On Friday night I watched The Sixth Sense for the first time since before 2006 -- that's how far back my written record of rewatches goes, in any case. I want to say it was probably even five years before that, remembering a specific scenario where I watched it shortly after my arrival in Los Angeles in 2001, which may have been my last viewing.
I didn't watch it because I've just watched (and reviewed) Knock at the Cabin, or at least not directly because of that. There have been about 10 other Shyamalan movies I've seen since my last Sixth Sense viewing, and none of them prompted a rewatch. I did name-check it in my Knock review, but that wasn't the reason either.
The actual impetus for the viewing was a segment they did on Filmspotting in conjunction with their review of Knock at the Cabin, which was "top five M. Night Shyamalan moments." Both hosts approached their individual top fives in very similar ways, each granting the fifth and fourth spot to an outlier moment from one of Shyamalan's "lesser" films, each selecting a moment from Unbreakable or Signs for their third and second spots ... and both choosing the same scene from The Sixth Sense as their joint #1.
The moment when Bruce Willis learns he's a ghost? No. The moment when Mischa Barton suddenly comes into view in Haley Joel's sheet fort and is already vomiting up some kind of gray liquid the first time we see her? No, that's just a personal favorite of mine. And it's not even the "I see dead people" scene.
Of course I am leading up to talking about the moment in the car between Cole -- let's use character names rather than actor names -- and his mother, Lynn (Toni Collette), in their joint last scene on screen.
As you will remember, traffic is stopped because there's been a fatal collision between a car and a bicyclist about six cars ahead of Lynn's. Cole knows it's fatal because he can see all the blood coming from the head of the cyclist as she stands outside his window ... and of course because otherwise she wouldn't be standing there at all.
I should pause here to acknowledge Shyamalan's brilliant mixing of tones. Even though I think we know this scene is headed for a moment of reconciliation between Cole and Lynn -- enough of the movie has gone by that we imagine it has to be wrapping up, and he's already said goodbye to Willis' Malcolm Crowe -- we still get a chill from the way Shyamalan suddenly shows us the ghost of the bicyclist outside the car. But we know that this ghost is different, because Cole has looked at her and then looked away. Pointedly, he's not looking at her when we see her.
Instead he's looking at his mother, finally having decided to reveal his big secret to her.
At first she is skeptical, as you would be. When Cole says that Grandma comes to visit him sometimes, her eyes sharpen and she says "Cole that is very wrong. You know Grandma is gone." As in, "Whatever direction you want to stage these delusions of yours, Cole, leave my mother out of it. That's crossing a line."
But then of course Cole does the thing that characters always do in movies where they offer inarguable proof of what they're saying, which is that he provides information he could only know if what he were saying was true. He describes both the fight Lynn had with her mother before her dance performance when she was young, and a question she asked her mother at her mother's grave.
Of course, the emotional brilliance of this moment is that Cole's grandma didn't tell him what her question was. That's something private between mother and daughter, which is Lynn's to reveal if she wants to. It also allows Collette to perform the emotional peak of the scene that always gets the waterworks going, when she repeats to Cole what her question was:
"Do I make her proud."
I'm getting a little verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves.
The thing that's so great about this moment is that it is accomplishing two things. I'll start with the most obvious:
1) Lynn is getting a catharsis with her mother that she desperately needed. Although it is certainly implied that they had a good relationship, as Cole knew her well and Lynn misses her desperately, obviously there was something unresolved about that relationship for Lynn, as there likely is any time a parent is lost. So a grief at her mother's passing is allowed to pour out at that moment, but this is a different, more nourishing brand of grief, because it allows Lynn to let herself off the hook for whatever shortcomings she imagined she had as a daughter.
But I think equally crucially:
2) It is the sweet relief of realizing her son is not crazy, and that what he is saying has to be true. All this time she has been trying to figure out a way to cure her son of whatever ails him -- and at this point we still think that includes hiring Malcolm as a child psychologist. Now she realizes both that it may not be curable but that it may be okay, since Cole has seemed to learn how to incorporate the wild, sometimes destructive desires of these ghosts into something positive, or at least something he can handle. Her son is going to be okay.
And then even a third thing:
3) It is indisputable proof that there is some sort of afterlife, and death is not the final stop on our journey.
Any one of these things happening would be enough to overwhelm someone. All three at once? That's something else.
And Collette gives a performance equal to that moment, starting to first tear up as the realization is hitting her, then climaxing in one of the most satisfying demonstrations of the emotional impact of a moment that I've ever seen on film. These aren't just the tears an actress can train herself to produce. This is the full body experience of being suddenly overwhelmed, including pauses in her speech to summon up the courage to speak a word that's pregnant with significance, even momentary displays of embarrassment about having this sort of reaction.
I'm obviously not the first person to diagram the effectiveness of Lynn and Cole's final moment -- in fact, what I've written here is probably rather banal to someone who has done a lot of reading and thinking about The Sixth Sense.
But it is the first time I've written about it myself -- that I recall, anyway -- and whether others got there first hardly matters. The brilliance about cinema is that when you are in that moment and having it yourself, you feel like the first person to have that moment -- even if it's a moment you had for the first time more than 23 years earlier.
A few isolated other thoughts about The Sixth Sense:
1) As we are always inclined to do on a second (or third, or fourth) viewing of The Sixth Sense, you watch to make sure that Shyamalan did indeed play by his own rules, never showing anyone interacting with Malcolm other than Cole (and his wife in the opening scene before he dies). The only moment that doesn't fully satisfy me is the quick flick of the eyes in Malcolm's direction that Lynn gives when Malcolm first comes to their house. Since they are sitting across from each other when Cole arrives home, you feel like this is an instance of cheating by Shyamalan -- until you realize that they don't actually interact in that moment, though Malcolm may imagine they are interacting. As she's leaving Cole alone with Malcolm -- or just alone, which is what she would have perceived -- she does quickly look in Malcolm's direction as she's leaving the room.
While this is not proof of anything definitive, I do wonder whether it was a shrewd piece of directing by Shyamalan, or just an accident, or just Collette's instincts as an actress to give another actor in the scene a glancing look as she leaves the room. I don't think it could be option 2 or option 3 so I am going with the fact that it was intentional by Shyamalan, and that it may indicate that Cole's affliction is in some way inherited. She may feel Malcolm's presence in the room even if she can't see it, enough just to make her look quickly as she leaves the room, but not enough to even slow her pace.
2) The scene where Lynn confronts Cole over the butterfly pendant strikes me as interesting, because Cole could have made it so much easier on his mother and himself if he just admitted to moving it -- even if he did not. Instead, he gives her the honest truth, that he didn't move it, without saying who did. This isn't his unfailing honesty toward his mother rearing its head. In the earlier scene where all the kitchen cabinets and drawers were suddenly open moments after Lynn left the room, he willingly engages in the fabrication that he was looking for Pop Tarts. But I think this just shows that his journey is progressing toward coming clean to her. He can no longer engage in simple half-lies as he becomes more and more desperate to reveal the truth of what's happening to him. Osment expresses this wonderfully in his intense look of fear and indecision as to how he should handle this moment.
3) I caught myself wondering, since Shyamalan has notably revisited Unbreakable in his later films, if he ever considered making a delayed sequel to The Sixth Sense in which Haley Joel Osment plays an adult version of Cole who continues to commune with the dead, and what form that takes for him when he's in his 30s. Especially with the version of Shyamalan we are getting today, this movie would almost certainly be laughable, but I have to admit there is a small part of me that wonders whether it would have the chance to be profound in the same way the original was profound, since it involves the same character and actor. Maybe this is just me wishing that Osment could get meatier roles as a 34-year-old. I did like seeing him show up in The Kominsky Method, but let's just say he is fully a character actor and never gets anything really juicy.
4) Speaking of actors who couldn't capitalize fully on what they demonstrated here, I still can't believe Donnie Wahlberg didn't/couldn't parlay this chilling single-scene appearance into a better subsequent career. He appeared in four Saw movies (maybe that was his first mistake) and then a couple other bad movies that at least you've heard of (Annapolis, Dreamcatcher), but he hasn't acted in a movie since 2011, when he would have been only 41.
I may keep an informal Shyamalan weekend going tonight with only my second-ever viewing of Unbreakable, which will gear me toward finally seeing Glass -- the only Shyamalan movie since The Sixth Sense that I still haven't seen. (And though I'm certainly not watching Shyamalan this year as a viewing series -- I've got enough of those -- it does occur to me that it's probably a good idea to watch the two films before Sixth Sense that I haven't seen.)
If I do watch Unbreakable, I'm sure I'll have something to say about it here tomorrow.
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