Stir of Echoes
Produced by Gavin Polone, Judy Hofflund, and Michelle Weisler
Directed by David Koepp
Screenplay by David Koepp, based on the novel by Richard Matheson
Released by An Artisan Entertainment

The Sixth Sense
Produced by Spyglass Entertainment and Hollywood Pictures
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Screenplay by M. Night Shyamalan
Released by Buena Vista Pictures

The ghost story has an honorable tradition. Writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Poe, Hawthorne, and Henry James have rung changes on its conventions. It’s easy to see why. Audiences love a good haunting. Some are so avid for ghostly visitations that they are ready to be scared silly by those that don’t even bother to show up—witness The Blair Witch Project.

At its best, the genre cuts to the mortal chase and confronts us with life’s ultimate issues, tamed for the moment within the precincts of fiction. Afterward, flushed with terror and pity, we get to have a comforting snack and a good nights sleep: not a bad deal to accept as we make our fateful course through this world. And if the writer has done his or her work, we may even find ourselves facing the next day with greater wisdom and strengthened moral courage.

Stir of Echoes and The Sixth Sense both have this tradition in mind. No, neither rises to the level of Macbeth or Turn of the Screw. (What does in our time?) They are, nevertheless, unusually ambitious, thoughtful films well worth seeing.

Until its formulaic thriller ending, director David Koepp’s Stir of Echoes is an unsettling, provocative ghost story adapted from Richard Matheson’s 1958 novel. It’s packed with surprises that go well beyond the usual ectoplasmic eruptions.

The narrative centers on Tom Witzky, played incisively by Kevin Bacon. He’s a telephone lineman who finds himself disconnected from his jovial Polish-Irish working class community. At a neighborhood beer party, he’s a moping Hamlet, emotionally self-exiled from his friends’ drunken merriment. Life seems stale, flat, and unprofitable. Why? “I just didn’t expect to be so ordinary,” he explains. Not surprisingly, he’s about to receive some ghostly exhortations to uncover an extraordinary secret his ordinary world has been hiding.

His college-educated sister-in-law (played with goofy earnestness by Illeana Douglas) diagnoses his malaise as a side effect of his close-mindedness. She ridicules him and his friends for never looking beyond the six-block radius of their fortress community. Tom rejects her analysis and on a dare allows her to hypnotize him in an effort to open his mind. During his trance, he receives visionary flashes so brief as to be nearly subliminal. But there is no mistaking their aura of menace. More troubling, they don’t go away after he is restored to consciousness. They reappear insistently, disrupting his daily life as they grow in length and detail. In one vision, a single bloody tooth filmed in monstrous closeup rattles across a wooden floor. In another, a huge nail tears from a finger. More visions follow. A ghost of a missing girl, visible only to him and his five-year-old son, Jake (played with charming naturalness by Zachary David Cope), shows up in his house. “Don’t be afraid of it, Daddy,” Jake innocently implores, trying to allay Tom’s growing distress. Apparently, the boy’s mind is naturally open to these communications from the spirit world because, unlike his father’s, it has not been closed by social conditioning. But I’m guessing. The script is unclear on this point.

After failing to rid himself of his haunting, Tom decides to get to the bottom of it, literally. At the ghost’s request be begins digging up his yard, tearing up his floors, and terrifying his wife, Maggie (Kathryn Erbe in a nicely understated performance). Although Tom, in his frenzied bewilderment, doesn’t seem to have any idea what his excavations will uncover, the audience can guess easily enough. I will leave you the pleasure of outguessing Tom. I do, however, want to consider what I take to be the narrative’s allegory, cleverly introduced by the hypnotism scenes.

Under his hypnotic spell, Tom finds himself in a vast, old-time movie palace, gazing at a huge 1940’s-style screen on which his troubling visions appear with luminous intensity. This screen-within-the-screen passage returns at the middle of the film and implicitly serves to remind us that we have come to the theater to be put under a spell ourselves. While under that spell, we, like Tom, may discover more than we anticipated. Our discoveries, however, are not to be found at the center of the film but at its edges. There, we glimpse what seem at first merely incidental details: a cordoned block party bursting with beer-fueled bonhomie; hundreds of neighbors marching in near-tribal frenzy to a high school football match; Tom and Maggie sporting tattoos on their arms and torsos; wives sneering at their husbands for being in a priapic state nearly three hours a day and not all that particular where they plug in; Maggie calling from her grandmother’s funeral to report that her family members are “all fine, drunk and fighting with one another”; a child left unmonitored in front of a television, horrified by The Night of the Living Dead as adult zombies cannibalize the young.

In these glancing asides, Koepp sketches the state of contemporary mass society, besotted by a popular culture that encourages indulgence in the quick thrills of booze, industrialized sports, ubiquitous pornography, impersonal sex, and violent entertainment. The many who settle for this parody of the good life, as Tom does before his mind is opened, assume it is the “ordinary” state of affairs. They are the hapless moral imbeciles we meet daily, so drugged by a soulless materialism that they are content to sit by as a weird alliance of commercial interest and political expediency devours their children with easy corruptions, leaving them destitute of natural idealism and moral insight. It’s no wonder that, when Maggie implores Tom to stop his obsessive digging, he refuses. “This is the most important thing that’s ever happened to me in my dumb life,” he shouts. Indeed, it is. What he finds will answer the narrative’s literal mystery while resonating powerfully with the film’s larger, if somewhat undernourished, ambitions. Directed and written by M. Night Shyamalan, The Sixth Sense has been marketed as a horror story. But like Echoes:, it uses its hocus-pocus to mesmerize us in order to suggest more than we would expect from a thriller. Once under its spell, we discover a story as old as the Odyssey: a boy in search of a father, and a man trying to be that father, both struggling to come to terms with the losses natural to the mortal condition.

The protagonist is Malcolm Crowe, an award-winning child psychologist, played by Bruce Willis. (There are several surprises in this film, not the least the subtle, intelligent performance Shyamalan has drawn from the usually insufferable Willis.) Crowe is recovering from the trauma of helplessly watching one of his former patients commit suicide. His confidence shaken by this experience, he takes on another patient whose difficulties resemble those of the suicide. This is nine-year-old Cole Sear, played by Haley Joel Osment, who is either astonishingly accomplished or a natural (probably a bit of both). Crowe intends to redeem himself by restoring the boy’s mental balance. He diagnoses Cole as depressed and perhaps borderline schizophrenic. Cole’s problems have left him the helpless butt of his classmates’ pranks and the focus of his school’s uncomprehending guidance counselors. For relief, he has retreated into a fantasy world populated with an unusual assembly of religious statuettes and action figures. They are his companions both in church and in a homemade tent he has erected in his room. But the source of his troubles lies much deeper. Ghosts haunt him. They bear the wounds of what killed them: A woman displays her slashed wrists, a boy turns to reveal the gash in his skull, three 18th century Philadelphians appear hanging from a rafter in his school. They seek help from Cole to settle their earthly affairs before they depart altogether. Not knowing what he can possibly do for them, the boy would prefer they just vanish immediately. But, as he finally confides to Crowe, they don’t know they are dead, so they go on haunting him relentlessly. “I see them all the time,” he whispers plaintively.

Crowe sets out to relieve Cole of his torment by winning his trust, in scenes which masterfully convey the boy’s isolation and sadness. These segments are slow, hushed, and so dark as to appear nearly monochromatic. When Cole and Crowe go outdoors, they are always cloaked in shadow. In one shot, they walk down a tree-shaded street, both wearing subdued colors, while in the foreground a troop of Little Leaguers crosses at an intersection, their red, white, and blue uniforms ablaze in the broad daylight. Their sunny American normality serves to intensify Cole’s somber condition.

The boy’s ability to see the dead is never explained. This is as it should be; the story’s ghosts are allegorical. What is really haunting Cole is his father’s decision to abandon him and his mother. When we first meet Cole, he is wearing lensless glasses and a stopped watch: Both articles had been his father’s. Now they are his talismans, but they prove powerless to make his family life whole once more. Instead, they signal the confusion and obsession that have descended on the boy in his father’s absence. And he wears something even more telling: the haunted expression one sees all too often on children today. It’s the look of those who have been left on their own well before they are ready to meet life’s challenges. Cole is a boy alerted too early to the inevitable losses mortality inflicts on us all.

Once Crowe realizes that the boy’s visions are more than psychotic fantasies, he attempts a therapeutic exorcism designed not to banish the ghosts but to accommodate them. It’s an unorthodox approach, and the question of its success or failure brings the narrative to its surprise ending. If you haven’t seen the film yet, don’t let others tell you what this is, as someone told me. While the attentive viewer probably will have intimations of the conclusion, complete foreknowledge will undermine its impact. And this would be a shame, for it’s much more than a plot gimmick. The ending genuinely amplifies the film’s themes.

The Sixth Sense is more satisfying than Stir of Echoes. It’s more internally coherent, and the rhythm of its ghost story and its allegorical intentions are more synchronized, but never forced. Shyamalan stumbles occasionally, especially when he reaches for moments of optimism, but these passages detract only slightly from the film’s otherwise unfaltering gaze on mortality. Its popular success confirms his accomplishment. He’s managed to get the mass audience to sit still and share his meditation on the only morally worthy response to the inevitabilities of our state. That’s no mean achievement in the age of The Phantom Menace and American Pie.

Do these films signal a change for the better? Stay tuned.