I thought of Linklater’s remarks throughout my reading of Michael Bamberger’s new book,  The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale (Gotham Books, 288 pages, $27.50, ISBN 1592402135). Linklater is a director I love and Shyamalan is one I have mixed feelings about, and the differences between them couldn’t be more caverous.

I read Bamberger’s book sympathetically, but it is easy to interpret the work as an embarrassingly lengthy press release, and it has already received devastating reviews, such as Janet Maslin’s in the  New York Times, and  Christopher Goodwin in the  Times of London, on the basis of its hagiographic genuflections to Shyamalan’s cinematic genius (though “business savvy” would be a better label). Bamberger is a sports writer who has moved placidly in the presence of superstars such like Jim Courier, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods, yet it is Shyamalan who has reduced him to a blithering fan, finding exquisite nuance in the most mundane aspects of the filmmaking process.

Part of the problem is that, as he admits, Bamberger knows nothing about movies. He never watches a film more than once, has never heard of Aint it Cool News, and couldn’t tell you if Ingmar Bergman is a chick or a guy. Instead he knows sports, and the ins and outs of conservative straight arrow publishing in the form of  Sports Illustrated. In short he is a square. But it takes a square to extoll one, and the clearest message in the book is that Shyamalan is a pampered, sheltered, privilged, unlettered, and inexperienced square.

 

I’m not sure where I fall on the issue of Bamberger’s ignorance of the movie biz. Things highly familiar and routine to me strike him as fascinating, and though it is sometimes nicely “Martian” to have these familar things seen though neophyte eyes, one also despairs that someone so clueless was given such supreme access to Shyamalan and everyone in his creative circle. Bamberger pursued Shyamalan not because he was a movie buff but because he was developed some kind of man crush on him at a party, and seems to have an interest in minority success in mainstream areas of activity such as sports. Bamberger, who also lives in Pennsylvania like Shyamalan and his extended family, met the director at an exclusive dinner party and found himself so intrigued he pitched to Shyamalan the idea of spending a year as his Boswellian amanuensis. Shyamalan, for his part, is a tireless self-promoter, or at least a protector of his talent, and Bamberger seems to have caught him at a vulnerable moment, when he wanted to “prove” something to his former studio, Disney, as he embarked on a new relationship with Warner. But I can think also think of a heck of a lot of American directors who would benefit from this same kind of scrutiny and access, scrutiny that would benefit the readerL Tarantino, Scorsese, Stone, Coens, an Anderson.

 

The book begins just as Shyamalan is finishing up his latest script,  The Lady in the Water. At least it sounds like MNS really writes his screenplays, unlike a lot of Hollywood frauds, and he had great difficulty composing it (the script is supposedly based on a fairy tale he made up for his kids). Bamberger follows the scripts, in the hands of MNS’s then assistant Paula, as it goes across the country to three execs at Disney, none of whom grant it the kind of courtesy the spoiled rich kid is used to. At the end of a tense dinner with the trio back in Philly, Shyalaman more or less announces that he is leaving Disney. Its not clear  how he can do this; Bamberger doesn’t go into detail about the kind of contractual relationship he had with Disney (at the end of the book, Bamberger invites readers to email him questions, so I did, and Bamberger replied that after Shyamalan’s disastrous experience with Harvey Weinstein, MNS maintained a more distanced relationship with Disney, which I imagine is akin to a month-to-month lease).

 

Like a John McPhee, Bamberger attempts to delve into the minds of both parties, but the inside of Night’s mind is fully and warmly portrayed and the minds of the execs are cold and unforthcoming (one of them was fired from Disney the weekend that the movie opened and the book came out). Though Shyamalan is ushered into the Warner world, the image of the three executives hover in his head as a spur and a curse, in a rather crowded place what with all those voices. I leave you to consult DSM-IV about what a head of voices means. Bamberger watches the set built, the film cast, what appears to be the whole shoot, and various screenings and premieres.  Throughout, he shows abject admiration for Shyamalan and for a few others, such as lead Paul Giamatti, who, it turns out, he knew slightly already. Rarely does he show Shyamalan throw a fit. But he does, occasionally, generally in the direction of the DP, Christopher Doyle, who does not, to put it mildly, conduct himself in a manner consonant with the standards of this ancient gentlemen’s club (the book has been talked about as a Shyamalan career killer, but if anyone is at risk, it is Doyle, at least in the American market). Doyle’s idea of complimenting an actress during costume sizing is to say, “You look fuckable.”

 

But for all the attention to the mechanics of the movie making process there are a few things missing. There isn’t a lot about Shyamalan and money, there isn’t much about  how he writes or why, and there isn’t anything about the vanity or consequences of him casting himself in his own movies. It’s reporting, not criticism, but I would also have liked something about Shyamalan’s artistic intentions.

 

The consistent theme in MNS’s movies, though, is not the trick or surprise ending, but instead, the interesting thematic turn of someone thinking he is saving someone when in fact it is really he who is being saved. Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) in  The Sixth Sense thinks he is helping the little boy, Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), but it is really the kid who is rescuing Crowe from the delusion that he is still alive, while in  Unbreakable,  David Dunn isn’t being revealed as as superhero, it is Elijah Price being exposed as a supervillain. In  Lady in the Water, Cleveland Heep isn’t saving Story, she is rescuing Heep; depending on how clearly this narrative twist is treated defines how successful Shyamalan’s movie is going to be, on an aesthetic level.

 Lady is further complicated by is subtheme  of  telling stories, though. Heep can’t just learn more about the mysterious ethereal woman who emerged from the apartment swimming pool, he has to enjoin all manner of complex re-tellers to tell him. Thus, he can’t get the lexicon of the water people directly from the old Korean woman, it has to be translated to him by her daughter. Shyamalan thinks he is honoring storytelling, but he is really putting impediments in its way. In a related subplot, the critic (Bob Balaban) must die because he  doesn‘t convey stories, he merely interprets and judges them.

Another theme in his films is water. Shyamalan is fixated on it. Water is (illogically, if you think about it for five seconds) Dunn’s Kryptonite in Unbreakable, as well as the aliens’ weakness in  Signs. Here it is the rejuvenating amniotic fluid for Story and her people.

Bmaberger doesn’t go into any of this, but one shouldn’t expect him to, I guess.  Instead, he is the interested fly on the wall when Shyamalan has numerous encounters with executives, actors, production people, and intimates. To me the most fascinating segment is when Shyamalan confronts an unnamed  African-American NYU film student about a highly negative review he wrote anonymously for Ain’t It Cool News (since pulled down) after piggy backing into a highly exclusive early screening for intimates. Night and his team figured out who the poisoned penner was and called him out. Night met him him at a public place in Manhattan and proceeded to break through the kid’s arrogance and reduce him to tears, a blubbering slave intent on following Night’s wishes evermore.

What is interesting about this story is less the intervention of a filmmaker into the very lowest rungs of critical reception of his work, but the image of him after the conversation, of him walking through the streets of New York, a little figure with an loose oversized knapsack hopping on his back. Suddenly the specter of Haley Macaulay Culkin in  Home Alone came into my head, and I realized that Shyamalan remains an adolescent. His movie tales are adolescent, his view on life is adolescent and his memories of the past are fixated on the small triumphs of the adolescent (as in an incomprehensible anecdote told first early in the book in which a teenage Night goes to a car with a girl in defiance of an athlete; I couldn’t really follow that anecdote but it apparently looms large in Night’s view of himself). MNS ended up marrying a beautiful woman, a sort of supermodel with brains, has two kids, is a millionaire with a large retinue of helpers, and his movies have made his corporate masters over a billion dollars. But he is still a disappointment to his parents, in Bamberger’s portrayal, and their lack of approval continues to infantalize him, while he still dwells (as do we all) on high school slights.  Night is a square. He uses outdated slang (dig, turn me off). Night’s favorite films are listed as films such as The Wizard of Oz, Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET: not a Samuel Fuller or a Bela Tarr flick in the bunch, just straight down the line corporate blockbusters. He is only just now “getting into” (as Night might say) Bob Dylan, and his identification with Dylan, as a troubled artist facing misunderstanding, is utterly square — and a few decades late.

 

I regret that all this sounds negative, because I had a fine time reading the book (which is really more like a long magazine article — without pictures). It made me almost sympathize with Shyamalan, it provided some insight into the movie making process, and I got interesting glimpses into Giamatti and Doyle.  The person I identified with most was, oddly,  Bryce Dallas Howard, who confesses to nervousness and emotional and intellectual withholding  and nervousness when she is in the spotlight on the set and when she is in Night’s presence, which is exactly how I would be. Bamberger writes easefully, his enthusiasm is appreciated, and he happened upon a showbiz story with real drama in it (although the book came out before the story was over). It’s a quick read but well worth the time.

 

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