This is Stuff You Like, you can call me Ursa, and does anyone else remember when M. Night
Shyamalan movies had twist ending that...actually made sense?
I DO!
Which is why today's topic is the 2000 psychological thriller - which is kind of like a horror
movie that the marketing department thinks will sell - Unbreakable.
It's a tense, dense, INTERESTING deconstruction of the superhero genre...and I love it.
They call me Mr. Spoilers.
Seriously though, if you haven't actually seen it yet, GO WATCH IT, it's that good,
and we're gonna be talking in depth about the twist ending: don't spoil it for yourself!
Go!
Go now!
Are they gone?
Great!
Right, the plot it goeth thusly:
Elijah Price is a baby with broken bones who grows up to be a comic collector/art dealer...with
broken bones.
"They call me Mr. Glass at school, because I break like glass."
He believes in superheroes.
Bruce Willis, aka David Dunn, is the lone survivor of a train crash:
"and he is miraculously unharmed."
I'm not sure whether or not to blame this film for the proliferation of gritty dark
realistic superheroes which followed not too long afterwards.
The thing is in Unbreakable it really does work, and they keep everything hero-related
very low key and talk about 'instinct' and 'ends of spectrums' and, nobody, you know,
turns invisible.
For example.
Anyway, Mr. Glass finds Bruce Willis after the disaster and tries to convince him 'YER
A WIZARD HARRY!'
I mean, 'YER A SUPERHERO, DAVID!'
Yeah.
Bruce Willis is sceptical, then kind of gets into it, learns his limits, then rescues a
girl and a boy from a murder house, and THEN, GASP!
WHAT A TWIST!
Turns out that Elijah Glass Price L. Jackson has been engineering disasters to find his
lone survivor.
And he gets arrested - probably while raving about being a super villain - credits roll.
The audience goes:
NOOOO.
Ah, twist endings.
The best twists are the ones you don't suspect, but it's more than that.
The best twist endings are the ones you don't expect...right up until they are announced
to you, and then it becomes so overwhelmingly obvious that you can't see how you could have
missed it.
The best twists are the ones that, the second time through, you pick up all those lovely
foreshadowy hints for.
And yes I may have just invented the word 'foreshadowy'.
I regret nothing.
It's surprisingly difficult to pull off a good twist ending, to be honest: too well
foreshadowed and three quarters of your audience be they ever so distracted by their popcorn
will have picked up on your suddenly not-so-shocking turn of events.
If it's completely out of left field with no warning whatsoever, then it's less of a
twist ending and more just something that the writers pulled from...somewhere unmentionable.
Foreshadowing is in many ways more difficult in television than in film because in television,
if you are, say, a crime show like NCIS, then you have to engineer a twist every single
week.
Round about the same point in the episode.
In a TV show every shot counts, and the audience knows that every shot counts, so if we're
paying close enough attention we should be able to guess that...it was the little kid
who killed the baby or that...there are identical twins involved in this murder somehow.
In film you can make every shot count, and Unbreakable does make every shot count, but
because there are so many more of them you can miss the subtle things which tell you
what the ending is going to be.
That being said, Unbreakable is STUFFED with hints as to what the twist is going to be.
Like, CHOCK FULL of them.
The opening gives the game away if you're paying attention as it starts with text about
comics and comic collectors.
So, we learn, the visual and storytelling language we're looking for here is that of
comics.
Pay attention, this will be important later!
Then we cut to Elijah 'the kids call me Mr Glass' because yeah, that's a totally heroic
name, being born.
Then we cut to David Dunn, who you know is a superhero because he has an alliterative
name.
Important things in Unbreakable are often presented upside down to make sure you're
paying attention.
This happens 3 times.
The disasters which Elijah has been engineering: there are 3 of them, and they are mentioned...3
times.
You know which character is forever giving away the ending?
Elijah's mum.
"They say this one has a surprise ending."
Uh, spoilers, lady!
Also she wraps his comic in super villain purple, which was, by the way, a suggestion
of Samuel L Jackson for the character.
A small digression on the fantastic use of colour here: the whole of Unbreakable is heavy
on the sagey greens and the moody blues and the warm yellows.
You've got green for everyday life, which is kind of sad and a little bit depressed,
plus you have yellow, for love, and you have blue, for 'we're being heroic and it's night
time and stuff'.
People David voodoo powers on are always brightly coloured: the red thief, the blue drug dealer,
the lime green rapist, the orange murderer, and the purple arch-enemy.
And David?
At the start of the film, dark red hat, occasional red T-shirt: the colour of heroism but...only
in splashes.
David's wife Audrey wears red when she's in the hospital being heroic and helping people.
Ditto the kid: heroes wear red.
Sometimes it's as subtle as the nurse's:
"I had red hair"
The colours get brighter as the movie goes on, and people move more fully into their
identities.
Elijah also has this tendency to foreshadow his own insanity.
This whole speech on art is the movie in condensed form.
And reminds me quite a lot of the monologue from Shaun of the Dead, but we'll come back
to that in a few weeks' time.
"Notice the square jaw of Slayer, common in most comic heroes.
And the slightly disproportionate size of Jaguaro's head to his body.
This again is common, but only in villains."
Look at how they're dressed.
David Dunn is in big, bulky clothes with a relatively small shaved head perched on top.
Elijah is in really slim lines.
Everything is slender except for his awesome hair, which makes his head look proportionately
bigger.
And it's asymmetrical hair to boot: clear sign of supervillainy.
The visuals clue you in to the plot before the plot does.
You know which other movie does this really well, that I have seen recently?
Pacific Rim.
The colours and the shot composition and everything works together to tell you a complementary
story to the story that is being told to you by the exposition and the actions of the characters.
The twist of Unbreakable, eventually, is simply that Elijah isn't.
That David and Audrey were right the first time.
Elijah was right about heroes existing, but he's so shattered that the knowledge has made
him a worse person, not a better one.
He's a moral gone bad.
If you choose to be afraid, Elijah's mum tells him, you'll never get anything done, that's
it: you'll hide your light under a bushel, so to speak, and that's that.
And while the moral is good and true, his mind is so twisted up that he has decided
that the only thing he can be is an archenemy, and for that he needs to find...a hero.
He gets caught: he EXPECTS to get caught.
"I think this is where we shake hands"
He found himself a hero just so he could confirm his place in the world as a villain.
No altruism here, he just wants to be a special snowflake.
Elijah is not reluctant: David is.
But while Elijah is villainous, David is heroic.
Elijah and David are opposites: the film STATES this, outright states it, no fewer than 3
times, and so while the first time we are shocked, SHOCKED, by the twist ending, the
second time we don't see how we could possibly have missed it.
And that's the genius of a good twist: rewatches INCREASE your appreciation of it, instead
of confirming your belief that the writer just pulled it out of...thin air.
Or somewhere else.
Yeah.
Exactly.