted,’ distinct from the majority of normal individuals that populate the world.

For every superhuman born, however, the universe or some unknowable higher power creates another, seemingly lesser human to balance things out. These lesser humans, going by the trajectory of Elijah, could very well end up being villains.

Now, we don’t know how long this has been going on, but if Elijah’s theories about comic books actually being based on real-life history hold any water, then it’s possible superheroes and their human opposites go back to ancient history, perhaps as far back as Ancient Egypt. One can infer that Gods indeed existed on Earth and the hieroglyphics and images were used by Egyptians to tell stories based on real life.

David Dunn is thus just the latest in a long line of people born with extraordinary abilities. We don’t know if David had his full power set from the very beginning, but it seems that all his life he had been virtually invulnerable, with water being his Achilles’ heel, the one thing that can physically weaken him and potentially kill him.

However, he had lived most of his life under the (false) belief that he is a normal human, never recognizing that he could be something more until the train incident revealed that he could be something more.

Split: Superpowers as Products of Trauma and Belief

“Rejoice! The broken are the more evolved!”

-The Beast

Split is an origin story for supervillain Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), who as a result of a highly abusive childhood has developed dissociative identity disorder (DID), which led to the formation of almost two dozen alternate personalities that can take control of his body. Three of these alters, nicknamed “The Horde,” begin kidnap-ping teenage girls in order to offer them as a sacrifice to a new personality they call “The Beast,” which physically manifests for the first time at the end of the film.

When it takes control of Kevin’s body, the young man undergoes a transformation, gaining the abilities and characteristics of various animals, arguably reflecting the fact that he had spent much of his adult life working at a zoo.* He becomes able to scale walls in a manner reminiscent of lizards, gains bulletproof skin similar to the thick hide of a rhinoceros, develops enhanced physical strength comparable to that of a bear, as well as the speed and agility of a lion or tiger.

*To be clear, Kevin himself maintains a recognizably human physical appearance, though with some slightly exaggerated traits, like a more muscular physique with bulging veins.

The manner in which Kevin’s powers emerge is considerably different from that of David Dunn. It is clearly established that Kevin was born as a normal human, and doesn’t exhibit any superhuman characteristics unless The Beast alter controls his body, effectively losing his ‘powers’ whenever switching to another persona.

Similar to the first movie, Split features a character that specializes in delivering expo-sitory information to viewers that helps them understand how and why superpowers manifest. In this case, it is Kevin’s psychiatrist, Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley), who posits that DID patients exemplify how great trauma and suffering can allow individuals to surpass the limits of normal humans through their beliefs, attesting to the capacity of the mind to influence the body.

Particularly insightful in this regard is an early scene, where Karen has an exchange about DID patients with a skeptical colleague.

Fletcher: They are what they believe they are. The brain has learned to defend itself.
Joe: You speak of them like they’re supernaturally gifted. Like, they have powers or something. Karen, these are patients. They have been through trauma.”
Fletcher: And perhaps now they are capable of something we’re not. We have brain scans now. DID patients have changed their body chemistry with their thoughts.

Fletcher does not deny that DID patients are victims of trauma. But she posits that their traumatic experiences have allowed them to evolve beyond normal human limits, to develop through their beliefs capabilities that may be seem supernatural. She elaborates on this later when giving an online lecture to the University of Paris :

“The identities have different IQs. They have different physical strengths. One personality is a Russian weightlifter and can lift three times his body weight. Their ability to hyper focus and have different experiences is astounding. Have these individuals through their suffering unlocked the potential of the brain? Is this the ultimate doorway to all things we call unknown? Is this where our sense of the supernatural comes from?”

The manifestation of The Beast, in addition to giving credence to Fletcher’s theories, establishes that one can be born a normal human but evolve into a superhuman later in life through belief. According to the internal logic of Split then, superpowers are NOT innate traits someone is born with, but are instead something one can develop or manifest in response to extreme trauma.*

*Though not explicitly stated, it is implied that The Beast was created through the collec-tive beliefs of the Horde members Hedwig, Dennis, and Patricia, who desired a powerful God-like figure that would protect them and thus Kevin from the world, striking back at the normal or ‘impure’ people who would mock and ridicule them. In other words, the three believed so strongly in The Beast, that it manifested in reality.

Here, there is no sense of individuals being born with abilities because of a cosmic balance or the influence of a higher power that singles them out as special. Rather, powers are produced by the human mind itself. In this sense, the film rationalizes superpowers, rejecting the implicit supernatural explanation of Unbreakable and positioning them as the result of a reactive evolution.*

*Fittingly, Dennis describes The Beast as “a sentient creature that represents the highest form of humans’ evolution.”

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Glass: Reconciliation and Expansion

Naturally, the distinctions between each film’s power system raise several questions about the nature of superpowers in the world of the Eastrail trilogy.

For instance, does this mean that there are different kinds of superpowers, distinguishable by rational and supernatural causes? Or does this signify that the information provided in Unbreakable about how powers work and where they come from was incorrect? And if the information was incorrect, then does the plot of Unbreakable still make sense with the events and lore of Split?

Arguably then, one of the central tasks of Glass, as a sequel that brought together the storylines of the first two movies, was to resolve these questions and reconcile the disparate mythologies of its predecessors, while simultaneously expanding on them.

Key to all this is Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), who is initially introduced as a the-rapist that specializes in individuals that falsely believe themselves to be superheroes, but who is later revealed to be working for a secret society dedicated to removing or suppressing superhuman powers and thus preventing public awareness of the existence of superheroes. In the course of the plot, Staple demonstrates two methods for turning superheroes back into normal humans: psychological manipulation and a fictionalized version of what appears to be radiation therapy.

David Dunn’s Revised History

Screencaps: David recalls his core trauma. Images courtesy of Universal.

The first method is exemplified by the film’s central ‘group therapy’ sequence set in the pink room. By mixing truths and lies, Staple hopes to make the main characters believe themselves to be only normal humans, knowing that this will de-power them, for victims of trauma, as Split has established, “are what they believe they are.”

And it is in the course of this sequence that various gaps between Unbreakable and Split are bridged, especially those pertaining to the character of David Dunn.

All three characters here are defined as ‘superheroes,’ which positions Kevin/The Beast as explicitly a comic book supervillain and so evinces that the Split power sys-tem should indeed apply to David and Elijah.

This is strengthened by the introduction of the concept of the ‘anchoring incident,’ a traumatic past event that first leads a broken person to believe themselves to be (and so evolve into) a superhuman, which fits into and so expands on the Split system.

Staple’s dialogue initially reaffirms the already-established fact that Kevin had been repeatedly abused as a child by his mother, which is what led to his DID and thus to his superhuman alter-ego The Beast. But it then reveals something new: that David too might have an anchoring incident that led to his believing himself to be a superhuman.

“David, I don’t think this applies just to Kevin and his disorder. Is there a memory? What you’re looking for is a moment of weakness that made you possibly entertain the idea of being superstrong. ”

-Ellie Staple to David Dunn

The moment Staple asks him to remember, the film cuts to his near-drowning as a child, an event mentioned via dialogue in Unbreakable but now depicted in flashback.

Though Glass does not explicitly confirm this, its positioning of the pool event as an anchoring incident clearly suggests to audiences that, much like Kevin, David is a victim of trauma who surpassed the limits of normal humans through his beliefs. This would mean that, rather than having been born as a nigh-invulnerable superhuman, David was actually born as a normal person and only evolved into a superhuman after his pool incident, which occurred when he was around 8 years old or so.

It logically follows that, in addition to being David’s weakness and the source of his hydrophobia, water was also the source of his strength. So, ironically enough, what made David virtually invulnerable is the only thing that can kill him.

Now, when you start to really scrutinize things here, you realize that such a rewriting of David and the nature of his power directly conflicts with some of the events of Unbreakable. That film clearly established that David possessed superhuman powers despite having lived almost his entire life under the impression that he was a normal person. It was not until after his train incident that he realized that he had never been injured and that he had never been sick a day in his life.

According to the ‘you are what you believe you are’ logic of Split and Glass, however, David should’ve indeed remained a normal human as long as he believed himself to be normal. So, this might be why Shyamalan refrains from openly corroborating that David indeed acquired his powers through his belief.

Nonetheless, the new take on David works perfectly in the context of Glass and does not at all break viewer immersion in the storytelling.

The Machine and the Procedure

Screencap: Elijah being forcefully subjected to ‘the procedure‘ by Staple.

If the first method of power removal was closely linked to the arc of David Dunn, the second is more firmly tied to that of Elijah Price, who is forcefully subjected to an unnamed “procedure” that, per Staple, ostensibly “rebalances the part of the frontal lobe that is overstimulated.”

First, let’s talk a little bit about the “procedure” itself, which is never fully explained.

Elijah is placed under a machine that fires a visible red fan-shaped laser beam (visually calling to mind a CT Scan) at his forehead.* This ties into the earlier group therapy scene, where it’s established that an MRI would show that, much like Kevin and David, Elijah has an abnormality in his frontal lobe that Staple cites as a ‘marker’ for the mental disorder she is ostensibly treating.

*The moment the beam hits Elijah’s forehead, he seems to have a violent flashback to being at a carnival as a child, where he sustained multiple breaks after taking a ride. By implication, this is Elijah’s anchoring incident: the moment he first recognized how fragile he really is, and thus what first inspired him to develop his superhuman power. It follows that the ‘abnormality’ and the ‘anchoring incident’ are indeed linked.

Presumably then, the procedure should help ‘cure’ those like Elijah of the ‘superhero delusion’ by surgically removing this abnormality. Of course, once the viewer learns that Staple is lying about the disorder and in reality seeks to destroy superheroes, it should be evident that this is the procedure’s true purpose.

Staple confirms this in her final speech to the Clover Society near the film’s conclu-sion, where she describes it as the second most humane alternative to outright executing empowered individuals after ‘convincing’ them:

“I know what my charge is. Convince them. This is the most human and effective method. We’re not executioners and we don’t need martyrs. If that fails, use the machine.”

But how does it work, exactly?

Well, the process as a whole arguably resembles external beam radiotherapy (EBRT), which is meant to destroy cancer cells within a specific part of the body, including the brain, without the need for any invasive physical surgery (eg. making incisions within the skull before targeting the cancer cells inside the brain.) Typically, MRIs and CT scans help doctors pinpoint the location of the tumor and so remove it without damaging healthy cells with their respective beam therapy machines.

In the course of it, a beam of radiation is

“delivered from a machine directed to the part of the body where cancer is present. ”

Source: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-therapies/external-beam-therapy

Staple’s machine seems to function in a similar manner. We don’t know exactly what kind of laser or beam it uses, but we can assume it targets the part of the human brain that has developed superpowers, and in ‘correcting’ the abnormality, removes the power and possibly with that, the traumatic memory that allowed it to manifest.*

*The audience, however, does not receive first-hand confirmation of this, as Elijah sabotages the process by removing a lens from the device prior to its usage, which weakens the beam to the point that it evidently does not affect him.

Given all the available information, we can conclude that, rather than proof of a mental disorder, the presence of a ‘clouded’ or ‘overstimulated’ frontal lobe is actually a sign of an evolved human, meaning anybody that has developed superpowers will show a similar abnormality in their MRI.

Redefining Elijah Price

**Screencap:** Elijah confirms that he possesses a superhuman intellect to Hedwig. Image courtesy of Universal.

Now, the whole subplot with the procedure and Staple’s machine only makes sense if Elijah himself has a superhuman ability in the narrative of Glass, which is a genius-level intellect.* And this constitutes a rather radical retcon of Unbreakable, yet one that, unlike the David retcon, never contradicts anything from the first film’s plot.

*If Elijah were simply an unempowered human, then Staple would never need to use the machine on him, nor would she consider his existence a danger to the mission of her organization. She would never refer to him as a ‘god’ among normal humans.

After all, it was never explicitly stated in the first movie that Elijah didn’t have a superpower, though this seemed like the only logical conclusion given that film’s power system. To reiterate, Elijah was supposed to be David’s literal opposite, so it only made sense that he didn’t have any ability that could position him as more than human. Or to put it simply, if David should have superpowers, then Elijah should not.

In the context of Glass, however, it makes perfect sense for Elijah to have a power as well, for he already has an established history of trauma and so fits very neatly into the ‘trauma-and-belief’ power system introduced in Split. No wonder then as to why The Beast immediately recognizes Elijah as a kindred spirit, as a fellow ‘broken.’

“He doesn’t have a superpower, but he’s smarter than anybody else, and he dresses with a grandeur that makes him larger than life and bigger than most people believed that he would be.”
Samuel L. Jackson on Elijah’s fashion sense. Interview by Brian Hiatt for Rolling Stone, Oct. 31 2018.

In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if Shyamalan’s decision to retroactively make him a superbeing, rather than just a Lex Luthor-esque human villain, was a logical byproduct of introducing that system in the first place. Given all the trauma Elijah has experienced due to his bone disease and his belief in the connection between comic books and reality, how could he not have developed a superpower? How could he not have evolved beyond the limits of a normal human via his belief?

Thus, once again, Glass revises the history of a main character from Unbreakable, retroactively reconciling it with the events and lore of Split.

The first movie led us to believe that Elijah was born broken and remained a lesser human his entire life to balance out the existence of his superhuman antithesis David. By contrast, the third indicates that Elijah was born broken but later evolved into a superhuman being following a traumatic trip to the carnival as a child, mirroring what happened to David at the swimming pool.

David and Elijah thus remain mirror images, but the notion that they are supposed to exist in a binary good/evil relationship, as ordained by the Universe or God, no longer seems to apply, indicating that Elijah’s initial theory about their connection was not entirely correct. Rather than just having an aversion or weakness to water as a point of overlap, the two now share the fact that they are superpowered individuals.

“We try to stop both of you. If there is one of you, the opposite of you appears. It escalates. We step in. There just can’t be gods amongst us. It’s not fair.”

-Staple to Elijah

Both were in their own ways broken and so both became ‘more evolved’ than the ‘impure’ (normal people). And like David, Elijah now also defines himself and is defined by others as a “super-hero.”* Quite simply, the lines between the two under the more grounded ‘trauma-and-belief’ power system are a lot more blurry.

*This isn’t to say that he never refers to himself a villain or a ‘bad guy’ but that the notion of what a superhero is has now expanded to include those like him. And certainly, he seems considerably less of a villain in comparison to a totalitarian like Ellie Staple. In fact, Glass positions Dr. Staple as Elijah’s actual opposite: a normal human that weaponizes doubt and perpetuates disbelief in the extraordinary, so as to maintain the dominance of normal people.

It is in the attempt to bring back the first film’s notion of binary cosmic opposition and suggest that it still indeed somehow works within the power system of Split and Glass that I feel the Elijah retcon falters. It simply makes no sense to suggest some supernatural causation to powers at the 11th hour after consistently sticking to the idea that they are the result of reactive evolution.

Shyamalan should’ve never had Staple bring up the opposition angle at all in her final conversation with Elijah, leaving it to remain solely within the context of Unbreakable or explained it as an erroneous assumption on Elijah’s part.

Regardless, I find that the Elijah retcon still works and is done rather subtly, to the point where I’m certain most viewers of the trilogy wouldn’t even notice it. With perhaps that one exception noted above, it never attracts attention to itself and so doesn’t break viewer immersion.

Conclusion

Overall then, I would say that, while the retcons of Glass are not completely seamless, they are well made, rarely feel contrived, and almost never detract from the story as you are watching it. Though the narrative elements of one film may be in conflict with those of another, each picture still works in and of itself as a cohesive, singular unit that never breaks the illusion of reality.

The fact that these changes occurred at all evinces that Shyamalan’s conception of the world of the Eastrail trilogy had evolved during the 16-year gap between Unbreakable and Split. This is reflective of the fact that long-form stories tend to organically change over time, especially across multiple installments released years apart.

One of the tasks of storytellers is to make it seem that everything that comes later feels wholesome and organic with what came before.

From this perspective, Glass feels like a natural follow-up to two very different films, with very different internal mythologies, that also successfully expands the world all three take place in. This is yet another reason why I think it is an underrated movie that will have been re-evaluated as a great film in the future.

But what about you?

Have you seen the Eastrail 77 trilogy?

Do you think it is internally consistent? Do you think the gaps between the installments detract from the experience? Are you generally bothered when serialized series or franchises retroactively change past events or ideas? Or are retcons not a big deal for you? Please,