M. Night Shyamalan’s Cinema of Self-Actualization
Touchstone PicturesWhat connects M. Night Shyamalan’s films? It’s the twists, right? At least this is what most film lovers would likely agree on. After all, the idea of pulling the rug from under the viewers has become Shyamalan’s brand – his signature – immediately after The Sixth Sense took the world by storm, ensnared general audiences and reminded them of the frankly magical powers cinema holds: the power to warp reality to hide secrets in plain sight only to be revealed with flamboyant sleight of hand trickery. But there’s more to this filmmaker’s work than the mysteries, setups, and twists.
It is an old truism that artists tend to have their preferred thematic obsessions to which they repeatedly return. In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s words, “Every decent director has only one subject, and finally only makes the same film over and over again.” Granted, he wasn’t the first one to say it and similar views have been attributed to Billy Wilder and Frank Capra, but nonetheless he managed to encapsulate one of the most primal aspects driving any artistic expression. It would be difficult to expect M. Night Shyamalan to be any different in this respect. Indeed, there is at least one theme pervading his entire body of work, which quite often ends up overshadowed by the spectacle and the plot engineering that are front and centre of the discourse – the theme of self-actualisation.
To tease out this connective tissue keeping most of Shyamalan’s body of work together, one must first have a closer look at what his movies are actually about. This is a seemingly easy question to answer. The Sixth Sense is about a boy who sees ghosts, Unbreakable is about superheroes, Signs is about an alien invasion, The Happening is about nature staging an apocalypse, and Old is about an anomalous beach where people age much faster. Simples. Although most of the stories he tells are built on conventional or archetypal ideas – ghost stories, superhero mythos, aliens, home invasion – Shyamalan never settles for narrative conventionality. He always puts a novel spin on them to make the movies a bit more interesting and out there. Thus, Signs is an alien invasion film devoid of spectacle, Unbreakable together with Split and Glass are superhero films grounded in tactile realism and Lady in the Water is a fairy tale set in the mundane world of concrete. However, these are just tools and narrative techniques. The thematic connective tissue is found within the characters populating M. Night Shyamalan’s stories.
If you subtract the twists, turns and the spectacle, what is left? When the ghosts, the intrigue and the iconic twist are all disregarded, The Sixth Sense becomes a simple story about a boy learning to understand the mechanics of the world around him as well as his own place in it. Over the course of the entire film, the viewer is asked to observe how he comes to terms with his unique skill of being able to interact with ghosts and uses this skill to help others. One could also extend this to the Bruce Willis’ character whose entire arc reaches its climax at the very moment when he realises who he truly is and makes sense of the world around him.
The same can be said about Shyamalan’s other films. Unbreakable is explicitly about a man figuring out he has supernatural powers and that these powers need to be put to good use. In fact, the film ends – thus subverting the genre expectations of what a canonical superhero movie should be – when many other archetypal stories would begin. Shyamalan prefers to end his stories at what others see as inciting incidents for more far-reaching intrigues, which is both a part of his brand and one of the most consistent pieces of criticism levelled at his work which – its structural inventiveness notwithstanding – might be seen as narratively incomplete or unresolved. After all, most people would like to know what happened next to Malcolm Crowe after he found out he was a ghost himself, or what the fate of the community in The Village was after Ivy returned with the medicine for Lucius. But that’s not what interests the filmmaker.
None of his movies end abruptly because Shyamalan has lost interest or because he didn’t know how to push them along. Some critics agree his stories are engineered to service their inventive signature final twists and jaw-dropping reveals; it’s hard to disagree with these assertions when discussing the primary sphere of their narratives. However, upon looking a bit deeper it becomes abundantly clear this is not the case at all. Either by consequence or coincidence, Shyamalan’s movies all conclude exactly when their primary mission is complete, which is when the main characters make sense of the world around them and understand how to use their own unique skills to navigate it and make an impact upon it. Granted, this might leave some viewers wanting but, equally, Shyalaman’s movies are not there to offer full satisfaction. They are there to awaken the viewer’s curiosity about the world around them and to re-examine skills of their own that they may have taken for granted.
These ideas have always been present in M. Night Shyamalan’s movies in some guise, beginning all the way back with Praying with Anger and Wide Awake. He has been consistently interested in telling stories about people looking to find answers to profound questions and to find some kind of inner peace, which may or may not be an extension of the filmmaker’s own personal anxieties carried over from his own life experiences. He was a bit of an outsider in his youth, being the only Hindu kid in a Catholic school and a child to immigrant parents in America, which invariably impacted upon the way he perceived the world . . . always from the periphery. In addition, from the very young age he knew he wanted to tell stories and make films, which apparently went against his father’s wishes who wanted him to pursue a career in medicine. Thankfully, supported by his mother, young Shyamalan persevered and pursued what he thought was best for him. His own childhood and maturation was an odyssey of self-actualisation. He was continually forced to understand how the world around him works and how to navigate its many vagaries and he cracked the code when he realised his own superpower was the ability to tell stories . . . which naturally brought him international fame and success.
In the spirit of living up to the tattered writing adage of “write what you know”, nearly all of Shyamalan’s films are built around the ripples of his own real-life experiences and focus squarely on the idea of following characters who discover their powers, turn their weaknesses into strengths, re-contextualise their predicaments and – most crucially – learn to navigate the world around them with their new-found knowledge. Therefore, Signs isn’t just an alien invasion film with a twist of it being that it’s told from the perspective of people who live in the middle of nowhere. It is about people learning that certain events that shaped their lives all happened for a reason and that what they saw as weaknesses are strengths needed to overcome the crisis threatening their lives. Split isn’t just a villain origin story but a journey of a young girl to turn the memories of her victimhood into a superpower matching and overpowering those of her captor. The Visit is a story about a young girl using movies and filmmaking tools, quite literally, to solve the film’s primary mystery and save the day.
And then there’s Lady in the Water, a movie that was so consistently derided by both critics and audiences that nobody even cared to think for a second what Shyamalan was trying to do with it: to leave a key to decode his work as a whole. Clumsy as it may have been received as, this modern-day deconstructed fairy tale is, quite frankly, one of the most earnest films in Shyamalan’s entire catalogue and – most crucially – it is the only one to use its meta elements to help the viewers make sense of who Shyamalan is as a storyteller and what he wants his movies to achieve. On top of the rudimentary idea of telling a bedtime story for adults – allegedly inspired by a story he used to tell his own kids – Lady in the Water is a manual one can use to watch all his other movies with as it spells out everything that The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, or The Village kept tucked beneath their primary mysteries. It is a film primarily concerned with a character trying to understand what Narfs and Scrunts are, how to let Story to safety and that everyone around him, including himself, have special skills that will be indispensable to this quest. It is literally a film about self-actualisation in the context of storytelling and hence likely one of his most personal features, which is heart-breaking considering how poorly it was received.
From Praying with Anger to Old, the themes of self-discovery, identity and self-realisation are found in every movie Shyamalan has made. It even extends to films like The Last Airbender and After Earth, neither of which originated in his mind. His movies are not empty vessels or cheap carnie tricks designed to wow audiences with the panache of their sleight of hand or the execution of their spectacles. It can be successfully argued that all movies Shyamalan ever conceived and gravitated to are deeply personal to him and that they all carry the same fundamental message many viewers would greatly benefit from finding and internalising. His movies are not about ghosts, aliens, or bloodthirsty plants. They are about people realising their potential. They are a reminder that everyone is a superhero when they realise what their powers are and how to use them to bend the world to their will.
