ZONE FILM CHALLENGE: A MOVIE WITHOUT A NOUN IN THE TITLE
John: Good evening Mr. and Mrs. America and All the Ships at Sea, welcome back to the Zone Film Challenge. Today’s prompt is one we just picked out of the barrel and found we had quite a good time with; A Movie Without a Noun in the Title. Lotta good ones we could have done for this one.
Alex: Lotta fun ones.
John: Certainly. Tony Scott’s Unstoppable.
Alex: There were a few Bruce Willis ones we looked at actually; Die Hard, Live Free or Die Hard.
John: Really all of them except A Good Day to Die Hard.
Alex: Die Hard With a Vengeance also has a noun. Also Die Hard 2: Die Harder was out because I was unsure if number counted as a noun.
John: Good question.
Alex: I didn’t think too hard on it.
John: You didn’t Die too Hard on it you mean.
Alex: I thought of Unbreakable, the subject of today’s discussion, more or less immediately. I’d never seen it before and it felt like a big blind spot so I selected it and it was… I mean, yeah, man. It doesn’t have a noun in the title that’s for damn sure.
John: It does not! That’s for certain. A blind spot for me as well. This is talked about as the other unambiguously good M. Night Shyamalan movie along with Sixth Sense. Before the long journey down into the depths with Last Airbender and Lady in the Water.
Alex: Yeah his late 2000s run is notorious, up until basically The Visit. Now he’s a punchline but the reaction has definitely mellowed.
John: Not equate the two, they’re very different directors, but he’s almost become and institution within the business the same way Tony Scott did. It’s kitsch to a degree. You won’t always like what M. Dog is cooking up but it’s always gonna be unmistakably his stuff. You’re gonna get M. Dog.
Alex: He does have some commonality with Tony Scott. M. Night’s got this thing were he’s always shooting in and around Pennsylvania, except for Old. He’s usually operating from original material, of which Unbreakable certainly is. He rarely adapts things, only Old and Last Airbender are adaptations. He’s an interesting modern director because when he started with Sixth Sense he was touted by Entertainment Weekly, I think, as the “Next Spielberg.”
John: Boy you wanna crush somebody with expectations. You did it.
Alex: One of the meanest things you can do to someone.
John: To not get lost in the crowd of people looking to dunk on M. Night let’s just examine what we have on the plate in front of us here. We have a Philadelphia film, starring two of the most essential American actors of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, with a pretty interesting premise that has a lot of potential, shot in a variety of very striking long takes. You couldn’t muster more than a “meh” and I actively disliked it. So let’s just dig into why. What exactly did we find so not good about Unbreakable?
Alex:
I hate to hit M. Night Shyamalan with any more derision, especially retroactively. And though it bums me out to say it, Shyamalan’s cult hit Unbreakable did not impress. For all of its communicated passion for the medium of superhero comics, the movie seems too afraid to unmoor itself from reality. Although undoubtedly the point, releasing in the aftermath of the disastrous Batman & Robin, Unbreakable often feels too much like an academic exercise made during a fallow period in the superhero genre. Its greatest sin is that it is unexcited by itself — an unfortunate sign of things to come.
Unbreakable follows David Dunn [Bruce Willis], an ordinary Manayunkian who survives a train derailing unscathed. In the aftermath of the incident, he meets with a Philadelphian, Elijah Price, [Samuel L. Jackson] who helps Dunn understand who he is — a human gifted with super strength and near invulnerability — in short, a superhero right out of the comic books. What follows is a grounded examination of what it would be like to develop superpowers in the real world — no flying, no giant robots running amok downtown, and no Bat Credit Card. It’s an engaging premise — a normal superhero story stripped down to its essentials, minimal grit and no glamor. Though, once you remove the grit and glam from the cape comic — what is left? Unbreakable never figured that out.
When the film was released in 2000, Touchstone promoted it as a thriller, like Shyamalan’s megahit The Sixth Sense. This marketing boondoggle plagued the movie’s reputation and a significant chunk of this movie feels like it’s trying to obfuscate that Dunn is a superhero. Shyamalan is on record as saying he wanted it promoted as a superhero film so it is odd that the film spins its wheels on that discovery. In the modern day, it is common knowledge that Unbreakable is a superhero film — that surprise is gone, but was it ever supposed to be a surprise? And if it wasn’t a surprise, then why spend so much time waltzing around the superheroics? Perhaps this is due to the abundance of superhero films nowadays but my patience has grown thin for these origin stories.
Respect must be paid to the clever ways the film strips down its heroes and villains. No one’s wearing any tights, cowls, or capes. Instead David dons a rain slick — practical gear that obscures his appearance from cameras while also looking…slick. By the nature of the comic book rivalry, the villain must be the hero’s opposite — which Elijah is superficially — but his brittleness makes it so even his powerset is a foil to David’s super strength. In contrasting the hero and villain so binarily, Shyamalan plays to one of the comic medium’s biggest strengths; its ability to make what should seem trite and obvious instead seem neat and clever.
The film briefly detours to allow Shyamalan to gush about the importance of comics. Elijah, a comic researcher gushes about how the comic book is following in the tradition of visual communication. He compares them to hieroglyphics, cuneiform tablets. It’s a smart thesis statement but Shyamalan lets it rest there and never makes another connection. By contrast, Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, released the same year, also loves comic books and examines them as examples of outsider art — created by Jewish Americans to tell fantastical stories designed not just to entertain but to communicate important feelings about being a part of an out-group in America. Unbreakable is missing something like this, the skeleton is there but the marrow and muscle isn’t.
Instead, Unbreakable tries to make a case for the movie as the co-conspirator to the comic book in visual communication. The lengths the film goes to make this case is admirable but it doesn’t make a winning argument. In this endless harvest season of superhero films, there still is not much like Unbreakable which will undoubtedly make it appealing to cape die-hards but for those still unimpressed by the genre’s offerings, Unbreakable is subject to most of the annoyances that still plague the genre today. Despite its enthusiasm for comic books, it still seems embarrassed by the camp elements essential to pulping cape comics. How is Bruce’s rain slick much different than Marvel Studios taking Captain America’s little helmet wings off? And can Unbreakable’s feet be held to the fire for desaturating the comic book film or should Christopher Nolan carry the whole burden?
John:
Over this past weekend I had the conversation every comics enthusiast is regrettably familiar with in this day and age. A co-worker of mine expressed her enthusiasm for some recent lore development within the ever-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe. She was curious. She wanted to know more. Immerse herself the minutiae of the source material that had been lost in translation to a new medium. Like an older sibling saying Santa Claus isn’t real I was forced to tell her, for her own sake, that it was probably pointless.
Picking up any ongoing comic from the big two American publishers is nigh impossible for any casual reader. Any character shown to turn a profit will be used to milk the reader for as much money per month as possible (there’s like twelve Batman monthlies now) or diluted through over-saturation (Marvel still hasn’t found a book they won’t shove Wolverine into for a sales bump). Oh but that’s new stuff, you say, I can get to that later, what if I just want to get started? I like Batman. What Batman comic should I read first?
Ah well here’s Batman: Year One, but that’s outside continuity. If you wanted to beginning of that you could go all the way back and read Bob Kane’s legendary Detective Comics #27, from 1939. But that era of comics can feel very dated, especially to readers with the gall to be neither white nor a dude.
So maybe you could jump forward to the beginning of the Denny O’Neil Batman run, more or less considered the start of the Dark Knight’s modern era. That starts with Detective Comics #395 from 1969, but O’Neill did a lot of jumping around between Detective Comics and the mainline Batman book so that might not be ideal for a beginner.
But DC did soft-relaunch their whole continuity a few years back (the notorious “New 52”) so maybe just start there. Tom King had a very well regarded Batman run after that relaunch but he’s also a former CIA agent so you may find that politically icky (even if a lot of his best stuff is about how he hates himself for having done it). Grant Morrison also had a pretty great run around that time as well but it drew on a lot of Batman deep lore stuff that had been in mothballs since that 60s and 70s O’Neil era and- oh just forget it.
Here, have a manga. You read the one that says “1” on the side first. Then “2” and so on and so forth.
I’m meant to be writing about a movie here. Sorry. I didn’t find it particularly interesting.
Unbreakable managed to push a few of my least favorite buttons. Its insistence on joyless, staid, “grown-up” grayness took me back to the bad old days of the early-aughts. A time in which superhero films were still withering in the shadow of Joel Schumacher’s towering Bat-Codpiece. The comics may have been even worse off. The industry as a whole fell victim to a severe sales bubble throughout the nineties, culminating in Marvel comics filing for bankruptcy as the new millennium beckoned.
I believe M. Night Shyamalan has a real degree of love for comics as an art form. He just couldn’t get that love across in this film. Perhaps he was afraid to. He’d been christened the next big thing in the wake of The Sixth Sense. Bowing down at the altar of children’s funnybooks might offend the cultural arbiters who’d spent the years since his debut feature putting all that shine on his name. Lord knows that was Kevin Smith’s mistake. Film critics all over America never forgave him for not being the gentile Woody Allen they wanted him to be. They sat down to watch Mallrats and realized they’d have to disavow all that praise they lavished on Clerks. M. Dog didn’t want to be seen as just another developmentally arrested Gen X-er. So he took a scholarly, clinical approach. It’s not just comics! It’s cultural transference! Visual communication of oral tradition! My self-insert mouthpiece doesn’t own anything so garish as a comics shop it’s an art gallery! Bang! Boom! Pow! Comics aren’t just for kids!
I hate watching new media sand off all its fun, interesting edges so it can better slide down the gullet of some “high culture” gourmand and be declared a momentarily interesting little trifle. Good news is that in this day and age none of it matters. High culture is dead. High art is dead. The internet killed it all. The average New York Times culture columnist with an MFA is less influential than a YouTuber with a high school diploma. Whether you get your bag by conducting a symphony orchestra or by vlogging until you’ve turned your life into a shittier version of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, it’s all the same so long as the checks clear. Long live the devolution baybay.
This is where I’m meant to point to the capes, cowls, boots, and masks saturating our modern film landscape as evidence of how far we’ve come since then. I don’t think that’s actually true. I think the pendulum has just swung back in the opposite direction. Now we swaddle it all in sickly sweet irony, inviting the audience to wink and nod. Now instead of stripping it down, talking about form or archetype, we blow it up, making the movies just as bloated and inaccessible to new fans as the comics are. Simultaneously disposable and all-encompassing. Serious art for adults but also just mass market entertainment not meant to be critiqued with any rigor. Same as it ever was.
John: It doesn’t do it for me. There are some good shots in this. There’s some great work from Sam L, there’s some good set-dressing, set design, costume design. The movie just doesn’t come together.
Alex: Not at all. I don’t find it visually fulfilling or spiritually fulfilling. I’ve seen a lot of praise for the film. As a Philadelphia film I like it. It feels like it takes place in Philadelphia and that’s a really good location to set a story like this. I just don’t think that this movie does what it needs to do. It’s not pulpy enough to be engaging and doesn’t ask enough probing questions to be intellectually stimulating. It lights the fuse but the flame gets washed out. It never reaches an explosive moment, which is partially the point, but even the low-key family stuff is a total wash. Just from a viewers perspective this film lacks significant tension. I know what the main guy’s deal is. I don’t care about his family.
John: It’s never good to feel like you’re about ana ct of plot development ahead of all the characters in the movie. Like you can know more than all the characters in the movie. A lot of the best movies let you know more than all the characters. But I feel like I’m just waiting too long for the other show to drop. I really do think a lot of this stuff would have just worked better in a comic book.
Alex: I think so too!
John: Comics readers love it when you talk about comics form and history in your comic. That’s like almost all of Alan Moore’s work!
Alex: Or Grant Morrison’s!
NEXT WEEK: A CONTROVERSIAL BOOK ADAPTATION
