SHATTERED GLASS
Son of Scam
Artistic fakery is ubiquitous and ancient: one imagines a caveman passing off a bison he's charcoled on his wall as the creation of some stone age Rembrandt. (Like those who pose as another individual, male artistic imposters have always predominated over females.) Whatever the place and time, the artistic impostor often possesses talent which would be recognized, even judged remarkable in its own right, were it not for his obscure compulsion to submerge his skills through devious mimicry.
A tragic case in point is the brilliant 18th century poet, Thomas Chatterton, who claimed he had unearthed poems written by an invented Fifteenth century English clergyman, Sir Thomas Rawley. Chatterton's forgeries were devastatingly unmasked in his day, and the impoverished poet subsequently committed suicide because he could not flourish under his own name. Today many of the Rawley counterfeits are considered masterful, and Chatteron himself lauded as an early Romantic genius.
Psychoanalysts have variously interpreted imposture as an attempt to repair the trauma of maternal loss; recuperate childhood physical injury; achieve a heightened sense of reality akin to the compulsive gambler's passion for 'action'. From an Oedipal perspective, faking art -- or borrowing identity entire -- has been construed as a symbolic competition with the father in which the impostor seeks to co-opt, subvert, even mock paternal authority from the shadows.
An intriguing subtype of artistic impostor is the journalist who invents material for no discernible reason, or with dubious rationales. Stephen Glass is arguably the most notorious, certainly the most gifted of these slippery gents to surface recently. Glass had already established gemuine journalistic credentials when he began confabulating stories for the New Republic, a magazine long esteemed for its high standard of probity. Director and writer Billy Rays' eponymous Shattered Glass documents Glass' shameful scamming, as well as the havoc it wrought upon the magazine and his associates, many of whom counted him a close friend.
In the film's establishing sequence, Glass is speaking about his achievements at his former high school with fetching modesty, to a class of starry-eyed students. Hayden Christenson wonderfully captures Glass' seductive blend of self-effacing charm and boyish sincerity. Scenes from the schoolroom talk and Glass' pensive voiceover about the demands of his craft are interpolated with the subsequent account of his appalling manipulations.
Armed with a photographic memory, Glass always seems uncannily to offer just the right kind word on his way up. He's the darling of the secretarial pool; endlessly supportive of junior colleagues; deferential towards senior staff, who in a patronizing sort of way are fascinated by his off-beat pitches. Glass carefully takes no side in the bitter snatch and grab for editorial control raging within the New Republic's staid offices. He's ever ready to cozy up to whichever top dog is occupying the big chair.
Within a few years, Glass becomes a much stroked feature writer for the New Republic, as well as a valued contributor to other publications. His meteoric rise is cut short when diligent reporters from a rival publication discover inconsistencies in one of his articles, delightedly catching the scent of blood. The following investigation topples Glass' house of cards. It's discovered that twenty seven of the forty-one pieces he penned from 1995 to 1998 are persuasively detailed, but patently egregious fabrications.
In theme and cinematic technique (music included) Shattered Glass comprises a well executed gloss on All The President's Men, with the shady side of journalism as the subject of interrogation rather than low deeds in high places. The New Republic's supposedly foolproof firewall (and by implication "infallible" safeguards against error elsewhere in print journalism) turn out to be deeply flawed, exquisitely vulnerable to exploitation by a rogue like Glass who proffers the wily simulacrum of integrity.
Glass' fall from grace -- and viewer sympathy -- is nicely dovetailed with one's increasing respect for Chuck Lane (Peter Sarsgaard), who replaced the popular Michael Kelly (Hank Azaria) as the New Republic's editor. Lane was disliked by many staff members because of his relative inexperience and lack of Kelly's common touch. In Peter Sarsgaard's acute portrayal, he's revealed as a man of unassailable honesty, with the strength of character and passion for truth so derelict in Glass.
The director invites us to experience Glass' bad faith through Lane's ever more penetrating gaze. Resisting his staff's pleas to pity Glass' apparent psychological unravelling, Lane relentlessly susses out Glass' gross betrayals of principle. Lane's disconcerted suspicion yields to lucid disgust, and he sends Glass packing.
Shattered Glass concludes with a return to Glass' school lecture: this time, the students fade away, revealing him alone, disconsolate before rows of empty seats. Here and elsewhere, the film is not well served by its too ironic portrayal of Glass as he later portrayed himself in his self-serving novel, The Fabulist: as a tender-hearted innocent adrift in a sea of editorial sharks, whose childlike desire to be liked precipitated his Munchausen-ish tall tales.
One is more convinced when Shattered Glass treats its anti-hero as a shameless psychopath, compelled like the scorpion in the fable to poison the very craft that sustains him, to betray mentors and friends even as he brings ruin down upon his own head. Although the film adopts a coolly distanced position vis-a-vis the journalist's motivations or psychodynamics, Glass' provocative scammming resonates with the above speculations on the impostor's Oedipally inflected, self-destructive provocation of paternal authority.
One wonders if holding a mirror up to Glass' egregious misdeeds has unintentionally provided him with yet another platform for profiting from them. According to the show biz mot, bad reviews are better than no reviews. Son of Sam-type legislation forbids reaping gain from criminal acts, even when the crime is not mortal. But at this writing neither Glass, nor Jason Blair, who similarly scammed the New York Times last year, have been subject to prosecution, civil or criminal.
Instead, the odious Blair reportedly garnered a six figure advance for his forthcoming autobiography. And while Glass' book has not done well, he has nevertheless achieved the dubious celebrity a culture of narcissism awards such creatures. Better not to have made Shattered Glass, rather than risk it becoming (or at least participating in) what it beheld. I recur to my paraphrase in an earlier piece on Crumbof Wittgenstein's famous remark: "Of which one should not speak, one should remain silent".