A reason to believe
In defense of Signs (2002)
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FILM: Signs, 2002
WHERE TO WATCH: On a tube T.V. set, in your closet, wearing tin foil.
“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism… Everybody worships.”
- David Foster Wallace
In M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs (2002), silence and dialogue bear equal weight.
Take the dinner scene, in which former Reverend Graham Hess (Mel Gibson), his two young children Morgan and Bo (Rory Culkin, Abigail Breslin), and his brother Merrill (Jaoquin Phoenix) prepare to eat their chosen end-of-the-world meals. With an alien invasion impending, each is terrified and still reeling from the brutal death of Graham’s wife and the children’s mother.
We see the family seated at the dining room table through the frame of a rectangular doorway as the camera moves in:
The scene is somber. No one is moving.GRAHAMWhat's the matter with everyone? Eat.No one says anything. No one eats.Beat.MORGANI'm scared.BOMe too.Everything in Signs is confined. The characters are suspended between grief and terror. The cinematography makes clear that the family is confined by the walls of their home and that the home is further boxed in by the towering stalks of a midsummer cornfield. We rarely leave the farm, and are only given a window to the outside world through the square frame of a T.V. set. Dialogue is confined within meticulously paced measures, like music notes. I picture a metronome thrumming softly on set, working to keep the film within its steady four-beat rhythm. How else to explain the way each character delivers their lines so consistently — heeding the whole- and half-rests, waiting for the next tick, never jamming an extra note within the measure or speeding up the time signature midway through their careful hymn.
“It is not just what we hear that is frightening,” wrote Roger Ebert, in his review of the film. “It is the way Shyamalan has us listening intensely when there is nothing to be heard. I cannot think of a movie where silence is scarier, and inaction is more disturbing.” Of the film’s actual score — composed by James Newton Howard, who also worked with Shyamalan on The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable — William Ruhlmann wrote that “the only distinguishing characteristic about it — consistent with Shyamalan's style — [is] that it is so relentless.”
From the relentless beat of daily life, we find staccato arcs of joy, sadness, anger, relief, and ecstasy. For many people, these are signs to keep on. Miracles remind the faithful that they are not alone and deep bouts of despair suggest that they are being tested for something greater. For those who, like Graham Hess, feel forsaken, what is there to give structure to suffering or joy? How can we define our perimeters as neatly as a piece of carefully composed music; as definitively as a crop circle in a cornfield? What use do we have for signs?
M. Night Shyamalan was just over 30 when he wrote and directed Signs, his third film at the time. For a movie about aliens, he drew from pretty Earthly inspiration. In an interview with Tim Greiving for The Ringer, Shyamalan said he was at a Denny’s when he saw a family eating in silence. He thought they looked burdened.
“I was looking at those people in the Denny’s, and I knew they were coming to my movies, and I wanted to make them feel better,” Shyamalan said.
We find a particularly burdened family in Signs. The bulk of the film unfolds in the wake of a brutal car accident, the one that killed Mrs. Hess (though we aren’t given the details of her death until later in the film). Graham has given up his post as an Episcopalian priest. His brother Merrill, a loveable, goofy former baseball player, has come to the family’s Pennsylvanian farmhouse to help take care of Graham’s kids. The film opens in silence, then we hear dogs barking. Merrill and Graham wake up to find the kids missing. Following the sound of the dogs, they run in a panic toward the cornfield, where they find Morgan staring at three massive crop circles, stalks perfectly flattened. The third circle is attached to a line that spears into thirds like a rounded pitchfork.
“I think God did it,” Morgan says.
Shyamalan had already begun filming when four hijacked planes flew into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and a field not unlike the Hess’s in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Cast and crew held a vigil before filming the flashback scene where Graham comes upon the accident that left his wife pinned between a truck and a tree. In the same interview with Greiving, Shyamalan said that the 9/11 attacks had a latent effect on the project.
“I think part of the spirituality of the movie came from its time, where we were at that moment,” he said. “All of us felt vulnerable and grateful to be together, and that our particular loved ones were OK, and feeling lucky on a lot of levels — and randomly lucky, you know?”
“Randomly” is an interesting word choice, since Signs denies coincidence. [Spoilers].
When the alien species finally touches down on Earth, the faithless Graham realizes that, rather than burdens, he is surrounded by small miracles. The glasses of water Bo obsessively distributes around the house are revealed to be the aliens’ Kryptonite, Morgan’s asthma saves him from inhaling an alien’s noxious gasses, and Merrill’s baseball prowess gives him the strength to beat an alien to death with a baseball bat.
“In the face of utter hopelessness, these outcomes suggest that the cosmos is on the side of humanity,” wrote Beatrice Loayza, “that something ingrained and incontestable in the fabric of the natural world has got our backs.”
Signs is most consistently criticized for its “irrationality”: If the aliens are highly intelligent, why would they choose to land on a planet made up almost entirely of water, the very thing that kills them instantly? To this, I offer: Humans are intelligent – we are at least aware that we cannot breathe without oxygen — yet we regularly and eagerly shoot off into space. We die on brutal summits. We jump out of airplanes. Inhale carcinogens. Pollute our own naturally-breathable atmosphere. “Intelligence,” as we’ve defined it, is not an aptitude for survival, but a willingness to test the limits of that survival regularly, buoyed by a bedrock belief in our own perseverance.
And I do think that everyone has a belief system — astrology, karma, Judaism, Catholicism, science*, pragmatism, energies. For some, a belief in the existence of aliens offers a form of reassurance: something greater is out there. For others, denial offers a similar sense of solace.
Belief systems help us reckon not only with the inevitability of death, but also with the unbelievable reality of our lives — that we survive despite loss, chaos, tragedy.
After 9/11, people grasped for signs and symbolism. In some cases, that grasping became dangerous. We know that conspiracy theories tend to proliferate after tragedy, some of which seek to deny a given tragedy entirely. And people too often use tragedy to justify the unjustifiable. There’s a lesson there, too, but it’s not the one we’re to take from Signs, because the film doesn’t zoom that far out. Instead, like most of Shyamalan’s films, we’re asked to put our faith in the possibility of a final, satisfying twist — one that makes sense of the senseless.
There were stories about miracles after 9/11, like the chapel across the street from the Towers where not a single window pane shattered and the stories of people who experienced life-saving setbacks in their commutes. “Something… has got our backs.” Through belief, for better or worse, we rearrange the misfit contents of the universe. We find reason to justify survival.
Excerpt from an email sent to photojournalist Mark D. Phillips regarding his photo “Satan in the Smoke,” in the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001:
“For those of us who know the Bible, this is not a surprising photograph for it is written in Luke 21:25-26 - ‘And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and waves roaring; Men's hearts failing them for fear…’”
There are a few ways to read the alien trope in horror. Aliens can stand in for the unknown or, more insidiously, for the “other.” But alien films also offer an opportunity to triumph in the fortitude of humanity.
Even when pitted against a species capable of out-inventing, out-traveling, and out-sciencing us, we humans tend to be victorious. Not because of our scientific prowess. Not because of our ability to transcend our own mortality. Not because we are blessed. But because we are human. Because, left with no other options, we believe in our own survival.
Alien films suggest there is something special about humanity, about being alive on this planet, in this timeline, with the very set of resources and natural abilities we have been given. In the end, the characters in Signs find that the tools they need to access transcendence are already at their disposal.
In one of the film’s most iconic moments, the Hess family discovers that Bo’s old baby monitor is intercepting alien transmissions. All four members of the family are on top of the car, each holding onto each other in a chain as Morgan jabs the monitor into the sky. We hear nothing but the faint crackling of static, when:
THE SOUND FROM THE MONITOR SUDDENLY CHANGES.MORGANStop!Everyone STOPS exactly where they are. Graham holds Bo over his head. Bo reaches out to Merrill. Merrill sits on the roof with one arm out. Morgan stands with the baby monitor raised high in the air. The Hess family remains very still on the hood of their station wagon as they listen.Again, we find silence punctuated by sound; a sign reserved for those who are listening.
Greiving describes the film’s score as suspense that builds to a revelation. The revelation for Graham Hess, who ultimately returns to his faith, is this: Stop, listen. Hold onto the people you love. Don’t lose the signal. Within the confines of your own life, you may find evidence of the miraculous.
* I’m not suggesting that science — or anything named herein — isn’t “real” or “true,” only that a reliance on science’s ability to explain everything offers the equivalent reassurance someone might get from spirituality or elsewhere. In other words, we’re not contemplating the thing itself (aliens, science, religion), rather the feeling (reassurance, fear, skepticism) the thing evokes.
Edited, as always, by Nicholas Gambini, who has just graduated from Columbia University with a degree in being really good at spelling! Please congratulate him should you see him.
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Loved the article.
Congratuations Nicholas!