The End of Thought

Expectation can be a real bitch.

How many films have been ruined for you because you set the bar too high?  Maybe you couldn’t enjoy Indiana Jones 4 because it just wasn’t as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark or you thought A.I. should have been a lot better coming from a Spielberg/Kubrick tag team.

How many entertainment careers have imploded under the weight of expectation as well?  Almost nobody involved with Star Wars was able to live up to the original trilogy (other than Harrison Ford, of course).  Jim Carey just barely managed to make it in more serious films, but I’ll never be able to take Will Ferrell seriously (and I really like Stranger Than Fiction).

There are countless other, more sophisticated examples of this phenomenon, if you want to call it that.  I bring it up only because M. Night Shyamalan’s career has become the quintessential example of being murdered by expectations and, with The Happening in theaters, it’s all coming to the surface again.

Everybody knows of The Sixth Sense by now.  It was the sensation of 1999 with its genuinely creepy style and now famous twist ending.  Immediately Shyamalan was a star and audiences wanted to know what else he had up his sleeves.

Fast forward a few years and a few movies later and we see the effects of expectation taking its toll.  Shyamalan releases Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village using the same formula that audiences expected of him and getting diminishing critical returns with each film.  The sensation of The Sixth Sense was now a memory to be parodied on “I see dead people” shirts in Hot Topic stores across the country.

M. Night (the M stands for Manoj if you were wondering) was determined to not fall into this rut forever so he made the fatally ambitious Lady in the Water.  Ostensibly, Lady was a fairy tale adapted from a story the director told to his kids.  On a more critical level, though, it was about the nature of storytelling and how it has evolved in the face of modern times.

Too bad that movie was a complete mess and came off as pretty arrogant.  Killing off the movie critic?  Casting himself as the writer who will change the world?  I’m sure it remains close to the director’s heart and probably is the most spun Blu-Ray disc in the Shyamalan household, but I’ll pass, thank you.

Now we get The Happening.  The previews promised a return to form for the director.  In fact, it would be even better because this time, it’s gonna be R-rated, bitches!  It seemed like it would be everything people who were disappointed in Lady wanted.  There will be suspense.  There will be danger.  There will be blood.

What we actually see on screen is a poorly acted, poorly written, hammy B-movie that is so in your face with its environmentalist message, it’s insulting.

And that’s why I loved it.

You could say that excusing a movie of its shortcomings by saying it was bad ‘on-purpose’ is a copout, but I don’t know how to address the movie otherwise.  Look at the previous work of the people involved.  Shyamalan’s films have always been good at creating tension.  Not so much here.  Mark Wahlberg has been great in films like Boogie Nights and The Departed.  In The Happening, he sounds like a high-school drama nerd.

Every bad movie rule is broken.  Characters inexplicably saying what they are thinking (Wahlberg’s ‘scientific method’ freak out is a hilarious example), cheap scares (the old lady pointing at the camera), and the left-open-for-a-sequel ending.  People are right to point out these flaws in the movie, but they are wrong to say that Shyamalan doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Another line I hear a lot is, “That movie was so terrible.  People were actually laughing the whole time.”  I bet Mike Myers would love to have that kind of ‘terrible’ reaction to The Love Guru.  If you were laughing the whole time, how can you come out of the movie saying you didn’t enjoy it?

This film is a giant middle finger to expectations.  It’s like Shyamalan is saying, “You wanted me to make another scary movie, huh?  Well be careful what you wish for.”  The marketing for the movie plays into this bravado perfectly.  The tagline says, “We’ve Sensed it.  We’ve Seen the Signs.  Now….It’s Happening” meaning if you keep forcing him to make The Sixth Sense or Signs over and over again, this is what you are going to get.

About halfway through the film, the cast runs right past a billboard for a housing development and along the top of the advertisement it says, “You Deserve This!”  This message was meant for me and anybody else that’s ever expected a movie to jump through the same predictable hoops and held it against the film when those expectations weren’t met.

I can’t think of a better person to deliver this message than Mr. Shyamalan.