- 1 For an analysis of Shyamalan’s focus on faith, see Tsopotos Alexandros, “La foi : questions, signes (...)
1 First hailed as Hollywood’s new wunderkind following the release of The Sixth Sense in 1999, M. Night Shyamalan has since become one of the most divisive filmmakers in activity today. Naïve and overrated for some, brilliantly deceptive and underrated for others, his films have divided viewers and critics over their narrative structures – their reliance on narrative twists – or over their thematic content – their exploration of faith, arguably Shyamalan’s central theme1. This article will examine the role of corruption in the director’s work. I will argue that corruption represents another major thematic concern of the director’s that has so far been largely unexplored by scholars. By focusing essentially on the ethical dimension of Shyamalan’s relationship to corruption, I will suggest that this understudied aspect of the director’s work may also explain the highly divisive quality of his films, which can be understood as embracing a highly radical belief as to the ethics of corruption, while reflexively questioning that belief (and its impact in popular culture) at the same time.
2This article will mostly examine what I would argue is the central ethical question asked by the films’ focus on corruption, which could be summarized thus: does one’s experience of corruption make one morally, intellectually, and even physically superior?
- 2 In particular, this article will leave aside any form of moral corruption, i.e. of a character’s be (...)
3While the word “corruption” refers to a variety of phenomena pertaining to the alteration of something previously perceived as “pure” or “intact”, this article will focus solely on the most systematically depicted form of corruption in Shyamalan’s films, which comprises any kind of physical and mental degradation, deterioration, and decay2. However, before focusing on the films’ thematic exploration of corruption, let us first briefly examine the myriad ways in which corruption may be said to be a key notion in the director’s aesthetics and artistic practice, as this brief overview will help shed light on what I would call the ethical paradox of corruption in Shyamalan’s work.
- 3 André Bazin, Qu’est-ce que le cinéma ? (Paris, Editions du Cerf, 1976).
- 4 Sébastien Lefait and Philippe Ortoli, “Introduction”, in In Praise of Cinematic Bastardy, eds. Séba (...)
4At least ever since Andre Bazin’s seminal article Defense of Impurity3, cinema has often been deemed an ontologically impure medium, one founded upon hybridity, intermedial influences and borrowings. As Sebastien Lefait and Philippe Ortoli point out, “the art of cinema, because it was born from various and heterogeneous sources (science, photography, popular entertainment, etc.) has constantly tried to preserve that taste for blending. And even though it finally created its own specificity, the art of film has not reneged on that founding principle”4. In this sense, Shyamalan could be seen as a prototypically impure filmmaker, in that his work fully embraces the “impure”, “corrupt” or “bastardly” quality of cinema by multiplying intermedial connections with other artforms.
- 5 The Happening is often considered one of Shyamalan’s worst films, the start of a dry spell which co (...)
5His films specifically tend to borrow from artforms that have historically been considered as hierarchically inferior to cinema, so that their impurity can also be understood in terms of cultural hierarchy: Unbreakable (2001), Split (2017) and Glass (2019) form a trilogy inspired by superhero comic books, Old (2021) was adapted from a comic book, Avatar: The last Airbender (2010) was adapted from a cartoon and Lady of the Water (2006) was initially a story that M. Night Shyamalan made up for his children. The director has also been the showrunner of two series, Wayward Pines (2015-2016) and Servant (2019-2023), thus showing his eagerness to invest a medium – be it TV or a streaming platform – which has long been considered unworthy of a director categorized as an auteur, even though this particular cultural preconception has long been challenged. The director’s rejection of cultural hierarchies also extends to an obvious desire to oppose the formal, thematic and cultural expectations of both auteur independent films and Hollywood blockbusters, by employing stylistic and narrative elements drawn from historically devalued forms of audiovisual production. His infamous5 The Happening (2008) has been defined as a B movie dressed up as a Hollywood blockbuster (Evangelista, 2018) while Old was described as a feature-length episode of The Twilight Zone (Simpson, 2021). Split even dramatizes Shyamalan’s taste for making films that question cultural hierarchies, as its final narrative twist reveals that what had so far seemed like a psychological thriller was in fact to be categorized as a superhero movie – a much more critically devalued genre.
- 6 Thomas Elsaesser, “The Mind-Game Film,” in Puzzle Films, Complicated Storytelling in Contemporary C (...)
6 Through the use of such narrative twists, which have become a staple of the director’s ever since The Sixth Sense in 1999, Shyamalan relies on narrative and stylistic strategies that have also been perceived by some as corrupting the purity of the film form. His films epitomize what Thomas Elsaesser calls “mind-game films”, i.e. films with complex narrative structures in which crucial plot elements are withheld from both characters and audience until a final revelation, thus adding a level of playfulness that alters what Elsaesser calls the traditional “spectator-film relation”6 as the viewers must first try to figure out the clues that suggest they are being led astray, then reinterpret the whole film once the twist has been revealed.
- 7 “M. Night Shyamalan on Making Horror Movies,” Youtube, uploaded by ScreenBites, 19 Oct. 2021. https (...)
7 In a recent interview, Shyamalan pointed at yet another aspect linking his films to corruption. He explained that he prefers to shoot using film rather than digital technology as he finds value in the inherent corruptibility of film: “I don’t like the feeling that happens with digital where you can just shoot for ever and ever. We shot [Old] on film, so it’s a finite amount of footage. It’s precarious, it’s going through a gate […] all of it makes you feel it’s rare and precious what you’re doing”7.
8The director’s aesthetics and cinematic practice thus point at the value Shyamalan confers on hybridity, bastardy and impurity, as well as on fragility, deterioration and decay. This article will now explore how such beliefs thematically translate into his work, first by suggesting that in Shyamalan’s films, experiencing or witnessing corruption is depicted as a necessary gateway to greatness, and, secondly, by examining how the moral ambiguity raised by such a counterintuitive defense of corruption is, at times, reflexively underlined and questioned.
- 8 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicity: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Or (...)
9The ultimate outcome of physical corruption is death. Since the dead may of course no longer strive for greatness, this article will mostly focus on the way Shyamalan’s work depicts corruption as a gateway to greatness for the characters who survive an experience of corruption. However, it is worth noting that some of Shyamalan’s films also explore the possibility that death itself, no matter how apparently absurd, may in fact be a positive event – if not for the dead themselves, then for humankind. In Signs (2002), Father Graham (Mel Gibson) loses his faith in God following the tragic and apparently meaningless death of his wife (Patricia Kalember) in a car accident. When hostile aliens invade the Earth a few years later, however, the narrative leads to the realization that her death, as well as the minor forms of mental and physical corruption that other members of the family are inflicted with (the water phobia of the daughter and the asthma of the son), all served a higher purpose, as they gave the Graham family the means to defeat the alien invaders. In Knock at the Cabin (2023), a group of unconnected individuals hold a family hostage because they all experienced visions showing them a member of this family must die in order to prevent the apocalypse. The family members are progressively convinced of the earnestness of the kidnappers, and various events announcing the looming apocalypse do take place, so that the diegetic ambiguity as to the veracity of the kidnappers’ beliefs is lifted by the end of the film. Eric (Jonathan Groff), one of the family members, does end up sacrificing himself and saving the world. These two narratives therefore adopt a religious perspective and imply that in spite of their apparent meaninglessness and arbitrariness, corruption and death are necessary - that if God included corruption and suffering as part of the human experience, then these experiences must serve a greater good, no matter how absurd they appear. Such reflections on the ethical necessity of corruption and death are highly reminiscent of Gottfried Leibniz’s theory of the Best of all possible worlds, developed in 1710 in Essays of Theodicy: on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil8. But while the films focusing on characters dying to develop a Leibnizian worldview, it is to another ethical philosophy – Friedrich Nietzsche’s – that one must turn to in order to shed light on Shyamalan’s portrayal of corruption as a gateway to greatness for those who survive the experience.
10Many of Shyamalan’s characters are physically or mentally corrupted by diseases, injuries, disabilities or senescence. The characters who experience or even just witness exceptional levels of physical and mental deterioration are set apart from the rest of the community, either isolating themselves or being excluded by a society that not only rejects death, decay and impurity, but also the individuals that remind them of it, often equating mental and bodily corruption with moral corruption. Yet through the course of the stories, it becomes apparent that witnessing or experiencing the corruption of the body and of the mind actually makes these characters stronger and more accomplished than anyone else. Most of these stories often revolve around such characters learning to accept these differences as a gift rather than a curse, as in The Sixth Sense, where a boy with the capacity to see and interact with dead people learns not to fear these embodiments of death and decay, and in the process acquires the superhuman capacity to help both the living and the dead cope with death and tragedy.
- 9 “M. Night Shyamalan on Making Horror Movies”.
11Shyamalan has repeatedly hinted at the superiority of the victims of physical and intellectual corruption in interviews, notably in a recent one promoting Old, in which he explained how improvement through corruption is, according to him, “the way of nature”: “Even if you’re talking about the littlest thing, like a wine or something, when it has to struggle a little bit, it has more flavor. It’s just the way of nature. You break and grow back stronger”9.
- 10 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyous Science, translated by R. Kevin Hill (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classi (...)
- 11 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, translated by Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford World’s Clas (...)
- 12 Pierre Roche, « Normativité, grande santé et persévérance en son être, » Pistes 16, no. 1 (2014), h (...)
12Just like wine must be altered through oxidation to age well, Shyamalan’s characters must embrace the struggles stemming from the inherent corruptibility of the human body in order to grow past their limitations, as in Old where the main couple finally learns to live in the present, their love for one another rekindled, as a result of the experience of accelerated senescence they are subjected to. This sheds light on the Nietzschean quality of corruption in the director’s work: in The Joyous Science (1882)10, Fredrich Nietzsche develops the concept of Great Health, which applies to those who do not seek to protect themselves from the corrupting influence of disease but embrace it. Nietzsche posits that disease must be seen as an opportunity to impose one’s will to power, a belief he famously summarized in the subsequent Twilight of the Idols (1888) by the aphorism “whatever does not kill me makes me stronger”11. As Pierre Roche argues, the strength Nietzsche describes entails a superior moral sense, a finer capacity to embrace life and even a new and improved value system12. Such a belief is echoed in Shyamalan’s films which posit that fighting all forms of mental and physical corruption makes one stronger.
13The Visit (2015) provides a telling example of the way Shyamalan’s films develop an ethical perspective that echoes Nietzsche’s Great Health. Two young siblings visit their grandparents, whom they have never seen as their mother hasn’t spoken to them in years. Upon arriving, they notice their grandparents are acting strangely, which they quickly attribute to mental diseases – sundowning and dementia – associated with their old age. As they are about to leave their grandparents’ house, they finally discover that the two elderlies with whom they have spent a week are in fact not their grandparents, but two patients from a mental hospital who killed their actual grandparents to take their place, and now threaten to kill the children rather than see them leave. The empowering nature of corruption is evident in the representation of the fake grandparents. While both characters are subjected to senescence and mental diseases, in no way are they debilitated. In fact, they seem like harmless elderlies at first, but they appear more and more formidable as their mental disorders take over, to the point of looking like quasi-supernatural beings gifted with extraordinary strength and agility: the fake grandmother (Deanna Dunagan) crawls through the basement while chasing the kids with almost superhuman speed, while the fake grandfather (Peter McRobbie) can overpower much younger men. But it is mostly through the trajectory of the young boy, Tyler (Ed Oxenbould), that the film points out how, in Shyamalan’s work, experiencing corruption is a gateway to greatness. Tyler is a germophobe: ever since his father left when he was five years old, he has developed an irrational fear of diseases. Before attempting to kill Tyler, the fake grandfather tortures him by smearing a dirty diaper on his face. Initially paralyzed, Tyler then finds the strength to act and kills his aggressor. The film’s conclusion implies that defeating this man has enabled him to overcome his fear of germs, which has in turn allowed him to make peace with his father’s abandonment. Confronting the risk of death and diseases, rather than running away from it, leads Tyler to accomplish a feat of physical strength (killing his formidable aggressor) as well as to reach emotional and psychological stability.
- 13 A theory most notably developed in his 1887 On the Genealogy of Morals, translated by Douglas Smith (...)
14With Shyamalan as with Nietzsche, only a few exceptional beings prove sufficiently strong to embrace the possibilities of growth offered by one’s experience of disease or corruption. In Old for instance, accelerated senescence strengthens the main couple but all the other victims of this plight die an absurd death, without having experienced any kind of growth. However, most characters fail to grow not because they fail to learn from their experience of corruption, but because, like Tyler at the beginning of The Visit, they try to avoid the experience at all costs. This inevitably leads Shyamalan’s films to verge towards an elitist moral worldview whereby the majority of the population is depicted as weak or cowardly. Such a tendency towards moral elitism also reflects the highly Nietzschean quality of Shyamalan’s conception of corruption. Nietzsche famously holds a certain contempt for the masses, notably due to his belief that Western culture favors mediocrity as its morality stems from the resentment of the weak toward the powerful13, but his disdain also ensues from his concept of Great Health, as he argues those who seek health at all costs lack the willpower to conceive of the life-affirming potential of one’s struggle with disease. Shyamalan’s work also condemns the mediocrity of the weak resenting the strong, as this article will point out through the example of Glass, but his films and series essentially suggest most people are morally and psychologically deficient in that they turn away from corruption, pain and death, either by isolating themselves, repressing memories or excluding those who act as living reminders of corruption.
15The community from The Village provides a telling example: after experiencing the death of loved ones, a group of American individuals decide to build a remote community where they can raise their families. There, they attempt to escape their own time, perceived as morally corrupt and excessively dangerous, by pretending to live in an idealized late 19th century community, sheltered both from the perceived dangerousness of their time as well as from the ravages of time itself. But in order to make sure their children will not discover these lies, they make up monsters surrounding the village, ready to attack anyone willing to get out. Despite all their efforts, however, corruption inevitably ends up stemming from within the community, all the more so as the lack of modern medicine increases the risk of diseases and premature deaths. In a vain effort to protect their physical, mental and moral integrity, the members of the community therefore end up causing even more harm, while simultaneously depriving life of all value, as indicated by the symbolism associated with the color red throughout the film. The color of corruption and blood, red is worn by the fake monsters, and has become taboo within the community as it is supposed to attract them. But red is also the color of life and passion, and in an early scene, two teenage girls become strangely frightened when noticing a red flower, which they hastily pluck and bury – by forbidding the color red within their community, the elders are therefore symbolically shown to have engendered a devitalized society.
- 14 In his study of The Sixth Sense, Jean-François Baillon notes that Cole is called a “freak” by chara (...)
- 15 The fact that normal people do not see corruption or refuse to acknowledge it is particularly evide (...)
16Such a critical outlook on a majority of the characters can appear surprising in films that, on the surface, seem to uphold an inclusive form of morality more in keeping with the kind of humanist worldview one might expect from a director once hailed as “the next Spielberg” (Mendelson), a worldview which would advocate the need for people to recognize the strength of those that society has labelled as “freaks” or “outcasts” due to their experience of corruption14. But with Shyamalan, such an apparently inclusive moral reflection turns into an exclusive moral belief advocating the superior nature of these very outcasts, shown as not just equal but better than regular people. Several of his films and series do attempt to undermine this latent elitism by depicting such characters as guides or healers who, once they have grown stronger, can in turn uplift the non-exceptional beings around them, such as in The Sixth Sense where Cole (Haley Joel Osment)’s gift eventually enables him to help others – be it his mother (Toni Collette) who has never properly mourned the passing of her own mother, or Malcolm (Bruce Willis), a ghost who first refuses to acknowledge his own death – or in Servant, where Leanne (Nell Tiger Free) develops supernatural powers which she then uses to attempt to heal the couple employing her as a nanny. In both cases, these characters are given the power to open the eyes of the normal people around them, forcing them to deal with the unavoidability of decay and death that they refused to acknowledge15.
- 16 Jean-François Baillon notably pointed out that Cole, in The Sixth Sense, is frequently associated w (...)
17Yet one may argue that such a narrative structure remains morally elitist, since even though Shyamalan’s films ultimately imply everyone is capable of growth, they also cement the ontological superiority of the few exceptional beings capable of leading the bulk of society towards a better path. Incidentally, these exceptional beings are frequently depicted as analogues of the filmmaker himself16.
- 17 Nietzsche, The Joyous Science, 22.
18A second consequence of the Nietzschean ethics advocated by Shyamalan’s films is the paradoxical attraction that the prospect of physical and mental corruption may exert, since even though these experiences are never represented as other than inherently negative in themselves, they are essential in the narrative journey of the superior characters, as they are necessary for them to grow and reveal their full potential. In The Village, this paradox is thematically established by the attraction towards the risk of pain and death shown by some of the younger characters, who play a game in which they must stand on the edge of the village for as long as possible, even though they believe they might attract dangerous monsters in doing so. Far from being depicted as an idiotically dangerous game of chicken, the film shows the characters willing to face such risks to be the only ones who, in the course of the film, are going to grow strong enough to leave the protective nest of the village and embrace the more dangerous, but also more real, wider world. Just as Nietzsche stated in the preface to the second edition of the Joyous Science that “it is great pain only which liberates the spirit”17, Shyamalan shows the risk of corruption to be ultimately desirable in that it can save those capable to embrace it from the shrinking and self-blinding impulses of the rest of humankind, and eventually grow stronger.
19While such an attraction to the threat of physical and psychological harm – and even death – runs rampant in most of Shyamalan’s films and series, some of them self-consciously question its problematic moral implications. This is particularly the case in the director’s superhero trilogy, which not only reflexively questions these points, but also metafictionally suggests that a Nietzschean ethics advocating the attraction of corruption may be prevalent in most popular fiction narratives.
20In Unbreakable, David Dunn (Bruce Willis) discovers he has superhuman strength when he survives a train crash. He then meets Elijah (Samuel Lee Jackson), a man gifted with extraordinary intelligence suffering from brittle bone disease. Elijah acts as a mentor who convinces David that he is a real-life superhero, but a twist eventually reveals Elijah had provoked the train crash, killing tens of people, in the hope of giving birth to a superhero, thus proving to be a villain as well as a mentor. Elijah embodies a morally ambiguous diegetic double of the director, a character constantly trying to bring a narrative to life – a comic book tale of heroes and villains – in order to prove the superiority of a few characters having experienced pain or disease, whose existence he believes had been revealed by popular comic books. Elijah stages everything from the shadows and shapes David like a director turning his actor into a full-fledged protagonist. Elijah’s own exceptional intellect and willpower are clearly shown to result from his life-long struggle with disease and pain. As such, the character enables the film to point at the moral ambiguity of the attraction to corruption-as-gateway-to-greatness, while simultaneously reinforcing this belief. And as a double of Shyamalan himself, Elijah also acts as metacommentary upon the ethical belief that structures most of Shyamalan’s works. While his crimes are morally condemned through the character of David, Elijah’s core belief that greatness arises out of one’s struggle against bodily and mental deterioration is never questioned. Elijah and David are such exceptional beings that one may indeed wonder whether, as Elijah argues, their pain and the many deaths necessary to reveal their potential, might have been worth it. In addition, Elijah’s obsession with popular fiction – and superhero comic books in particular – adds a metanarrative dimension to the film’s ethical reflection. Not only are viewers reminded of the widespread presence of exceptional men and women in popular narratives, they are also led to ponder upon the necessity for these characters to be psychologically and physically harmed or deteriorated in order for them to prove their greatness and therefore turn into appealing fictional character. The attraction to corruption that Shyamalan self-consciously advocates is therefore shown to be deeply engrained in Western culture. If one considers that popular culture both reflects and helps shape the ethical norms of a given population, then the appeal of corruption that Elijah embodies may, Unbreakable suggests, be a dominant – albeit problematic – moral value in modern Western cultures.
21The sequel, Split, further develops this reflexive and metanarrative exploration of the attraction of corruption through a new protagonist, Kevin Wendell Crumb (James Mc Avoy), a man suffering from DID who has developed 23 distinct personalities coexisting within the same body. In an effort to create a 24th personality nicknamed “the beast”, who would be gifted with superhuman powers, some of these personalities have taken control over Kevin’s body and kidnapped three young women to be used as human sacrifice during a summoning ritual. Kevin’s DID is once again the result of countless physical and mental ordeals, that Kevin went through during his childhood due to an abusive mother. As the film progresses, the belief held by Kevin’s personalities as to their potential to rise above regular humans is proved right, as the beast finally emerges and is indeed capable of extraordinary feats, like bending steel. The beast is an explicitly Nietzschean character who argues that those he calls “the broken” are “the more evolved”. He even reverts the traditional association of corruption with impurity by suggesting his young innocent victims deserve to die as it is they who are “the impure”: “The impure are the untouched, the unburned, the unslain”.
22When he discovers that one of his victims, Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) self-mutilates as a reaction to being sexually abused by her uncle ever since she was a child, the beast recognizes her as pure and lets her go. Like Casey, whose point of view the viewers share throughout most of the film, and like Kevin’s psychiatrist (Betty Buckley) who is convinced of his patient’s superiority yet ends up killed by him, viewers are encouraged to simultaneously pity, fear and be in awe of Kevin. The viewers must ponder upon the seduction exerted by this character on the one hand, and his criminal nature as well as the radicality of his belief on the other hand.
23Just like David and Elijah’s, Kevin’s power of attraction also acts as a metafictional reflection on “the broken” as not only superior people, but also more appealing fictional characters. Many have praised James McAvoy’s performance for interpreting several personalities coexisting within one body and indeed, Kevin’s DID leads to a mise en abyme of actorial performance; both one man and a receptacle of potentially unlimited personalities with specific traits and backgrounds, Kevin, due to the many physical and mental scars that triggered his condition, embodies a myriad of fictional characters condensed into one body; he is a matrix of countless different storylines, a pure potential of unlimited fictional development. As such, the character reflexively underlines the superior appeal of so called “broken” characters.
24One could argue that the conclusion of the trilogy, Glass, fails to maintain such a reflexive exploration of this problematic attraction toward corruption, as it minimizes the moral ambiguity of the first two films. Indeed, the fact that two out of the three characters are mass murderers is played down throughout the whole film. All three are depicted as unambiguously sympathetic superior characters fighting a mediocre society that fails to acknowledge how their struggles have led them to grow past the limitations of everyday people, turning the film into a more straightforward tale praising the superiority of “the broken”. The characters are imprisoned in a high security mental asylum, in which they are treated by a doctor attempting to convince them that the belief they possess extraordinary abilities is a delusion; that they are in fact ordinary, less than ordinary even since they are ill and require to be locked away. In a highly Nietzschean twist, the doctor is later revealed to work for a secret group whose sole purpose is to hide the existence of beings having developed superhuman capacities as they are seen as a threat to regular people; the doctor is therefore an agent of mediocrity attempting to prevent the superhumans from tapping into their unique potentials, and the three protagonists must struggle against this group to force the world to acknowledge their existence. After threatening to escape, the three characters eventually die, and the secret group can be comforted in the knowledge their existence no longer poses a threat to mediocre people. Yet in another twist, the film reveals that Elijah, again associated to a film director, had managed to film David and Kevin fighting and share the footage to the whole world, thus revealing the existence of individuals with undeniably superhuman capacities and defeating the secret group. Shyamalan once again attempts to resolve the problematically elitist quality of the film’s ethical reflection by presenting the supermen as guides inspiring normal people in the last scene of the film, which shows passersby in a train station in awe of the supermen’s exploits as they watch the footage that has gone viral.
25While Glass therefore seems to be a more unapologetically Nietzschean film dismissing the moral ambiguity of Unbreakable and Split, such ambiguity is nonetheless present in the scene of Elijah’s death, which encapsulates the paradoxical desirability of corruption in the trilogy. Elijah is forced to reveal to Kevin that he killed his father, and that he is therefore the maker of Kevin as much as he is the maker of David. Elijah is indirectly responsible for the abuse that Kevin, without the protection of another parent, suffered from his mother as a child. Upon hearing the news, the beast now controlling Kevin’s body reacts ambiguously: as a personality whose sole purpose is to protect Kevin, he must kill Elijah to punish him, yet Elijah’s actions enabled Kevin to experience the mistreatment necessary for him to develop a superhuman potential, and for that the beast tells Elijah he is “grateful”. The mixture of rejection and gratefulness experienced by the character aptly summarizes the moral ambiguity towards corruption as a necessary gateway to greatness developed throughout the whole trilogy.
26The superhero trilogy therefore sheds light on the paradox of corruption in Shyamalan’s work. On the surface, the director’s films and series display the need to accept mental and physical corruption as an unavoidable part of life, and in doing so promote acceptance of the so-called “broken” that a society bent on denial and repression tends to exclude. By doing so, on the other hand, they lean towards a more morally problematic depiction of physical and mental corruption as a necessary gateway to greatness, and towards an elitist view of a society dominated by the few exceptional individuals capable of facing corruption and of growing out of that experience. While some of Shyamalan’s films unambiguously embrace such Nietzschean relation to corruption, the superhero trilogy reflexively highlights the moral ambivalence that such an attraction to corruption entails, while also implying it to be latent in many fictional narratives. By pointing out the superior fictional appeal of “the broken”, Shyamalan’s work both exemplifies and underlines the implicit Nietzschean streak that permeates popular fiction, where physical and intellectual deteriorations are essential narrative drives, where mediocrity often equates an outright rejection and fear of corruption and where heroes are defined as the characters who have become stronger thanks to their struggle against mental and physical deterioration and decay.