Marco conceptual Mejora continua

Shyamalan’s work has gone through many stages. In The Sixth Sense (1999), fear appears timidly in the form of collective rejection of somebody who is different. The possession of extra-sensory perception - “I see dead people” - becomes almost a curse. When the protagonist, Cole (Haley Joel Osment) finally understands that only through association with the antagonist (his gift or curse) will he be able to live in peace, he also finds out that, sadly, the benevolent intruder who has helped him in the process, the psychiatrist Malcolm Crowe, has to learn to live with his own fear, accept his own death and his consequent disappearance from daily life.

In Unbreakable (2000), Shyamalan sets up an apparently classic clash between the hero who discovers a power (David Nunn, played by Bruce Willis) and the antagonist (Elijah Price, played by Samuel L. Jackson), and does not reveal until the end that the true antagonist was fear: fear of frustration, of not doing

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one’s duty in every situation, of not being a good person and of one’s most unpleasant side, the most selfish side. This is illustrated in the protagonist’s vulnerability when faced with one of the most conventional, everyday elements: water. With

Signs (2002), a clear tribute to B-movies, Shyamalan goes a step further and dares to frighten the protagonist, Reverend Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) with the loss and subsequent recovery of his faith, while the rest of his family, including his brother, Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix), an atheist, face an invasion of extra-terrestrial beings.

In The Village (2004), Shyamalan goes further, rejecting conventional narrative structure and creating something of an anti-story. In this film, fear is recreated by the village elders themselves, who transform themselves into their own antagonists by means of clumsy disguises. While at first they control the villagers, they later end up destroying the very ideals which first led them to that isolated place. The heroine, a young blind girl called Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas-Howard), manages to overcome the collective fear thanks to her blindness and her faith in love. Thus fear, in this case, is a mismanaged obsession centred on the pursuit of an aim based on the common good. (Here we have an underlying message which is very relevant to certain current forms of power.)

Lady in the Water(2006) marked the director’s return to classic stories, paying homage to his maestro, Spielberg, and E.T

(1982) as the most obvious re-creation of the benevolent intruder archetype. In this film, Shyamalan presents a group of characters who have to work together to return a water nymph to her fantastic homeland. Successions of mythological monsters are the antagonists who try to prevent the nymph from going home. Despite the dramatic effects and the sudden appearances of these beings, they are not the incarnation of

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fear in this story. Rather, fear is a character camouflaged in the initial distrust of the characters, in the insecurity of Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) and in his traumatic past. The true fear of the heroes of this story lies in their uncertainty and lack of faith in the strength they can possess if they help each other. With The Happening (2008), Shyamalan evolves again with a new form of science fiction linked to the environment. For the first time, he explicitly reveals the antagonist from the very start of the film. In a ground-breaking, innovative – even surreal – way, Shyamalan turns the world’s flora into a weapon of mass destruction aiming to wipe out humanity. In revenge for being mistreated for millennia, nature has become a terrifying lethal weapon.

Finally, we come to Shyamalan’s latest film at the time of writing, the futuristic and dystopian After Earth (2013), which incorporates an analysis of fear rarely before seen in the cinema. Here, fear, or cowardice, takes the shape of a physical, sensorial element which betrays the presence of humans. Monstrous blind creatures eradicate the population by using their sense of smell to track humans down. If there is no fear, the creatures cannot detect their target. The relationship between a father (Will Smith) and son (Jaden Smith) progresses from estrangement to admiration precisely because of the way in which the protagonists deal with their respective fears, the fear that each feels regarding the other’s well-being, and their mutual fear concerning survival.

By way of a provisional conclusion we might go so far as to say that that Michael Night Shyamalan tells us modern fantasy stories and, without our realising it, speaks to us of fears, hidden in impossible characters, which are closer to us and more relevant than we can possibly imagine: fears around

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topics such as marginalisation, solitude, difference, corrupt power, contempt, underestimation and cowardice. These are feelings inherent to mankind which, today more than ever, are relevant in an age of communicative overload, so-called ‘infoxication’. Shyamalan tells us that these feelings, sublimated in frightening characters and identities, touch on our most hidden fears. Is it possible that he, who hates film critics so very much, is himself a critic of modern society?

Notes and References

1 _{See Richard Mathews, Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination,} London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 132-136.

2 _{The Younger Pliny, The Letters of Pliny the Younger, London:} Penguin, 1969, Book 7 Letter 27, pp. 202-205.

3 _{David Flint, Zombie Holocaust: How the Living Dead Devoured the} Pop Culture, London: Plexus, 2009, p. 26.

4 _{Carlos Aguilar, El cine fantástico de aventuras, Málaga: Diputación} Provincial de Málaga, 2004, pp. 87-91.

5 _{Interview with M.N. Shyamalan: The Sixth Sense, Buena Vista} Pressbook, 1999.

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