Blog - Thursday, May 14, 2009 19:55 - 14 Comments

Code Unknown

by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

A mysterious transmission, an MS. found in a bottle that somehow ended up on the screen. This inhuman film. This monster. There’s a lot to write about The Happening–a lot to write because so little has been written. When the movie was released last summer, the response from reviewers was a steady monotone. The reviews’ll tell you very little about the movie, but a lot about their authors: that they think cleverness is more important than intelligence, plotting’s better than feeling, and verisimilitude is important above all else. That they think that there are such things as “good” and “bad” acting and that a movie is not itself, but the interpretation of a screenplay. That cinema is a grammar. That they want that mysterious variable–”quality”–which The Happening completely lacks. And it’s the better for it.

It’s easier to identify decor than ideas. So we call anything with a cowboy hat a Western, anything with dancing a musical, anything with guns an action film, anything with a handkerchief a melodrama, anything strange “science fiction,” and anything with a sharp knife horror. It’s degrading, not because it misidentifies (ultimately a pedantic footnote), but because it’s usually used to denigrate movies classified as “genre films.” No one would say that The Quiet Man “is a drama” and end at that, but we’re fine with saying that Canyon Passage “is a Western,” as if that’s enough to let people know whether they want to see it or not. And when we feel there’s more to say than that, we write that a movie “transcends the genre.” So we say The Happening is a “horror film” and we use that word as if it refers to one thing. But it’s a term whose beauty lies in its vagueness. Horror can be a confrontation, as in Haneke. It can be a liberation, as Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s recently demonstrated with the little, personal horrors of Tokyo Sonata. It can be the description of a struggle, like in Carpenter. It can be a violation of taboo, like in a Coffin Joe movie, or the reinforcing of a social code, like in Nakagawa or Craven. But The Happening isn’t any of these. We attack it, we’re disgusted by it, because it doesn’t seem to be horror at all–and then again, what’s it supposed to be? The Happening is made in a language entirely its own. It begs to be decoded. It ignores every convention of contemporary American cinema. There’s no naturalism here, little handheld camera. The characters are banal, not fashionably quirky. It’s asking, “What kind of movie am I?”

Well, first off, it isn’t a thriller; The Happening’s got no highs or lows, only a flat, inevitable doom, an abandonment of “drama” in favor of images and sounds and of “plotting” in favor of edits. There’s no twist ending. The final scene, which repeats the opening, confirms what we already know. It isn’t visceral, and is the more unsettling for it: there are maulings and deaths and mutilations in The Happening, but no “violence.” Violence is something social; violence is inflicted, it’s a matter of choices and actions. It’s emotional; for something to be pain, it has to be felt. No one killed in The Happening feels it. No one flinches or screams. People stick pins through their necks, hurl themselves off of roofs or smash their heads through windows with no emotion, not even calmness. There’s that infamous scene where the characters huddle to watch a video of a man having his arms bitten off by lions. What’s unsettling is not what’s on the iPhone screen, but the calmness of the reactions. It’s only a video, and so they’re able to watch unflinchingly.

If there is a horror to The Happening, it’s the horror of Bigger Than Life: a world that is empty. It has the directness of simple terror: The Happening is a series of little panics, episodes that are disconcerting in their acceptance of the fantastic. There is more Buñuel here than Hitchcock and more Shyamalan than any of his other films: with The Happening, he essentially strips away any attempt to be anyone else (namely Steven Spielberg) and any trace of the neat sentimentality that he’s often intoxicated by. It’s more expression than entertainment.

An expression of what? Maybe the director’s fears. There isn’t just “the situation,” but the unsettling way in which characters react to it. The irony of so many reviewers attacking the film for the implausibility of its plot (besides the fact that that kind of criticism belongs to another century), is that the movie isn’t an “ecological parable;” what’s horrifying isn’t that nature can turn against us, but that we are essentially machines, an idea that is spiritually unsettling to Shyamalan. To believe in the soul, Shyamalan must believe in free will and the world of The Happening is a nightmare where humanity is negated. When we talk, we’re merely transmitting information, not expressing. People are just fleshy machines.

The plot is a simple B-film set-up, the kind that would’ve been written for Lippert Pictures fifty years ago. For reasons unknown (i.e. unnecessary), flora in the US Northeast have begun releasing a chemical that forces people to kill themselves. A high school science teacher, his wife, his friend from the math department, the friend’s daughter and a dwindling group of refugees flee Philadelphia for the country. The high school teacher is Mark Wahlberg, all flesh and muscle; his wife is Zooey Deschanel, an image who almost resembles a human being. If the film has a human, it’s John Leguizamo, who doesn’t manage to live to the end. As in the films of Joseph H. Lewis, every image is not merely forceful, but seems to have been made forcefully. When the camera is stationary, it isn’t resting, it’s bolted down. When it moves, it’s a shove, not a glide. M. Night Shyamalan strips away all pretensions of verisimilitude: The Happening is a film without details. Every face is gigantic, even on the small screen, the features somehow distorted. Every line of dialogue is like a thudding footstep–a conscious progression.

To a man who believes in God, as Shyamalan clearly does, there is only one thing scarier than the chance of his non-existence: the possibility of his indifference. This is not the prodding God of Signs or the unmentioned God of Unbreakable and The Village, who watches while we go about our pathetic little lives. Heroism and virtue exist in those films; our actions have weight. But in The Happening, God, if he exists, doesn’t give two shits. Affection and friendship are nullified. It’s a world in which children are killed with no consequence. Our protagonists live to the end through a combination of circumstances that have little to do with fate or ability. They haven’t survived–they just haven’t been killed yet.