The superpower within...

Glass (2019)

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Is having superpower abilities real, or is it merely a construct of our creative mind? We have grown up looking at comics and movies, yearning to be invincible people who could fly like a plane and jump buildings in a single bound.

We longed secretly to have that single superpower, not to change the world, but to be better than the most intelligent guy in class; or the tallest, the strongest, the funniest, pick your pick.

In the annals of time, somehow, we lost interest in all this sorcery. The journey of life straddled us thus far. We look back at our lives and are happy with what we see. We cannot fathom how the heck we managed to achieve all of these. Given a chance to do it all again, we are sure we would not have made it. The hard knocks that life had to offer pushed us to achieve the impossible. Perhaps they awoke the sleeping superbeing within us to fight our inner demons to come out tops. Sometimes we marvel at our achievements and ask ourselves how we did all the things we did - that public exams, that marathon, that earth-defying feat. We doubt we could reproduce such results if we were to do them all over again.

In other words, we have powers within us waiting to be harnessed. We need not go around looking high and low for that push. No beam of light will shine from above to give it extraordinary powers. Still, all have us have that feared Kryptonite that may ruin us. Stay away!

In a convoluted way, this is the subtle message this film is trying to impart. Three characters with superpowers within their own rights - David Dunn (Overseer), Kevin Crumb (with multiple identities, including the Beast) and Elijah Price (Mr Glass).

The Overseer, the unassuming middle-aged man with incredible strength, with the help of with adult son, manages to capture the Beast, who is high on alert for kidnapping four teenage girls. But both Overseer and Crumb are captured and held in a high-security infirmary. Within the facility, the apparently catatonic Glass is also kept. The doctor in charge of them is part of a secret organisation out on a crusade to tell the world that there are no superheroes but disillusioned individuals with delusions of grandeur. In their defence come Glass' mother, Dunn's son and Casey Cooke, the victim who escaped Beast's clutches in the second offering of this trilogy, Split (2017).

Glass plans an elaborate escape route to announce to the world that they indeed have superpowers.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Peel open the eye of ignorance

Doctor Strange (2016)

They say Dr Strange dabbles with magic in his crusade to fight the destructive forces that attack Earth. An intelligent but arrogant neurosurgeon in the real world, he is floored by a nasty accident that damaged his hands so severely that all the modern medicine could offer could not put his hands in working order again. No amount of aggressive physiotherapy or experimental avant-garde modality of treatment could resurrect his limp hands. They continued tremoring like leaves.

At this juncture, he heard of a patient with a transacted spinal cord who attained 100% recovery with alternative therapy when modern science failed him. Dr Steven Strange's subsequent journey for a cure led him to Kathmandu to things beyond his imagination. He got sucked into a world of 'magic', harvesting inner energies, dark forces and alternate dimensions. Things became so complicated that he found himself defending the Universe's right side against the Dark Forces.

I could not help but saw parallelism in how the story went to what is perceived in Vedantic teachings. Similarly, the mathematician Ramanujam saw his formulas spilt out of his mind as he sat and gazed at his devata, Namagiri. Hindus believe that the various Gods and Goddesses are a personification of conduits in pursuit of specific vibrations. Tune in a particular wavelength and see a sea of knowledge deep and too immense for the human mind. Seek Saraswati for an educational path, Durga for athletic endeavours, Lakshmi for a road of prosperity, Ganesha to remove obstacles, etcetera. 

Another exciting part of the story is the concept of time in a loop form. Unlike modern man's idea of time being linear, the Vedic teachings suggest that it could be cyclical. What takes place now had probably happened many times before and bound to happen again and again.

Among the many that get thrown in along the movie's course, one philosophical question is whether it is alright to be dishonest to win over your opponent? Is it acceptable for a leader to do the very thing that the rest of the subjugated are forbidden from? When life is simple, the rules of life must be followed to the tilt. As life becomes complex, rules are not so straightforward and can be bend.

We can draw our conclusions from the events in Ramayana and Mahabharata. Ramayana, depicting simpler times, portrayed Rama's life decision that was cut and dry. Do this and that. Simple. During Mahabharata, things become complicated. "They are your relatives, but you Arjuna still have to defeat them in battle. That is your dharma, the correct thing to do." In another scenario, it is perfectly expectable for Yudishtra to 'lie' that Drona's son Aswatthama 'died' when in fact, Yudishtra meant Astwatthama the elephant died. It was justified as Drona was almost undefeatable in war with his unfair usage of the celestial weapon. Drona's subsequent slaying was excused. These days we call these half-truths white lies.

Watch out for its sequel in 2022.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.