Movie reviews: Unbreakable and The Sixth Sense

Originally published December 29, 2000, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1415

There is much talk of how director/writer/producer M. Night Shyamalan (wouldn’t it be fun if the “M” stood for “Moon?”) has managed, with remarkable ingenuity, to sneak a “comic book movie” into the public perception without the public being aware—until the movie has actually started—that a comic book movie is what’s being seen. Which he did. But it’s not the first time he’s done it.

A quick summary of Unbreakable: Our protagonist is a Philadelphia resident who seems to be moving through his life in something akin to a dreamlike stupor. He comes to the realization that he is not like other people; that there is something bizarre and unusual about him. A mysterious individual enters his life The mysterious individual serves as a sort of mentor to the protagonist, helping him to realize his full potential and the true destiny that this supernormal ability will guide him toward: Namely helping others. Our protagonist uses his newfound ability to uncover a murder that no one even realized had occurred (thus avoiding any messy entanglement with the police, allowing our protagonist to operate on his own) and by the film’s resolution the protagonist has some inkling of the direction that his abilities will take him in life. He is also able to reconnect emotionally with his family. Ultimately it’s revealed that the mysterious individual is not what he seems, with his true nature constituting the surprise ending of the movie (at least for anyone who wasn’t paying close attention.) Oh, and it stars Bruce Willis wearing rain gear.

This is not to be confused with The Sixth Sense, which can be summarized as follows: Our protagonist is a Philadelphia resident who seems to be moving through his life in something akin to a dreamlike stupor. He comes to the realization that he is not like other people; that there is something bizarre and unusual about him. A mysterious individual enters his life The mysterious individual serves as a sort of mentor to the protagonist, helping him to realize his full potential and the true destiny that this supernormal ability will guide him toward: Namely helping others. Our protagonist uses his newfound ability to uncover a murder that no one even realized had occurred (thus avoiding any messy entanglement with the police, allowing our protagonist to operate on his own) and by the film’s resolution the protagonist has some inkling of the direction that his abilities will take him in life. He is also able to reconnect emotionally with his family. Ultimately it’s revealed that the mysterious individual is not what he seems, with his true nature constituting the surprise ending of the movie (at least for anyone who wasn’t paying close attention.) Oh, and it stars Bruce Willis wearing rain gear.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with taking the same formula and draping a different film over it. It’s not like each James Bond film is startlingly dissimilar from the one before it. But people don’t look at one Bond film and say it’s espionage, and then look at the next one and say it’s a murder mystery. Yet people are reacting to Unbreakable as if it’s one thing and The Sixth Sense as if it’s something else when they’re pretty much, identical in tone, style, and story content.

Sixth Sense was as much a classic comic book origin story as Unbreakable. The end basically resulted in a young superhero who could be called “Kid Spectre,” a cross between the Spectre and the old Golden Age hero, Kid Eternity, who had the power to summon the shades of notable dead guys to help him dispatch criminals. (Personally, I always wanted to see Kid Eternity bring a villain to his knees by summoning the guy’s dead mother who would likely ream him out for pursuing a life of crime.) But because Sixth Sense was marketed as a horror thriller, it didn’t get any tacky comic book tag slapped upon it. Unbreakable, however, has no claim to the horror genre, and so cannot be sold that way.

So instead it’s cleverly marketed as an M. Night Shyamalan film, which apparently is its own genre. As a consequence, people are lining up to see a film which they assume is going to be just like Sixth Sense. Which it is. So in that respect, they’re getting what they paid for. But the public perceives “comic book films” as movies with guys in spandex or black leather form fitting outfits (sometimes with nipples) fighting clearly demarcated supervillains. Unbreakable doesn’t fit those conventions, which confuses the hëll out of audiences. “It’s a comic book movie,” say viewers (many, according to anecdotal evidence on computer boards, say so with great disdain.) They feel they’ve been “had” somehow.

The problem is that the term “comic book movie” has come to have a certain delineated, usually pejorative meaning. If a reviewer wants to use a dismissive shorthand for certain black-and-white elements in a film, he’ll say it has a “comic book feel” to it. Any movie which has larger-than-life heroes or villains, or developments that border on the outrageous, is considered “comic booky.” The fact that comic books themselves have never been as circumscribed as those who don’t read them would perceive is almost incidental. In the old days comic books included westerns, romances, horror and true crime. Nowadays comics range from Pulitzer-winning material such as Maus to products of much of the Vertigo line, a.k.a. the BBC (Brooding Brit Comics). But the public prefers to pigeon-hole “comic book movies” as the over-the-top adventures of long-underwear superdoers in the same way that it decrees that “science fiction” of necessity must involve people in spaceships fighting aliens with laser beams. The Truman Show was unquestionably science fiction but never would have been marketed as such, and Chris Carter has taken pains to explain why the SF world of The X-Files is not SF at all.

Did I see the end of Unbreakable coming? Yeah, pretty much. Conditioned to look for the little things in a Shyamalan film, I was struck by how often and in how many ways he used both reflective surfaces and upside down visuals to tell his story. (He also used lengthy single takes of scenes which gave the film the same leisurely dream-like pace of Sixth Sense… which was fine for that surreal film, but here just made the pace drag… so much so that, by the time the pace finally picked up in the last quarter of the movie, it made some viewers think the ending felt rushed. In storytelling terms, it wasn’t. Visually, it was.)

Shyamalan throughout the film seemed to be constructing an entire visual subtext of reversal and mirror images. It made me think about reflections, about opposites. I was also puzzled by Elijah’s (Samuel L. Jackson’s) obsession with three particular disasters. With all the catastrophes that go on in the world, why was Elijah (named for a famous prophet) focused on those three? Those thoughts combined in my mind about three quarters of the way through the film and that’s when the eventual denouement hit me: He was fixated on those three disasters because he was responsible for them. If this was a “comic book” movie, there had to be a supervillain of some sort, and Elijah was the only candidate. He was in every way the opposite of David Dunn (Willis.) Brittle compared to invulnerable, insightful contrasted to obtuse (I mean, come on, who in the world reaches his mid-to-late 30s and is oblivious to the fact that he’s never been sick?)

Some fans have complained that Elijah’s character was poorly motivated. I disagree. Ultimately his character—a comic book fanatic, rather than a fan—used comic books to define his world. But it was only a definition that worked if a superhero rose to oppose him. It’s the sort of dreamlike logic that characterizes the truly insane… or the truly brilliant. Within the context of Unbreakable, that worked fine for me. Honestly—fans accepted for years that Lex Luthor’s main motivation was that Superboy made him lose his hair as a kid. This is hardly more farfetched than that. Others protested that Elijah then let himself be dragged off to an insane asylum at the end. Why shouldn’t he? He’d be secure in the knowledge that he could get out whenever he wanted. Keeping with the Luthor model, Lex in the old days was in and out of the slammer so much that his prison grays served as his costume.

Basically, Shyamalan endeavored to use comic books to comment on the real world. To say that life imitates the art. No wonder that such a view prompted some film-goers to be condescending toward the film. To hard-core comic fans, it was galling to see the one true comic book enthusiast in the film turn out to be a mass-murdering psycho. It even seemed to present a cautionary tale to parents: If you get your kid interested in comic books, they might rot his mind and turn him evil. Wertham would have loved that message.

On the other hand, the non-comic fans can react with disdain. How dare a mere “comic book movie” pretend to have depth, or philosophy, or aspire to exist above its station by endeavoring to relate to the real world, rather than the artificially constructed environment of a Marvel or DC universe. Don’t comic book movies know their place? How can Shyamalan claim that life imitates art when everyone “knows” that comic books aren’t art, but merely garish four-color escapist crap?

Word is that Unbreakable is the first of a trilogy. With all respect to the movie maker, I’d say it’s the second of a trilogy, with Sixth Sense being the first. What I want to see now is Cole from Sixth Sense teaming up with David Dunn (an alliterative name; how comic book can you get?) of Unbreakable to fight crime. What a team. Cole will keep staring at him saying, “You look just like a dead guy I knew” and David will be saying, “Kid, stop whispering, will ya, I can’t understand a word you’re saying.” Cole talks to murder victims and gets leads, and David does the leg work. Call it Cole’s Law.

What do you think? Too comic booky?

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)