It wasn't but five minutes into my first "Twilight Zone" before I thought, "Rod Serling
where have you been all my life?" I was ten years old, and WPIX in NYC was running them every night at eight. Planted on the couch, wide-eyed, I gloriously absorbed what were obviously nothing short of the most substantial stories ever dreamed up by anyone, anywhere, anytime. Like when the guy who played The Penguin is the lone survivor of a nuclear war, but happy because all he ever wanted was to read – only he breaks his glasses, so now he can’t! Or when Will Robinson from “Lost in Space” wished everybody into a cornfield just because he didn’t like their attitude. Or that gremlin tormenting that poor crazy dude flying coach because nobody recognized he was Captain Kirk.
I mean, night after night, blowing my mind.
The show nearly ruined me, narratively. Any story that didn't peel away the thin veneer of reality coating the universe’s perverse and inscrutable core just didn't cut it. To my 10-year old mind, the Zone provided an almost religious transcendence. Brought up wholly secular, my source texts for delving into the Big Questions consisted mostly of "Peanuts" books. The possibility that the Devil was being kept under wraps in a European monastery, held captive by only a staff of truth, or that a little girl might find herself lost in another universe by crawling through an inter-dimensional gateway behind her bed, felt like divine revelations.
All this is to say, when it comes to grandiose spooky shit, I’m ripe for the picking; I’m vulnerable... I got no defense. Which is why I ended up seeing The Happening on opening day, even though M Night Shyamalan had made only one film I thought genuinely worthwhile (Unbreakable); and even though I stopped watching his last masterpiece about the fish-lady a half hour in because it was lulling my metabolic processes to a slow crawl.
The Happening, for its part, starts off in fine T Zone fashion. A woman in New York’s Central Park, chatting with a friend on a bench, notices some odd behavior in passers by. Or is it that she herself has become disoriented? The answer comes when she stabs herself in the temple with a hair rod. Next, we see a nearby construction site, where a hard-hats' bull session is interrupted by one of their co-workers still on high plummeting to the ground. As they gather around, dozens of their cohorts follow suit, splatting themselves against the pavement. (And when will sci/fi filmmakers stop referencing September 11 for cheap thrills? I'd like to know.) News reports attribute the events to a terrorist attack with a chemical agent inducing suicidal impulses. The movie then leaps to Philadelphia, where Mark Wahlberg just happens to be teaching his science class about the recent true-life, mysterious, disappearance of honey bees. Any theories, he asks? “It’s an unexplained event of nature,” offers one student.
And with that, ladies and gentlemen, it's game over, mystery-wise. Might as well flash an "Allegorical Significance" title across the screen. That’s the main prob here: Once the film tips its hand about what's causing the spreading insanity, the tension drains right out. Since there are precious few twists and turns anyway, I don’t think I’m giving anything away by stating if you’re familiar with the Gaia hypothesis, you’ll catch on pretty quickly to what's happening. And even if you’re not, M Night’s environmental message couldn’t be any clearer if he’d hired Greenpeace to hand out pamphlets with the popcorn. One shot is gratuitously backgrounded with giant smokestacks from a plant, reminiscent of Three-Mile Island, belching God knows what into the air. A later scene finds Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel, playing his wife, in a model home where everything is plastic. Fleeing from the encroaching source of the attacks, they run past a billboard advertisement for the housing development. The giant tag line: “You deserve this.”
If the mystery behind the spreading madness satisfies you, you’ll probably stick with the story. My interest climaxed about the time a train carrying a bunch of Philadelphians, fleeing to the countryside, suddenly stopped dead in the middle of nowhere. “We lost contact," says a conductor, "with everyone." Spooky. But the film soon degenerates into one of those panicked- population-behaving-badly stories, with occasional pit-stops to check in on Zooey Deschannel's emotional progress concerning her ability to commit. Why do so many earth-shattering catastrophes in the movies result in immature people finding themselves? Because lemme tell you, when the aliens, giant reptile, or apocalyptic global warming phenomenon finally migrate off-screen and into the real world, my first order of business will not be working out previously intractable emotional problems, but stockpiling toilet paper. Because I am going to be soiling myself non-stop.
The latter part of the film does offer one potentially interesting run-in between our heroes and an old woman, played by Betty Buckley. Shyamalan however, treats her character -- a paranoid fundamentalist Christian who keeps a doll in her bed for company -- as an embodiment of everything mean and twisted. This is too much burden to place on an actress who was the heart and soul of "Eight is Enough."
To sum up, the whole thing’s a little sophomoric. But with all my kvetching about Hollywood films being “too big,” my main complaint about this movie is that it's too small. I read recently that Shyamalan manages to keep making movies in part because he holds production costs down. I'll say! This is at least his third film in which the action attenuates to a bunch of people scrambling around in a field. No explosions, no car chases -- okay. But no sets? The biggest expense here must have been a wind machine: Shyamalan laces the proceedings with dozens of trees-swaying-in-the wind shots, indications of an imminent attack.
I will say this, however. The Sony Metreon now charges just $6.00 for a matinee, and that certainly mitigates any movie experience. At that price, it might even have been worth it to hear Mark Wahlberg browbeat himself with this mumbling line: “Be scientific, douchebag.” Still, at only an hour-and-a-half, the film feels long. At the end of the showing I was at, one person applauded, no doubt moved by the environmental agenda, and another hissed, no doubt moved by everything else. Despite Shyamalan's technical facility in the supernatural suspense genre, The Happening isn’t. Wait for cable. And to see how it's really done, watch as many old Twilight Zones as you can.
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