“now that we know who you are, i know who i am”: dialectical oppositions, recursive exchange, and how to think about superheroes

unbreakable is remarkably plainspoken about its fundamental view of the nature of comic books and their semiotics, with elijah price essentially laying out a theoretical perspective, applicable to “low culture” objects more generally, that the comic book form is a sort of compromised ethnography, the transformation of actual lived experience in accordance with commercial impulses and the flattened, fantastical moralism they demand. in light of this view of so-called “cape” comics (which i take to be essentially accurate), i think shyamalan’s overall aesthetic approach within the film might be characterized in terms of a dual, recursive process: inasmuch as comics represent the warping of self-articulation and lived history into an individualist drama of exceptionalism and moral absolutes, shyamalan seeks to not undo this first process but to offer us a counter-process, one which re-translates that distorted, simplistic drama back into the social frameworks and psychologies of empathetically imagined and heartbreakingly recognizable human beings. the tension produced by these opposing dynamisms is more productive than simply ignoring or negating the original development outright, because a single cultural object cannot reverse the mechanisms of capitalism as they relate to culture, but it can offer us a way to think through, and perhaps even out of them in small ways.

this synthesis is realized diegetically by the (here unresolved) dialectical opposition of elijah and david, the poles of a different dialectic. david, emblematic of working class masculinity and the embattled american family, serving as an unimportant, disposable cog in the machinery which ensures capital’s smooth operation with his labor, utterly unremarkable and alienated, comes to be the text’s (and elijah’s) signifier of an outwardly indomitable normalcy, which, of course, conceals a deep inner fragility. elijah, on the other hand, bitter but unbroken, marginalized many times over, humiliated but constantly hopeful, useless to capital and preoccupied with apparent frivolities, utterly vulnerable to the world at large, is the marginal and abjected subject (whose inner nature is truly unbreakable). they are, as elijah says, on alternate ends of the same curve, a thesis and antithesis whose only overlap lies in mutual, but complementary, vulnerabilities: they are the weakness and strength of the social order, each destabilized within, and thus the pageant of superheroism and supervillainy which mr. glass envisions represents the turning outward of those inner conflicts such that it might destabilize that very order (an idea followed through on in shyamalan’s glass but left without synthetic resolution here).

my understanding of unbreakable’s central, organizing tensions is thus twofold: the first tension , wherein each impulse comes to enrich and restructure the other, is that between the nature of the comic book form and shyamalan’s pursuit of genuine, total empathy; the second occurs within the text and operates withint the first tension as a gesture towards its embodiment and place within a social, human context, and implicates david dunn and elijah price as the living antithetical endpoints of a spectrum of marginalization and normalcy. but there is value in further pursuing the aesthetic minutiae and results of these structuring principles within the narrative and at its fringes.

“you know what the scariest thing is? to not know your place in this world”: david dunn’s heroism; or what does a superhero look like drained of fascism

superheroes, in the american psyche, are remembered as coming into being in response to fascism. and our superheroes are propagandistic through and through, emblazoned in the colors of our nationalism, the apotheosis of individual might in opposition to ineffective structural and collective processes, a fantasy of a perfectable human without weakness and without need for others but with the grace to serve and preserve capitalism. they are fascist, to the core.

and shyamalan does not directly address this within the superficial text of unbreakable, but instead rhetorically shifts the interrogation onto a cultural role proximal to that of superhero comics (if often placed in derogatory contrast with it), namely the practice of american athleticism, specifically as it is realized in football. football here serves as a figurative device onto which he displaces a critique of the superheroic fantasy: it is named (by dunn’s wife and implicitly by dunn, although his complicated position with respect to football dramatizes his relationship to heroism) as intrinsically violent, punitive, a game of base physical superiority (see the valorization of the gifted player from the very second scene of the film) which incentivizes its violent imposition onto the physically “inferior”. dunn defends it as a security guard and shuns it in his private life, caught in the space between yearning to exercise his gifts and being repulsed by the consequences and reality of doing so. regardless of whether it is intentionally so, the role that football plays exists clearly in parallel to dunn’s heroic pursuits, attitudinally and semiotically.

ultimately, dunn chooses to try and be a hero, on elijah’s advice. but his heroism is not the individualist morality play that the superhero (no matter how “complicated” or “tragic” ultimately enacts): it is limited in who and what it can protect (note that dunn is unable to punish or stop the violently racist or the sexual assaulters of the world, and what he can save is the fragments of a white, middle-class, suburban nuclear family), operates successfully only with collective and reciprocal participation by the supposedly victimized (who are as much saviors of him as he is of them), and ultimately marks a gesture towards vulnerability (and near self-destruction, in the process) more than dunn’s physical indomitability or any kind of self-sufficiency, as he returns from his act of rescue to seek comfort and reassurance from his wife. (this is of course, in addition to the fact that he must reach out and touch, as well as allow himself to be touched, to even perceive what he might save and what might hurt him). he is enabled, moreover, to do so only because of his position of relative privilege: he still wears his raincoat emblazoned with the word “SECURITY” to save people, after all.

and, yet, shyamalan allows himself a small note of love for the dream of the superhero: david’s perception, superhuman or not, brings a splash of unmistakable comic book-color to the world for a moment, a “villain” drenched in purple or garish red, bright orange or uncanny blue. for a moment.

“I’M NOT A MISTAKE”: the draft of a conclusion

a film about touch with a sensuousness (of wildly different aesthetic sensibilities, naturally) to rival claire denis’ most vital works, and a film about real people with the generosity and unsparing kindness all its own, and which, to me, is the most compelling and, thankfully, most prominent directorial mark over the course of his oeuvre. unbreakable, on a second viewing, has unfolded itself in my estimation as more than a major work: i think now it is a masterpiece, although one that is surrounded in shyamalan’s filmography by other masterpieces. it is a picture of precise formal control which nonetheless allows spacious room for the complexities of human psychology, and a text of considerable theoretical complexity which nonetheless possesses a lightness of presence and a total absence of ponderous self-importance. people often note the abruptness of the ending, the cold and fleeting inscription of text onscreen to mark the path of these characters’ lives, as a misstep. but what other way is there to end this but with the banal and undramatic death of two dreams, strangulated by a permeating social misery

but a wreck offers the possibility of renewal; that which appears to break survives, miraculously. lives saved, a newspaper passed gently along the same table graced earlier by the hurried retrieval of a gun are not erased that easily.

hope i’ve done this movie some justice.