People who aren’t from Washington, D.C., or the surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia, are often perplexed by it. How could I have grown up, they wonder, in a metonym for the U.S. government? I imagine these Californians and New Yorkers and Texans picturing me playing on the White House lawn, maybe returning home to a cell at the top of the Washington Monument. As I would tell anyone who’d listen when I moved to Los Angeles for college, D.C. is more than imperial offices and monuments. It’s a plurality-Black city—though gentrification has pushed that percentage down by 20 points in the past two decades. It has a thriving all-ages D.I.Y. music scene in which I was an enthusiastic participant in high school, and without which I would have had next to no social life as a teenager. But it’s also true that a lot of D.C. locals—maybe most—have some connection to politics. Some help keep the machinery running, some advocate to jam it, others report on it.
My parents are in the latter category. Neither of them are from D.C., but their journalism careers brought them to the city. The job that led my mom to D.C. was at The New Republic, and she was there when the young star journalist Stephen Glass was unmasked as a serial fabricator of news stories. This was in 1998, and within five years the whole affair was immortalized in Billy Ray’s Shattered Glass (2003). That film’s 20th anniversary was this past fall, retrospective pieces were rolling out—my mom was interviewed for at least one—and I figured this was as good a time as any to finally watch it.
"Some help keep the machinery running, some advocate to jam it, others report on it."
Only a few real New Republic staffers appear as characters in Shattered Glass, and my mom is not one of them. It’s popular legend in our family to say that Chloë Sevigny plays her—like my mom in those days, she’s young, impassioned and compassionate, with a layered and highlighted blonde shag–but Sevigny’s character is ostensibly a composite of a few writers. There are familiar names in Shattered Glass for a child of a New Republic veteran; people who came to my parents’ house parties, or traveled with us on research-trip-cum-vacations, or whose families my mom catches up with from time to time.
There’s another character in Shattered Glass who is played rather convincingly by a chameleonic actor: Washington, D.C., portrayed through most of the film by Montreal. I must admit, I was convinced by the performance. It helps that the opening credits unfold over B-roll of the city’s real downtown. These shots are immediately identifiable not only for the marble colonial architecture characteristic of D.C.’s federal buildings, but also the less imposing hallmarks of the city: leafy deciduous trees shading Victorian row houses, the red-white-and-blue striped metrobuses that were retired in the late 2000s in favor of a sleeker silver-and-red style. I was primed by the nostalgia engendered by these sights to believe that the rest of the film really was shot in my hometown. Like Glass’s coworkers, I was duped.
Glass was first hired at The New Republic as a fact-checker, an irony not lost on my mom or the other editors involved in bringing him on. It’s easy to see a throughline from his fastidious fact-checking of other writers’ work to the effort he put into constructing evidence for his false stories–building fake websites, getting his brother to pose on the phone as a tech CEO. As Glass, Hayden Christensen is awkward and self-effacing, endearing and annoying in equal measure. His mannerisms are stilted but enthusiastic, as if he’s putting immense effort into a performance of humble charm.
To a rapt audience of colleagues at a pitch meeting, Glass recounts a meeting between a teenage hacking prodigy named Ian Restil and the management of the tech company, “Jukt Micronics,” whose servers he managed to compromise. As Glass tells it, the Jukt executives decided it would be cheaper to put Restil on the payroll as a security consultant, appeasing his juvenile demands for comic books and porno magazines, than to try and stop his anarchic antics. This tale, illustrated onscreen to the letter as Glass narrates it, became “Hack Heaven,” the piece that ultimately brought Glass’s lies to light.
Seeking confirmation of accusations leveled against Glass by a Forbes journalist, Chuck Lane (then the New Republic’s editor-in-chief, played by Peter Sarsgaard) confronts Glass. He insists that they go together to the Bethesda, Maryland hotel where Glass claims he visited a hackers’ conference with Restil in attendance. The establishing shot of the hotel—like those in the opening credits—is the real deal. It depicts a street corner in downtown Bethesda, a suburb 10 minutes from my childhood home that resembles many of the neighborhoods that developed in the car-saturated postwar boom. But evidently, the rest of the scene—Lane interrogating Glass in the airy postmodern conference center, walking him to the small cafe where Glass claims he ate dinner with a gaggle of 10 hackers—was shot in Montreal.
"This practice shapes our memories, marbling our real recollections with those constructed by pop culture."
To pose as something one is not, to convince people of something that isn’t true, it helps to weave in some truth. For chiefly financial reasons, Canadian cities play American ones all the time (Vancouver as Seattle, Toronto as New York); cities in U.S. states offering tax breaks play those in more expensive U.S. cities too (Atlanta and Wilmington, North Carolina as pretty much anywhere else). This practice shapes our memories, marbling our real recollections with those constructed by pop culture. I was born the year after Glass was unmasked, and I was 4 years old when the movie came out. I have no memories of my own of the debacle, and few of D.C. in the years immediately after it. Even with the discrepancies, I can’t help but see Shattered Glass as something real. Sometimes it’s hard to tell fact from fiction.
People who aren’t from Washington, D.C., or the surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia, are often perplexed by it. How could I have grown up, they wonder, in a metonym for the U.S. government? I imagine these Californians and New Yorkers and Texans picturing me playing on the White House lawn, maybe returning home to a cell at the top of the Washington Monument. As I would tell anyone who’d listen when I moved to Los Angeles for college, D.C. is more than imperial offices and monuments. It’s a plurality-Black city—though gentrification has pushed that percentage down by 20 points in the past two decades. It has a thriving all-ages D.I.Y. music scene in which I was an enthusiastic participant in high school, and without which I would have had next to no social life as a teenager. But it’s also true that a lot of D.C. locals—maybe most—have some connection to politics. Some help keep the machinery running, some advocate to jam it, others report on it.
My parents are in the latter category. Neither of them are from D.C., but their journalism careers brought them to the city. The job that led my mom to D.C. was at The New Republic, and she was there when the young star journalist Stephen Glass was unmasked as a serial fabricator of news stories. This was in 1998, and within five years the whole affair was immortalized in Billy Ray’s Shattered Glass (2003). That film’s 20th anniversary was this past fall, retrospective pieces were rolling out—my mom was interviewed for at least one—and I figured this was as good a time as any to finally watch it.
"Some help keep the machinery running, some advocate to jam it, others report on it."
Only a few real New Republic staffers appear as characters in Shattered Glass, and my mom is not one of them. It’s popular legend in our family to say that Chloë Sevigny plays her—like my mom in those days, she’s young, impassioned and compassionate, with a layered and highlighted blonde shag–but Sevigny’s character is ostensibly a composite of a few writers. There are familiar names in Shattered Glass for a child of a New Republic veteran; people who came to my parents’ house parties, or traveled with us on research-trip-cum-vacations, or whose families my mom catches up with from time to time.
There’s another character in Shattered Glass who is played rather convincingly by a chameleonic actor: Washington, D.C., portrayed through most of the film by Montreal. I must admit, I was convinced by the performance. It helps that the opening credits unfold over B-roll of the city’s real downtown. These shots are immediately identifiable not only for the marble colonial architecture characteristic of D.C.’s federal buildings, but also the less imposing hallmarks of the city: leafy deciduous trees shading Victorian row houses, the red-white-and-blue striped metrobuses that were retired in the late 2000s in favor of a sleeker silver-and-red style. I was primed by the nostalgia engendered by these sights to believe that the rest of the film really was shot in my hometown. Like Glass’s coworkers, I was duped.
Glass was first hired at The New Republic as a fact-checker, an irony not lost on my mom or the other editors involved in bringing him on. It’s easy to see a throughline from his fastidious fact-checking of other writers’ work to the effort he put into constructing evidence for his false stories–building fake websites, getting his brother to pose on the phone as a tech CEO. As Glass, Hayden Christensen is awkward and self-effacing, endearing and annoying in equal measure. His mannerisms are stilted but enthusiastic, as if he’s putting immense effort into a performance of humble charm.
To a rapt audience of colleagues at a pitch meeting, Glass recounts a meeting between a teenage hacking prodigy named Ian Restil and the management of the tech company, “Jukt Micronics,” whose servers he managed to compromise. As Glass tells it, the Jukt executives decided it would be cheaper to put Restil on the payroll as a security consultant, appeasing his juvenile demands for comic books and porno magazines, than to try and stop his anarchic antics. This tale, illustrated onscreen to the letter as Glass narrates it, became “Hack Heaven,” the piece that ultimately brought Glass’s lies to light.
Seeking confirmation of accusations leveled against Glass by a Forbes journalist, Chuck Lane (then the New Republic’s editor-in-chief, played by Peter Sarsgaard) confronts Glass. He insists that they go together to the Bethesda, Maryland hotel where Glass claims he visited a hackers’ conference with Restil in attendance. The establishing shot of the hotel—like those in the opening credits—is the real deal. It depicts a street corner in downtown Bethesda, a suburb 10 minutes from my childhood home that resembles many of the neighborhoods that developed in the car-saturated postwar boom. But evidently, the rest of the scene—Lane interrogating Glass in the airy postmodern conference center, walking him to the small cafe where Glass claims he ate dinner with a gaggle of 10 hackers—was shot in Montreal.
"This practice shapes our memories, marbling our real recollections with those constructed by pop culture."
To pose as something one is not, to convince people of something that isn’t true, it helps to weave in some truth. For chiefly financial reasons, Canadian cities play American ones all the time (Vancouver as Seattle, Toronto as New York); cities in U.S. states offering tax breaks play those in more expensive U.S. cities too (Atlanta and Wilmington, North Carolina as pretty much anywhere else). This practice shapes our memories, marbling our real recollections with those constructed by pop culture. I was born the year after Glass was unmasked, and I was 4 years old when the movie came out. I have no memories of my own of the debacle, and few of D.C. in the years immediately after it. Even with the discrepancies, I can’t help but see Shattered Glass as something real. Sometimes it’s hard to tell fact from fiction.