Blindness and Sight: M. Night Shamalayn on the Limits of our Perspective

“The world breaks down into two types of people, those who see signs and those who see chance.” So says Mel Gibson’s character in M Night Shyamalan's hit movie Signs. If you’ve ever seen a film written and directed by M Night Shyamalan, you’ll know exactly what he means. Shyamal's films often hinge on two ways of seeing.

In the Sixth Sense, Night takes his audience through the experience of Malcolm, a child psychologist, who is attempting to regain his confidence after being shot by an enraged patient. Malcolm spends the rest of the film working with Cole Sear, a child showing many of the same strange symptoms that plagued this former patient. At first Cole is nervous and keeps his distance from the psychologist but as the film progresses he warms to Malcolm more and more. Half way through the movie, Cole confesses to his counselor that he is afraid because he can see dead people, walking around as if they were alive all the while not knowing they are dead. Malcolm helps Cole come to grips with this gift, telling him that it’s possible they are coming to him for help. If he helps them solve their problems they might just leave him alone. His young patient follows his advice and discovers that it is indeed true and he doesn’t have to be afraid.

The real shocker, however, occurs in a closing scene when Malcolm, along with the audience, discovers that he himself is one of those dead people who sought his patients help. In His moment of realization the film quickly recaps half dozen scenes in which you can see how each scene has been wrongly perceived. Although it appears that Malcolm has spoken to others in the film, in reality no one has spoken to him since his shooting except the young boy. Watching the movie a second time reveals that every action in the movie is ambiguous, encouraging the audience to mistakenly grasp the significance of the story until the very end.


In Signs, Shyamalan again builds into his story this two-sided perspective. The title itself participates in the film’s double meaning. At a first glance, Signs refers to the crops circles and other mysterious appearances that provoke the small family, around which the film centers, to believe they are being visited by aliens. Yet, as the movie progresses we find that while this may be the external situation around which the plot develops, the movie is really about Grant, the father of the family, and his loss of faith in the absence of God given signs. Like each scene in the Sixth Sense, the title is ambiguous. Although the audience doesn’t see it at first, Grant’s statement that, “the world breaks down into two types of people those who signs and those who see chance” mirrors Cole’s confession to Malcolm in the Sixth Sense. It is the statement upon which the film will hinge. Just like the title, evidence for God’s presence is often itself ambiguous. In the end, Shyamalan reveals in the ordered assembly of the numerous quirks in the story, the young daughter’s inability to finish a glass of water, the son’s asthma and the brothers desire to swing a bat all come together to reveal a benevolent God. Although God is never seen in the film, the order in the films closing scene reveals that he is in fact present to those who have eyes to see.


The Village, while not as popular as the Sixth Sense or Signs, still trades on the concept of sight. The film centers on a group of families living in small colonial community and in particular two youths a quite boy and Ivy, a girl who is out going but blind. Throughout the film, the town is dominated by the fear of a wild beast - he who must not be named – that roams the forest, keeping the villagers confined to their tiny world. But when the quiet boy is wounded, the blind girl must confront the forest and seek help from the outside. Remarkably it is she who is blind who is shown that the beast is simply a costume, a phantom created by the elders to keep the young from leaving the village. After groping through the forest she climbs a fence to the other side. In that moment the film cuts to Ivy’s parents back in the village. They open a box and pull out some papers, old photographs to be exact. The photographs reveal a past that is not a black and white pioneer world; instead it’s a colored photo of 1960’s. The audience at once experiences a paradigm shift. In an instant, past and present slam together. The village does not exist in the past, rather it is a gated community locked away from the present. Cutting back to Ivy on the other side of the fence, we find her confronted not by a horse and buggy but a modern SUV. In Shyamalan's worldview the blind are the ones who are truly able to see. For unlike the audience, there blindness has allowed them not to be fooled by the external trappings of this world.


It is Shyamalan's penchant for dazzling his audiences with things hidden in plan sight which has made his films so successful. The movies in and of themselves reveal that there are truly two types of people, those that see and those that don’t. At first the audience is completely blind, ignorant of even of their own ignorance, unable to even comprehend that they are interpreting the story wrong. When the revelation comes however it not only exposes their ignorance but gives them eyes to see.