Unbreakable

considered through the lens of critical disability studies

My last review discussed M. Night Shyamalan’s breakout hit, The Sixth Sense. His follow up to it was Unbreakable. In Unbreakable he continued to use plot twists to create excitement and mystery, but to a much subtler effect. In fact, Unbreakable’s twist turned out to be more of a genre twist than a plot one. Just as in The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable begins as a drama and is later revealed to be something more like a superhero origin story.

The movie centers on Bruce Willis as David Dunn, a security guard in a failing marriage who, on his way home to Philadelphia from New York, miraculously survives a train crash that kills every other passenger. Samuel L. Jackson

plays the mysterious Elijah Price, a comic gallery owner who contacts David after the crash with the theory that David is literally unbreakable. David dismisses the notion as crazy, sighting how his football career ended after a car crash. Later, it is revealed that David was actually unharmed in the crash and just used it as an excuse to stop playing a sport that his girlfriend and future wife disapproved of. However, he does know that he once almost drowned in a pool, so he remains skeptical of Elijah’s claim.

Elijah does not give up on David easily, though, and follows him to his job, where Elijah helps him to realize that his unique ability to sense security threats is a type of extrasensory perception. David begins to experiment with his strength and with the help of his son, Joseph, played by Spencer Treat Clark, realizes he can lift over 300 pounds. Joseph becomes determined to prove that his dad is more than human and is frustrated by his dad’s constant assertions of his normalcy. He goes so far as to try to shoot David, to prove that he cannot be harmed, but is talked down by both of his desperate parents.

Upon Elijah’s suggestion, David goes to Philadelphia's 30th Street Station in a rain poncho and attempts to sense the evils of the people around him. As people walk by, he is able to see the worst things that they have done. As a janitor walks by, he sees a crime that he can stop. The janitor has invaded a family home, killed the father, and is now holding the wife and their two children captive. David rushes to the home and frees the children. He runs upstairs to try and free the mother, but she is already dead and he is pushed out a window by the janitor into the family pool. Because water is his weakness, David begins to drown, but the children save him and he then kills the janitor. After returning home, David reconciles with his wife and the next day, shows his son an article about an unknown hero who saved children from a home invader.

Now get ready, because here comes the twist. No, David is not evil or dead and the whole thing was not a dream. What does happen is that upon going to Elijah’s gallery, David discovers that Elijah was the perpetrator of the train crash and several other recent high fatality “accidents”. When Elijah is confronted, he reveals that he has been looking for someone who is unbreakable and now that he has found David, he can be the villain to David’s superhero.

Now here’s the interesting element that I neglected to mention. Elijah has type I osteogenesis imperfecta, which is also known as brittle bone disease. This makes him extremely breakable and therefore the opposite of David. Elijah gives a classic villain speech, explaining how hard his life has been and how the kids always teased him by calling him Mr. Glass, which will now, of course, be his villain name, and how finding an equal and opposite to him has given his life meaning. Despite Elijah’s compelling explanation for his actions, David is appalled and an epilogue reveals that David reported Elijah's terrorist attacks to the police and that Elijah was placed in a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane.

What I find most interesting about this complex and contemplative film is the concept for the character of Elijah. Type I osteogenesis imperfecta is a very real disease that affects about one in every 15,000 people worldwide. However, as I hope you know, being basically invincible is not a real condition because comic books are, sadly, not real life. It is typical, though, for people with physical limitations to be incredibly smart, most often because not being able to spend time on physical activities leaves lots of time to read and learn. So again, Elijah is a character totally steeped in realism and it seems quite realistic as well, that someone whose disease has made their mind and body so out of sync with each other, would attempt to compensate for their physical weakness with their mental aptitude. Elijah’s mother appears just before the twist is revealed to tell us as much through a discussion of the use of strength versus intelligence in comic book characters.

The movie works hard to make the audience conflicted about Elijah from the start. We see him berate a customer at his gallery for attempting to buy one of his pieces for a child, but we also see him chase after a man who David suspects of having a gun, in an attempt to prove that David’s psychic abilities are accurate, and then tragically fall down a flight of stairs and just totally shatter as his body hits the ground. M. Night Shyamalan certainly does not condone Elijah’s evil methods, but he does show empathy for him and his situation.

Elijah’s disability being used as a tool should be annoying or offensive, but it isn’t because of the realistic approach that the script takes to humans’ relationship to normalcy. David so desperately ignores every indication that he is different and buries his abilities so deeply in the comfortable mediocrity of his life at the beginning of the movie. Being normal is easy and cozy and being special in any way is hard. Being a genius and having abnormally low IQ are on opposite ends of the intelligence spectrum, but they are more similar than different when it comes to the amount and type of challenges each entail.

The idea that people crave normalcy and fear the different is expanded upon in Glass, the 2019 film that ended the trilogy of films that Unbreakable started. That movie centers around David, Elijah, and Kevin (a character played by James McAvoy, who is introduced in the middle film of the trilogy, Split) fighting a clandestine organization that has suppressed and destroyed superhuman heroes and villains for millennia to protect civilization from the tyranny of living “gods” among men.

This group so strongly fears the abnormal that they have devoted their lives to ending anyone who does not fit the mold. While the group is clearly telegraphed by the film as evil, their position is not far off from how most people feel about those who are different from them, especially if those differences threaten their way of life. With this trilogy of films, I think Shyamalan posits that being above or below normal does not matter, what matters is that both are not normal. Having a super-ability has the same result as a disability; it makes you an other.