Thrashing Blindly Through a Wood: or, Approaching Shyamalan with an Agenda

1 year ago

Thrashing Blindly Through a Wood: or, Approaching Shyamalan with an Agenda

by Evan Bryson

The Village was supposed to be a summer treat in the way M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs, Unbreakable, and The Sixth Sense were before it. It was supposed to be like an ice cream cone, Neapolitan in its blend of the blockbuster, philosophic, and idiosyncratic. A cone, deliciously waffled―for the cast was larger, comprised of liberal types (Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt and others had been vocal about the war in Iraq), and introducing Bryce Dallas Howard in the way the talents of young Abigail Breslin and Haley Joel Osment had been unveiled to the Hollywood-conscious world in films prior. We were supposed to feel good at this movie, to feel American, and awed.

Only Spielberg has so consistently appealed to the latent fervor of his audiences’ nationalism. The man who made E.T.―a plodding inversion of then-thawing Cold War anxieties―also made gristly movies about World War II, dinosaurs eating the denizens of San Diego, and an archeologist’s sexual exploits; Spielberg’s aesthetic is nothing if not perpetually counter-perestroika. Shyamalan, who broke through in the spangled twilight of the Clinton administration, and maintained his success during the burgeoning shit-storm of the Bush administration, promised to be as dexterous: tributing equally the appetitive delectations of ghost stories, monster attacks, and courageous heroes, the producer, screenwriter, and director seemed at the helm of turning popcorn cinema back to its roots in the numinous. (Did it help that his name is foreign? How often our dreams of prosperity nourish upon unpronounceable names!)

Was it a little sanctimonious, a little fussy, a little creepy―that Shyamalan couched his talent in messianic terms? Until The Village, this was inconsequent, a niggling matter. His was a vision whereby our friends, teachers, and neighbors could reflect upon their own hopes and fears, share those with us, and perhaps together we would ruminate on the state of our souls. Genius is forgivable. The guarded press surrounding Shyamalan’s sixth feature (yes―his sixth: he’d proven his mettle to execs by previously directing family films, the first starring Rosie O’Donnell, the second a small talking rodent) ensconced the proceedings in a spiritual aura, as if the finished product would be less compelling cinematically than theologically. Interviewers were keen to ferret out the spiritual dimension of his work, those aspects that curved the bright wall in the dark room into a shell of light, to hold us tight and keep us safe. And lest we forget: The Village was released in the summer of 2004. If it would not promise democracy’s futurity―least of all the Democratic party’s―than at least it could provide a little guidance as to living in this day, in this war-dumb country, in this new bogus century where god was nowhere to be found.

Instead, The Village was a history lesson in repressive thematics. Mod Podged together from Rod Serling’s b-rolls, Roger Ebert went so far as to suggest that children had crafted the story’s monsters during a long, boring summer camp, using tongue depressors. Many other critics had just as much fun lambasting the movie. Shyamalan’s political allegory, seditiously mired in the pre-medicinal late-1800s, with characters speaking through grammatical archways whilst suffering melodramatic reversals, left a strange taste in our mouths. Partisans of the right suggested it contained unpatriotic flavors; middling critics found it worse for the chunkiness of its parable; and, indeed, the left was too busy eating itself to go to the movies. This intelligentsia was then evaporating on ugly terms―2004 remains, after all, the watershed year, the apotheosis, of Christopher Hitchens and company’s coming out, vociferously, in time for the presidential elections, as pro-war and pro-Bush. So reactions to Shyamalan’s film were complicated when they were not outright hostile, given the complicated and outright hostile critical miasma in which it was birthed. We wanted the taste of The Village out of our mouths.

We spat at Shyamalan’s next two movies, for our palettes had not cleansed, and we have not forgiven him.

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The Village suffered from the momentary collapse of a liberal confidence in the project of truth. (Only a documentary as ludicrous as Fahrenheit 9/11 could breech the hull of the matter. A lot of us left that movie so sick we were in tears. A few months later, on a Tuesday night in November, we were in tears again.) The courage of liberal artists was then an embarrassment. For his message―which was not without poignancy, delicacy, or ambiguity―Shyamalan was castigated, and his craft―let alone his untenable filmmaking convictions―disparaged. Is the film a masterpiece? No. However, (excepting the funny business of maybe plagiarizing Margaret Peterson Haddix’s children’s novel, Running Out of Time), neither is the film a Gigli, and comparisons were made!

No wonder he used his next movie, Lady in the Water, a fantasy set around a lower-class apartment complex’s pool, to stage a ponderous scene wherein a movie critic is eaten by a slimy, red-eyed wolf. The bawdry self-referentiality knew no shame. Shyamalan, who before cameoed in a privileged Hitchcock way, in this seventh film played a significant supporting role as a writer of prophesied greatness. The titular nymph tells him that he will save the world with his art but only after the world destroys him. But Bryce Dallas Howard!―we shout―weren’t you the blind chick in The Village?―the movie that crushed M. Night’s soul?

Was it Shyamalan’s anger that led him to create such a bizarre work, teeming with personal consolations? Perhaps understandably so. Lady in the Water is a hallucinatory redaction of allegiances―the director cut ties with Disney to make the film. Unfortunately Warner Bros. gave him the money without giving him time to cool his head. Personally (and here I relinquish the collective voice, realizing from the beginning that I’m on shaky ground as is, coming out as a Shyamalan fan, and miring his filmography in the spectral waters of contentious political ideology, of which, believe me, I’ve no accreditation to rightly remark upon, whatsoever), I admire the sloppy hamstrung gesticulations of pain and disappointment that tether the film along from one blue-tinted scene to the next. When the Latina sisters, the African-American father and son, Paul Giamatti’s building super, and the other sentimental garnishes encircle Story to heal her wounds, I choked up. At this stupendously felt moment, the chronology of Shyamalan’s nascent politicking becomes crystal clear, in accordance with a general index of the post-9/11 cultural downturn: Signs stands to say, “Strangers are fucking us.” The Village stands to say, “We are fucking each other.” And Lady in the Water stands to say, “I am masturbating.”

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The Happening, a film I’ll remark on only this once, is a product of M. Night Shyamalan’s cogent analysis of the global ecological crisis.

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My boyfriend, my twin brother, my co-workers―what they remember first about The Village is that the monsters are not real. Second, they remember Hillary Hahn as featured violinist (somehow, we’re gaga about decent violin scores). These recollections are of a piece with the underlying structure of the movie: it is merely a Gothic, cruel in its inspiration from Emily Brontë, though rooted socially in the conventions of Jane Austen’s sparkling romances. The simulated 1897 time period presents one, undoubtedly, with vexing logistical issues, but so do Christian Scientists, and they’ve kept their faith. I believe the movie’s value would greatly diminish if its monsters were real; if in the third reel, we discovered alien experimenters (a sequel of sorts to Dark City), or just the roving mutant porcupines, the ambiguity of the villains would be lost, and this ambiguity of villainy is an important lesson―one we tried so very hard not to receive.

Whatever. Probably The Village simply missed its moment, grounded by its bloated symbolism, brusquely over-determined to have us see ourselves for the monsters we are. Yet, given the plurality of, and lucrative market for, hybridized horror tales of yore (think of mash-ups like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, or, hell, Brotherhood of the Wolf, a scintillating film that combines werewolves and seventeenth century France’s clerical conspiracies), wouldn’t a period drama with monsters thrive at the box office? This hindsight is useless, I know, and here I dither in uselessness but not before offering a coda.

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Spielberg’s War of the Worlds came out the summer after The Village. A marine friend of mine, back from his second “pump” in Iraq, and stationed in San Diego at the time of the movie’s production, volunteered as an extra in the battle scenes against the aliens. A lot of marines from his division enlisted to drive around in the sparse hills and play at launching missiles upon the tripod hordes. “We followed around blue markers,” he explained. “A lot of the explosions were added later, but there was some fire.” The tripod hordes won, of course. That scene is hysterical in its fecklessness, its bald drumming home of real service mens’ real meaningless deaths by the time the film hit theaters to make a splashy summer-time feeling in our pants.

I’m reminded of the use of service men in Abel Gance’s J’Accuse (1919), a haunting film that bothers to ask us how we conduct ourselves with any dignity when a war is going on. It’s an old question, anyway. Wikipedia supplies: “The sequence of the ‘return of the dead’ at the end of the film was shot in the south of France, using 2000 soldiers who had come back on leave. Gance recalled: ‘The conditions in which we filmed were profoundly moving… These men had come straight from the Front―from Verdun―and they were due back eight days later. They played the dead knowing that in all probability they’d be dead themselves before long. Within a few weeks of their return, eighty percent had been killed.’” I wonder if Spielberg thought about that at all.

In The Village, the closest the film gets to discussing the war in Iraq, or a disquisition at all on the politics of fear, or terrorists, etc., is when Lucius Hunt addresses the town’s council, near the beginning. The crux of the patrician folly resides in the elders’ embarrassed fidgeting, their darting eyes. Lucius, head-bowed, reading from a carefully prepared letter, says:

“My mother is unaware for the reason of my visit today. She did not give her consent or consult me in any form. The passing of little Daniel Nicholson and other events have weighed heavy on my thoughts. I ask permission to cross into the forbidden wood and travel to the nearest town. I will gather new medicines and I will return. With regards to those we do not speak of, I am certain they will let me pass. Creatures can sense emotion and fear. They will see I am pure of intention, and not afraid. The end.”

That’s the delusion of our imperial project told without smoke bombs and fake blood, or aliens hordes for that matter. This is an innocent young man before guilty recruitment officers, old men who will not trouble themselves to know: Our lies are not worth our saving but we’d have you die for them anyway.