Reading Shyamalan
The longer I write this blog, the more I become convinced that the internet is just one big game of ‘Telephone’. The latest incident to provoke this theory is the recent news that a soon-to-be-released book on the making of Lady In The Water digs up some dirt on the executives at Disney. The article linked above details some of the more salient parts we can expect from The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale, including a dinner conversation turned nasty between Shyamalan and Disney executives Nina Jacobson and Dick Cook.
When she told him that she and her boss, studio Chairman Dick Cook, didn’t “get” the idea, Shyamalan was heartbroken. Things got only worse when she lambasted his inclusion of a mauling of a film critic in the story line and told Shyamalan his decision to cast himself as a visionary writer out to change the world bordered on self-serving.
The verdict is pretty much evenly split among movie pundits as to whether this book means that Shyamalan is striking a blow for creative types everywhere or just acting like a little baby. One mistake that nearly everyone seems to be making is assuming that this really is exactly what happened. Even worse is the assumption being made that Shyamalan wrote the book himself, or at least brought it to fruition. Though the article states that Shyamalan is supportive of the book, other articles have made it clear that this is an unauthorized account. Perhaps the most shocking thing about both the article and reaction to it is that the words of the author, Sports Illustrated writer Michael Bamberger, are being interpreted as quotes by Shyamalan himself.
In an interview, Bamberger said that in that section — like in several others — he was channeling Shyamalan’s deepest convictions, even though the book usually does not quote the writer-director directly.
“Night really let me get inside his head,” Bamberger said. “He told me what he was thinking, and I wrote it.”
Does that seem ridiculous to anyone else? There appears to be only one direct quote attributed to Shyamalan in the entire article, and if the brief snippets are anything to go by, the majority of the book will run the same course. Bamberger claims that he spent a large amount of time with the director, yet he has to resort to using his own interpretation of Shyamalan’s inner monologue. There are even “quotes” attributed to people from conversations from nearly a decade ago, and others that couldn’t have been taken at the time because the person quoted was presumably alone.
So what we have here is a number of people making judgements based on fragments printed in an article on an unpublished book by an author who is himself gathering second or third hand evidence when he isn’t producing them out of thin air. Add to this the fact that no one seems to have finished the article to see that in the end Shyamalan supposedly apologized for his conduct and admitted his mistake, all of which diminishes the cases both for and against him.
As for myself, i’d be a lot less hard on Shyamalan for any behaviour which isn’t yet attributable to him than I would for his alleged support for such incredibly florid writing.
“Sometimes Night would close his eyes and see little oval black and white head shots of Nina Jacobson and Oren Aviv and Dick Cook floating around in his head, unwanted houseguests that would not leave. The Disney people had gotten deep inside his head, interfering with the good work the voices were supposed to do — and it would be hell to get them out.”
Someone’s been borrowing from their old high school poetry again.