The mark of a truly original movie franchise is the willingness to challenge its own universe. It’s the ability to deconstruct everything it stands for. The trick, however, is when the characters of the story express beyond the shock of the audience watching them; or when they aren’t so concerned with trying to discard our dreams as they are with trying to rescue theirs. For instance, after seducing an entire generation with “supernatural” constructs like serendipity and soulmates with Before Sunrise and Before Sunset , Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight pulls the rug out from under our feet with alarming nonchalance. Jesse and Celine meet as young strangers for a fateful day in Vienna, and rekindle their chemistry through a chance meeting in Paris a decade later.
Passage of time
A decade more on, we meet them on a family vacation in Greece; only here, they are crabby parents struggling to live upto the pressure of being “the” couple. They have left their respective partners in pursuit of a more permanent future — that is, they have ceased being the film in favour of becoming the people that watch these films. It’s almost as if the timeless romance of the previous two movies were weighing down on them to earn a happy ending. Even a naked body — an image that might have been associated with desire in the first two films — acquires the desexualised visibility of human companionship in the third. Celine’s bare breasts informally dot the confines of a heated debate rather than a passionate lovemaking scene.
We, the viewers, are jolted out of our reverie by Linklater, but this isn’t the film’s primary purpose. It’s actually the two protagonists that, irrespective of who watches, are coming to terms with the tragic pragmatism of togetherness. They were always standing on a heavier rug than ours.
Surprise element
M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass , similarly, is the Before Midnight of his ponderous EastRail 177 trilogy. The first two films, Unbreakable (2000) and Split (2016), were typically interactive experiences that derived its effect from surprising its viewers.
The strength of Unbreakable lay in its ability to “reveal” itself as a superhero-origin movie to us. It wasn’t just David Dunn, but I, too, that struggled to accept that comic books are reflections of history and not caricatures of it. Split , too, masked its identity — as a movie, as a universe – from us till the final scene, in which the presence of Dunn turns the psychological thriller into a sudden supervillain-origin story. Perception was a device as much as the writing or background score.
Glass , though, isn’t as occupied with tricking us as it is with emotionally testing its central characters. After spending two films solidifying the emergence of an unsuspecting superhero universe, Glass asks its own inhabitants an unsettling question: What if the films were wrong all along? A human psychiatrist, Ellie, not unlike The Joker in the Dark Knight universe, is introduced to uproot the very foundation of a 19-year-old movie franchise. She exists solely to challenge a younger Shyamalan’s dreamy-eyed ideals. She makes Dunn and Crumb doubt their own place in the ecosystem, with only Price — it had to be Eli(jah) resisting Ellie — immune to her skills.
Most of Glass is not an easy watch, especially from an entertainment standpoint, because it is designed to suppress the very origins of fantasy. It is designed to desexualize the supernatural universe through the insecurities of the human mind — a line that just as easily describes Linklater’s startling finale. The sight of The Overseer, Mr. Glass and The Beast doing battle in the grounds of a psychiatric institution – unsure about whether they actually exist at all — works as a striking socio-political allegory of our times.
Parallel dimensions
But even as they violently go at each other to prove that they are real, they invoke the ugliness of Celine and Jesse bickering in a bedroom that is otherwise supposed to consummate their longtime love. As the voices get louder, it’s hard not to imagine a parallel dimension — one in which a fresh-faced Jesse and Celine on the Eurail train dissolve into grainy fragments even before they begin to chat. When a wounded Dunn and Beast inch closer to death, one can sense Tobey Maguire, Robert Downey Jr., Christian Bale and others gradually vapourising into thin air like Thanos’ victims.
Because, they aren’t just fighting for their own survival in a movie franchise. They are fighting for the survival of both the past and the future simultaneously, for every love story and superhero universe that followed them as well as those that are yet to be conceived. They are, effectively, saving the world from no imagination. And, quite literally, the human race — from itself.
