Glass is Reflective: A Comic-Book Movie About its Own Making

The final part in M. Night Shyamalan's superhero trilogy, "Glass" is clever as a meta-narrative about its own making. "Unbreakable" (2000) was similarly--although, media-wise, more limited--a movie about a comic-book enthusiast (Mr. Glass) creating a superhero ("the Overseer"). I think "Split" (2017) is the disappointment among the trilogy because it largely failed to realize its potential of a character as analogous to cinema and of an actor playing multiple characters in an actorly manner; it was as disparate and disorganized as the mind of its villain. "Glass" takes these notions of meta-narrative to the next step--beyond the simple deconstruction of "Unbreakable" or something like, say, "Scream" (1996), where characters act as though they're in a movie. What Mr. Glass does here is construct the superhero movie, as informed by comic books. It's a glass-mirror image reflecting the same thing Shyamalan has done in making this very picture.

Unfortunately, the last time Shyamalan employed this type of self-reflexive meta-narrative, it was one of his most-widely-panned releases and certainly his most pathetically self-indulgent effort in "Lady in the Water" (2006), which starred the writer-director himself as the genius author with a martyr complex whose work is misunderstood by a movie critic. Seriously. Years later now, the Shyamalan cameo in "Glass" is a man who admits that he's done some bad things in the past, but he's since turned his life around. At least, it appears he's since become a little less blatantly egotistical in his work since "Lady in the Water," as well as, perhaps, less pretentious in his subject matter by turning his attentions here to the popular subject of superheroes instead of water nymphs and whatnot.

Nevertheless, "Glass" features a mastermind storyteller and director (although played by Samuel L. Jackson instead of Shyamalan), who is tormented by his critics--there being a clandestine organization seeking to prevent him from exposing his stories to the world. Even the way they are depicted here meeting in restaurants seems aimed to make them look like snobs. Anyways, they lock Glass and the other two supers in an asylum for this purpose of shutting them up and to berate them with psychobabble in an attempt to convince that their stories are mistaken--not unlike what many a film critic will do to movies. Meanwhile, us movie-goers are represented on-screen by our surrogate spectators and fans of superheroes: the mother, the son and the orphaned friend. They--and thus, supposedly, us--believe in the awesome power of the superheroes despite what the critics say. In the end, "Glass" implies that it doesn't matter what the critics say--they can try to beat his creations to death--but they can't stop him from telling his stories. Mr. Glass finds a way to get his cameras and to distribute the footage to the world, so that all that's left is for him to direct his comic-book-informed characters in a climactic showdown for all to see.