Movie Review of "Shattered Glass" (2003 debut)

 

I don't have time to watch as much TV or movies as I used to. I mostly run "Shark Tank" non-stop 24/7, an old rerun of "Charlie's Angels" or "Columbo" that my mother and I used to watch a lot over the years. My mother recently passed, and I am finding that some of the simplest moments we shared were the most precious... just watching reruns of our favorite shows, "The Andy Griffith Show," and others that were special to us and laughing and talking together.

But once in a while nowadays, I catch a movie late at night. I have the old favorites that I think were genuinely great films, but most modern-day movies and music disappoint me. They are high on action and violence, but low on genuine didactic messages or even a good plot. Ridiculous sitcoms you see now? Forget it! Shows like "Big Bang Theory" are among the worst and literally attempt to forget the idea of a belief in God altogether. 

Once in a while, I do find a pretty good film (not nearly as many as Spielberg is planning to retire)...But I caught a movie from 2003,  "Shattered Glass," the other night, that I thought was worth commenting on.

I actually thought this film was new at first until I saw the date, but it's still relevant today because of the mainstream media and the way they've been acting lately against the President and the country, etc., all in the name of views, revenue, and control. 

"Shattered Glass" begins with a look into the reporting career of a young up-and-coming journalist named Stephen Glass, who builds a reputation for writing fiery, accusatory articles about well-known people and organizations such as the "Young Republicans" and other groups that he is not too fond of. In one of his headliners, he visits a meeting they hold in a hotel, in which he describes extreme behavior, describing a mini bar in which all of the members get drunk and carouse with women until all hours of the night. Not once does his article mention the policies or statements mentioned at one of the Young Republicans' meetings, and he paints a trashy picture of the otherwise respected group in "The New Republic" Magazine.

As you can see from the cover of the latest issue, the misleading nature of the stories in this scandal rag continues in the current political environment.

One scene of the film features a group of editors circling all the commas in an article to show that, unlike other publications of its day (circa 1990s), they were nearly perfect in their use of common punctuation.

For those who don't know, newspapers are notorious for misusing and deleting commas and other punctuation to save space. Why an entire media category of publications decided to ignore proper style and grammatical correctness in the name of saving space, I'll never know. Regardless, Glass and his co-writers and editors spent hours circling commas to show people how well they used them. Ironically, it appeared they OVERUSED them at times. 

The hero writer, who always created the big headlines, was always hard at work on the latest piece that would astound and shake up readers, improving their circulation.

One story he wrote about a "Hacker's Convention" revealed the underhanded acts (and even implied felonies) of a well-known software company, and it got millions of reads. But when he was questioned about the events later and his sources, he was unable to verify any of them. Admittedly, all of us who are writers sometimes have to keep our sources anonymous, such as some of my own sources who work in a top intelligence agency and would be endangered at times by revealing their identities. But Glass was unable to reveal any sources besides himself, leaving them to question where he was getting his information.

Slowly but surely, the facts of his masterpiece start to unravel until it is finally discovered that he fabricated not only the sources from which he pieced the article together, but that the entire article was completely from his imagination. 

This movie is a great example of the Biblical truth that a lie requires someone to keep backtracking and lying over and over to cover up the original lie. 

The two editors who have so respected his work over time team up to uncover what Glass had done, and it becomes increasingly evident what great lengths he had gone to in order to keep the lies alive. He even made recordings of the supposed software company's CEO in which he masked his voice and recorded a message that was supposedly from the nonexistent software guru, who threatened to sue The New Republic for defamation.

Then one of his editors asked him to accompany him to New York, where the infamous "Hacker Convention" took place, and little details, seemingly unimportant at the time, slowly but surely reveal the malfeasance.

Glass claimed that a restaurant across the street saw him on the Sunday afternoon that he was there. But when his editor approaches the door, there is a sign up that says, "Closed on Sundays after 3pm." Glass had said the meeting occurred at night. Other discrepancies about details surrounding the meeting where he had gathered the sources of information seemingly did not even exist.

Logic begins to break down completely and Glass starts to "shatter," but attempts to hang onto the larger lie that the story is based on facts as he was given them, and acts as though he was just fooled by bad sources.

His editor, realizing finally that Glass lied about everything, finally confronts him with what he knows to be the truth-that he completely fabricated the entire story.

Glass is later fired for the infraction. He apologizes fiercely, but as he's about to leave, he notices his editor removing the article headlines that he had written from a display shelf. As the editor removes each one, he thumbs through the old articles, and as the camera moves in on him, we realize that he is starting to question what we (the audience) have wondered all along-perhaps he made them ALL up?

A hearing is held later with Glass's attorney (because some of this behavior crosses over into criminal law) and Glass agrees that when his editor mentions a title that he is to remain silent if he admits it is fabricated in its entirety.

One by one, as he reads the titles, Glass says nothing, meaning that every last title was fiction, nothing more than a creation of his imagination in order to keep his job and become a journalistic star under The New Republic name.

This movie exposes how easy it is for the Media to lie and peddle the lies as truth to an adoring public who can't believe what he's saying isn't true. 

He wrote like a best-selling fiction writer, not a serious reporter, because he was giving readers what they wanted-entertainment.

In a way, we can blame the paying public, too. They kept buying the magazine every single week and reading the "trash" that Glass was peddling, all to salivate over the idea that a respectable organization like The Young Republicans was nothing but a bunch of sex-crazed adolescents paying hookers for a good time.

Rather than covering the philosophies that fuel the organization or the ideas that held them together, rather than exploring the issues that their readers really would have benefited from, he wallowed in decadence and sensationalism, helping to sustain the idea that all the media is interested in is (in one famous singer's words, 'dirty laundry.')

One simple scene near the end makes a great point. As the editor is leaving the building, his secretary says quietly, "You know what would have prevented this, don't you?" 

"What's that?" he replies.

"Pictures," she says. "It would have substantiated everything."

This movie, "Shattered Glass," is based on the true story of Stephen Glass (played by Hayden Christiansen) and an article he wrote for The New Republic in 1998 entitled "Hacker Heaven," which was so sensational in its style that it started the entire unraveling of the string that led to the undoing of Glass when the facts didn't add up with reality. 

Ultimately, the tables turned when Forbes Magazine discovered what Glass had done and exposed him, completely destroying Glass's reputation in an article that was later heralded as "a breakthrough in modern journalism."

Oh, the irony!