A good third of the way into Signs, while Mel Gibson was up on the screen nervously wandering around a newly-abandoned farmhouse, a couple of theater-hopping girls in the front row grew restless, and started to make their way out of the movie. I think they couldn’t have been older than fourteen, considering that they were dressed like they were at a nightclub, but were walking with all the grace of sixteen year-old guys, which is pretty much a dead giveaway. On-screen, Gibson picked up a knife and observed his reflection in it; walking down the exit hallway, one of the girls shouted, “OH MY GOD, HE’S GOING TO CUT HIS FINGERS OFF!”
Two guys from seperate parts of the theater answered, “Shut the hell up!” One guy, closer to the exit through which the girls left, said something with such perfect, directed scorn that just his tone won him supporting laughter, even from people like me, who didn’t actually hear his words.
Had they been even slightly closer to the crowd, I doubt those two would’ve lived to see fifteen.
I tell you this because Signs, like M. Night Shyamalan’s other films, rests very heavily on its tone, and on the creeping tone that it builds throughout its duration. There’s a light spell cast through the silences and quiet times, which deepens as those moments turn from odd to tense to quite nearly unbearable. It draws the audience into the movie, and as a happy side-effect, makes them react with an almost psychotic violence to even the slightest hint of a spoiler.
So I’ll say this now: I enjoyed Signs a great deal, because it is and it isn’t what it says it is. If you’re one of those people who bitterly, angrily complains about The Blair Witch Project because there weren’t “good effects,” or you hated Unbreakable because you thought the ending was totally lame and you would’ve completely kicked that fragile bone-guy’s ass, then for God’s sake just go and rent Independence Day, and then maybe get yourself sterilized. Signs moves slowly, and relies greatly on the audience building up its own dread of what’s coming, even as the characters on-screen do the same. But it tells a very interesting story, and one I find I’d like to discuss at great length — and extremely spoilerish detail.
From this point forward, therefore:
THIS IS COMPLETELY A SPOILER REVIEW. SEEN THE MOVIE? READ ON. HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIE, DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS? DON’T READ ON. DON’T WANT TO SEE THE MOVIE, DON’T CARE ABOUT THE MOVIE? DON’T WORRY — I SCORED A TOTALLY KICKASS TAPE OF THE EWOKS CARTOON SHOW AT A DOLLAR STORE LAST NIGHT, TOO, AND WE CAN LAUGH ABOUT IT LATER THIS WEEK.
Now.
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As I was driving Sham home last night, I kept thinking about what it is that M. Night Shyamalan does with his movies, and how it seems that he’s really more interested in re-visiting North American cultural tropes and casting them in a very personal light. The Sixth Sense was a puzzle of perception, as both Malcolm and Cole start from completely diverse levels of comprehension — the movie is almost their intersection, and the audience grows to understand that neither necessarily knows more than the other, but rather that they know the same things very, very differently. It was an intimately personal ghost story, a problem movie about a problem-solver trying to solve a problem, and finally understanding that he is, himself, the last problem to be solved.
So that was in my head, along with the very, very many familiar elements of Signs, which stirred memories of War of the Worlds in so many different ways. Mel Gibson’s Graham Hess is a former Reverend, six months out of the job after his wife dies in a particularly horrible car accident. The audience meets him living in an isolated farmhouse in Pennsylvania, with his two children and his brother Merrill, a washed-up minor league ballplayer played very, very well by Joaquin Phoenix. A crop circle appears in his fields, and as the clues mount and the evidence begins to point very clearly to an alien invasion, Hess finds his broken faith tumbling farther and farther out of reach.
I think I remembered that there was a preacher in Wells’ story at about the same time as Merrill, who finds himself sitting more and more often in the closet with the television, watching news coverage of lights in the sky and tall creatures stalking the suburbs. As he stands with his family and watches the first news releases, he glances at Graham and says, “This is just like The War of the Worlds,” and he’s right. It’s a lot like that, and it’s very interesting that Shyamalan chooses this particular story to re-tell.
In Wells’ story, the unnamed narrator of The War of the Worlds finds himself trapped in a collapsed farmhouse with a local preacher, and the two of them hide out there as they watch alien craft being assembled to go forward and destroy humanity. As they witness the reproductive cycle of the Martians, the construction of their craft, and the odd wilting of their Martian weeds, the preacher slowly begins to slip his rails. He starts ranting about the end of the world, ignoring the frantic protests of the narrator, who’s certain that the Martians will overhear and exterminate them both. Finally the bellowing becomes too much, and the narrator is forced to kill the preacher, rather than have his cover blown, and then himself collapses until the following morning. There are many who interpret this as the text’s assertion that God is dead, and that there will be no divine salvation for the human race. Indeed, it’s simple biology that ultimately thwarts the alien menace, wiping them out as easily as it does the plants they brought with them.
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In Signs, here’s the preacher again, himself convinced that God is dead, or deaf, at the very least. “I’m not going to waste another minute of my life on prayer,” he says angrily. “Not one.” He has a family now, and an extended community that seems unwilling to accept his lapse in faith — the local sherriff won’t stop calling him Father, and the girl at the drug store checkout counter won’t let him go without hearing her confession — but by the end of the film, he’s still the religious man trapped in the crumbling farmhouse, under seige by hostile green men from outer space.
Hollywood has told Wells’ story before, during the Cold War, and managed to spice it up with some particularly memorable alien craft and disaster sequences. The preacher had a family in that movie, too, a particularly pointy-titted daughter who happened to be the main squeeze of the movie’s hero — more importantly, though, the preacher had A Message For Those God Damned Commies, and he delivered it whenever he could. I think I remember him even carrying a Bible during the last scene, when the brave Americans emerged from their shelters to witness the demise of the alien invaders, wonderously declaring the infectious salvation to be a true miracle sent from God. You hear that, Kruschev? From God, because God loves America, because America loves God. The politics of the time made The War of the Worlds a particularly relevant film, just as the explosion of Darwinism made Wells’ original text such an amazingly applicable novel.
And so what of the politics of right now?
This is where I start to feel a little bit soiled, because I think just about every critic on God’s earth is doing what I’m about to do, and I absolutely hate it. I’d love to live just one more day without having every aspect of my life connected back to this, just like every Baby Boomer I’m sure is sick of having their entire fucking lives looked at through the lens of the Kennedy shooting, but sadly I’m forced to admit that the story applies, that Shyamalan’s telling of it seems to apply so incredibly well, and that the message it seems to send isn’t nearly as clear-cut as its main character might think.
Signs is the War of the Worlds for the September 11th generation.
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Ew, I know. I can’t believe I said that either — first, that I called us “The September 11th Generation,” like it’s the replacement for “The Pepsi Generation” or something; second, that I’m going to actually look at this from such a recently-historical point of view. And yet you sort of have to, because even if it wasn’t intended to be, the echoes are there and they’re clear, and years from now when this film (and this version of what’s now a very, very old story) is looked at critically, I truly believe that’s what people will be saying. Just as 1953’s The War of the Worlds crystallized America’s xenophobic anxiety and almost aggressively Christian response to it (by adding “Under God” to the Pledge of Alliegance, for instance), so too does 2002’s Signs capture the sickeningly shared sense of isolation and helplessness in America on September 11th, and articulates the choices available to survive the wake of it.
Somewhere midway through the movie, Graham and Merrill sit together in the middle of the night, while the two kids are passed onto the couch with them. The brothers watch the television in the dark, and you get the feeling there are no lights on because neither of them can leave their seat — they’re riveted by the footage of dozens of lights in the sky, floating silently over cities across the world. Merrill tries to sound casual as he mentions that lots of people are talking about how this might be the end of the world, and asks his brother what he thinks. Graham looks back at him and nods a little, agreeing that it may well be.
Merrill isn’t comforted. “How can you say that?” he demands. He backs off a little, explaining that he was looking for something a little bit more re-assuring, but his brother’s reaction still frightens him.
In response, Graham delivers the central speech of the film. “People can be divided into two groups,” he explains. The first group looks at the lights in the sky, and the crop circles on the ground, and they see signs — they might be scared, and they might not know what’s going to happen next, but somewhere deep down, they know that what they’re seeing is miraculous, because they believe truly that there’s someone out there protecting them, looking out for them, and that those lights are a sign of that. They have hope.
The other group, Graham adds, looks at what’s on the television screen and figures they’ve got a fifty-fifty chance. On the one hand, things might turn out well; on the other, things might turn out for the worst. They can’t judge yet, because they don’t know all the facts. Underneath it all, though, there’s a nagging, hungry fear that comes with the understanding that no matter what, they’re on their own.
Merrill feels a bit better after this, and tells the story of his nearly kissing a girl who — had he not paused to spit out a piece of gum — would have thrown up right in his face. It was definitely a sign, Merrill says, and from that day forward he knew he was a Miracle Man. He presses Graham on which group he belongs to, the first or the second, until finally Graham angrily says, “There is no-one out there looking out for us. We are on our own.”
Graham gets up off of the couch and goes to bed. Merrill stays where he’s sitting, watching the television.
Everything that’s just right about Signs is right there in that scene. Graham and Merrill are alone together, a small family in the middle of nowhere, tensely watching the television as the world goes to hell, wondering what’s going to happen next, whether it’s going to keep on happening, whether it’s going to get better or worse or what. Moreover, Graham won’t go so far as to admit that he doesn’t believe in anything — only that he feels alone, frightened, and that nobody’s coming to save him.
This carries forward to another quiet, important little scene later on. As the family’s home is being invaded, with aliens hammering at the doors, smashing through the windows, and crawling through the ducts to get at them, Graham and Merrill lock themselves and the kids into the basement. The lights are broken, they can’t see anything outside, and just as they’ve secured every possible entrance into their sanctuary, Graham’s son Morgan falls victim to an asthma attack. Again, Graham is reduced to helplessness, and again he’s forced to watch something horrible and terrifying.
And then, he tries to intervene. Graham wraps his arms around his son, and alternates between quietly encouraging Morgan and angrily cursing. “I hate you,” he sobs, echoing Morgan’s own words to him earlier. “I hate you for this,” he adds, cursing the God he’s not supposed to believe in any more. When he turns his attention towards his son, his allegedly abandoned faith becomes even more clear. “Believe that the air will come,” he urges Morgan, “and it will.” Morgan continues to labor, and Graham continues to soothe, until finally the attack seems to pass.
The juxtaposition of these two scenes proposes something interesting, and makes the apparently spiritual message of the film more than a bit problematic. Graham isn’t quite the unbeliever that he takes himself to be — he can’t categorize himself fully among Group B, and he can’t really be seen as someone who doesn’t believe. He ignores his faith, and is angry with it, but it’s still resident in him. In desperation, he still draws on it, and while it seems to be effective, Shyamalan leaves little hints behind that perhaps it’s really only working for Graham. Despite everything, when the next morning rolls around, Morgan still can’t breathe.
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So, when the final scene of the film comes around, tying together all of the disparate elements of Graham’s experience — his wife’s dying words, the glasses of water sitting around the house that his daughter never seems to finish, his brother’s baseball bat hanging on the wall, his son’s stubborn asthma — the audience can actually go in two different directions, depending on whether they’re part of group A, or group B. Those in group A will suddenly see all the signs that have been waiting for them through the entire movie, just the way Graham has done, though they might not react with the same joy that Graham does. Plenty of reviewers are very happily slamming Signs as a ponderous study of human spirituality, and yet ironically, they do so because they’ve chosen to believe in the signs that Shyamalan leaves for them — they put them together and they believe in the message, even if they don’t necessarily agree with it.
Those in group B, though, will see Graham doing what’s in his nature to do — reading the signs, making his choices, believing his way through the worst his life has to offer. By connecting the last, confused words of his wife to the alien holding his son hostage in the middle of his living room, Graham grants meaning to the two most desperate, meaningless moments of his life, and almost everything in between. More importantly, he finds suddenly the will to deal with them both, granting his brother free reign to hammer the shit out of the alien, while he carries his son outside to administer the epinephrine shot that saves his life. Those in group B see these as choices, as Graham decides in his own mind that which is signified by the sign.
Those who are feeling particularly conspiratorial might even consider that Shyamalan is playing with his own technique through Signs, particularly in the conclusion. The final montage that flashes through Graham’s mind is so similar to that which jolts Malcom Crowe in the closing scenes of The Sixth Sense that you might think the purpose of both is exactly the same — in the latter, Malcolm realizes a map of subtle, occasionally imperceptible clues to an inevitable conclusion; in the former, however, Graham is knitting together a continuum of huge, vague signs to build something entirely subjective. Indeed, Graham himself isn’t entirely sure that he’s right about anything, and as he’s cradling his son out on his front lawn, he’s still convincing himself. “His lungs were closed so that the poison wouldn’t get in,” he says. “That has to be it.” So, where the end of The Sixth Sense is one of inevitability, Signs‘ ending is one of validation. There is nothing certain about Graham’s conclusions except, ultimately, what he chooses to see.
The ambiguity of all of this is uniquely appropriate to even the title of Signs, and even moreso to its connections to current cultural politics. Even as Graham reels in the wake of one disaster after another, so too did Americans in general on September 11th and the days following — and even as Graham finds a way to retroactively inform his own judgement, to reinstate himself to a status of faith, so too does American culture. Issues of almost every kind are being related to terrorism, to patriotism, to the defense of the nation, whether they would have eleven months ago or not. Those in Group A are fighting hard to keep God in their Pledge of Alliegance, to restore the United States to the fighting form that they feel would’ve prevented any kind of disaster in the first place, and to defend their nation against a menace that is both nationally and religiously alien.
Those in Group B, well, they know I’m pushing the comparison a little, but they know it applies, too.
Signs manages to take The War of the Worlds and transplant it into the ambiguous context of modern American culture, and just happens to hit a paricularly sore spot on its post-September 11th trauma. It plays elegantly on the simple, choking fright of watching the world change for the worse on your television set in the middle of the day — a fear that just about everyone can say they experienced in the last year or so — and draws it forward, blending it into the creeping horror of having The Other hiding somewhere out there, somewhere nearby, waiting to open the door for so much worse to come. It also illustrates exactly what choices were, and are available to Americans in the wake of it, and exactly how easy it is to arrive at one or the other of them.
Watch it for that reason, if not because it’s well-acted, well-made, and occasionally very, very creepy. Watch it because it’s probably more important to understanding current affairs — or at least, those affairs of almost one year ago — than Minority Report, and deals with them more intimately. Watch it because it’s entertaining, and it’s telling a better story than you might think at first.
God, watch it because your only alternative is Master of Disguise. That should be argument enough, right there.
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