As usual, an excellent and insightful piece. I think Shyamalan is very, very talented, and he's brilliant at creating haunting, solemn images, but he's seemingly unaware of the world in which these images exist. This manifests itself most obviously in his clueless humorlessness (it's hard to believe he started as a writer in comedies, like <i>She's All That</I> and <i>Stuart Little</i>) where he presents things that are utterly ridiculous with a straight face without realizing how ludicrous they are; Tommy Wiseau is touched by the same issue - <i>The Room</i> is supposed to be an epic tragedy.

I don't think this is a problem with <i>Sixth Sense</i>, because what's happening is very <i>serious</i>, the character just doesn't know why or how serious. But it does show up in other ways - some of what's presented, such as a girl who's raped and murdered by her parents, is so grim that it demands to be examined with depth, but it isn't - it's just fodder for images, like any tabloid murder. There's also the horrible ending, where Cole is trapped in a world where he's trapped with the dead forever. This isn't a welcome thing, but something horrifying - <i>Stir of Echoes</i>, about a similarly gifted child, treats it as such.

I think that lack of any sense of a containing world is at the heart of why people (and by people, I mean me) had such a problem with <i>Unbreakable</i>'s ending. Despite the solemnity of both <i>Sense</i> and <i>Unbreakable</i>, what makes them so incredibly effective is that they're very much in the mode of social realism. Willis might be playing Malcolm Crowe, but this isn't one of those movie psychiatrists who can also take out a SWAT team or learn to use a gun instantly - if he were to do anything like either thing, the audience would feel cheated. His actions and visibility are as limited as any man or woman's. This is especially effective in <i>Unbreakable</i>, since almost no superhero movie is done in this mode. The character not only has the powers of a god, but they speak in quip laden dialogue, and the villains have the obsessions of Dr. No. This is why many comic book fans respond so strongly to <i>Unbreakable</i>, that it does get this very important thing right - many comic books, whatever their fantasies are rooted in social realism, and arguably, this is what gave Marvel's titles an edge over DC's. Peter Parker is an actual student, dealing with a shitty boss, a shitty job, trying to impress a girl, and has no idea how he got into this mess where a guy with eight mechanical arms wants to kill him - he's not a billionaire solving crimes in a St. Simeon mansion by a huge fireplace. The power of Frank Miller's <i>The Dark Knight</i> lies with this as well, rather than any ostentatious luridness - when Batman uses an explosive to escape from the tunnel of love, it's not a graceful exit; you can almost hear the crack of bones as he hits the ground. This detail makes important sense with this character - he's like Harvey Keitel in <i>Mean Streets</i> when he holds his hand over a candle. This physical agony is self-punishment for not saving his parents.

<i>Unbreakable</i>'s ending is a break in these modes. We go from social realism to the epic style of some comic books, where people make declarations and offer up massive revelations (despite the fact that their audiences sometimes fall along gender lines, this is very similar to the mode of TV soap operas) and where in other parts we have the thrill of the heroic or epic in social realism -