Notes on a Scandal

It would hardly be circumspect to avoid comparing this splendid novel to another English-language work.  Both feature a scandalous and sultry affair between an adolescent and a member of the opposite sex old enough to be the child’s parent, and both precipitate some even rasher decisions.  Most surprising of all, in each case it is the elder lover who loves more and who, unlike this poet, is not as resigned to the truism that equal love cannot be.  Books like these can only be written in the first person because they represent the narrator’s quittance with the world; an omniscient storyteller buoyed by such cynicism would rapidly drift into murky philosophical waters and, frankly speaking, come off as quite a boring old pessimist.  Its immorality notwithstanding, Lolita involves beauty that not everyone is allowed to see, hence the highly subjective first-person narrator and no small amount of pent-up anger after this beauty is lost to him.  Humbert is angry with a modern world that has reduced men of letters to impoverished and risible vagrants; angry with the gods that robbed him, at the tender age of twelve, of his one true love and, with her, his youth, his innocence, and his selflessness; angry at the Philistines who do not recognize his genius (and he is most definitely a genius) and try to make him one of them; angry at his bourgeois wife, her comforting colonel, and the kitschy materialistic values that these boors tend to espouse; and, most unfairly, angry with the young waifs he hires to forget Annabel Lee because they are not Annabel Lee.  Dolores Haze, for all her faults, is not a part of the world he wishes to escape.  For him she embodies the opposite of all that he hates, and so she becomes all that he loves.  The mistake here (which Nabokov brilliantly amends in this later novel as well as in a new English translation of a previous Russian gem) is to seek an apotheosis amidst tawdry and quasi-pornographic circumstances.  Humbert may love his nymphet, but theirs is not a love we can or will ever endorse.  Contemplating such a romance – the novel’s first half – may hardly be differentiated from a poet’s wild fantasies about his lost paradise; but its grunting consummation, the second part of the novel, ushers a few disgusting characters into our theater who proceed to ruin the rest of the performance.  

This is not to say that British writer Zoë Heller, in her second novel, patterns her text on a classic.  Rather, she seems to grasp the age-old concept that you cannot sublimate something intractably earthbound.  The core of a literary work, its banner so to speak, must be a worthy theme: love, death, intellectual curiosity, nostalgia, remorse, happiness, remembrance, and so forth.  It cannot and should never be corporal gratification, however much emotional power such a connection to another human being often produces.  Heller's narrator must then be an old Romantic gazing upon a  princesse lointaine from some secluded nook, maybe simply the other corner of  a teacher's lounge.  She also wisely understands that, to improve the formula, the child should be older (Steven Connolly is fifteen), the first-person narrator should report such an affair instead of experiencing it herself, and, most importantly, the novel should mirthfully slip into satire.  A satire, one might add, of the simplest mold: that of society’s hypocrisy in the face of scandalous private affairs.  These small changes (apart from an older and female narrator) are brilliant enough to cause a seismic shift in perception on the part of the reader. 

 

Officially, the narrative belongs to Barbara Covett, a high school history teacher who, now in her sixties, has never been married.  There have been, she tells us, many special “friends” in her life, but she has chased them all away with her combination of neediness and arrogance.  Barbara does possess a superior intellect and writes alone and confident in a library surrounded by the best of modern English literature.  Her vocabulary’s expanse and acuity of observation are rarely beheld outside the literary arena, and for that reason (among many others) she feels that she cannot relate to anyone the way she relates to her wonderfully blank, wonderfully malleable diary.  It is in this diary that she begins the odyssey of Sheba Hart – 41, haute bourgeoisie wife, mother of two, and soon-to-be adulterous teacher – and Steven Connolly, 15, the working-class boy whose supposed learning disabilities are soothed by a teacher’s caress.  If that last sentence sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is ridiculous: Sheba and Steven are as unlikely a pairing, as oh, say, Sheba and Barbara.  Did I mention that these “friends" of Barbara’s were all women?  Or that Barbara’s text was driven by “an impulse that fell outside the magic circle of sexual orthodoxy”?  

They (Humbarb and Sheblita) become friends at a local high school, but it is evident that neither one of them belongs there.  Barbara should be doing what she does most of the novel, that is, composing her salacious prose; Sheba, however, is not quite as artistic as her pretensions and trendy thoughts try to postulate.  Her husband Richard builds a basement kiln in their privileged residence for her to have a creative outlet, but Sheba ends up frittering away her time in naps and, literally and figuratively, half-baked projects.  What is interesting is how much Barbara, a brilliant psychologist of everyone except herself, demands of Sheba, a rather silly woman who has glided through life without too much countercurrent.  The most minor of Sheba's decisions are hot potatoes, and even her primary lusts are a matter of debate:

It is a nice question as to when exactly Sheba became conscious of having amorous feelings for Connolly or, indeed, became conscious of his having amorous emotions for her.  I have pressed her on many occasions for specificity on this issue, but her responses are maddeningly inconsistent.  At times she will insist that she was guilty of nothing more than maternal fondness for Connolly and was utterly “ambushed” when he first kissed her.  At other times she will coyly volunteer that she “fancied” him from the start.  I daresay we shall never know for certain the exact progress of her romantic attachment.      

Barbara’s queries for ironclad truth are not only stereotypically male, they evince the deep frustration of a scientist who has never learned to empathize with the creatures he studies.  It would almost be inhuman to begrudge Sheba her mixed feelings about such a risky venture.  But it is no surprise that the difference in age between Steven and Sheba is about the same as that between the two teachers, and Barbara, in asking Sheba how she feels about the boy, is essentially asking herself about Sheba.           

 

Barbara, Steven, and Richard are not the only ones who want her: there is another teacher by the name of Bangs who cannot stop imagining himself in Sheba's life.  One peppy day he confronts Barbara with this bit of personal ambition, thereby triggering the decisive series of unfortunate events.  Like all flirts who pretend to be unaware of their attractiveness but leave tangy tastes in their suitors' mouths, Sheba is hypersensitive to the opinions of others.  With occasional impulsive exceptions, she only wants to be wanted, but not pursued, or, God forbid, propositioned.  Rumors start that Barbara, now in wimpled guise, tries her best to squelch.  Well, maybe not her best:

Vulgar speculation about sexual proclivity would seem to be an occupational hazard for a single woman like myself, particularly one who insists on maintaining a certain discretion about her private life.  I know who I am.  If people wish to make up lurid stories about me, that is their affair.  I could not be sure, however, that Sheba would be offended, or enraged, or else horribly embarrassed.  After considering the matter carefully, I decided it was best not to tell her about the rumours.   

But writing about them at length – well, that wouldn’t do any harm whatsoever.  That the end is given full vent at the beginning of the novel helps the reader relish each well-chosen word, each delicate sentence, each felicitous combination of sound and syntax, without racing through what would otherwise be quite a page-turner.  And at the end, when Sheba’s former, changeless life is destroyed (like the tumult caused by her namesake) and her only friend turns out to be a duplicitous and lustful old woman, we sense remorse for, strange as it may seem, only Barbara.  She is, after all, unpleasant and self-serving, but she understands her limitations and parlays them into artistic achievement.  And Sheba?  Sheba is still napping on Barbara’s couch, a few pages into some novel she will never finish.

Yuki-onna

Interpreting legends or literature – which are, in a way, modern myths – of nations one has only read about but not seen in person is a dangerous task for the uninitiated.  These pages have been devoted to the mostly European traditions on which I was raised and which continue, for better or worse, to comprise my view on the whole planet.  Yet how can one presume to judge the earth entire from life in so few places (perhaps not that few; but I have lived in or visited about three dozen lands)?  What truths about Bihar or Benin can one hope to extrapolate from London?  What can Copenhagen or New York, two of our most beautiful cities for completely different reasons, show us about life in Kuala Lampur?  In our increasingly globalized world many of these differences are being eradicated through the spread of technology and the triumph of governments staffed by elected officials (not quite the democracy the Greeks had in mind, but something of the sort).  As a result metropolises have begun to blur.  I can walk through the streets of a large Latin American city and see much of the Cairo of my childhood; returning to Boston brings me tastes of Prague, perhaps in part owing to my having studied in Prague when I was still living in Boston.  What many of us brought up on the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and monotheism have come to expect from countries in which such terminology is not part of their histories is strangeness, an alienation that we then haplessly promote as greatness without understanding one tile of its enchanted mosaic.  About thirty years ago, this scholar published one of the more famous treatises on the obsession with the otherness of the East.  Among many piquant observations was Europe's and America's shared supposition that being unhappy in one's inherited tradition can be remedied by embracing a very different set of codes and customs.  Given his heritage, Said was referring to what we have come to call the Middle East – the birthplace, as it were, of the values promoted in the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and monotheism.  But what he mentions less are the alien landscapes of the Far East, countries that have thrived for thousands of years with minimal interference from enterprising Europeans, and which are expected to have other means for going about the conflicts and lessons of an average day.  Which brings us to this well-known short story from Japan.

Perhaps it will disappoint the reader to learn that the translation of the story is "snow-woman"; that its most famous English version is allegedly plagued by historical inaccuracies may be even more off-putting.  The tale, contained in this fine collection, has a plot that will sound familiar to all ears.  Minokichi, a young man of eighteen, and Mosaku, an older man and Minokichi's mentor in the humble trade of woodcutting, are bound to travel every day on foot over dangerous terrain, "a forest situated about five miles from their village."  One day, of course, their routine is broken.  They arrive at the bridge on the river whose current "no common bridge can resist" and find their boatman has left and stranded his boat on the other side.  As "it was no day for swimming," they take shelter in a two-mat hut about six feet square.  They fall asleep and reality and fate merge into a coherent unit.  Snow begins to drift into the cabin as sleep covers their eyes, and while Mosaku dreams about the long life he has already experienced, Minokichi's mind is alert with the fears of a youthful imagination.  In time he feels snow on his face and opens his eyes to behold a beautiful "woman in white."  This woman, as white as the snow sprinkled over the two men, blows her breath over Mosaku then turns to Minokichi to do the same.  At the last moment she refrains, and gives him her reasons:

I intended to treat you like the other man.  But I cannot help feeling some pity for you – because you are so young .... You are a pretty boy, Minokichi; and I will not hurt you now.  But, if you ever tell anybody – even your own mother – about what you have seen this night, I shall know it; and then I will kill you .... Remember what I say!

I would be the last person to promote readings that equate sixteenth-century Japanese legends with the works of the Brothers Grimm and their contemporaries, but the famed otherness of the East is not evident here.  The story progresses and Minokichi awakes the next morning wondering whether it hadn't all been a dream.  His fears are confirmed, however, when Mosaku is found dead, an event that he obliterates from his memory until the tale's fateful dénouement.

The translator of Yuki-onna and many other classic ghost stories is this renowned Nipponophile, born in Greece but raised in an English household.  Research will tell you that Hearn likely conflated Yuki-onna with Yuki-joro, a "snow-harlot" with far more vengeful ends in mind.  I suspect we should not fault Hearn for making the rather banal Yuki-onna a more glamorous fit in his collection, yet we know that translators who tend to exaggerate will not resist to repeat their hidden crimes.  Moreover, the fact that Hearn is still read and enjoyed might be as much a testament to his insight into the culture he adored as an indication of the difficulty of transposing Japanese sense and sensibility into good English.  In an age when video games and bizarre horror movies are how we picture the developing culture of one of the world's most ancient traditions, a reminder of its other contributions is always welcome.  Perhaps just not too late at night.

Wolfen

Readers will undoubtedly notice the thin thread of superstition that hems each of the glorious robes adorned in these pages, and this fact cannot be helped.  For whatever reason – fear, perhaps, or an eerie sense of systematic involvement – I have always been terrified of the shapes of supernatural ideas, dark patches that continue to surface in my nightmares and momentary lapses of attention.  As a child, I wondered why this was so.  After all, the teachings inculcated in my formative years were of the broadest bent, so what was I doing believing in such rot?   Many moons, full and otherwise, passed and the same dread persisted: phantom fears of strange and monstrous things with one element in common – they were all distortions of our human existence.  When pundits launch into their habitual tirades about life on other planets, one cannot help but notice that the creatures they tend to describe are mockeries or improvements of us.  A rational man might conclude that we cannot understand anything without relating it to ourselves, that's why our extraterrestrials are either little green men or manifestations of the age-old enemy of the ape, the reptile (occasionally, another pest is featured, the insect).  Yet these are all, I repeat, rational conclusions.  The most frightening of our nightmares are surely distortions of our mores and images; but what makes them truly horrifying is the unpredictability of their outcome.  Some critics have misinterpreted this device in evaluating modern films by praising their lack of morality and lauding the "anything could happen now" feature of so many films devoid of any moral center – but this again is very far from the point.  Superstition, legend, myth (the last apparently this famous actor's favorite word) endure the centuries because there is a lesson involved.  Never is a hero betrayed just because the villain feels like it; never does a conspiracy develop with a rejection of the idea of divine redemption.  In other words, the worst kind of nightmare – and by association, the scariest myth ever told – is one where we don't know what is happening but we know why.  We have done some wrong to someone (the victim, as much as we might deny it, is well-known) and we must pay for our sins.   A great way to segue into this extraordinary film.

Casual observers and film critics might have thought at the time that the title was the Germanic plural of "wolf," which it is and isn't.  The author of the original novel is this German-American mystic and writer of speculative fiction whose affinity for the language of his forefathers (-en is indeed a common plural in modern German; "wolfen" in this case, however, is an archaic adjective that means "wolf-like") made the neologism an easy one.  What is more important for our purposes, however, is the commonality with older English plurals such as brethren, suggesting not only brotherhood but spiritual kinship.  The scene is New York City at the end of the 1970s, the last chapter to a period of urban expansion, crime, and dissolute living that for many reasons has not been matched since.  Many have profited from the excesses of these years; others continue to live in abuse of their bodies, minds, and fellow human beings.  We are not told any of this, mind you, we see it in the streets.  Drug addicts and winos litter our pavements and alleyways; dealers of pleasure stand in the shadows of every dark corner; and the wealthy, shallow pundits of greed circulate in ostentatious cars flaunting their lust.  This world is fallen; it is also, we notice, a society of predominantly European and African descent.  These two strands are represented, respectively, by detective Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney) and coroner Whittington (the late Gregory Hines).  Wilson is older and attached to more traditional methods; Whittington is young and less categorical, more insouciant about the development of the society he sees every day in its final coldness.  The odd coupling is indicative not only of the changes in the American political landscape that ultimately led to this year's presidential candidates, but also of the oversimplified black-white approach to strange phenomena. When it rains, we witness the condensation of atmospheric water vapor into large drops, or it's not really rain.  And when someone is found dead, ravaged by wounds that could only have been made by an animal, the animal must be a species known to science.

These attacks befall the fallen.  That is to say, the winos, drug dealers, and hoodlums who help divide a city into quarters according to standard of living and safety, who affect travel guides and tourism, education and nightlife.  When certain parts of your hometown are far less desirable or peaceful than others, you have lost your home as well as all the citizens obliged to stay there.  You will never know them, never experience what they experience, but you will read about their woes in the newspaper or liberal pamphlets that encourage compassion and forgiveness.   In these modern times when hollow shells in the form of human beings have sold everything they and we have to some dark force – namely, greed, the most unforgivable sin after betrayal – we should begin to doubt that they are really human.  Someone more evangelical than I might deem these wastrels the Devil's minions, but I shall not.  No, they are very human, very corrupt, and beyond all repair.  What if a scourge were to rise among these same debauched and dirty streets, an ancient scourge of the people who once lived in smaller tenements among green fields and bountiful harvests, well before the steel and concrete impaled each field and caused it to wilt and die?  There have been many works of fiction on the brotherhood of the wolves or something to that effect, a plausible conceit since canis lupus is the most notorious of pack animals (a natural instinct belied by the modern oxymoron "lone wolf").  We have also been exposed in the last two hundred years to countless tales of lycanthrope shapeshifters, curses, full moons, silver bullets ...  But why are we still talking about wolves?  Aren't these the villains of children's fables and adolescent dreams?  Aren't the only bloodthirsty, ruthless pack predators in New York City the roving gangs of thugs that limit us to about one-third of the actual urban landmass?  Are we not immune if we simply keep away from these ghettos?  Yet sometimes, as in the first, amazing attack sequence, even the most privileged are not immune, nor should they be.  After all, we are all brothers and sisters falling from the same eternal tree.

The Three Students

There are, we are told by the new priests of the religion of unassailable and unfathomable darkness, a hundred billion suns in each of a hundred billion galaxies in our universe.  That these pundits are rounding to the nearest happy figure (one with a comet tail of twenty-two zeros) should tell you exactly how sure we are of what is out there and what might actually be hidden from our perspectives.  The students of today are indeed confronted with the dilemma of overspecialization, of realizing from the beginning of their education that they unlike this man of letters or this great philosopher, mathematician and diplomat, cannot possibly learn in a lifetime everything that is worth learning.  Instead, they are advised to choose one small, sniveling category as their Bible and pursue that microcosm with all due alacrity and ferociousness, with man's greatest achievement, literature, being no exception.  Surely – and I may reveal some prejudices with the following statement – each literary tradition needs its experts.  Each language needs diligent men and women gorged on the masterpieces of the tradition in question and sufficiently familiar with everything else of note to derive from this assortment another library of thematic and philological studies.  In smaller and newer traditions, however, there inevitably lurks a paucity of works available to the scholar who wishes to place his countrymen (usually these tasks are best left to a native) on the same shelf with the books of great world literature.  It has been commonplace in the last century and in this one to speak of major traditions as simply those who have been historically blessed over the course of written time.  So the fact that Italy has countless works of art and Slovenia does not (as it were, my grandmother was an ethnic Slovene who spoke both languages) should not make one think that Slovenian literature possesses any less dignity than its Roman neighbor.  Yet given our terrestrial limitations, what is worth learning and what isn't?  Have I been foolish in my choice of Czech (now long since forgotten) and Danish, two smaller traditions rich in culture?  Let us put these questions aside for the moment and turn to this gem of a story that broaches the subject.

From its title, we understand that the tale will involve a university or a school, and likely one of great standing.  This suspicion is confirmed in the opening paragraph when Watson informs us that he and his sleuthing chum had the opportunity "in the year '95 ... to spend some weeks in one of our great university towns."  Holmes profits from the occasion to frequent a library

Where [he] was pursuing some laborious researches in early English charters – researches which led to results so striking that they may be the subject of one of my future narratives.

Although Holmes's academic interests – tire tracks, ash, poisons, inks, and coded languages, to name but a few – are arcane and often only used to propel the story forward, it is always interesting to see a great mind tackle a subject systematically since true learning can only be gotten from such an approach.  Holmes's work is going so well, in fact, that he initially fends off the pleas of a Mr. Hilton Soames, tutor and lecturer at the College of St. Luke's.  It turns out that, the following day, Soames will be administering an exam in Ancient Greek (including a sight passage from this famous historian) with the best grade to be awarded a scholarship.  Perhaps stupidly, he receives a copy of the Thucydides passage and leaves it unattended on his desk for an hour.  When he returns, he finds a key in the lock of his office and, upon entering, the three slips of paper containing the Greek scattered across the room.  The only other person with a key is the mild-mannered servant, Bannister, "a little, white-faced, clean-shaven, grizzly-haired fellow of fifty" and "absolutely above suspicion."  So the blame must fall to one of the three students for Soames is responsible:  Daulat Ras, Miles McLaren, and a young man named Gilchrist.

Holmes's methods are simple and elucidating, so no more of the plot will be revealed here.  What is most interesting is Conan Doyle's choice of three students, instinctively reflecting three societal currents with which Victorian England as a whole had to contend (women's rights lagged behind just a tad).  Gilchrist, who is never mentioned by his Christian name, is the son of the infamous Sir Jabez Gilchrist, a lord of ill repute "who ruined himself on the turf"; Ras, "a quiet, inscrutable fellow," represents the movement of academics from the Indian subcontinent to the best universities of their erstwhile oppressors and the seed of postcolonialism in general; and McLaren is described as "wayward, dissipated, and unprincipled," but "when he chooses to work, one of the brightest intellects of the university."  To Conan Doyle's credit, little is made of these differences, and the investigation proceeds more along an examination of personality and motive rather than cultural tendency.  Still, we see old England, modern polyethnic England, and modernity's knee-jerk reaction to authority and its preposterous claim to hereditary divine rights.  By the way, the only divine rights that exist are common to all of us, and they involve the right to believe in something greater than ourselves.  Sometimes that means admitting that we cannot understand our universe in full, but that, to paraphrase this writer of genius, we can begin to grasp the outline of a future understanding.  Maybe this sentiment can be pamphletized as follows: read as much as you can, learn as much as you can, but do it with the big picture in mind.  Regardless of how many suns you choose to worship.

Unbreakable

As far as I can remember, about three decades now, I have never been able to admire the Hellenic deities that continue to induce countless writers into unremitting adulation.  Perhaps it is the distance on the long beam of time; perhaps, and more likely, the immortality of these beings who were said to have made us, walked among us, played with us like the toys we give our children, and left us in the end to our own miserable devices.  The Hellenic gods, a subject I know enough about but not plenty, were always superior to the mere mortal, always ahead, always unconcerned with the daily traffic of worries and conundra because they knew their days were not numbered.  But how then do we relate to something that cannot die?  With every letter I write, I gain upon my end, and my end is what makes what I do have any significance.  Being immortal or immoral (a difference, to paraphrase this author, as narrow as that between "cosmic" and "comic") results in a similar quandary, that of the meaninglessness of existence, either because it will never end or because it never really began.  Revisionists pursuing this argument would claim that Christianity is based specifically on a refutation of the Hellenic tradition, of a god who dies only to return to live forever.  Now I am all for eternal redemption, and I believe in it as much as I believe in art – and every atom of my body believes in art – but immortality bestowed and immortality inherited are two different states of perpetuity.  The latter is the empty gift of the unknowing; the former is our alpha and our omega.  Still, conventional wisdom suggests that we do not have latter-day gods, Hellenic or otherwise, but we do have a fantastic collection of children's heroes that have had a profound impact on the American cultural landscape.   Their stories are published for children and young adults, with the macabre and cruel themes that only adults know to be part of this world, and they are, for sure, stories with a certain ease of expression that could not possibly be art.  Yet they have one redeeming function: they have replaced the figures worshiped centuries ago and, for the most part, improved on them because they have been fashioned in our own image – mortal and flawed.  Which brings us to this remarkable film.       

In the beginning we are seated on a Metroliner near David Dunn (Bruce Willis), a nice-looking, middle-aged fellow who thinks he still has enough charm and muscle tone to woo a much younger female passenger.  Our first impression of him as he stealthily hides his wedding band is one of deception, an impression obliterated when David's train proceeds to crash headlong into another Metroliner.  We awake in the hospital.  David revives and is informed that he is the sole survivor of one of the most horrific rail accidents in U.S. history.  The kicker is, he not only survived, he was not even hurt.  The amazing scene as he proceeds past the legions of bereaved relatives, very much as if he didn't belong there in the first place, should tell you what we are dealing with.  As should, as it were, his initials.  Super heroes tend to have alliterative names, perhaps because they're catchier, or perhaps because destiny sometimes has a way of making sure that we know its whims.  Whatever the case, David, a part-time security guard at a stadium in Philadelphia comes home to his wife Audrey (Robin Wright Penn) and ten-year-old son Joseph, yet it is a happy homecoming only because of his survival of the crash.  For years now David and Audrey have had their issues, mostly stemming from the fact that David allegedly gave up a promising football career after a car accident involving the high school sweethearts.  What is most interesting about this premise is that, at the time, Audrey accepted David's sacrifice regardless of whether her husband was telling the truth.  In fact, there are hints interspersed throughout the film that she knows the car accident did him no harm whatsoever.  That means that David gave up football for her and her alone, which might explain why she has stuck with him through some lean and difficult times.  It also means that David's lies become the lifeblood of their relationship, reducing their trust in the future while strengthening their faith in the past.  A fine point to introduce another character, a certain Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson).

While also boasting a Biblical name, Elijah could not be more different than David.  While David is white, thickly muscled, and a longtime family man, Elijah is African-American, gaunt, frail, and, apart from his mother, very much alone in the world.  David is impecunious and plugged into the banality of working class everydayness; Elijah is well-off and, of all things, a comic book retailer, one of the relentless dreams of every ten-year-old boy.  Elijah approaches David after the train crash and asks him a bizarre question: "How many days have you been sick in your life?"  Puzzled, David repeats the question to his boss, who interprets it as a backhanded ploy to get a raise, which he grants.  No, David has never missed a day of work, never even had so much as a cold.  But why should this be problematic?  And why should a man like Price, a man so brittle that he spent his childhood breaking his bones from the slightest concussive force, take an interest in an underachieving security guard?  If you are familiar with stories of this ilk, you will see where things lead but may not guess what revelations take place at the end.  What is most astounding about this film is the simplicity of its plot: the discovery of a greater purpose.  Literati like to talk about the Bildungsroman, a pretentious term for a coming-of-age story of a person of artistic merit – but we will not venture into those treacherous waters.  Suffice it to say that Elijah, like David, has a secret, and maybe David and Elijah have some kind of contrapuntal need for one another.  When do opposites need another?  To define their own abilities and interests?  Or perhaps to justify their conflict?  Not that you will really see more than verbal sparring between David and Elijah throughout the film.  After all, what could someone nicknamed "Mr. Glass" as a child possibly do to a man who survived a train wreck unscathed?  And that's where most youngsters would flip to the end of the comic book.  But, one would hope, we adults are more patient than that.