The power of opposites

Rating: Null/10 (18 May 2002)

`Real life doesn't fit into little boxes that were drawn for it,' says Elijah Price, the villain, to David Dunn, the hero. And yet, in a different part of the movie, Elijah also says `Comics are our last link to an ancient way of passing on history.' These two statements seem incompatible; but, they're not: Comic book images resemble the simplified depictions of reality that appear in consciousness, but they are not snapshots of the reality itself. They point to something true, though the renderings themselves are not.
I find the comic book theme of Unbreakable to be absolutely enchanting and irresistible. I love this sort of movie: it's substantive, original, yet completely familiar -- a comic book story set to film. It proceeds at a slow pace, the way a serious comic book aficionado turns the pages, slowly and carefully, alert to every nuance of meaning that can be gleaned from the amplified scarcity of the sketches and the terse prose. Every spoken word, though prosaic, comes forth layered with meaning, like a Hemingway novel. The images are oversimplified, drawing attention to the one point of a scene carries the full weight of the story's intention, like the vivid colors of the evil malefactors set against a dull gray background.

And the good versus evil theme, intentionally based on the physics of polarity, invests the stylized images with unfeigned power. An electrical potential is increased when one side of a circuit has a deficiency of electrons, while the other side has a surplus. The greater the imbalance, the higher the voltage. Weather systems gain strength when there is a disparity of hot and cold, wet and dry. The greater the imbalance, the more powerful the system. And so it is with Elijah and David, both of whom represent the internal polarities of good and evil. The exaggerated imbalance between them, `opposite ends of the same curve,' as Elijah put it, is quietly, but utterly, engaging.