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Signs
I saw M. Night Shamyalan's Signs again. I will surely remember it longer than any other movie I've seen this year. The "signs" are, ostensibly, the crop circles, made by the aliens to guide their navigation. In fact, the signs are more broadly theological.
Mel Gibson is a "Father" Hess, a former Episcopal priest, who lost his faith when his wife was killed by a driver (remarkably played by Shyalaman himself) who fell asleep at the wheel. The driver says he had never fallen asleep at the wheel before and never has done it since. That night, he saw nobody on the road for miles and miles. He encountered only this poor woman. Almost as if it had to be, he says.
Predestination is a major theme. Hess, trying hard now to be an unbeliever, explains to his brother Merrill that there are two kinds of people in the world. For the one kind, things just happen at random: no connection or deeper significance. For the other group, there are connections: things happen as signs of other things. For the second group there are no coincidences. The former priest tries hard to be a person of the first type, but events keep pressing him in the other direction.
In a subplot, we learn that Merrill was a minor league baseball player who scored many home run records, but never made it in the majors because he also won the record for the number of strikeouts. He just swung at everything; couldn't stand the idea of not swinging. (I am reminded of the Pittsburgh player of the 1960s Dick Stuart, once known as the "Babe Ruth of the bush leagues," later as "Dr. Strangeglove.") When the priest's wife hung between life and death at the accident, she told her husband, "Seek," and she asked him to tell his brother, "keep swinging." Hess tries to explain to Merrill that these dying words were the result of delirium, had no meaning. Her brain was dredging up "random" memories. But in the crisis of the movie, it is Merrill's "swinging" that makes the difference.
Hess's two children play major roles in the drama, and in the network of signs. Morgan, the older, has asthma, and one element of tension in the film is whether he will survive an attack without his medicine. But ultimately, the fact that his asthma has closed up his lungs, proves to be his salvation. Bo, the daughter, has a penchant for leaving glasses of water all over the house. She thinks one is polluted, one is too dirty, one has a hair in it, etc. The glasses of water turn out, too, to play a crucial role in the resolution of the battle.
So the film works on several levels. On one, it is a reprise of "War of the Worlds," but much scarier than any other movie about aliens I can recall. On another, a study of a very real family, responding to their fears in the midst of equally difficult problems of health, regrets, and loss. On still another level (I think even deeper), it is a film about worldviews.
Shyamalan was born into a Hindu family. Later he went to an Episcopal school on the Philadelphia Main Line. I don't know much about his theology, but this film gets deeper into theology than any other film this year. For Christians, it raises the question of general revelation. When we think about general revelation we tends to think, Thomistic fashion, about causality: God reveals himself in the starry heavens, because who else could be great enough to bring them into being? Or teleologically: God reveals himself in the intricate machinery of the human eye (or now, thanks to Michael Behe, the living cell) because these machines require intelligent design. But Signs suggests that general revelation is also to be found in the rhythm of human life, the structure of coincidence, the fact that one event prepares us for the next. Apparently meaningless events turn out, maybe years later, to take on importance in our lives. And as we reflect on that, that too seems to presuppose a designer.
This kind of teleology is not so much that of a machine-designer as that of an author writing a novel or play, using one event to anticipate another. We are not surprised to find insight into that kind of teleology from a gifted writer and film director like Shyalaman, for it is precisely his business to design a world with such a structure of foreshadowing and recapitulation. The interesting thing is that that kind of world, from my experience anyway, comes out looking very much like the real one.