12.05.00, 5:34 p.m. || unbearable (edited
12.06.00, 10:23 a.m.)
Okay, I just can't take it. I don't think M. Night
necessarily intended to make his latest film an "all-American"
redemption narrative of (white) fathers finding themselves
in a New Age reassertion of authority and personhood. But no doubt
his "instincts" told him this was a compelling (i.e., blockbuster)
narrative, which can't help but resonate with very prevalent
anxieties about race and sexual politics in
U.S. culture.
In comic book fable
Unbreakable, stoic security guard
David Dunn (Bruce Willis) suffers from a broken family -- his estranged
wife sleeps in a downstairs bedroom (with a lock on the door) and his
ten year-old son wants nothing more than some kind of "real" connection
to his father. But Dunn can't take action to correct the situation,
paralyzed by an overwhelming sense of his own unimportance. Feeling like
a pawn helpless in the grip of unknown forces and indiscypherable
fates, he can't even articulate this dis-ease, or its source. Surviving
a horrendous train wreck doesn't help; he still wakes up every morning
with a lingering sadness -- something about a lack of purpose, of
direction, having sacrificed his promising football career years earlier
to preserve his relationship with his pacificist fiance (or as
another character put it, incredulous, "You gave it up for a woman?").
Despite my own comic book history and usual willingness to suspend
belief (I loved Charlie's Angels), I couldn't do it for
this film. The technical aspects of the film -- the directing, the
camerawork, the lighting-- were brilliantly executed. (Though the
soundtrack is totally overbearing.) But the premise
--do real heroes with real powers walk among us?-- operated at a
level that ultimately functioned to recuperate the all-American (i.e., white)
nuclear (minus one child) heterosexual family in a multicultural
postmodern America by a re-empowered father.
I had visions of men's movement adherents flocking to this metephysically-inclined
film in teary-eyed affirmation of their inner warrior spirits,
or some such nonsense.
There's one scene in particular that stands out. Having discovered his precognitive
powers, Dunn visits a crowded bus station to test the
waters. Standing in a sea of worn, withdrawn faces and endlessly shifting bodies (in
a rain poncho, no less), he receives vivid flashes
upon brief contact from a few individuals, visions of Bad
Things: a well-dressed blonde snatches a diamond bracelet from a jewelry
case; a collegiate white man rapes an unconscious white woman at
a party; a black woman is attacked on a street corner in a drive-by; and
a respectable suburban white patriarch is pushed down the stairs by
a psychotic jumpsuit-clad janitor. It is only when he received this last
vision that he feels compelled to act, having decided to otherwise ignore the
rape and the street corner attack. It's impossible not to
notice that both these attacks are directed at women, and women who
might conceivably be imagined as "bad" women -- the unconscious woman on the bed
is dressed in a spaghetti-strapped slip dress, and presumably too
drunk to struggle, and the street corner victim,
for all that she is respectably dressed, is a
black woman. Dunne leaves these kinds of epidemic violence --so normalized in everyday
American culture -- well enough alone. Apparently there
is no preserving the "innocence" of a "loose" woman or a
black woman, but somehow the (totally contrived and) random death of a suburban patriarch
is supposed to register as, well, more urgent, more terrifying, more
deserving of his superheroic efforts. That is, there is something
more precious to be protected here.
And this precious commodity, this higher
principle, doesn't invoke just any kind of family either. The pathology
assigned to other kinds of families could not be more obvious than
in Elijah's (Samuel L. Jackson) own family formation -- his black single
mother struggled to raise him right (in some of the more poignant scenes
in the film) but to no avail. And okay, I recognize that Elijah
was living out his comic book fantasy and thusly garbed like some
crazed nut (everything lined in shiny purple, velour, weird collars,
rubber Nehru jackets, quilted leather throws?!) with wacked out hair
(for a supposedly sophisticated art dealer/villain, shouldn't he at
least have been able to afford some pomade?), but c'mon, that was just
ugly. Damn ugly. And not least insidously racialized -- in a
dialogue-sparse film, the heavy hints about villainous comic-book
morphology (heads and eyes slightly larger than "normal") resonate in
the Elijah character and simultaneously reference the
historical stereotype of dangerous black (and yes, often
"bug-eyed") dandy.
So after throttling the
psychotic janitor and rescuing two chubby-cheeked young girls
from the violated sanctity of the 'burbs, Dunn reenters his
own home a new man. He returns his wife to his bed, and
reaffirms his paternal authority as he reveals to his son --
and to him only (apparently wifey needn't know about his nightly
escapades)-- that his father really is
a superhero. The boy smiles through his tears, all
bright-eyed and full of keen hope.
Oh yes, it's the dawn of a new day. (Literally -- this tearful exchange takes place at the breakfast table.)
Everyone knows that sons really want indestructible, uncomplicated fathers, and
it doesn't hurt the nation to reaffirm the all-American
patriarch in these wild and heady days of minoritarian/multicultural rights movements, a "castrating" feminism,
shrinking middle classes and
threatened white majorities --think of it as a kind of identity politics for
the Angry Yet Sensitive White Man.