Lady in the Water

Shyamalan's latest film essentially reduces the "true meaning" of storytelling to spiritual fundamentalism. A fundamentalist requires belief in a self-enclosed, ahistorical, rootless, system of signs, all of which point to each other.

The film's plot line "invents" its own mythology, but by using parataxis as a methodology: like when 6-year olds tell you about their entire day, each event equal in meaning ("I ate some ice cream, and then there was a dragon, when I fell down, but Janie has a blue hat!" Nothing in this film has any symbol that we might match up to one that we already know from the vast vat of cultural capital. No, Shyamalan, says, "It's MY story. It bears NO resemblance to anything, ever." Well, fine, then I won't try to match your ferocious creatures with any of the one's I already know; I won't try to compare your "Interpreter" character with any other kind of interpreter (there are so many!).

It's like when you tell a kid who thinks he invented the wheel that others have already done it, and the kid says, "No, it's MY wheel. It's a Shyamalan-Wheel. No, it's not even called a wheel, it's a Porchumztzkrpl!" And since he kills of the critic-character, who dies after having reviewed several cliches about people who die in movies, we know that Shyamalan's real beast, his worst enemy, is All Critics and Naysayers Who Don't Believe.

It's as if he's been waiting his whole life to make this film, but first he had to trick people by making blockbusters that followed narrative rules and had interesting twists like a decent pulp mystery novel does. "Fooled ya! I was just giving people what they wanted: moderate entertainment with heartwarming messages of facile transcedence. What I really want is to vocalize my personal fears that if I don't get to make the REAL movie I want, that if no one likes it, that they really want to Kill me. Critics don't believe. They're out to get me! Please believe in me. Or I'll die. All good storytellling will die. You just don't understand. It doesn't have to make sense to YOU. This is MY GOD, the God no one understands until they take some time out to get to know Him...I mean Her, and Her name is Story. And she's stares at you from the floor of the shower, huddles in the corner. How can you not want to help her, I mean beleive in me, I mean her."

Fundamentalist New Age Baby Boomer Crap, this one.