"Glass" is not enough, but something in contribution to making someone else appear to make use of our eyes

Anthony Lane in review of this film postulated that no one would really be all that agog at realizing that there were people out there that were capable of doing feats that no one of our current biology could manage -- feats of strength that were evidently, as we weighted if maybe the strongest MIGHT actually manage them, 50 to 100% more than any man really could, regardless of how full of adrenaline, or heavily heaped in muscles, for example. He assumed that whatever they saw, they'd subsume it with their awareness of how much now is digitally altered, or regularly explained away as as extraordinary they are, how they're ACTUALLY still within human capacities... perhaps from understanding "outside human capacity" as the stuff movie superheroes do, which is the like of not just making a significant dent in a car, not just lifting one side of one and putting it on edge, but ripping in it two, or lifting the whole damn thing and tossing it.

There is a way in which he is both right and wrong. The publication he writes for, the New Yorker, published a piece awhile ago where Harvard scientists were arguing that the strange object that entered our solar system last year could not but be an alien probe -- nothing else could explain it. I think at some level New Yorker readers were aware that, whether or not it was that, may not matter for it really being able to penetrate into our current fascinations, which draw us to some kind of show-down we're anticipating where potentially all our current anxieties might find easement, ourselves validated and future path guaranteed to be vexation-free, our enemies broken for good... if Trump is linked with Russia, the alt-right and the rise of fascism and the fall of a worldview which had sustained and supported us and which had been allowed to exist uncontested in terms of validity, would fall away as did the great towers of Sauron once the quest to link him with what could destroy him had finally been accomplished; conversely, to the other side, if Trump could be validated, then the next long period of time were guaranteed to be one of an alt-right universe as no longer questionable but god-sent, and their warriors as pure and righteous only.

Still, this week the New Yorker brought this subject up again, the presence of the alien ship, and it was the most viewed article on the site. Whether or not we are so bent on seeing the further unfoldings of dramas at play in the world that literally nothing could interfere with our focus on them if it didn't seem in some way to bear on it, be subconsciously construed to factor into it as an essential "player" we were maybe lacking -- and an ostensibly neutral outsider, currently doesn't; its being alien to our psychological requirements trumps its status as a meaning-marker OF ACTUALLY BEING ALIEN -- we are not so obsessed that we couldn't detach ourselves somewhat from them. We ponder: aliens might just have visited us, something we've wondered for the longest of time if it could ever be possible, usually in hope but frequently in doubt, and even if not now at some point there is a future "us" that will emerge that will engage with this fact in a much less distracted way... 'cause, holy sh*t! We'll largely dismiss them for now, but THEY HAVE BEEN tabled. We're not that idiotic.

I think this is probably what we would do if we were given visual evidence that such super-powered beings as the ones in "Glass" existed, but if they didn't seem to have anything to bear on global warming, the rise of fascism, the rise of socialism/new democrats vs. neoliberal democrats, the rise of the alt-right, etc. THIS IS BIG, we'd at some level register... and subconsciously table our consideration of them as an "issue" onto themselves, rather than, say, something we fold into one of current ways of narrating what is meaningful to our existence in the world, like the rise of ostensibly superior beings all over the place, like on one side, young socialists and, on the other, proud men, as they might see themselves.

The film is being derided all over the place. It certainly appears to favour our sense of sticking with our own heightened sense of selves, and seeing any detractors as simply jealous or envious, as malformed in every way but their ability to appear benign and to manipulate. It would seem a great film for those who want to find support for their own narcissism, to see what others claim is their narcissism as actually seeing what is good about them that deserves support and expansion, to be played to, not to be cursed with doubt, contrived into an illness, but that they themselves have found themselves in life denied. But still, it does land onto each one of these characters -- excepting the super-mind Glass, it is made to seem -- some ability to consider themselves as having somewhere in their subconsciousness imagined themselves grandiose super-powered, as some kind of remedy to brutal situations that occurred to them in the early years of their life that functioned to make them feel powerfully small, vulnerable, and likely always readily prey to subsequent victimization; that they are fundamentally denied human beings, those denied of proper care and attention, rather than those possessed of superior skills or well-being -- what the psychiatrist, in her -- as Stephanie Zacharek delineates in her review for us -- "watercolor-hued cashmere outfits," and patient-respecting intentions and manner, would in real life represent.

There was, in a sense, a lot I could work with in this film. It would be exactly something, for example, one would expose to a narcissist in therapy, for narcissists reject all overt criticism so you have make an extra-large effort to acknowledge them when treating them, don't challenge their narcissism but play to it, and slowly introduce them to the possibility that their "greatness" is not about their selves, but about an alternative explanation for themselves that functions to elide a sense of themselves as fundamentally abandoned and weak and which actually intrudes on their ability to forge something unique and wonderful about them that is independent of functioning as a salve to trauma. The heroes all get to know they are actually super-empowered at the end, recovered into a status where they formerly felt secure, but narcissists experiencing themselves through them they might recall those moments where their likenesses, where the main protagonists, did sit with those recalls of moments in their lives where they were terrorized and tormented, where they were made to feel terribly weak, and where, counter-mingled with their distance from the incidents and their being more grown-up, they forged the logical connection that, yes, though they themselves might actually be super-powered, to believe themselves that is exactly what someone who shared their early formative experiences would have formulated for themselves... and so how can they be sure they really are the different that escapes the rule? Or that their own experience of grandiosity was reflective both of what is factually true about them, an honest reflection of the great powers they do possess, AND something that serves to help them feel less helpless as they once were to terrible victimization, making it a convenient fact that makes less necessary their being forged out of thin air.

The hard part, a bit, is that you have to elide all of "the beast's" inclination to eat and kill young women -- and only after making them sex-objects for "other's" purview, and otherwise psychologically torturing them -- in order to understand him as simply one of those whose true greatness can't be recognized because a world is intent on keeping it unrecognized out of having fashioned for themselves some means to contrive originality as a sin to the world; as not something innocent but an aggressive deliberate measure to make others feel small and undervalued.

The psychiatrist claims that this is her complaint with the super-powered, that they aren't fair... that by simply existing, they humiliate all the "norms" into being, no matter their best efforts, second-best at best. She is contrived in the end as someone herself suffering from a sense that she has been humiliated by other's show of strength. If the film had a larger, more self-aware consciousness, it would have had her... at least in her imagination, demonstrating through her abilities as a psychiatrist that the truth was that she was never smaller than the super-powered, but actually always their better: that she, in readily bettering them -- for a good while at least -- was evidence of humanity gendering more evolved forms. They were the test of self-doubt that needed to be created, for her to show her own superpowers; come into her own.