The Unbreakable Trilogy and the New Hero

How Shyamalan’s trilogy is exceptionally modern

This January, Hollywood finished wrapping up a new story that began with the millennium. It’s news. More often than not, the fictional work that’s produced in the land of dreams are retellings of old stories. This time, however, the unbreakable trilogy, written, produced and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, came to boldly challenge the archetypal hero we know only too well.

Notice that having watched Unbreakable (2000), Split (2016) and Glass (2019) won't be a requirement to follow the following, as the material will be self-contained, in as much as the discussion is about the theme and message of the story. That said, the films are good. It’s okay to watch them.

[Warning, this article contains theme spoilers. They don’t reveal events or how the story ends, though]

The unbreakable trilogy presents the stories of three men, each of which with his own film. They are all people who are marked by the struggle of life, who live trying to find a purpose that transcends their suffering.

The first movie, Unbreakable, tells the story of David Dunn, a security guard who can’t be injured, and has a sixth sense for seeing other people’s past crimes. His path to the discovery of himself and eventually to heroism is opened by Elijah Price, a comic book expert who suffers from osteogenesis imperfecta (brittle bone disease).

The second movie, Split, tells the story of Kevin Crumb, a zoo employee with 23 personalities and a tough childhood, oppressed by his own mother. With the help and opposition of Casey Cooke, one of his captives, and of Dr. Karen Fletcher, his therapist, Kevin’s multiple personalities fight among themselves to either deny or unleash The Beast, an animal-like creature who feeds on the impure young — those who have not suffered.

The third movie, Glass, while showing the power of Elijah’s mind, develops the classic biaxial opposition, very common in comics and superhero stories. At one level, heroes oppose villains, and vice versa: It’s the overseer (David) contending with both The Horde (Kevin) and Mr. Glass (Elijah). The other axis is instantiated by the war of superhumans versus anti-superhumans.

The unbreakable trilogy is a foundation enterprise. It makes reference to all the fictional work that’s been developed around the idea of superheroes while questioning and enhancing its core message. The theory that underlies this new stories can be summarized by these to premises, one inherited from legacy fiction, the other, unexpected:

This new superhero idea is posited as a rereading of the traditional one. We have to recap the good old archetype to better understand the move.

Heroes are an indispensable part of a culture. They establish the model to be acted out by a population. They are the culmination of the moral call for good behavior. The hero ideal transcends society by calling on the individual to act instead of merely behaving. It’s an invitation to be good beyond the convenient and the lawful. This greater goodness means finding your own purpose, living to your potential, contending with the world’s inherent difficulties and malevolence.

The hero I refer to here is not only represented by comic book characters or film stars. They are also the motive of books, myths, and folk tales. They are the engine of Christian tradition and the raison d’être of Greek cosmogony. Spider-Man, Andy Dufresne, Anna Karenina, Hercules, Rocky Balboa, Snow White, they’re all models for all of us, who need a goal and good and bad examples to live better.

Jordan Peterson on Maps of Meaning develops the hero idea up to the point of conceptualizing it as an archetype. For him, our brains are by nature organized so that we can easily accommodate and act out the hero manifested around us. It’s not as if they were artificially created by someone.

The process is more like a feedback cycle. We slowly shape the stories we create while being shaped by them. This archetypal hero is exactly the hero we are used to. We’ve created them because they were best for the flourishing of our species. In the words of Dr. Peterson

There’s an important shift of emphasis from the traditional hero to Shyamalan’s. The first seeks to represent good and evil while calling for the emulation of his behavior. Shyamalan’s hero and villains are primarily a call for action, rather than an example. They carry a message of empowerment based on the difficulties you’ve experienced and on the suffering you went through.

This difference is very important. The traditional heroes are there as a passive invitation for the greater good. Passive because it invites for action only indirectly, through our natural instinct for pursuing the admirable.

The unbreakable hero talks to you in your individuality. He seduces, inviting you to fight your own problems as mundane as they might be. Not primarily because they are good for humanity but because they are necessary to mitigate the suffering of your life. The Horde speaks to one of his hostages in these terms

The unbreakable hero is also a libertarian. The films show that superpowers are the result of the force of will to overcome the difficulties of life, especially under traumatic experiences. This echoes nicely Matthew 7,

Also, M. Night Shyamalan puts a very insightful emphasis on the mutualistic relation between David and Elijah, archrivals-to-be. It’s a known theme, very common to oriental thought, famously represented by yin and yang. But it’s one which is not normally verbalized and brought to the conscious level.

We see in the films a clear mutual benefit coming from encountering one’s opposite. Elijah’s search for the unbreakable man is a quest onto himself. He knows he’s at one side of the spectrum. The quest for the other extremity defines the trajectory of his life.

Likewise for David, who feels miserable for failing his life, and thanks to the appearance of evil, through Elijah, he’s able to know the missing part of himself.

There’s a nice juxtaposition to observe in the change of focus we have seen. The traditional hero, although an individual, carries a collective message. He or she are there to show the way to go and the way not to go, without recognizing the struggle necessary to overcome our problems in the first place. It’s as if their message was limited to “it’s okay to be good and not okay to be bad”.

Shyamalan's new take on heroes, like an append, stresses the individual call for each of us to be the savior of our own lives. That’s what, without knowing it, little David did when bullied at the swimming pool, he decided to be strong. It’s also how Kevin was able to manage his mother. It’s how Elijah outsmarted his illness.

It’s a very important and modern distinction. We’ve grown accustomed lately to blame society and the state for our problems. The economy, the government, public agencies, technology, are recurrent scapegoats we use to explain away our frustrations. Although those may be to blame to some extent, it’s not on their fault that we should concentrate our effort.

Many problems we may have, health issues, lack of opportunity, difficulties of expression, can be better addressed if we learn to be the protagonists of our lives. Shyamalan’s heroes and villains invite for self-responsibility. They tell us that, instead of criticizing the world, we should outgrow our problems.

A discussion on the archetypal hero and on the space left for a self-responsibility call from fiction.

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