On The Happening

I didn't like this movie, but I felt the need to post how it could have been good.

Much has been made that this is M. Night's first R rated movie.  It qualifies for that R rating, but it does so in a very PG-13 way.  There is violence.  A lady stabs herself in the throat with a sewing needle.  A man allows his arms to be bitten off by a lion.  Construction workers rain down from the sky.  But it's all very quick-cut, and the images don't resonate.  It's as if Shymalan had to coax the un-family friendly images out of himself.  As if he felt he were slumming by filming them that way.  He was probably thinking to himself, Hitchcock did one R rated movie, so I can do one R rated movie.

It's strange - the violence was the most excessive thing about the film, and yet it was also a fault of the film that it did not go far enough.  To get real terror out of an audience (especially an audience today), sometimes you have to turn them red.  So the opening passages should have been savage.

The real problem, however, was that the film had nowhere to go.  I have seen many horror films that were about a mass exodus - Cloverfield and War of the Worlds being the most recent - and those films, neither of them very good, were also about something else.  What is The Happening about?  It's about a marriage that is falling apart.  I think.  There wasn't much to it.  It seemed like it was just kind of tacked on.  And if a subplot about love is going to be tacked on, then you better get two actors who are more heavily invested in each other than Deschanel and Wahlberg.  She was on Pluto, and he looked like he was still trying to decipher what it means to play a biology teacher in a movie.

About forty minutes into the movie, I was really enjoying myself.  Despite its faults, the film seemed to be establishing itself as some sort of retro-'50's sci-fi horror film, a la Them or The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.  It even had a scientist (or botanist in this case) delivering an unnecessarily long and complex theory as to what he thought was really happening.  It had corny dialogue, and everyone looked authentically scared - eyes wide, mouths agape.  A character at one point utters the line, "Cheese and crackers!" in exasperation.  

Now, I'm fine with camp as long as it is intentional.  As long as it is marketed that way.  But I don't think that was Shymalan's intention.  He seemed to have varying intentions at varying points during the movie - that can be the only explanation for the wild shifts in tone.  The botanist character keeps asking, at one point, if Wahlberg likes hotdogs.  The characters arrive at a house in the middle of nowhere, and for some reason, it is a model home, and everything in it is fake.  What is a model home doing way out in the middle of nowhere?  There is a run-in with a bunch of hicks with shotguns.  The hicks are boarded up in a house, and they don't want to let anyone in because the airborne virus will seep in with them.  I know it's supposed to be funny that there are holes in the walls and that the virus would obviously get in anyway, but why would Shymalan think that at this point we needed to laugh?  I mean, ten seconds later the shotguns have gone off and blood is all over the place, and no one's laughing then.

Late in the film, the characters stay at the home of an old woman who randomly screams threats at them and slaps a little girl on the hand when she reaches for a cookie.  Later, Wahlberg finds a doll that resembles the mummified corpse of a little girl lying on the old lady's bed.  At that point, I'd kind of want to get out of there, but Wahlberg decides they'll just stay for awhile.  I don't understand why they would have stopped at all.  Why wouldn't they just find a car, shut up the vents, and drive away?  There must be plenty of cars lying around; after all, everyone else is dead.  Shymalan seemed to be saying something here.  Although what that was is anyone's guess.  I guess the old lady, the recluse, the Thoreau, who lives out in the country without any electricity, without any news from the outside world, is supposed to represent Shymalan's view of how we are going to have to be if we are to survive in this flooded plain of technology and consumption.  I don't know, some bullshit like that.

Why did The Happening need to be about anything more than some people getting out of Dodge?  It didn't need any explanation besides that there's a gas and it's making people go crazy and kill themselves.  There could have been a real shocker at the end when the characters realize what's really going on, but Shymalan blows that when he introduces the hotdog-loving botanist.  What Shymalan seems to have done was to film his rough draft - before he really knew what he was writing about, and how he was writing it.

Straight horror or high camp; those are the options here.  The Happening needed to have gone one way or the other.  I'm leaning toward high camp.  Because of Wahlberg.  Because of the hotdogs.