If the fool were to persist in his folly, he would become wise.

- William Blake

The film Unbreakable is remarkable for a great many reasons but primarily because it stands out as a genuine film with something to say rather than a market research driven product, carefully skewed to capture demographic groups. This is a film that does the almost unthinkable by today's standards; it makes demands of its viewers instead of giving them already chewed bubble gum for the mind. It is a far more mature and serious film than the director's flashy but still valuable debut, The Sixth Sense. If Manoj "Night" Shyamalan keeps this up he is bidding fair to become one on the most important directors of the 21st century.

At the outset let me say that his so called surprise endings are no surprise at all. It is because people have become systematically ignorant of dramatic structure that he is able to pull off these effects. Anybody with the basic level of appreciation of the rules of dramatic construction (like an Elizabethan theatre audience) would have been able to work out the so-called surprises. In a classical narrative the first rule is that no element be introduced unless it has a relevance to the overall plot, and that there be no "surprises' which are not intrinsically present in the plot and indeed are an inevitable outcome of its unfolding. As in the first movie, the clues are scattered all over the place and you can actually go back and work out a coherent pattern where the director repeatedly cues in the audience as to what is coming. This is not a detraction of Night's work. It is actually both good and great that somebody is again making movies in the classical narrative pattern.

What is really groundbreaking here is that the comic book industry gets a serious look at. This was inevitable. After all films have become more and more like comic books, with The Matrix being the ultimate comic book. That movie was pitched to its producers not as a script but as a fully drawn comic book! The comics have grown up a long time back and they are serious adult reading nowadays, but the rest of the media was a bit slow in realizing that they are not kiddy-reads any more. This dichotomy is brilliantly captured in the sequence where Samuel Jackson has just finished a remarkably insightful monologue into the intricacies of comic art, and the buyer wants to buy the original artwork for his four-year-old son! Jackson's angry outburst at such philistines does not reflect only the angst of the comic reader but it also serves as a metaphor for his feeling out of step with the times. The exposition he gives on the meaning of comics and how they represent a dying tradition of communicating wisdom through visuals is alone worth the price of admission. When was the last time you saw a film that took ideas seriously? He sees deeper and more wisely than his fellow men but he has not found anybody who understands him. His life is a desperate search for that understanding and the consequent validation it will provide.

The Jackson character is actually quite unlikable, even though as a physically impaired person he should get the audience sympathy. It is a sign of Night's maturity that he does not succumb to such cliché. It is also a level of psychological astuteness rarely seen on screen when the therapist wife of the Willis character explains to their son that sometimes people who are hurt a lot in the their body also become hurt in their mind and begin to think and do pretty weird things. This by the way is one of the clearest indications of the fact that Jackson will turn out to be the villain. It is a measure of his talent that Jackson should have spent most of 1999 in knee length Armani leather jackets, first for Shaft and then for Unbreakable and yet been two characters who are not in any way related. The rage the comic book dealer feels is a rage against fate, for having trapped him in a body that break so easily while he has a mind that is easily superior to the general run of mankind. Any little thing is enough to break him apart and he spends most of his time in hospital healing and mending limbs that shatter like glass. So much imbalance is cosmically untenable, he has enough wisdom to realize that. He begins this desperate search for his polar opposite, and finds him in Bruce Willis, a non-too-bright security guard who is the sole survivor of a horrific train crash.

Willis has never been sick in his life. He has never had an accident in his life. No wounds, no scratches, no colds, no headaches, nothing. All this robust good health does not do him any good, his marriage is as good as over and he is planning to go to New York. The grimy meaninglessness of his life is found in his slipping his wedding ring off when he goes to the city for his interview for a new job. His boss in Philadelphia gives him a forty- dollar raise when he points out that he has never taken a day off work. Such are the dreary ambits of his life. His wife however thinks his miraculous escape is a chance to begin anew. Jackson keeps needling Willis into discovering ever-fresh aspects of his abilities. The security guard soon finds himself lifting weights over a hundred pounds above what he thought was his maximum capacity. Jackson also makes him ponder why he choose to be a security guard protecting people, and why he has the ability to sense trouble makers and psychically see their concealed weapons. Willis is a super-hero, with no clue about it!

Willis is having none of this. He is a hero in obscurity and that is where he prefers to be.
To resist the call of one's inherent hero-nature is however a devastating thing to do and accounts for the aridity of his life. He argues that he is not the invulnerable superman Jackson insists he be. Did he not lose out on a great athletic career because of a crash that permanently disabled him from playing football? This is actually a lie and they both know it. He faked the accident because his then girlfriend and now wife would never have married a football player. As the sardonic Jackson says in one of the most elegantly harrowing moments of the film, "You gave it up for love, and that is supposed to be forever isn't it?" The point being made is that you cannot be loved if you are living an inauthentic life, if you are not being what you truly are. Willis has been in flight from his talent and ability all his life and is paying the price for conforming to society's mores. You cannot live by denying your essential nature. Jackson recognizes that he is special and will not let him off the hook, forcing him to confront his destiny.

The harried Willis finally accepts that he may have special abilities. He capitulates when Jackson explains away his near drowning as a child as the one weakness that all super-heroes have. It is a weakness that he too shares with the hero, the common factor that links two people on the opposite ends of the same spectrum of human possibility. On the advice of Jackson Willis goes to the suburban train station in a sequence that has been seen countless times before in the Batman books. He is waiting to intervene in a major crime. The flotsam and jetsam of society swirl around him, color-coded in red, while law-abiding society passes by in somber gray and blacks. It is an astonishing sequence and the film takes a dialogue sound break for over ten minutes as it follows his adventure, operating on pure visual narrative alone. He lets the petty criminals and the shoplifters go his abilities are not to be trivialized by dealing with minor crimes. Finally his pre-natural senses alert him to a murderer and he follows the man to the scene of his crime and saves the children in the house from being murdered like their parents. He is even pushed into a swimming pool and almost drowns. This is the classic first adventure of the hero that almost ends in disaster. He beats the criminal into unconsciousness and like all good comic heroes' preserves his secret identity. His raincoat makes him look like a Jedi Knight and the papers next day call him by the generic "Hero".

An exultant Willis feels alive for the first time in years. He makes love to his wife, symbolizing his return to living, and his adoring son shares the secret that his dad has begun his super-hero career. He then goes to report his success to Jackson but the ominous warnings now pile on too fast to be ignored. His wife has already suggested that they call the police next time the peculiar and disruptive Jackson initiates contact and Willis did not disagree. The comic dealer's mother too explains the symbiotic relationship between hero and villain. When Willis touches Jackson for the first time in a loving handshake, he gets a cognitive flash which appalls him. Jackson had been killing people all over the world in the attempt to flush out his polar opposite! He had been triggering off large-scale acts of sabotage to find the one person who would be miraculously unharmed.

He becomes a true super villain, a genuine monster. And yet in ghastly sort of way his actions make sense. His sense of resentment against the taunts of the world and the unfairness of his disease had made him evil. He is intelligent enough to recognize that he will never stop on his own. He has to be stopped and only the person who is inextricably linked to him, the Hero-Shadow, can do so. It is a bizarre and revolting method of seeking a cure, but his compulsions drive him. He cannot be anything other than what he is, evil because of his circumstances, and there is a grim grandeur in his acceptance of that role.

His determination to find the hero is actually the only way his viciously brilliant intelligence will cease to inflict misery upon the world. This is the mythic combat, restoring the equilibrium of a world so seriously out of joint that it creates a Mister Glass, a man so fragile that his bones were broken while he was being born! The only way such a monstrous Cosmic Joke can be justified is to find the other polarity and turn him loose to do good in the world. He will go to prison but the good that the hero will do will ultimately balance out the evil he has performed. Perhaps it will even turn out that more good than evil will ultimately result. Glass is clever enough to appreciate the irony that the world would not have gained this protector without his evil deeds to pave the way. It is again a mythically valid point.The births of both Krishna and Jesus were accompanied by the slaughter of innocents. So much good cannot enter the world without a price being paid. Glass is consciously aware of that and he was hastening the process.