A crypto culture of life director?

I haven’t read all the blog entries so I may be repeating what people already said. I don’t know much about hidden messages my business is movies. (Line from Airplane II- Laweyr: “Dr. can you give us your impression of Lieutenant Stryker?” Dr.: “I’m sorry, I don’t do impressions. My business is psychology.") I was able to pick up the overall message in the movie but not the specific references such as the three main forms of abortion being shown front and center. This was better than just a B movie. There was some suspense, M Night Shyamalan dry humor and even some tips of the hat to Alfred Hitchcock. The story of involving the plants was a little cheesy. I was also surprised that it was rated R. I think Shyamalan talked to the ratings board and asked them what he has to do at the minimum to make a movie rated R so that he could market it that way. It is an adult message directed at adults.  Good insight though Matt. I appreciated it as a movie fan and an M Night Shyamalan fan.

Morus,
Without as much reflection as MTM, but buying his reading, let me suggest that it doesn’t actually matter, for the purposes of the allegory, what is Happening.  Elliot asks, about the bees, where are the bodies?  Well, the scientific answer in that situation seems to be there aren’t any, they are disappearing by not appearing.  MNS’s response seems to answer his own question in the movie, you want some bodies?  I’ll show you some bodies.  What MTM has left out of the discussion is some of the overall infertile and lack of life imagery, that seems as crucial to the message.  Take, for instance, the model house they stop at.  The food is fake, the wine is fake, the house is itself plastic and dead.  The spread of modern society is occurring at the expense of animation (anima/alma?).  So, in a sense, the nature/science/senselessness of the death can fit the story, but at some point it doesn’t matter what is Happening.  He wants us to watch senseless death and destruction, to raise questions about life.

["But why is this clear?  What drives the decision to adjudge that there are too many people?  I will leave this question for you before exhausting you with more on this score."]

I’m not good with formulating questions right away when confronted with a puzzle, but sometimes later things become clearer in my head after I’ve give them time to simmer a bit.  I think my question for you here is why you think that population control ("there are too many people") is the primary motive for abortion - or even just “a” motive for abortion?  I was trying to ask that earlier, but I think I failed to do so directly.

Ah, I see.  It’s “arbitrary” because at first it’s large groups in urban settings, then smaller groups in rural settings, then finally one lonely woman in the woods.  Fair enough. 

Your question, “Why is this clear?” is a good one.  What triggers the change that forces plants to begin poisoning humans?  I suppose that isn’t clear at all.  I feel like I need to watch the film again in order to discuss this with any merit.  Until then, I am still… almost, at times, the Fool. 

One other question occurred to me.  With abortion, human doctors are performing these procedures.  In the film, some general force of nature emits a poison that makes humans “abort” their own lives.  Isn’t this problematic, since nature here is filling the opposite role from what it would in life?  Meaning, nature bids us to copulate & procreate.  It’s human will that seeks to circumvent nature and prevent pregnancy.  But in the film, nature is the evil force, in the sense of evil as population control in your reading.  Isn’t this at least a small problem for your allegory? 

Am I the dark knight?  Perhaps, or I might just be another big, goofy white dude.

Morus,

I think you want a stable ground from which to interpret all details of the film.  You’d like there to be just one lever, not the 3 or 4.

I think you miss my point concerning the arbitrary nature of the plants: the decision that there are too many people is arbitrary, is it not?  You seem to conclude that the plants’ “decision” to depopulate is self-evidently the case. 

You say: “it seems pretty clear that the underlying reason the plants seek to destroy the humans is because of the increased, threatening human presence into the bounds of nature through both population (pushing out nature) and pollution (harming nature).”

But why is this clear?  What drives the decision to adjudge that there are too many people?  I will leave this question for you before exhausting you with more on this score.

As for the allegories and metaphors, I would caution you not to look for 1 for 1 perfection through out the film.  My review tries to give this caution: the lemming metaphor (which may also be a 9-11 ref.) and the soldier and gun violence may well be wider culture of death indictments; the couple with little Jesse repeatedly find “no room at the inn”; and then there is the lesson of the misuse of science…

The science angle is to be kept in mind when you answer my question above.  I think one might say that the answer to this question has a great deal to do with how one responds to this film and its metaphorical and allegorical nature.  One’s view of human population levels and one’s view of the cosmos go hand in hand.

And, I have to ask, dark knight, just where are you from?  And why play the morus?

I’ve had some time to reflect on your reading of the film, and I still find it mostly persuasive.  I say “mostly” because there is something gnawing away that doesn’t work for me.  According to your reading, you point out that there are 3 or 4 levels of meaning working at the same time, but this one is perhaps the central allegory:

The plants themselves are those adults in our society who abort babies
The adults are the babies who are aborted
The “Happening” is the program of abortion as birth control

In the film, the plants are trying to kill off human beings because they have become a threat to plant life.  The “happening” is triggered by humans gathering together in populated groups, but the plants become mysteriously more and more sensitive and start killing even individual people, like the crazy old lady.  So although there is some mystery in the film, like - why do the protagonists escape death when the wind passes over them after they are separated from the “hot dog” guy’s group (who all die)?  Why do the protagonists escape death at the end when they walk out together in the midst of the wind?  Why does the happening begin again? - it seems pretty clear that the underlying reason the plants seek to destroy the humans is because of the increased, threatening human presence into the bounds of nature through both population (pushing out nature) and pollution (harming nature). 

If this is an allegory against abortion, though, it has to be about abortion as population control - doesn’t it?  But in America, people choose abortion for many reasons, but I don’t think many would choose to terminate a pregnancy because they are concerned that they are adding to the future overpopulation problem. And abortion doesn’t seem to me to be an “arbitrary” thing at all - I expect most abortions are the end of a long, agonizing process for most women.

Help me understand.

Thanks, MTM.  I want to think about what you’ve written before I respond.

Morus (what a name!):

I think you are saying something more complicated--a type of mixed metaphor, if you will.  While there are many layers to this film, the overarching one can be reduced to this: the plants:suiciders:The Happening::older culture of death generation:aborted and stifled next generation:population control and abortion.

That is, the plants are like anti-lifers.  Despite having lots of room to grow, the plants make an arbitrary decision that they need to start killing everyone so that they will not be crowded out.  Yet this culling is strange in that it even goes so far as to kill sole old ladies in rural areas, old ladies who tend gardens no less.  Just so, those who opt for population control and abortion do so arbitrarily, killing off the next generation without any true justification or rational, but more of a “feeling” the source of which is never really explained.  The plants kill the people by making them kill themselves in ways much like abortion; people kill babies by abortion.  While there may be a kind of schadenfreude in having the current generation (whish is killing babies) “get it”, I do not think that is the central allegory.

For instance, the partial birth abortion-like suicide?  What is said just before the park is poisoned and she stabs herself in the back of the neck (a la partial birth abortion)?  Her friend reminds her of her place in her book: “You were at the part where the murderes decide what to do with the crippled girl.” Partial birth abortion generally comes once a child has been identified as crippled, retarded, or maimed--things often discovered very late in the pregnancy.  The plants kill the girl, just like parents kill their kids, just like the murders decide “what to do” with the crippled girl.  Shyamalan works on 3 or four levels at once.

Does that “clear” things up a little?

MTM:  I found your reading of the film actually quite compelling, inventive, and indicative of a bright mind that has the keen ability to notice detail that most people would skim over as irrelevant.  Your reading definitely makes the film better, as without it - if it’s just a “green” movie about the negative human impact on the environment - the film has to be considered a dismal artistic failure. 

There’s one thing that doesn’t “fit” into the allegory, though.  Let me see if I can articulate it.  I think you are suggesting that the adults in the film are being given a bit of poetic justice, since nature rebels against human attempts to command or tame it (through population control & infanticide) by ironically causing those adults to kill themselves in the same manner in which they have killed the unborn.  Is that at all what you are saying, or am I totally off? 

If so, it would seem that nature is doing just what it is trying to correct, since it is defending life/attacking the culture of death by needlessly ending lives.  Does that make sense?  Another way of making this point is to simply reiterate what Thomas seems to be getting at - the environmental allegory would appear to be a more persuasive reading of the film considering that nature is “offing” human beings in order to right the scales in its favor, which is perpetrating the very thing that a personified nature against population control would abhor. 

I hope that’s clear.  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

This looks like a straw man argument.  I don’t see the link between pro - population control interpretations and that for some time in the film most who survived the plant attacks were those who weren’t living/moving around in big population groups. 

The movie indicated an observed trend and a projected peak in plant sensitivity.  That would easily explain how the recluse was struck while wandering about outside in her garden. 

The scientific explanation, like all scientific explanations are prefaced with an often unstated “based on the preponderance of the currently available and apparently valid evidence so far...”

The last scene could easily be consistent with both a pro-population control position and any negative perception Mr. Shyamalan might have of scientists.  After all, there was no scientific statement to the effect that the plants’ immune response was caused by the presence of too many humans, even though the rest of the film was consistent with that interpretation.

One of the arguments put forward to substantiate the pro-population control interpretation is “the fact that the only people who survive the plant attacks were those who weren’t living/moving around in big population groups.”

But by the end of the film this “fact” is falsified: The old recluse is killed.  Indeed, Eliot tells Alma the theory must be thrown out for this very reason.

It appears that Eliot, the scientific expert, is unable to explain what is going on.  This is one, if not the, central arguments of the film: “Science will come up with some reason to put in the books, but in the end it’ll be just a theory. I mean, we will fail to acknowledge that there are forces at work beyond our understanding.”

This raises an interesting problem about the end of the film:  In a TV interview, a SCIENTIST says the plants are responsible for the deaths.  The film concludes with another outbreak in Paris, which seems to confirm the scientist’s hypothesis.  But Shyamalan has been pummeling scientists and mathematicians throughout the film.  What are we to make of this last scene?

Dimwit,
Your intentional fallacy is...um...fallacious and part of the reason there has been little literary criticism of worth in the last hundred years. 

We are expected to read Dante’s Comedia without reference to the political realities of his time, his relationships with people who are clearly present in the work?

How about More’s Utopia?  Jane Austen?  Tolstoy?  Chaucer? Blade Runner? The list goes on…

Taking Cartesian first principles and then applying their relativism to art is a useless exercise.

Thomas,
I guess there is no arguing with you.  You insist that each scene means what you say, and refuse to, well, argue.  The zoo is this because of that, etc.  I, however, do not refuse.

As you point out, the group deaths are all long, dramatic scenes.  But they are also all GROUP deaths.  As Matthew and I pointed out, we are talking about the INDIVIDUAL death scenes. 

Further, your offered explanation that the zoo death is supposed to be incongruous because the zoo is a place of safe fun is a stretch.  First of all, the zoo is a place to get freaked out by wild animals from a safe distance.  The idea that someplace dominated by cages, electric fences, DON’T REACH IN signs, et al. is so universally known to be a place of peaceful fun that it forecloses all other meanings is not reasonable.  Second, you ignore the details of the death scene.  The man goes out of his ay to offer his arms to be ripped out.  Lions do not naturally hunt humans, and they aim to disable and then go for the jugular.

The lawnmower is normally innocuous and thus it is jarring when a man kills himself?  First of all, have you ever worked with large industrial or commercial equipment like that?  It is a dangerous tool that needs training and supervision to prevent injury.  Second, you concede my point.  The man was not accidently ran over.  He chose to run himself over.  The image is not of an innocuous machine killing someone, but of someone choosing to die in such a vicious way. 

Lastly. with your slightly condescending movie/artistic explanations, you completely miss the possibility (or fail to address) that he could be doing BOTH.  Using angles, images, and techniques on an artistic level AND an allegorical level, much like Hitchcock, Kubrick, etc.

You claim that his movie is flawed because it rejects some philosophical first principles that apply in the real world.  This is the reel wold.  HAL the computer was actually menacing, which can’t happen...it was an allegory.

Mr.(?) Dimwit,

There is a mean between New Criticism and Historicism.  If there is not, then I will take the text of your comment without considering your intent and deduce that you seek to punish me cruelly for what you perceive to be an error.

One literary concept which would add light to this conversation is the so-called “intentional fallacy”—that all questions about the author’s own attitudes to his utterances within the work of art are critically irrelevant, as I recall C.S. Lewis writing. In more recent times, this doctrine has evolved into “the death of the author”.

This is broadly accepted as a principle of modern literary criticism and is very usefully applied to the question of whether or not M. Night Shyamalan intended “The Happening” to be a parable about the culture of death and abortion. Citing extra-textual references is irrelevant. The only thing that matters, basically, is whether an interpretation based on the text (here, the film) is internally consistent.

Who knows what Shakespeare intended Hamlet to mean? We have no way whatsoever of discovering. Does this mean that we are critically helpless when we approach the play? Of course not. To take things to an absurd extreme, if the author’s intentions matter, then if he regards his ghastly little melodrama as a great work of art, is it therefore a great work of art?

Both sides in this controversy should be put in the stocks for criminal violations of the intentional fallacy.