The latest issue of Touchstone arrived today; I’m currently partway through Russell Moore’s excellent article “The Gospel’s Bigger Idea: You Can’t Tell the Story of Jesus Without Jesus,” which I would link to if it were only available online. (I may very well post on it later anyway.)At the moment, though, my brain is off on a tangent. Dean Moore notes in his piece that he’s never seen the movie The Sixth Sense, in part because a friend told him about the “twist” ending, which he assumes means the movie is now ruined for him.
If I saw the movie now, I would see the same film everyone else saw at its release, but I would be seeing it with the mystery decoded. I would see where the story was going.
This is true, but I don’t think it ruins the movie. I watch very few films, but I have seen that one, at the urging of a couple good friends of ours; I watched the whole thing, appreciating some aspects of it and very much not appreciating others, and waiting for the twist ending—and when it came, was very surprised to find myself not surprised, because the “twist” was something I had understood from the beginning of the movie. I was interested to be told afterward (was it in the extras on the DVD? I don’t recall) that M. Night Shyamalan had actually not expected it to be a twist for the audience—it was a revelation for the protagonist, of course, but he assumed the audience would understand the situation. His indirect exposition at the beginning proved to be rather too indirect for most people to catch, however, and so the film ended up a different experience for audiences than he had expected.This is, I think, unfortunate, for two reasons. One is that people watched the movie less as a character study—which was the aspect that I really liked; Bruce Willis did a terrific job with a fascinating role—and more as a horror thriller. That probably helped Shyamalan at the box office, but I think it weakened the effect of his work. To put it in terms of this post, this focused people more on the mystery in the story (“What’s the twist going to be?”) and less on the mystery of the story: who are these two characters, what are they about, and what is the real meaning of what’s going on?The other is that it established Shyamalan as a sort of O. Henry of the theater, with a hefty dollop of Poe or Lovecraft: a guy who made creepily atmospheric films that set you up for a great twist ending. Again, that was great for him in the short run, and most people agree that Unbreakable was a major accomplishment as well; but trying to live up to that has been an increasing burden on him, and one that seems to be ruining him as a writer and director. His greatest break, the jolt of surprise that (with an assist from The Blair Witch Project) made a megahit of The Sixth Sense, may ironically be the thing that breaks him. It’s too bad; he’s a gifted storyteller, if he’d just stuck to telling real stories instead of artificial ones.