Books in Brief

This attachment to pop culture is not mere caprice, nor even in the spirit of epater les intellectuels (although, having studied film at New York University, Shyamalan surely knows something about what nettles les intellectuels most). Rather, Shyamalan has recognized that we express our deepest longings through the mythopoetic impulse. As one of the characters in Unbreakable says of comic books, “I believe that [they] are a form of history that someone, somewhere felt or experienced [before] those experiences or history got chewed up in the commercial machine, got jazzed up, made titillating for the sale rack.” While some conservatives have, often quixotically, turned to high culture to preserve and revitalize civilization, Shyamalan has turned instead to popular storytelling; he is Alexandre Dumas to their Matthew Arnold. Mindful that Arnold saw high culture in part as a substitute for religion, we might wonder whether Shyamalan has the better of the argument.

Indeed, as many commentators have noticed, Shyamalan’s movies treat religion with a sympathy rarely seen in Hollywood. To be sure, they do not betray intimate familiarity with any particular religion, nor do they illustrate elaborate theological truths. Religion nevertheless remains central to Shyamalan’s storytelling. In The Sixth Sense, a child psychiatrist has a patient who prays “De profundis clamo Domine” (Out of the depths I cry to thee, O Lord) through his toy figurines; only when the hero sees that he cannot himself save the child—so that the child was correct to cry to God rather than man—does he realize who he is. In Unbreakable, a mother’s prophecy that “God has a plan for everyone” turns out to be correct: Her son and his physical and moral opposite become engaged in a Manichaean struggle of good against evil. In Signs, Shyamalan’s most explicitly theological movie, an Episcopal priest, after cursing God for allowing his wife to die in a car accident, returns to his calling when he witnesses the reality of Providence. Even the thrills that Shyamalan so expertly produces have a religious significance. The philosopher Rudolph Otto once famously identified “the idea of the holy” with the experience of terror, the mysterium tremendum that tells us that something is out there. Shyamalan sets himself apart by taking

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This attachment to pop culture is not mere caprice, nor even in the spirit of epater les intellectuels (although, having studied film at New York University, Shyamalan surely knows something about what nettles les intellectuels most). Rather, Shyamalan has recognized that we express our deepest longings through the mythopoetic impulse. As one of the characters in Unbreakable says of comic books, “I believe that [they] are a form of history that someone, somewhere felt or experienced [before] those experiences or history got chewed up in the commercial machine, got jazzed up, made titillating for the sale rack.” While some conservatives have, often quixotically, turned to high culture to preserve and revitalize civilization, Shyamalan has turned instead to popular storytelling; he is Alexandre Dumas to their Matthew Arnold. Mindful that Arnold saw high culture in part as a substitute for religion, we might wonder whether Shyamalan has the better of the argument.

Indeed, as many commentators have noticed, Shyamalan’s movies treat religion with a sympathy rarely seen in Hollywood. To be sure, they do not betray intimate familiarity with any particular religion, nor do they illustrate elaborate theological truths. Religion nevertheless remains central to Shyamalan’s storytelling. In The Sixth Sense, a child psychiatrist has a patient who prays “De profundis clamo Domine” (Out of the depths I cry to thee, O Lord) through his toy figurines; only when the hero sees that he cannot himself save the child—so that the child was correct to cry to God rather than man—does he realize who he is. In Unbreakable, a mother’s prophecy that “God has a plan for everyone” turns out to be correct: Her son and his physical and moral opposite become engaged in a Manichaean struggle of good against evil. In Signs, Shyamalan’s most explicitly theological movie, an Episcopal priest, after cursing God for allowing his wife to die in a car accident, returns to his calling when he witnesses the reality of Providence. Even the thrills that Shyamalan so expertly produces have a religious significance. The philosopher Rudolph Otto once famously identified “the idea of the holy” with the experience of terror, the mysterium tremendum that tells us that something is out there. Shyamalan sets himself apart by taking