Actions Written on Water

Reflections on a film: Once Upon a Time in China II (1992)

When people talk about "poetic cinema", or films that have the quality of verse, they usually have a very specific type of film in mind. Slow, languorous films about serious subjects, like war, alienation, grief, historical atrocity, or cultural and emotional displacement. Films peppered with beautifully shot natural landscapes, or scenes of urban decay, where the atmosphere of a particular place, its ghosts and memories, is evoked by the filmmaker through a series of drifting, carefully choreographed tracking shots. On the soundtrack, classical music plays as solemn voices intone their deepest and most solipsistic feelings as an aural counterpoint to the images on screen.

Plainly speaking, the term "poetic cinema" no doubt conjures up the impression of works by filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky, Terrence Malick, Abbas Kiarostami, João César Monteiro, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Wong Kar-Wai, Alice Rohrwacher, Sergei Parajanov, Derek Jarman, Maya Deren, Theo Angelopoulos, or the later films of Jean-Luc Godard, to name a few. While the work of these filmmakers is poetic, and sometimes even contains actual poetry spoken as part of the dialog, poetry itself is a form, like literature and painting, and within that form there are several different genres, schools and styles.

Dante Alighieri was a poet, but so is John Cooper Clarke, Dr. Seuss and Pam Ayres. Leonard Cohen was a poet, while Bob Dylan became one; likewise, Tupac Shakur. I'd even argue that there's a poetry in certain pop songs, which stir the soul as deeply as the poetry of the landscape, nature and the cosmos.

THE POETIC CINEMA?

The Color of Pomegranates [Sergei Paradjanov, 1969]:

The Mirror [Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975]:

The Tree of Life [Terrence Malick, 2011]:

As a result of both snobbery and inverse-snobbery, few would ever think to call an action film "poetic." However, many of the great action films of the past forty years do have a sense of poetry to them. I suspect this is because action cinema, at its core, is essentially operating on a similar level to that of the musical. These are both genres defined by the physicality of their performers, their grace and agility, as well as the presentation of the human body as a vessel for drama and spectacle. Action cinema is frequently called "balletic", not because it's an adjective that convinces the reader of the author's tremendously rich vocabulary, but because the line between ballet, as an art form, and mainstream action cinema, as a phenomenon, is incredibly faint.

Once Upon a Time in China II (1992), co-written, co-produced and directed by the legendary Tsui Hark, is a film that I wouldn't hesitate to call poetic. Melding themes of historical oppression, violence and xenophobia, alongside moments of slapstick comedy, melodrama and martial arts, it's an unashamedly mainstream film. However, in its stylization, its use of light and shadow, the movement of the camera and the way that it records bodies engaged in the most graceful and intensely choreographed movement, as well as in the generally heightened emotions of the film and its protagonists, it achieves something poetic, or something lyrical or rhythmical in nature.

Once Upon a Time in China II [Tsui Hark, 1991]:

Once Upon a Time in China II reacts both to and against the more conservative political leanings of the first installment, resulting in a work that's richer, both politically and aesthetically. Hark's cinema is liberated from convention here; the camera in perpetual motion, in step with his performers. It moves gracefully, like a flighted bird skimming the surface of a still winter lake. Like poetry written on water, the film becomes a dance between the elements, expressive and emotional.

Screenshots don't do the film justice, as the real thrill of Hark's work comes from the action, the cutting between shots and the way the actors and stunt performers express their tremendous physical abilities. Such demonstrations remind us throughout that the greatest special effect a film can contain isn't something that's been created and rendered on a computer, but the unique talent of the performers on screen.

What Hark does with Once Upon a Time in China II is take a style similar to that of Terrence Malick and apply it to the already vivid and comic-book-like stylizations of the martial arts film. So, the defining factors of the 'Malickian' aesthetic – the drifting camera, the wide angle lenses, the associative cutting between shots (which here emphasizes the minutia of the violent world in close-up against the confident wide-shots that give spatial and physical context to the giddy action) – provide a counter-point to the scenes of heroism, the knockabout comedy and the more conventional blockbuster flourishes. Hark's subsequent films, Green Snake (1993) and The Blade (1995), would push this poetic and delirious aesthetic even further, but the experience of Once Upon a Time in China II is no less brilliant.

The Drowned World

Thoughts on the book by J.G. Ballard

"The next morning he dismantled the craft, ported the sections one by one up the enormous sludge-covered slopes, hoping for a southward extension of the waterway. Around him the great banks undulated for miles, the curving dunes dotted with cuttlefish and nautiloids. The sea was no longer visible, and he was all alone with these few lifeless objects, like the debris of a vanished continuum, one dune giving way to another as he dragged the heavy fifty-gallon drums from crest to crest. Overhead the sky was dull and cloudless, a bland impassive blue, more the interior ceiling of some deep irrevocable psychosis than the storm-filled celestial sphere he had known during the previous days. At times, after he had dropped one burden, he would totter down into the hollow of the wrong dune, and find himself stumbling about the silent basins, their floors cracked into hexagonal plates, like a dreamer searching for an invisible door out of his nightmare."

- The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard, 1962

"As I wrote Empire of the Sun I could see the way in which the landscapes of Shanghai had permeated all my previous novels in disguised form, and it always struck me as odd that I should have waited 40 years to write about my wartime experiences. But I realise now that I probably was writing about them all the time, and that one of the reasons I chose to write science fiction at the beginning was that it offered me a way in which I could remake the landscapes of the England I knew in the 1960s and 1970s, in the way that the surrealists worked, to make them resemble unconsciously the landscapes of wartime Shanghai. I could flood London and the drowned world, I could reshape the everyday reality of Britain, western Europe and the United States."

- Great voices of science fiction, The Guardian, 14^th May, 2011

Despite being an early work for the writer J.G. Ballard, "The Drowned World" (1962) is nonetheless characteristic of the themes and interests that would go on to define and dominate the author's later, more celebrated books. Books such as "Concrete Island" (1974), "High Rise" (1975) and his final novel, "Kingdom Come" (2006), where microcosms of contemporary culture break down into scenes of tribal violence, or where characters isolated from the accepted niceties of polite society, find liberation in their regression to a more lawless, primordial state.

The Drowned World [J.G. Ballard, 1962]:

Originally published as a short novella in the January 1962 issue of the magazine "Science Fiction Adventures", before subsequently being expanded by Ballard into its current form, "The Drowned World" builds on the still timely issue of global warming, depicting the landscapes of Northern Europe turned by ecological disaster into a tropical lagoon overrun by exotic reptiles and dangerous creatures. However, the book eventually reveals itself to be more concerned with the standard 'Ballardian' themes of contemporary existentialism, civil disobedience, hysteria, and the descent of humanity into expressions of primal aggression.

Having spent his childhood years in Shanghai during The Second World War, and at one point finding himself a prisoner in a Japanese internment camp, Ballard recognised how thin the line is that separates societies from order into lawlessness. Wars, crises and catastrophes turn people desperate, backing them into corners, elevating the need for survival and self-preservation over rationality and reason. His characters, like so many people he must have encountered during his youth, descend in the face of this desperation, into brutality; as tribalism and general anxieties and fear wash over them like a wave.

Ballard's characters frequently embrace this degeneration into primalism, seeing themselves as modern-day (or even futuristic) variations on "Robinson Crusoe", part anthropologists, part survivalists. In this sense, the book will be of interest to fans and devotees of the author, as we can recognise where ideas that later formed the basis of remarkable books, like "Crash" (1973) and the aforementioned "Concrete Island", first bloomed into consciousness. "The Drowned World" isn't a remarkable book. It's a good book, with remarkable moments, but it finds Ballard as a merely talented young writer, before the quantum leap he would later make with The Atrocity Exhibition (1970); that endlessly controversial and experimental work that would go on to define the general cultural perception of Ballard's fiction, his imagery and his themes.

The Thin Grey Line

Speculative thoughts on a film: 1917 (2019)

Granted, I haven't seen 1917 (2019), the Sam Mendes directed WWI epic currently generating much discussion following the film's innumerable Academy Award nominations, so this post is pure conjecture; a kind of hypothetical dialog that functions on a level similar to that of thinking out loud.

At the time of writing, critics have praised Mendes's film for its technical proficiency and "event movie" status, as well as its worthy and historically significant depiction of the First World War. However, there's one specific aspect of the film's construction that has really dominated the discourse surrounding the work and its supposed claim to greatness. In short, 1917 is made up of several increasingly long takes, which, when creatively edited to disguise the moment of 'the cut', give the impression of the entire film taking place in "real-time", over the duration of a single, continuous shot.

As an experiment, this is reminiscent of two earlier films released almost twenty years ago: Timecode (2000), conceived and directed by Mike Figgis - which upped the ante by filming not one but four continuous sequences in single shots that played out simultaneously on-screen - and Russian Ark (2002), co-written and directed by Alexander Sokurov.

Timecode [Mike Figgis, 2000]:

Russian Ark [Alexander Sokurov, 2002]:

Timecode and Russian Ark were two films that took full advantage of the digital revolution that occurred at the beginning of the current century. The move towards high-profile directors like Lars von Trier, Hal Hartley, Bernard Rose, Spike Lee, Danny Boyle and others shooting acclaimed films on consumer-quality digital video was an act of liberation; not only freeing up the filmmaking process from the more cumbersome necessities of shooting on 35mm film, but resulting in pacing and imagery that would've been impossible to achieve with more conventional filmmaking methods.

This period was one of the most bold and experimental periods since the beginning of cinema itself, with directors, cinematographers and camera operators taking up the challenge to rediscover the language of film using these new tools. Tools that were considered primitive - in the sense of being accessible (and as such apparently lesser in quality) - but also ultra-modern. The disparity between the two forms completely apparent in that first wave of digital cinema, from Festen (1998) to Dancer in the Dark (2000), from Bamboozled (2000) to Hotel (2001), from 28 Days Later (2002) to Topspot (2004), where the divides between professional and unprofessional, mainstream and experimental, old and new, blurred into insignificance.

It would be tempting to say that 1917 has taken up the baton passed from Timecode to Russian Ark, to films such as Victoria (2015) and Lost in London (2017), but this would be untrue. While critics have zeroed in on the apparently single-take, fully immersive aesthetic that Mendes has adopted, it would be more accurate to say that his film has instead taken up the baton passed from Rope (1948) to Birdman (2014). In other words, it's a film that gives the impression of having been filmed in a single continuous shot, but was in fact pieced together from several different ones. The distinction is important.

1917 review [Peter Bradshaw/The Guardian, 2019]:

"And it's filmed in one extraordinary single take by cinematographer Roger Deakins, a continuous fluid travelling shot (with digital edits sneaked in...)" Arguably Britain's worst high-profile film critic Peter Bradshaw contradicting himself as he pushes the false narrative of the film having been done in a single-shot. Also, wouldn't it have been more appropriate to turn a single-shot masterpiece into a western front horror, and not the other way around? Bradshaw's take elevates formalism above historical atrocity.

Rope [Alfred Hitchcock, 1948]:

The construction of Rope, like the titular cord of death, is a continues strand, tight and unbroken. The beginning and end – isolated elements there to be "tied up" in the sense of narrative exposition – eventually becomes entwined at the precise moment of James Stewart's third act reveal, creating a twist, or should that be a noose?

Behind the scenes on Rope [photo credit: https://cinephiliabeyond.org/alfred-hitchcocks-rope/]

Rope was one of the earliest films to attempt to create the impression of a single continuous take. On one level it could be read as an experiment in recorded theatre, but that's not the case. Hitchcock was a filmmaker who revelled in the artificiality of the film medium and in the introduction of intentional creative restrictions. For Hitchcock, creating the impression of a single take was more important than shooting a film in an actual single take, and being able to achieve such a feat with the cumbersome camera equipment available in 1948 was part of the challenge.

So, what do we make of Mendes's decision to adopt this approach and to marry it to a film about survival and The First World War? It would be impossible to say without seeing the film for myself, but being an inherent cynic, I have my reservations, specifically in regards to the way the "form" is being pushed as a unique selling point to the extent of trivialising (or further trivialising) the notion of the war film, as a genre. Characters and even plot are not part of the cultural discussion here; the film has instead been reduced to its subject and method of delivery.

For those that have already seen 1917, I'd be tempted to ask: does making the film look as if it were shot in a single take add anything to the commentary on war, or is it simply a formalist gimmick? I can see the appeal of trying to make the experience more immersive; however, making combat immersive is kind of counterproductive if you want to express war as the horror it truly is.

1917 [Sam Mendes, 2019]:

Watching footage put out by the studio to further promote the massive technical achievement of Mendes and his crew set alarm bells ringing for me. The side-by-side comparison between how the film was made and the resulting image of a shell-shocked soldier fleeing across a battlefield as militias storm the trenches and bombs erupt like anxious tremors of the unconscious, signalling fears of destruction and death. The footage is visceral, epic in scope and succeeds in propelling the audience along on the soldier's journey, where the bombs and the bloodshed are designed to elicit an emotional response from the audience equivalent to that of a big-budget Hollywood action movie.

This is problematic for me for several reasons. In presenting war as a series of action set-pieces, the film, intentionally or accidentally, succeeds in making war, for lack of a better word, "thrilling." No matter how persuasively the film works to push an anti-war commentary, there will always be large factions of the audience who find the combat - and the filmmaking as illustrated in the above shots - exciting; the explosions and the gun fire, and the intensity of the performances, turning the battle scenes into something exhilarating. Without wishing to invoke Martin Scorsese and his infamous 2019 commentary on the modern superhero movie, the approach turns the spectacle of war into something closer to a theme-park ride, or even a video game.

This seems dishonest to me as it shows only the valour of war and combat and not the reality of what war is. A film like Come and See (1985) for example is immersive, but it immerses the audience in the muck and bloodshed of war and the prolonged state of horror that comes with it. Not soldiers storming trenches or trying to outrun bullets, but families rounded up and burned alive in barns, or corpses piled high alongside villages.

Come and See [Elem Klimov, 1985]:

The horror of Come and See, and why it works as an anti-war statement, comes from the film's evocation of the occupation and the unending nightmare of what it must have been like for normal people just trying to live from day to day. Not soldiers or lieutenants, but farmers, labourers, teenagers, all caught up in an unwanted intrusion that robs people of their dignity, their morality, and even their lives.

From the trailers and promotional materials, 1917 seems to fall into the same trap as Steven Spielberg's similarly acclaimed war movie Saving Private Ryan (1998). There, Spielberg worked to throw the audience headlong into the chaos and the horror of the Normandy invasion by using the cinematic form to immerse us in the experience.

Spielberg uses handheld cameras that seem to shake uncontrollably as they react to every explosion or bullet hit, disjointed cutting that turns the melee into a free-for-all, shots that are intentionally out of focus or obscured by seawater or bursts of arterial spray. He also experimented with the sound in much the same way that Klimov and his sound-designers did in Come and See, letting the explosions boom in deafening crescendos of noise and then whistling through the perforated eardrums of his characters rendered subjectively for the audience as the sound becomes muted and disorienting. Violence occurs as something surreal, something that we can barely believe, capturing the senselessness of it all.

Saving Private Ryan [Steven Spielberg, 1998]:

The sequence is astounding. If you need clarification that Spielberg is one of the great technical filmmakers, then look no further. However, despite the aesthetic brilliance of its presentation, the sequence sits uneasily within the context of the film itself. Presenting a highly manipulative and melodramatic narrative that refuses to engage with the realities of war in favour of a generic men on a mission adventure story, Saving Private Ryan is ultimately one-sided, jingoistic and effectively works to show the nobility of war-time sacrifice, and the invented valour of men killing and dying for "the greater good."

By aiming for the subjective and immersive, and by refusing to contextualise the scenes of action and violence with a stronger political and intellectual commentary on war and the impact that war has on societies, culture and humanity, Saving Private Ryan turns its combat into cinematic spectacle. So persuasive and immersive were these sequences in their stylisation they worked against the supposed anti-war commentary of the filmmakers and instead led to the further fetishizing of war and military manoeuvres in popular culture through things like the TV series Band of Brothers (2001) and video games, like the "Call of Duty" and "Medal of Honour" franchises.

Medal of Honour: Allied Assault [2015, inc., 2002]:

Know your enemy. Medal of Honour: Allied Assault carries a writing credit for Steven Spielberg. The general gameplay and historical detail are heavily modelled on Saving Private Ryan, but it's the unbroken, fully immersive, single-shot aesthetic that predicts the subsequent approach of 1917. In forcing the player to identify with these soldiers in a first-person format, the games compel the player to not only adopt a pro-war mindset, but to trivialise war atrocity by carrying out unthinking murder in the name of valour and heroism.

It's this aspect that has me concerned about Mendes's film; the presentation of war, not as a period of occupation that destroys communities, cultures and perspectives, but as something thrilling or "epic" in nature. At a time when the world and its politics is already divided and hostile to outsiders, we need war films that are defiantly "anti-war"; something that isn't reducing a historical atrocity to a formalist gimmick; something that refuses to show scenes of combat or heroism; something like Jean-Luc Godard's Notre Musique (2004), which picks the scab of the atrocities of Bosnia and Herzegovina as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were still raging, and shows the struggle of people to continue on when the scars of war remain from generation to generation.

Again, I haven't seen Mendes's film, so this is all just an obscure line of thought on my part and I'm happy to be proven wrong. I just wonder what this particular visual aesthetic is meant to communicate about war, as both a reality and an ideology. Doesn't this approach turn war into an aesthetic fetish that dehumanises and depoliticises the true historical significance of the event and the profound impact it had on people? Time will tell.

Roadside Picnic

Thoughts on the book by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

I only knew of the brothers Strugatsky from the various film adaptations of their works. Specifically, the film Stalker (1979) by Andrei Tarkovsky, which is adapted from the book in question, and Hard to be a God (2013) by Aleksei German, based on the book of the same name.

Stalker has been one of my favourite films since I first discovered it during my teenage years and began those first tentative, adolescent steps towards a cinema made outside of the Hollywood mainstream.

To this day, the film's formalist aesthetic - its long tracking shots and carefully choreographed camera movements, its cross-cutting between images of both colour and sepia-tinted monochrome, its voice-over digressions and quoted poetry, its foggy landscapes and falling rain, its wind pushing through blades of grass and its preoccupation with ruined architectural spaces - remain part of my understanding of what many critics would call "pure cinema"; something that can't be translated to any other medium, but has to be experienced through that combination of sound and moving pictures, which only film (or visual content) can convey.

Stalker [Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979]:

While punctuated by earlier scenes of action and even a moment of suspense, Tarkovsky's film is a largely slow, vaguely academic treatise on philosophical and metaphysical themes. Like his earlier film, Solaris (1972), Stalker is recognised as a work of science-fiction, but unlike that earlier adaptation of the book by Stanisław Lem, the science-fiction elements have been made vague; pushed to the background of a story that's more concerned with atmosphere, imagery and ideas. Stalker gives the impression of themes like extra-terrestrial visitation, post-nuclear devastation, telekinesis and mutation, but without necessarily having to commit to an explanation as to why these events have occurred.

Approaching "Roadside Picnic" with an impression of what the book might be like from having seen and loved Tarkovsky's film was quite an experience. While the book expresses the same basic plot – a scavenger, known as a 'stalker', leads willing participants into a dangerous hinterland known as 'the zone', which has been transformed by an alien visitation – the structure, character and general tone of the book is remarkably different.

Roadside Picnic [Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, 1972]:

While Tarkovsky's film is quiet and reflective, "Roadside Picnic" has the tone of a hardboiled 40s detective novel. The character is cynical, violent and world-weary. He's closer to Harrison Ford's characters in either Star Wars (1977) or Blade Runner (1982) than the portrayal by Alexander Kaidanovsky in the subsequent film. The book's protagonist is a professional who's in it for the money; conflicted and marked by past experiences, and in a sense as much a prisoner of the lifestyle and the cruel economic realities of the brutal world that he inhabits.

The book is fragmented; it begins with a television interview (written in the same format), in which characters that drift in and out of the narrative as peripheral figures set-up the backstory and exposition. From here the book presents different episodes of the Stalker's life, establishing a narrative that feels more like a mosaic. Something made up of incredibly small, seemingly disconnected details that only become clear the further we step away from it.

Anyone going into the book expecting something akin to Tarkovsky's film will be disappointed. But the book is its own beast, and while fragmentary and episodic, I found it completely compelling. The atmosphere and world that is evoked by the brothers Strugatsky and the slow accumulation of details which add to our understanding of the character of the Stalker are each brilliant, with the writing teasing out moments of suspense, action, horror, humour and even the same philosophical concerns that Tarkovsky had elaborated upon in his subsequent film. In particular, the discussion that gives the book its title, "Roadside Picnic", is beautifully written, expressing the existential anxiety of human beings left feeling deficient or insignificant when touched by the presence of something greater than themselves.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky [Photographer unknown]:

"Roadside Picnic" confounded my expectations, but it turned out to be a great work of pulp science-fiction. Having never read anything penned by the brothers Strugatsky, the book in question has definitely left me interested in experiencing more of their work. "Hard to be a God" (1964) is already of interest because of its connection to German's bizarre and (intentionally) alienating film, but I'm also keen to read the beautifully titled "Ugly Swans" (1972) and "The Doomed City" (1988).

After finishing the book, I was compelled to return to Tarkovsky's film to contrast and compare the differences between the two works. I think Tarkovsky and his collaborators capture an atmosphere of 'the zone' that exists in the book, but it's genuinely remarkable that Tarkovsky read "Roadside Picnic" and arrived at the character and narrative found in the finished film. It feels like he adapted the film from a plot synopsis rather than the book itself. That said, Stalker remains an absolute marvel and one of the great works of twentieth-century cinema.

While often considered a key work of the supposed 'slow cinema' movement, the first half of Stalker is actually briskly paced and relatively action packed; easing us into a mesmerising second-act expedition that connects the physical to the metaphysical in a profoundly dramatic way. Tarkovsky's aesthetic had matured into something unique here; his reflections on nature and existence finding the perfect expression in both content and form.

The Current Cinema

A Question of Aesthetics?

Avengers: Endgame [Joe & Anthony Russo, 2019]:

Image credits: Larry Wright @refocusedmedia [Twitter] / Marvel Studios

The Politics of Hope

Glass vs. Joker

Last year, I wrote a bit about the recent M. Night Shyamalan film, Glass (2019). On release, Shyamalan's film was largely pilloried by American critics who claimed at the time to be tired of the superhero sub-genre, only to subsequently praise the mega-budgeted Captain Marvel (2019) and Avengers: Endgame (also 2019) as pinnacles of blockbuster cinema. As the same critics now busy themselves with the pointless task of comprising the best and worst films released during the past year, it makes me sad to think that Shyamalan's personal and eccentric vision will no doubt end up further denigrated by its inclusion on many of these "worst of" listings.

Despite its flaws, Glass remains a bold and original work that stands outside of the conventions of any other superhero movie released in the last two decades. A film that UK critic Mark Kermode compared favourably to the cult works of William Peter Blatty - specifically The Ninth Configuration (1980) - while fellow critic Mark Cousins compared it favourably to The Testament of Orpheus (1960) by Jean Cocteau.

Glass [M. Night Shyamalan, 2019]:

Corridors of the mind: Like The Ninth Configuration, the hospital becomes a physical representation of the unconscious state; the cerebral space where the three characters as manifestations of the "id", the "ego" and the "super ego", battle for supremacy.

However, this end of year concern isn't the only reason why I'm thinking about the film again. Followers of contemporary British politics will know that last month the country voted almost unanimously for the Conservative government to remain in power for the next five years.

Led by bumbling Etonian elite Boris Johnson - a man who compared Muslim women in Niqābs to "ninjas" and "letter boxes”, called black people "piccaninnies with watermelon smiles", referred to homosexual men as "bum-boys" and called working class people "lazy, stupid and feckless" - the Conservative party is now free to continue its campaign of austerity, cruelty and division. A campaign that over the last ten years has seen amenities privatized by massive corporations that refuse to pay tax, services cut or underfunded to the point of failure, benefits for people with disabilities and learning difficulties removed completely, and student loans increased to the point that a good education is now something that only the very privileged can afford.

Most of our town centres are dead and dying. Police funding has been massively cut to the point that violent crime statistics have skyrocketed in the last five years, with hate-crimes increasing exponentially. The future of our National Health Service is at risk and continual focus on Brexit has shown to the world that the British are a nation of bigots and racists that can't get along with any other country unless seeing themselves as superior to them.

That the majority of voters in the UK looked at these last ten years of toxic Conservative leadership and thought: "Yes please, five more years of that!", is truly dispiriting, and while I attempt to remain respectful of others' political choices, I can't help feeling ashamed that this is now the general attitude of the country I grew up in (especially as the result has further widened the political and personal divide between England and our neighbouring countries, Scotland, Ireland and Wales).

But how does this relate to Glass? At the end of Shyamalan's film, three characters marked by grief and trauma, sit together on a bench in the middle of the busy 30^th Street train station in Philadelphia (significantly: "the city of brotherly love.") Crossing the divides between age, race and gender, the three characters hold hands and together commit to an act of defiance. Their end-goal? To overthrow the insidious forces that attempt to control and regulate the general populace; to prove to the world that every one of us is remarkable, that every one of us has the power to be extraordinary; to demonstrate that if we work together we can bring about positive change.

Glass: Behind the Scenes Footage [Unknown, 2019]:

I was unable to source an adequate screenshot of the scene in question, so this behind the scenes footage will have to suffice.

Glass [M. Night Shyamalan, 2019]:

Physical gestures and hand-holding are major visual themes in Shyamalan's work. It's often a way for characters to connect or to show their true intentions. Such moments frequently illustrate characters at their most vulnerable; letting down their defences or letting another character in on a secret.

Praying with Anger [M. Night Shyamalan, 1992]:

The Village [M. Night Shyamalan, 2004]:

The Happening [M. Night Shyamalan, 2008]:

Arriving at the end of the film, this connection between characters remains a moment of pure hope and positivity; a complete subversion of the usual expectation of the superhero or comic book movie, where the requirement is for a grand battle in which cities are destroyed, the heroes vanquish the villains, and a beam of light is fired into the sky.

The final battle in Shyamalan's film is less a bang than a whimper, but it's necessary in showing its audience that heroism is not about who can punch the hardest or who can take the most punishment, it's about passive acts of courage. Not beating and abusing mentally ill people whose delusions have made them believe that they have superpowers, but by honouring those same people and standing up against governments and organizations that want to deny each of us our own identities and differences, our strengths and weaknesses, and anything else that mark us out as unique and extraordinary human beings.

The politics of Glass are the politics of hope, which is perhaps why the film was received with such cynicism. Because mainstream critics recognized that they are part of these organizations that tell people they're worthless; that punish those that attempt to be different; that destroy those that seek to push the message that each of us is capable of great change. The critics, who saw Shyamalan's anti-authoritarian, anti-government commentary, were blinded by it; seeing only a critique of themselves and their poor profession.

Glass [M. Night Shyamalan, 2019]:

A moment of reflection: Dr. Ellie Staple, named after the piece of stationary that holds the pages of comic books together, becomes a critical stand-in. The supposed voice of reason or authority that tells these characters they're ordinary; that they're unremarkable.

Lady in the Water [M. Night Shyamalan, 2006]:

A moment of reflection: Dr. Staple connects back to one of the most controversial characters in Shyamalan's oeuvre; the entertainment critic Mr. Farber. Farber stands in judgement over the events of the film, misreading the wonder and magic of the story unfolding through an attitude of cold cynicism.

Unbreakable [M. Night Shyamalan, 2000]:

In the film's reconfiguration of the title character, Mr. Glass, from his appearance in the earlier Unbreakable (2000) to his function in the film in question, Shyamalan has turned the character from a proto-terrorist into an almost Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders type figure; someone going up against an organization that wants to keep people in their place so as to profit from them; someone pushing a message of hope and collaboration.

As Corbyn, Sanders and others like them have been vanquished and denigrated by cruel populists like Johnson, or the American president Donald J. Trump, so Glass was vanquished by the designer nihilism of another comic book movie, the Todd Philips directed Joker (2019).

Praised by critics for its novelty of presenting the famous comic book villain as if it were a serious psychological study on mental illness, Joker aims for profundity, but merely wallows in its own unpleasantness. Rather than explore mental illness as a serious condition it merely exploits it, as a window dressing. Its existentialism is shallow and third hand; the product of someone that has never read the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Søren Kierkegaard or Immanuel Kant, but has seen the films of Martin Scorsese, specifically Taxi Driver (1976) and The King of Comedy (1982), and has borrowed from them, liberally.

Joker [Todd Philips, 2019]:

The King of Comedy [Martin Scorsese, 1982]:

Nothing about Joker is original or authentic. Its director, Todd Philips, made his name directing atrocious comedy films like Road Trip (2000), Old School (2003) and The Hangover trilogy (2009-2013); films that revelled in sexism, racism and homophobia, that were crass and morally repugnant, that were defined by a poor, televisual aesthetic. In interviews Philips claims to have turned to drama because comedy has been ruined by millennial "snowflakes"; the culture is apparently so "woke" that audiences don't appreciate the Philips brand of offensive humour. It's no surprise then that Joker has played into the mindset of people like Jordan B. Peterson and Paul Joseph Watson; cultural commentators who see the film's defiantly nihilistic, offensive right-wing aspects as a blow to the supposed suppression of political correctness.

Paul Joseph Watson repeatedly aligning himself with the Joker as a right-wing "anti-SJW" icon.

Throughout his career, Shyamalan's innovations have been denied him. With Unbreakable, he wasn't simply ahead of the curve in creating a modern-day superhero movie, he was creating a serious, psychological superhero movie that approached the sub-genre as if it were a gritty procedural. Shyamalan's film received mixed reviews with many critics calling the film silly, joyless and pretentious. Cut to five years later, when Christopher Nolan directed Batman Begins (2005), and the same stylisation and aesthetic was praised as game changing.

We're seeing the same thing now with Joker being touted as an original work, despite Shyamalan directing arguably the first gritty supervillain origin story with Split (2016) several years earlier. Once again, those that control the narrative have the power to re-write history and Shyamalan's innovations are credited to someone else.

Glass isn't as great as those earlier Shyamalan films, but it's nonetheless a work that connects to the mood of the day and feels - in its final moments at least - like a necessary healing, especially for our countries that have lost sight of what it means to see others as friends and allies. It's a film that shows its surviving characters moving towards something hopeful, something positive, towards genuine change. You can balk at the film's slow pace, its weird tone, its intentionally anti-climactic final face-off (though no critic would balk at these things if the film were a foreign-language art-movie or had been directed by some hitherto unknown A24 sponsored Wizkid), but you can't deny its positive intentions and its message of hope.