M. Night Shyamalan’s blockbuster twist horror film The Sixth Sense turns 25 this week. The movie’s designed for rewatching—though it doesn’t necessarily improve on second or third look. At least for me, knowing the trick(s) doesn’t increase my appreciation for the magician’s skill. Instead, it underlines the movie’s core slickness. The film’s an extended exercise in flattering the fooled viewer for being a viewer and for being fooled. Suspending disbelief, Shyamalan insists, will heal the world. The real sixth sense is the ability to nod along as Hollywood tells you how awesome movies are.
The movie starts when brilliant child psychologist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) is shot in his home by an adult mentally-distressed former patient. The patient accuses Malcolm of failing him, and kills himself while Malcolm’s wife Anna (Olivia Williams) tries to save her bleeding husband.
The following fall, Malcolm and Anna are increasingly estranged. That’s in large part because Malcolm has become obsessed with helping a child who reminds him of the boy he failed. Cole (Haley Joel Osment) is a sensitive boy child who occasionally draws and writes disturbingly violent things. He’s also covered with mysterious scratches and welts, to the confusion and horror of his mother. Lynn (Toni Collette).
Cole’s affliction is that he can see dead people, or ghosts. Malcolm doesn’t believe him at first, but he’s eventually convinced, and suggests that Cole might be able to exorcize the ghosts by listening to them. Cole tries it with a dead girl named Kyra (Mischa Barton, and learns that she’s a victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy—her mother is poisoning her. (This is a very rare mental illness in real life, but a standard melodrama twist in media.)
When Cole tells the father what happened to his daughter, ensuring the mother can’t do the same to the younger sister, Kyra’s ghost is freed. Cole now feels like he can get on with his life, and Malcolm also feels his work is done. Whereupon Malcolm realizes he’s a ghost himself. His distressed patient killed him in the opening scene. Having saved Cole, and reconciled himself to his death, Malcolm can now move on. With all its tricks revealed, the film ends.
The repeated revelations and switchbacks in The Sixth Sense are meant to dazzle. You’re supposed to feel like you’re watching a magic trick, like the one that Malcolm shows Cole to entertain and comfort him. The movie emphasizes the wonder of its own movie narrative; it wants to wow you. The insistent wowing reminds the viewer that they’re a viewer, being moved through one satisfying gasp after another. More, the movie’s most audacious trick is that its high concept replicates the experience of the viewer within the film.
Malcolm is, after all, a viewer himself. Especially on rewatch, you can see that he can see, but he can’t really affect anything or anyone. He tries to tell his wife he loves her, but she can’t hear him, just as you, the viewer, can’t speak to anyone on screen. Malcolm says, at one point, that he’s lost track of time—just as you, as the viewer, are set adrift in time, narrative, and space by the filmic conventions of the cut. How does Malcolm get from place to place—into Cole’s house, into the hospital where Cole is convalescing? The same way we do when the film takes us there. Malcolm, like us, moves about within the film without crossing intervening distances. He, like us, is at the mercy, and the whim of the movie and its director.
Movie viewers often are meant to feel empowered; you identify with James Bond or Iron Man or some other hero who beats up super villains and gets the girl. But the empowerment is an illusion; you can’t really help anyone on screen; you can’t really get the girl (or in this case, the wife). You’re frozen, impotent. You have no purchase on the world you see.
Some filmmakers like Hitchcock in Rear Window or Brian DePalma in Body Double, play with this tension between the empowered and disempowered viewer to ratchet up tension or undermine (and accentuate) the discomforts of genre and gaze. Shyamalan isn’t really interested in discomfort, though. With all its vacillations and reveals, the ultimate conclusion of The Sixth Sense is that the hero, who’s also the viewer, can in fact help and heal.
Malcolm teaches Cole to listen, truly listen, to the ghosts—who are, like Malcolm, each an epiphenomenon of film narrative. To heal, Cole must throw himself into each successive melodrama, empathizing with the damaged characters, and leading them to their uplifting movie-of-the-week resolution. And in helping Cole, Malcolm also helps himself. The process of film, the magic of movies, is a mutual healing. You, as the viewer, lend your belief, your attention, and your heart to the process of narrative unraveling, closure, and healing. Then you in turn are healed.
It's a clever conceit designed to get you to a banal place—like an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine of weights and pulleys which is set up to deliver you a message scrawled in sparkly ink, “Aren’t weights and pulleys awesome?” I can admire the mechanism of The Sixth Sense to some degree. But a movie constructed to make you gasp as trauma, pain, sadness, anxiety, all disappear like a hidden coin thanks to the magic of movies—well. You can show me the trick again and again for a quarter-century. I still don’t believe it.