Wisely, the makers of Shattered Glass have not pitched their story to viewers—or the media—as being about the inner workings of a hundred-year-old publication or the pitfalls of modern political journalism. No, according to the film’s writer-director, Billy Ray, Shattered Glass is “bigger than journalism”—it’s about “right and wrong.” Reviewers and critics have generally bought into this point of view, agreeing that Shattered Glass is, if not “bigger than journalism,” still about journalism’s big issues: It “puts journalistic ethics on trial,” according to blurb-whore repeat offender Peter Travers. Rex Reed raves (does he ever not?) that it “will teach you something about ethics gone awry.” The Washington Times sees it as a “vivid morality play.” David Edelstein, writing for the Glass-obsessed organ Slate (by my count, they’ve run ten stories about Glass in just the past six months), gets rather scarily into the spirit of such moralizing, writing that Shattered Glass “makes us feel the way our forefathers must have felt after a really good public stoning.”
This is all quite a windup for a movie in which the central moral quandary isn’t much of a head-scratcher: Is it wrong for a journalist to make up stories? Well, yes. Not since Saving Private Ryan’s faux-philosophizing—“Is the life of one man worth risking the life of many?”—has such a simple question generated such a flurry of non-answers.
To be fair, critics would have to do some fabricating themselves to find a true ethical dilemma in the story of serial myth-maker Stephen Glass as told by Ray. While superficially compelling, the Shattered Glass version of the events that brought down a rising young magazine writer and threatened a venerated magazine feels less like a meditation on right and wrong than a police procedural. In May 1998, Glass was fired from the perennially almost-relevant New Republic after a writer for the unfortunately named (and now defunct) Forbes Digital Tool unraveled the first of what would prove to be a string—nay, a whole skein—of almost totally invented feature articles. Shattered Glass tells that story and nothing else: None of the ulcer-inducing questions about the propriety of using anonymous sources, or the legitimacy of using the press as judge and jury—questions whose thorniness would exemplify a true dilemma. There’s just Glass and his made-up stories, presented with all the depth of character of an episode of Law & Order.
Much has been made, for instance, about Ray’s decision to keep Glass—in a manner of speaking—opaque. We don’t find out much about his motives, hear little about his past, and learn only the barest outline of the mechanics of his fraud. On this score, the movie fails as even a genre flick; the best part of any film about a con is finding out how it’s done.
And it was undoubtedly necessary to telescope Glass’s two-year career at the New Republic, but the events of the movie feel as though they take place over a matter of days. No sooner are questions raised about a Glass story on hard-partying young Republicans than the magazine’s editorship changes hands: The fatherly Michael Kelly (played by Hank Azaria of Simpsons fame) is replaced by the young (and, as played by Peter Sarsgaard, almost reptilian) Charles Lane. Impervious to the writer’s nebbishy charm, Lane senses that Glass is up to something almost, it appears, immediately. Questions arise about another story, Lane smokes out Glass’s lies. The magazine prints an apology to the readers. Wham, bam, we’re sorry, ma’am. While this quick-cut approach might have stemmed from a desire for more effective movie-making, it has the effect of making Glass’s tenure at the magazine seem brief, and absolves the magazine’s management from responsibility for the twenty-two stories—twenty of which the magazine later repudiated—that appeared between the first hint that something might be wrong and the final, ugly proof that it was all a sham.
The result of this temporal sleight of hand and, more significantly, characterless shadow-play is a film that feels small in a dozen different ways—not just made-for-TV-movie small (it was produced by HBO Films) but small in scope, small in ambition, small in moral imagination. The questions that Ray wants the audience to deal with all have simple answers; that’s part of the problem, and it makes Shattered Glass feel less like a morality play than a morality skit.
The other problem with Shattered Glass is more subtle but also more substantive. If the “dilemma” set out by Ray is whether to lie or not lie, the stakes of the choice are absurdly, insultingly low. By the moral calculus of the film, Glass is wrong to lie because he made the New Republic look bad. But those most damaged by Glass’s falsehoods were the New Republic’s readers, and they—unlike the people Glass defamed—don’t even get to sue. The closest the movie gets to realizing that journalism is a public service and not a personality contest is a line that’s really meant to underscore how important the magazine itself is: “What you write gets read by people who matter.” This, and the movie’s repeated assertion that the publication was “the in-flight magazine of Air Force One,” suggest that the journalistic line Glass crossed is worth holding not just because he hurt the feelings of those he worked with but also because, you know, “people who matter” might make decisions based on what they read in the New Republic. If they’re no more trustworthy than the CIA, we’re in trouble.
Maybe focusing on the difference between Glass’s lies upsetting his colleagues and Glass’s lies influencing public policy is nitpicking. After all, Glass didn’t write about anything as important as ethanol subsidies. In fact, throughout the movie, magazine staffers use “a piece on ethanol subsidies” as shorthand for the kind of dry, wonky inside-the-Beltway journalism that Glass didn’t practice. Glass wrote about people and pop culture ephemera with just enough attention paid to politics and policy that it didn’t feel irrelevant; Glass had a feel for what would make a fine zeitgeisty, counter-counterintuitive snapshot of the country’s mood—or, rather, the mood of the moderate-liberal intellectual readers of the New Republic. The magazine still publishes these kinds of pieces; my personal favorite was a 2001 cover story entitled “In Praise of Conventional Wisdom.” But many of the New Republic’s most famous and infamous stories of the modern era fit into this rubric, from the mild endorsement of racial essentialism of “The Bell Curve” to the passive-aggressive anti-SUV harrumphing of “The Axle of Evil.”
Which brings us to the question I kept hoping Shattered Glass would ask. As interesting as the answer to “Why did he lie?” might have been, discovering “Why did anyone believe him?” could be a more fruitful investigation. Ray tries to make the answer to this question easy as well. “We were entertained,” one character says, and that’s pretty much the end of any discussion about the true journalistic dilemma at the heart of Shattered Glass. What do you do when a story seems too good to be true? When you love a story idea so much you ignore its veracity, whose fault is it? These are questions for editors, not for reporters like Glass.
In hindsight, almost all of Glass’s stories have the “if it ain’t true it oughta be true” ring of urban legends: Wall Streeters who worshiped Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, bored executives who paid outdoorsmen a bundle of money to be dropped in the middle of nowhere, a trade show specializing in trinkets commemorating the Monica Lewinsky affair, those drunk young Republicans, and, of course, the story that brought him down, the hackers employed by major electronics companies to use their powers for good, not evil. Glass’s stories made it into the pages of the New Republic because the magazine’s staff and its r
eaders wanted to believe they were true. This willingness to believe is not, by any means, as great a sin as the many transgressions Glass committed, but it’s a sin nonetheless. If, as David Edelstein put it, Shattered Glass makes those whom Glass betrayed “feel the way our forefathers must have felt after a really good public stoning,” I would hope that what he means by that is “guilty.”