It’s tough to find examples of filmmakers with serious intent who make bad movies, since those filmmakers are generally weeded out by a studio system that won’t allow anyone except a certified master to try anything interesting. Fortunately, we still have one bona fide hack to learn from: M. Night Shyamalan. Some have said that Split (2016) is his return to form, but that a) is not true and b) presumes he had good form at some point, which is also probably not true.
Shyamalan’s formula for writing a movie is as follows:
1) Come up with an interesting, supernatural premise.
2) Spend an entire movie trying to explain how that premise could actually be true in the real world.
It’s obvious where he goes wrong. Every good artist should ask “what if?” But instead of creating a world to fit the hypothetical, which a good artist would do, Shyamalan insists that the world be the real world exactly as he knows it: banal, Philly-suburban family life, with all its soccer mom bustle and banter, its casual pop culture, its intimidating schoolyards.
Only The Sixth Sense (1999) can even somewhat solve this compatibility issue, and it does so by creating a ridiculous mythos: dead people don’t know they’re dead, and they see whatever they want. Very convenient. But even with this catch-all structure, problems emerge. Is it really possible, for example, that all of the many ghosts who haunted, threatened, and injured Cole were merely trying to be friendly the whole time? If dead people are everywhere, how come everyone isn’t always cold?
It only gets more strained thereafter. In Unbreakable (2000), Shyamalan posits that superheroes exist, and then instead of creating a world in which this might be plausible, he devotes the film to inventing an absurd backstory that explains how a regular man could have superpowers for his entire life without becoming the greatest professional athlete in human history, or some kind of famous psychic. Does Shyamalan expect us to believe, given this backstory, that it may, in fact, be possible that superheroes exist? Apparently he does, because there would be no other reason to spend the entire film telling it.
In The Village (2004), we meet a medieval community that doesn’t know it’s 2004. It’s not too far off a modern road, but, as always, Shyamalan thinks he has his bases covered: as he himself explains in cameo, a no-fly zone was declared over the area.
A no-fly zone, you say? Maybe such a village could exist!
You get the idea, but skip ahead to Split, where dissociative personality disorder confers unpredictable mutant abilities. It’s a fine premise, but why must a stock psychologist spend so much time explaining to us how, via the brain’s natural defensive mechanisms, this can be an actual phenomenon, when we know it can’t be? Even the psychologist herself seems to lose credulousness toward the end, reminding her patient, “there must be limits to what a human can become.” But apparently, there aren’t: she’s immediately killed off after this statement, and the patient later absorbs point blank shotgun blasts. So the psychologist was tasked with convincing us that this patient’s abilities were possible, but then could not believe the degree of those abilities. Is this the real world, or isn’t it?
Shyamalan spends his movies endlessly clarifying his own interesting ideas, because he can’t let go of the possibility that they are actually true. What a strange flaw. It’s almost enjoyable to watch him tie himself in knots, but in the end, it’s just tiring. Stick with X-Men.
-Jim Andersen
For more on overrated movies, check out my article on The Breakfast Club.