See what you have to ask yourself is what kind of person are you? Are you the kind that sees signs, that sees miracles? Or do you believe that people just get lucky? Or, look at the question this way: Is it possible that there are no coincidences?
Graham Hess
In the wake of the ineffable, belief is often a beacon.
In the final moments of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, a medieval Christian, Töre, assumes murderous vengeance in the wake his daughter’s assault and death. In the film’s closing moments, Töre lifts the head of his deceased child in a cathartic motion, and a rush of water emerges from the dirt just beneath her skull. Töre, reconciling his faith through the ordeal, resolves to establish a church at the very location as his beliefs are emboldened through tragedy. In a sense similar to Bergman, M. Night Shyamalan concerns himself less with the inexplicable occurrences of his work, and more with how his figures react to and digest them.
It can be easy to dissect and ridicule Shyamalan’s apparent dependency on a narrative twist. To do so is not even terribly inappropriate, as his reliance on very overt indicators can compromise the mystique of his subtext and by extension, sabotage the resonance of his work. Though both Lady in the Water and The Happening posit intriguing ideas, the director’s own heavy hand suffocated both films in many ways. Yet somehow, Signs proves itself different. Granted, it still toys with the tried and tested convention of an alien invasion, but it also examines one of humanity’s oldest forms of preservation: Belief.
Belief, of course, can often become so dogmatic and dependent upon a specific ideal it over time moves from animating an individual’s purpose and instead leveraging a possibly toxic system. These systems, be it organized religion or something else, can also give one an accessible grasp upon what is difficult or even possible to comprehend with the tools available. In this way, the tendency to believe rather than to know is both a strength and a bane; it is equally an opportunity for dependency as it is for healthy doubt. With Signs, Shyamalan champions belief in the value of the seemingly meaningless when all other logic points towards cataclysm.
Shyamalan wastes no time acknowledging the connection between belief and uniform spirituality. The man at the center of Signs, Graham (Mel Gibson), is a retired Episcopal priest. After his wife, Colleen, is struck and killed by a truck six months prior, he abruptly abandons his faith, resigning to raise his children mostly removed from his community. Once the voice of hope through Christianity for Doylestown, Graham becomes a self-identified pariah, interacting with his former congregation only out of necessity. In the midst of tragedy, he not only sheds his faith, but also any kind of functioning belief. Any questions from his children are answered with sharp and lackluster responses. Graham likewise shuts down any allusion to his previous profession from the townsfolk as they too, struggle for meaning.
His spiritual absence, it seems, is filled with an apocalyptic consequence. To complicate matters further, the protagonist’s immediate family still emit remnants of his past aptitude for belief. At the film’s onset, Graham finds his son and daughter, Morgan (Rory Culkin) and Bo (Abigail Breslin), alone in his cornfield, warped and branded with iconography the international media quickly struggles to understand. Graham’s brother, Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix), often goes full tilt with his understanding as he initially considers the crop signs the vandalism a few drunken neighbors, later resolving towards something more extraterrestrial. Amid all of this, Graham is haunted by his wife’s departing words, “swing away, Merrill,” which he has compartmentalized as the mutterings of a fever dream tied to his brother’s failed attempt at professional baseball. Just as Merrill wades in the dreamless murk of his only passion, Graham also commit to apathy following the death of belief. Though Merrill adopts a new sense of purpose alongside Morgan and Bo at the dawn of assumed end times, Graham is left struggling with confusion.
As the film progresses, Graham is confronted with two conflicts. First, the faint notion of something previously beyond belief, otherworldly invaders, snowballs into an irrefutable, yet still difficult to discern reality. On another front, distant coincidences and quirks continue to pile up, yet not with any obvious meaning, prodding at the void left in belief’s absence within Graham. It is in conflict Signs endures, as it harnesses several of Shyamalan’s tendencies without overwhelming the narrative or theme. He does, of course, slowly pull back the curtain on his world, attaching an approximate reason for the crop circles as well as several of the aliens’ weaknesses and drives. However, Signs accumulates most of its power through a lack of explanation in coincidences. For instance, though Bo’s tendency to leave full glasses of water around their house or Morgan’s asthma has an impact on neutralizing the antagonist, there is no further reason attached to these quirks. Rather, Shyamalan illustrates Graham to attach meaning to circumstance via belief, rather than something definite.
The above idea is tackled a little more overtly as Shyamalan inserts himself into the film. Ray (Shyamalan), the man who fell asleep at the wheel and pinned Colleen to a tree, has been broken down by guilt since the night of the accident. When Graham attempts to check on Ray after an emotional conversation with Merrill about his late wife, he finds Ray’s house in shambles, its owner minutes from escaping with a handful of belongings. Piercing into the burden of story-crafting it in a moment of metafiction, Ray (and by extension Shyamalan) apologizes for the damage he has afflicted. While Rey understands he is the reason for Graham’s abandonment of faith, Shyamalan hints that he’s wielding belief. The filmmaker gives his protagonist a hint, suggesting the invaders “don’t seem to like water” and that he has trapped one into the pantry. Graham can no longer skirt the conflict of the invaders, but at that moment, he knows he will be forced to find value in the coincidences haunting his life. One conflict moves to embody a straightforward bane, while the other conjures a risky solution.
Even after many of the minute details of Graham’s life culminate in the final brawl with the invaders, he is not irrefutably sold on the power of coincidences. He is, however, confident that occurrences do involve reason. Belief, in some way or another, is an avenue to approximate reason however far-fetched it might be. Within this use of belief, lies something sustaining and powerful.
Later this month, we will take a look at Shyamalan’s subsequent film, The Village, and how belief is molded into something malicious.
