For Your Pleasure

Why M. Night Shyamalan Is Better Than You and You Deserve to Die

He alone is aware of our insignificance:

“Where did the idea for movie come from?
“I was driving to New York and going down a country road with a lot of trees and fields, and it occurred to me that we are totally outnumbered, like a million to one, by plants and trees. Its so funny—we think we’re all that, and really we’re just this little scar on the land.”

Wow, if Mr. Shyamalan had never pointed this out, I would have continued to think I was all that. Now I know that I am ugly scar and need Mr. Shyamalan to bandage me with his soothing, cinematic panacea, The Happening.

He likes fucking with you and he’s good at it:

What is the message of the film? Did you mean it to serve as some sort of cautionary tale, or is it simply a thriller with an environmental bent to it?
Probably the latter. It’s like in the classic B movies: you take the paranoia of the time and morph it into an almost silly, dismissible thing. But then it sticks with you in a way that taps into your original paranoia. For that to work, you need to have this angle to the movie: “I’m not serious … or am I?” It ends up being a nightmare sort of scenario.

Well, I agree with one part of this statement. The Happening is definitely a nightmare.

The world wants you to die and you’re responsible because he says so:

The story never touches on why exactly the trees and plants are so upset with us, what triggers “The Happening.” Why did you leave that out?
That was always the intention of the movie—to have this open-ended quality—I wanted it to bleed out into the real world a little. For me, one of the great things about “The Birds” was that you never knew why it happened. By leaving it out you force the audience to consider what their own culpability is, to ask, “Are we blameless?” Because, of course, we aren’t.

And by “we”, he most certainly means “YOU.”

You can learn more from Mr. Shyamalan’s sermon by going here.

But if you want to know what’s really happening in The Happening, read this:

Without any redeeming characters, without any message beyond the obvious, The Happening is another step in the complete irrelevance of a filmmaker a lot of people, himself included, were calling the new Hitchcock. It’s pathetic (never scary, never particularly tense, never poignant), but it’s interesting as hell if, for no other reason, than that it’s unusual to see a picture that’s this much of an asshole, making no attempt whatsoever to simulate a single human emotion. Shyamalan’s essentially made a sociopathic movie.

Walter Chaw’s analysis of this film is dead-on. Strangely enough, most of the other reviews chose not to address Shyamalan’s creepy, sanctimonious and misanthropic vision that teems with such hatred for humanity, that the only indelible image is that of the director’s invisible, smug and ghoulish visage gleefully presiding over this shitstorm of a cautionary tale.