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The protagonist of The Happening is biology teacher Elliot Moore, played by Mark Wahlberg.
Zade Rosenthal. © 2008 Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved.

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.