The Happening

Posted on | 3 years, 7 months ago, in the early evening | 3 Comments

It’s no secret that M. Night Shyamalan’s popularity has waned in recent years, and that people tend to either love his work or hate it. Let me be clear up front before I start talking about The Happening: I love his movies. Love them. When they’re good they’re sublime; and even when they’re “off” they’re clunky only because they carry so much in their pockets. If he ever falls short as a writer or director, then at least he does so ambitiously.

So if you’re an M. Night Hater and you want to read a good tear-down of his latest, kindly send your eyeballs elsewhere.

I’ll keep everything above the cut free of spoilers, but there will be some light discussion of plot events. If you prefer to take your cinematic experience as virginally as possible, then consider coming back to this entry once you’ve caught the flick for yourself.

So. Here goes. The Happening.

In Brief: Bizarre phenomenon prompts gruesome, exponentially spreading string of mass suicides. Marky Mark, funky bunch, et. al. try to escape the deadly and little-understood event. Terrorist attack? Natural but lethal occurrence? Stay tuned.

Overall Impressions: Not as thematically dense as The Village nor as grittily whimsical as The Lady in the Water (which I really loved) — The Happening is somehow both messier and tidier than the M. Night films that have come before it. I can’t tell if I was just told a capricious morality fable or a 90-minute joke with a wink at the end. I sensed elements of both.

Full-length assessment: Earlier today I ran across an article discussing how Shyamalan calls Happening a fun B-movie, and at first I made a little frown, and then I said, “AH HA! I see what you did there!” Because it’s impossible to talk about this movie without first explaining about the bees.

Most of the MNS movies have some thematic underpinning that’s either overt or understated-but-prevalent. In Happening it’s put right up front, from the very first moments of screen time to the tell-tale stripes on a stick at the movie’s near-ending. This one’s all about the bees. More specifically, MNS is running a fictional (and, one could argue, quasi-scientific) experiment that runs parallel with the widely reported disappearance of billions of bees. So, perhaps inspired by this real-life dilemma, Happening is a story about hives, and the breaking up of hives, and the question of what becomes of the residents from these vanished social and abandoned physical structures.

Except we’re not talking bees anymore. We’re talking people.

And we’re also talking about math. If there’s a secondary theme in Happening it’s the failure of numbers and the distancing effects of using statistics to talk about a catastrophic event. When you’re dealing with millions of anything it’s difficult to look at each individual participant; but that’s the beauty of storytelling — you can focus on one sub-unit of the big picture and chase it through the mystery.

Things are likely to get somewhat spoilery now, so this is where I’ll insert the jump. Click the link below to read the rest, if you are so inclined.

In this case, the sub-unit is one couple with marital difficulties and the traumatized child who is foisted upon them. They are fugitives from a series of hives that have been subsequently broken down, largest to smallest, by unseen and baffling forces.

Our protagonists began as citizens of a large city. Then, when the city is assaulted by the event, they flee it and become part of a smaller population seeking shelter in a small town; and then, when this town is also affected, the group breaks down into tinier portions — collections of fifteen or twenty — and then, as they split up or die off, eventually there is no more hive and the population is reduced to straggling individuals doing their best to outrun everything behind them.

The bee cues are all over the place, and I loved them.

The prominent and repeated buzzing of the cell phones performs the heaviest metaphoric duties — simultaneously throwing a nod to the theory that bees are disoriented by cell signals, and serving as a symbol for group communications, AND imitating the map dance (for example, when Alma’s phone is left to buzz around on the coffee table).

Bees return to their hives and perform elaborate dances that tell other bees where to go find the best flowers; and these performance “maps” are integral to their survival. So too, the scavenging for maps becomes key to the survival of our characters, who must use them to seek the most isolated and promising hiding spots. The persistent buzzing means communication with others; and when it stops, the individuals are further reassured that they are absolutely screwed. When there’s no more buzzing, the hive is dead and the stray residents are very seriously on their own.

Likewise, math takes a subversive position in the movie’s scaffolding. The spread of the “event” is numerically exponential, unfolding like a fractal, and playing the odds is a dangerous game at best. Calculations can get you killed, just look at Julian’s desperate reliance on the sums. Note also, the final words of the woman’s daughter in Princeton, broadcast as a last message over her cell phone: “Calculus. Calculus. Calculus …”

Calculate all you like. When you don’t know any of the variables, you’re not doing much to improve your chances. Ten billion bees and how many millions of people? Ignore the numbers. They aren’t going to help you. You’ll have better luck taking Elliot’s scientific method (he’s a biology(?) teacher) and running with that, instead. When the numbers are this big, personal observation will tell you more than math.

Anyway. Let’s see, I’ve covered the bees and the numbers, and then there’s the big question of what started The Happening in the first place — to the bees, to the people. And will it happen again? The environmentalist message, this warning/reminder about how Mother Earth is a whole lot bigger than we are and we’re pissing her off … it ends on sort of a frayed note, but I found it more or less acceptable. After all, in real life no one knows what’s erasing all the bees; and in this fictional corollary, no one knows what caused the creation and spread of the natural neurotoxin that effectively erased all the people.

In the end, the macrocosm of humanity is just a big ol’ mirror displaying how little we know about the microcosms that share our living space.

So okay, yes. MNS can call this his “B-Movie” if he wants, and you can go ahead and grin at the punchline; but don’t think for a moment that The Happening is unthoughtful schlock.

Category: misc

Comments

3 Responses to “The Happening”

  1. MHA
    June 16th, 2008 @ 12:39 am

    Um, hey, there wasn’t so much of a “jump” for those getting this post via RSS. No “link below;” it just kept going. (Though I didn’t.) Just thought you should know. :-)

  2. Cherie
    June 16th, 2008 @ 11:57 am

    Whups! I guess I’ll have to keep that in mind; perhaps leave larger blank rows between sections of content … hmm …

  3. Anansi133
    June 21st, 2008 @ 12:02 am

    I saw it last night, and I didn’t hate it as much as most other people seem to.

    I don’t like splatter films, they gross me out. I’ll make exceptions for this guy, because his horror logic puzzles are fascinating. I thought The Village was awesome. Lady in the water kept *not* becoming a splatter film, and I loved it. This one? Not so much.

    In The Andromeda Strain, they do pretty much the same thing: all these people dies horribly, we don’t know why, and it stopped on its own. But the whole thing is not really about the disease, it’s about the poeple fighting it. I didn’t get much sense of our heroes, who they were or why I should care if they lived.

    The Bee reference makes a lot of sense, I had fun with this by squeezing it between Stephen King’s Cell and this latest I Am Legend. On its own it just turns out to be one of those “wouldn’t it be awful if *this* happened?” movies. But yeah, read between the lines, and it’s a statement about how royally screwed we are.

    (I mean, c’mon, we can’t even reach a meaningful consensus about global warming, how are we going to respond to hive collapse?

    Between fruit vanishing off the shelves (for lack of pollenators) and the grain reserve drowned, I wonder how far away a food crunch really is?

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