Movie Review: The Happening
I can’t pretend I’m not affected by the sight of a woman stabbing herself in the neck. Or the sight of a dozen people who’ve hanged themselves from the highest trees on a quiet suburban street. Or a line of people picking up a gun and using it to blow their heads off, one after the other. I’ll admit I was engaged by The Happening’s core story of Elliot (Mark Wahlberg) and Alma (Zooey Deschanel), newlyweds who need to work on their marriage and receive a crash course when they’re forced to take care of Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez), the daughter of Elliot’s friend Julian (John Leguizamo). Like many filmgoers, I enjoy being affected by good movies; it’s one of the reasons I see them in the first place.
I have a problem, however, with films that wrap their elements in a narrative so crassly manipulative, so patently unbelievable, that my emotional responses become Pavlovian and I can feel myself being jerked around. I’m no psychologist, which unfortunately limits the insight I can offer with this review, but my experience is that people don’t enjoy something as much once they know the reason they’re enjoying it. This is why students in high school rarely enjoy the books they study; once they understand how the author has made an impact, it’s difficult for them to experience that impact.
Another way of putting it is this: Audiences like being jerked around, but only when they’re unaware someone’s doing it. Alfred Hitchcock liked to say that he played the audience like a piano, but you weren’t aware of how brilliantly constructed his films were until they were over. With The Happening I could see M. Night Shyamalan pulling my strings all the way through, and when the film was over instead of congratulating him I wanted to punch his lights out.
If you’ll indulge me, a theory: Audiences will buy anything once. King Kong’s Skull Island includes dinosaurs, savage natives, giant insects, and a 50-foot ape, but we accept this (even if other elements in the 2004 remake are flawed) because the rest of Depression-era New York is realistic. In Jurassic Park dinosaurs are bred from DNA extracted from mosquitoes and combined with a frog’s DNA – but in film terms it makes sense because the island is isolated, the characters who visit the “amusement park” seem like people we could meet, and it’s not difficult to imagine someone profiting off the technology if it actually existed. It doesn’t matter when the Big Scene occurs either, provided the narrative which comes before and after remains consistent.
A corollary: if working with a fantasy world the trick is to keep your inconsistency consistent – you can establish any boundaries you like provided you remain between them (which is one of the reasons I liked Speed Racer). In The Lord of the Rings Middle-Earth is established from the beginning as inhabited by hobbits, which don’t exist, which means we can accept the elves, which don’t exist, and the wizards, and the orcs, and the shadowy demon-riders, which also don’t exist. This is why in later movies it’s not a stretch to see talking trees and gigantic spiders even though the first film doesn’t include gigantic animals or sentient vegetation. However, if a man from our era were to suddenly show up in LOTR wearing a baseball cap and listening to an iPod, the film would become unbelievable, because while realistic, the man doesn’t fit the (wide) boundaries of the world that’s been established.
Back to The Happening. The Happening is book ended by scenes which could plausibly exist in the real world, which means that Night is given one chance to pull the wool over our eyes. The problem is he thinks he’s only selling one unbelievable event, when in reality he’s selling two. The second is the Explanation, which in my opinion is idiotic but can be found elsewhere on the internet and so I won’t reveal it here. The first is that people can be scientifically manipulated into killing themselves.
From what I recall of psychology classes, humans can be manipulated into murder; eating or drinking beyond the body’s capacity; fearing, laughing at, or becoming aroused by just about anything. But overriding the body’s natural instinct to preserve itself means overriding any capability the body has of injuring itself. Humans can be manipulated so they won’t react to someone else killing them, but they won’t be capable of killing themselves. When people contemplate suicide it’s in response to something: if the “Happening” had caused people to kill each other then others might kill themselves in response to the first wave of people dying, or after losing a loved one. However, no amount of scientific manipulation without social stimuli on an otherwise ordinary day will make a construction worker suddenly think jumping off a building is a good idea.
Now imagine my reaction watching the movie: Night has already attempted to sell me on one idea which I don’t buy, then pulls out another – the Explanation – and spends the second half of the film pummeling me with it. Alfred Hitchcock never directly explained why avians turned on us in The Birds. There’s a reason for that.
Night remains maddeningly ambitious – why haven’t Michael Bay or Brett Ratner received the kind of drubbing he gets? – but The Happening is another miscalculated failure, an example of his still-sharp filmmaking being applied to an idea that couldn’t carry it in the first place. Blacklisted by two studios and reduced to adapting a kid’s TV show for his next project, he needs some time off. Hopefully he can learn the right lessons. He created two of the best films of the past decade and has been going progressively downhill ever since.
