The under­ly­ing pol­i­tics of M Night Shyamalan

M Night Shya­malan has been many things since the suc­cess of The Sixth Sense two decades ago. He has been a cre­ative vision­ary, The Next Spiel­berg, Hollywood’s king of the twist end­ing. He’s also been both a punch­line and a punch­ing bag thanks to com­mer­cial flops like After Earth, The Vis­it and The Last Air­ben­der. The sur­prise tri­umph of 2016’s Split may have put him back in the moviego­ing public’s good graces, but it remains to be seen just who Shya­malan will be in the next chap­ter of his career.

There’s no mis­tak­ing the Shya­malan touch, yet there is one aspect of his mul­ti­fac­eted film­mak­ing style which tends to go unno­ticed: his pol­i­tics. He may not be a polit­i­cal film­mak­er in the tra­di­tion­al sense, but in all his films there is an under­ly­ing inter­est in how peo­ple in a soci­ety relate to one anoth­er. More than a mas­ter of sus­pense, Shya­malan is a mas­ter of melo­dra­ma – and there has always exist­ed a polit­i­cal urgency to film melo­dra­ma in it how uses style and per­for­mance to empha­sise and inter­ro­gate cer­tain social issues. Shya­malan has car­ried this torch into the 21^st cen­tu­ry, using genre con­ven­tions to explore how peo­ple con­nect, which is fun­da­men­tal­ly a polit­i­cal issue. After all, polit­i­cal bod­ies are in the busi­ness of set­ting the para­me­ters with­in which we interact.

Shyamalan’s polit­i­cal streak is par­tic­u­lar­ly evi­dent in one of his ear­li­est films. The polit­i­cal imper­a­tive of 2000’s Unbreak­able lies less in ask­ing why Amer­i­can cul­ture idolis­es super­heroes and more in ques­tion­ing who gets to be the hero. Samuel L Jackson’s Eli­jah Price (aka Mr Glass) points out the essen­tial phys­i­cal dif­fer­ence between com­ic book heroes and vil­lains: the clas­sic super­hero has a square, sharp jaw­line; the villain’s head is a lit­tle too big for his body. On an aes­thet­ic lev­el, super­heroes ful­fil some kind of soci­etal norm. They don’t just act right, they look right, liv­ing up to our stan­dards of beau­ty, abil­i­ty and nor­mal­cy. On the oth­er hand, cul­ture shows us who the vil­lain is by telling us who doesn’t behave or appear ​“right”.

If super­hero movies are about indi­vid­u­als – team-up movies like The Avengers are more about col­lec­tions of per­son­al­i­ties than they are about an actu­al cohe­sive unit – dis­as­ter movies are about com­mu­ni­ties. In the clas­sic dis­as­ter movie sce­nario, extra­or­di­nary cir­cum­stances – epi­dem­ic, nat­ur­al dis­as­ter, alien inva­sion – force a group to come togeth­er in spite of the loom­ing dan­ger and their own inter­per­son­al differences.

Even post-apoc­a­lyp­tic dis­as­ter movies about iso­lat­ed pro­tag­o­nists like I Am Leg­end are defined by com­mu­ni­ty: not the pres­ence of com­mu­ni­ty, but the absence of it. Of course, ​“com­mu­ni­ty” is a con­cept Shya­malan has explored in sev­er­al of his films, most notably 2004’s The Vil­lage and 2006’s Lady in the Water, the lat­ter of which treats a sin­gle apart­ment com­plex as a micro­cosm of soci­ety as a whole. Yet Shyamalan’s most potent polit­i­cal mes­sage appears in per­haps his most maligned film.

The Hap­pen­ing may have out­grossed its bud­get, but it proved the straw that broke the first act of Shyamalan’s career, with crit­ics and audi­ences alike con­demn­ing the film for its wacky sense of humour, maudlin sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty and tru­ly baf­fling lead per­for­mance from Mark Wahlberg. Shya­malan had been crit­i­cised for his corny jokes and schmaltzy sto­ry­telling in the past, but those things alone were not any more of a turn-off for audi­ences in this case.

On the sur­face The Hap­pen­ing might be Shyamalan’s sil­li­est movie, but it’s also his dark­est: the plot con­cerns a virus that makes you kill your­self the instant you catch it. One of the first images we see in the film is of con­struc­tion work­ers will­ing­ly fling­ing them­selves off of rooftops, which inevitably evokes those deeply upset­ting real-life images of bod­ies falling from the Twin Towers.

The film’s big twist (spoil­er alert: the plants did it) empha­sis­es Shyamalan’s pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with envi­ron­men­tal­ism, a con­cern that has recurred through­out his fil­mog­ra­phy, from Lady in the Water to After Earth. Humankind has become a dan­ger to Earth, so Moth­er Nature is exact­ing her cru­el revenge. It’s not just that the virus is a cer­tain death sen­tence for those who catch it, but that it forces the unin­fect­ed into com­plete isolation.

The plants infect the air not only with a dan­ger­ous neu­ro­tox­in but with para­noia, one that leads to the break­down of nor­mal soci­etal rela­tions. The film’s ensem­ble cast is slow­ly but sure­ly paired down as the run­time stag­gers on, until Wahlberg is left com­mu­ni­cat­ing with his wife and child through a talk­ing tube in the walls of an old house. They might be able to hear each oth­er still, but they are com­plete­ly and utter­ly alone.

Once you’ve read The Hap­pen­ing as an alle­go­ry for ⁹⁄₁₁, it’s hard to read it as any­thing else. The true dam­age of a dis­as­ter like ⁹⁄₁₁ comes not just from the ini­tial inci­dent, but from society’s response to it. Like the plant plague in The Hap­pen­ing, ⁹⁄₁₁ spread and stoked lin­ger­ing pan­ic and para­noia. It may not have forced Amer­i­cans into iso­la­tion quite as lit­er­al­ly as occurs in The Hap­pen­ing, but it iso­lat­ed peo­ple from one anoth­er as cer­tain seg­ments of the pop­u­la­tion were blamed for the events, treat­ed with sus­pi­cion, and pushed to the margins.

“Dis­as­ter”, both in real life and in cin­e­ma, has a cer­tain gen­er­a­tive poten­tial, as it can force those who may not nor­mal­ly asso­ciate with one anoth­er to work togeth­er. But in an already decay­ing soci­ety, dis­as­ter can offer an excuse for those who want to exclude, pun­ish and oppress.

As the suc­cess of Split and the release of Glass prompt us to rethink M Night Shya­malan, it’s worth not­ing that his work digs deep­er into impor­tant issues than he might have been giv­en cred­it for. Shya­malan isn’t just telling us scary sto­ries in the dark, he’s think­ing crit­i­cal­ly about the envi­ron­ment, the icons our cul­ture wor­ships, and how we use nar­ra­tive forms to con­nect with one anoth­er. Giv­en his love of good old-fash­ioned Hol­ly­wood thrills, it’s prob­a­bly safe to say that Shya­malan will nev­er make an Adam McK­ay-like piv­ot to upfront, in-your-face polit­i­cal film­mak­ing. Then again, we all know how he loves a twist ending.