Portrait of the journalist as a young grifter:… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

Por­trait of the jour­nal­ist as a young grifter: Shat­tered Glass at 20

04 Sep 2023

Words by Kyle Turner

A man wearing a striped shirt and glasses, looking directly at the camera against a blurred background.
A man wearing a striped shirt and glasses, looking directly at the camera against a blurred background.
Bil­ly Ray’s 2003 thriller about a young jour­nal­ist who fab­ri­cat­ed sto­ries for The New Repub­lic is a curi­ous rel­ic two decades on, with an under­cur­rent of homo­erot­ic tension.

Shat­tered Glass depicts a time ancient enough that, when my col­leagues and I watched it, we mar­velled at the notion of a mag­a­zine writer get­ting their own office. It even has a lit­tle plac­ard on the door, and win­dows you can look through as someone’s draft gets torn through. Between now and when the New Repub­lic pla­gia­rism scan­dal movie takes place in 1998, enough things have changed – in jour­nal­ism, in pol­i­tics, in cin­e­ma – to make its set­ting feel like anoth­er uni­verse. Dig­i­tal jour­nal­ism was not yet in a per­pet­u­al­ly pre­car­i­ous state, the whole world wasn’t careen­ing to the right, and peo­ple went to see movies like Shat­tered Glass in the the­ater (well, sort of, the film bombed with $2.9 million).

But what hasn’t changed, besides the way that charm­ing, het­ero­sex­u­al men can be infan­tilized long enough in the work­place to get away with heinous acts, is the col­lec­tive impulse to cre­ate fic­tions for our­selves. Only now you can get mil­lions of fol­low­ers for it.

Based on the arti­cle by HG Buzz’ Bissinger, Shat­tered Glass’ sto­ry of sociopa­thy and the jour­nal­is­tic mal­prac­tice per­pe­trat­ed by the eager-to-please 24-year-old Stephen Glass (Hay­den Chris­tensen) is per­haps more inter­est­ing in what it doesn’t show rather than what it does. It shows Glass’s ques­tion­able real­i­ty, dra­ma­tiz­ing some of the arti­fi­cial sce­nar­ios he made up for a few of the numer­ous arti­cles he pub­lished while at The New Repub­lic; it shows the unsta­ble office pol­i­tics and the flim­si­ness of his cha­rade. But it seems like there’s some­thing else hid­ing in the film.

Read­ing Shat­tered Glass as prophet­ic for the way that illu­sions can become iden­ti­ties on the inter­net feels easy, as evi­denced by the lengths Glass goes to cov­er his tracks by lazi­ly mak­ing up a web­site, phone num­bers, and a busi­ness card for sources that don’t exist. How­ev­er, there’s a bizarre queer cur­rent that runs through the film. The rela­tion­ship between Glass’ favored and even­tu­al­ly fired edi­tor Michael Kel­ly (Hank Azaria) and his replace­ment Charles Lane (Peter Sars­gaard) feels less like that of col­leagues and more like a ping-pong­ing of Oedi­pal desire and abjec­tion. Michael Kel­ly is dad­dy; Charles Lane is rel­e­gat­ed as stepfather.

A group of people standing in an office, dressed in business attire. Colours include blue, green, and black.

It feels ampli­fied by the way that, rather than focus on the ways in which Glass is using the resources he is to craft a per­sona, it fix­ates on his need­i­ness, his con­stant need for reas­sur­ance, and self-efface­ment. And while he announces in voice-over that the meek­ness is most­ly a put-on, one is left doubt­ing that con­fes­sion. Are you mad at me?” Glass whines to near­ly every­one. Christensen’s good looks and tiramisu-toned skin in an already ivory-splashed work­place give him an advantage.

Yet, per­haps this dull, bour­geois ver­sion of white mas­culin­i­ty is what feels sti­fling. While Glass acknowl­edges the low pay, there’s a degree to which his made-up arti­cles cre­ate fan­tasies of not only suc­cess­ful pieces that make a career, but the kinds of tran­si­tion he could nev­er fath­om mak­ing. One arti­cle fea­tured in the movie is about a group of bar­bar­ic and drunk young Repub­li­cans in a hotel suite dur­ing a con­fer­ence, and the oth­er is about a pubes­cent hack­er who brings a large soft­ware com­pa­ny with a con­nec­tion to the gov­ern­ment to its knees. But all Glass has is his ambi­tion to become a famous writer, sap­ping the souls of the peo­ple he writes about in lieu of cul­ti­vat­ing one for himself.

There’s noth­ing behind his eyes, maybe even less so than Tom Rip­ley. Yet Glass’ evil Zelig-like nature has a whiff of gay self-loathing to it: be every­thing but your­self. That Peter Sars­gaard plays his pri­ma­ry antag­o­nist has a jok­i­ness to it, giv­en that Sars­gaard has aggres­sive bisex­u­al ener­gy. He’s soft, seduc­tive­ly dry, and his lip curls like he wants to buy you anoth­er drink and then ask if it’s okay if you both go to his place and talk about Oscar Wilde. And although Lane is depict­ed as hav­ing a wife and kid, there’s an unde­ni­able homo­erot­ic ten­sion between him and Glass, from their pow­er strug­gles to their pas­sive aggres­sion in the office.

Ear­ly in the film, Glass bemoans to his cowork­ers that he does things that make him seem gay, like com­pli­ment­ing the secretary’s lip­stick. Per­haps all those faked sto­ries were a kind of lit­er­ary drag, an attempt to become the bold and trans­gres­sive human he wished he could embody more mean­ing­ful­ly. Glass could nev­er be a suc­cess­ful child hack­er, much less a wealthy young Repub­li­can. They feel like, if not per­fect match­es, then attempts to try on the kinds of humans he’s left observ­ing rather than being. The impulse to try on an iden­ti­ty is famil­iar to queer people.

That HG Bissinger was drawn to a fig­ure whose iden­ti­ty was pred­i­cat­ed on a kind of jour­nal­is­tic self-oblit­er­a­tion, an unmak­ing of the self through the fab­ri­cat­ing of one, makes a cer­tain amount of sense, giv­en that he went pub­lic with his exper­i­men­ta­tion with his gen­der pre­sen­ta­tion and sex­u­al­i­ty in the doc­u­men­tary Buzz (2019), framed around his Van­i­ty Fair pro­file of Cait­lyn Jen­ner, don­ning heeled leather boots, shiny black jack­ets and stud­ded har­ness­es. Twen­ty years after Shat­tered Glass, and 25 years after Bissinger’s orig­i­nal arti­cle, the options for peo­ple to inves­ti­gate them­selves through the per­for­mance of oth­ers are eas­i­er than ever. A char­ac­ter on the Inter­net whose authen­tic­i­ty doesn’t real­ly mat­ter that much is just one in a thou­sand videos you’ve scrolled past. Is this the self, the world, that Bissinger always want­ed? If it’s not, there’s always a new one to try tomorrow.

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