M. Night Shyamalan at Cinética’s podcast

My friends at Cinética have started a podcast and they invited me to join Marcelo Miranda and Raul Arthuso and talk about the work of M. Night Shyamalan. The podcast is entirely in Portuguese, and if you know the language I recommend you hear it. As a palliative for the non-Portuguese speaking readers, I selected some of my provisional thoughts, translated them to English, and edited the ideas just enough to make them legible. There’s something fictitious about these quotes. They do not represent the way these thoughts came to be, which were often in direct reaction to something either Marcelo or Raul had said. It is hard to measure or properly account for that here, so I thank them for both the said and the unsaid, the direct provocations as well as the invisible strings they pulled, which are shaping every word from the cracks that hide between the lines.

M. Night Shyamalan, the auteur past the plot twists

“There at least two M. Night Shyamalan. One is that of the films I call “a film by M. Night Shyamalan,” which starts with The Sixth Sense (1999) and remains consistent until The Happening (2008). Then that trajectory is interrupted, and he goes back to being the other M. Night Shyamalan, making films to producers where he didn’t have final cut, which was the case of Wide Awake (1998). In fact, with The Sixth Sense there’s an entire calculation on his end that he’d write a great script but only sell it if he could guarantee he’d be the director of it as well. He writes the film in a way that he could protect it from the domination of the studios over the material. That changes again with The Visit (2015).”

“On the one hand, I think there’s a marketing element to the plot twist, which is one of the many things he takes from Alfred Hitchcock. There is a strategy there to sell the film advertising a mechanism of narrative surprise, which is something Hitchcock used in Psycho, and his insistence that people couldn’t enter the theater after the projection had already started. Shyamalan had a business-oriented intelligence in that sense, drinking from the holy source of the cinema that interests him. He’s always referring to this place that Hitchcock occupied in the industry. His cameos are another nod to that. And on the other hand, this perception of the plot twist becomes simplistic as you see more of his work because normally they follow a dramatic catharsis which happens near the end of the film with a form of complement. You have that in Glass (2019) as well. There’s a grand dramatic and physical catharsis in the film, but then after he gave that to you he inserts a sort of epilogue to finish telling the story. That’s a strategy he uses time and again in his work, and The Sixth Sense is also a bit like that. There are different degrees to his use of narrative complement, which is more often than not there to return our attention to what was important to the narrative of each film so that the storytelling can go full circle.”

“I think his strongest films are the ones that use this epilogue to open the work to what cannot be captured, defined, or said, and that forces you to keep dealing with it after the lights go on. To some degree, I feel that way about all his films. In that sense, Glass is an interesting case, because if there’s one film that I think the epilogue feels particularly contrived that would be Split (2016). And the Glass comes and reopens both Split and Unbreakable (2000). It pushes me to revisit those films with a new perspective that was not present in them, but that really changes them. The films were already open, but we were not equipped to see that and articulate that until we got to the end of the trilogy. I find that fascinating about his work. He’s frequently making you go back and forth in time as if the films were also a trigger for a process that can only happen in time, in duration, outside the time of the screening.”

M. Night Shyamalan, the historian

“At least since Unbreakable, his films are actively addressing the historical moment in which they were created. In that sense, the trilogy becomes very interesting, because it also changes in the way it sees the archetype of the super-hero and the conventions of the genre in relation to different historical moments the country goes through. In that sense, the fact that the film is set in Philadelphia, with its specific place in U.S. history, becomes very important. Especially in Glass, where the city is such an active character in the movie. The film incorporates the history of a place where values were established after a process of dispute, at the same time that it nods to this tradition of American cinema to try to make sense of the anxieties of the country. When I watched Split, for example, I was amazed that James McAvoy’s character looked so much like a skinhead, and how the film was addressing this sort of mutant form that is characteristic to a new kind of white supremacy, and how one is able to deal with such evil.”

“I like to think of Glass in terms of ‘embodiment’ and ‘incarnation,’ especially when it comes to McAvoy’s character. And I’m thinking of those terms also from a religious perspective, how he embodies different types of characters, different voices, different genders, different ages. He is at a crossroad of multiple becomings. It’s almost rouchian in that sense. But it also reminds me of Brad Bird’s The Incredibles 2, especially because of the baby. That’s another character who can be anything, who can become anything and can go any direction, and because of that he is completely unpredictable, and might also end up setting the house on fire. If we think of the current context in which there’s so much conversation about transitioning identities, both films are rooting this discussion in different kinds of ancestry, and with different kinds of attitudes about it.”

“So many of Shyamalan’s films end with a family resolution, which reestablishes some kind of nuclear family. But in Glass this family is a gathering of survivors. They unite in loss to create a new form of family unit.”

M. Night Shyamalan, the agitator

“Part of what makes his cinema so engaging to me is that it rescues a feeling of perplexity. I think there are very few filmmakers doing that these days. There’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul, there’s Jean-Luc Godard, there’s Julio Bressane, but there are not many filmmakers that work with my bewilderment as to what to do with the films as I’m watching them. It’s a sense of awe that is actively produced by the films. And in order to do that, I think he uses different strategies in different films. That’s where I think The Visit becomes an important inflection point because I think with that film he changes the way he creates this perplexity. But the feeling remains more or less the same. I always leave the theater unsure of what to make out of what I saw, and, personally, I remember feeling that way with his films at least since Signs (2002). Ever since, I feel like I always have to keep working after the film ends, not to harmonize the many things are doing, but to embrace the potency of their internal disharmony.”

“One important strategy he uses in Glass, for example, is how right at the beginning of the film he caters to our expectation on how the characters of the three films will come together, with that scene of all-out confrontation, and then after that it’s like an hour and a half of four people talking locked in a pink hospital. It’s bonkers because if you think of the film in regard to the superhero genre and the blockbuster format it is really doing the opposite of what’s expected of it. There’s a lot of strange stuff like that happening in that hospital.  For example, there’s a POV shot from the perspective of Samuel L. Jackson’s character when he appears to be catatonic, and Shyamalan uses a dutch angle to match the position of his head hanging from his neck. It’s like he’s the algorithm’s biggest fear. It’ll be very hard for an algorithm to make sense of the patterns he creates in his films, and how they generate emotions in the viewers.”

“I’m also intrigued by the use of direct address in the film, and how it embraces a kind of promiscuity of registers. There seem to be no boundaries between our gaze, the film’s gaze, and the characters’ gaze. At the same time, the film keeps a lot of information from the viewer. He is often not sharing the information that we need in order to understand what’s happening. That information comes after the fact, through a flashback. We’re always a couple of steps behind. On the one hand, that’s an infuriating narrative trick. But on the other, that’s also what the film is about. It is about reexamining and adding new angles to something that has already happened.”

M. Night Shyamalan, the media archaeologist

“There are many ways that Glass reminds me of Twin Peaks – The Return. One way is the cinematography, which really incorporates a sort of glossy shine of HD video, where you feel like you’re seeing too much, and nothing can be obscured. But there’s also the way the film uses the 19 years that passed, and how it recovers all the stories the could’ve been, all these aborted films that were latent in the original source. There are all these tricks to make the past and the present blend and talk to each other, to reestablish a continuity which, at least in the case of Twin Peaks, was interrupted by capital, by the industry.”

“In a sense, there’s another meta aspect to the film, because James McAvoy is also playing an actor. An actor who becomes a different character every time the light hits him. These scenes in the hospital room where they use that device with the lights, where every time they click it he becomes a different personality, a different voice, a different intonation, they are like an acting workshop. They’re an exercise, an experiment that allows the same body gets to inhabit many different subjectivities.”

“Part of my lukewarm reaction to Split is that I found so little of The Visit in it. It was a film that shook everything he’d done up to that point and the fact that those discoveries seemed like an exception was frustrating to me. But Glass brings all of that back. For people who are interested in this idea of auteurism in which each film operates as a part of a bigger whole, Glass seems to look back and put all these discoveries he collected over time to talk to each other. And there’s one specific moment that embodies that in the film, which is a shot of Bruce Willis on the train taken from Unbreakable that blends in with a new shot as a faux one take, and there’s even a shift between video and 35mm within that ‘shot.’ The material shift of the film itself embodies the distance between the two stories. And this happens in a movie in which Shyamalan appears at the beginning buying a bunch of CCTV cameras.”

“It’ll be interesting to revisit The Happening after seeing Glass because that film was moved by anxiety about media. It is populated with radios, with screens, with communication devices that fail to make sense of and transmit information. Nobody knows exactly what’s happening in that film, despite getting so much information. I think that was coming from an ecological concern about what this new world was going to be like. With Glass, this anxiety has clearly become pointless. That world is already crystallized. But, ultimately, it is the same system of surveillance that creates the opportunity for a subversive act, to turn it against itself and what it was designed to do. It’s like the film is a sabotage handbook.”

“It’s significant that it ends at a train station, with all the symbolic value that place has carried for cinema since Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895), and how trains are a thread that holds so much of film history together. The fact that Shyamalan goes to this place when he wants to implode the narrative with this profusion of cameras, and at the same time uses that to reclaim a certain space of creation and diffusion of mythology – a function that cinema has often had in the U.S. – adds another layer of meaning to it. This amplification of mythology through all these new screens and devices gets to happen inside the home of cinema.”