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The Happening -- "The Most Morally Abhorrent Film Ever Made"
James Kirchick, "The Plank" blog @ The New Republich/t Instapundit Chris [Orr] does an admirable (and hilarious) job of tearing apart M. Night Shyamalan's latest crime against cinema, The Happening. Go click through and read the review. It's possibly the best film review I've ever read. (The review, that is, not the film.) Maybe "review" isn't quite the word; how about "deconstruction" or "demolition"? It is incredibly awful, so laughingly bad that at one point during the screening I attended last night a man in the audience yelled, "I can't take it anymore!" No one shushed him. While Chris deconstructs the film's myriad absurdities, poor performances, and atrocious script, he didn't go after what I believe is its morally appalling premise: that the mere existence of the human race is a cause for great shame. As with most of Shyamalan's films, The Happening has an intriguing plot: centuries of human pollution has prompted nature to retaliate against us by form of a noxious gas released from trees, plants, grass -- it's never really clear. The toxin is first emitted in Central Park, smack dab in the middle of one of the most densly populated places in the United States. First, victims lose their critical faculties. Then they freeze. Then they killl themselves. From New York City "The Happening" spreads all along the east coast, from Boston to Washington. Shyamalan leaves little to the imagination in depicting man's nature-inflicted suicide. We see a woman stab herself in the neck with a hair pin. A man runs himself over with a lawnmower. On can't help but leave the theater thinking that Shyamalan derives a sick, masochistic pleasure in showing the deaths of all his bit characters, hopeless rubes are these human beings. They drove their SUVs for too long and had a big carbon footprint and now they're going to pay. "Repent, sinners! Gaia's gonna get'cha!" This isn't just radical environemntalist fare; it's perverse and anti-human. Shyamalan cuts immediately from the natural joy of pregnancy to its consequence: mass, nature-inflicted murder. It's not carbon output, styrofoam cups or the clearing of the rain forests that so angers Mother Earth and, thus, her self-appointed human spokesman. It's us. Some of the TNR commenters make similar points: You're right that the movie - which I saw last night - is morally abhorrent, but you're wrong when you imply that its message is outside the mainstream of environmentalism. What is the "environment," which is the standard of the good in this religion? Anything - animal, mineral, or vegetable - which isn't human. It follows that humanity is evil, a blot on an otherwise pristine natural world. There are plenty of prominent environmentalists who will say as much explicitly. Others don't quite get the point, but even some of them help to prove it: To be fair, the sheer mass of humanity, arguably already past the planet's carrying capacity, is in fact a huge problem. Shyamalan has apparently made a singlularly awful movie based on the conceit that we're outgrowing our Petri dish, but the bad movie doesn't discredit the idea. Nature will, in fact, cull the herd if it gets too large. I understand that your objection is a moral one, that you think Shyamalan seems to be saying that human presence is intrinsically bad. I dunno--haven't seen the movie and don't plan to, and I suspect your accusation is one of those highly arguable, eye-of-the-beholder things. But even if we grant that point, let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. (After all, water conservation helps save the earth! Throw the baby out and recycle the water!) At some point, we'll either have to manage our population growth (i.e. start offing people) or drastically increase the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet, or both--or we court disaster. . . . Strangely, I feel optimistic. If even the fiftieth-percentile-of-the-liberal-elite crew at TNR is realizing that radical environmentalism is "morally abhorrent" and anti-human (at least when encountered in the form of a crappy M. Night Shyamalan movie with a screenplay from the darkest fantasies of Al Gore and Paul R. Ehrlich), radical environmentalism (and all the global warming carbon footprint hysteria it's stirred up) is close to (if not already making) the old shark-jump. Posted by: Mike 2008-06-15 |
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