M. Night Shyamalan is one of those film makers people love to ask "What the hell happened to you?" His breakout movies - The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs - cleaned up at the box office and were cultural events the same way Star Wars or Marvel movies are now. These days he's more punchline than anything else, a director who had one gimmick that increasingly sputtered out until his work crossed over into self-parody. You can find all manner of retrospectives of his work trying to autopsy his career and pin point the moment were things went bad.
Interestingly, all these autopsies miss something. They all gloss over what turned out to be the canary in the coal mine, which, to be fair, I didn't even know existed until my girlfriend showed it to me. So, let's talk about The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan and how it spelled the doom of Night's career.
The movie was a joint collaboration between Shyamalan and the Sci Fi network as a guerilla advertising campaign for Shyamalan's then upcoming release, The Village. It was played off as a behind the scenes documentary, but the entire thing was scripted, which generated some controversy at the time given the claims the film makes, but we'll get into that a little later.
For now, I want to focus on what I think is the most unintentionally telling moments in the movie. In his first interview with the documentary crew, Shyamalan says that his goal is to make movies that connect in some unusual way; if they don't, then they're "just" a movie. The second comes when he's explaining his admiration for Alfred Hitchcock, specifically that he was a filmmaker who you could always see pulling the strings of his films stories.
What these moments reveal is the pressure an artist places on themselves to live up to their own reputation. It may be hard to remember now, but the twists of Shyamalan's movies were talked about and dissected all the time. You couldn't talk about his films without talking about the secret, the inevitable reversal of what we thought we knew to be the story. People would look endlessly for clues or inconsistencies in his movies to see if the movie still held together once we all knew the "real" story it was telling.
In that context, I can't fault Shyamalan for putting the twist at the center of his creative process. Everyone else was.
It's unfortunate how consumed Shyamalan became by the most inconsequential elements of his stories. It lead to situations so absurd, so nonsensical, that knowing them felt like a betrayal of the emotional investment people had leading up to the reveal. An article from the British Film Institute argued that Shyamalan's career tanked because his movies demand a childlike sense of wonder and attention in their quest to inspire deep contemplation in an era of cynicism and short attention spans. To that I would counter that when presented with things like the trees don't like us so they're making us kill ourselves or a group of people hate the modern world so much they decide to go LARPing in the woods, scorn is the only appropriate response.
The real winner though is this documentary. It claims, with an honest-to-god straight face, that Shyamalan drowned in a lake near his childhood home. And died. For thirty-five minutes. Until he was resurrected by a spirit who gave him a preternatural ability to tell stories.
How anyone thought this was a good idea is beyond me. It's too outrageous to accept without question, there's no way the lie will survive even the slightest amount of examination, and there's no way people aren't going to feel betrayed and furious once the lie was exposed. Which is exactly what happened.
Here again though, we see the pattern that emerged in Shyamalan's films- a baffling decision that couldn't survive any amount of scrutiny with no way to handle the fallout once it fell apart.
The Village is a perfect example of this. Shyamalan really wants you to delve into the decision making of the town elders in creating the eponymous village. He wants you to feel the grief, the desperation that would allow them to agree to such a ridiculous idea. And, truth be told, there's a really good story in that. The problem comes with the fact that this little pocket of isolation can't exist without taking advantage of the world`it seeks to spurn.
In order to keep prying eyes away from the town, the land it was built on was bought by one of the founding members and turned into a wildlife reserve. From there, the whole thing was declared a no-fly-zone so no one would accidentally buzz over their heads, ruining the deception. All those things can only happen because of laws and regulations that have come into existence over the last century or so. At the heart of this story is a tension that cannot be resolved. This community of grief-stricken, desperate people wants to live apart, isolated from the evils of the modern world but can only have the isolation they seek because of protections the modern world grants them.
It's an unsustainable situation, waiting for the moment when their implicit relationship with the outside world is forced to be explicit by events they cannot control. Again, this is a fantastic premise with all the examination of guilt and grief that are central themes of Shyamalan's early work.
Except, none of that examination happens. The crime the elders sought to escape finds them when one of their children stabs another out of jealousy, their explicit reliance on the modern world comes out when they need medicine to save said stab victims' life.
And then, everything works out.
The medicine is retrieved without complication, the boy lives, and the perpetrator dies wearing one of the monster costumes which makes the lie all the more plausible. We're dropped into an untenable situation on the edge of disaster and leave it much the way we found it.
How exhilarating.
To see how disappointing this storytelling is, let's work back to the Hitchcock quote from earlier. Yes, it's true that to say that Hitchcock was a filmmaker dedicated to pulling the strings on his stories and play his audience like puppets. But for what purpose? Take Vertigo, for example. We experience the movie squarely in James Stewart's character Scottie Ferguson's point of view. As a result, we are as disoriented as he is navigating the twists and turns as the story makes us question everything we know until it leads us to tragic conclusion. Where is the catharsis of mother son conversation from The Sixth Sense? Where is the quiet acknowledgment of the breakfast scene in Unbreakable?
For Shyamalan's older works, the twist worked as the vehicle for the characters to find the courage to face a truth about themselves they could not accept, then move on. Both The Village and The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan rely on their twist to shock the audience into bewilderment that they live in a different world then they expected. Which, they already know. The whole point of a movie is to take people out of their normal existence; if all you give them is "You thought you were in this kind of story, but you're actually in a different one. Aren't you amazed? Aren't you astonished?" it should be no surprise that the response is "No."
Maybe I'm blowing this all out of proportion. Maybe I'm making too much out of a largely forgotten extended marketing gimmick. But if we've learned anything from a good twist it's that the thing that explains everything, that brings us into the full understanding of what's happened, is usually something tucked away in the corner, always a little blurry until we finally get a good, solid look at it.
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