Glass (M. Night Shyamalan, 2019)

You gotta give M. Night some credit. When it came time to jumpstart his floundering career, he didn't go back to the obvious well, creating sequels or prequels to The Sixth Sense, still his defining success. Instead he went to Unbreakable, a much less popular film that in fact remains his best. For someone who, let's face it, has frequently evinced an outsized notion of his own talents, Shyamalan can at least distinguish wheat from chaff, which you could never say of, for example, Prince.

It was a gambit, naturally, since there was no reason to expect that reverse-engineering an Unbreakable trilogy would necessarily work. Based on the last two minutes of Split, it might have been a trial balloon or even an afterthought, but Glass goes all the way, with predictably mixed results. Part of it is simply formal. For such a talented filmmaker, Shyamalan is certainly willing to cut narrative corners when it comes time to bring his plots together. If some of the Big Answers were simply searchable on the internet, why didn't the men themselves ever discover them? Aren't superheroes supposed to be preoccupied with their own origins? And Anya Taylor-Joy's character, unlike the other two "helpers," is clearly driven by deep psychological damage, something Glass is happy to just accept at face value. Not only is this conveniently incurious; it's also borderline insensitive to survivors of sexual violence.

But I think the main problem I have with Glass is that, whereas Unbreakable represented a novel twist on the concept of superheroes, this movie really just reiterates the going line about them, the same stock ideas that you find throughout Marvel, DC, even Harry Potter. There are seemingly ordinary people, ones who don't fit in with the rest of society. And in fact, they are special, remarkably gifted, and the fate of humankind rests on their shoulders. One reason for the extreme popularity of these narratives is that they feed into a culture of narcissism, a reader's belief that he or she too is "special" in some as-yet-undetermined way. Everyone is the star of their own private epic, feeling very strongly that they were meant for something greater than the mundane life we all actually live. It's a compensatory fantasy for existing within a capitalist system in which we are, in fact, not only average but interchangeable. 

Glass in no way complicates this narrative. Instead, it ratifies it, going so far as to imagine an entire global bureau devoted to keeping extraordinary people from realizing their gifts (like the government agency in The Incredibles but with a SWAT team behind them). The ultimate master plan of Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson) is to reveal the possibility that hundreds, if not thousands of other extraordinary people might be lurking in the shadows. It's a lovely fiction, but it's no different than waiting for a Messiah. All we have is us.

I have neglected to mention James McAvoy's showy performance as Kevin Crumb, aka "The Horde." His shifting between personalities is even more rapid-fire and thespian-lightning-round here than it was in Split, and I am torn between thinking that it is a truly phenomenal performance and suspecting it's more of a trick of contrast and "dramatic montage" than anything else. At any rate, he'll be getting some Skandie points from me.