As Some of Your Own Poets Have Said

When Paul is preaching to the philosophers in Athens, he appropriates their own mythologies to support his evangelism. He quotes pagan poets, who were writing mythologies of demons, and uses them to serve his purposes of propagating the truth. Television and cinema are the modern pagan mythologies and when I review them, I am seeking to emulate Paul. To bring these stories under our dominion as Christians. To make them slaves to truth even if that was not their original intent.

Shyamalan as Artist

I love M. Night Shyamalan’s films. Signs, Lady in the Water, The Village, The Sixth Sense, and Servant are phenomenal. His Unbreakable Trilogy is also incredible. Shyamalan is one of the most underrated film makers of our time. He’s had some flops like The Happening and The Visit, but generally his films are quality. I love the aesthetic of his films. The dialogue. Everything. I liked Unbreakable and Split, and loved how he surprised us with Split being a sequel at the very end. James Macavoy and Anya Taylor Joy were incredible. I was unsure if he could make a good third film to complete that trilogy, but I was not disappointed. It’s hard to make good trilogies. But Glass along with its two predecessors make a great trilogy, and I think its a work of art comparable to much of C. S. Lewis’ work.

The Lewisian Shyamalan

While Lewis deals with a number of topics, I would say his life’s work was a project which sought to show the inadequacy and shallowness of modern, scientific, materialism, and countered this by showing us the glory of poetry, imagination, the supernatural, antiquity, myth, and how those things find their ultimate expression in our Creator and Christianity. His was a relentless, shrewd, and extraordinary rage against the ugliness and impoverishment of modernity. I think we can say at least something similar about M. Night Shyamalan. Shyamalan comes from a India. He has Indian parents. His upbringing and education, however, was at a Roman Catholic school. So, he has this pagan spirituality and Christian spirituality in his mind. This is not unlike Lewis who also brought pagan mythology and Christian mythology together in his works. Lewis, of course, was a Christian, and sought to defend the truth of Christian religion, whereas Shyamalan is not a Christian (at least I don’t think he is) and is not trying to defend Christianity exclusively at least. So, there are differences, significant differences between the two. But the similarities are enough in my mind at least to see similar goals and trajectories in their work.

Unbreakable, Split, and Glass revolve around the idea that comic books have some kernel of truth in them. That they reveal something about reality through imagination. Lewis came to similar conclusions regarding pagan mythology. And I believe J. R. R. Tolkien helped to form this understanding in him. In the beginning of Tolkien’s poem Mythopoeia it reads, To one who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though “breathed through silver”

PHILOMYTHUS TO MISOMYTHUS

Lover of myths to hater of myths. If I’m not mistaken, this was penned in reference to his friend Lewis. I’m too lazy to look up the specifics, and I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong on this point. But either way, Lewis came to love mythology. And we see a similar love for the mythology of comic books in Mr. Glass. We also see this very thing happening in our culture as a whole, who devour comic book movies all the time. For a nation that doesn’t believe in God or the supernatural we certainly have an insatiable desire to be told stories about the supernatural. And I think this is because they do pick up on some aspects of truth and ultimate reality.

The Dark God

After watching Glass, my sister observed that Mr. Glass was something of a dark god figure. He is a kind of prophet using a megaphone to rouse a deaf world as Lewis would say. His name is Elijah after all. God reveals Himself throughout history as recorded in Holy Scripture with accounts of extreme violence. The Tabernacle and Temple sacrifices, the pogrom of the Canaanite people, the drowning of Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea, the angel of death visiting the first born in Egypt, the sick and dying in Corinth, the threat of death of the children in Thyatira, the blessedness of the one who dashes Babylonian infants against rocks. “Shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it?” (Amos 3:6) These are all blood-drenched startling events, and yet this is an aspect of how God has revealed Himself to us. Elijah Price is only a type, a shadow, a figure of this kind of dealing with humanity. We are led to believe he is the villain. And he is, in some ways. But the similarity is that he orchestrated a tragic amount of violence to show the world a supernatural reality – the presence of David Dunn (the hero) and Kevin Crumb (the villain).

Ellie Staples: The God-Killer

But in my estimation, the real villain, the truly demonic figure in this story is expressed most resolutely in Dr. Ellie Staples and the secret society she represents. We don’t know much about this organization. But we do know that it exists to suppress the knowledge of the existence of supernatural beings from the rest of the world. At one point, Dr. Staples says something like, “We can’t have gods walking around.” This, in my view, represents the modern project of scientific materialism. It’s been a while since I’ve read That Hideous Strength, but it’s similar to N.I.C.E, also a secret (or secretive) society, which attempted to capture Merlin and tried to convince Mark that his emotions were simply chemicals inside his body. And at a key part in the book, they wanted Mark to step on a crucifix. N.I.C.E. is modern scientism as a religion. Lewis took the name That Hideous Strength from a poem by Sir David Lindsey. And it’s a reference to the Tower of Babel. In Glass we see this represented by the Osaka Tower. At the end of the film it shows this tower while Elijah is saying “Whoever these people are who don’t want us to know the truth, today, these people lose.”

Ellie Staples exists to convince Elijah and the rest that they are only suffering from delusions of grandeur. That every extraordinary thing they believed and practiced could be explained away with pure scientific and natural explanations. She existed to take away the strength of these men. To convince them they were insane for believing the miraculous. To make them docile and unbelievers, even though she herself was a believer. Even the demons believe! (James 2:19) Ellie is the adversary Elijah. Her name is similar. She is an anti-Elijah. El is Hebrew for God. She is an anti-God. Ellie’s goals are exactly the opposite of Elijah’s. Her last name, Staples, has etymological roots meaning pillar or tree used for executions. You can even think of office staples. Metal nails used to stab. Ellie Staples is the god-killer.

The Woman of Science Exercising Authority Over Men

It really is quite amazing that M. Night Shyamalan did this with every other main character, too. Just as Ellie Staples exists to diminish Elijah Glass, the other main characters all have women who exist to do the same. In Unbreakable, David Dunn gives up his power for a woman. She was opposed to his pursuing a football career, and so David pretends to be wounded in a car accident, to give up exercising his God-given strength to be with her. It’s a Sampson and Delilah story. But Elijah rekindles David’s strengths. He gets David to nurture those gifts once again, and David channels his supernatural strength and prophetic visions to protect and liberate the weak and those in bondage. David is truly a Christ figure throughout the whole series. Even in Glass it shows him breaking the chains of the captives and freeing them from the prison of the Beast. In Unbreakable we see him in his security guard rain poncho which somewhat suggests a super hero cape. But I think it also looks very much like a priestly chasuble. A chasuble, while eventually signifying a priest’s eucharistic vestment, originally was also simply a poncho, like David’s. David is acting as a priest, David is acting in persona Christi as the savior.

Additionally, David’s son, Joseph, a child in the first film whole-heartedly believes and sees clearly what His father is capable of. It is a wonderful picture of Christ’s command to become like a child to enter His Kingdom. Children know. Children see. Children believe. Adults are blind. Adults are cynics. Adults deny their power. This is another similar theme in Lewis’ work.

In Split, Dr. Karen Fletcher is a psychologist who also exists to suppress the full supernatural power of Kevin Crumb. He is a demonically possessed man controlled by a horde of multiple personalities. But the arch-demon is the Beast. And I believe this actually represents something like Nietzsche’s Übermensch. A return to the old pagan power of supernatural man. A Goliath figure. A figure almost identical to the demoniac in Mark 5 who identifies himself by saying, “My name is Legion; for we are many,” and who also had supernatural ability to break chains. An Anti-Christ and a Beast. Dr. Fletcher labors to prevent Kevin from realizing his full demonic potential with the tools of her profession. But as it turns out, modern psychology loses out to that old demonic power, and she is killed by the Beast. This again I think emphasizes the weakness of an unbelieving purely scientific materialism. It is wholly inadequate in striving to rid the world of the supernatural. It is insufficient in taming these demonic forces. It is arrogant and naïve. It underestimates what is dealing with because from the get-go it is assuming a purely naturalistic view of the world. And Dr. Karen Fletcher ultimately ends up dead in her attempts to subdue demonic forces.

David’s wife Audrey (a physical therapist), Kevin’s psychologist Dr. Fletcher, and Elijah’s psychiatrist Dr. Staples, are all women of science who exist to suppress the strength of men and deny the supernatural. Truly a remarkable pattern in this series.

At one point, Dr. Staples is given extended time to treat her patients and gives them all naturalistic explanations for their “delusions of grandeur.” It starts to rattle David and Kevin. Even the viewer begins to doubt. It’s a convincing and believable episode. And it reminded me of Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor speech in The Brothers Karamazov. Shyamalan like Dostoevsky is able to articulate the arguments for unbelief convincingly and better than the unbeliever.

Deceiving the Deceiver

While Ellie Staples’ purpose is to deceive the world into thinking there aren’t gods that walk among us. Elijah’s purpose is to reveal to the world the truth of the supernatural in men. And so Ellie Staples is a Deceiver, but Elijah deceives the Deceiver and brings her tactics back on her. He sacrifices himself and in that sacrifice gets Ellie Staples to televise the battle between David and the Beast to the whole world.

Apostles of Truth

And at the end of the film, while Elijah and David have sacrificed themselves for others, their disciples, so to speak, go out with good news to the world. They reveal to the world that there is this supernatural war happening. A mother, a son, and an outcast woman. This unlikely band of disciples are bringing truth to the world that mankind can be greater than simply talking pond-scum.

Natural and Supernatural Telos

The last thing I want to touch on is Elijah’s motivation. He is obsessive about purpose, about telos. He dies saying he wasn’t a mistake. And he lived his life trying to realize the purpose in the lives of others like him, to get them to actualize that potential, to fulfill the end for which they were created. This preoccupation with teleology is certainly an ancient and medieval way of thinking. Science can explain the how, sometimes, but not the why. Science cannot tell us what the chief end of man is. They claim to, but we all know they are lying. We all sense that scientific explanations of purpose are not the whole story. That they don’t speak to the eternity that is in the heart of man. Science, as a comprehensive religion, will never be able to come close to touching that deep teleological sense embedded in every image of God, because science is a servant in the Kingdom, a slave to our Master. It was made for us, not us for it. No matter how hard she tries to clinically rid us of our primitive understanding of ancient truth, there will always be artists like Lewis and Shyamalan subverting her, mocking her, and exposing her fraud and weakness. The immutable truths of God march forward and the gates of Hell will not prevail.

From the Westminster Shorter Catechism, Question 1:

Q: What is the chief end of man?
A: Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.