I’m a writer. And several years ago, I was doing some research for a book chapter on Psycho. Anyway, some college students had asked me a question about the similarities between a Faulkner story and Psycho. There was no question that the similarities were there, and there was also no question that both Faulkner and Hitchcock had worked in Hollywood in the 1940s. So I got curious and decided to explore that angle.
Well, there wasn’t any connection. The similarities were coincidental—sort of a convergence between cultural trends and the necessities of storytelling. However, in the course of my investigations, I did some reading from a book about the psychology of murder, published in 1959—shortly before Hitchcock made his movie. I wanted to know what that book had to say about Ed Gein, since Bloch loosely based Norman Bates upon Gein.
The book had an entire chapter on Gein. But I didn’t stop there. I read about nearly every infamous murderer catalogued in that book. Along the way, of course, I came upon Jack the Ripper. When I read about the injuries he inflicted on his victims, I wondered: “Why didn’t I know about this? Why did I only know that he cut their throats but never knew that he also disembowelled them?”
The answer was obvious: nearly my entire source of information about the Ripper was from television and movies (most of which I’d seen on television). Pop culture, for the most part, had sanitized and softened the Ripper. So I became curious about how the culture interprets Jack the Ripper–not just now, but ever since the Autumn of 1888.
Maybe I’ll blog about various trends in the coming days. But for now, I’ll just settle on the victims. Okay, I’m assuming that anybody reading this has some kind of interest in Jack the Ripper and/or Ripper movies. So tell me: what do you know about the victims? You probably know their occupation, right? I think nearly everybody knows that. Do you know the average age of the victims or their names? Unless you’re a hardcore Ripperologist (or serious fan of the Johnny Depp From Hell movie), probably not.
I gave a questionnaire to a film club a few years ago, and most people thought that the victims were young and beautiful. So did I before I began to study the case. I do have a theory on why many people think that. Many of us have gotten our impressions of the case from pop culture. And, of course, pop culture knows that beautiful young women sell product a whole lot better than decrepit middle-aged alcoholic prostitutes do. Hence, the first “distorted” presentation of the victims in cinema.
Now, I’m not complaining about the distortion. I just find it interesting… just as I find it interesting that the Ripper can be used in supernatural horror movies, science fiction, and virtually anything else that writers can dream up. Every character inspired by Ed Gein–whether it’s Norman Bates, Leatherface, or Buffalo Bill–is a character planted at least marginally in the real world. Okay, Texas Chainsaw is kind of a surreal world, but there’s nothing supernatural about it.
Why does the Ripper get to be immortal (or whatever) and Gein-based characters do not? Well, I have a theory about that too.
I think I’ll save it, though, for tomorrow.
why the happening doesn’t
The RipperLady blog is not limited to Ripper movies. Here we takes a look at M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film, and how it stacks up against the movies it’s taking on.
Filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan is known for creating twist endings. What he should be known for is twisting conventional genres. Sometimes it works—as it did in The Sixth Sense, Signs and Unbreakable. And sometimes it just falls flat.
In The Happening, Shyamalan plays off a couple of different genres, but most obviously he works with “nature gone wild”—a subgenre of science fiction and horror with a resumé dating back at least to 1954’s Them! In its science fiction manifestation, “nature gone wild” usually involves genetically altered species of animals or insects: giant irradiated ants (Them!), giant chemically mutated bunnies (Night of the Lepus), giant irradiated brain-eating talking crabs (Attack of the Crab Monsters). You get the picture.
In its horror manifestation, “nature gone wild” sometimes involves natural breeding gone dangerously out of control (The Swarm), but most often it involves some kind of malign natural sentience. That is, some element of nature, without any mad science assistance, has developed an apparently conscious will to kill humans. The two most famous examples involve: 1) a lone shark preying in shallow waters, and 2) the interspecies flocking of homicidal birds (c’mon, you know the titles!).
In The Happening, Shyamalan blends “nature gone wild” with what I jokingly refer to as the “siege on a farmhouse in Western Pennsylvania” subgenre of horror—i.e. the George Romero Dead movies and their descendents, including the British Dog Soldiers and Shyamalan’s own Signs. (Curiously, the original “siege on a farmhouse” movie took place in Bodega Bay, CA… and involved the interspecies flocking of homicidal birds).
The most obvious similarity between The Happening and Romero’s zombie movies lies in what happens to the infected. They don’t become flesh eating zombies, of course, but they do become something equally alien and horrifying to the non-infected: suicidal automatons, often wreaking (or seeking) havoc on their own bodies. The Dead films are not just about zombie noshing. They’re also about loss of will and becoming one’s own worst nightmare.
Shyamalan intentionally, even strategically, inserts The Happening into the lineage of some of Alfred Hitchcock’s and George Romero’s greatest work. So how does it match up?
The Birds takes its time in revealing the threat. Starting out as a sort of screwball comedy about the wacky interactions between a wealthy socialite and a young lawyer, the first bird attack— a single swoop down on the socialite— comes at least 20 minutes into the film. The attacks build and build, though, until swarms of birds are racing down the farmhouse chimney, pecking their way through ceilings and doors, and massing for what seems like miles around the farmhouse. In the end, we don’t know the cause of the event. We don’t even know if it’s isolated to Bodega Bay and environs or if it’s the first wave of a worldwide apocalypse.
Night of the Living Dead similarly paces itself. An isolated attack in a graveyard leads to the discovery of an abandoned farmhouse, which leads to the grisly discovery of a mutilated corpse, which escalates towards a full-scale assault. We get the news in waves. The living, first in ones and then groups, descend on the farmhouse. Then come the dead. The film is well underway before we hear the first newscast explanations for this epidemic of homicide.
But the slow, deliberate tease is not necessarily crucial to the genre. Drawing on the mythology of its antecedent, Dawn of the Dead places us already in the middle of the crisis, opening with a SWAT team trying to take down zombies while talking heads try to explain the phenomenon.
The Happening tries it both ways—starting off fast, but teasing it out slow. Like Dawn of the Dead, The Happening opens with a large-scale crisis. Mass suicides occur in Central Park and nearby. But by the time Philadelphia hears, the only questions are how large the crisis is and what’s causing it. Our awareness of the size of the catastrophe, like the characters’, develops slowly, while our sense of the cause evolves over the course of the film.
Regardless of characters’ theories, the film never unequivocally adopts a single explanation. In fact, the “wrap up” at the end is actually The Happening’s most direct tribute to Dawn of the Dead. This is not a categorical summation or pronouncement but an intentionally comic explication of the event by an “expert”… and the exasperated reaction by the show’s host. If you want to get the joke, watch Dawn of the Dead and pay close attention to the talking heads. But herein lies a problem. Should we really need to familiarize ourselves with a secondary film in order to “get” the equivocal nature of Shyamalan’s ending? Not in a mass market movie! But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s back up a bit.
Like Romero in Night of the Living Dead, Shyamalan does do a reasonably good job with building up the sense of danger, from rumor to reality to panic to mass death and the potential for apocalypse. But he gets his film too tangled up in secondary mechanisms (not to mention other people’s movies) to give his threat the immediacy it deserves.
In The Birds and the Dead movies, the threat is immediate and visceral. Birds or zombies attack. The characters defend themselves or die. In The Happening, the threat is more conceptual. Neurotoxins are released into the air by an unknown agency (the trees? the government?), and those infected kill themselves. (Technically, they lose their self-preservation instinct, and for some reason, this translates into an immediate and fatal burst of self-destruction).
Shyamalan did a nice job with the unseen threat in Signs. But there was always a physical bulk behind the invisibility, and that physical bulk could be fought. Here, the struggle is against something insubstantial (the wind) and microscopic (the neurotoxins it carries) and the destruction is ultimately carried out by a secondary agency (the infected individual against him or herself). This pestilence cannot be fought. All anyone can do is try to outrun it (or find an antidote!). And this makes the struggle seem less immediate, even passive.
By riffing off Hitchcock and Romero, Shyamalan creates certain expectations about the kind of threat his protagonists face and how they will fight it. Of course, Shyamalan lives to subvert expectations, but in order to do so successfully, he needs to create a work that at least nearly equals the ones he’s challenging. The expectations established by these films have, after all, seeped in to our collective cinematic unconscious.
So does Shyamalan pull it off? The concept he’s dealing with has potential. In “nature gone wild,” the things we take most for granted are typically the things that turn against us. And what do we take more for granted than the air we breathe? (No matter the cause of the crisis, air is the common denominator here). The concept can work, but it will need strong characters to drive it and actors who will sell it.
Characters do drive The Birds and the Dead movies. The Birds starts with strong characters and develops them more fully through the crucible of an apocalyptic nightmare. In the Dead films, Romero cuts straight to character development through crisis. Unlike Hitchcock, he can’t pay for for A-list actors or a lengthy prelude, but he makes up for these deficiencies in the raw urgency and passion he gets from his cast. Audiences care when major characters go down in Romero films. Romero’s actors, regardless of acting skill, always sell their situation.
In The Happening, though, Shyamalan sacrifices character to situation. Mark Wahlberg’s is the only well-realized character among the major cast. A few small players – the soldier and horticulturalist in particular – manage to make their characters resonate. But most of the cast has trouble getting the audience to care deeply about their characters’ plight or even their deaths. Whether this is a function of the writing or the acting, it is ultimately the responsibility of the director.
Shyamalan loves to present himself with tricky problems that he tries to solve in unique ways. But instead of high concept that can be distilled into a single sentence (eg. “tell a ghost story from the perspective of a ghost who does not come across as a ghost”), The Happening gives us multiple concepts that get tangled up in each other: 1) “transform the ‘nature gone wild’ subgenre from animal/insect threats into vegetation/environmental threats while remaining equivocal that the threat even has its origin in nature,” 2) “transform the end result of the toxin so that the infected do not attack the uninfected but the infected attack themselves,” 3) “transform pestilence movies from scientists racing to find a cure to characters racing against the wind,” and so forth.
The Happening ambitiously attempts to refresh old subgenres. It would like to be The Birds. It would like to be Night of the Living/Dawn of the Dead. But without the boldness of high concept, and without actors who can really sell its overly tangled and abstract threat, The Happening doesn’t ever quite happen.
This article first appeared on Blogcritics.