Shattered Glass (Movie)

"Do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing." ~The Screwtape Letters

Shattered Glass is a movie that starts by following the career of a promising young journalist working at the political magazine "The New Republic". Stephen Glass is entertaining, he is creative, and he is very quickly climbing the corporate ladder. But (*Spoiler Alert*) Glass, in the end, is revealed to be a pathological liar who has fabricated all or part of the majority of his articles. The web of lies that Stephen spins catches him and destroys the career that he has worked so hard to build. Lying is the easy thing for him to do, because it gives him success and satisfies the most people with the least work. What he thinks of as small sins adds up and pulls him completely into darkness.

Glass also begins to blame those around him for the mess that he is in. When Chuck (his boss) confronts him, Glass uses bulverism to fight back. He says that Chuck is only “attacking” him because he supported his former boss all the way up until the end. He takes the attack personally instead of professionally, and cannot see that Chuck is not doing this because of any personal history or disagreements, merely because Stephen has made a huge mistake.

The life of Stephen Glass has a lot to do with the very first article we read, “Meditation in a Toolshed”. Glass’ perspective was that he had not anything wrong. Many times he wrote stories about events that he had “gone to”, when in reality he hadn’t actually been there. To sound like a good journalist, he led people to believe that he had looked along things, when in reality, he was only looking at them. This simple change perspective may seem like a small lie, but it significantly changed many of his stories. And he thought that if he could change the perspective that he wrote from, he may as well change a few of the facts, the locations, the times, or the people. Soon he was convincing himself that if he could slightly alter facts, then he could also add new details to the story. And then he was making up parts of the story, and soon he was making up entire events. This is what we learned in the above quote from the Screwtape Letters; sin tends to have a snowball effect in our lives.

One more connection: Glass’ life is also a great example of what C.S Lewis talks about in the first chapter of “Mere Christianity”. Glass constantly spoke of the importance of true journalism, of fact-checking, of a reliable and honest system. Then in his own life and career, Glass completely failed to live up to the standards that he held for others. He thought that to be honest and communicate truth was Right, and lying and fabrication was Wrong. But he did not live according to his own standard. In our fallen world, we still have a standard of right and wrong, and we hold others to it, but often we fail to follow it ourselves.