The protagonist of The Happening is biology teacher Elliot Moore, played by Mark Wahlberg.
Image: Zade Rosenthal. © 2008 Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved.
More In This Article
Listen to this Podcast
-
The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
Read More »
In M. Night Shyamalan's film Signs, the protagonist suffers a crisis of faith so deep that it takes an alien invasion of Earth for him to work it out. In Shyamalan's latest movie, The Happening, which opens today, the protagonist suffers a crisis of reason. Unfortunately, this time not even the looming extinction of humanity resolves it for him.
Given that it's mass entertainment, the film raises a lot of interesting questions about science, and it's clear from it that Shyamalan's interest in science goes much deeper than a superficial mining of ideas for plotlines. His protagonist, high school biology teacher Elliot Moore (played by Mark Wahlberg), lectures about the limits of science's ability to explain the world and applies his critical faculties to staying alive when the "happening" happens.
(Spoiler alert from here on!)
He deduces that trees and grasses, stressed by human presence, emit a toxic substance that causes progressively smaller clusters of people—first cities, then towns and villages, then groups of refugees, and finally lone individuals—to commit suicide. Meanwhile, his friend Julian (John Leguizamo), a math teacher, comes to terms with imminent death by teaching one last student the parable of rice grains on a chessboard.
To the wider world, it remains unclear whether the attack was a terrorist incident, a bioweapons experiment gone awry, a nuclear accident or another of the usual suspects, and the film ends with humanity still missing the environmentalist message—at its peril.
Scientific American's George Musser interviewed Shyamalan by phone earlier this week. Here's an abridged, edited transcript of the conversation, a version of which is also available as a podcast.
SHYAMALAN: Did you see in The New York Times yesterday about plants talking to each other? It was the front of the Science Times. I couldn't believe it!
MUSSER: Life imitates art, I guess! We also had an article a few years ago by Robert Sapolsky that talks about how parasites affect animals' behavior and effectively causes them to commit suicide. So that is also life imitating art. There's a quote in that article that ties into the zoo scene of the film: "This is akin to someone getting infected with a brain parasite that…generates an irresistible urge to go to the zoo, scale a fence and try to French-kiss [a] polar bear." There are these parasites in nature that subvert and turn the survival instinct against the animal. In this case, it affects rodents and takes away their fear of cats. It's the parasite that pregnant women are warned not to get near to litter boxes about.
Wow, that's fascinating.
One of the things I wanted to ask you about were your thoughts about the limits of science. That's clearly something on your mind; it comes out in the very beginning of the film and toward the end of the film as well.
The thing is, we have only our own invented categories in which to judge things. This thing that we're looking at, which of our eight categories (or however many) does it fit in? The things that don't quite fit in, we shove into something. We're inventing those categories; it's very limited. Psychologically, if you're looking for something in your data, you'll see it. If you're doing an experiment and you're looking for patterns, and you go: "Oh, there it is! I see it!" In that same way, if you're going, "There's always an explanation that we have already at our fingertips," you're going to find some way to put it in there.
See what we're tweeting about
15 Comments
Add Comment"The fact that the placebo effect exists is a fact, but what is it? We have no idea. "
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUhoh...
Mr. Shyamalan -- for a small fee I would be happy to serve as a 'Basic Science Consultant' for one or more of your film efforts, with the proviso that you at least agree to *listen* to some reasoning before committing the subject to film.
During my first 20 minutes of watching your film 'Signs', I genuinely thought it was a bizarrely-formed black comedy, then I realized the viewer was supposed to believe it to be a serious drama with the protagonist fighting with a lack of belief in his faith and a subsequent supernatural message from the dead about a baseball bat. Basic practical science was thrown out with the bath water, for the most part. But then I learned that, like several contemporary film directors, you require your audience to take a leap-of-faith into the 'Shyamalan Universe' to make your point.
Well, I am sure its great for ticket sales to generate an anything goes environment certainly makes it easier to do or say just about any absurd thing, but it makes for a much more interesting, intriguing and dramatic story line when the story contains some basic reasoning and hence realism.
The synopsis Crop circles are needed as navigational aids for an alien race that has traveled light-years to invade Earth. Just when they have humanity nearly wiped out, a country preachers brother takes one out with a baseball bat&
Perhaps if youd have included a scene that had some yokel with a lawn mower accidently changing the design of a circle so that the aliens end up in Poughkeepsie now THAT would have been hysterical!
Cheers,
Steven
I liked the premise of "The Invasion Of Body Snatchers" a lot better. Whether you believed something like that could happen or not, it still was a gripping story. This movie however seems to rely on too many undefinable concepts to gain much traction with me anyway. "Friday The 13th" and sequels made money, so who knows.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisImperialism and the bad conscience about that; this is the key to the understanding of that film. Science? The guy is slippery about that notion. Nature? The hippies always have had that experience. The movies, the movies ... Good invention for us spectators, and good too for film makers and their dollars.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisImperialism and the bad conscience about that; this is the key to the understanding of that film. Science? The guy is slippery about that notion. Nature? The hippies already have had that experience. The movies, the movies ... Good invention for us spectators, and good too for film makers and their dollars.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis movie is pretty silly, without the effectiveness of "12 Monkeys". But, it is a big step up from "The Andromeda Strain".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI felt like sighing reading the interview. Oh, well.
--
Edited by John_Toradze at 06/16/2008 9:04 AM
Yawn.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSame old. Man evil. Nature good. Go hug a tree and utopia shall return.
I was surprised Shyamalama could still get a job after "Lady in the Water," but now it makes sense. Make a movie about how evil humanity is towards the environment, and you're bound to get a green light.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this--
Edited by CraigC762 at 06/16/2008 4:54 PM
I actually really liked the movie; however, I can tell that there are going to be people that don't like it. It wasn't what I was expecting, but I appreciated the underlying theme. I believe the film will remind people of the tenacity of nature.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUnfortunately for M. Night Shyamalan and others this movie is wishful thinking; mother nature is not that quick and kind.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe don't understand the placebo effect completely, but the idea expressed in the interview that we don't understand it at all is wrong. I recommend "Snake Oil Science" by R. Barker Basall for a good discussion of our current understanding.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBased upon his comments for this article, I find Mr. Shyamalan surprisingly narrow and naive in his views, statements and perspectives.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlmost any science fiction reader of the past 50 years can tell you that the question about the future of humanity on earth is almost solely an issue as to whether evolving technology can completely replace our past dependency upon "the natural world"--- for food and shelter, etc. In most humans' judgement, all non-human species are but inconveniences to be liquidated, intentially or unintentially, if "humankind" can to benefit as the net result. There is absolutely no value or respect to be attributed to non-human species, who basically just "get in the way".
Consequently, the film is almost moronic in its focus upon "nature striking back" against the human foe.
I am sure SciAm can do better than provide a platform to the sort of statement inherent in this interview and film.
MNS does not go far enough,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisnano-tech isn't the only think set to wipe out our populations! We are eating mad cows, radiated grains, and new germ epidemics daily that we don't hear about, and hearing LEMP. Oh what are they bringing back from space really? Hope we don't have to Kiss our a_s's good bye yet!
I listened to the podcast and I was really hoping the interviewer would nail M. Knight -- but he remained polite. Shayamalan doesn't really deserve science coverage.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA lot of things could be explained if enough money is spent on research.I wonder,has anybody studied the placebo effect on any other species.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI like Shyamalan's movies: as pure entertainment. There is NO Science in anything he'd done, however.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMr. Shyamalan is one great example of how people can talk about something without actually having any knowledge of it.
To say the placebo effect isn't understood or "answered" - it ridiculous.
Picking apart his movie, "Signs," is quite easy even for informed laymen. What others here evidently forgot is that the actual "defeat" of the aliens was due to their (very improbable) vulnerability to water. How could an advanced race that specialized in taking over inhabited planets have MISSED the fact that the Earth is cloud-covered and has a total landmass of only 30% of it's surface??!! Hilarious!
It would be interesting to see a good story on intuition or precognitive dreams.