Shyamalan's signs (quick read)

Hello! This is :A:, Adriano Barone’s newsletter. This is the first (and maybe the last) edition of a format I labeled “Quick reads”. Why? Because it’s short and it’s in English (a terrible English: I’m not a native speaker, mind you, but I hope the core concepts remain clear and not lost in translation. Not that I’m such a great thinker, meself…).

But let’s start. Many, many times (the last time it happened it was more or less one year and half ago) I read articles on M. Night Shyamalan’s movie Signs that deeply irritated me.

Premise of said articles: “In Signs the alien invasion is an excuse to tell the story of a priest who rediscovers his faith.”

WRONG: ...because Signs is simply a movie ABOUT CINEMA, a film that meditates on the mechanisms of cinema itself.

Why do things happen in movies, and specifically in THIS movie?

Not because God wants it (Gibson's recovery of faith is super crude, and voluntarily told like this), but because the Author wants it, specifically the Director (capital letters not randomly used here): in fact who starts the events that in the end allow the family to save themselves? Oh, look: Rey Reddy when he runs over Gibson's wife.
A character played (not surprisingly) by the director.
The director is God, at least the god of the film. If not the god, at least "the king": REY Reddy, did you really think that the name is casual? And it is REDDY, that is, reddish, bloody, because to bring to life a drama and a moment of growth for his protagonists he stained his hands with blood, that is, in the script - and by playing the part of that specific character - to set everything in motion he had to make a sacrifice, that of the protagonist's wife (which is quite sexist, but not what we are talking about here).

Signs is a meditation on cinema and even on the naivety of causal mechanisms (caUSal, not caSUal) of cinematographic dramaturgy (and this is achieved also by voluntarily bringing them to light. My favorite one: aliens vulnerable to water raiding a planet composed of 70% by water), according to which things "are" that way because they "must be", the characters have those traits because they need them to solve the plot points "assigned" to them… or a story would not be a story, a screenplay would not be that perfect clockwork mechanism that it is (this applies to the Hollywood writing style, let's skip the freeforms European cinema likes so much).

Life is chance and chaos, cinema (according to Shyamalan who talks to us about this, but we can extend the concept: every well-structured story) is a causal and consequential sequence of events; there is no God: there is cinema, though.
I’m fine with the latter.