Lessons in Failure

Don't worry, this isn't a review of The Last Airbender, as that would necessitate actually seeing it.  But it is worth noting that, three duds in a row -- this one a catastrophe of proportions significant enough to end a career -- and the spectacular implosion of M. Night Shyamalan's popular art continues to enfold like a star gone nova.


Unrepentant narcissist that he is, no one seems much concerned with the question of "why?" as much as "why does he continue to get financing to make more pictures?"


As something of an amateur storyteller, however, the Shyamalan case is frightening to me because it seems it could happen to anyone.  Indeed, it's happened to a number of a widely celebrated filmmakers, from FF Coppola to Woody Allen.  This "it" refers to what I can only describe as a loss of mojo.


It's fair to say that the downward spiral, regardless of your opinion of Signs, became more pronounced with The Village.  Abandoning all notions of character and settling instead for the monochromatic grammar of "allegory," the film revealed just how tenuous Shyamalan's tendencies always were.  He could still work up a scare and conjure casually charged imagery, but in the absence of recognizable characters, the mannered, self-congratulatory artifice that lurked behind the surface of his early work, not to mention the pretense of profundity in his films' conclusions, lurched to the forefront.


Shyamalan's more recent work has been cynical enough to cast doubt on his talents in the first place, which is only fair, I think, because he's such a dick.  That said (and a number of my peers would disagree here), I thought Unbreakable and Signs, though certainly lacking the novelty of Shyamlan's debut, were pretty good pictures.  Shyamalan, it seemed to me, was genuinely interested in characters and their struggle to find meaning in some capacity of their daily lives; this was explicitly true for both the Bruce Willis protagonists in The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable and Mel Gibson's patriarch in Signs.  He respected his audience enough to develop even the most minor of characters, regardless of how silly the picture's premise.  Ironically, he appeared to be very good with his actors, getting good to exceptional work from the likes of Willis, Toni Collete, and of course, Haley Joel Osment.  The respect was mutual in that the audience was willing to follow these characters to the ends of the arcs, regardless of how ludicrous or manipulative the ending.


About those Shyamlanian endings: I've always thought it a bit overly simplistic to characterize his movies as mechanical exercises solely leading up to a "surprise" ending, for the reasons I've described above, but then I am reminded of how conditioned we are as audiences to procedurals.  Just about every show on network television follows a pretty rigid template, leaving the audience little choice other than to impatiently guess who the killer is and watch the rest of the show purely to confirm whether or not they were right.  Producers understand this phenomenon perfectly, so rather than try to upset the template, they cater to the audience's need to be right.


Let's take a guy like Hitchcock, to whom Shyamalan, in his better days, was oft compared.  Didn't just about every Hitchcock film you can think of end with someone falling, or nearly falling, off of a really, really tall man-made structure?  Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest, the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur, a bell tower in Vertigo, a window in... well, Rear Window.  Clearly, he liked this idea of falling, so he used it liberally in his films.  Good for him, right?


Shyamalan certainly takes a more varied approach to his endings, but the reason his endings are more harmful than Hitchcock's is because they play on the notion that movies -- and by extension, storytelling -- are ultimately just elaborate, cruel cons, and since the ending is the last thing we remember, this is a risky approach to take.  


Of course, the revelation of the con can be immensely rewarding, as it is in The Sixth Sense, when it illuminates that which makes us so ready and willing to be conned in the first place.  That is, our greatest hopes and fears and desires are literally played out on the screen in ways we can only abstractly imagine, and with the more respectful movies, the emotional, intellectual journey is real, hokey endings and all.


Shyamalan is still working the con, except now he appears to be doing it with a kind of malice.  It's happened before: Herman Melville reeled off Typee and Moby Dick, but then he developed a terrible chip on the shoulder after the latter failed to sell through the first printed run.  His next novel, Pierre, is one of the most puzzling, ill-conceived novels of all time.  The New York Day Book published an article in with the word "CRAZY" in it to describe his downfall.  The aptly titled Confidence Man, his last novel, was equally mystifying, though not without merit.


Weezer fans know all about this phenomenon.  After Pinkerton, now widely regarded as a pop masterpiece, bombed commercially and perturbed the critics, Rivers Cuomo seemed genuinely angry at his situation and developed a chronic case of diminishing returns, troughing with the nihilistic Make Believe and coasting on a serviceable single here or there ever since.  I imagine a narcissist like Shyamalan experienced the same anger when Signs failed to convince everyone that he was the real deal, and The Village bombed.


As droves of angry moviegoers flooded the exits after experiencing the thoroughly self-deprecating yet no-less risible The Happening, I wondered to myself why I enjoyed it so much.  Some cons are executed with such impish glee that you can't help but smile and say, "OK.  You got me," even when you really, really don't appreciate it.  For even when you feel that the author is laughing at you for indulging him, it's highly unlikely that his art originates from such a place.  


When Shyamalan set out to make The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, he was also making them for himself.  Just as he was The Happening and Lady in the Water.  They are all products of the the ideas he cared about at the time that he made them.  Now if only someone could remind him that character, not genre, is his strength, he may yet get back on track...