The Happening

I’ll start off by noting that this film has received many bad reviews so far. That is to say, it seems that the critics don’t really like it all that much. With that said, I am an avid M. Night fan, and I found this movie every bit as enjoyable as the others that he has done. The thing I always look forward to the most whenever I watch a Shyamalan film is the heavy use of metaphor and symbolism he employs to deliver layers of meaning that cut deep below the surface of the film. And The Happening makes use of this perhaps more than any of his previous films.

The basic story revolves around school teacher Elliot Moore, played by Mark Wahlberg. The surface plot itself is pretty simple, and essentially involves Moore, along with his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) and a small girl Jess, fleeing Philadelphia to avoid a lethal neurotoxin that is being released by plants. The neurotoxin causes people to abruptly kill themselves, which accounts for some really gruesome scenes, as well as Shyamalan’s first rated R film.

The overarching theme of the movie is that nature is unpredictable. This is what Moore, the science teacher, tells his students at the beginning of the film during a discussion about the declining numbers of honeybees. Ominously present on the chalk board just behind Moore, and barely visible, is the Robert Frost poem Waspish.

“On glossy wires artistically bent,
He draws himself up to his full extent.
His natty wings with self-assurance perk.
His stinging quarters menacingly work.
Poor egotist, he has no way of knowing
But he’s as good as anybody going.”

Don’t ask me what it means, I have no idea, but it’s there none-the-less.

Throughout the film we see Moore continually making an effort to figure out what exactly is “happening,” and though he at least appears to have come to the right conclusion, we (the audience) are informed through the mirror scenes at the very beginning, and the very end, that Moore and the rest of the world do not have it completely figured out. While the toxin seems to kill anyone at random, and even seems to favor larger concentrations of people, there are still those within the kill zone who are inexplicably unaffected. This phenomenon is never explained, but reinforces the initial premise of the film, that nature is simply unpredictable.

Another core theme, which runs throughout all of Shyamalan’s films, is that, “love conquers all.” In my opinion M. Night is a master at expressing this idea through film, and his ability to generate emotional connections between his characters is amazing. We see this in The Sixth Sense through the mother and son relationship. In Unbreakable it revolves around a married couple who have become estranged from one another, before eventually falling back in love. In Signs, it is the love of a father for his family, and in The Village it is the love of a young woman for her fiancé. The key moment in Lady in the Water comes when the main character (played by Paul Giamatti) weeps over the family which he loves deeply, and has tragically lost. In The Happening, this theme resurfaces when Moore and his wife, who have been on the outs with each other, realize at the moment when they are in the most danger that they do not want to die apart from each other. And so the entire force of nature comes to a complete standstill as they embrace one another, and the calamity which has killed millions of people seemingly comes to an abrupt halt at this exact moment.

One noteworthy use of symbolism comes in the form of houses. Elliot and his entourage come upon three different houses as they flee the disaster. They enter the first house seeking to find food and shelter, only to realize it is a model home filled will plastic versions of everything. In one interesting scene, Elliot raises a fake wineglass complete with fake wine as he sits at the dining room table. At the second house, the small group gets only as far as the porch, and is soon forced to flee yet again as the inhabitants who have boarded themselves inside open fire on them. I prefer to think of these two houses as a brief commentary on the hollow, materialistic, and violent society we live in. But who knows…

The third house is the most interesting. At this house, which is completely cut off from the outside world, there lives an older woman all alone. She is so isolated that she has no idea what has been happening, and she begrudgingly agrees to give the refugees food and shelter for the evening. While she does help them, her extreme discomfort and sense of being intruded upon are magnified in various ways. At one point she explains that the architecture of her home hides a separate room that was once used to harbor runaway slaves. In another scene she slaps the hand of the young girl Jess as she reaches for a cookie, yelling at her to not take what isn’t hers. And in the most stunning scene of all, Elliot wakes up in the morning and goes looking through the house in search of the others. What he finds is an empty bedroom filled with pictures of Jesus, crosses, and framed scriptures on the walls. Just as Moore takes note of what is in the room, the old woman storms in violently and begins yelling at him to get out of the house. In the next scene we hear the woman quoting the 23rd Psalm while walking through her garden, just as she is infected by the neurotoxin and commits suicide by ramming her head through the windows of her house. The whole sequence is one of the most eerily disturbing that I have ever seen in a film.

I can’t say for certain what all this represents for M. Night Shyamalan, but his theme of religious isolationism has been seen before, most notably in The Village. It is interesting to note, however, that Shyamalan’s contempt for religious legalism and isolation is not a slam against faith in general. It’s very clear, at least in the context of his films, that he sees a difference between faith and religion. He is very careful in this film, as well as in his others, to draw a careful distinction between the two. For example, in this film we witness a horrible display by an outwardly religious woman, who offers help when she doesn’t want to, and who hates the rest of the world. At the same time, however, we see Elliot and Alma looking after the distressed and orphaned Jess, which the book of James tells us is a part of what God accepts as pure and faultless religion (James 1:27).

As with any of Shyamalan’s films there is always more material and metaphor to grasp. What initially might appear to some as shallow is most assuredly just the surface reflection that once penetrated, will reveal a much deeper undercurrent.

After some friends of mine saw the movie a second time, they noticed several more clues as to the message that M. Night is attempting to convey through this film. My friend Kiel had this to say:

When Elliot gets home to get Alma and she turns on the news, right under the TV are three Grand Theft Auto games for playstation. I think that furthers my thinking that the movie is not just environmentally concerned, but concerned for complete social degradation. I felt like M. Night is saying, “look at yourselves, you love violence, you like killing, so all I had to do to get you to come to my movie was earn an R rating and get good actors, the main one having been in a lot of violent films.” All the violence is shocking to the people in the film, but much like if it would have happened in real life, they are kind of intrigued by it dispassionately. For instance, when everyone is stuck in Filbert, where “nothing could happen to them”, and this lady shows a video her daughter sent her containing a guy in the zoo trying to get eaten by lions. There in that small town where nothing happens are people watching what the Romans would have paid to see in the Coliseum.

Another thing I noticed was the connection between math and death. I really appreciated this connection. The math teacher says numbers give comfort, and when he leaves his daughter with Elliot and Alma, he has to give some probability to comfort himself and the others. Right before he dies he’s giving math puzzles to the girl in the back seat. Also, when Elliot and Alma are at the intersection with all the people trying to get away, and some lady is on the phone with her daughter in Princeton, right before her daughter dies, the mom turns the speaker phone on and the daughter is saying, “calculus, calculus…I see calculus.” Then she kills herself. I think this has to do with the theme that “their are forces in nature that are beyond our understanding.” The fact that we try to understand and control our environments with mathematical precision, and then have all our faith in that ability is an illusion.

The last thing that really stuck out was the care that was given in the film to show how many illusions of safety we have. That goes back to numbers as well, but the other thing I noticed was when the Military dude drives up in his hummer, the flower talking hotdog man from Dr. Quinn says, “it’s the military, we’re safe.” Then, GI Joe proceeds to give a textbook explanation of how to get to a safezone. Everyone who follows him dies.

To top all of this off, the opening and closing shots in the film are of the clouds. Could this be a subtle insinuation that what appears to be the unpredictability of nature, is actually an event under the control of another force — a deity perhaps?

It’s too easy (especially since this is a Shyamalan film) to suggest that he’s only attempting to make a point about the environment and push the “Green” agenda. I don’t think that’s what he’s going after at all. We have to remember that the “environmental retaliation” explanation of the event is one that the characters in the film come up with, and a conclusion that is promoted by the news broadcast at the end as the country attempts to get back to normal. I think it is much more likely that M. Night is attempting to show that so much focus on this supposed “green effect” is actually a distraction to what is really happening… in essence, that people are walking around everyday killing themselves in all kinds of ways without even knowing it.

In effect, I believe that The Happening is M. Night Shyamalan’s way of showing us, through extreme metaphors and dramatic effect, how we are as a society.

~ by Adam J. Coffman on June 18, 2008.