The TV Addict 

I owe M. Night Shyamalan. I probably wouldn’t have finished my MA in Film without him, given that my 90 + page thesis was on him and his films. Perhaps that’s a silly thing to say, given that he didn’t do anything personally for me in getting the thing done, and writing about him was my own personal choice. But when you find a subject is able to yield enough fruitful material to help you finish that kind of massive project, you can’t help but feel a certain obligation.

It’s why despite the increasingly building bad buzz surrounding the soon to be released THE HAPPENING, I’m still going to see it. I can’t say I’m excited about it though, because I actually know what’s “happening” in the film, what’s making everybody killing themselves and banging on those doors in the trailers. Without spoiling anything it’s so utterly ridiculous (and potentially unintentionally funny), so difficult to realize, let alone make scary, that I doubt even someone like Shyamalan can pull it off.

Aside from my odd sense of obligation, the other reason I’m still going to see THE HAPPENING is for the same reason I wrote about Shyamalan: I’m drawn to his works. I consider him to be one of the most visually captivating directors currently working in Hollywood. He has a wonderfully calm, lingering, and absorbing visual style, one that is reminiscent of the deliberate mise-en-scene of the filmmakers of old. I also always enjoy that beyond the supernatural elements of his stories he’s always intimately focused on a more human character-based story, one usually featuring a family struggling with its own fragmentation. His films don’t always work, but the thing is even when he fails – and goodness knows he has the last few times – they still remain what I like to call “interesting failures.” I always find myself able to get something out of them. After all, as some film critics/academics have pointed out, it’s the films that fail or diverge from a director’s auteristic fixations or levels of quality that are the most interesting because they become points of comparison.

Sure, that seems to have become the norm for Shyamalan now, but what can I say? I owe M. Night Shyamalan.

What about you guys? Do you like Shyamalan still all these years after THE SIXTH SENSE and UNBREAKABLE, or have you given up all hope and consider him nothing more than a one-trick wonder? Are you planning on seeing THE HAPPENING? Enthusiastically, or apprehensively?